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Here are some news stories that might be of interest. Most articles will be more or less summarized in the headline. You can skim the headlines and summaries, and click the links if they are of interest. Keep in mind, many of these reports are products of the Fake News, so although they will be what people are hearing and talking about, there is no guarantee any one of them is necessarily correct, and we have had cases of outright lies make it onto these pages, especially about President Trump.
No Q. You can see Q’s posts aggregated live, and new ones which may have gone live after our print deadline at http://www.qanon.pub
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Former President Donald Trump plans to lay out his vision for America and give his assessment of Biden administration policies during his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). One of the stranger anomalies is that he is not talking, not issuing statements, or rallying his troops.
Kash Patel says Trump gave in to pressure from the IC and did not declassify all the material he could have because of IC complaints. All bullshit. Whatever the intel thing is targeting the American people, it views them as the enemy because they are the only threat to its power, and that would extend to Trump as well after his four years of mayhem and exposure. The shit they are talking about declassifying is meaningless compared to what is out there. I have no idea what it means, but I know everybody talking like the Russia stuff is the big game is either not aware of the real issues, or they are covering them up. If there ever is a Civil War, the real opposition to the American people will be the IC, and whatever has taken it over. Future rebels will either understand the intel game and its full capabilities, and maybe have a chance, or they will be destroyed.
Lindsey Graham tells Greg Kelly, ‘I don’t think Joe Biden’s in charge.’ His argument was he felt AOC and Pelosi are in charge.
President Joe Biden is reportedly considering “every tool” at his disposal to crack down on Second Amendment rights as left-wing activists are pushing him to deal with the issue of gun violence by declaring a national emergency and using executive orders. On the bright side, this happening will tell us once and for all where we stand.
Trump’s tax returns have been handed over to Manhattan prosecutors.
Ex-Olympics gymnastics coach John Geddert dies by suicide hours after being charged with sex crimes and human trafficking. If he actually killed himself, and wasn’t Epsteined. He reportedly worked closely with Larry Nasser, the sex-abusing sports doctor for the team. I’d love to know how many physicians, coaches, and others who do not have pedophilia problems went to work every day and did their jobs as conscientiously as possible at high schools, and YMCAs, and other studios, and were never able to get higher up the ladder, as they watched all these pedos and sex fiends seemed to effortlessly congregate at the highest echelons of the sport. Do you think they all rose that high by chance? I wonder if there was a Ghislane Maxwell type who you would find in the backgrounds of photos at all those competitions.
The U.S. government is taking new steps to speed up releases of unaccompanied children to parents or other sponsors as the Biden administration grapples with a growing number of underage migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. I wonder what they are using the children for. It didn’t take them long to get them flooding in again, and disappearing into the country. If the story is real, which you never know these days.
Illegal alien charged with raping 11-year-old girl in North Carolina. It is not a democrat administration if you don’t have stories like these.
The family of a Latino father of three is worried that his health condition will worsen if he remains in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody. And we are back to these sob stories too.
BiteLabs grows meat from celebrity tissue samples and uses it to make artisanal salami. Artisanal cannibalism.
Biden launches air strikes in Syria. On Twitter, Rand Paul condemns it.
Leftist activist launches $65 million effort to fight Conservative media and push progressive news. I am kind of amazed I was ever so stupid I thought any of these people were spending their own money. But it is shocking to think of how almost all of these expenditures are cases of money laundering by those who do not wish to be known.
Lady Gaga’s dog walker is shot, and the singer’s two dogs are stolen.
Interesting – an earlier photo in the house Chambers, away from protesters, believed to be of the Capitol Cop who supposedly shot Ashli Barrett, shows him looking elsewhere, while holding his Glock pointed at other officers, with his finger on the trigger. Cops generally try to drill that trigger discipline into officers, and would fail an officer out for such an infraction in training. It is possible he was just absent minded, or didn’t pay attention to his training. But it is curious, especially since his shots would have been fired at Ashli Babbit while she was in front of numerous other officers who could have been hit after the bullet exited her. So he had no concept of minding what was behind his target either. Interesting also, is they are now saying it was definitely not David Bailey, the Capitol Cop involved in the Steve Scalise softball shooting. However it was another Black Capitol Cop, involved in a seemingly staged event, wearing a similar beaded bracelet. I wonder if the bracelet is a sign of membership in a group. Also they say there are credible threats on his life and he in hiding, but no civilians know who he is. Which could point to another group with access to secret information engaging in tit for tat violence.
Transgender PA Health Secretary Levine questioned on missing Pa. nursing home data in federal confirmation hearing. Literally he killed a bunch of innocent people right after saving his own mother by pulling her out, and this is the new highest ranking health official in the land.
Police Chief tells Congress that Trump supporters want to blow up the Capitol. Whatever is going on behind the scenes, they aren’t about to tell us. And why wasn’t Trump giving the State of the Union in January before the inauguration, as would have been customary?
Oddly enough this twitter account says Biden was invited already to give the State of the Union on Jan 23rd, and he didn’t show up for unknown reasons, and the media is covering it up.
Democrats introduce a bill to ban body armor. Amazing to me they would consider banning a purely defensive tool.
‘Everything has been criminalized,’ says Neil Gorsuch as he pushes for stronger Fourth Amendment protections. This has to do with Police entering a home without a warrant when in pursuit of a suspect, which makes me think this might be a meme to convince you that your Fourth Amendment protections are so great you can commit a crime and the Police can only follow you to your door, and it is debatable if they are allowed in. Meanwhile as you read that, a room full of Glowies down the street is scanning the audios in all the houses around them and looking through the walls and hacking cameras in the houses, just as part of normal duties to monitor the people in the neighborhood. Sooner or later surveillance is going public, and it will make all of these articles look ridiculous. Understand Goresuch almost certainly knows about it already, because according to Scalia the entire Court was under surveillance. But nobody talks, and everybody keeps to the script. Except Scalia, who of course ended up dead.
Leaked emails confirm the UN gave names of dissidents to the CCP.
New book which tells women how to become a “bitch” because men won’t stay with submissive women, tops the best seller list. All of the hype is fake, and it is all designed to trick women into being reduced to r-strategists.
Mr. Potato Head’s ‘makeover’ will leave him gender neutral. When I was really young, I kept falling into subjects that required categorization. Dinosaurs, model rockets, fish/aquatic ecosystems, and eventually guns, and martial arts. I realized later on my brain had developed from all of that, a system of mental cubbyholes from that early activity. When I got into school subjects, I found I could pick up a lot of material cold and store it, well organized and accessible, in that mental cubbyhole system. r/K Theory in politics was a result of just looking into all those cubbyholes and seeing where similar pieces were stored alongside each other. Notice, they are destroying even the most fundamental cubbyhole-building system in kids, by eliminating even the two sex cubbyholes. If the left could have its way, they would destroy all cubbyhole organization in kids, by denying all differences and delineations everywhere. On the bright side for them, that molds the world’s reality to be processable by imbeciles who cannot store categorizable data.
Under Armour forced white employees to undergo ‘antiracist’ reeducation program.
Ghislaine Maxwell has offered to give up her UK and French citizenship in exchange for bail.
Senate Parliamentarian rules against including minimum wage increase in Covid bill.
From Twitter – Federal judge rules CDC order temporarily halting evictions during pandemic unconstitutional.
Spread r/K Theory, because not every day is a happening day.
A new poll has found something that is at the same time disturbing and hilarious.
It asked people about their greatest concerns.
Republicans listed traditional issues like the economy and illegal immigration. The number one issue for Democrats was how scared they are of Trump supporters. Seriously.
The Blaze reports:
Survey: GOP is concerned about policy issues, while Democrats are most concerned about ‘Trump supporters’
A new survey found that while Republican voters are mostly concerned with policy issues, Democratic voters are primarily concerned with Trump supporters and the growth of various “-isms” in the country such as “systemic racism” and “white nationalism.”
The survey, conducted by Echelon Insights last week, found that the top concern among Republican voters was illegal immigration, with 81% of respondents reporting that they are very concerned about the issue. Following behind is the lack of support for police in the country, with 79% being very concerned, and high taxes, an issue that 77% said they were very concerned about.
Republicans also did express concern over issues not necessarily related to specific policy — such as liberal bias in the media, the general moral decline of the country, and socialism — but those concerns did not top the list.
