Anxiety Grows as Long-Term Care Awaits COVID-19 Vaccines

Anxiety Grows as Long-Term Care Awaits COVID-19 Vaccines

Nurse Lacinda Snowberger gives Priscilla Lockhart a shot of the Pfizer vaccine at a walk-in COVID-19 vaccination POD inside a vacant Sears store at the Lake Square Mall. The appointment-only site for frontline health care workers and seniors 65 and older is vaccinating around 700 people a day. (Photo by Paul Hennessy / SOPA Images/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

SEE: https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/virus-outbreak-long-term-care/2021/01/31/id/1007958/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Frustration is building over the pace of COVID-19 vaccinations at long-term care sites, where some homes still await first shots while fending off a virus that can devastate their residents.

The major drugstore chains tasked with giving shots in these places are far along in vaccinating nursing home residents and staff. But some other types of group residences won't receive first doses until mid-February or later, despite being among the top priorities for shots.

CVS and Walgreens have started a massive vaccination push in nearly all states, and they say they are proceeding on schedule. But resident advocates and experts are anxious about delays in delivering vaccines that have been available for more than a month.

“Every week that you wait and you’re not vaccinating is a big deal here,” said David Grabowski, a health policy professor at Harvard Medical School. “My sense is that this process is still going too slow.”

Government officials placed long-term care residents and staff among their top vaccination priorities after they authorized the emergency use of shots from Pfizer and Moderna late last year. That includes both nursing homes, where residents get 24-hour-a-day medical care; assisted living facilities, where people generally need less help; and other types of group homes.

Vaccinations then proceeded quickly in some states like West Virginia, which didn’t rely on the drugstore chains and Connecticut.

But — as with other aspects of the rollout — the results have been choppy overall. In many places, home operators and residents' relatives have watched with frustration as states opened vaccine eligibility to other populations before the work in long-term care homes was finished.

Laura Vuchetich says her elderly parents live in a Milwaukee assisted living community and need shots badly. But they have been told they won’t get them until the middle of February even as pharmacies have started handing out hundreds of doses to younger people, including a friend of hers in good health.

“They’re supposed to be at the front of the line,” she said. “They’re in the mid-80s, and my mom had a heart attack last year. It’s just baffling to me.”

Such homes have been hit hard by the coronavirus.

A federal government study last fall found that an average of one death occurred among every five assisted living facility residents with COVID-19 in states that offered data. That compares with one death among every 40 people with the virus in the general population.

The government tasked CVS and Walgreens with administering the shots to long-term care locations in nearly every state. Each vaccine requires two shots a few weeks apart, and CVS and Walgreens say they have wrapped up first-dose clinics in nursing homes.

The chains plan three visits to each location. CVS spokesman TJ Crawford said most residents will be fully vaccinated after the second visit, and the vast majority of assisted living facilities and other residences will have their third visits by mid-March. Some clinics will wrap up in April.

While they wait, the people working and living in those locations are stuck in limbo, hoping the virus doesn’t spread to them or return, said Nicole Howell, who runs a California-based non-profit that advocates for long-term care residents.

“They are essentially standing at the front door fighting this disease with sanitizer and limited staff,” said Howell, executive director of Ombudsman Services of Contra Costa, Solano, and Alameda counties.

Severine Petras watched a COVID-19 outbreak develop at a Pennsylvania assisted living home her company operates a couple weeks before the first vaccines arrived. The Priority Life Care CEO said the recent outbreak hit a “significant” amount of staff and some residents, including one person who died.

Vaccine scheduling has been slow in that state, she said.

“We should have had at least one round of vaccinations in there," she said. “It would have helped tremendously.”

Petras said she's frustrated in part because it was widely known that COVID-19 cases would surge after the holidays. She wishes vaccines had been scheduled sooner to protect against that.

As of Sunday morning, 3.5 million doses have been given in long-term care facilities, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That's about one-third of the roughly 10 million vaccines that Grabowski estimates will be needed to fully protect residents and employees.

“It almost feels like we went about this backwards where they contracted with the pharmacies and let set up the schedule versus saying, ‘Here’s the schedule that you need to meet,’” he said.

The drugstore chains have faced several challenges. At some locations, a high percentage of staff have declined the shots on the initial visits. The companies also had to set up thousands of clinics and reschedule some at locations where COVID-19 outbreaks developed.

CVS and Walgreens say states determined when they could start giving shots at assisted-living facilities, and they have finished first-dose clinics when they were allowed to begin in December. But other states didn’t allow them to start until mid-January. They also say they are pouring thousands of employees into the effort.

Even so, Grabowski and Howell say outside assistance still may be needed to speed up the effort in some areas.

In New York, the Empire State Association of Assisted Living contacted state regulators because some homes had initial clinics scheduled in March, Executive Director Lisa Newcomb said. Those clinic dates were then moved mostly to late January.

“We had some members who were very, very upset about having to wait until March,” she said.

In Florida, the state brought in an outside company to help deliver vaccines if the drugstore chains weren’t able to schedule a first clinic until late January.

Innovation Senior Living CEO Pilar Carvajal said the company called one of her homes that hadn’t had a clinic date set yet and showed up the next day to start delivering shots.

She said vaccinations should be complete at her six Florida assisted-living facilities by the end of March. Then she can stop worrying about employees bringing the virus to work after doing something as simple as going out to eat.

“That is the one thing we cannot control,” she said. “The sooner we can get vaccinated, obviously the safer we will be.”

Biden administration reverses Trump’s weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, UAE

BY CHRISTINE DOUGLASS-WILLIAMS

SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2021/01/biden-administration-reverses-trumps-weapons-sales-to-saudi-arabia-uae;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Democratic Senator Chris Murphy tweeted:

But he ignored Iran’s role in the Yemen civil war which started in 2014, “when Houthi insurgents—Shiite rebels with links to Iran and a history of rising up against the Sunni government—took control of Yemen’s capital and largest city.”

Weeks ago, Yemen pleaded for the UN, the international community and human rights organizations to “take a clear position on the war crimes and brutal violations committed by the Houthi militia in Yemen.”

Although Saudi Arabia is heavily engaged in the Yemen war, it does not take much insight to observe the Iranian regime’s trajectory if it is allowed to continue pursuing its objectives unimpeded. Iran is a perpetual menace and threat, which is why Trump took a stand against this common enemy by favoring Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The Biden administration, on the other hand, is in the process of eroding Trump’s efforts as part of its very different “strategic objectives”; these include a re-engagement of the disastrous Iran deal while leaving Israel out of the talks. Iran is now waiting for the Biden Administration to lift sanctions.

The Biden administration has in effect continued along the same lines of the Obama administration, which strengthened Iran and weakened Israel and American interests.


Biden administration pauses arms sales to Saudi Arabia and UAE,” by Jennifer Hansler and Kylie Atwood, CNN, January 27, 2021:

Washington (CNN)The Biden administration has paused arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as it conducts a wider review of agreements worth billions of dollars made by the Trump administration, sources familiar with the matter told CNN Wednesday.

Secretary of State Tony Blinken confirmed that pending arms sales are under review, as is typical at the start of a new administration, “to make sure that what is being considered is something that advances our strategic objectives, and advances our foreign policy.”

He did not reference any specific sales or countries in his remarks, which were made at his first State Department news conference as top US diplomat.

The move to freeze the pending sales to the Gulf allies could signal a change in approach by the Biden administration after the Trump administration approved major sales in the last months of its tenure.

Gulf nations that have sales in the pipeline had expected some sort of pause for the administration to review but the practical impact isn’t clear yet, a source familiar with Gulf nations’ thinking said.

A State Department official earlier described the pause as “a routine administrative action typical to most any transition, and demonstrates the administration’s commitment to transparency and good governance, as well as ensuring US arms sales meet our strategic objectives of building stronger, interoperable, and more capable security partners.”…

Democrats in Congress immediately came out in favor of the move.

“The weapons we sold to Saudi Arabia and UAE have been used to kill schoolchildren, transferred to extremist militias, and fueled a dangerous arms race in the Middle East,” tweeted Sen. Chris Murphy. “This is the right move. The time is now to reset our relationships with Gulf allies.”….

Biden’s Pentagon to offer covid vaccines to 9/11 jihadis at Guantánamo before many Americans have access to them

BY ROBERT SPENCER

SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2021/01/bidens-pentagon-to-offer-covid-vaccines-to-9-11-jihadis-at-guantanamo-before-many-americans-have-access-to-them;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Priorities, priorities. But you see, they’ve got to have them so that they can resume “war crimes hearings at the base’s Camp Justice compound.” That raises another question: why are there still hearings being conducted regarding these men? Way back in 2009 they essentially confessed by publishing a lengthy Islamic defense of their actions. Why are they still waiting to be tried so many years later? Who is protecting them?

“Prisoners at Guantánamo Bay will be offered vaccination, the Pentagon says,” by Carol Rosenberg, New York Times, January 28, 2021:

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has decided to offer coronavirus vaccines to detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, possibly starting next week, according to a prosecutor in the case against five prisoners accused of conspiring in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The prosecutor, Clayton G. Trivett Jr., wrote to defense lawyers on Thursday “that an official in the Pentagon has just signed a memo approving the delivery of the Covid-19 vaccine to the detainee population in Guantánamo.”…

Lack of vaccinations has been a major obstacle to resuming war crimes hearings at the base’s Camp Justice compound. It was not immediately known whether the defendants in the Sept. 11 case, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, would consent to be vaccinated….

