“It doesn’t matter what rights you have under the Constitution, if the government can punish you for exercising those rights. And it doesn’t matter what limits the Constitution puts on government officials’ power, if they can exceed those limits without any adverse consequences.” – Thomas Sowell
NOTICE: We are taking a break over the holidays. Unless something earth shattering takes place, our NEXT Sunday newsletter will come out January 3, 2021.
Twitter & Parler: To get up to date info FAST, follow me on BOTH Twitter and Parler where I have the same “address” @sanuzis.
Electoral College Votes – What’s Next: The Electoral College voted and cast 306 votes for Biden and 232 for Trump BUT six states sent competing slates of electors. Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico sent alternative slate that “could” give the presidency to Trump.
This is NOT likely, but now a joint session of Congress with meet on January 6th to finalize the process. There will be a challenge from some, but if no additional evidence is produced, versus just allegations and statistical/procedural anomalies and irregularities, I suspect it will officially be President-Elect Biden after the New Year.
There are enough anomalies, irregularities, affidavits, and confusion with regard to the votes & vote counting that state legislatures MUST act to fix and better define the process to avoid such issues in the future. Pretending that nothing went wrong or that there weren’t any problems is as unfair and irresponsible as it is to just proclaim there was massive fraud without proof.
The system needs additional safeguards, procedures, and uniform rules to prevent future challenges to our democratic process. Each and every reform will help. I will happily take a “slice” of reform at a time than fail on getting the whole “loaf” and changing nothing!
STOP The Steal Michigan GOP: Frustrated citizens just want answers. If there was no fraud, no broken laws, and no election manipulation – then what’s the harm? The public deserves an open, transparent process.
Here is an example of a citizen initiative in Michigan to investigate the situation and if the facts merit a cure, send and support an alternative slate of electors.
https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/stop-the-steal-michigan-gop
Georgia U.S. Senate Races: Nothing is more important. Both the Democrats are out of the mainstream leftist progressives, who support the radical positions on the far left. The only “check” on a run-away left wing progressive agenda is to have a check on the Executive Branch and Congress…hence a Republican controlled Senate that would require moderation and compromise.
Give, volunteer and help in any way you can. Our way of life may truly depend on it.
Mr. Jones: An excellent portrayal of the Soviet/Ukrainian Holodomor famine. This is the true story that inspired George Orwell to write the book “Animal Farm.” It is a political thriller that dramatizes the efforts of Gareth Jones to expose the famine and genocide committed by Stalin in the Ukraine. What’s timely is it exposes the New York Times as engaging in “fake news” on behalf of Stalin and the Soviets as far back as the 1930s. (Not to mention this week’s retraction of “Caliphate”)
–Saul Anuzis
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60 Plus Weekly Video Rewind
Links to the articles discussed in the video:
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/thom-tillis-georgia-voters-perdue-loeffler-senate
Republicans hold slight edge in Georgia Senate runoffs
Georgia Republican incumbent Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler currently have a slight lead over their Democratic challengers, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, in the state’s critical Senate runoff races, according to a new Emerson College poll.
In both highly contentious races, the Republican senators are leading with 51 percent of the vote. Warnock and Ossoff are holding at 48 percent, and 1 percent is undecided.
According to poll results, Ossoff and Warnock are favored by the younger demographic, especially with voters under the age of 30, while Loeffler and Perdue are more popular with older voters, those 65 and older.
Voters in rural areas are also polling toward the Republican tickets, with Loeffler and Perdue leading with 68 percent and 67 percent of the vote, respectively. In urban/suburban regions, the Democrats are ahead, with Warnock at 75 percent of the vote and Ossoff with 73 percent.
Here’s Everything We Know About The Hunter Biden Investigation
Hunter Biden, President-elect Joe Biden’s son, is under federal investigation for his relationship with a prominent Chinese energy firm and has since been subpoenaed for records of his overseas business ventures.
The probe into the foreign dealings follows a Dec. 9 announcement from Hunter Biden in which he announced he is being investigated by Delaware authorities for possible tax crimes.
