Reading the Stars - Lessons in Justice, Liberty and Patriotism from Three 2020 Departures

by Lloyd Billingsley: Back on October 31, in the run-up to the election, Sean Connery passed away at 90. Critics worldwide hailed him as the greatest James Bond of all, but there was more to the character, the films, and the man.

Unlike Michael Douglas, Jane Fonda, Kiefer Sutherland and many others, Sean Connery did not become a star because his father or mother had been one before him. He was working class all the way, laying bricks, driving trucks, polishing coffins and such. After a few movie roles, including in Darby O’Gill and the Little People in 1959, producers tapped Connery to play British agent 007 James Bond in the movie version of Ian Fleming’s Dr. No. Connery played Bond in seven films from 1962 to 1983, when Johnny Carson quipped that old 007 needed a cyanide suppository.

The left derided the Bond movies as Cold War propaganda but that misses the mark. The villains were criminal organizations such as the Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion (SPECTRE), playing the West and the Soviets off each other. Bond also encountered Auric Goldfinger, who proclaims, “Man has climbed Mount Everest, gone to the bottom of the ocean. He has fired rockets at the moon, split the atom, achieved miracles in every field of human endeavor, except crime!”

As he battles Goldfinger, Bloefeld et al, Bond remains an employee of an elected British government, with established and respected authority. In all the Bond films, there is no question that Britain is worth defending, and that continued long after Connery gave way to Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and Daniel Craig.

In the 2012 Skyfall, spymaster M (Judy Dench) must face the music in government hearings. She sets up headquarters in Winston Churchill’s old bunker, and a British bulldog figurine, wrapped in the Union Jack, holds vigil on her desk. So the most enduring feature of the films is the conviction that, as the song says, “There’ll Always be an England.”

Olivia de Havilland, who passed away in July at 104, was best known as the genteel Melanie Hamilton in the 1939 Gone with the Wind. In reality, de Havilland was anything but a pushover. Olivia de Havilland was the first to challenge the industry’s onerous contracts in court, shaking the studio system to its foundations.

In 1944, de Havilland joined Humphrey Bogart, Judy Garland, and other stars in a radio broadcast for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. After World War II, de Havilland networked with other stars in the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee for the Arts, Sciences and Professions, but this group had a problem.

Like many Hollywood guilds and unions of the time, HICCASP was controlled by the Communist Party, a force in the studios since the 1930s. De Havilland was given a speech written by dutiful Communist Dalton Trumbo. She tossed it, and that surprised fellow HICCASP member Ronald Reagan, who thought that de Havilland was one of the Communists. She thought the same about him, but they duly teamed up on a letter rejecting Communism and championing American free enterprise.

Communist Party straw boss John Howard Lawson promptly exploded and smeared the dissenters in typical style. Reagan and his allies duly resigned from HICCASP, one of many Communist Party front groups. The feisty patriot de Havilland outlived them all, a triumph of sheer staying power.

Wilford Brimley, who passed away on August 1 at the age of 85, played roles in Cocoon, The Natural and The Thing. What may have been his best performance came in the film that replicates a Washington intrigue of the past four years.

The 1981 Absence of Malice dramatized the high concept: “In America, can a man be guilty until proven innocent?” Prosecutor Elliot Rosen (Bob Balaban) leaks a story that Michael Gallagher (Paul Newman) is under investigation in an unsolved murder case. The fake story wrecks Gallagher’s business and puts him in jeopardy, but Gallagher fights back and trips up Rosen and the local DA, suspected of taking bribes. That brings in U.S. Attorney James A. Wells, wonderfully played by Brimley.

“We can’t have people go around leaking stuff for their own reasons,” Wells says. “It ain’t legal, and worse than that, by God, it ain’t right.” Wells asks Rosen what he plans do after government service. Rosen says he’s not going anywhere, but Wells explains, “You got thirty days.”

In the real world, Hillary Clinton concocted a fake story that Donald Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election. The media ran with it, and the upper reaches of the DOJ and FBI deployed the fake story in an effort to take down candidate and President Trump.

Attorney General William Barr put John Durham on the case but despite mounds of evidence Durham brought no charges against major players Comey, Strzok, Page, Rosenstein, Ohr, et al. What this gang did wasn’t legal, and by God it wasn’t right, but they got away with it.

Deep State Productions now favor the bad guys, so more than ever we need people dedicated to justice under the law. It is possible to be a patriot in Hollywood, but you have to take a stand. If there will always be an England, and an America, we need the intrepid 007 types fighting behind the scenes. Sean, Olivia, and Wilford, thanks for the memories.
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Lloyd Billingsley writes for FrontPage Mag.

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Biden Loses, Looking Ahead

Gary Bauer

by Gary Bauer: Biden Loses
Every year since 1946, Gallup has asked Americans to name the man they most admire. For the past 12 years, it has been Barack Obama. This year, America's most admired man is President Donald Trump.

But what about Joe Biden? He finished a distant third, behind his old boss Obama. I find the result of this popularity contest interesting, given how popular the media seem to believe Joe Biden is.

One would think the media's anointed savior of the country could do better than third place in Gallup's survey of the most admired men in America. But apparently not.

Looking Ahead
2021 is going to start off with a bang!

President Trump will be in Georgia for a major rally on Monday, January 4th.

The next day, Tuesday, January 5th, Georgians will choose their senators for the 117th Congress.

Then on Wednesday, January 6th, Congress will meet in a joint session to count and certify the votes of the Electoral College. That same day, a huge pro-Trump rally will be held in Washington, D.C.

I am more convinced than ever that there was widespread cheating in the November election. The lax attitude of Democrat states has resulted in built-in cheating that is sadly accommodated by the left, which insists that voter fraud is a myth. Except that it isn't a myth. The Heritage Foundation has documented more than 1,000 examples.

But as you can tell from the increasingly frustrated statements of the president and others, including me, no one has been able to find all the requirements necessary to compel a court to correct the situation.

I know President Trump and Vice President Pence will continue to fight to secure the integrity and fairness of our elections. That is vital to the future of our constitutional republic.

And that is why I am adamant that Republican governors and state legislators must do everything they can to secure voting integrity so that no future election is stolen as this one was.

One Week To Go
We're one week out from the critical Georgia Senate runoff elections. The outcome of those contests will be as consequential as any Senate race in modern history, and almost rivals the importance of the presidential contest. The fate of our country will be decided by these two Senate races.

If by some chance President Trump secures a second term and both Georgia senators manage to secure their reelection, then America will continue to be governed much as it has been for the past two years. The Senate will remain in Republican hands, while Nancy Pelosi will continue to rule the House of Representatives by a very narrow margin.

If President Trump secures a second term but both Georgia seats go to the Democrats, then Trump will face a hostile Congress with both chambers controlled by the opposition party. His agenda will be dead on arrival on Capitol Hill. There will be no chance of confirmation for his conservative judicial nominees. And another impeachment effort seems inevitable.

If Joe Biden is sworn in on January 20th, and Republicans win one or both seats, then Republicans will have a slim majority that will be able to block the worst aspects of the left's radical agenda.

But if Joe Biden is sworn in next month and Democrats win both Georgia seats, then Katie bar the door. The Senate will be evenly divided, making Vice President Kamala Harris the ultimate decider on everything from higher taxes to abortion funding, open borders and climate change craziness.

