Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Majority
2. Peltola
3. Videos
4. Unverifiable
5. CCP
6. Equity
1. Majority. One of the things about having a razor-thin majority is that when people get sick or check into the hospital, they are no longer present to provide votes in support of that majority. Such was the case last week when senate democrats lost their 51-49 majority when Dianne Feinstein went into the hospital for treatment of shingles. John Fetterman checked himself into Walter Reed Feb 17 for treatment of depression. Although nobody has formally left Schumer’s majority, it is at best looking shaky. Among other cats he has to herd, there are three independents, Angus King (MA), Bernie Sanders (VT), and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ). He also has Joe Manchin (WV) who is chafing under the increasing weight of a clinically insane energy policy. The problem is that when Feinstein and Fetterman are off the floor, they can’t vote unless they can scare up enough Republicans to assist them. Even with Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney, this is difficult to do. Unfortunately, the staffs continue humming along, doing their dirty work in the background prepping legislation. Fetterman allegedly joined on legislation with fellow US Senator from PA Bob Casey last week aimed at helping stop derailments. Tough to do that when in Walter Reed. Feinstein’s Alzheimer’s is sufficiently advanced that her staff has been doing what Biden’s staff has been doing for years, pointing her in the right direction and telling her when to put her hand up. They even announced she wouldn’t be running for reelection in 2024, much to her surprise. There are some real costs to being too old and having a slim majority. The first thing is you had better pray that you have a governor from your same party in place. The second is that majority like we see this week gets increasingly rickety. Next up for democrats is Pat Leahy who has increasing health issues, and Bernie Sanders who will be 83. For Republicans, Chuck Grassley is the oldest, just reelected last year. He seems to be going strong, though things can change for the worst in a hurry.
2. Peltola. Newly ensconced US Representative from Alaska Mary Peltola appears to be getting groomed to run against incumbent US Senator Dan Sullivan in 2026. Peltola is a reliable democrat vote, last week voting to support Biden Treasury ESG rules for investors (think all retirement accounts). The Congressional Review Act was used to invalidate the rule and passed in both houses. Biden announced he will veto the resolution. With her vote, Peltola demonstrates she is little more than another democrat shill, with a non-existent understanding of basic economics. It also demonstrates both her and Biden’s timing are terrible, as ESG is today on the downslope as pushback against it is making some real progress. Happily, this progress is coming before the big guns of anti-trust, Sarbanes Oxley, and RICO are trained on investment and financial houses who use ESG to enforce their political beliefs. I mentioned Peltola had a poor understanding of economics. Unfortunately, she has a great understanding of personal economics, especially economics that involve insider trading and dirty money. Peltola’s husband may be the source of the idea that led to Governor Dunleavy proposing Alaska get into the carbon capture business. Timing of this is perfect, as carbon capture has become a real income source of free money for tribal interests in the west, rivaling income from casinos. And Peltolas’s husband last summer started positioning himself to be first at the trough. Finally, we have Politico running an extended love letter last week raving about Peltola standing up to the Bering Seas trawl fleet for decimating halibut population out there. One of the things Peltola ran on was protection of fisheries. Much of the piece is wrong, clearly written by someone with no experience in the rolling disaster that is commercial fishing in Alaska. But it is a nice piece of pre-campaign propaganda. Dan Sullivan, be warned.
3. Videos. Tonight, Tucker Carlson is scheduled to release the first tranche of over 41,000 hours of video taken during the Jan 6 festivities. Nancy Pelosi and House democrats sat upon what they claimed was 14,000 hours of video for two solid years, they and Do(In)J prosecutors leaked and used carefully edited snips to make their case that what happened that day was an insurrection aimed at overthrowing the government of the US, a logical impossibility when you consider that the guy guys on the right failed to bring any guns. One of the promises of the incoming Republican majority in the House was to release what they thought was 14,000 hours of security video. Turned out it was over 40,000 hours. Following the model of Elon Musk and the Twitter files, McCarthy released the videos to a media outlet he trusted. Now the media is going nuts demanding a complete release so they can get the democrat story out first. I am torn with this approach, as it does the very same thing the democrats spent years doing, using a friendly media to make their anti-Trump / anti-conservative / anti-Republican case to the general public. Also, these days any video (all of them) can and will be edited to elicit the desired response from whomever the audience is expected to be. This practice is so prevalent that everyone on all sides does it all the time. Nothing you see in video is to be believed as all context before and after the clip ends up in the bit bucket. OTOH, I do get the idea of releasing it to a friendly reporter, as we have seen (and will continue to see) carefully edited video of snippets from democrats and their media cheerleaders. I do like turnabout, and I do like forcing the left to play under their new rules. Somewhere along the line, all of the video needs to be released, if for no other reason than to crater the illegal prosecutions of the 1,000 or so Jan 6 political prisoners. Sooner would be better than later.
4. Unverifiable. A piece by Joe Fried in American Thinker 10 days ago made the case that while Biden won the 2020 vote by a legal process, he did not earn enough verifiable (auditable) votes in six key swing states. The piece was pushing his book on the topic and lists a single example in each of the six swing states. Note the varied techniques used by democrats to diddle elections from this list. Unless properly addressed, expect to see the same stuff from the same locations in 2024, as they reprised their act in 2022. Unless stopped, it will only get worse.