Among Democratic voters, however, non-policy-related issues were of greatest concern. In fact, the No. 1 “problem” causing concern for Democratic respondents was not an issue at all, but a group of people — Donald Trump supporters — at 82%.
A lot of this can be blamed on the media.
This is actually pretty incredible
It also shows how effectively the Democrats/media have marginalized the Bernie Bros and other substantive leftist concerns by instead spending their time dehumanizing Trump supporters https://t.co/wHggxBDuW3
— Will Chamberlain (@willchamberlain) February 25, 2021
Of issues we asked ONLY of Democrats, their biggest concern is Donald Trump's supporters. pic.twitter.com/4MpbmtfB6u
— Kristen Soltis Anderson (@KSoltisAnderson) February 24, 2021
It’s just absurd.
Cross posted from American Lookout.
The post Survey Finds Democrats’ Greatest Concern Is Scary Trump Supporters appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Democrats are the master of “situation ethics.” Now that President Biden has bombed an Iranian-backed militia in Syria, let’s revisit some Tweets that have aged worse than a poorly corked cheap Burgundy (be sure to check the dates):
“You watch, he’s going to win.” That was U.S. Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, election eve 2016. As he sat in his house on Pine Valley Road in Winston-Salem, Burr was bullish on Donald J. Trump’s chances of capturing the White House. Longtime aides and family members rolled their eyes. OK, whatever you say.
Burr had good reason to believe. The 60-year-old former appliance salesman was on the same ticket with Trump, running for his third term as a Republican from the Tar Heel State. For more than a year, Burr watched voters turn out with building intensity. In tiny places down east such as Rose Hill, Trump rallies would be scheduled for 12,000 supporters; 25,000 would show up. And the first 5,000 of them waited in line for two hours.
The crowds listened as Trump gave away the game, one Burr had spent a career playing. The Manhattan real estate developer ridiculed George W. Bush’s presidency, railed against bipartisan trade deals that closed thousands of American factories, attacked policies that favored illegal immigrants over U.S. citizens, and picked apart spymasters and their benefactors for shoddy track records and pushing a fraudulent war in Iraq.
Burr could admit some of these inconvenient facts (in 2004 he said that NAFTA was “a net loss for North Carolina”) but he resented Trump’s lambasting of the Bush family and GOP orthodoxy. He realized, though, that it was in his best interest not to make waves and to focus on winning his own race. The evidence at GOP headquarters in Forsyth County was clear: Everyone who came in asked for a Donald Trump yard sign. Every other person asked for a Donald Trump and a Richard Burr yard sign.
Burr’s campaign style harkened back to his days in sales. He would slide into his Acura and drive from place to place, spend half the day walking up and down Main Street in little towns across the state. Talk to voters, shake hands. When they asked why he wasn’t in one of the big cities such as Charlotte, Raleigh, or Greensboro, Burr would answer, “That’s not where my people are.”
If Burr grew tired, he checked into a Comfort Inn. “Can I get access to the conference room?” he would ask the front desk clerk. Sometimes at two o’clock in the morning, the senator would get up out of bed and go print something he needed for the next day’s campaign schedule.
Now, in the most unpredictable campaign in modern American history, Burr seemed to be coasting to victory against a liberal state rep from Raleigh, Deborah K. Ross. As the days to the election dwindled, the man at the top of the ticket was catching tailwinds, too. Hillary Clinton’s line that Trump was a sinister, shadowy figure tied to Russian president Vladimir Putin wasn’t getting traction with voters.
On election night, Burr made his way to nearby Forsyth Country Club where his supporters gathered. Phillip Phillips’ song “Home” played over the sound system: “Hold on to me as we go/As we roll down this unfamiliar road/And although this wave is stringing us along/Just know you are not alone/’Cause I’m going to make this place your home…”
At 10:32, Burr bounded up on the podium in the dining room to celebrate victory. His supporters cheered. “Wow!” he said. “This one is better than all the rest… This is a victory for all those who have believed in me, and those who have continued to have confidence in the fact that my values match your values.”
Burr thanked his family, and quoted from a sermon delivered by his father, the late Rev. David Burr, who pastored the First Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem from 1962 to 1986. “He said there’s always work to be done by the living and it’s our responsibility to get in on the action. He taught me to do my part. I intend to carry out my duties through this next Senate term, as I’ve tried to do to the best of my ability for the past 22 years.”
The usual GOP tropes followed. “We will not retreat in the cause of freedom”; “we have freedom coursing through our veins”; “we live in the greatest land known to mankind.” It should have been a freewheeling, relaxed night for a man who announced months earlier that this would be his final race, but Burr read from a script. He seemed uneasy.
Just as Burr said, “We don’t know what we might face in the nation ahead,” Trump was coasting to critical victories in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
“Life is and always will be a circle,” Burr continued. “People are born, they live their lives, hopefully making a difference, and then their lives come to an end and they’re replaced by a new generation.”
At 2:30 a.m., the networks declared the winner of the presidency. Chyrons spread across every channel: DONALD TRUMP ELECTED PRESIDENT. With that news, Richard Burr was forced into a decision, one that would define his character and chart a divided course for the nation.
* * *
Until 2017, when Burr became chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, I hadn’t given a serious thought to his career since he got elected to the U.S. House in 1994. Why should I? For most of a decade, Burr was a standard-issue, post–Cold War GOP congressman. Ran for and won a Senate seat in 2004, focused on constituent services, reelected twice.
The idea of Burr overseeing all of the spy agencies called to mind Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene’s darkly comic 1958 novel that parodies espionage bureaucracies. Greene writes about a vacuum cleaner salesman, James Wormold, who gets approached by a British intel officer. “We must have our man in Havana, you know,” the officer says. London is setting up the Caribbean network and wants Wormold to spy for them. The salesman accepts the offer because he needs additional income to support his extravagant teenage daughter. He makes up information about Russian threats, draws diagrams of vacuum cleaners that he says are missiles, creates fake agents from names in the phone book, and then packages the reports to his spymasters. London is impressed.
If you ask former aides to name Burr’s chief accomplishment, they don’t mention his work with spy agencies. Instead, they cite things such as his maneuvering of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 to benefit North Carolina. “Richard came up with the idea that if you’re going to drill off the coast, we want royalties and we want them coming in to help beach nourishment, the intercoastal waterway, and dredging,” a longtime aide says. “This made the environmentalists say, ‘Wait, we’re going to get a pile of money for this?’”
As much as I love my home state and still follow politics there, I had never heard that Richard Burr got this money coming in, or that it mattered. The media always gets things backwards or misses the real story. Other than Burr being a fellow Demon Deacon, to me he was just another D.C. Republican who sang from the same songbook that got him elected to Congress.
When Burr arrived in Washington in 1995, another Wake Forest alumnus and I met him in the bar at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill. Richard ordered a beer. “Bring it in the bottle,” he told the waitress, “makes me think I’m back home.” He struck me as the personification of Tom Wolfe’s good old boy. It never occurred to me that one day Richard would become so skilled at playing the game.
He wasn’t destined for the game, the United States Senate, or the chairmanship of a committee that oversees all of America’s spies. His father was a prominent preacher and president of the Rotary Club. Burr’s most overt connection to politics was ancestral—he’s a distant relative of Aaron Burr, who for many Americans has gained notoriety as the character in Hamilton who kills Lin-Manuel Miranda in a duel. Before that, Aaron Burr was vice president under Thomas Jefferson, a fate that would cause him to become one of the most reviled figures in American history.
Richard’s dad was devoted to debunking the attacks against Aaron Burr, his ninth-generation cousin. Most of them stemmed from Jefferson’s determination to crush him because he was threatened by Burr’s appeal. Jefferson accused Burr of treason, without evidence (as we now say). Burr, he asserted, was guilty of “stoking a rebellion, deceiving and seducing honest and well-meaning citizens, under various pretenses, to engage in their various criminal enterprises.” In 1807, Jefferson had Aaron Burr arrested for “suspicious activities.” Of Burr’s guilt, Jefferson declared, “there can be no doubt.” Burr was put on trial. And acquitted twice.