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UPDATE:

GOP Slams Biden on Vaccinating Gitmo Detainees; Pentagon Pauses Plan

SEE: https://www.newsmax.com/us/covid-vaccine-biden-gitmo/2021/01/30/id/1007921

Austria: Muslim gang of Sharia enforcers threatens to behead children

BY ROBERT SPENCER

SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2021/01/austria-muslim-gang-of-guardians-of-public-morals-threatens-to-behead-children

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

“When you meet the unbelievers, strike the necks…” (Qur’an 47:4)

“The moral guardian gang threatened children with beheading,” translated from “Sittenwächter-Bande drohte Kindern mit Enthauptung,” by Christoph Budin, Kronen Zeitung, January 24, 2021 (thanks to Medforth):

The notorious moral guardian gang of devout Muslim Chechens does not shy away from the brutal extortion of protection money. A father of two was threatened in Vienna with the beheading of his sons – police protection for the family and handcuffs for four young suspects!

The Caucasus gang – among them mostly recognized or tolerated war refugees – had already made headlines several times in the federal capital and Linz. Their compatriot women always had to wear headscarves. And if their behavior was too “Western” or, in their eyes, their values ​​did not correspond (photos in swimwear or meetings with non-Chechen men were sufficient), the victims and their families were severely threatened and persecuted.

“Take your sons head off”

Now apparently blackmail has been added to the long criminal list of arms trafficking, imprisonment, grievous bodily harm, car theft and burglary. Because four young Chechens between the ages of 21 and 25, who are apparently part of the large group, are said to have scared a father in Vienna via WhatsApp.

They know where he works, where his family lives and where his two children go to school. If he doesn’t pay 5000 euros, then, according to the gloomy message in bad German, they will “take your sons’ heads off”.

The blackmailers were also so cheeky as to pretend to be protectors (“solve the problem”) and to demand money again. While the threatened family was under police protection, the quartet was arrested by the WEGA.

PHILIP CARL SALZMAN: I’ve Been ‘Canceled’ Because of My PJ Media Articles

SEE: https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/philip-carl-salzman/2021/01/30/ive-been-canceled-because-of-my-pj-media-articles-n1419631;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

An open letter published by the McGill Student Society cited my publications in PJ Media and demanded that McGill University cancel me. More specifically, the society demanded that my status as Emeritus Professor of Anthropology be revoked. This letter was signed by the McGill Student society, anthropology undergraduate and graduate societies, four student Middle Eastern and Islamic groups, and a black student group.

The open letter targeted a more general policy, that of academic freedom. The view expressed in the open letter is that academic freedom should not allow opinions that the signatories disagree with or facts that they might find uncongenial. The signatories believe that they should be the arbiters of what may be thought, said, and written. This is an ambitious role for students to claim, rather akin to a ministry of truth in a closed, Soviet, or Maoist dictatorship.

The open letter takes particular exception to one of my PJ Media articles:

In one recent example [originally published in PJMedia], Salzman goes on to write that “the Middle East is a place where doing harm and being cruel to others is regarded as a virtue and a duty.” …

Framing this as an issue of Professor Salzman’s academic freedom, rather than the right of Muslims and People of Colour have to feel safe, illustrates the ways in which McGill maintains structures that protect and legitimize racist and Islamophobic dialogues. [brackets added]

The Middle East: What You Need to Know

The open letter does not take issue with the truth of the offending statement, or offer argument and evidence attempting to show that it is incorrect, but the letter’s authors limit their efforts to calling me names—“racist” and “Islamophobic”—about an article in which neither race nor Islam were mentioned. In other words, there is no attempt to engage in academic or even common civil discourse to ascertain truth, because truth is not of interest to the students; as far as they are concerned, only their feelings count.

The letter is explicit in saying that the only criterion that should be applied is “the right of Muslims and People of Colour have to feel safe.” Apparently, only opinions that make people feel good about themselves allow them “to feel safe.” This is of course a new definition of what “safety” is: never hearing anything, no matter how true, that you find unpleasant.

Unlike most of these student signatories, including the ones from Middle Eastern and Islamic families, I have spent considerable time living in the Middle East, much of it engaged in ethnographic research in the desert with tribal peoples. My concern about the violence in the Middle East might be taken by fair-minded readers as an admirable, humanitarian concern. It seems likely that many of the McGill student signatories are from families that left the Middle East and brought their children to Canada in order to have a safer and more secure, as well as a freer and more prosperous life. These students do not appear to have learned the lesson of their emigration, or the values of the country to which they immigrated.

Woke Inquisition Strikes Again: Andrew Sullivan Is Out After Attacking the Left’s Stifling Orthodoxy

In the open letter, and in subsequent articles, critics have cited many of my articles, mentioning them by subject or title, denouncing them as expressing unacceptable opinions. But none of the opinions expressed in my articles are explained, none of the arguments presented, and none of the evidence countered. In many cases, the students’ gloss on my articles radically distorts what the articles actually say. It seems uncertain whether the students ever actually read the articles. Certainly, neither the open letter nor subsequent student newspaper articles criticize the articles in any serious substantive fashion. The students apparently hold some woke quasi-religious creed that may not be challenged and regard those who do challenge that creed as heretics who must be canceled. Re-education camps are already working in many institutions, with diversity and inclusion officers policing heretics.

I have already replied to the anthropology students. Anthropology when I entered as a student and then as a professor was an intellectually serious field. Now, having succumbed to grievance narratives, it is little more than a font of woke victimology. Its social analysis is warmed-over Marxist class conflict between identity classes and advocacy for identity politics. Contemporary anthropologists have betrayed anthropology and academic values, which are rarely found in universities today.

Returning to the offending phrase “the Middle East is a place where doing harm and being cruel to others is regarded as a virtue and a duty,” let us consider briefly whether there is any evidence to indicate a prima facie case for its truth. Leave aside the brutal conquests of the Arab Muslim Empire, its invasions and colonies from India to Iberia, its massive enslavement of conquered populations, and the slave-raiding from Africa to Ireland that continued right into the twentieth century. Forget the Turks’ genocide of the Armenians, and the hundred-year Arab terrorist war against the Jews, Saddam’s poison gas attack on his own Kurdish civilians in Halabja, and Sudan’s war against its own “infidel” citizens.

Orwellian Marxists Claim Free Speech Letter Is an Attempt to Silence Minorities

Let’s just stick to recent events. There is the on-and-off war between Turkey, Iraq, and Iran against their Kurdish citizens, the war against Middle Eastern ChristiansBaha’iYazidi, and other minorities, and, most egregious, the fanatical Islamic State and its maximal brutality, from capturing Yazidi girls and women, gang-raping them, selling them as sex slaves, and then murdering them; to beheading prisoners; to burning alive opposition soldiers. Finally, there is the Syrian war, whether seen as a war of the government against its citizens, or a civil war inspired by Sunni-Shia conflict, in which up to a half-million people—men, women, children, the elderly—died of bullets, bombs, exposure, or starvation.

Perhaps the McGill Middle Eastern and Muslim students do not see any of this as cruelty and harm. Perhaps they are fine with it. Then they should tell us exactly what this is, and how they justify it other than trying to blame someone else.

Like the cruelty and violence in the Middle East, there are many truths that we are no longer allowed to speak about, lest these truths offend someone’s “identity” or contradict the extremist and false views of woke activists. For example, it is forbidden to say that men and women are biologically fundamentally different, and that, other than in imagination, men can never be women and women can never be men. It is forbidden to say what statistics prove absolutely, that African Americans are at great risk, not from police, but from African American criminals. Above all, it is forbidden to state that “systemic racism” does not exist in America, and that statistical disparities among racial census categories are primarily the result of social and cultural conditions and not the result of discrimination. Today, the official institutional culture in the English-speaking world is a set of motivated lies designed to distinguish the elite from the mass of the population and to divide and weaken the people in favor of the elite.

Affirmative Action: The Systemic Racism No One Wants to Talk About

Students, encouraged by their Marxist and neo-Marxist professors, and by university policies of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” that privilege students from some minorities, have become America’s and Canada’s Maoist Red Guard, upholding the official lies by attacking fellow students and professors who do not endorse extremist views in order to silence and destroy them. No unwelcome opinions are tolerated, and no discussion of difficult questions allowed. This is no less than the death of the Enlightenment academic tradition and its replacement with far-left Marxist and far-right Islamist propaganda.

Recently many academics have been “canceled,” losing their posts, salaries, and even careers for expressing an opinion or even saying a word that some students and professors found objectionable. In my case, the McGill Red Guard was foiled. Strong support for academic freedom and for myself was provided by the Canadian Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship through letters to the University and to the student signatories, the American National Association of Scholars in an international petition, and the British Free Speech Union in another international petition, as well as letters and articles from a number of colleagues.

In the end, McGill affirmed its commitment to academic freedom, saying that “no single idea, argument, word, or work is ‘prohibited’ at McGill.” Regarding the student demands that my emeritus status be revoked, McGill stated that “Although ‘emeritus’ status may be revoked for misconduct, that term refers to misconduct as defined by the regulations and policies that apply to tenure-track and tenured academic staff. The exercise of academic freedom or freedom of expression, within the boundaries acknowledged by law, is not misconduct under those regulations and policies.” I am an Emeritus Professor still.

