We saw this exact same strategy play out in Wisconsin circa 2011 when the Democrats in state legislature fled the state to avoid showing up to a legislative session. They left the state specifically to avoid state police arresting them and forcibly returning them to work. This is how Democrats operate.
In Texas the milk-carton Democrats do not have the numbers to block legislation; however, they can deny a legislative quorum by not showing up to work. The Democrats took buses to a private airport where they took private charter flights to Washington DC; all of their manipulative schemes paid for by Democrat activist groups. The cases of beer on the seats is a nice touch.
Meanwhile, Texas citizens are paying taxes to fund the salaries of officials who refuse to come to work.
Texas TRIBUNE – […] “We are now taking the fight to our nation’s Capitol,” the Democrats said in their statement. “We are living on borrowed time in Texas.”
The Democrats convened at a local plumbers union building and boarded a bus that transported them to a private airport terminal. They arrived at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport shortly after 2:30 p.m., driving straight onto the tarmac.
Lawmakers did not speak with the media before they left. Terminal staff kept reporters off the premises and on the street outside. By 3 p.m., several supporters of the legislators were gathered outside the terminal, holding signs that said, “Let my people vote,” and, “Thank you for fighting voter suppression.”
Even if Democratic lawmakers stay out of state for the next few weeks, the governor could continue to call 30-day sessions or add voting restrictions to the agenda when the Legislature takes on the redrawing of the state’s political maps later this summer. (read more)
They appear to be very proud of themselves.
Of course, Texas officials could play hardball, but they won’t.
The Texas AG could issue subpoenas post them to each office-holder for 72 hrs, then the state governor Greg Abbott could issue XO arrest warrants for non-compliance. It won’t happen because those running the state of Texas are purple, not red (it’s an open secret down there). Texas is not as conservative as people think; exactly the opposite is true… just review their conduct during COVID.
Texas is to Republican as Republican is to Mitch McConnell.
The Coming of Strong Man Populism and the Power of 'No!'
Get ready for Strong Man Populism. The bad guys - the soft elite who
think it can hold onto the societal power it inherited, but did not
earn, through petty oppressions - will call it “authoritarianism.” Of course, they like authoritarianism when they are the authority - that’s
why they feel no compunction about remaking our country and culture
without bothering with obtaining our buy-in. But history teaches - not
that they would know it, because they have never been taught it - that a
backlash is inevitable.
We’re
going to turn to someone who won’t be deterred by cultural caterwauling,
who will not be satisfied with a status quo ante that is deeply
anti-American, who will ruthlessly use his power to reclaim our society
for us, and who will wreak vengeance on our enemies.
That last one is important. They must learn never to do this again.
We’re
going to elect a Strong Man Populist because the current crisis is
intolerable, and because we understand that the Weak (Wo)Man Caucus -
think pliable puffball Jeb! and Chamber of Commerce-curious squishes
like Nikki!, Kristi! and Asa! - don’t know what time it is.
It’s
time to smash the ruling class - an odd thing for conservatives to want,
but then we’ve never quite had a ruling class that sucked so much.
Strong
Man Populism will come, and dumb people will find this ironic, because
we are, at heart, still a free people unwilling to merely survive on
scraps as serfs. Oh, some of us are eager drones - the lazy, the stupid,
the morally illiterate who empower the mutants against us, or who sit
on their moms’ couches playing video games. But
the rest of us are getting fed up. We can’t be free when we are cowering
in our homes, unable to speak, with our interests left undefended. We
will take our freedom back, at the ballot box, because our failed ruling
class has, well, failed.
Drug-addled hobos, junkies, and degenerates infest our cities
and, increasingly our suburbs. The elite answer is, of course, to
destroy the suburbs - equity demands everything outside their gated
communities suck equally.
Our teachers, in the rare cases they
teach, teach our kids to hate our country. Our warriors, in the all too
common cases they war, lose, and also teach our kids to hate our
country.
Our establishment scoffs at laws, everything from
election rules to regulations against spying on citizens who oppose the
regime. At the same time, it lets street criminals run rampant. The law
enforcement agencies do nothing, the media does nothing, and the courts
do nothing. But when we break their laws, watch out - especially you
LEGO insurrectionists.
Our voices are silenced, we have no
institutional advocates; the institutions designed to vindicate our
rights won’t. That limits our options going forward to opting for
submission - that’s the aptly-named David French solution - or opting to
burn it all down.
I say flick the Bic.