The America First Movement
I want to reiterate something we addressed yesterday. What Donald Trump accomplished by molding populism with conservatism was to create a working-class coalition of all races. Blacks, Asians, Hispanics and working-class white voters are the future of the country.

Every big business donor who thinks it will be great to return to "business as usual" in Washington with big international trade deals, open borders and appeasing communist China is clueless about the mood of America outside the elite enclaves of Wall Street and the Washington, D.C. beltway.

And a return to "business as usual," with nothing but lip service to cultural and values issues, would be political suicide for the GOP.

You don't have to take my word for it. As I noted yesterday, polling shows that the overwhelming majority of Republicans see Trump, not the average Republican politician, as the party's future.

Moreover, the left knows it too. The New York Times recently posted a stunning analysis of how Donald Trump's America First message attracted huge numbers of new immigrant voters.

There is a battle in the Democrat Party between the AOC Squad and the Pelosi-Schumer old guard. In my view, it is largely a battle over style, not policy. But there is also a battle in the Republican Party between the old GOP establishment and a new populist conservatism. John McCain and Mitt Romney ran as old guard Republicans and lost big.

Donald Trump created an America First movement within the GOP, but I believe it is a message that has appeal beyond one party. There are millions of independents who feel neither party speaks for them but desperately want a leader who will put their interests and our country first.

I am a Reagan conservative. But I am also an America First conservative. I am going to do everything I can to ensure that a remade and revitalized conservative movement emerges in the future.
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Gary Bauer (@GaryLBauer)  is a conservative family values advocate and serves as president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families

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Free Mitch Rutledge

Stephen Moore 

by Stephen Moore: Nearly everyone has seen the classic movie "The Shawshank Redemption." Well, it turns out there is a real life "Red" Redding, the character played by Morgan Freeman. He is in prison in Alabama. He has been there for nearly 40 years. He was guilty of his crime: a murder he committed as a teenager in a drug operation. But so many people who have interacted with Rutledge in prison see the similarities in character with Red.

He grew up in a broken home with a father he never knew. His mother was a child of 13 years old and was hardly around for adult supervision. He was illiterate. As a teen, he roamed the streets with drug dealers and prostitutes. With no real family. Without religion. Without schooling. Without love of any kind. It was the kind of trapped and hopeless situation that makes you think, "There but for the grace of God go I."

He admitted his heinous crime, and he was convicted and sentenced to death. His tragic story was widely publicized in 1983 by a Time magazine profile of individuals in prison on death row. It was not a sympathetic portrayal. The author ended her story by dismissing Rutledge as irredeemable. She recommended that he "sit and stew in his 8-ft. by 5-ft. pen in Alabama. Forget him."

But his story drew the attention of my friend and fellow economist Burton Folsom -- a bestselling free market author -- and a few other kindhearted people who saw a chance of redemption. Burt and his wife went to visit Rutledge on many occasions.

They and others converted him to Christ, and his life has been turned around. His death sentence was commuted to life in prison. He has become in every way a model citizen in prison. He instructs young Black men how to avoid the mistakes he made. What gave Rutledge hope was his inner conviction that "maybe there was a purpose to my life. Maybe there were still things God wanted me for." This epiphany is what has kept Rutledge from the torture of total despair after 40 years behind bars in a maximum-security prison in Alabama.

Prison normally hardens men's souls. Rutledge has softened. As Folsom and his wife, Anita, wrote in their biographical book "Death on Hold," "There may be no inmate in the United States who is more rehabilitated than Mitchell Rutledge." After 40 years behind bars -- two-thirds of his life -- with virtually no personal freedom and only knowledge of the outside world from TV in prison, he has paid his debt to society.

Trump and/or Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey must act with justice and mercy. It would be a victory for our penal system that a man can serve his time and be rehabilitated. Rutledge puts it well: "The prison system does not rehabilitate inmates. The prisoners have to rehabilitate themselves." Everyone, including the warden, has spoken up on his behalf.

The famous line from Tim Robbins in "The Shawshank Redemption" is, "You have to get busy living or get busy dying." Let Rutledge get on living. Freeing a 60-year-old Black man, who has reformed his life against all odds and poses no threat to the public, would be an appropriate and justified use of presidential power by Trump, highlighting his righteous crusade for civil justice reform. Redemption is a beautiful thing.
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Stephen Moore, (@StephenMoore) is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an economic consultant with Freedom Works. He is the co-author of "Fueling Freedom: Exposing the Mad War on Energy." Moore encouraged the ARRA News Service editor at SamSphere Chicago 2008 to blog his articles. His article was in Rasmussen Reports

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2020: America's Wake-Up Call

Patrick J. Buchanan

by Patrick J. Buchanan: Who could have predicted how

 dreadful a year 2020 would be.

By this New Year's Eve, 19 million to 20 million Americans will have contracted a deadly virus in a pandemic that exploded out of China to carry off 333,000 Americans, one of every 1,000 of us.

As 2021 begins, Americans will be dying at the rate of 10,000 a week and contracting the virus at a rate of more than 1 million new cases a week.

Yet, during that same year, miracles occurred. Vaccines were created, tested and mass-produced by Pfizer and Moderna that could, with 95% effectiveness, stop this virus cold. If Americans can reach "herd immunity" -- from having caught and survived the virus or having been vaccinated against it -- the COVID-19 pandemic might be contained by the summer of 2021.

Economically, the pandemic caused the worst crash since the Great Depression with scores of thousands of schools closed and empty, and scores of thousands of stores, bars and restaurants shuttered, many never to open again.

Yet, in the same year, the Dow Jones Industrial Average broke every record, crossing the 30,000 mark, again and again, with the NASDAQ and S&P 500 reaching new highs.

Thus, as tens of millions of Americans saw their savings wiped out and had trouble making rent payments and feeding their families, some investors saw their stock portfolios surge. Yes, Virginia, there are two Americas.

On Memorial Day weekend, a white police officer in Minneapolis was taped kneeling for nine minutes on the neck of a Black suspect.

Hours later, George Floyd would die, and his death would trigger protests against police brutality that quickly degenerated into radical and racial rioting unseen since the 1960s.

The arson, looting and attacks on police caused a backlash that spread across the country when the demands of antifa and Black Lives Matter suddenly became, "Defund the Police!" That anti-cop slogan did for law enforcement reform what rioters' cries of "Burn, baby, burn!" did for the civil rights movement in the '60s.

By the time the fires burned out, Middle America was recoiling against the left for indulging the anarchists and denouncing Democratic leaders who refused to condemn the rioting.

Still, despite the pandemic, the third of a million dead, the crash and the seemingly endless riots, President Donald Trump won 74 million votes, the largest total of any president in history. And he held the Senate for the Republicans and added more than a dozen seats in the House.

Yet, Joe Biden, who would be crushed in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary and lose Nevada to Bernie Sanders, would be rescued by a massive Black turnout in South Carolina. Revived, he would go on to win the Democratic nomination on the first ballot.

Sheltering in his basement through the fall, Biden would run up a 7 million-vote victory over Donald Trump, though his verbal and mental deterioration was almost painfully obvious in his few public appearances.