I Lived in a Society That Had No Police
The Peculiar Progressive-Islamist Alliance
Anti-Trump Cancel Culture Comes for Franklin Graham
House Democrats ‘Cancel’ Themselves With Gender-Neutral Rules Excluding ‘Mother,’ ‘Father’

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SEE ALSO: https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2020/12/04/add-me-to-the-list-of-canceled-professors/

AND: https://ssmu.ca/blog/2020/11/open-letter-demanding-the-overhaul-of-mcgills-statement-of-academic-freedom/

AND: https://www.thecollegefix.com/student-organizations-demand-conservative-professors-emeritus-status-be-revoked/

sarah corriher: 10 Years in Prison for a Meme?

The Department of Justice is showing that it has become a political weapon in the earliest days of the Biden Presidency. The F.B.I. has arrested a pro-Trump meme maker (artist), who now faces a 10-year sentence for posting a comical image four years earlier. They are outright beginning to arrest people for political speech. Get reliable notification options and further information at Sarah's home site: https://SarahCorriher.com/

Blue-Check Lib FREE, While Meme Poster Faces PRISON Time!

Florida Man Arrested and Charged for Posting 2016 Hillary Clinton Meme, DOJ Calls it 'Disinformation Campaign'

BY NICK KANGADIS

SEE: https://www.mrctv.org/blog/florida-man-arrested-and-charged-posting-2016-hillary-clinton-meme-doj-calls-it-disinformation;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

It’s amazing to watch the federal government devolve into authoritarian levels of censorship that we typically see from places like the U.K. and China. But when the federal government begins arresting people because of “memes,” it’s time to take notice because “tyranny” is here. Essentially, the feds are moving ahead with punishing the American public in different ways because their pre-approved presidential candidate didn’t win in 2016.

Florida resident and “conservative journalist” Douglass Mackey, 31, was arrested and charged with “conspiring with others in advance of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election to use various social media platforms to disseminate misinformation designed to deprive individuals of their constitutional right to vote,” according to a Department of Justice (DOJ) press release.

The simple response is that Mackey didn’t deprive anyone of anything.

Here’s what the DOJ is reporting about Mackey:

As alleged in the complaint, between September 2016 and November 2016, in the lead up to the Nov. 8, 2016, U.S. Presidential Election, Mackey conspired with others to use social media platforms, including Twitter, to disseminate fraudulent messages designed to encourage supporters of one of the presidential candidates (the “Candidate”) to “vote” via text message or social media, a legally invalid method of voting.

For example, on Nov. 1, 2016, Mackey allegedly tweeted an image that featured an African American woman standing in front of an “African Americans for [the Candidate]” sign.  The image included the following text: “Avoid the Line. Vote from Home. Text ‘[Candidate’s first name]’ to 59925[.] Vote for [the Candidate] and be a part of history.”  The fine print at the bottom of the image stated: “Must be 18 or older to vote. One vote per person. Must be a legal citizen of the United States. Voting by text not available in Guam, Puerto Rico, Alaska or Hawaii. Paid for by [Candidate] for President 2016.”

The tweet included the typed hashtags “#Go [Candidate]” and another slogan frequently used by the Candidate. On or about and before Election Day 2016, at least 4,900 unique telephone numbers texted “[Candidate’s first name]” or some derivative to the 59925 text number, which was used in multiple deceptive campaign images tweeted by the defendant and his co-conspirators.

The DOJ did everything they could in this press release to make Mackey sound super scary, but it leaves a couple of questions. So Mackey was arrested because people were stupid enough to believe a meme that told them to text their vote? How is that his fault? Mackey didn’t “deprive” anyone of anything.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. You know why they’re really going after Mackey? Because the “Candidate” whose name was redacted by the DOJ was non-other than failed presidential nominee, former senator and former First Lady Hillary Clinton.

As Fox News host Tucker Carlson said in a segment concerning Mackey on Wednesday evening, “Mockery online is now illegal when it’s aimed at the wrong people. Doug Mackey hurt their feelings, so they put him in jail.”

Bingo! Everything the current federal government is instructed to do and will continue to do is based on identity politics and to see who can virtue signal the most. Remember those "lists" the left kept talking about after the 2020 presidential election.

This should scare you, folks. It shouldn’t scare you to the point that you should watch what you say, it should scare you to the point that you have no choice but to keep speaking.

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JUDGE BRUCE REINHART: 

Judgereinhartfromcourtblog300x400

Biden Justice Department arrests and charges man for anti-Hillary social media posts from 2016 election

SEE: https://www.michaelsmithnews.com/2021/01/biden-justice-department-arrests-and-charges-man-for-anti-hillary-social-media-posts-from-2016-elect.html;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Arrested and charged for "amusing or interesting items through social media".

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A Florida man was arrested this morning on charges of conspiring with others in advance of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election to use various social media platforms to disseminate misinformation designed to deprive individuals of their constitutional right to vote.

Douglass Mackey, aka Ricky Vaughn, 31, of West Palm Beach, was charged by criminal complaint in the Eastern District of New York. He was taken into custody this morning in West Palm Beach and made his initial appearance before U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce E. Reinhart of the Southern District of Florida.

“According to the allegations in the complaint, the defendant exploited a social media platform to infringe one the of most basic and sacred rights guaranteed by the Constitution: the right to vote,” said Nicholas L. McQuaid, Acting Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “This complaint underscores the department’s commitment to investigating and prosecuting those who would undermine citizens’ voting rights.”

“There is no place in public discourse for lies and misinformation to defraud citizens of their right to vote,” said Seth D. DuCharme, Acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. “With Mackey’s arrest, we serve notice that those who would subvert the democratic process in this manner cannot rely on the cloak of Internet anonymity to evade responsibility for their crimes. They will be investigated, caught and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

“Protecting every American citizen’s right to cast a legitimate vote is a key to the success of our republic,” said William F. Sweeney Jr., Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s New York Field Office. “What Mackey allegedly did to interfere with this process – by soliciting voters to cast their ballots via text – amounted to nothing short of vote theft. It is illegal behavior and contributes to the erosion of the public’s trust in our electoral processes. He may have been a powerful social media influencer at the time, but a quick Internet search of his name today will reveal an entirely different story.”

The complaint alleges that in 2016, Mackey established an audience on Twitter with approximately 58,000 followers. A February 2016 analysis by the MIT Media Lab ranked Mackey as the 107th most important influencer of the then-upcoming Election, ranking his account above outlets and individuals such as NBC News (#114), Stephen Colbert (#119) and Newt Gingrich (#141).

As alleged in the complaint, between September 2016 and November 2016, in the lead up to the Nov. 8, 2016, U.S. Presidential Election, Mackey conspired with others to use social media platforms, including Twitter, to disseminate fraudulent messages designed to encourage supporters of one of the presidential candidates (the “Candidate”) to “vote” via text message or social media, a legally invalid method of voting.

For example, on Nov. 1, 2016, Mackey allegedly tweeted an image that featured an African American woman standing in front of an “African Americans for [the Candidate]” sign.  The image included the following text: “Avoid the Line. Vote from Home. Text ‘[Candidate’s first name]’ to 59925[.] Vote for [the Candidate] and be a part of history.”  The fine print at the bottom of the image stated: “Must be 18 or older to vote. One vote per person. Must be a legal citizen of the United States. Voting by text not available in Guam, Puerto Rico, Alaska or Hawaii. Paid for by [Candidate] for President 2016.”

The tweet included the typed hashtags “#Go [Candidate]” and another slogan frequently used by the Candidate. On or about and before Election Day 2016, at least 4,900 unique telephone numbers texted “[Candidate’s first name]” or some derivative to the 59925 text number, which was used in multiple deceptive campaign images tweeted by the defendant and his co-conspirators.

The charges in the complaint are allegations, and the defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Erik Paulsen and Nathan Reilly of the Eastern District of New York, and Trial Attorney James Mann of the Criminal Division’s Public Integrity Section are prosecuting the case.

ENDS

 

2021.01.22 Mackey Complaint... by Michael Smith

Hamas-linked CAIR sues US government, claiming terrorism watchlist is unconstitutional

BY ROBERT SPENCER

SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2021/01/hamas-linked-cair-sues-us-government-claiming-terrorism-watchlist-is-unconstitutional

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

“They said many Americans experience such delays during travel, often at random.”

Yes, and often not at random: American Airlines, for one, is far more hostile to foes of jihad terror than to Sharia supremacists and advocates of Sharia-based oppression of women and others.

Anyway, this case has a good chance of succeeding given today’s political climate, but the Terrorism Screening Database is unlikely to be scrapped altogether; it will just be filled up with opponents of Biden’s handlers’ regime.

“Is the Terrorism Watchlist Legal? Appeals Court Hears Virginia Case,” Associated Press, January 27, 2021 (thanks to Henry):

FALLS CHURCH — On Tuesday, a panel of federal appellate judges expressed concerns about ordering wholesale changes to a government terrorism watchlist. A lower court previously found the list of roughly 1 million individuals was constitutionally flawed.

The 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond heard arguments Tuesday on the constitutionality of the watchlist, also known as the Terrorism Screening Database.

Government lawyers urged the judges not to intervene in the executive branch’s administration of the list and its national security judgments.

Fundamentally, they said the problems encountered by those on the list, like enhanced screening at airports and delays at border crossings, were too insignificant to merit intervention on constitutional grounds. They said many Americans experience such delays during travel, often at random.

‘Far From Insignificant’
Gadeir Abbas, a lawyer with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which brought the suit on behalf of roughly two dozen Muslim clients, said the burden faced by those on the list is far from insignificant. He cited accounts from plaintiffs of being shackled and having guns pointed at them in front of their children at border crossings when agents encountered their names in the database.