We’ll be told we
hate democracy. Yet, for all the performative anguish about the perilous
peril posed by selfie-snapping grandmas in the Rotunda - the best thing
ever are the media blue checks insisting the sight of a faux Viking and some elderly tourists so traumatized them that they must see therapy - the elite sure hates democracy. Well, to be precise, it hates democracy when we attempt to participate in it. There’s a high fuss factor out there right now over how uppity we peasants are getting, and the message is clear.
Stop complaining, racist.
Stop complaining, insurrectionist.
Stop complaining, Jesus gun people who like the flag.
Obey.
But people aren’t obeying, and the usual suspects are mortified. How dare we say “No,” but dare we do, and the ruling class can’t even.
So
the elite fight back, aided and abetted by the surrender caucus of
formerly relevant conservagrifters who take a break from thinking about
their pool boys and their wives to come out and explain why True
Conservatism™ means absolute submission to whatever the establishment
wants.
You can see it in response to the poison that is CRT.
According to unserious people, for us to decide what lazy, unionized
public school teachers get to teach our kids is some sort of assault on
the academic freedom of cheesy, pudgy timeservers. There’s
a premise problem here. Teachers have to teach something. The question
is who gets to decide. One would think that should be, you know, the
people – we sure don’t want democracy dying in darkness, do we?
Yes, they want democracy to die in darkness, preferably painfully.
But when the ordinary ways to have our voices heard are closed
off to us, we’ll find extraordinary ones. Trump was one. He was a
warning. But he was, despite the mass-micturition of the elite - no
radical. He had no desire to lay waste; he wanted to rule, but as a
member of what he did not understand was a terminally ill ruling caste.
Remember how he was caught up in institutional prestige - this college
was great, that company was respected? This, as well as the fact that he
showed up without a Rolodex and needed to rely on a bunch of
establishment acolyte-kissers, made him too weak to truly use his power.
Yet even with his limitations, he did many amazing and consequential
things.
The Strong Man Populist coming soon will not have that weakness. He
will not hesitate to use his power to clean house, to prosecute the
criminals, to defeat our enemies, both foreign and domestic. Some
Republicans will recoil in horror at the idea of us actually winning.
“We can’t abandon our fundamental norms,” they will fret, and that’s
literally true. We can’t abandon our fundamental norms because the
establishment these shills flack for already abandoned our fundamental
norms over the last five years. Zombie norms will not restrain the
Strong Man Populist.
He will unleash the power of “No.”
No, hobos, you can’t live on our streets.
No, criminals, you don’t get to commit crimes.
No, Pentagon, you are going to focus on winning wars.
No, academia, you do not get to take our money and use it to turn our kids into little commie saps.
No, tech jerks, you do not get to decide what we can read and say.
No, climate cultists, we are not going to live in caves because of your bizarre, quasi-religious weather obsession.
No, media, you do not get to be partisan advocates and also treated like neutral truth tellers.
No, Democrats, you don’t get to steal elections.
No.
“No”
is the weapon of the Strong Man Populist; it is our weapon. It is a
rejection of elite hegemony, and the ruthless use of power to enforce
it. And it is coming.
The establishment should have heeded the
warning that was Donald Trump. But if it was smart enough to do that, it
never would have botched its cultural curation so spectacularly that it
made him necessary.
The best part of the coming Strong Man Populism will be watching them cry.
Democratic socialists ignore Cuban protesters railing against communist dictatorship
Thousands of Cubans marched on Havana’s Malecon promenade and elsewhere
Anti-government protests broke out Sunday in Cuba demanding freedom and calling on the disbandment of the country’s communist dictatorship,
all while some of the U.S.’s most outspoken, self-professed Democratic
socialists appear to be in lockstep by not acknowledging the historic
events unfolding on the island about 90 miles from Florida.
Fox
News has emailed Reps. Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida
Tlaib and Sen. Bernie Sanders and has yet to receive a response from any
of them. As of early Monday, none have even mentioned the protest on
social media.
Thousands of Cubans marched on Havana’s Malecon
promenade and elsewhere to protest food shortages, high prices and the
coronavirus outbreak in one of the biggest anti-government
demonstrations in the country ever.
Police
initially trailed behind as protesters chanted "Freedom," "Enough" and
"Unite." One motorcyclist pulled out a U.S. flag, but it was snatched
from him by others.
The Biden administration was criticized on
social media for appearing to have difficulty finding its footing on how
to respond to the protests.
Sen.
Marco Rubio, R-Fla, took the State Department to task over a tweet that
blamed the protest on concerns over COVID-19 and not the worsening
economic situation or the fact that protesters chanted, "We Want
Liberty."
"People in Cuba are protesting 62 years of socialism,
lies, tyranny & misery not ‘expressing concern about rising COVID-19
cases/deaths. Why is it so hard for @Potus & the people in his
administration to say that?" Rubio tweeted.