Hunter Biden received numerous wire transfers from the Chinese firm, called CEFC, which total more than $6 million dollars, and a Senate GOP report alleges that some of the transactions involved criminal activity.
The President-elect’s son garnered national attention after his computer hard drive went public and was found to contain numerous emails, text messages and lewd photographs that painted a fuller picture of his dealings with Ukranian energy company Burisma.
How did the GOP gain in the House while Trump lost? It’s actually pretty simple. (An interesting analysis -Saul)
One of the increasingly prevalent arguments spun by President Trump and his allies when it comes to supposed voter fraud in the 2020 election is this: Republicans had, by and large, a pretty good election below the presidential level. They gained significant ground in the House and probably held the Senate — as long as they don’t lose both Georgia runoffs. So how on earth did Trump lose?
The answer is actually pretty simple: Our elections increasingly look more like parliamentary ones, and given that, the results make a ton of sense.
New data from the election-reform group FairVote sheds some light on how the battle for the House played out. The big takeaway: Our politics are increasingly less about people and incumbents and more about party. We’ve been talking about increased polarization for many years, but the 2020 election really drove it home. The results for Congress affirm the fact that Republicans writ large lost the election, even though it might have been closer than many expected.
FairVote has for years studied an issue called “incumbency bump” — i.e., how much an incumbent benefits relative to other members of their party thanks to already being in office. The conventional wisdom on incumbency is that it’s a big advantage — that people might not like a politician’s party or Congress as a whole, but if they know that politician well or have any doubts, they’ll revert to supporting the person in the seat.
The 2020 election, though, continued an increasing decline in that advantage.
FairVote’s formula for “incumbency bump” is somewhat complex; it combines how much voters favor incumbents overall in a given election and the incumbent’s performance relative to how an average candidate would have been expected to do based upon past results.
Covering for Hunter Biden: Why Americans distrust the media
Covering for the Biden family by trying to suppress rather than report on The Post’s scoops may prove expensive for a host of US media institutions — especially the privileged social-media companies.
A majority of voters say the media intentionally buried The Post’s October bombshell about Hunter Biden’s laptop to help his father Joe Biden’s political campaign, a Rasmussen Reports poll showed Tuesday.
The poll found 52 percent of likely voters believe media companies provided scant coverage of the laptop story — which shed light on Hunter’s Ukrainian and Chinese business activities and suggested Joe Biden knew about them, despite his denials — in order to boost Biden’s prospects in the election, then a few weeks off. Only 32 percent disagreed.
Among those who said they followed the news “very closely,” more than three in four (76 percent) say the media ignored the story to help Biden.
A clear majority of voters (56 percent) also think it’s “likely” the president-elect was aware of his son’s ties to a corrupt Ukrainian business and to China, including 43 percent who think it’s “very likely.”
‘Stirring Up A Russia Scandal to Vilify Trump’: Declassified Brennan CIA Notes Prove Claims Were Political Hoax
Newly declassified documents, released to the U.S. Congress, appear to prove the expensive and nationally demoralizing Russian interference narrative was a broad political hoax by the Democratic Party.
Proving claims made in the explosive book The Russia Lie, documents released by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe allegedly show CIA Director John Brennan plotting against a political candidate and appearing to brief or prepare to brief the President of the United States at the time – Barack Obama – on the matter.
The Federalist reports:
Newly declassified handwritten notes from former CIA Director John Brennan show that the U.S. intelligence community knew in 2016 that Russian intelligence was actively monitoring, and potentially injecting disinformation into, Clinton’s anti-Trump collusion narrative. The intelligence concerning Russia’s knowledge of Clinton’s campaign plans was so concerning to Brennan and other national security officials that they personally informed Obama of the matter in the Oval Office in the summer of 2016. The handwritten notes from Brennan were declassified by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Ratcliffe and provided to Congress on Tuesday afternoon.