“They are not just inconveniences,” Abbas said.

But J. Harvie Wilkinson, one of three judges who heard the case, said that while some plaintiffs experienced significant issues, others experienced only minor problems. He suggested it might be better for individual plaintiffs to file suits based on their own experiences, rather than just attacking the watchlist as a whole.

He also questioned whether the judiciary branch was able or qualified to require revisions to a program that the government insists is vital to national security….

ERLC “Pro-Life” Speaker Says Women Who Choose Abortion Deserve “Quality Care”

SEE: https://reformationcharlotte.org/2021/01/28/erlc-pro-life-speaker-says-women-who-choose-abortion-deserve-quality-care/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

The Southern Baptist Convention’s notorious rogue entity, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) should have been defunded and abolished years ago. Yet, the entity, led by Russell Moore, continues to advance a progressive agenda from every front.

Reformation Charlotte, along with other conservative Christian outlets, has been calling on Southern Baptists to remove the liberal Democrat from office and for churches to stop funding his leftist causes for years. Russell Moore is one of the heads of the Evangelical Immigration Table (EIT), a front group for the George Soros-funded National Immigration Forum (NIF) which calls for open borders and amnesty for illegal aliens. The fact that the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission head, Russell Moore, has never had to explain his association with George Soros is telling of the direction the denomination has gone.

The ERLC is now primarily an outlet to propagandize semi-conservative pew-sitters with left-wing politics. And they are now redefining the pro-life movement to do so.

The progressives at the ERLC and the Southern Baptist Convention have already redefined “pro-life” to include a watered-down stance on abortion and a pro-social justice view on various left-wing pet causes such as slave reparationsthe death penaltyanimal rights, and illegal immigration.

Now, Russell Moore has invited a so-called “pro-life” advocate, Denise Harle, who also serves on the legal counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, to speak at the hijacked Evangelicals for Life March — which coincides with the annual March for Life on January 28 — who says that women who choose abortion deserve quality and competent care.

In an article penned at The Advocate arguing for laws requiring abortionists to have hospital admitting privileges, Harle writes, “women seeking abortions deserve the same competent and quality care as I’ve had through my two pregnancies.” She continues, “Women don’t give up that right when they choose abortion. We all deserve qualified medical services. Everyone — whatever their view on abortion — should agree with that.”

Of course, anyone who is actually pro-life from a biblical perspective could not actually come to this conclusion. The reality is that women who choose abortion — and those who advocate for it, practice it, or tolerate it — deserve nothing but death (Romans 1:32).

Let this sink in: for a Christian — at least, one who claims to be a Christian — to argue for safe, competent, and quality abortions is absurd. This is nothing more than the continued liberal drift in the Southern Baptist Convention being tolerated by the Church.

Hillsong Pastor Joins With Joe Biden Transition Team and Muslims to Call for Religious Unity

SEE: https://reformationcharlotte.org/2021/01/27/hillsong-pastor-joins-with-joe-biden-transition-team-and-muslims-to-call-for-religious-unity/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Interfaith unity seems to be all the rage these days — but historically speaking, it always has been. There has never been true unity between God’s people and the rest of the world. But the world, itself, despite the vast diversity of religious beliefs, have always been unified around one thing — their rejection of the Biblical Jesus.

This includes Jews, Muslims, Eastern religions, and false churches such as the Roman Catholic Church. It also includes false Evangelical churches — like the cult of Hillsong — that have turned Jesus primarily into a social justice activist who seeks spiritual unity with Pagans to affect societal change.

And this is right where Hillsong Church is. Christine Caine, one of Hillsong Australia’s “pastors,” is teaming up with Jews, Muslims, and even Joe Biden to call for spiritual unity and “societal change” in the public square.

Image

In a roundtable discussion on Thursday, which is open to the public, Caine will join Islamist, Dalia Mogahed and Jewish professor, Amy-Jill Levine and will be, according to the registration website, “discussing the topic of religion in public square, the importance of multi-faith relationships, mending the divide in our nation, repudiating sex trafficking, and more.”

The call will also feature Josh Dickson, the National Faith Engagement Director for the Biden Administration Transition Team, who will “deliver greetings from the Biden team and briefly discuss how we can unite to build civility in order to address societal challenges.”

Of course, this leaves Bible-believing Christians with a list of questions:

  • What partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? 
  • What fellowship has light with darkness?
  • What accord has Christ with Belial?
  • What portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? 
  • What agreement has the temple of God with idols?

when we are commanded by Scripture to not be “unequally yoked with unbelievers.” (2 Corinthians 6:14-16)

 

 

Nine High Profile US Catholic Bishops Sign Statement Declaring God Approves of Homosexuals

SEE: https://reformationcharlotte.org/2021/01/29/nine-high-profile-us-catholic-bishops-sign-statement-declaring-god-approves-of-homosexuals/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Despite the fact that the Roman Catholic Church is a false church — a harlot masquerading as the Church of Jesus Christ championing a false gospel and worshiping a false Jesus — the institution has nonetheless held strong on certain conservative ideals for centuries. Historically, the Roman Catholic Church has stood against the intrusion of such wickedness as abortion, feminism, and sexual immorality, at least on an official level. But, as with all convictions that aren’t rooted in the objective morality of God’s word, but merely, cultural preference, these convictions too will change.

Under the leadership of the current pope, The Roman Catholic Church has taken a sharp left turn toward many secular-rooted dogmas, including the advancement of world-wide Communism, cultural Marxism, ecumenism, and the advancement of LGBTQ ideology. Francis has even held a mass for “gay Catholics” and endorsed same sex marriage in a recent documentary. He also said that God “loves gay children as they are.”

Now, in the United States, nine Roman Catholic bishops have sign a joint statement declaring that God approves of homosexuality. The statement, titled God Is On Your Side: A Statement from Catholic Bishops on Protecting LGBT Youth, reads, “As we see in the Gospels, Jesus Christ taught love, mercy and welcome for all people, especially for those who felt persecuted or marginalized in any way; and the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that LGBT people are to be treated with ‘respect, compassion and sensitivity.'”

The statement then goes on to denounce “bullying” — which, in most cases, declaring that God hates sexual immorality is considered “bullying.”

The statement then finishes, “Most of all, know that God created you, God loves you and God is on your side.” The statement was signed by the following Catholic bishops:

  • Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin
  • Archbishop John C. Wester 
  • Bishop Steven Biegler
  • Bishop John P. Dolan
  • Bishop Thomas Gumbleton
  • Bishop Robert McElroy
  • Bishop Denis Madden 
  • Bishop Ricardo Ramirez 
  • Bishop John Stowe 
  • Bishop Anthony B. Taylor
  • Bishop Edward Weisenburger

There should be no doubt left in anyone’s mind that the Roman Catholic Church — despite it’s centuries-old apostasy — has completely buried its head in the sand of cultural influence and abandoned all conservatism that once kept it thriving in the midst of a secular world. God is clearly separating the sheep and the goats and bringing clarity and purity to His Church by exposing the counterfeit.

 

 

Left in Complete Meltdown Over Conservative Pastors Comparing Kamala Harris to Jezebel

SEE: https://reformationcharlotte.org/2021/01/29/left-in-complete-meltdown-over-conservative-pastors-comparing-kamala-harris-to-jezebel/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Just to clear the air and bring clarity to the situation, Kamala Harris, who now occupies the United States’ office of Vice President and is the most powerful woman in the world, is, biblically-speaking, a perfect modern-day example of Jezebel. Now, to clarify, I have no idea what Harris’ sex life is or how many men she’s been with in her life nor do I care. I also am not interested in the color of her skin. But her actions — from a political perspective — place her in the category of a sick and perverse God-hating woman of power, just like Jezebel.

To clarify, Kamala Harris wants to murder children, advance sodomy and promote sexual immorality in schools and public and force Christians to celebrate it. She wants to steal from people with a good work ethic to give to people without it. She wants to abandon immigration laws and allow swaths of criminals and drug cartels to control our borders and enter our country. And, worst of all, she wants to legislate away the constitutional protection of religious freedom, forcing Christians to embrace a secular godless worldview or be pushed to the fringes of society.

And she does it all with a fake smile on her face, just like Jezebel.

Recently, a Southern Baptist pastor, Tom Buck tweeted the following in reference to Kamala Harris comparing her, in a sense, to Jezebel.

Now, Tom Buck, I really like him and consider him a friend. Hopefully, the feeling is mutual despite some disagreements we’ve had in the past. I believe we’re past that. However, here’s where I think Buck messed up. In response to Buck’s tweet, leftists, feminists, gays, and liberals all teamed up to denounce Buck. Unfortunately, he took the bait. When he did, this sent him into a spiral of having to defend himself against something he said. Something that was perfectly accurate and needed no defense — especially to leftists. No matter what kind of defense Buck puts forth, these liberals will not be satisfied with it. They don’t care.

My take, drop the bomb and leave it. Let them stick around to clean up the mess.

Now, in the wake of Buck’s nuclear bomb (I’m calling it that because of its effect, not its intended purpose), leftists have launched a campaign against Buck and other Southern Baptist pastors who have done this. It is clear that Tom Buck wasn’t actually calling Kamala Harris a Jezebel, he was making a completely unrelated biblical comparison to holding a “woman of power” up as someone to be modeled after by young girls simply by the virtue of their “power.”

“Racist, sexist!” cries the left.

Apparently, the most sickening part of Buck’s tweet is that he was unaware of the “implicit sexual reference nor the explicit use of it in slavery by Massa against black women.”