“Aaron Burr has been given a bad deal,” Rev. Burr said to the Associated Press in 1987. At the time, he was president of the Aaron Burr Association. On the matter of the duel, Rev. Burr said, “Hamilton is the one who challenged Burr and Hamilton lost, obviously.” About whether Burr was a traitor, Rev. Burr said, “It’s taken some time for the real facts to surface… he was completely exonerated.”
With no proclivity for politics, Richard turned to athletics. At the R.J. Reynolds High School in Winston-Salem, he played football. Burr became a star linebacker and helped take the team to a district championship where he was selected Forsyth County’s offensive player of the year in 1973. His performances caught the attention of Chuck Mills, head coach of the football team at Wake Forest University, the “Demon Deacons.” Mills signed Richard to a football grant-in-aid to play in 1974.
Going into that season, Mills told the campus newspaper, the Old Gold & Black, “We honestly feel we are on the precipice of a solid and respected football program.” To anybody who followed sports on Tobacco Road back then, there seemed to be a specter hanging over Wake Forest. In an unguarded moment on local radio discussing the upcoming football schedule, Mills alluded to it. “Saturday, September 28, will be the best Saturday of the season,” he said, “because on the 28th, we don’t have to play anybody.”
Demon Deacons are accustomed to losing in athletics. In fact, in the 71 years before Richard joined the football team, Wake had only 25 winning seasons. In Richard’s freshman year, they lost game after game. By mid-season, the Deacs were listed on the Los Angeles Times “Bottom 10” rankings.
But Richard still looked promising. At 6’2’’ and 195 pounds, he was a solid player, big and fast, who stayed banged up. (My parents were friends with another player, Solomon Everett, and we attended many games.) Richard kept moving and sustained so many injuries and scars that teammates nicknamed him “Zipper.”
* * *
There was a time when the giants of North Carolina politics, in both parties, were outraged over abuses from the national security state. Long before Sen. Sam Ervin became a folk hero for presiding over the Watergate hearings, the Democrat from Morganton led a crusade against Army spying on civilians. He was celebrated by Robert Sherrill, Washington correspondent of The Nation, for being “the closest thing we have to a Federal Ombudsman in the crusade against Big Brother.”
Sen. Jesse Helms, a staunch anticommunist, condemned FBI wiretapping and bugging as “the whole smelly mess of American politics.” In 1974, Helms said, “Bobby Kennedy tapped telephones of everybody in sight, including 38 Senators… let’s see who else has been doing it.”
In 1975, the Senate voted 82-4 to establish the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Agencies, to launch a massive investigation into allegations of wrongdoing. Members included Sen. Robert Morgan of North Carolina, a graduate of Wake Forest University Law School, who took a special interest in the probe.
Morgan said he was drawn to the inquiry when he heard how I.R.S. agents had “engaged in a lot of illegal activities” to entrap taxpayers. “I remember a case of a banker from the Bahamas being in this country and they investigated,” Morgan said. “The I.R.S. wanted some papers in his briefcase so they literally set him up with a woman in Florida, in Miami, and then got him about half drunk, and while he was drunk with the woman, they robbed his briefcase, photographed the records, and put them back.”
The committee exposed espionage on U.S. citizens, such as opening mail, listening in on phone calls, and bugging bedrooms; interference in domestic politics; harassment and character assassination of civil rights leaders, Vietnam War protesters, and radicals; and subversion of foreign governments.
In August 1975, Committee chairman Sen. Frank Church of Idaho appeared on Meet the Press to explain why the committee was vital. “In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air,” Church said. “These messages are between ships at sea, they can be between military units in the field—we have a very extensive capability of intercepting messages wherever they may be in the airwaves… no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability, to monitor everything—telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter.”
“If a dictator ever took charge in this country,” Church said, “the technological capacity that the intel community has given government could enable it to impose total tyranny and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know.”
Committee members were hopeful that what they launched in 1975 would be permanent. They wanted to inspire an enduring mission of “seeing to it that all government agencies… operate within the law and under proper supervision.”
* * *
In 1978, Richard graduated with a communication degree from Wake. He emerged into a state that was the headquarters of industry—tobacco, textiles, and furniture. Cannon Mills in Kannapolis produced half of the nation’s towels and a fifth of its bed sheets. Almost 35 percent of North Carolinians worked in manufacturing, more than any other state. Rev. Burr helped Richard get a full-time position with Carswell Distributing Co., which sold appliances in the Winston-Salem area. One of his first jobs was demonstrating kerosene heaters to potential customers.
Richard purchased a house on Polo Road, near the Wake Forest campus. The place needed a lot of work, and Richard had just the man for it, an undergraduate named Tom Fetzer. They met when both were students who landed jobs at The Hub Ltd., a men’s clothing store at Hanes Mall. Soon, Fetzer learned a key fact about his friend: “Richard Burr is the tightest man you have ever met.” Richard showed Fetzer his new house and said, “If you help me fix this place up, I’ll let you live here for free.” Fetzer agreed and moved in. “I went in as his indentured servant.”
The house needed a lot of work. “There was scraping paint, painting, all kinds of stuff,” Fetzer says. “One day Richard asked me to mow the backyard. I said, ‘Alright.’ So I’m out there mowing the backyard and, all of a sudden, my legs just catch on fire. I had hit a ground wasp’s nest that he knew was there—he just didn’t know where it was. Richard stood on the screened porch and watched me to find out where it was.”
Oil prices were high during the winter of 1979 and Richard’s house had an oil furnace in it. “But he never burned a drop the whole time we lived there,” Fetzer recalls. Instead, Richard purchased a wood-burning stove from his employer, put it in the basement, and it theoretically heated the whole house. “Well, I lived in the bottom floor bedroom and I would go to bed with a sweatshirt, a stocking cap, and ski gloves. You could see your breath in my room,” Fetzer says.
During the time they lived together, Fetzer, not Burr, was the one interested in politics. That summer, a prominent Republican lawyer, Fred Hutchins, hosted a fundraiser at his residence for John P. East, a political science professor from East Carolina University. He was running to defeat Sen. Morgan in the 1980 election, the same senator who exposed the spy agencies’ wrongdoings. Fetzer was friends with Hutchins’s daughter and Hutchins asked him to bartend for the event. It was there that Fetzer met Thomas F. Ellis, the top strategist for East and Helms, who had also helped engineer Ronald Reagan’s 1976 primary victory in North Carolina. “Come see us when you finish school,” Ellis told Fetzer. When classes were completed that fall, Fetzer went to Raleigh to meet Ellis and was hired for $850 a month to work in East’s campaign. In November 1980, East defeated Morgan by a little more than 10,000 votes.
For the next decade, Burr continued to work for Carswell as a salesman. He married a girl from nearby Salem College, Brooke Fauth, and they had two boys (Fetzer is godfather to their oldest son). Fetzer kept active in politics and in 1988, he challenged incumbent congressman David Price, a Democrat from the Triangle. “Even though George Bush won the presidential election I got soundly trashed,” Fetzer says.
During a Christmas visit to the Burrs following that defeat, Burr informed Fetzer he might run for Congress. “We were in his kitchen and I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Yeah, the boys are getting to be of age and I’m really worried about where this country is headed, what kind of future they’re going to have. It’s something I want to do.’ I never saw it coming,” Fetzer says. “But Richard turned out to be a natural politician.”
* * *
Between 1969 and 1975, North Carolina’s Fifth Congressional District was represented by a former pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, Wilmer “Vinegar Bend” Mizell. After Watergate he was defeated by a 40-year-old mortgage banker and newspaper publisher, Stephen L. Neal, a Winston-Salem native.
I remember Neal as a centrist Democrat who was able to hold on through the Reagan and Bush landslides of the ’80s. In 1992, Burr declared against him. “We will run a campaign based on a theme of ‘It’s time to make Washington work again.’” (Has it ever?) He came to the Wake Forest campus, where I was a student, looking for support that fall. His pitch was that he was prompted to run by “lack of representation” from Neal. After a year in which the insurgent candidacies of Patrick J. Buchanan and Ross Perot revealed voter outrage toward the establishment, Burr’s anodyne message was ill-suited for the political climate.
When he spoke to a small meeting in the Benson Center that I attended, he said, “I truly believe we’re at a crossroads in America this year. America must choose between decay and prosperity. As long as our policy is anti-business… anti-growth, we are not going to change.” In addition to generic platitudes, Burr also expressed support for the line-item veto, something even Reagan couldn’t get passed despite pushing for it during his two terms.