This pandemic has politicians treating the public like children
During a news conference last week, Gov. Cuomo put up a chart highlighting where the novel coronavirus is being spread. It turns out, a shocking 74 percent of new cases were caught at gatherings in private homes. Restaurants and bars, meanwhile, accounted for just 1.43 percent.
So the governor banned indoor dining, specifically in New York City, which has the second-lowest case rate and the second-lowest hospitalization rate of any region in the state.
Makes sense? Of course, it doesn’t. Cases have been rising sharply in our state, a few months after Cuomo published a memoir celebrating his triumph over COVID-19. He must’ve felt he had to do something. And something is what he did.
His actions — shuttering businesses that weren’t responsible for most of the spread — are a symptom of the wider infantilization of the American people by elected officials. Politicians wield a vast power for its own sake: power over subjects whom they consider too stupid to object or to make rational decisions for themselves.
Cuomo, whose decisions yielded the highest death rate of any state, doesn’t know how to slow the spread of COVID-19. Instead, he keeps handing down unscientific edicts against already-struggling businesses.
7 Takeaways From a Senate Panel’s Hearing on Election Fraud
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Wednesday held its first hearing looking into the issues of vote fraud and other irregularities surrounding the 2020 election.
The committee’s chairman, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., defended the hearing against Democratic detractors.
Johnson said the hearing was about ensuring confidence in the electoral system and getting to the facts. The hearing included testimony from legal and election security experts, as well as from witnesses from the hotly contested states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Nevada.
The hearing came two days after former Vice President Joe Biden won in the Electoral College with 306 votes to President Donald Trump’s 232. A minimum of 270 votes is needed to win. However, Trump has not conceded the race.
The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database Tops 1,300 Cases
With the addition of the newest batch of cases, all from the state of Texas, The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database now has 1,302 cases of proven election fraud, and we are following numerous other ongoing prosecutions.
As these cases and the database demonstrate, the threats to election integrity and instances of election fraud throughout the country continue to jeopardize fair and free elections for the American people.
The Texas cases also demonstrate that fraud can happen at different points during the election process, and that it effectively dilutes legitimate ballots cast by legal voters.
During the 2014 general election, for example, Avery Ayers sought to run as an independent challenging Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. However, he forged the signatures of voters to qualify to be a candidate on the ballot. Ayers pleaded guilty to a third-degree felony fraud charge in state court and was sentenced to five years in prison.
Trump made big in-roads in Hispanic areas across the nation
One of the most notable early results on Election Night came from Florida’s heavily Hispanic Miami-Dade county. President Donald Trump lost it to President-elect Joe Biden by just 7 points, after losing it by 29 points in 2016.
A big question was whether Trump’s improvement in Miami-Dade would be replicated in other majority Hispanic areas on the electoral map.
The answer from coast to coast is a definitive yes. Trump did considerably better than he did in 2016 across an array of Hispanic areas.
When you see such a dramatic shift, it naturally brings up the question over whether we’re looking at something distinct about 2020 or something that will carry into the future.
That’s far from certain. Republicans certainly hope so, and they could be right. It’s way too early to know for sure.
3 Quotes From Founding Fathers Remind Us Why We Are a Constitutional Republic (Not a Democracy)
We have all heard the common talking point from the left that conservatives are destroying democracy. The response to this claim is the same time and time again: “We’re not a democracy, we’re a constitutional republic!” This leads us to ask an important question: Are there any differences between the two, and if so, why do they matter?
The answer is simple: There are profound differences between a democracy and a constitutional republic that are crucial to every aspect of American life. These three quotes from the Founding Fathers remind us to defend our constitutional republic with all our might.
Alexander Hamilton stated, “Real liberty is neither found in despotism or the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments.”
Hamilton recognized the first of three harms of a real democracy. Democracy excludes the minority’s rights. It reminds me of the classic saying, “Democracy is like two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch, but a republic is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.”
Ron Johnson Blasts Gary Peters For Lying About Russian Disinformation In Explosive Senate Hearing
Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson railed against Senate colleague Gary Peters on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Wednesday after the Michigan Democrat spent months falsely characterizing Johnson’s work with Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley investigating Hunter Biden as Russian disinformation.