The outrage from the pseudo-religious wing of the political left — namely, clowns like Lucan Mann and Washington Post reporter, Sarah Bailey, who tweeted:

Of course, nobody — literally nobody — actually believes that Tom Buck’s reference to Jezebel had anything at all to do with the use of the term during slavery. In fact, if anyone actually believes that Kamala Harris is a decendent of any American slaves is foolish. Harris was born to a Jamaican father and Indian mother, neither of which have any lineage to American slaves.

But none of that matters because that’s not what it’s about. The fact that so-called Christians are more concerned about the secular implications of the term than the actual biblical meaning is telling. This smear campaign on Buck and other conservatives, like Steve Swofford, is purely political — they can’t have anyone speak against their idols because their idols bring them political joy. They worship the secular almighty State first and their god is subservient to them. It’s why they are hell-bent on destroying conservative Christianity because conservative Christianity is the only thing between them and their god.

My advice to them is to stop defending it and let the left eat themselves alive over it.

Unite and Heal With Show Trials and Fascist Purges~Enjoy unity at gunpoint in the Bidenist banana republic.

BY DANIEL GREENFIELD

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/unite-and-heal-show-trials-and-fascist-purges-daniel-greenfield/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Joe Biden has called for “unity” and “healing”. And nobody knows as much about healing as Joe whose wife has a doctorate in education from the university that hosts his Biden Institute and the Beau Biden Foundation which was charging $3K for lessons on preventing online child sex grooming even as Hunter’s laptop with the Foundation’s sticker allegedly showed him doing it.

Except maybe Joe’s brother who took out $650,000 in personal loans from a company that bankrupted local hospitals while trading on his brother’s name and connections to his campaign.

"I think it has to happen," Biden said, mandating the show impeachment trial of his predecessor.

Once upon a time, impeachments were rare things. These days, Democrats aren’t considered truly progressive if they don’t impeach a Republican president twice in one term. President Trump is back in Florida, but that won’t stop the Democrats from impeaching him anyway before they move on to impeaching the presidents like Washington and Lincoln whose statues their insurrectionist mobs were toppling all summer and fall back when insurrection was still cool.

When asked how he defines unity, Joe Biden, with the help of three teleprompters and a small staff communicating with him through his earpiece and a series of frantic signals and hoots, explained that, “If you pass a piece of legislation that breaks down on party lines but it gets passed, it doesn't mean there wasn't unity -- it just means it wasn't bipartisan.”

Like most ideas that travel the circuitous route between his handlers, his brain, and his mouth, it may be impossible to understand what Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. said, but it’s pretty clear what the senile hack ruling a city under the shadow of military occupation and political terror meant.

Unity is when Democrats get their way. Unity is when no one opposes them. Unity is when they terrorize their political opposition into submitting and keeping their mouths shut.

Or as Speaker Pelosi put it, “I don't think it's very unifying to say, 'Oh, let's just forget it and move on.' That's not how you unify."

How do you unify? The same way every great democratic people’s regime did from France to Russia to China to San Francisco -- with show trials and purges of the enemies of the people.

Nothing says unity like a city full of barbed wire and soldiers. Not to mention a one-party system that is obsessed with criminalizing its political opposition using a fake state of emergency.

"There can be no unity, federal or other, with liberal-labor politicians, with disruptors of the working-class movement, with those who defy the will of the majority," Vladimir Lenin wrote. "There can and must be unity among all consistent Marxists."

The only unity on display is the unity of “consistent Marxists” who claim to represent the will of the majority, or those parts of it willing to trade harvested ballots for a fruit basket and $25 gift cards, as they move to heal the country by eliminating women, suburbs, and the economy.

The show trial of President Trump and the city full of soldiers is just the opening act to the Great Purge of a domestic terrorism crackdown on anyone who ever retweeted the wrong meme.

Biden will embed a domestic terrorism office in the NSC, making the NSC's former abuses under Obama routine as a system meant to track foreign enemies is instead used to surveil domestic political opponents. Heading the effort will be Joshua Geltzman who had formerly falsely claimed, "No, Black Lives Matter is not a terrorist organization."

Inside of a month, Democrats had redefined riots and election challenges from the highest form of patriotism to an attack on democracy. And by “democracy”, they mean the Democrat Party.

Popular leaders don’t take their false oaths of office in a deserted city surrounded by barbed wire and military checkpoints manned by 25,000 troops. Nor do they engage in show trials of their predecessors or unroll massive efforts to surveil, arrest, and silence their opponents.

That’s not the stuff of healing, but it is how you unite a country at gunpoint under your rule.

After four years of vowing to remove President Trump by any means from massive riots to illegal eavesdropping to coups, the Democrats declared an emergency because a few Republicans had done 10% of the things they had been doing, but without dressing up as human genitalia.

Democrats had been collecting bail fund donations for mass arrests in post-election protests and even a “separate fund to raise money for the families of anyone killed in violence on or around Election Day.” And then they pivoted from prepping body bags to declaring that insurrection was a national emergency which will require the National Guard to sleep in parking lots where they won’t annoy Democrat House members until Biden sees his own shadow.

That or the show trials wrap up before they get around to mandating that all future elections take place at Democrat campaign offices preceded by poll tests about equity and white privilege.

Meanwhile, the Democrat media went from writing sympathetic pieces about BLM lawyers throwing molotov cocktails at the police to demanding a thorough purge of every single person who had ever questioned the idea that Joe Biden might not be the most popular politician ever.

"Marxist philosophy holds that the law of the unity of opposites is the fundamental law of the universe," Mao had argued. " Under this system, the people enjoy extensive democracy and freedom, but at the same time they have to keep within the bounds of socialist discipline."

The bounds of socialist discipline, like a black hole, sucks things in without letting them out.

Democrats aren’t proposing that Americans unite under the Constitution. There’s no room in the Constitution for criminalizing political opposition or impeaching presidents after they leave office.

The Democrats want to make sure we stay within the shrinking bounds of socialist discipline.

Unity just means bringing the opposition into the dialectic and then making sure that it plays by the new rules of the game even if they were invented last week by way of convenience.

The new rules of unity are that no one may question an election that the Democrats claim to have won, no one may say anything that Big Tech doesn’t like, and no one may suggest that Biden’s Assistant Health Secretary is a middle-aged man in a dress and a flowing blonde wig.

(Now there’s a man who knows a lot about healing. Just ask the 8,400 seniors who died in Pennsylvania nursing homes while Dr. Rick ‘Rachel’ Levine, Biden’s new Assistant Health Secretary, withdrew his mother, but forced facilities to accept infected coronavirus patients.)

Questioning an election has become incitement to insurrection. To suggest that there’s anything illegitimate about Biden is sedition. Unity means believing that Joe Biden legitimately won an election for which Democrats changed the rules beforehand, then declared a national emergency, and inaugurated him behind barbed wire and lines of soldiers authorized to shoot.

That and believing that his assistant health secretary is a woman.

Believing implausible things is the essence of party discipline. If you want to understand how hardened Communists could shout, “Long live Stalin” just before they were shot in the gulags, it’s because they had spent a generation being conditioned to believe whatever they were told.

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command,” George Orwell wrote in 1984.

When slavery is freedom, and ignorance is truth, then repression becomes healing. The dialectic unites opposites, turning lies into truth, and flattening all contradictions. The message of the party becomes a gnostic mystery whose paradoxes are overcome by political faith.

The evidence of our eyes and ears is more valuable than ever in an environment of lies.

And that ocular and aural testimony finds scant evidence of unity, but plenty of repression. Americans aren’t coming together, they’re being driven further apart under the guise of a manufactured emergency being declared by insurrectionist rioters suddenly turned patriots.

D.C. isn’t the epicenter of unity and healing, but of a wave of political purges targeting everyone from President Trump to ordinary Americans whose political views are being criminalized.

There’s no healing to be found in show trials and political purges. Only the unity that comes from eliminating the political opposition in your very own Bidenist banana republic.

Biden Orders the End of Construction of U.S/Mexican Border Wall

One of many Executive Orders to reverse Trump’s successful immigration policies.

BY MICHAEL CUTLER

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/biden-orders-end-construction-usmexican-border-michael-cutler/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

President Joe Biden is opposed to nearly everything that Trump stood for.  Biden’s dangerous immigration policies have been the focus of a number of my recent articles, for example,

Terror Arrest Highlights How Perilous Biden’s Immigration Plans Are and What Biden’s Immigration Policies Would Do To America.

During his run for the Presidency four years ago, Donald Trump made immigration law enforcement and border security key priorities for his campaign.

At numerous political rallies, the raucous and enthusiastic attendees would frequently chant, “Build that wall!”

The need to secure that border and address the myriad other vulnerabilities was made abundantly clear by the 9/11 Commission which determined that the 9/11 terror attacks and other such attacks were only possible because of multiple failures of the immigration system.

Furthermore, large-scale human trafficking and the flood of narcotics flowing into the United States across that dangerous border added to the demand for securing it.

As I have noted many times in previous articles, the preface of the official report, 9/11 and  Terrorist Travel begins with the following paragraph:

It is perhaps obvious to state that terrorists cannot plan and carry out attacks in the United States if they are unable to enter the country. Yet prior to September 11, while there were efforts to enhance border security, no agency of the U.S. government thought of border security as a tool in the counterterrorism arsenal. Indeed, even after 19 hijackers demonstrated the relative ease of obtaining a U.S. visa and gaining admission into the United States, border security still is not considered a cornerstone of national security policy. We believe, for reasons we discuss in the following pages, that it must be made one.