Nobody on the national GOP level thought Burr stood a chance at winning, for good reason. Bill Clinton was running for president at the top of the Democratic ticket and Neal dismissed Burr as a “Japanese-appliance salesman.” (As a top North Carolina Democrat puts it, “At that time, Japanese products were not real welcome here in North Carolina.”) Sure enough, Burr went down to defeat.
“We thought we had a shot,” Chuck Greene says. He was just out of Wake Forest and worked as Burr’s western field director. “Actually, we didn’t do too bad. If you look at the final outcome, and it being a big Democratic year with Bill Clinton’s victory, and Steve Neal outraising us, to get to 47 percent, where we ended—we thought that was pretty good.”
For Republicans in Washington, the race put Burr on the map. As for Neal, he decided to get out while he was still ahead.
* * *
In 1994, North Carolina had a “blue moon election,” as it’s known in the state, a rarity where contests for the Senate or governor aren’t on the ballot. President Bill Clinton had grown unpopular in North Carolina and Hillary’s plan to overhaul health care had hit roadblocks. Sensing an opportunity to chalk up a win, then-House minority whip Newt Gingrich put the big GOP money behind him. Burr raised more than $600,000. For the first time since 1972, the Fifth District seemed winnable for Republicans. Neal announced his retirement and Democrats drafted state senator Alexander “Sandy” Sands as their successor to Neal.
While the GOP pushed Gingrich’s Contract with America as its nationwide theme, the biggest local issue was NAFTA. Burr declared his support for the free trade agreement and followed the party line that NAFTA would be a winner for the district. He also attacked Sands for raising his own salary while in the General Assembly. “That was technically not correct,” Sands recalls. “We voted as a legislature to adopt the budget which gives every state employee a certain percentage raise. It applies to everybody, and never went into effect until you got reelected.”
That November, Burr won with 57 percent. SALESMAN BURR HEADS TO WASHINGTON was the headline in the Charlotte Observer. There was a pullout quotation from Burr’s wife, Brooke: “He was always a leader. He was on the football team. He was in a fraternity. He never missed a Sunday at church.”
Before Burr was sworn into office, he met with his campaign strategist Paul Shumaker. “You have ten years to find a landing place for me statewide,” he said. His message to Shumaker was, I believe in term limits, and five terms is the most I am going to serve in the House. For the next few years, “We went through a process of preparing him to run statewide and building relationships,” says Shumaker.
It didn’t take Burr long to master the way people in Washington speak without saying anything. Appearing with a group of House Republicans in 1995 to announce the formation of a group called the Mainstream Conservative Alliance, Burr said the mission was “fiscal sanity.” He declared, “Solutions are bipartisan. We’ve got a long way to go in this institution, but this is the first step of one that I think will be many in the foreseeable future and I’m glad to be a part of it.”
Later that fall, Burr appeared at a Chamber of Commerce-sponsored event, the Washington Issues Seminar, moderated by Rep. Bill Hefner, an old-line Democrat and former gospel singer in the Harvesters Quartet, who represented the Eighth District. In the morning session, Hefner urged everyone to get their coffee and danish and settle in as he introduced the new congressman. “Richard’s a very articulate young man from Winston-Salem, and in just the short while that he’s been here, I’ve learned to have a great amount of respect for him.”
Burr strode to the front wearing his horizontal striped tie and congressional pin, shaking a few hands as he moved along. He joked about trying to work his way through Gingrich’s reading list. Referring to the 53 Republicans who got elected nationwide with him, Burr said, “This is not a partisan class,” even though what had happened was considered a political revolution and the first time the GOP would have control of Capitol Hill since 1952.
Before signing off, Burr acknowledged another participant in that morning’s affair, Albert R. Hunt, Jr., then the Washington bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, and also a graduate of Wake Forest, class of 1965. Hunt was one of the most prominent mediocrities in all of Washington journalism, always a reliable source of useless conventional wisdom and left-wing takes. Outside the Beltway, reporters marveled at how Hunt kept his job. But Burr took a different approach. “I don’t think there’s an individual who has a better grasp of what’s happening in the city,” he said. When I heard that line, I knew Richard was well on his way to punching all the right tickets for success in D.C.
* * *
“Are you familiar with Wilkes County?” Neal Cashion, the former mayor of North Wilkesboro, asks me. He’s describing the long odds he faced in 1996 when he tried to unseat Richard Burr. “I’ve lived here all my life. Hell, when you live here and you’re a Democrat, you have to fight the weather, the devil, and the Republican Party—and just about in that damn fashion, to tell you the truth about it.” I checked, and the last Democrat to carry Wilkes County for president was Andrew Jackson, in 1832. Cashion says Governor Jim Hunt asked him to run to fill the Democratic ticket. “They needed a full slate that year,” he says.
He recalls putting some $100,000 of his own money into the race, and getting a little help from the Democratic Party, but it was impossible to persuade big business to give him a listen. Cashion called the Miller High Life plant in Rockingham County to ask if he could tour and meet the workers, and executives said, no, we’re for Richard Burr, we can’t let you in here.
“The Clinton-Gore bunch came out against tobacco so, you know, it was kind of like standing on the corner raising money,” Cashion recalls, “wishing in one hand and taking shit in the other and seeing which fills up first.”
Burr and Cashion did meet for one debate, in Winston-Salem. “I probably did a pretty good job,” Cashion says. “That was my first ever debate as any kind of a candidate. In a small-town race you don’t have that type of thing. That’s where Burr kept bragging about being a Presbyterian minister’s son. They made a video of it.”
How did you size up Richard Burr? I asked. “He was very polished, very familiar with the issues, he was in Newt Gingrich’s pocket.”
Cashion says, “I’m not a Richard Burr fan. I always thought his daddy was a nice fella. He used to come up here and preach in our church some. His son didn’t like staying a Presbyterian for one reason or another.” The Burrs now attend Centenary United Methodist Church in downtown Winston-Salem, known more for the social climbing of its members than the teachings of its reverend.
“I grew up in my grandfather’s house and my grandfather was a big Presbyterian,” Cashion says. “And you always hear about, ‘Well, we got to do this for the preacher, we’ve got to help the preacher’s son do this, we’ve got to help the preacher’s wife do that, we’ve got to help the preacher’s daughter’—always wanting to do something for the preacher’s young’uns, all the time having to take up a collection. And it made me think, Burr bragged about being a Presbyterian minister’s son and the first time he gets a chance he changes his religious affiliation to something else. I thought, damn, what a traitor. It’s the damn truth. He sucked on the Presbyterian teat for years, and then spit it out for some reason.”
With the district leaning more Republican, Burr carried 62 percent of the vote and secured his place in Washington. Neil Cashion says he’s happy these days just watching the Golf Channel.
* * *
In February 1999, a small group of businessmen who supported Burr asked him to run for governor. Shumaker talked Burr out of it by saying they were looking to protect their own business interests. “My job is to protect your interest,” Shumaker told him. “You’re not ready for this, nor is this your issue set.”
Burr stayed in Congress and, after 9/11, grew to believe that spies were the first line of defense against the jihadists. He took a spot on the House Committee on Intelligence, where he sat next to Nancy Pelosi and questioned top intelligence officials. In October 2002, he voted in favor of the war in Iraq and became a strong supporter of President George W. Bush. He began to view the FISA court and the Patriot Act as tools spies could use to beat back the terrorist threat.
When top political aides in the Bush White House went looking for potential U.S. Senate candidates to run for 2004, Burr impressed them as being someone they could rely on. (“Their main criteria were people who would do what they wanted,” says longtime North Carolina political strategist Carter Wrenn, who worked for Helms and East.) Karl Rove says he talked to the Burrs—“he does not make a political decision without his wife, Brooke, she’s very smart”—and told them that if Richard decided to run, “we’re in, money, marbles, and chalk.”
Burr never had to worry about an election again. His commitment to deal-making was viewed in the Senate as serious-mindedness and earned him plaudits from Teddy Kennedy and Harry Reid. Among GOP Senate leadership, Burr was the workhorse guy. There’s no drama with him, he’ll put his head down. During Barack Obama’s presidency, Burr turned to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the spy agencies for guidance on next steps. McConnell groomed Burr to take the place of the retiring vice chairman on the Select Committee on Intelligence, Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia (one of Burr’s close friends).