Another wake-up call to how polarized we are came with an orgy of icon-smashing of statues and monuments, from Columbus to presidents Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

A large slice of America's academic and intellectual elite detests the men who created and built the country America has become. Not a positive omen for those who believe America has done great things, greater than any nation, and can do them again.

As America was shaken by its vulnerability to a pandemic, the U.S. saw its warships and warplanes challenged in the South and East China Seas and Taiwan Strait by a China, which, admonished to allow greater democracy in Hong Kong, proceeded to extinguish the existing democracy there. And the world and the West did nothing.

Revelations that China was running concentration camps in its interior to "reeducate" Muslim Uighurs in what it means to be a patriot in a nation dominated by Han Chinese and ruled by the Chinese Communist Party evoked only verbal protests.

By year's end, it was not America warning China but Beijing warning America that manifestations of political or military solidarity with Taiwan, and arms sales to the island, would constitute interference in the internal affairs of China -- as Taiwan belongs to China.

Suddenly, a great awakening about the character of the regime we have pampered with investment and trade for three decades appeared stark.

Unable to stand up to a China in which they invested so many hopes, the American establishment turns to Russia -- a nation with one-tenth China's population and one-tenth of its economy, and no army or navy to match Beijing's -- as its adversary of choice.

But while President Vladimir Putin may fulfill well the role of villain, his principal foreign intervention in 2020 was to play the role of peacemaker in the South Caucasus' war between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
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Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever."

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What Denying Election Fraud Accomplishes

by Mark Andrew Dwyer: There were voluminous reports, from eyewitnesses and experts, of widespread election fraud in the so-called battle states and beyond. Specific allegations were made, and evidence of election rules violations and statistical anomalies were collected. Yet the courts refused to listen to virtually all witnesses and experts, rejected most of the evidence, and refused to subpoena more evidence requested by the plaintiffs. Many state government officials and some top representatives of companies supplying voting machines and software categorically denied any election fraud.

So, on the one hand, there is plenty of evidence strongly suggesting that the widely observed election fraud took place during the 2020 presidential elections. On the other hand, all we have are assurances of the election fraud–deniers that there was no election fraud, which were later changed to admissions that although election fraud did take place, it wasn't large enough to sway the results. No verifiable facts that would clearly invalidate the specific election fraud allegations were presented to the public as of the time of this writing, while quite a lot of obstruction of investigations, like denials to subject the vote-counting software and hardware to examination by independent experts, took place. Some of this obstruction had all appearances of a cover-up.

I must say that anyone who, knowing the above, claims that Joe Biden has received required majorities of legitimate votes to become a duly elected president is either stupid or willing to cover up the truth about the rigged elections that we have allowed to continue in America.

I am not going to analyze the stupid. However, I would like to look into possible reasons why an intelligent observer would opt for the cover-up of election fraud if it did take place.

Reason 1: The election fraud–denier wanted President Trump to be removed from the Oval Office.

There were many individuals and groups who for more than four years have been desperately trying to stop Mr. Trump from becoming the president in 2016 and then, after his inauguration, to remove him by any means available. False charges of his collusion with Russia and other impeachable offenses were being thrown on him and investigated vigorously for most of his term as the president, to the tune of mass propaganda from the majority of the "mainstream" media portraying him as a monster, a dictator, a profiteer, a destroyer of the world order, and such. Obviously, the anti-Trumpers are not going to allow anybody to question the validity of the election of Mr. Joe Biden.

Reason 2: The election fraud denier-wanted a Democrat to be elected as the president.

Although any individual voter is free to vote for whomever he wants, when government officers let their personal political preferences override their official duty, then prerequisites for corruption are met. For instance, if judges or election officials refuse to seriously consider election fraud because of their affiliation with or support of the Democrat Party, then corruption has taken place. Not that the Democrat Party has a monopoly on this kind of wrongdoing, but it has gained notoriety as the party who cheats the most and the best.

Reason 3: The election fraud–denier was afraid of the violence that investigation of election fraud may lead to.

Unfortunately, many of those in positions of power who could order serious and impartial investigations of the alleged election fraud and possible overturning of the results, if proven fraudulent or invalid, were concerned with a threat of violent riots of left's militant organizations, like BLM and Antifa. Some could have been trying to save our country a civil war or something equally horrible, while others were afraid for their own safety. As much as I disagreed with their decision to support the cover-up of election fraud, their position had a dose of rationality.

Imagine that you are a judge or a justice, and you have a family to feed and protect. Wouldn't you be concerned that your controversial judgment may irritate BLM or Antifa into bringing their "protests" to your neighborhood and trying to harm your spouse and your children or burn down your home? It seems likely that without violence by BLM and Antifa earlier this year, the well-orchestrated election fraud would not have stood a chance to be left uninvestigated. If a thorough investigation proved that the results were invalid, Mr. Joe Biden would not stand a chance of being declared the winner.

The above realization implies that we are seeing a dawn of mobocracy in the U.S. as a replacement for our Constitutional Republic as a form of government. That spells out bad news for virtually everyone, including even the mobsters. We need brave leaders who will put the safety of law-abiding Americans in front of these leaders' personal safety and political interest.

Reason 4: The election fraud–denier wants to be "pragmatic" — that is, to accept whatever happened and go along with whatever comes out of it.

By doing so, the election fraud–denier makes himself a perfect target for all kinds of predators, social parasites, and control freaks. He does not realize that losing a battle does not require capitulation of the war and that losing a war does not require surrendering the nation to the hostile power that waged it. Some election fraud–deniers of this kind go even as far as to insist that if we cannot (or don't want to) fight them (the election fraudsters and power-grabbers), then we may as well join them. That may be a nice little trick that may work, to some extent, in low-stage games, but not when submission of once-free people to the power of the government that is not accountable to them is at stake. Such submission is almost always permanent, and the longer it lasts, the more difficult it is to abolish. Clearly, if the president is determined not by the will of the people, as prescribed in the Constitution, but by rigged elections under the control of a determined and ruthless cabal, then the president, and other elected officials, are accountable to the cabal and not to the voters.

Reason 5: The election-fraud denier was concerned that any serious investigation of election fraud might erode public trust in our elections.

Surely, many politicians who were not enthusiastic about how the elections 2020 were carried on, wanted to protect a "higher good," a public trust that our elections are free, fair, and honest. As much as such may seem on its surface a noble concern, it is based on a fallacy.

It presupposes that public trust in elections integrity is far more important than the actual integrity of the elections, which it is not. For why would We the People agree to be cheated of our right to elect the president of our choice just to maintain appearances that we were not cheated of that fundamental right? True, our Constitutional Republic has not been perfect, yet so many of us wholeheartedly support it. But among other strengths, it has an exceptional ability to self-repair. That is definitely not a feature of any rigged election system; once in place, it has a natural tendency to get worse and worse until it is overthrown by its victims — a costly and destructive option that is less than certain to deliver the desired results.

Moreover, concerns that any serious investigation of election fraud might erode public trust in our elections are in many cases hypocritical, as they often come from the very groups and individuals who were not concerned with weakening the presidency by endless investigations of false charges against him or who spread the mass anti-Trump propaganda that grossly undermined public trust in the Office of the President of the U.S.

Why would we, without a serious and thorough investigation, accept categorical assurances by election fraud–deniers despite mounting evidence that organized election fraud took place in 2020 and was widespread, while President Trump's categorical assurances that he did not collude with Russians were deemed not enough so that all the false allegations against him had to be seriously and thoroughly investigated?