Let me be clear, the border wall, by itself, will not end the immigration crisis.  It is, however, an important element of what should be an integrated system.  I have come to compare the border wall with a wing on an airplane.  Without its wings an airplane will not fly, however, a wing by itself goes nowhere.

Opponents of the wall sometimes refer to it as a “Wall of Hate” allegedly designed to keep Mexicans out of the United States.  This is, of course, a bald-faced lie.  Every day the Border Patrol encounters illegal aliens seeking to enter the U.S. by evading the inspections process conducted at ports of entry to prevent the entry of aliens whose presence in the U.S. would threaten public health, public safety, national security, and the jobs and wages of Americans.

A review of a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act, 8 U.S. Code § 1182 - Inadmissible aliens will quickly dispel the lies about the nature of our immigration laws that are utterly and totally blind as to race, religion or ethnicity.

Furthermore - and this may shock you - but the wall is not designed to keep anyone out of the United States! 

The wall does not block our ports of entry.  The wall is simply intended to make certain that all people and all commerce seeking entry into the U.S. are funneled through ports of entry so that they can be vetted in an orderly process and a record of entry is created.  To this point I also compare the border wall with the velvet rope at the bank that guides customers to the next available teller; or to the “cattle runs” at airports that guidelines of passengers to the inspections process conducted by the TSA to keep weapons and dangerous individuals off of airplanes.

This gives rise to an interesting question: do you know anyone who would get on board an airliner if he/she saw fellow passengers evading the TSA inspections process?  Why then is it reasonable for Americans and lawful immigrants to be forced to live among millions of illegal aliens who evaded a very similar inspection process conducted by CBP (Customs and Border Protection) at ports of entry for a very similar purpose?

Although the need to construct a secure border was clear to everyone, nothing of consequence was ever done to actually build a physical wall even after the terror attacks of 9/11.

Members of Congress said that we needed to find a “modern” and high-tech way of securing the border.  This gave rise to various high-tech proposals such as SBInet (Secure Border Initiative Network).

Many of these supposed high-tech “solutions” came to be referred as a “Virtual Fence.”

SBINet was ultimately abandoned after an expenditure of roughly one billion dollars that was reported on Washington Technology website in the January 14, 2011 article, Boeing's SBInet contract gets the axe that included a link to the DHS report, Report On The Assessment Of The Secure Border Initiative-Network (SBInet) Program.

Donald Trump, the builder, came along and promised that he would build a wall.  A real wall!  I addressed this in an article several years ago, Why Trump’s Wall Is A Must (And why a virtual fence” will stop no one.)

Even with Republicans controlling both the Senate and House of Representatives during Trump’s first two years, the money was never appropriated to construct the vital wall.  Lawsuits were filed to block the wall and President Trump decided to use money allocated to the military to secure the border and finally he succeeded.

On July 26, 2019 The Hill reported, Supreme Court rules Trump can use military funds for border wall construction. 

The bigger issue is why on earth would anyone be opposed to protecting America and Americans from the influx of huge numbers of illegal aliens whose backgrounds, identities, possible affiliations with criminal or terrorist organizations cannot be determined?  Why would anyone act to prevent the flood of dangerous narcotics into the United States - unless, perhaps, they were profiting from these deadly criminal enterprises of human trafficking and drug smuggling?

Trump’s tactic makes perfect sense.  The primary shared mission of the U.S. military is to keep America’s enemies as far from our shores as possible.  However, “up close and in person” that vital mission falls to the Border Patrol and ICE (Immigration and Customs enforcement).

Arrests along the border dropped as the wall’s construction began.  The wall certainly helped to deter illegal immigration, but so did the policies of the Trump administration that included the “Remain in Mexico Program” for political asylum applicants as was reported by NPR on March 11, 2020, U.S. Supreme Court Allows 'Remain In Mexico' Program To Continue.

What a difference a day or, an election makes!  Ever since Joe Biden appeared to have won the elections we have seen massive caravans of thousands of foreign nationals forming up in Central America, heading to the United States. 

Biden promised a 100 day moratorium in the deportation of illegal aliens - although that Executive Order was put on hold temporarily, on January 26, 2021. The Blaze reported,  Federal judge blocks Biden's deportation pause for two weeks,  Biden’s message is clear, any aliens who enter the U.S. by any means will not face consequences and will likely be granted lawful status via Biden’s legislative initiative to create a dangerous massive amnesty program.

These issues all fly in the face of not only the 9/11 Commission but the findings and recommendations of many experts who have testified before numerous House and Senate hearings.

I wrote about one such hearing in my article:

World-Wide Threat Assessment Makes Powerful Case For Border Security

I have testified before more than 15 such hearings and have often said I wish that they had “listenings” instead of “hearings!”

On April 17, 2018 the House Committee on Homeland Security, Counterterrorism and Intelligence Subcommittee conducted a hearing on the topic, State Sponsors Of Terrorism: An Examination Of Iran’s Global Terrorism Network.”

The prepared testimony of one of the witnesses, Dr. Emanuele Ottolenghi of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, included this excerpt that will serve as the final word for my commentary.  I want you remember his warning the next time you see coverage of the caravans of foreign nationals heading to the United States or when you hear the leaders of Iran threaten action against the United States:

In recent years, Hezbollahs Latin American networks have also increasingly cooperated with violent drug cartels and criminal syndicates, often with the assistance of local corrupt political elites. Cooperation includes laundering of drug money; arranging multi-ton shipments of cocaine to the United States and Europe; and directly distributing and selling illicit substances to distant markets. Proceeds from these activities finance Hezbollahs arms procurement; its terror activities overseas; its hold on Lebanons political system; and its efforts, both in Lebanon and overseas, to keep Shia communities loyal to its cause and complicit in its endeavors.

This toxic crime-terror nexus is fueling both the rising threat of global jihadism and the collapse of law and order across Latin America that is helping drive drugs and people northward into the United States. It is sustaining Hezbollahs growing financial needs. It is helping Iran and Hezbollah consolidate a local constituency in multiple countries across Latin America. It is thus facilitating their efforts to build safe havens for terrorists and a continent-wide terror infrastructure that they could use to strike U.S. targets.

Biden Rescinds Mexico City Policy Prohibiting Foreign Aid From Being Used to Perform, Promote Abortions

BY HEATHER CLARK

SEE: https://christiannews.net/2021/01/28/biden-rescinds-mexico-city-policy-prohibiting-foreign-aid-from-being-used-to-perform-promote-abortions/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden rescinded the Mexico City Policy on Thursday, which prohibits taxpayer money from being used by foreign aid recipients to perform, promote or refer women for abortions. The policy, created by Ronald Reagan in 1984, has been reversed by every Democratic president ever since and reinstituted by every Republican president.

In a statement released by the White House, the Biden administration said that its policy is to “support women’s and girls’ sexual and reproductive health,” asserting that those who are poor, of certain ethnicities, homosexual or transgender have been denied such services both nationally and internationally.

“Across the country and around the world, people — particularly women, Black, Indigenous and other people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and those with low incomes — have been denied access to reproductive health care,” it states. “President Biden is … issuing a presidential memorandum to protect and expand access to comprehensive reproductive health care.”

As previously reported, many Americans do not consider abortion to be health care as the vast majority of abortions are not related to the mother’s health but are rather elective — meaning, committed because the mother, who in more than 80% of the instances is unmarried, simply does not want her son or daughter.

“Like memoranda issued by President Clinton and President Obama before him, [Biden’s memo] immediately rescinds the global gag rule, also referred to as the Mexico City Policy, which bars international non-profits that provide abortion counseling or referrals from receiving U.S. funding,” the statement outlines.

The policy, which applies to recipients of family planning funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), was first instituted by then-President Ronald Reagan in 1984, being announced during the International Conference on Population in Mexico City.

It was expanded during the Trump administration, being renamed the “Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance” policy and applying to all global health assistance and all federal departments.

Last week, Biden Press Secretary Jen Psaki seemingly sidestepped whether or not the president would repeal the Mexico City Policy when a reporter with EWTN asked about Biden’s plans regarding the prohibition, along with the Hyde Amendment.

“I will just take the opportunity to remind all of you that he is a devout Catholic and somebody who attends church regularly,” Psaki answered, stating that the administration would have more to say about the matter. “He started his day attending church with his family this morning, but I don’t have anything more for you on that.”

The White House said on Thursday that Biden’s memo also directs the Department of Health and Human Services to immediately consider rescinding Trump administration/Reagan-era regulations under the Title X family planning program, which resulted in Planned Parenthood declining to comply and thereby losing millions in federal funding.

As previously reported, on Friday, the 48th year since the 1973 ruling of Roe v. Wade, Biden reiterated his commitment to codifying Roe v. Wade into law, asserting that “reproductive health, including the right to choose, has been under relentless and extreme attack.”

THE CHURCH ON ABORTION 

Photo Credit: Gerd Altmann/Pixabay

Christians have long opposed abortion as murder, seeing the taking of human life — no matter what his or her age, size or location (whether inside or outside the womb) — as playing God in essentially considering it a “right” for mothers to dictate which one of her children lives or dies.

Believers for centuries have sought to assist children worldwide, running crisis pregnancy centers, rescuing and housing abandoned children, operating orphanages, and opening foster and adoption agencies. Many Christians adopt children themselves, whether from overseas or those placed in the foster care system, and churches help provide food and clothing to those who are struggling financially.

See example stories hereherehere, here, here and here.