While the tobacco, textiles, and furniture industries that once filled little cities all across North Carolina closed, Burr grew to love the briefings and the collegiality with the spymasters. He even refused to condemn waterboarding. In 2013, during an interminable hearing with CIA director John Brennan, Burr joked, “I’m going to try to be brief because I notice you’re on your fourth glass of water, and I don’t want to be accused of waterboarding you.” He said he considered any effort to hold hearings on CIA torture as an attempt to smear the Bush administration. When a staffer for Sen. Dianne Feinstein discovered that the CIA was spying on committee computers, Burr didn’t seem to be bothered by it. Living in the world of espionage—“It’s what he gets up and breathes for,” says one former aide.
* * *
If Donald Trump’s trip down the escalator in 2015 revealed anything, it was that he did not belong to The Club. As Gore Vidal describes in his 1967 novel Washington, D.C., “No one was ever quite sure who belonged to The Club since members denied its existence, but everyone knew who did not belong.” Burr knew right off that Trump was not a member, nor would he ever be. This was reinforced when Trump said the espionage business was a waste of money and incompetent, insofar as they missed the end of the Cold War, 9/11, WMD, and the rise of China.
I spent a year conducting the Playboy Interview with former NSA and CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden when Trump was running for president. The last spymaster to sit for a Playboy Interview was William Colby in 1978. Colby’s more than 10,000-word interview maintained the tradition of publicly staying out of domestic politics. Hayden’s did not.
In August 2016, Hayden and other former national security officials, from the Nixon to the Bush administrations, signed an “open letter” that was publicized through every media outlet in the world. “Trump has dangerous qualities in an individual who aspires to be President and Commander-in-Chief, with command of the U.S. nuclear arsenal,” they wrote. “We are convinced that he would be a dangerous President and would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being. None of us will vote for Donald Trump.” Trump responded by saying that people such as Hayden were the same ones who brought us the war in Iraq and allowed Americans to die in Benghazi.
Days after Trump was elected, President Obama ordered our 17 intelligence agencies to conduct an investigation and write a report about alleged Russian interference in the election. The report was released to the public on January 6, 2017. It said that all of the spy agencies were in agreement that “Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. Presidential election.” The document was a tool meant to undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s election.
With six years remaining in his political career, Burr was in the position to correct the narrative that the election was stolen by Putin for Trump, as chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence. He refused to push back and decided that he was going to undertake the same investigation that Obama had ordered, except this time run it through the Senate committee.
A few days later, BuzzFeed published the notorious “Steele Dossier,” written by a British spy, Christopher Steele, who hated Trump and was paid by Hillary’s campaign. The document portrayed Trump as a Russian stooge cavorting with prostitutes in Moscow. Despite its lack of evidence, it circulated among top U.S. spies, who seemed to relish reading and disseminating it. Over Twitter and in person, President Trump attacked the dossier and the espionage apparatus that generated it.
This “antagonism, this taunting to the intelligence community,” as Rachel Maddow described Trump’s response, caused Hayden, Brennan, NSA director James Clapper, CIA deputy director Michael Morrell, and FBI director James Comey to double down against the president. They broadcast their antipathy for him through a myriad of channels, continued spying on Trump and his advisors, and sought to neutralize him through leaks. Their anger was telegraphed in the interview Sen. Chuck Schumer gave Rachel Maddow shortly after Trump was sworn in. “Let me tell you,” he said, “you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you… From what I am told, they are very upset with how he has treated them and talked about them.”
On March 29, 2017, I watched as Burr appeared on the podium in the Senate Radio-TV Gallery studio. He was sweating as he announced his probe. “Our mission is to earn the trust and respect of the intelligence community so they feel open and good about sharing information with us because that enables us to do our oversight job that much better,” he said.
For the next three years, Burr said he was overseeing “one of the biggest investigations that the Hill has seen in my tenure here.” He didn’t really “oversee” it. He put a longtime aide, Chris Joyner, who had also worked as a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, in charge and ceded considerable authority to the committee’s vice chairman, Sen. Mark Warner, Democrat, of Virginia. In public, Burr bragged about the extraordinary number of witnesses he and the committee questioned. In reality, some vital witnesses never even laid eyes on Burr.
Tom (I shall disguise his real identity) got subpoenaed by Burr and Warner for “documents related to Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections.” Tom was ordered to appear in person at the committee or go to jail. Tom hired a lawyer, complied with Burr’s request, and appeared on Capitol Hill for what he thought was going to be an interview with Chairman Burr. “Not only did I not see Burr, but the staff played a game with me where they pretend, ‘Oh we’re so bipartisan, you won’t even be able to guess who works for whom.’ You’ve got all these people in the room with various agendas and in between questions they run outside and leak to the press. A bunch of really shitty, untalented people. In the intelligence community, they’re looked down on as losers and wannabes, people who couldn’t get into the agencies.” In the end, Tom spent close to $250,000 on lawyers and his life was ruined.
Burr and Warner released five volumes of a study that concluded that Russia did what they had been doing since the Bolshevik Revolution—though in 2016 they were so stupid they spent $100,000 on Facebook ads, some of which appeared after the election. Out of some 200 witnesses, none could swear to having any evidence that the Trump campaign colluded, conspired, or coordinated with any member of the Russian government.
While committee staff members were investigating Trump and Russia, FBI agents caught the committee’s director of security, James A. Wolfe, leaking classified and disparaging information about Trump and others close to the president to reporters, including one with whom he was having sex. (“I always tried to give you as much information that I could and to do the right thing with it so you could get that scoop before anyone else,” Wolfe texted the reporter in 2017. “I always enjoyed the way that you would pursue a story like nobody else was doing in my hallway.”) After Wolfe pled guilty to lying to the FBI and was set to be sentenced to prison, Burr, Warner, and Feinstein wrote to Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson and beseeched her to give Wolfe leniency. In December 2018 she sentenced Wolfe to two months in prison and fined him $7,500.
At the end of Our Man in Havana, Wormold confesses. His “intelligence” has been a scam. There is no threat. The spymasters in London need to keep this quiet. Determined to avoid embarrassment, they give Wormold an award, the Order of the British Empire, and a prestigious teaching post at headquarters.
Soon after President Trump left office in January, officials at the Department of Justice contacted Burr. For almost a year, they’d investigated him because following a private briefing from intel agencies in early 2020 regarding the coming pandemic, he liquidated his stocks. The Burrs were spared some $250,000 in losses. We won’t be charging you with any crimes, Justice officials at long last informed him.
“The case is now closed,” Burr announced in a statement. “I’m glad to hear it. My focus has been and will continue to be working for the people of North Carolina during this difficult time for our nation.”
John Meroney is contributing editor of Garden & Gun and consulting producer of the upcoming CNN Originals documentary series, The Woman Who Took Down the KKK.
The post Our Man in Winston-Salem appeared first on The American Conservative.
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WATCH: WWII Veteran Awarded Purple Heart over 76 Years After Being Injured
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A snowplow cleaning streets in the aggravated traffic due to strong snowfall.
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The wreckage of a car hit by an attack led by Boko Haram members is seen surrounded by residents of the Adam Kolo district of Maiduguri on February 24, 2021. - Boko Haram jihadists attacked the Nigerian city of Maiduguri in the volatile northeast, killing 10 to 17 people, including nine children who were playing football in a field, local militia told AFP February 24, 2021. (Stringer/AFP via Getty Images)
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US Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, speaks during a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee nomination hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on February 25, 2021. (Photo by TOM BRENNER / POOL / AFP) (Photo by TOM BRENNER/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
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Governor John Kasich of Ohio speaking at the 2016 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland.
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BEDFORD, NH - FEBRUARY 11: A voter walk to the voting booth at Bedford High School during the New Hampshire primary on February 11, 2020 in Bedford, New Hampshire. (Photo by Matthew Cavanaugh/Getty Images)
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WASHINGTON - SEPTEMBER 29: Associate Justice Clarence Thomas poses with other justices during a group photograph at the Supreme Court building on September 29, 2009 in Washington, DC. The high court made a group photograph with its newest member Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
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The Coronavirus package will fail to include the $15 minimum wage hike due to a parliamentarian decision, President Joe Biden announced on Thursday.