“The people peddling it, are not on my side of the aisle,” Johnson said with Peters seated at least six feet to the left. “Senior Democrat leaders, including ranking member Peters, were involved in a process of creating a false intelligence product that was mostly classified.”
Johnson continued, lambasting Peters for accusing Johnson and Grassley of capitalizing on Russian disinformation to conduct governmental oversight.
“They leaked the media that accused Senator Grassley, the Senate pro tem of the Senate and myself of accepting and disseminating Russian disinformation… Senator Peters introduced that false information, Russian disinformation into our investigation record,” Johnson said, who chairs the committee.
‘Everything’s great’: GOP ditches election post-mortems
Democrats in Texas and New Hampshire are forming committees to examine the party’s failings in last month’s election. Less formal autopsies are underway in states across the country.
But the party that lost the presidential election isn’t soul-searching at all.
For the final act of his showman-like presidency, Donald Trump has convinced the Republican Party that despite losing the White House by 7 million votes — and despite seeing five states flip in 2020 — things could hardly be better inside the GOP.
Even as the Electoral College this week confirmed Joe Biden’s victory, interviews with more than two dozen GOP state and local chairs and Republican National Committee members reflect a party that, far from reassessing its embrace of Trumpism, is hell-bent on more of the same.
“Our president absolutely grew our party,” said Jennifer Carnahan, chair of the Minnesota Republican Party, noting the GOP’s down-ballot victories and explosive turnout with Trump on the ticket. “He totally advanced our party … I think that as Republicans, we just need to continue to remain on the course.”
It hardly matters that Trump couldn’t beat Biden in the Rust Belt. Or that Trump ceded the longtime Republican strongholds of Georgia and Arizona to Democrats and, in defeat, became the first incumbent president since 1992 to fail to win a second term.
Six weeks after the election, Republicans are beginning to chart a multi-state effort to undo mail ballot expansions that disadvantaged the party in November. But that’s a mechanical concern. As it prepares for the midterm elections and 2024, the direction of the party is set.
“As far as I’m concerned, everything’s great,” said Stanley Grot, a district-level Republican Party chair in Michigan, a state Trump won four years ago but lost to Biden in November.
Mail-in ballots were part of a plot to deny Lincoln reelection in 1864
Traveling to Baltimore in the fall of 1864, Orville Wood had no way of knowing he would soon uncover the most elaborate election conspiracy in America’s brief history.
Wood was a merchant from Clinton County in the most northeastern corner of New York. As a supporter of President Abraham Lincoln, he was tasked with visiting troops from his hometown to “look after the local ticket.”
New York legislators had only established the state’s mail-in voting system in April with the intent of ensuring the suffrage of White troops battling the Confederate Army.
The results of the 1864 elections would heavily affect the outcome of the war. Lincoln and his supporters in the National Union Party sought to continue the war and defeat the Confederacy outright. Meanwhile antiwar Democrats, also referred to as Copperheads, looked for an immediate compromise with the Confederate leaders and the end of the abolition movement.
Troops from New York were allowed to authorize individuals back home to cast a vote on their behalf. Along with their mail-in ballots, troops would assign their power of attorney on slips that required four signatures: the voter’s, the person authorized as a recipient, a witness to the signed affidavit and a fellow officer. These documents would be sealed in an envelope and shipped back home to be counted in the final vote. This was the process that Orville Wood intended to uphold, he would testify in court later. He quickly found out what a challenge that would be.
Mr. Jones
The story than inspired George Orwell to write “Animal Farm”, a political thriller that dramatizes Gareth Jones efforts to expose the famine genocide committed by Stalin in the Ukraine. What’s timely is it exposes the New York Times as engaging in “fake news” on behalf of Stalin and the Soviets as far back as the 1930s.
As Rotten Tomatoes Critical Critics share “Flawed yet fundamentally worthy, Mr. Jones peers into the past to tell a fact-based story that remains troublingly relevant today.