Critics
will likely say that these Democratic socialists are remaining quiet in
the early stages of the protests because there are so many unknowns.
Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel, who heads the Communist Party, has already called on the country’s revolutionaries to counter the demonstrators.
"We are prepared to do anything," he said during a national address. "We will be battling in the streets."
He
continued, "We are calling on all the revolutionaries in the country,
all the Communists, to hit the streets wherever there is an effort to
produce these provocations."
Jake Sullivan, the White House
national security adviser, took to Twitter to say the "U.S. supports
freedom of expression and assembly across Cuba, and would strongly
condemn any violence or targeting of peaceful protesters who are
exercising their universal rights."
There has been an uneasy
relationship between Cuban-Americans and the extreme left of the
Democrat Party. Ocasio-Cortez once took to Twitter to defend
"progressivism" against claims that some of the policies sent minority
voters into the Republican column in 2020.
The Democratic socialist tweeted,
"But honestly when it comes to Latinos the party’s just never seriously
made an effort," apparently referring to the Democrat Party. "Mexicans,
Central Am, Caribbean, Chicanos — Cubans are not the only impt
community."
The Trump administration won the favor with a bloc of Cuban American voters
who support his hardline stance on Cuba after he abandoned attempts at
diplomacy brokered under former President Barack Obama, reimposed
economic sanctions and tightened travel restrictions that had been
relaxed under Obama.
The National Review reported
that these legislators have never even denounced Venezuelan President
Nicolas Maduro. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has described Maduro
as a "brutal dictator" and vowed to continue recognizing opposition
leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s rightful leader — a position shared by
more than 50 nations.
In 2019, Omar, D-Minn., went as far as to accuse the U.S. government of leading a coup against Maduro.
Sanders, I-Vt., once defended some of the policies of Cuba's previous communist dictator Fidel Castro.
Following his win during Nevada's caucus in the 2020 Democratic primaries, Sanders was asked by Anderson Cooper during an interview on CBS' "60 Minutes" why
the Cuban people didn't rise up and help the U.S. overthrow the Castro
regime. Sanders replied that the dictator "educated their kids, gave
their kids health care, totally transformed the society."
"We're
very very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba but you know, it's
unfair to simply say everything is bad," Sanders explained. "You know?
When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a
massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro
did it?"
Republicans have taken to social media to support the protesters in their effort.
Cruz
reposted a video that claimed to show dozens in front of the Communist
Party Headquarters and said the current regime will be "consigned to the
dustbin of history."
"It has brutalized & denied freedom to
generations of Cubans, and forced my family & so many others to
flee," he tweeted. "The American people stand squarely with the men
& women of Cuba and their noble fight for liberty."
Victimizers quickly becoming victims is a recurrent theme of Thucydides’ history. In his commentary on the so-called stasis at Corcyra, he offers his most explicit warning about the long-term dangers of destroying legal institutions, customs, and traditions that serve the common good for short-term gain.
The historian notes that in the inevitable yin and yang of politics, the destroyers inevitably will seek, but do so in vain, refuge in what they have destroyed. Between 2017 and 2021 the Left has done exactly that.
What was common to the media’s deification of the criminally minded Michael Avenatti, and the promotion of a series of abject hoaxes? Do we remember the Steele “dossier,” the supposed authority of Fusion-GPS, the Schiff “report,” and the entire Russian “collusion” yarn?
Do we recall how the Left invented the Charlottesville construct out of a supposedly racist and unqualified endorsement by the president of the Klan and neo-Nazis? Who has forgotten the charge of “racism” for merely connecting the origins of COVID-19 to a Wuhan, level-4 security, gain-of-function-research, Chinese-military-affiliated virology lab rather than to a chopped-up wet bat or pangolin?
Do we remember the names of our supposed best and brightest retired intelligence officials who lied shamelessly and on spec for the Biden campaign, claiming that Russian “disinformation” accounted for a supposedly fictitious Hunter Biden’s laptop? And are the fabrications by Joe Biden and the media—that men with guns staged an “armed insurrection” of January 6 and “killed” officer Brian Sicknick—the new standard of truth?
What ties together the efforts of Robert Mueller’s 22-month, $40 million witch hunt, and the two impeachment proceedings—the last dispensing with witnesses, formal hearings, cross-examinations, a special prosecutor, and the Chief Justice presiding, all in mob-like efforts to try to convict in the Senate now private citizen Donald Trump? Must a Joe Biden, one day as president-emeritus and private citizen, fear that there will be no statutes of limitation to his vulnerability, when the vast trove of Hunter Biden’s laptop is finally accessed and turned over to a future hostile congress or federal prosecutor?