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GOP New York Mayoral Candidate Nicole Malliotakis Speaks On Mayor De Blasio's Travel Expenses
NEW YORK, NY - JULY 19: Nicole Malliotakis, Republican New York City mayoral candidate, arrives for a press conference outside City Hall, July 19, 2017 in New York City. She discussed what she described as 'the lack of transparency surrounding Mayor de Blasio's travel expenses.' (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
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NYPD digidog police dog drone
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Republican voters are more concerned about illegal immigration to the United States than any other issue, including the economic damage caused by the Chinese coronavirus crisis, a new survey reveals.
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Former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm speaks during the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing to examine her nomination to be Secretary of Energy, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on January 27, 2021. (Photo by Graeme Jennings / POOL / AFP) (Photo by GRAEME JENNINGS/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., left, poses during a ceremonial swearing-in with Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., right, on Capitol Hill, Thursday, Jan. 3, 2019 in Washington during the opening session of the 116th Congress. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
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Lee Zeldin on FNC 4/20/20
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Asian-American writers in Hollywood are blaming studios for contributing to the alleged rise in anti-Asian sentiment in the country, calling for them to put an end to ethnic stereotyping in TV shows and movies.
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United Nations agencies have begun efforts to return asylum seekers currently residing in Mexico under the Trump Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) back to U.S. soil. An estimated 25,000 asylum seekers are eligible for transfer under President Joe Biden’s cancellation of the MPP. The UN received 12,000 applications over a three-day period beginning February 19.
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Not since Dan Quayle misspelled “potatoe” has there been such a fuss in the spud world as there was today. Word came out this morning that Hasbro, the maker of Mr. Potato Head, was going “gender neutral” with the famous toy. As usual, Twitter lit up with a lot of spuddering. Hasbro later clarified that they were not giving up the gender binary, but were only dropping the “Mr.” from the toy’s title, which I expect will not stop the yam-mering from the wokerati. (Woke-tatoes??)
Where will this lead? I can see Mr. Clean now, saying, “First, they came for Mr. Potato Head, and I said nothing, because I care not for starches. And then they came for Mr. Coffee, and I said nothing, because the conspicuous absence of a Mrs. Coffee kitchen appliance is further proof of misogynistic patriarchy. But then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me. Not even Mrs. Butterworth. Who, come to think of it, tasted great on potato pancakes. Though I preferred Aunt Jemima. Wait—she’s gone too? Help us Uncle Ben’s Kenobi—you’re our only hope!” Or maybe will just call them “potatx” now.
All this put me in mind of a very old Jay Leno bit from the mid-1980s:
Guest post by Mark
Maricopa County in Arizona recently released reports by two vendors who conducted election audits in early February. Witnesses working at the (MCTEC) Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center testified that 12% of all ballots were being sent to adjudication. Numerous supervisors offered this data when struggling to assign this large amount of ballot files to adjudicators.
So one in eight ballots were being sent as a digital image to humans at computers. These adjudicators would review and could change the circles voters selected on these ballots. Changing a ballot is as easy as checking a box on a PDF form. But neither audit discloses this unusually high rate of adjudication or why it happened.
The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors provided both audit organizations a “test deck” of ballots. The audit by Pro V&V states they processed at least 1,549,703 ballot positions. If their test was truly replicating the election, then 186,000 of these ballots should have been sent to adjudication. But there’s no mention of this or any recurring scanner issues. Other than 2 ballot jams, their report simply says “Ballots were imported into RTR and adjudicated resulting in accurate numbers.” The reports are purposely void of any details. It should be noted the MCTEC center was staffed with anti-Trump zealots, just not as bad as the TCF center. These were the people adjudicating ballots.
There is a major difference between an investigation and an EAC accredited audit. With an EAC “audit” the vendors are given a strict scope of work by the customer. Anything outside these parameters is not investigated or disclosed. This 12% of adjudication would have created a tremendous amount of errors in the logs. Did these auditors choose not to disclose this? Or did their “test deck” not produce many adjudicated ballots? If so, why? No one knows because it was not in the scope of the audit. An investigation would get to the bottom of this. Investigators would compare “ballot images” against the actual paper ballots.
As another example, Maricopa instructed auditors to check devices for internet connectivity between July 6th and November 10th. So SLI looked at the logs of a couple of servers, some adjudicator workstations, and 35 of the 315 precinct scanners. They only checked the logs for signs of internet connectivity. No other analysis was documented because it wasn’t ordered by the Maricopa Board of Supervisors. It says no evidence of internet connectivity was found, but farther down discusses reviewing browser history and search terms. Analysts have noted that Dominion software allows logs to be edited, replaced, and completely deleted while leaving no audit trail of that users credentials.
These publicly released audit reports are noticeably void of dates, especially when software was installed. During the “investigation” conducted by Allied Security for Antrim County, they found the Dominion ImageCast Precinct Cards were reprogrammed. This software affects how ballots are read and tabulated. The programming was changed just before the election on 10/23/2020. Then two days after the election on 11/05/2020 it was changed to a compliant software version most likely to hide fraud. When an audit just checks the software version or hash numbers it could conclude this recently installed software was compliant and everything was OK.
SLI Compliance states they inspected many aspects of EMS (Election Management System) from the registry to the USB history. Several witnesses stated a Dominion employee used an orange external drive to back up the entire system. The device was removed at night, taken off-premise, delivered to someone, and reconnected to the servers via USB in the morning. The Dominion employee admitted there was no chain of custody and would not disclose his offsite handoffs. There is no mention of this USB activity or any EMS activity like this in either audit report. Again, this is the difference between and EAC accredited “audit” and a real investigation.
SLI Compliance states they audited all 9 of the ImageCast Central Count (ICC) high-speed scanners used at MCTEC. Witnesses testified that ballots were dropped off by Runbeck Election Services trucks on November 4th, 5th, 6th and daily until the 12th. Supervisor explanations on these deliveries was always the same: “Runbeck has high speed scanners.” Their facility is 6 miles away from MCTEC. But there is no mention of Runbeck or these offsite scanners in either audit report. Bryan Dandurand, VP of Operations for Runbeck, was contacted for further clarification and has not yet responded.
It’s likely there is more documentation from these audits than what is provided to the public. Only 14 of the 60 pages from SLI Compliance report contains useful information for the public. About 7 of the 10 pages in the Pro V&V report is useful. What’s noticeable is that EAC accredited audits never seem to look at known issues and whitewash the obvious. A real election investigation focuses on the known issues, looks at all aspects of information, and follows the evidence.
The post Maricopa County Releases Junk Audit Reports – 12% Ballot Adjudication and Dominion Employee’s Use of Prohibited Orange External Drive Omitted from Report appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
The Texas blackout is over, and water has also been restored. It didn’t get as much press as the loss of electricity, but water pipes froze and broke across a wide swath of the state, causing inconvenience that for many was greater than the power outage. The ultimate source of both problems was the same: the relevant authorities failed to anticipate record-breaking cold.
One question that I have not seen asked is this: why didn’t the relevant authorities–the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, and whatever municipal governments and private contractors have been responsible for water pipes–anticipate a “worst case” cold snap such as what actually happened?
One obvious possibility is that they were so deluged with propaganda about “climate change,” which just means global warming, that they took elaborate precautions against record-breaking heat, but it didn’t occur to them to guard against unprecedented cold. Is this what happened? I don’t know, but back in the days when we had people known as “investigative reporters,” someone might have looked into it.
Yesterday the Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board weighed in on the subject. The editorial is behind a paywall, so here are some excerpts:
Regulators have been warning for years that the grid is becoming shakier as cheap natural gas and heavily subsidized renewables replace steady coal and nuclear baseload power. “The nation’s power grid will be stressed in ways never before experienced” due to “an unprecedented resource-mix change,” the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) warned in 2011.
It added: “Environmental regulations are shown to be the number one risk to reliability over the next one to five years.” But the Obama Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) refused to consider how climate policies would affect reliability.