There is no good reason for us to accept these assurances. The Constitutional laws and processes that make for this Republic have been weaponized to facilitate a grab of sweeping power by the transnational cabal that has long considered the U.S. as an obstacle in the imposition of their rule over the world. Never mind that American $20+ trillion a year economy for grabs by the said control freaks would have been a sufficient reason in its own right. Now, it's up to us, the American people, to resist the cabal and defend our freedom and the Constitution that stands for it.

As George Orwell wrote in 1984, "[w]e know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it." So will our future rulers not relinquish the power they grabbed with 2020 election fraud if we let them have their way?
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Mark Andrew Dwyer writes at American Thinker

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Cuomo Loses Again

by Bill Donohue: On December 28, the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the Diocese of Brooklyn and the Orthodox Jewish group Agudath Israel in their attempts to overturn the tyrannical edicts of Governor Andrew Cuomo: he loves to impose occupancy limits on houses of worship. For those keeping score at home, this is Cuomo’s third defeat in court.

The most recent setback for Cuomo came in the form of a 3-0 decision by the Second Circuit to block his restrictions which limit the capacity of worshipers to 10 in red zones and 25 in orange zones.

In the court’s ruling, Circuit Judge Michael Park said, “no public interest is served by maintaining an unconstitutional policy….” This is a scathing rebuke, and Cuomo would do well to abandon his course. However, he is no stranger to defeat and appears not to heed such warnings from the courts.

On June 26, U.S. District Court Judge Gary Sharpe handed Cuomo his first defeat when he ruled that the governor exceeded his authority by putting restrictions on people of faith while simultaneously condoning protests.

Not to be deterred by this ruling, in October, Cuomo tried again to limit the religious liberties of New Yorkers when he issued his dictates to cap the number of worshipers in houses of worship to 10 or 25 people. Fortunately, on November 25, the Supreme Court intervened and provided a temporary injunction against enforcing these draconian restrictions. The ruling from the Second Circuit made the high court’s decision more enduring.

If this were a game of baseball, this would be Cuomo’s third strike, and he would be out. Unfortunately, Cuomo is not a major leaguer. He is a tyrant, and tyrants do not play by those rules. Their voracious appetite for power and insatiable lust to dominate their fellow man cannot be curtailed so easily. That is why it has taken a district court, a circuit court and the Supreme Court to try to bring Cuomo to heel.

It will require courageous men and women of all faiths to remain vigilant and continue the fight to safeguard our freedoms. However, rulings like these three against Cuomo boost our chances of success, and as far as the Catholic League is concerned, this is one man who cannot lose enough.
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Bill Donohue (@CatholicLeague) is a sociologist and president of the Catholic League.

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The Portland Chaos

by Paul Jacob, Contributing Author: “As a lifelong Portlander,” Alan Grinnell writes to the editor of The Oregonian, “I am shocked at what our city has become.”

Responding to a Steve Duin column about Portland, the “broken city,” Grinnell asks, rhetorically, “Who would have thought that our downtown would become a wasteland, that there would be homeless camps everywhere in the city, and that gangs of armed thugs on all sides of the political spectrum would run out our police?”

Duin defined the problem as one of “mob rule,” lamenting that “just about everyone I spoke to was terrified they might be the next random target of the mob.”

After months of riots and property destruction following the killing of George Floyd by police in distant Minneapolis, Minnesota, the focus of recent police and community attention turned to a house on Mississippi Street from which so-called “sovereign citizens” — the Kinney family (who are black and indigenous) — were evicted for not paying their mortgage (since 2017). Now the house is being occupied by “activists,” who have turned the area into a sort of autonomous zone — as was done for weeks this summer, dangerously, in the Capitol Hill area of Seattle.

“[I]f you live or tend shop on North Mississippi, and fear for your own safety around the local ‘security’ forces,” inquired the columnist, “what do you make of the cops’ retreat from the neighborhood?”

While many appear sympathetic with the Kinneys’ plight, the takeover by the terrorists, er, activists, is another matter entirely. One black man on reddit calls it “one big scam,” suggesting folks “ignore these loons.”

But ignoring willful lawbreakers appears to be the problem, not the solution.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Paul Jacob (@Common_Sense_PJ) is author of Common Sense which provides daily commentary about the issues impacting America and about the citizens who are doing something about them. He is also President of the Liberty Initiative Fund (LIFe) as well as Citizens in Charge Foundation. Jacob is a contributing author on the ARRA News Service.

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Democrat Governors Freed the Criminals and Killed the Elderly

by Daniel Greenfield: In March, Governor Cuomo's administration ordered nursing homes to accept infected coronavirus patients and prohibited even testing incoming patients for the virus. The same month that Cuomo began the process of infecting countless nursing home residents with the virus, he also began freeing thousands of criminals from prison to protect them from the virus.

Over 3,000 criminals have been freed from New York State prisons to protect them from the virus, and New York City’s Mayor Bill de Blasio freed 1,500 criminals, and they swiftly began committing a variety of crimes, but despite the media hype claiming that prison was a death sentence and a campaign by woke celebs like John Legend, criminals were not at risk.

Only 19 inmates in New York State actually died of the virus.

Meanwhile an estimated 11,000 nursing home patients have died of the virus statewide.

Unlike the prison numbers, which are easily accessible, the Cuomo administration has stonewalled and refused to provide the actual number of deaths, instead offering only an incomplete listing of only those nursing home residents who died in the actual facilities.

While Governor Cuomo took great care to protect criminals, very few of whom died of the virus, he condemned thousands of nursing home patients to a slow and miserable death. And the media and celebrities who advocated for rapists and killers showed no interest in their fate.

But it wasn’t just Cuomo.

In California, Governor Newsom ordered skilled nursing facilities to accept infected patients. The next month, 3,500 criminals were freed. By the fall, over 9,000 criminals had been freed, with a plan to release as many as 17,600 criminals. After an ACLU lawsuit, Orange County was ordered to free 1,800 violent inmates whom Sheriff Barnes described as "people in for very serious offenses -- murder, attempted murder, domestic violence."

96 California State prison inmates have died in the pandemic alongside an official death toll of 5,940 nursing home residents.

But the lives of nearly 6,000 nursing home patients mattered less than the lives of 96 criminals.

New Jersey released 2,258 criminals in one day to slow the spread of the virus.

“Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, our administration has worked tirelessly to save as many lives as possible,” Governor Phil Murphy falsely claimed. Then he bragged that, "the population in State correctional facilities has decreased by nearly 3,000 people."

This wasn’t good enough for Senator Booker who demanded that Murphy release more criminals, claiming that he could “save the lives of tens of thousands” of criminals.

Just not of their victims.

Only 52 criminals in New Jersey custody have actually died of the virus.

The former Goldman Sachs executive who started his career in politics by buying an ambassadorship from Obama was far less compassionate to the elderly than he was to his own kind. His administration signed a death sentence for thousands of senior citizens by ordering nursing homes to accept infected patients and banned them from using coronavirus tests.

Over 7,400 nursing home residents died of the pandemic in New Jersey. Some of the hardest hit residents were veterans living in nursing homes managed by the New Jersey government.