What is the common denominator of the Lt. General Michael Flynn debacle, the unmasking and leaking of surveilled American citizens, the nonstop politicized commentaries of retired military officers, and the weaponization of the intelligence agencies? What binds together the text trove of Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, the cleansing of FBI cell phones, or the forgeries of FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith?
What was the catalyst that turned a left-wing Democratic Party into a cultural revolutionary mob? In other words, why in our 233rd year of the republic are Democrats so intent to destroy the Electoral College, pack the court, admit new states to the Union, junk the filibuster, and federalize national election laws? What was so wrong with assimilation, integration, intermarriage, the “content of our character,” and race as incidental rather than essential to who we are? What has the woke revolution offered us instead?
Since when did regaining a House majority equate to impeaching a president on the eve of a reelection campaign, with his future and fiercest campaign opponents possibly as senators to be sitting in judgment on him in any Senate trial? What was common to all the “bombshells” and “walls are closing in” mythologies regarding meetings with Russians in Trump Tower, or mysterious “pings” of Trump tower machines automatically communicating with Russians, or the certain impending indictments of the Trump family?
Since when do we go back over three decades to destroy a Supreme Court nominee, with rumors of teenage drinking and supposed sexual harassment, charges brought without independent witnesses and evidence, but with plenty of solid refutation?
When did the 25th Amendment become a political tool to remove a president before a scheduled election? Since when does a Yale professor become a congressional deity for unprofessionally tele-diagnosing the president as mentally enfeebled—to the acclaim of Congress? Since when do the acting FBI head and the acting Attorney General spin mad ideas of entrapping the president with a wire to oust him as crazy?
Since when do former officials and public intellectuals write openly about the possibilities of a coup d’etat? Or when was it honorable for an “anonymous” and supposedly “important” administration insider to brag publicly about deliberately obstructing and undermining a president, or for retired admirals to address the nation in op-eds raising the possibility of removing a president “the sooner, the better”? What exactly does “sooner” mean?
The ties that bound all these melodramas over the last four years were threefold: 1) venomous hatred of outlier, controversial, and combative Trump; 2) the sanctimonious, near-religious belief that any means necessary were justified in the noble aim of destroying his presidency—and damn any lasting damage to traditional customs and constitutional norms; and 3) no counterforce would ever dream of doing to the Left what it was doing to destroy Trump.
Now we have a new president, a new administration, and a media that has gone from hysterical and venomous hatred of a president to sudden puppy-dog obsequiousness. In a blink, the national press corps molted its National Enquirerexoskeleton and revealed its inner flabby Pravda essence.
What are the lasting consequences of all this madness?
The Left should hope that House Republicans are Marquess of Queensberry players and do not emulate the Democrats’ behavior. They should hope that a Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee would not monitor the phone records of Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). For if the opposition did gain the majority in November 2022, Joe Biden’s past involvement with foreign monied interests, and the evidence of his shady behavior from his own son’s laptop texts offer a far more convincing case of impeachable offenses—failure to report to the IRS off-the-books income, influence peddling, and abject lying about foreign quid pro quo involvement—than does a single Ukrainian phone call. All that exposure is well aside from Biden’s deliberate decision not to enforce, as his job requires, federal immigration law.
Is screaming that the Trump boys were crooked, about to be indicted, and should be investigated nonstop a good precedent for federal fishing investigations of Hunter Biden? The mystery of Hunter Biden’s audacity and shamelessness seems now simple: as his recent “artist” scam, and the excuses of the White House for his artifices, show, Hunter will never, ever stop his grift.
Why? Aside from the easy lucre, a cynic might conclude that Hunter expresses bitterness at his own “clean” father for not appreciating dirty Hunter’s own slimy and raunchy “sacrifices” to enrich the Biden family in general, and in particular the “big guy” and Mr. “10 percent.” In truth, Hunter’s spite increasingly borders on implicit blackmail of his presidential father, as if something like, “You owe me, so cut me some slack—or perhaps if I go down, so does the family.”
In sum, Hunter is kryptonite to the White House and not just because of his drugs, his pornography, his women, and his criminality, but because in his delusions at least he thinks that all he did was the cost of business for the Biden family, and the proof of his pudding is in his family’s voracious eating.
If the media can force a compos mentis president to take the Montreal Cognitive Assessment to stop the hysteria that he is both enfeebled and should be removed, what do we then do with a Joe Biden who is the first president since Woodrow Wilson who often seems not mentally or cognitively up to the job? Keep talking about Joe’s favorite ice cream or the décor of Air Force One?