Ecclesiastes 11:5 states, “As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child, even so thou knowest not the works of God who maketh all.”

Psalm 139:13-16 outlines, “For thou hast possessed my reins; Thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Marvelous are thy works, and that my soul knoweth right well.”

“My substance was not hid from Thee when I was made in secret and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect, and in Thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.”

Scripture, in addition to speaking on the value of the unborn, also repeatedly addresses the precursor sin of fornication, teaching in 1 Corinthians 6:13, “Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.”

1 Thessalonians 4:3-5 exhorts, “For this is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye should abstain from fornication, that every one of you should know how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honor — not in the lust of concupiscence, even as the Gentiles which know not God.”

Verses 7-8 add, “For God hath not called us unto uncleanness but unto holiness. He therefore that despiseth, despiseth not man but God, who hath also given unto us His Holy Spirit.”

Please visit Christian News Network’s Outlaw Abortion page to help us work to abolish the worldwide holocaust.

 

American-Israel diplomatic crisis brewing: ‘Nothing to discuss with Biden’ if he returns to Iran deal

BY CHRISTINE DOUGLASS-WILLIAMS

SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2021/01/american-israel-diplomatic-crisis-brewing-nothing-to-discuss-with-biden-if-he-returns-to-iran-deal;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

“Israeli television on Wednesday reported that Jerusalem is warning an American return to the former terms of the nuclear deal with Iran under President Joe Biden could lead the countries to a crisis in relations.” Obama’s disastrous Iran deal enabled the Islamic Republic of Iran to use the $1,700,000,000 Obama gave it to finance jihad terrorists. Israel, as is well known, faces the most imminent and direct threat from Iran. Congressional testimony revealed that Iran may have received $33.6 billion in secret payments facilitated by Obama administration.

Obama also used the national security apparatus to spy on Americans opposed to Islamic terrorists.

Israel’s Iran documents have long showed that the nuclear deal was built on lies, and Iran even admitted its deception. Under Biden, Israel is on its own. There really is nothing left to discuss. No one did as much as the Trump administration did for the state of Israel.


“TV: Israel warns ‘nothing to discuss’ with Biden if returns to Iran deal as is,” Times of Israel, January 20, 2021:

Israeli television on Wednesday reported that Jerusalem is warning an American return to the former terms of the nuclear deal with Iran under President Joe Biden could lead the countries to a crisis in relations.

Channel 12 news cited “a very senior Israeli official” as saying: “If Biden adopts Obama’s plan, we will have nothing to talk about with him.” The official was referencing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action signed by former president Barack Obama in 2015.
The official did not elaborate further.

The comments came just a day after Biden’s nominee for secretary of state Antony Blinken pledged to senators at his confirmation hearing that he would engage with Israel and its Arab allies before reentering the JCPOA. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ambassador to the US Ron Dermer had called on Biden to do just that several weeks earlier.

Biden has made clear that a JCPOA return is his goal, but that he will only agree to do so if Iran returns to compliance with the deal first.

The president has also said he intends to enter subsequent negotiations to reach a “longer and stronger” deal with Tehran that would also address its ballistic missile program and regional hegemony. Iran, though, has said it is not interested in reaching any subsequent agreements and has also warned that it won’t return to compliance with the JCPOA until the US lifts sanctions against Tehran.

The premier is believed to support a more confrontational approach to dealing with Biden’s plans to reenter the JCPOA, while others in the security establishment have argued that it would be better to try and keep disputes with the new American administration behind closed doors and try to influence Biden to be as tough as possible on Iran, even if he returns to the deal.

Now that Biden is president, Netanyahu is slated to convene a series of discussions on Iran with various bodies including the National Security Council, Defense Ministry, Foreign Ministry, Israel Defence Forces and Mossad, Hebrew media reported.

According to Channel 12, the key theme of those discussions will be Israel not allowing Iran to get nuclear weapons. Biden has said he has the same goal.

Israeli-American relations reached a nadir toward the end of the Obama presidency, in large part due to Netanyahu’s clashes with his administration over the Iran deal.

Biden has argued that while he would like to address Iran’s ballistic missile program and regional hegemony, the most pressing issue is its nuclear program, and must be dealt with first. Blinken said Tuesday that an Iran with a nuclear weapon in addition to its other destabilizing tactics is more dangerous than an Iran without a nuclear weapon that is wreaking havoc on the region….

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Iran threatens to block UN nuclear site inspections while urging Biden to end sanctions

SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2021/01/iran-threatens-to-block-un-nuclear-site-inspections-while-urging-biden-to-end-sanctions

Biden’s LGBT agenda uses invented language to force denial of reality on America.

Recent Executive Order and upcoming “Equality Act” part of new wave of bizarre “rights.” Undefined radical terms being put into law!

ALT TEXT

At the 2018 annual banquet of the national homosexual organization Human Rights Campaign, Joe Biden promised them that he would be very aggressive in implementing their demands on America.

BY AMY CONTRADA

SEE: https://www.massresistance.org/docs/gen4/21a/Bidens-LGBT-agenda-using-invented-language/images.html;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

[Republished from American Thinker with some additions and changes.]

On the afternoon of January 20, Biden issued an Executive Order demanding “equal treatment under the law, no matter [one’s] gender identity or sexual orientation.” This is just the first salvo in the next wave pushing “LGBT rights.”  The order will soon be backed by federal law, via the pending LGBT “Equality Act.”

While many are now warning the order will destroy girls’ and women’s sports, the order’s impact is much broader.

The enforcers will be handed free rein to transform society in unimaginable ways, given the undefined terms in the order and pending law: gender identity, sexual orientation, LGBT.  Why has there been no pushback on embedding these sexual-radical concepts in our legal system?

Establishment conservatives have shied away from addressing this issue and denigrate anyone who dares to confront it.  They don’t want to be called “anti-gay” or “uncompassionate” towards the “gender confused.”  (In 2018, MassResistance was banned from CPAC for our outspoken opposition to the transgender movement. See more here and here.)

Yet now, conservative commentators complain about boys taking over girls’ sports and locker rooms.  Too little, too late.

Biden’s LGBT Executive Order

Biden’s Executive Order (EO) targets “discrimination” based on “gender identity and sexual orientation.”  Anywhere existing statutes or regulations prohibit “sex discrimination,” the EO instructs all federal agencies to review and revise regulations as necessary to include “gender identity and sexual orientation.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch’s absurd ruling in Bostock , which radically re-defined Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” as official Civil Rights protections, is cited as one basis for this EO.  The woke EO even references the radicals’ idea about “overlapping areas of discrimination,” called “intersectionality,” that deserve special notice.

As we often see from the Left, the EO’s introductory paragraph is emotionally manipulative, mentioning respect, dignity, love, children, one’s true self, and people just wanting “a roof over their head”:

Every person should be treated with respect and dignity and should be able to live without fear, no matter who they are or whom they love.  Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports.  Adults should be able to earn a living and pursue a vocation knowing that they will not be fired, demoted, or mistreated because of whom they go home to or because how they dress does not conform to sex-based stereotypes. 

But nowhere does the EO define the new terms at issue.

LGBT “Equality Act”

As of this writing, the so-called Equality Act has not yet been filed in the new 117th Congress.  But you can see last session’s Equality Act bill here.

ALT TEXT 
Even during the campaign, the LGBT movement was bragging about "Joe's plan" to integrate their agenda into the federal government and US law. It starts with the re-definition of the word "equality." Note that LGBT doesn't go far enough; Biden now says LGBTQ+.

The Equality Act’s stated goal is “to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation, and for other purposes.”  (What are the “other purposes”?)  The bill employs the phrase “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (referred to as ‘LGBTQ’).”  That’s as close to a definition it gets.

Anywhere discrimination on the basis of sex appears in the law, the new terms gender identity, and sexual orientation will be added.  That includes laws on public accommodations, employment, housing, credit, education, federally funded programs, jury service, and child welfare programs.

One foreboding clause states: 

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993… shall not provide a claim concerning, or a defense to a claim under, a covered title, or provide a basis for challenging the application or enforcement of a covered title.

So, destroying religious freedom on these issues is one of the “other purposes” of the Equality Act.

No Definitions

What exactly will be protected under the terms “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” in Biden’s EO and the Equality Act? No actual definitions are given.  So we must look elsewhere for hints.

“Gender Identity”

The whole idea of “gender” is recent – and irrational. It’s basically an evolving theoretical construct disseminated by sexual radical academics, political activists, and allies in the medical establishment.  But what we’ve seen play out so far under cover of “transgender rights” reveals it as pure lunacy.

Massachusetts law includes a silly circular definition of “gender identity.”  The relevant section states:

''Gender identity'' shall mean a person's gender-related identity, appearance or behavior, whether or not that gender-related identity, appearance or behavior is different from that traditionally associated with the person's physiology or assigned sex at birth.  Gender-related identity may be shown by providing evidence including, but not limited to, medical history, care or treatment of the gender-related identity, consistent and uniform assertion of the gender-related identity or any other evidence that the gender-related identity is sincerely held as part of a person's core identity...

In a ridiculous attempt to explain it, The Massachusetts Attorney General writesIn essence, gender identity is a person’s internal sense of their own gender.”  So “gender” is just what an individual thinks about himself, unconnected to the reality around him.  But we all must “respect” his delusion.  We are also presented with the absurd phrase, “sex assigned at birth,” which negates the scientific reality of the distinction between biological male and female.