Governor Pritzker in Illinois released around 4,000 criminals from prison, including 64 murderers, using the same Disaster Proclamation that he used to lock residents in their homes, while failing to notify their victims. Only 50 prison inmates actually died in Illinois.

But recently 605 nursing home residents died in Illinois… in just 7 days.

7,559 nursing home residents have died in the pandemic in Illinois amounting to over 50% of the state’s death toll. Criminals only account for 0.3% of the state’s death toll. But while Pritzker was freeing criminals, he funneled infected coronavirus patients into nursing homes.

Democrat officials repeatedly prioritized criminals over nursing home residents, releasing the former to protect them from getting the virus while locking up the latter with the virus.

Had the Democrats set out to deliberately kill 100,000 senior citizens, they couldn’t have done a better job than the policies enacted by the Cuomo, Newsom, Murphy, Whitmer, Wolf, Pritzker, and other Democrat administrations.

And now that the vaccine is being rolled out, the welfare of criminals remains a top priority.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley, a member of the socialist squad, vowed to fight, "for incarcerated men and women to be prioritized in the distribution of the vaccine."

A report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine being utilized by the CDC recommended placing criminals and homeless vagrants in phase 1b, the second phase, alongside nursing home residents, as if their risk or moral standing were equivalent.

D.C. and a number of states are indeed putting criminals ahead of much of the population.

But after all the agonizing from Democrats, activists, and the media over outbreaks in prisons, 149 federal inmates out of 124,538, and 551 state prison inmates out of some 1.2 million died.

In 2016, 4,117 criminals had died in federal and state prisons.

The only prison coronavirus crisis was caused by the release of criminals back onto the street.

The plight of criminals facing coronavirus in prison has led to celebrity awareness campaigns, protests with lefty activists chanting, “Free Them All”, massive media coverage that describe every prison death as another “grim milestone”, and special interventions by governors, mayors, and judges on behalf of the worst people in our society outside of politics and the press.

Meanwhile the deaths of 113,981 nursing home patients, a true grim milestone, have passed unnoticed with no word from any celebrity, no protest, and hardly a whisper.

Democrat governors not only haven’t intervened on their behalf, but helped kill them.

New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, and California, the states run by Cuomo, Murphy, Wolf, Pritzker, and Newsom, who pushed infected patients into nursing homes, account for some 40,000 deaths among nursing home patients. These numbers are incomplete because of the deliberate obstruction of some of these administrations, notably those of Cuomo, Murphy, and Pritzker, when providing accurate and comprehensive statistics of these deaths.

While Democrats fought to help criminals, they neglected and killed the elderly.

The media has run more high profile coverage of the deaths of a few hundred criminals in custody, out of millions, than of the deaths of 113,981 nursing home patients. And even now it urgently warns that the criminals are in danger and must be freed before they all die. Certainly, it insists, they should be early in line for the vaccine even though very few criminals have died.

The true story of the pandemic’s grim milestone is that the Democrats freed the criminals to protect them from the virus and locked nursing home patients, who were the most vulnerable, in with those infected with the virus. Now they want to prioritize criminals for the vaccine.

And that stands to reason.

As pro-crime felon voting laws sweep the nation, the Democrats are fighting to keep their voting base of criminals free, while killing the elderly who are more likely to be conservative.

They didn’t mismanage a pandemic. They managed a political genocide.
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Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

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Our Upside-Down Postelection World

by Victor Davis Hanson: After Nov. 3, the meaning of some words and concepts abruptly changed. Have you noticed how new realities have replaced old ones?

Media cross-examination of the president is now an out-of-date idea. The time for gotcha questions has come and gone. Why ask a president whether he is a traitor or a crook when you can focus on his favorite flavor of milkshake or compliment him on his socks?

The old pre-election truth was that new vaccines take years to develop. The new postelection truth is that it’s no big deal to bring out new vaccines in nine months.

Impeaching a first-term president after his first midterm election—on a strictly partisan vote, for political reasons other than the Constitution’s “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors”—is now a terrible idea.

Worse would be to appoint a special counsel to harass a president on unfounded charges of collusion with China. An even scarier notion would be a conservative dream team of partisan lawyers hounding a President Joe Biden—using a 22-month, $40 million blank check.

It would be unprofessional for university psychologists and physicians from a distance to diagnose, in pop fashion, the mental faculties of a President Biden.

Certainly, there would never be talk about Department of Justice officials contemplating wearing a wire as part of an entrapment scheme to remove a President Biden through the 25th Amendment. That would almost constitute a coup attempt.

Almost as bad would be for the holdover FBI director to start “memorializing” his private conversations with Biden on FBI devices. He might then leak such memos to the press—just in case he were to be fired for secretly investigating Biden for “Chinese collusion” and then lying about such a probe.

What happened to the Logan Act? Not long ago it was assumed to be a critically needed guardrail. Wouldn’t it now ensure that presidential transition team members were not calling foreign leaders while Donald Trump is still president? How has it suddenly become a defunct, ossified relic?

Leaking classified material would be about the worst thing government officials could do. Imagine if a Trump holdover, burrowed into the new Biden administration, released a transcript of Biden’s private conversations with the Mexican president or the Australian prime minister.

Such a breach of trust would be almost as bad as a turncoat anti-Biden mole seeking to resist presidential directives. Imagine if this anonymous staffer were given an op-ed in The New York Times to claim that a cadre of old-time Democrats was shocked by Biden’s cognitive decline and resisting his directives.

Is extending security clearances to former high-level officials-turned-cable TV pundits still a bad idea? Who would wish to see, for instance, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe issuing warnings each night on Fox News? With a wink-and-nod hat tip to his “confidential sources,” Ratcliffe could spin conspiracy theories that Biden is facing bombshell disclosures about his family misadventures with the Chinese.

Is it still important that we keep the tradition of retired high-ranking military officers—all subject to the requirements of the Uniform Code of Military Justice—not disparaging the president?

Who would want former Pentagon officials, some of them serving on the boards of military contractors, warning us that Biden should be removed because of cognitive challenges? Certainly, generals and admirals should not compare a President Biden’s policies to those of Mussolini or the Nazis.

At least “dark money” no longer exists. The old idea of right-wing billionaires pouring money into candidates’ political campaigns was supposedly a dangerous practice. It would be far more civic-minded for left-wing billionaires to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the coffers of nonpartisan state bureaucracies entrusted with guaranteeing the sanctity of national elections.

And apparently after, not before, an election is the proper time to announce critically important news.

Like the rollout of a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine?

Like a $900 billion stimulus package?

Like a revised upward Fannie Mae report on the economy?

Like the ties between a Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee and a suspected Chinese spy?

Like a federal investigation of Biden’s son and his possible profiteering with rich Chinese elites affiliated with China’s government?

To keep track of our brave new American world is easy.

Just consider everything said to be bad by the “Animal Farm” media before Nov. 3 as now good. And remember that everything said to be good two months ago is now actually bad.
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Victor Davis Hanson (@VDHanson) is a senior fellow, classicist and historian and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution where many of his articles are found; his focus is classics and military history. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Article shared on The Daily Signal.

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In A Handbasket . . .

. . . The Georgia run-off election is America’s only hope against insane liberals taking over America.

Editorial Cartoon by AF "Tony" Branco

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Privilege Alert!