Are we now to expect dissident retired generals and conservative admirals soon to swarm the airways and op-eds columns claiming that Biden is derelict, non compos mentis, and, in McCarthyite style, scanning the ranks for mythical insurrectionaries and thus using the tactics of the Nazis and Mussolini to divide us? Is that our new standard? If a Biden campaign helper or advisor is brought up on charges, will Fox, in CNN style, accidentally show up at the home of the accused to film a SWAT team arrest?
In truth, constitutional protections, sane media coverage, and acceptable behavior for the top echelon of the political-military-intelligence-industrial complex were abandoned during 2016. The old rules were jettisoned on the assumption that the nation’s moral superiors and Platonic guardians had the right, and indeed, the duty, to suspend norms and traditions for our own greater good of sandbagging a political campaign, undermining a presidential transition, and removing the elected Donald Trump any way possible.
Again, none of our moral overseers ever produce any historical metrics to justify their precedents of sabotaging of a presidency. Were there Trump sins and crimes in office comparable to FDR having his daughter arrange trysts with his mistress in the White House, or putting Japanese-Americans in detention camps, or emulating JFK’s sexual depravities in the White House swimming pool, or wiretapping Civil Rights leaders for purposes of blackmail, or exposing oneself in LBJ-style, or the Clinton cigar antics, or siccing the IRS, Obama style, on political enemies, or the latter’s intelligence agencies green-lighting a foreign agent to use foreign sources to run a smear campaign against a presidential candidate?
So the problem now is that under such our new precedents, Joe Biden has more exposure to investigations of his own family’s criminality and behavior than Trump ever had.
If Trump was rash, Biden really is cognitively compromised and would not fare as well against the same “prove you are sane” choruses. His executive orders are far more constitutionally questionable than Trump’s. And under the new rules of impeachment, he is far more culpable for using his office in the past for personal gain. The Left fished for liberal federal justices to derail the Trump executive-order agenda, and now the Right will simply copy that protocol and shop around for conservative judges to do the same to Biden’s edicts.
The Left is well on its way to incurring a pushback in 2022 comparable to 2010, with the potential to make the Tea Party boomerang seem like small stuff. And the difference this time around is that there are no customs, no traditions left in treatment accorded a political opponent in office. No one any longer knows what is fair play and what is out of bounds, but only what the Democrats have left us as the new normal: if you deem a candidate, a president-elect, and a president a radical threat to your agenda, then any means necessary to destroy or to remove him and his enablers are not merely legal but absolutely moral and necessary—and damned be the damage to the nation.
What has been sown into the Trump wind, will likely be reaped in the Biden whirlwind.
In Symbolic End to War, US General to Step Down From Command in Afghanistan
U.S. Army Gen. Austin S. Miller, the U.S.'s top general
in Afghanistan, speaks to journalists at the Resolute Support
headquarters, in Kabul, Afghanistan on June 29. (AP Photo/Ahmad Seir)
The U.S. general leading the war in Afghanistan,
Austin Miller, will relinquish command on Monday, U.S. officials say, in
a symbolic end to America's longest conflict even as Taliban insurgents
gain momentum.
Miller will become America's last four-star general on the ground in
Afghanistan in a ceremony in Kabul that will come ahead of a formal end
to the military mission there on Aug. 31, a date set by President Joe
Biden as he looks to extricate American from the two-decade-old war.
While the ceremony may offer some sense of closure for U.S. veterans
who served in Afghanistan, it's unclear whether it will succeed in
reassuring the Western-backed Afghan government as the Taliban press
ground offensives that have given them control of more territory than at
any time since the conflict began.
U.S. Marine General Kenneth McKenzie, whose Florida-based Central
Command oversees U.S. forces in hot-spots including Afghanistan, Iraq
and Syria, flew into Kabul to underscore America's future assistance to
Afghan security forces.
"Admittedly, it's going to be very different than it was in the past.
I'm not going to minimize that," McKenzie told a small group of
reporters. "But we're going to support them."
But he also cautioned that the Taliban, in his view, appeared to be
seeking "a military solution" to a war that the United States has
unsuccessfully tried to end with a peace agreement between the Taliban
and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani's government.
He cautioned that provincial capitals were at risk but noted that the
U.S.-backed Afghan security forces "are determined to fight very hard
for those provincial capitals."
Even after Miller steps down, McKenzie will still be able to
authorize U.S. air strikes against the Taliban through Aug. 31 in
support of Ghani's Western-backed government.
But after that, the Marine general said when it came to U.S. strikes
in Afghanistan, his focus will shift squarely to counter-terrorism
operations against al Qaeda and Islamic State.