There is an enormous difference between energy sources that are reliable and can produce electricity on demand–coal, nuclear, natural gas, hydro–and those that are weather-dependent and therefore unreliable–wind and solar. If we want the lights to go on every time we flip the switch, we need to have enough reliable (not “Green”) electricity sources to meet peak electricity demand. This is not rocket science, but it is news, apparently, to “Green” activists, a category that now includes the entire Democratic Party.
[T]he Southwest Power Pool, north of Texas, and the Midwest power grid—both of which rely heavily on wind backed by gas—also experienced power outages last week due to surging demand, declining wind production and gas shortages. California relies on gas and imports to back up its solar power. But last summer California couldn’t get enough power from its neighbors amid a heat wave that strained the entire Western grid.
If we increase our reliance on wind power in the years to come, blackouts will become a common feature of American life. For policy purposes, the most immediately relevant takeaway from Texas’s electricity fiasco is that wind energy failed to show up for work. I am pleased that the Journal’s Editorial Board relied on data from my organization, the nation’s cutting-edge source on energy policy:
The wind lobby says Texas should have required thermal (nuclear, gas, coal) plants to be weatherized to withstand single-digit temperatures. Perhaps, but wind still performed the worst during the blackout, generating power at 12% of its capacity compared to 76% for nuclear, 39% for coal, and 38% for gas, according to a data analysis by the Center of the American Experiment.
How are liberals trying to defend the abysmal performance of wind turbines during Texas’s energy crisis? Absurdly, they argue that wind turbines “outperformed the forecast” and therefore can’t be blamed for the fiasco. This is an astonishingly dumb argument. First of all, what “forecast” are they talking about? ERCOT issues a forecast, every day, for electricity production from the various elements–coal, gas, wind, etc.–the following day. Why is this a “forecast” rather than a plan, as it would be in a state that gets its electricity from reliable sources? Because it depends in considerable part on the weather.
When the weather forecast says it will be windy, ERCOT’s daily forecast predicts a lot of electricity coming from wind turbines and less from conventional (i.e., reliable) sources. Conversely, when the weather forecast says there will be little or no wind, ERCOT predicts little electricity from wind turbines and more from coal and natural gas.
What happened during Texas’s energy crisis is that the weather forecast predicted almost no wind, and therefore hardly any contribution from wind turbines, exactly when the state needed electricity the most. What occurred instead is that a little bit of wind blew, so that electricity production from the turbines that didn’t freeze up, while pathetic, was a bit above the forecast. This chart, from my colleague Mitch Rolling, shows how minimal wind turbines’ contribution to Texas’s energy needs was:
Far from proving the merit of wind energy, Texas’s experience precisely illustrates why wind and solar energy, which are weather-dependent and therefore unreliable, are essentially worthless in any time of crisis. To depend on unreliable sources of energy when the grid is stressed and reliability is imperative is a recipe for disaster, as Texas has learned. Let’s hope the rest of the country takes away the right lesson.
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Gov. Cuomo and the Science of Political Decay
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This picture taken 26 December 2011 shows the Pentagon building in Washington, DC. The Pentagon, which is the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense (DOD), is the world's largest office building by floor area, with about 6,500,000 sq ft (600,000 m2), of which 3,700,000 sq ft (340,000 m2) are used as offices. Approximately 23,000 military and civilian employees and about 3,000 non-defense support personnel work in the Pentagon. AFP PHOTO (Photo credit should read STAFF/AFP/Getty Images)
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Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials are warning of an illegal immigration crisis at the United States-Mexico border as President Joe Biden continues unraveling border controls that slowed the flow of foreign nationals over the last year.
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A woman carrying a child on her shoulder waves a rainbow flag during the opening event of the annual Gay Pride parade in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, on June 3, 2016. A carefree and cosmopolitan crowd of tens of thousands of homosexuals, transsexuals and supporters took part it the Gay Pride in Tel Aviv, deemed one of the largest in the world where amid the crowd, tourists waved large flags of their country of origin to signify their presence in a city known as a rare oasis for LGBT (lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender) in the Middle East. / AFP / JACK GUEZ (Photo credit should read JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images)
Maryland teacher’s aide Mark Schack was caught on camera masturbating during an 8th grade virtual lesson earlier this week.
When Schack spoke with FOX 5 reporters he said it was not on purpose and that it was just dumb luck that students were able to see him.
Schack is currently suspended – but is not out of a job.
The New York Post reported:
A teacher’s aide in Maryland masturbated during a Zoom call with eighth-graders — but insists he thought the online lesson had ended.
Marc Schack, an assistant for special education students at Shady Grove Middle School in Gaithersburg, told the Bethesda Magazine Wednesday he was unaware his self-love session had been captured on the virtual call until being interviewed.
“I thought I was logged out when class was over,” Schack told the bimonthly mag. “I had no clue that Zoom was still on. Why would I do that? That’s my job. I had no clue that Zoom was on. I mean, that’s just crazy behavior.”
A 13-second clip — later posted on social media – shows Schack gaze at his screen before standing up, taking a few steps away and beginning to pleasure himself, according to the report.
The post Maryland Teacher Seen Masturbating During Zoom Lesson with 8th Graders – Says It Was “Dumb Luck” After He Is Caught (VIDEO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
NEW YORK, NY – NOVEMBER 10: Low wage workers and supporters protest for a $15 an hour minimum wage on November 10, 2015 in New York, United States. In what organizers are calling a National Day of Action for $15 and hour minimum wage, thousands of people took to the streets across the country to stage protests in front of businesses that are paying some of their workers the minimum wage. Home care workers, employees in retail and fast food restaurants say that the current minimum is not a living wage. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
The Senate Parliamentarian on Thursday ruled that including $15 minimum wage in Democrats’ COVID package violates Senate budget rules.
Parliamentarian says including $15 min wage in Dems’ COVID package violates budget rules. Bad news for progressives but ought to ultimately smooth passage of the bill https://t.co/i1miZNF6df
— Igor Bobic (@igorbobic) February 26, 2021
The Huffington Post reported:
Democrats’ push to pass a $15 minimum wage in their $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package violates Senate rules, according to the Senate’s parliamentarian, who delivered a likely fatal blow Friday to the effort to give tens of millions of workers a raise.
For weeks, Democrats have been waiting for a ruling from the Senate parliamentarian, who oversees Senate procedure, on whether they can raise the minimum wage through the budget reconciliation process, the legislative maneuver that will allow Democrats to pass legislation with a simple majority.
House Democrats are expected to soon vote on a COVID-19 package that includes raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour in stages over the next four years. The provision also eliminates the tipped minimum wage, which currently allows employers to pay workers a lower base wage as long as the workers receive gratuities.
The proposal would give an estimated 27 million workers raises over the next four years. The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 and has not been increased in more than a decade.
The post BREAKING: Senate Parliamentarian Says Including $15 Minimum Wage in Democrats’ COVID Package Violates Budget Rules appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Politicians are not, in general, renowned for honesty. Spin is universal and exaggeration goes with the territory. But actual lying–verifiable, damnable lying about an important public issue–is relatively uncommon. Unless we are talking about Joe Biden.
During the campaign, Biden absurdly alleged that President Trump had mishandled the COVID epidemic, and therefore had murdered the several hundred thousand Americans who allegedly died from that disease. The theory was that if Trump had done something differently–God knows what–the U.S. would have been the only country on Earth with zero Wuhan deaths. Reporters went along with Biden’s fantasy.
Since his inauguration, Biden has continued his assault on his predecessor by claiming, repeatedly, that little was going on with regard to vaccinations until he took office, and that the Trump administration “had no plan” to effectuate vaccinations. This, too, is a damnable lie. Biden repeated it today:
Joe Biden repeats false claim that there was no vaccination “plan” from Trump administrationhttps://t.co/vTX8ioOPVh pic.twitter.com/3lhoOgIexI
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) February 25, 2021
Having had enough, the GOP responded via email:
Today, Biden again falsely claimed that they inherited a “mess…from the previous administration, which left us with no real plan to vaccinate all Americans.”
Let’s look at the facts.
The Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed developed a vaccine in record breaking time and was already meeting Biden’s goal of 100 million vaccines administered in 100 days before Biden took office. His own HHS nominee even debunked his claim.
And take a look at the trendlines. As production was ramping up, more people were being vaccinated daily. That’s to be expected, especially as more people became eligible for vaccination. However, there was no change in the rate of increase after Biden took office. In fact, it has recently decreased.