. . . AOC feels she’s essential and therefore needs to be put in front of the line ahead of the elderly.
Editorial Cartoon by AF "Tony" Branco

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An Examined Life - Two Volumes of David Horowitz’s Autobiography Portray Him in Full

David Horowitz

by Bruce Bawer: In some parallel universe, David Horowitz never left the left. Instead he closed his eyes to the cracks in the Marxist ideal, zipped up his lip about the high crimes of his comrades, and, like them, reaped the rewards of his blind loyalty. He continued to write books that were lauded in the mainstream media; he was profiled glowingly in the New York Times Magazine and got the cover of Time; he won Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards; he was offered huge sums to teach at Harvard, Yale, and other top universities, all of which awarded him honorary degrees. In that alternate world, in short, Horowitz, along with the likes of Angela Davis, is today regarded in the corridors of academic, political, and cultural power as an ornament of American civilization.

Thankfully for all of us, Horowitz – in this cosmos, anyway – took another journey, of which his newly reissued 1997 autobiography, Radical Son, and its 2019 sequel, Mortality and Faith, provide a riveting account. Indeed, if Hollywood were not more inclined to celebrate Communists who stayed Communists (such as Dalton Trumbo), Radical Son would long since have been made into a feature film. Elevator pitch: the brilliant, noble-minded son of devout Kremlin minions helps found the New Left only to discover, through a series of violent incidents, that he’s worshiped a false god and climbed into bed with thugs, and that the only principled thing to do is to publicly break ranks – even though doing so may mean losing everything, including his life.

American politics. He was a grad student at Berkeley when he and his comrades established the New Left – which, unlike the Old Left of the 1930s, openly proclaimed its revolutionary goals instead of “hiding its agendas behind liberal and progressive masks.” In 1962, Horowitz wrote Student, “the first book to appear in print about the New Left”; in 1965 came The Free World Colossus, “the first account of the Cold War written from a New Left perspective.” He was among the first to refer to “the American empire.” Later, as an editor of the movement’s leading magazine, Ramparts, he consorted with Jean Genet, Bertrand Russell, Easy Rider producer Bert Schneider, and Jane Fonda, who married his friend Tom Hayden. He was on intimate terms with the Weather Underground and with Black Panther leaders Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, and Huey Newton.

It was a heady time. They were all warriors together, determined to transform the world, sure that they had all the answers, and convinced that they were the most virtuous of human beings. And yet most of the whites among them, Horowitz noticed, were unconscious racists, viewing their Black Panther allies as noble savages, while most of the men were sexists, treating their female collaborators as girl Fridays and playthings. There were other problems. Michael Lerner, who would go on to found the magazine Tikkun, was one of many movement members who, Horowitz saw, “were disconnected from family and real community.” Horowitz eventually understood, too, “that drugs were far more central to the consciousness of the Movement than I had realized”; when Lerner heard that Horowitz had never taken LSD, he said, urgently: “You have to take LSD. Until you’ve dropped acid, you don’t know what socialism is.”

As if his activism weren’t enough, Horowitz was also juggling a complicated personal life. He went through several wives and girlfriends, fathered four children, and had a complex relationship with his parents, especially his emotionally distant father, who disapproved of his criticism of the Soviet Union and palpably envied his success. As the 1960s wore on, Horowitz saw parallels between his life in the New Left and his father’s in the Old Left; in turn, to read Horowitz’s chapters about the 1960s is to be reminded that there’s absolutely nothing new about today’s Antifa and BLM radicals. Like the rioters in Portland today, Horowitz’s comrades spoke of establishing revolutionary enclaves inside major cities; they accused others of “white skin privilege” and of being “First World beneficiaries of imperialism”; and they were prepared to forgive any totalitarian government, however cruel, so long as the tyrants were non-white.

Eventually, Horowitz’s faith in socialism began to waver. After black comedian Dick Gregory met Cleaver and Newton, he told Horowitz they were “thugs,” and Horowitz knew he was right. Seeing the armed honor guard at a Panther funeral, a tearful Horowitz “felt as if at the bottom of an abyss” and asked himself: “David, what are you doing here?” And then a friend of his, Betty Van Patter, whom he’d recommended for a bookkeeping job with the Panthers, disappeared. Suspecting the Panthers had killed her, he was shaken to his core by the thought that his “effort to ally myself with what was virtuous and right” had led him into a compact with killers.

What to do? The idea of abandoning socialism “was still unthinkable. It had been the standard by which I judged right and wrong…. I had no conception of myself without it.” Yet he now realized that the “revolutionary community” in which he believed was an illusion; ditto his hopes for a “redemptive future.” Over time, he distanced himself from the left; with Peter Collier, he co-wrote bestsellers about the Rockefellers and Kennedys; and eventually he came out as a conservative – and paid the price. A new ally, Norman Podhoretz, advised him: “When you were on the left, you got away with everything. Now that you’re on the right, you’d better be careful, because they won’t let you get away with anything.” Indeed, while old America-hating comrades rose to elite positions in government, media, and the academy without ever forswearing their radicalism, Horowitz found himself a pariah in the eyes of the elite. By becoming a patriot, he’d become a traitor.

At first blush, Mortality and Faith may seem to be a very different work from its predecessor. Whereas the earlier book is a gripping narrative of a young writer’s ideological pilgrimage, the second is an absorbing account of an older writer’s most solemn inner musings – for, while still in the thick of political conflict, now as a major voice of the right, Horowitz is no longer a prisoner of ideology, and is able to think at length about such things as, well, mortality and faith. Not that he’s found religion, although if you handed certain excerpts from Mortality and Faith to someone well read in the modern mystics and said they were by Thomas Merton or Henri Nouwen, he’d find no reason to doubt you. Indeed, some passages in this book, such as the following (which I’ve broken up into lines to illustrate my point), read like poetry:And what I can remember is all that is left

of the time we spent together long ago, a fading image

now like the rest. I can still see the sunlight

on the green hedge where we paused

on the sidewalk. I can see the mottled sycamores

shading the street, and the way my father turned

until the tan dome of his forehead caught the glint

of the light when he shared his thought.But despite the obvious contrasts between the two volumes, there’s a powerful continuity between them.

The Horowitz of Mortality and Faith remains a man with a mission – only now his mission is to resist the dangerous efforts of those who are still committed to the mission he’s renounced. Whereas he once stood at the center of a movement he thought would transform the world, he’s learned “that we are not at the center of anything except our own insignificance.” He once thought utopia was at hand; now he knows better: “This world is created every day by us at odds with each other, and over and over. It is irrevocably broken into billions of fragments, bits of human unhappiness and earthly frustration. And no one can fix it.”

If Radical Son recounts Horowitz’s escape from the prison of socialist ideology, Mortality and Faith is, to a great extent, a reflection on the lessons he’s learned from the prison – as well as from the escape. For example: “Don’t bury the life you have been given in this world in fantasies of the next; don’t betray yourself with impossible dreams.” He thinks frequently about the meaning of his late father’s life, noting that the lesson his father taught him “was not contained in the earnest lectures he gave, but in the instruction of a life that clung to its defeats like an infant to its mother’s breast.” Reading Sayyid Qutb, the father of modern jihad, after 9/11, Horowitz recognizes a version of the same “totalitarian idea” to which he was once devoted. He even sees an unsettling reflection of himself in the terrorist Mohammed Atta, who, he reflects, “appears to have been an ordinary man who was seduced into committing a great crime in the name of a greater good. Is this not the most common theme of the human tragedies of our time?”