INTELLIGENCE NETWORK
Gathering enough intelligence on the ground to prevent another Sept.
11-style attack could become increasingly challenging, as America's
intelligence network weakens with the U.S. withdrawal and as Afghan
troops lose territory.
Democratic Representative Elissa Slotkin, a former senior Pentagon
official, said many lawmakers were still looking for answers from the
Biden administration about how the U.S. will be able to detect a future
al Qaeda plot against the United States.
"I don't need them to tell the entire world what our day-after plan
is. But I think it's important that they let us know some of the details
on a private basis," Slotkin said.
U.S. officials do not believe the Taliban could be relied upon to
prevent al Qaeda from again plotting attacks against the United States
from Afghan soil.
The United Nations said in a report in January there were as many as
500 al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan and that the Taliban maintained a
close relationship with the Islamist extremist group.
LONGEST SERVING GENERAL
As he steps down, Miller, 60, has spent longer on the ground than any of the previous generals to command the war.
He had a close call in 2018 when a rogue Afghan bodyguard in Kandahar
province opened fire in and killed a powerful Afghan police chief
standing near Miller. A U.S. brigadier general was wounded as were other
Americans but Miller emerged unscathed.
After Miller leaves the post, the Pentagon has engineered a
transition that will allow a series of generals to carry on with
supporting the Afghan security forces, mostly from overseas.
Beyond McKenzie's overwatch from Florida, a Qatar-based brigadier
general, Curtis Buzzard, will focus on administering funding support for
the Afghan security forces - including aircraft maintenance support.
In Kabul, Navy Rear Admiral Peter Vasely will lead a newly created
U.S. Forces Afghanistan-Forward, focusing on protecting the embassy and
airport.
Vasely, as a two-star admiral, is higher ranked than usual for a U.S.
embassy-based post. But a U.S. defense official added that Afghanistan
was a "very unique situation."
"There's no comparable diplomatic security situation in the world
with what we're going to establish," the official said, speaking on
condition of anonymity.
Still, what happens next in Afghanistan appears to be increasingly out of America's control.
Biden acknowledged on Thursday that Afghanistan's future was far from
certain but said the Afghan people must decide their own fate.
"I will not send another generation of Americans to war in
Afghanistan with no reasonable expectation of achieving a different
outcome," he said.
About 2,400 U.S. service members have been killed in America's longest war - and many thousands wounded.
CTH ongoing series about The Fourth Branch HERE: “When we understand how the Fourth Branch works, questions about our dysfunctional U.S. modern government are answered. Additionally, the motives and intentions of people inside the institutions start to reconcile.” ~SD
The Intelligence Branch is an independent functioning branch of government, it is no longer a subsidiary set of agencies within the Executive Branch as most would think. To understand the Intelligence Branch, we need to drop the elementary school civics class lessons about three coequal branches of government, and replace that outlook with the modern system that created itself.
The Intelligence Branch functions, much like the State Dept, through a unique set of public-private partnerships that support it. Big Tech industry collaboration with intelligence operatives is part of that functioning; almost like an NGO. However, the process is much more important than most think. In this problematic perspective of a corrupt system of government, the process has become the flaw – not just the visible outcomes.
There are people making decisions inside this little-known, unregulated and out-of-control branch of government that impact every facet of our lives.
None of the people operating deep inside the Intelligence Branch were elected; and our elected representative House members genuinely do not know how the system works. I know this because I have talked to House and Senate staffers, including the chiefs of staff for multiple House committee seats. They are clueless. That is part of the purpose of me explaining it, with examples, in full detail and sunlight.
Until we fix this modern bastardization of government, it doesn’t matter who we elect into office. Politicians are irrelevant, albeit useful gnats, from the perspective of the people in control of the Intelligence Branch.
It’s a good thing to review some “irregularities” in the 2020 election that have already been uncovered by intrepid analysts, as some of the questions that the Arizona audit needs to answer are pretty obvious. Let’s get started.
This article previously examined the two yuuuge ballot dumps within minutes of the polls closing in Arizona on Election Day night last November:
Two massive vote dumps occurred in just over an hour after the Arizona polls closed totally ~625,000 and ~1,473,000 votes, respectively.
The total of those two vote dumps (2,098,619) exceeded the official results total of Maricopa County votes cast (2,089,563) by more than 9,000 votes.
Biden received more votes in those two vote dumps (1,161,582) than his official vote tally (1,040,774) in Maricopa County.
How is that possible without some funny business associated with ballot counting and adjudication?
Why don’t the certified vote total and the county totals reconcile (a 9,999-vote difference)?
Where did the ~106K decline in minor party ballots from 2016 to 2020 go?