- Arizona. 95% of military overseas absentee ballots in Maricopa County went for Biden. The military split in the rest of the state was 51 – 49%. Ballots were sheets of copy paper. The number of overseas ballots jumped from 1,600 in 2016 to 9,600 in 2020. This provided 8,000 net votes to Biden who won Arizona by 10,000 and flipped a US Senate seat to democrat. Thousands of military faxed votes were counted in Pima County. There was no chain of custody documentation.
- Georgia. The number of unsupportable ballots found in Fulton County was 45x larger than Biden’s margin of victory (%) for the entire state. There are over 4,000 ballots with the same timestamp. It takes a second to scan a ballot and the date timestamps are in hours / minutes / seconds. 16,034 mail-in ballot authentication files were added several days after scanning. There are no ballot images to support 17,700+ final certified recount ballots. No images to support over 374,000 certified in-person votes. Over 132,000 mail-in ballot images have no certification files. Biden won Georgia by just over 12,000 votes and flipped two US Senators to democrat.
- Michigan. The Secretary of State (democrat) implemented a new procedure before the election, assuming all signatures are valid unless proven otherwise. This decision was challenged in court. The plaintiffs won, four solid months after the election was certified. The new procedure invalidated MI election certification.
- Nevada. NV passed a new election law 3 months before the election. Under the new law, ballots were automatically mailed to all registered voters. Vote by mail ballots piled up in post office trays, outside apartment complexes, even on community bulletin boards. Ballots could have been collected at any apartment building, signed and mailed in. No ID required. Biden won NV by around 34,000. It is astounding that NV elected a Republican governor in the face of this.
- Pennsylvania. PA certified the result with over 202,000 more ballots cast than the number of people who voted. No investigation was done before certification. Months later, counties finally submitted their voter information, moving the total down to over 90,000 votes. Biden won PA by 80,000 and flipped a US Senate seat to a democrat.
- Wisconsin. The writer cited a 13x increase in turnout in Madison Ward 124. Analysis of the total turnout finds this to be only an 862-vote increase. He needs better examples as Biden won WI by 20,600 votes. Whatever took place in WI did not unseat incumbent Republican US Senator Ron Johnson.
5. CCP. The CCP set their crosshairs on the growing Starlink constellation of internet satellites. Last week they announced a project to build a constellation of nearly 13,000 satellites to compete with and monitor Starlink satellites. Claimed rationale was not to allow Starlink to preemptively grab all low earth orbit satellite slots. They used the term “suppress” when talking about Starlink, so expect some sort of electronic or kinetic activity used against Starlink. It is it kinetic, it will really, really garbage up low earth orbit. The China Satellite Network Group, Co made claims about wanting to be able to track and disable Starlink satellites with their own constellations. They claim to be concerned about Starlink maneuverability. China matched SpaceX launches in 2022, both launching 61 times. SpaceX is tripling its launch mass in 2023. Whether the CCP can ramp up to launch 13,000 satellites by the end of 2024 remains to be seen. On the SpaceX end of the discussion, this all depends on getting Starship operational, which will allow it to increase its launch rate and mass to orbit 10 – 1,000 x. As a small reminder of who the aggressor is here, Space.com ran a piece about a CCP satellite that has been inspecting other satellites in geo. The TJS-3 satellite was launched in 2018. It was vaguely named as a commsat (not unlike how the Soviets used their Cosmos name for decades). The satellite has been making close approaches to US satellites in recent months, drifting near a pair of US Space Force satellites, getting as close as 6 km to one in Oct. US, Russian and CCP satellites have been inspecting others in recent years using close approaches and imaging. Looks like creation of a warfighting force for space was just in time. I wonder who decided to do that? Hint: (Trump)
6. Equity. If your goal is to pit Americans against Americans based on nothing more than race, I couldn’t think of any better technique than Biden’s recently signed Executive Order (EO) on Advancing Racial Equity. The EO and Treasury plan to distribute the $1.2 trillion passed in the American Rescue Plan Act on purely racial grounds. The Treasury committee set up to oversee this want to discretely distribute the money based on a review of the economy with unfavorable results for people of color, a purely racist goal. This has led cities to set up what they call Equity Atlas, where GIS tools are used to assign equity scores by census tracts and aggregate them by districts. Census tracts with the highest scores receive the most money. San Antonio created one in the American Thinker piece linked. This all violates in a very serious way the equal protection clause of the US and state constitutions. It also violates similar language in local charters. It is a return to redlining aimed at whites this time around. Think of every federal dime spent having to go through this filter. Large donations and government grants are pouring into nonprofits to promote adoption of data-driven system for social justice. One of the most militant and influential of these is PolicyLink. Joining San Antonia are Portland, Austin, and Tacoma. Data populates local government dashboards justifying this race-based redistribution of federal money. Note that in all of this, equity is not equality. Equity is a fundamentally Marxist term meaning equal outcomes.
More later –
– AG