For the young left-wing Horowitz of Radical Son, political ideas were all, and the sole meaning of life was to bring about revolution; his intellectual touchstones included Marx, Engels, Lenin, Nechaiev, Aragon, Eluard. The older, post-left Horowitz, for whom life is largely a matter of coming to terms with mortality and the mystery of existence, peppers Mortality and Faith with quotations from Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Marcus Aurelius (“Make the best use of what is in your power and take the rest as it happens”). Even as he ruefully recalls the early socialists – among them Speshnev, Comte, and Bakunin – who saw their utopian ideology as a religious faith, he peruses with admiration the writings of Enlightenment philosophers (Spinoza, Locke, Kant) and scientists (Copernicus, Pascal, Newton) who, even as they made strides in human knowledge, continued to believe in God.

Yes, at the end of these books Horowitz remains an agnostic. But he’s also a man who’s thought more deeply about life, death, and the hereafter than most believers. He loves his wife, April (who, with her tenderness toward animals, emerges from these pages as a veritable saint), he cherishes his friends and pets, and he’s touchingly proud of his children (one of whom he tragically lost, while two have attained capitalistic success on a level that, one suspects, would have left their grandfather speechless). But the Horowitz whom we get to know in this dual-volume autobiography feels in many ways like a solitary figure – a man with too restless a mind, too intense an imagination, and too keen a conscience to ever be able to relax for very long in the company of his nearest and dearest. But then one could have said the same thing of Churchill, Lincoln, or many another great man.
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Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Article shared on FrontPage Mag.

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China Threat

by Kerby Anderson: China is a national security threat. That is the conclusion of the Director of National Intelligence. John Ratcliffe begins his assessment by reminding us that he has access to more intelligence than any member of the US government other than the president.

He says that if he could “communicate one thing to the American people from this unique vantage point, it is that the People’s Republic of China poses the greatest threat to America today, and the greatest threat to democracy and freedom world-wide since World War II.” To put it simply, China wants to dominate the US and the rest of the world economically, militarily, and technologically.

He describes ways in which China has been stealing trade secrets from American manufacturers. He talks about Chinese nationals stealing research and development secrets. China’s intellectual property theft costs America as much as $500 billion a year.

China is also stealing sensitive US defense technology in order to make China the world’s foremost military power. We also have found out that China is even conducting human testing on members of the People’s Liberation Army in hopes of developing super-soldiers for the future.

China is also developing world-class capabilities in emerging technologies. It is also developing cyber capabilities against the American government.

He concludes by warning us that “Beijing is preparing for an open-ended period of confrontation with the US. Washington should be prepared. Leaders must work across partisan divides to understand the threat, speak about it openly, and take action to address it.” Let us pray that the next administration and Congress do this, but I have my doubts.
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Kerby Anderson (@KerbyAnderson) is an author, lecturer, visiting professor and radio host and contributor on nationally syndicated Point of View and the "Probe" radio programs.

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27 Ways to Convince People You Rigged an Election

If you do all of these things, your candidate may be declared the winner; but you can rest assured that doubts and resentment will linger for years.
by Richard McCarty: If, for some bizarre reason, you would like for your candidate’s apparent victory to be widely viewed as illegitimate, there are many things you can do. Based upon our national experience this year, here are 27 ways you can help ensure that outcome.

In the years prior to the election, lay the groundwork.1. Ensure your party reflexively opposes any and all anti-vote fraud measures even if they are popular, such as voter ID laws.

2. Make sure your party repeatedly refuses to accept its candidates’ losses.

3. Have a shady billionaire try to elect friendly secretaries of state – the officials who oversee elections in their states.Choose your nominee carefully.4. Nominate the oldest, least coherent major party candidate in history.

5. Nominate a career politician who has accomplished virtually nothing after five decades in government.

6. Nominate a candidate who knowingly and willingly hung out with racists and even eulogized a former KKK leader while your party claims to be “woke.”

7. Nominate an out-of-touch candidate who advises parents to play a record player for their kids at night.

8. Nominate a candidate who tells stories from way back in the day about colorful characters, like Corn Pop, and who uses hip terms, like ‘malarkey.’During the campaign, do the following:9. Have your party file lawsuits to weaken election integrity laws.

10. Have allies in social media censor and “fact check” your opponent and his supporters.

11. Make sure that your candidate has relatively few people watching his social media events.

12. Organize the worst national convention (by a major party) in history.

13. Make sure your candidate spends most of his time in his basement and attends few events.

14. Organize the most boring campaign events imaginable in empty fields, back yards, and parking lots.

15. Make sure your candidate’s events are sparsely attended.

16. When your candidate speaks at events, make sure that he does not know where he is or even what office he is running for.

17. Make sure your candidate is combative with average voters.

18. Make sure your candidate avoids as many serious journalists as possible.

19. Make sure your candidate who will not answer key questions.

20. Make sure your candidate uses a teleprompter for softball interviews.

21. Allow billionaires to determine which county election offices receive additional funding.During early voting and on Election Day, do the following:22. Ensure that voter turnout during a pandemic is fantastic – the best since more than 100 years ago when we had fewer states and a much smaller population.On election night, do the following:23. Have election officials tell observers that they are done counting ballots for the day, then have the election officials sneakily restart counting in the middle of the night.

24. Have suitcases filled with mysterious ballots hidden away, then bring them out and count them after the observers leave.

25. Make sure your candidate’s vote totals spike – with few votes going to your opponent — while no one is observing the vote counting.

In the wake of the election, do the following.

26. Have officials in a key county refuse to comply with a subpoena seeking information about the election.

27. Have party officeholders go to court to try to suppress an audit of controversial voting machines.If you do all of these things, your candidate may be declared the winner; but you can rest assured that doubts and resentment will linger for years. But what difference will it make? After all, your candidate’s family may be able to cash in for four more years; your party may be able to defund the police, pack the Supreme Court, assault both religious freedom and gun rights, hike taxes, kill millions of American jobs with regulations and offshoring, soften our country’s policies toward China and Iran, and subsidize a whole new generation of green energy “success” stories like Solyndra. So it would all be worthwhile, right?
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Richard McCarty is Director of Research at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.

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The Real Reason Why Your Kids Can’t Go Back To School (Hint: It’s Not COVID-19)

by I&I Editorial: Schools have been closed for the better part of a year now, for the putative reason that COVID-19 makes them unsafe. Only distance learning and Zoom and other online classes are safe enough for both teachers and kids, we’re told. Even though the science says otherwise, powerful teachers unions keep schools closed anyway. But why?

Let’s start with a blunt fact: The teachers unions — including the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA), along with a host of radicalized local unions — don’t have your kids’ best interests at heart, despite their well-funded, slick propaganda to the contrary.

They oppose reopening schools, despite overwhelming evidence they should be reopened immediately.

As a must-read piece in the American Institute for Economic Research recently noted:Significant evidence shows that a truncated school year supplemented with online learning is vastly inferior to the education children get in-person. Virtual learning is particularly harmful to students from poor socioeconomic backgrounds who do not have sufficient resources to support their learning.This is a looming disaster for all children, but especially for poor and minority kids.