How could there be 628,034 more absentee/early votes counted than reportedly received?
How could there be zero write-in votes in over 3 million total ballots cast in Maricopa County?
Then there are the very strange irregularities pointed out by Seth Keshel (former US Army captain, military intelligence, and a protégé of Gen Flynn). He has been conducting demographic analyses of voter registration data in order to analyze voting patterns and the irregularities in many states (including Red ones). Here is an excerpt about Arizona from his Telegram account (@RealSKeshel):
Remember: Maricopa hasn’t been blue since 1948 It was even red when Bob Dole lost Arizona in 1996, the first loss since 1948. Trump won Maricopa in 2016 with fewer votes than Romney Trump decided to set a GOP record by gaining 248,000 additional votes from his 2016 total just so he could lose the county for the first time in 72 years Dems have never gained more than 116,000 new votes in Maricopa. So it’s totally natural of course, for Biden to come in 338,000 over Clinton to BARELY win the state. Why? He needed every one of those votes. They appear to have known the score of where Trump would come in, which is why they awkwardly counted a few batches of votes per day until they ran out of them.
Keshel’s irony in the last few sentences highlights a virtual impossibility: there is no way that The Hologram – who was an absentee candidate, and who drew minuscule crowds when he did leave his basement to “campaign” – received 338,000 more votes than Hillary Clinton did! No way, that is, without some serious monkey business behind the scenes on his behalf. Where did those votes come from?
What about those routers and passwords that have been withheld from the auditors by Maricopa County? There is no real reason for that stonewalling other than there has to be something very important that “must remain hidden,” e.g., that – as alleged – the election management servers were actually connected to external networks and/or the internet. Why not provide the routers and passwords if, as Democrats claim, “the 2020 election was the most secure in history”? Why are they stalling?
What will the Arizona audit reveal? That there have been no leaks from the audit team is an excellent sign that security is tight, which debunks Democrat claims to the contrary. If the audit wasn’t professionally being conducted, the leaks would have been nonstop from the very beginning, accompanied by the usual Democrat-media spinning. All the likes of AZ Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D-Soros) can do is disparage the auditors without evidence and coordinate with other states in demanding that states’ attorney generals “investigate the auditors” and whistleblowers. Acts of desperation at this point!
Patience is a virtue, ostensibly. We will have to wait and see what the auditors have found.
The Alaska Republican State Central Committee on Saturday endorsed Kelly Tshibaka in the 2022 race for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Republican Lisa Murkowski.
The committee approved Tshibaka’s endorsement in a 58-17 vote during a meeting in Fairbanks.
In a statement, Tshibaka said she will uphold conservative ideals and be a senator who Alaskans “can depend to make every decision based on what is best for our great state.”
Tshibaka announced on March 29 that she would run for the Senate seat held by Murkowski, who has been in office since 2002 and is widely viewed as a moderate. Two weeks earlier, the Republican State Central Committee voted 53-17 to censure Murkowski, citing her vote to impeach former President Donald Trump and other votes that have broken with GOP leadership. Alaska Republican Party leaders said at the time that they would recruit someone to run against her.
Murkowski said in a statement to the Daily News that she has fought for Alaskan values in the U.S. Senate and will continue to do so.
She has not yet filed for re-election, a spokesperson for Murkowski said.
On paper, Tshibaka looks like a solid candidate. She is married, a mother, a Harvard Law grad. She has worked in the IG offices at Department of Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, she was the Chief Data Officer of the Postal Service IG and she served as Alaska’s Commissioner of Administration until from 2019 until her resignation in March of this year to pursue a Senate run.
Why it matters: It’s another sign of division in the GOP between supporters of former President Trump and those who’ve publicly criticized him. Several senators have been censured in their home states for voting to convict Trump at his second impeachment trial earlier this year — including Murkowski.
There is some superficial truth in this statement. But let’s not forget that Murkowski isn’t terribly popular in Alaska:
And there is much, much more to the dislike of this crone than her voting with Democrats and refusing to support a popular president of her own party.
We shouldn’t count her out just yet. Murkowski has beaten the Grim Reaper once before, in 2010 she lost a primary challenge but won the general election by an unholy alliance of the GOPe, Democrats, and the Alaskan Native progressive mafia aiding her write-in campaign.
And, of course, Tshibaka is being portrayed as an extremist because that’s really all these clowns have.
When Tshibaka was at Harvard Law School, she wrote “The Right Side: Coming Out of Homosexuality,” for The Harvard Law Record, an independent newspaper at the law school, in December 2001.
“Today is National Coming Out of Homosexuality Day, a day dedicated to helping homosexuals overcome their sexual tendencies and move towards a healthy lifestyle,” she wrote in the article under her maiden name Kelly Hartline.