* Doses administered on January 20, 2021 (Inauguration Day): 1.5 million
* Doses administered on February 24, 2021: 1.4 million
Here is the chart:
Operation Warp Speed was President Trump’s last and in some ways greatest gift to the American people. Not because COVID is a disease of unprecedented or even unusual virulence, but because shutdowns have devastated the lives of many millions of Americans, especially children. The fact that Joe Biden does not have the grace to acknowledge this, but rather continues to baldly defame his predecessor, is testimony to his low character.
There are a number of ways to look at Joe Biden, but my verdict is this: he is too stupid to be humble.
AP Photo_Mike Roemer
National Anthem Protests
Luka Garza #55 of the Iowa Hawkeyes attempts a shot while being guarded by Micah Potter #11 of the Wisconsin Badgers in the first half at the Kohl Center on February 18, 2021 in Madison, Wisconsin. (Photo by Dylan Buell/Getty Images)
Luka Garza #55 of the Iowa Hawkeyes attempts a shot while being guarded by Micah Potter #11 of the Wisconsin Badgers in the first half at the Kohl Center on February 18, 2021 in Madison, Wisconsin. (Photo by Dylan Buell/Getty Images)
BOW-WOW SHOOTOUT IN H'WOOD
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Adriano Espaillat on 8/18/18 "MSNBC Live"
Dr. Rachel Levine (Tom Brenner - Pool / Getty)
WASHINGTON, DC - FEBRUARY 25: Rachel Levine, nominee for Assistant Secretary in the Department of Health and Human Services, testifies at her confirmation hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee February 25, 2021 on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. Levine previously served as Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Health. (Photo by Tom Brenner-Pool/Getty Images)
Joe Biden personally approved US airstrikes on Syria Thursday in response to recent Iranian-backed militia attacks on US forces in Iraq, Reuters was first to report. The Biden airstrikes reportedly targeted a facility in Syria belonging to Iranian-backed militias. (UPDATE at end, Pentagon statement.)
Two days after Biden took over the White House last month, U.S. troops were seen entering Syria from Iraq, signaling a reversal of President Trump’s efforts to end U.S. involvement in ‘forever wars’ in the Middle East.
Fox News reporter Jennifer Griffin posted more on Twitter, “Senior US official confirms the US military carried out a single airstrike in Syria against a single location used by Iranian backed militias- multiple facilities struck tonight. Pres Biden approved the attack. Strike designed to deter rocket attacks against US forces in Iraq.”
Senior US official confirms the US military carried out a single airstrike in Syria against a single location used by Iranian backed militias- multiple facilities struck tonight. Pres Biden approved the attack.
Strike designed to deter rocket attacks against US forces in Iraq.— Jennifer Griffin (@JenGriffinFNC) February 25, 2021
On Tuesday Reuters reported an Iranian-backed militia in Iraq denied responsibility for a streak of three attacks on U.S. forces in recent weeks:
An Iran-aligned Iraqi militia group on Tuesday denied any role in recent rocket attacks against U.S. targets in Iraq, but said an attack against Saudi Arabia last month was justified.
It is a rare direct denial and the first time the Kataib Hezbollah group, one of the Iraqi factions closest to Iran, has commented on the most serious incident this year, a rocket attack in Erbil on Feb. 15 that killed a contractor working with U.S.-led forces.
…In the Feb. 15 attack, rockets hit the U.S. military base housed at Erbil International Airport in the Kurdish-run region killing one non-American contractor. Another salvo struck a base hosting U.S. forces north of Baghdad days later hurting at least one contractor.
Rockets hit Baghdad’s Green Zone on Monday which houses the U.S. embassy and other diplomatic missions.
More via ABC News (excerpt)
“The airstrike targeted structures in the eastern Syrian town of Al Bukamal that belong to Kataib Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed militias that have launched rocket attacks in the past against American facilities in Iraq, said the U.S. official. Another official described the airstrike as targeting a location through which smuggling occurred.”
On Tuesday, Jack Posobiec posted this observation on Biden and Syria, “One thing people aren’t picking up on is how focused the Biden White House is on Syria. They want Assad and his generals gone. This is taking up way more of their time than they are letting on publicly.”
One thing people aren't picking up on is how focused the Biden White House is on Syria. They want Assad and his generals gone. This is taking up way more of their time than they are letting on publicly.
— Jack Posobiec
UPDATE: “American forces have struck at an Iranian-backed militia in Syria that launched rocket attacks against U.S. bases in Iraq, Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby told reporters. President Joe Biden ordered the attack.”
American forces have struck at an Iranian-backed militia in Syria that launched rocket attacks against U.S. bases in Iraq, Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby told reporters. President Joe Biden ordered the attack.
— James A. Garamone (@GaramoneDODNews) February 26, 2021
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby: “At President Joe Biden’s direction, U.S. military forces, earlier this evening launched airstrikes against infrastructure utlilized by Iranian-backed militant groups in Eastern Syria. These strikes were authorized in response to recent attacks against American and coalition personnel in Iraq, and to on-going threats to those personnel. Specifically the strikes destroyed multiple facilities located at a border control point used by a number of Iranian-backed militant groups including Kait’ib Hezbollah and Kait’b Sayyid al’Shuhada. This proportionate military response was conducted along with diplomatic measures, including consultation with coalition partners. The operation sends an unambiguous message: President Biden will act to protect American and coalition personnel. At the same time, we have acted in a deliberate manner that aims to deescalate the overall situation in both eastern Syria and Iraq.”
The following is a statement from John Kirby.
At President Joe Biden's direction, U.S. military forces, earlier this evening launched airstrikes against infrastructure utlilized by Iranian-backed militant groups in Eastern Syria.
— James A. Garamone (@GaramoneDODNews) February 26, 2021
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby @PentagonPresSec on Syria strike: pic.twitter.com/UtZin79PHV
— Molly O'Toole (@mollymotoole) February 26, 2021
The post Breaking: Biden Bombs Syria to Punish Iran for Attacks on US in Iraq appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
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Staff Sergeant Herbert Lins of the Missouri Army National Guard administers the Covid-19 vaccine to a resident during a vaccination event on February 11, 2021 at the Jeff Vander Lou Senior living facility in St Louis, Missouri. The Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis is hosting vaccination events in and around underserved communities in St. Louis as recent reports rank the state of Missouri as one of the lowest in vaccinations nationally. (Photo by Michael Thomas/Getty Images)
Staff Sergeant Herbert Lins of the Missouri Army National Guard administers the Covid-19 vaccine to a resident during a vaccination event on February 11, 2021 at the Jeff Vander Lou Senior living facility in St Louis, Missouri. The Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis is hosting vaccination events in and around underserved communities in St. Louis as recent reports rank the state of Missouri as one of the lowest in vaccinations nationally. (Photo by Michael Thomas/Getty Images)
Police officers wearing face masks patrol on the deserted Red square, with the St. Basil's Cathedral (L) and Kremlin's Spasskaya Tower (R) in the background, in Moscow on March 30, 2020, during a lockdown of the city to stop the spread of the epidemic COVID-19, caused by the novel coronavirus. - Moscow and its surrounding region imposed lockdowns on March 30, 2020, that were being followed by other Russian regions in a bid to slow the spread of the coronavirus. The enforcement of the strict new rules, which Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin suddenly announced for the capital late Sunday, coincide with the beginning of a "non-working" week declared by President Vladimir Putin last Wednesday. (Photo by Dimitar DILKOFF / AFP) (Photo by DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP via Getty Images)
Police officers wearing face masks patrol on the deserted Red square, with the St. Basil's Cathedral (L) and Kremlin's Spasskaya Tower (R) in the background, in Moscow on March 30, 2020, during a lockdown of the city to stop the spread of the epidemic COVID-19, caused by the novel coronavirus. - Moscow and its surrounding region imposed lockdowns on March 30, 2020, that were being followed by other Russian regions in a bid to slow the spread of the coronavirus. The enforcement of the strict new rules, which Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin suddenly announced for the capital late Sunday, coincide with the beginning of a "non-working" week declared by President Vladimir Putin last Wednesday. (Photo by Dimitar DILKOFF / AFP) (Photo by DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP via Getty Images)
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