A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) estimated that school closures could cost the 24.2 million affected U.S. students nearly 5.53 million total years of life, largely due to lower incomes, less educational achievement, and worse health outcomes.

Higher levels of drug abuse and overdoses, massive increases in mental health hospital visits, along with surging suicide rates among children have been cited by the Centers for Disease Control as stemming from pandemic school closures.

Meanwhile, fears of schools becoming incubators for renewed surges of COVID-19 infections are grossly exaggerated, other studies and data show.

Start with the fact that, according to the Centers for Disease Control, just 168 kids 17 or under have died from COVID-19 through Dec. 19. That’s less than 0.05% of the total of nearly 300,000 COVID-19 deaths. By comparison, those aged 65 to 74 accounted for more than 21% of the total deaths.

Studies this year by peer-reviewed journals back these data up.

“COVID-19 is generally a mild disease in children, including infants,” a study in the British medical journal Lancet found.

Even the usually union-friendly New York Times was recently forced to admit: “Researchers once feared that school reopening’s might spread the virus through communities. But so far there is little evidence that it’s happening.”

The most cynical expression of unions’ lack of concern for students came earlier this year in Los Angeles, where the 35,000-member United Teachers of Los Angeles demanded, among other things, that local officials defund the police; pushed for a “moratorium” on charter schools; and insisted policymakers enact Medicare for All, provide more welfare for illegal immigrants, and levy enormous new taxes on commercial properties and “wealth.”

Of course, none of these things have anything to do with education. They’re just part of the much broader extremist agenda of the far left, which now largely controls American education.

The frightening thing is leftist teachers unions seem to have a strong ally in Joe Biden, who recently suggested that it might be better to keep schools closed all year.

So what is the unions’ price tag for reopening schools nationally? A cool $100 billion “investment,” as the left calls it. Smells more like ransom to us. The Democrat progressives and unions are holding your kids hostage.

Too cynical, you say? Not at all. Unions have been behind the closures all along.

As a recent study of 835 school districts asserted: “Using data on the reopening decisions of 835 public school districts in the United States, we find that school districts in locations with stronger teachers’ unions are less likely to reopen in person even after we control … for differences in local demographic characteristics.”

But health concerns weren’t the reason for closures. They were a pretext.

As the study cited above noted, closures “provide additional benefits to union members by reducing childcare responsibilities, hours of direct instruction, and commute times. Furthermore, because teachers’ unions with more power are in better positions to influence school districts, we expect that school districts in locations with stronger teachers’ unions will be less likely to reopen with in-person instruction.”

In short, teachers unions are using COVID-19 to extort more benefits and more money from the education system for their members. They don’t care about the kids.

For his part, if he gains office, Biden will be more interested in keeping his solid union support happy than in sending kids back to school.

Polls show parents want their kids back in school. The only people who don’t want the schools to reopen appear to be leftist politicians and their union supporters. For the record, since 1990, the the NEA and AFT, the two largest teachers unions, have given Democrats at least 94% of their political contributions.

There’s a solution for this dilemma. De-unionize the nation’s public schools. Unions have damaged American education, dumbing down curricula, filling kids’ heads with anti-American socialist dogma, and presiding over decades of rising costs and declining or stagnant test scores. It’s time to restore local control by parents over education. A system that works.
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Written by the I&I Editorial Board

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Trump Signs $2.3 Trillion Relief and Spending Bill, Says More Money to Come

by Janita Kan: President Donald Trump on Sunday evening signed the $2.3 trillion pandemic relief and spending bill after reaching an agreement with Congress over stimulus checks, Section 230, and voter fraud, the White House said.

Trump’s signing of the bill, which includes a $900 billion COVID-19 relief package, means a partial government shutdown is now averted, while financial aid for Americans will be delivered.

“As President of the United States, it is my responsibility to protect the people of our country from the economic devastation and hardship that was caused by the China Virus,” Trump said in a statement.

“I am signing this bill to restore unemployment benefits, stop evictions, provide rental assistance, add money for PPP, return our airline workers back to work, add substantially more money for vaccine distribution, and much more.”

He added that “more money is coming” and vowed to “never give up” his fight for the American people.

This comes after a delay due to Congress’s failure to meet Trump’s demand to increase stimulus checks from $600 to $2,000 per person. Trump had repeatedly expressed dissatisfaction over what he described as “wasteful” spending in the bill while Americans continue to struggle due to pandemic lockdowns.

Although the bill, passed by both houses of Congress earlier this week, was sent to the White House on Christmas Eve, Trump did not immediately act on it but instead renewed his pressure on lawmakers to revisit portions of the omnibus bill and to increase direct payments for Americans.

The president said Sunday that along with signing the bill, he will invoke the 1974 Impoundment Control Act to demand “rescissions” be made to the spending measures. Under the Act, if the president wants to spend less money than Congress provided for a particular program, he can seek congressional approval to rescind by sending a special message to Congress identifying the amount he proposes to rescind, reasons for it, and the economic effects of the rescission.

“I will sign the Omnibus and Covid package with a strong message that makes clear to Congress that wasteful items need to be removed. I will send back to Congress a redlined version, item by item, accompanied by the formal rescission request to Congress insisting that those funds be removed from the bill,” he said.

Trump also noted that the House will vote to increase direct payments to $2,000 per person and $5,200 for a family of four on Monday, and that the Senate will also start the process for a vote.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged the president to “immediately call on” Republican lawmakers to stop blocking legislation to increase the direct payment checks. But her statement did not address alleged voter fraud and legal protections under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act for internet companies that have engaged in censoring or political conduct.

Trump said Congress has promised to review the law, which largely exempts online platforms from liability for content posted by their users. They can be held liable for content that violates anti-sex trafficking or intellectual property laws.

Section 230 currently allows companies to block or screen content “in good faith” if they consider it “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable.”

Trump and his administration have repeatedly underscored the risks of unbalanced policing of user content on social media platforms, claiming that many Big Tech companies are engaging in conduct that limits conservative viewpoints and stifles free speech. The president has urged Congress to roll back the liability protections and vetoed a defense-spending bill over lawmakers’ failure to do so.

“Congress has promised that Section 230, which so unfairly benefits Big Tech at the expense of the American people, will be reviewed and either be terminated or substantially reformed,” he said. “Big Tech must not get protections of Section 230!”

Meanwhile, Trump also said that both houses of Congress agreed to “focus strongly” on the slew of allegations of voting irregularities and fraud during the 2020 presidential election. The president noted that the Senate will now be starting “an investigation into voter fraud.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) applauded Trump’s decision to sign the bill in a statement. Like Pelosi, he did not mention a vote on increased checks, Section 230, or voter fraud.

The president and his legal team are working against the clock to seek a determination from the courts over mounting evidence they say raises questions over whether the 2020 election was stained by fraud and last-minute unconstitutional rule changes due to the measures introduced during the pandemic. If so, the president is seeking to invalidate ballots and allow state legislatures to decide on which electoral college votes should be counted on Jan. 6 during the joint session of Congress.

Trump has also demanded that Republican senators “step up and fight for the presidency” as lawmakers weigh in on whether to participate in a proposed effort to challenge electoral college votes on Jan. 6.
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Janita Kan (@janitakan) writes for The Epoch Times.

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