In the article she touts the work of Exodus International, a group that advocated gay conversion therapy. The group a decade later closed and apologized for the harm it did to the gay community.
“Homosexuals can come out of homosexuality because their preference is not biologically mandated.” Tshibaka wrote in 2001. “Unlike race or gender, homosexuality is a choice.”
She also later apologized to readers who were upset over the article, saying she did not intend to offend.
Tshibaka said she was assigned the article by an editor as a counterpoint piece. “I don’t hold that view today,” she told the AP.
When asked if same-sex marriage is settled law, she said: “I personally believe that marriage is between a man and a woman, but the Supreme Court has ruled that same-sex marriage is the law of the land.”
think it is time we look back to Barry Goldwater for some perspective:
“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”
While it is too soon to tell, I think the curtain may be coming down on Murkowski’s era of sucking up to Democrats for fun and profit. She hasn’t filed to run and she might want to leave office under her own steam rather than being run out of town on a rail. If you tie this with what is happening with Liz Cheney, we may, in fact, be on the leading edge of a purifying fire sweeping through the GOP and retiring establishment types who’ve been happy to stand by and let our nation be stolen while they took no risks nor action to prevent it.
Senator Murkowski Tells Alaska Radio She Has Not Decided if She Will Run for Re-election,
If She Does She Will Be Crushed Unless She Runs as a Democrat
CTH readers know Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowsi very well. Her history of political manipulation and DeceptiCon activity is deep. Murkowski was defeated in the GOP primary in 2010 by Joe Miller (who we supported), and yet the Alaska senator refused to give up her power and ran as a write-in candidate. CTH has been exposing this b**ch for 12 years. Enough is enough.
The RNC club never punished Murkowski for those 2010 shenanigans because, well, the RNC club supports this type of cocktail club ideologue.
This reality is part of the entrenched problem with the RNC as an organization, they rebuke the efforts of the grassroots base.
Ronna McDaniel is simply one vile person in a long-line of vile RNC people who maintain this corrupt club operation.
Lisa Murkowski is a prime example of the type of politician who permits the Intelligence Branch to exist because the superseding branch of government allows her to continue living a life of indulgence and influence. She is a grifter and a liar of the highest order.
The DeceptiCon wing of the UniParty fuels and supports the Intelligence Branch because the Intelligence Branch protects both wings of the UniParty. This is why, despite refusing to accept the primary defeat, when Senator Murkowski arrived back in DC in January 2011 the Grandmaster DeceptiCon, Mitch McConnell, just let her go right back into her Energy Committee leadership spot. There are never repercussions for anything when you are protected by the Intelligence Branch.
This is not a party issue. Republicans and Democrats form both wings of the UniParty in congress; it is just more visible in the upper chamber because the Senate is more corrupt and entrenched. The Intelligence Branch exists because the lack of Senate oversight is responsible for it.
Lisa Murkowski was one of seven Republican senators who voted to impeach President Trump over the January 6th “riot” in DC. [Other GOP senators included Sens. Richard Burr (N.C.), Bill Cassidy (La.), Susan Collins (Maine), Mitt Romney (Utah), Ben Sasse (Neb.) and Pat Toomey (Pa.)] It is absolutely certain that Murkowski will be dispatched by the Republican base in the 2021 primary.
Senator Murkowski is uncertain if she will run again, but she is certain of her hatred for President Trump:
The Hill – […] During an interview that aired Friday with Alaska Landmine Radio, Murkowski, a GOP moderate, said that former President Trump has “threatened to do a lot” to his detractors, even those in his own party.
The veteran senator has served in the upper chamber since 2002 but during Friday’s interview would not confirm whether she would run for reelection in 2022. Radio host Jeff Landfield said that the race for her seat in the Senate would be closely watched.
“It will be. I think one of the things that I’ve learned is that none of the races that I’ve been part of have ever really been easy or ordinary. This will probably prove to be much, much along those lines,” Murkowski said. “I know that former President Trump is skeptical about me and the job that I do for Alaska, but I really think that that’s for Alaskans to judge.”
“Do you think he’s going to come up here?” Landfield asked.
Murkowski appeared to brush off past threats the president has made and characterized them as “idle.”
“You know, he’s threatened to. He’s threatened to do a lot to those who have stood up to him, and sometimes there’s some carry-through, and sometimes maybe it’s just idle words or idle threats, but I can’t let that influence what I do and how I do it and who I do it for,” Murkowski said. (read more)
The RNC club never punished Murkowski for those 2010 shenanigans because, well, the RNC club supports this type of cocktail club ideologue.