The far-left Human Rights Campaign has an equally absurd definition:

Gender identity:  One’s innermost concept of self as male, female, a blend of both or neither – how individuals perceive themselves and what they call themselves.  One’s gender identity can be the same or different from their sex assigned at birth.

Already, we’ve seen this nonsense allow for glaring abuses in language, schoolssports, public accommodations, healthcare, insurance, and businesses. It has led to children being confused and indoctrinated; some are having their bodies destroyed and sterilized by puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical mutilations.

Lacking any rational legal definition, who can imagine what further demands will be justified under the “gender identity” umbrella? 

ALT TEXT 
Biden is very serious about his intentions push the LGBT denial of reality. As one of his first acts he nominated Dr. "Rachel" (formerly known as Richard) Levine - a man who pretends to be a woman - as Assistant Health Secretary.

“Sexual Orientation”

What exactly is “sexual orientation”?  Massachusetts law includes a disturbing hint of what could come our way, among other things, if Biden’s EO and the Equality Act law are enforced: legalized pedophilia.

Where Massachusetts law mentions “sexual orientation” (as protected from discrimination), the term is immediately followed by the phrase, “which shall not include persons whose sexual orientation involves minor children as the sex object.”  Clearly, pedophilia can be considered a sexual orientation.

But the EO and Equality Act do not limit “sexual orientation” in this way.  Nor do they exclude other reprehensible and dangerous practices which could be considered sexual orientations such as BDSMpolygamyprostitutionbestialitypornography addiction.

The radical homosexual advocacy group Human Rights Campaign defines sexual orientation as, “An inherent or immutable enduring emotional, romantic or sexual attraction to other people” – also without any limitation on who those “other people” might be.  That syrupy reference to emotion and romance helps cover over the dangerous promiscuity common to many in the “LGBT community.”  And HRC repeats the false claim that sexual orientation is “inherent or immutable.”

“LGBTQ+”

The Equality Act uses the acronym LGBTQ [no +] without defining it. We’ve been told that LGBT stands for “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender.” The meaning of the long-standing words “lesbian” and “gay” are obvious – but what exactly are “bisexual,” “transgender,” and “queer” (Q)?

Here is how the Human Rights Campaign defines the Q for “queer”:  

Queer:  A term people often use to express a spectrum of identities and orientations that are counter to the mainstream.  Queer is often used as a catch-all to include many people, including those who do not identify as exclusively straight and/or folks who have non-binary or gender-expansive identities.

In a recent interview with Philadelphia Gay News (Oct. 2020), Biden went even further and added + (a plus sign) to the LGBTQ acronym. He promised the moon to the “LGBTQ+” community and said he would guarantee transgender housing. He said, “It’s about dignity, plain and simple.” But what does that + (plus sign) mean?

Orwellian “Newspeak”

The ruling elite wants free rein to keep expanding their reach without limit of legal definitions.  That’s what the + means!  

What we’re experiencing is the perversion of language for use as a political weapon. Orwell explained this in “The Principles of Newspeak”:

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the [ruling regime], but to make all other modes of thought impossible….

This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings…. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought…

New words and phrases invented by the Left:

sexual orientation - gay - gay marriage - bisexual – gender - gender identity - transgender - [pronouns] zie, zir, they, them - queer - LGBTQ+ - questioning - pansexual - nonbinary - genderqueer - sex assigned at birth - who they are - hate speech - hate crime - love is love - social justice

Undesirable words and phrases the Left is attempting to eliminate:

God - faith - Bible - truth - free speech - freedom of the press - Constitution -Founding Fathers - abortion - morality - perversion - modesty - sodomy - mother - father - son - daughter - parental rights

Words and phrases that are being stripped of unorthodox (unapproved) meanings:

sex – man – woman – boy – girl – marriage – family – human rights – justice – discrimination – hate – equality

It’s been going on for decades now.  But we must demand that our political leaders call out the illegitimacy of embedding undefined radical terms in our laws. And we must continue to make that clear, too!

As we pointed out above, we can't simply wait until a new transgender edict begins to destroy girls' and women's sports. The deeper roots of that agenda need to be confronted now. Are conservatives up for that? More to the point: Do we have a choice?

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Amy Contrada is with MassResistance. Early in the transgender rights onslaught (2008), she published a groundbreaking analysis of the Massachusetts transgender rights bill.

Biden Forms a Commission to Pack the Supreme Court

BY RICK MORAN

SEE: https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/01/28/after-claiming-hes-not-a-fan-biden-forms-a-commission-to-pack-the-supreme-court-n1415026;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Joe Biden has begun staffing a commission that would examine reforming the Supreme Court and the federal court system. The commission will supposedly be bipartisan, but we all know which side will be in the majority.

Biden floated the idea of a commission to study reforming the Supreme Court during the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett. At that time, the radical left was advocating to put more justices on the court to flip its ideological makeup to make it friendlier to the radical liberal social agenda.

Biden said at the time he was “not a fan” of court-packing. He said in 2019 that he opposed the idea. But now that he’s president and beholden to the radicals for his election victory, it’s time to pay up.

Politico:

The commission will be housed under the purview of the White House Counsel’s office and filled out with the behind-the-scenes help of the Biden campaign’s lawyer Bob Bauer, who will co-chair the commission. Its specific mandate is still being decided. But, in a signal that the commission is indeed moving ahead, some members have already been selected, according to multiple people familiar with the discussions.

Among those who will be on the commission are Cristina Rodríguez, a professor at Yale Law School and a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Obama Department of Justice, who will join Bauer as co-chair. Caroline Fredrickson, the former president of the American Constitution Society, and Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and a former assistant attorney general in the Bush Department of Justice, will also serve on the commission, those familiar with discussions said.

Fredrickson, a respected constitutional lawyer, had this to say about packing the court.

Fredrickson has hinted that she is intellectually supportive of ideas like court expansion. In 2019, she said in an interview with Eric Lesh, the executive director of the LGBT Bar Association and Foundation of Greater New York: “I often point out to people who aren’t lawyers that the Supreme Court is not defined as ‘nine person body’ in the Constitution, and it has changed size many times.”

This is very true and the federal judiciary certainly could do with some reforms. But the Supreme Court is the primary battleground in the culture war. We can pretend it’s “above politics” but everyone knows it isn’t. It’s besotted with politics and the political calculation of the left is simple: if they can’t get the American people to elect a radical president whose term coincides with Supreme Court openings, they’ll just manufacture a new court with more justices who will rule the way they want them to.

At bottom, this is about the left not getting their way and changing the rules to bend the court to their political will. What they can’t do at the ballot box, they will do in the courts.

I really wish Joe Biden had had the political courage to say he would pack the court with more liberals if he was elected. Then, the American people would have had a say in how the court was constructed. If the people thought more justices were needed they could have voted for Biden. If they didn’t, they could have voted for Trump.

As it is, Biden will try and effect change through the subterfuge of a commission set up to satisfy his radical left base.

Help us STOP Joe Biden’s radical agenda by becoming a PJ Media VIP member. Use promo code AMERICAFIRST to receive 25% off your VIP membership.
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SEE ALSO:
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State AGs Warn Biden: Follow the Constitution or We’ll Sue

BY BOB ADELMANN

SEE: https://thenewamerican.com/state-ags-warn-biden-follow-the-constitution-or-well-sue/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey minced no words in his letter of warning sent to the president on Wednesday: “If you sign unconstitutional laws passed by Congress, it will be our responsibility and duty to challenge those laws in court.”

Attorneys General from Arkansas, Indiana, Mississippi, Montana, and Texas signed the six-page letter. It said, “One week ago … you swore to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States … [but you] cannot cut constitutional corners or shirk statutory strictures without inevitably doing more harm to our country than good.”

It added:

Overreaching and defying Congress will not be rewarded or succeed. Our states have led the charge in successfully challenging unauthorized and unlawful executive actions, as you know from your years as Vice President.

You can be assured that we will do so again, if necessary.

This is only the latest example of the mounting pushback against Biden’s policies. His decision to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement generated a bill from Colorado Republican freshman Lauren Boebert to prevent its funding.

She also filed bills to halt funding for the World Health Organization “until we hold them accountable for their role in COVID”; and another bill to overturn the president’s mask mandate.

Those three bills, filed on Tuesday, immediately generated almost a dozen GOP co-sponsors. Representative Boebert stated:

My bill prohibits Congress from spending a single penny on the Paris Agreement until this treaty is ratified by the United States Senate.

Joe Biden took an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution. If he wants to keep it, he must transmit the job-killing Paris Agreement to the U.S Senate for ratification.

As for COVID, she tweeted:

Had the WHO not taken China at [its] word, COVID-19 would never have spiraled so deeply out of control.

The WHO is beholden to China and American taxpayers should not be sending them nearly a half a billion dollars each year.

Others are pushing back against the president’s executive orders, including the Western Energy Alliance, a group representing fossil-fuel producers operating on federal lands. It just challenged the president’s ban on oil and gas leasing: “The law is clear. Presidents don’t have the authority to ban leasing on public lands. All Americans own the oil and natural gas beneath public lands, and Congress has directed them to be responsibly developed on their behalf.… President Biden cannot simply ignore laws in effect for over half a century.”

And some of that pushback is meeting with initial success. A federal judge temporarily blocked Biden’s EO halting the deportation of certain immigrants for 100 days.

Many Christians are supporting this pushback as well. For example, on Lou Dobbs Tonight Friday, January 15, Pastor Robert Jeffress said:

The Bible says we need to pray for all our leaders. But we also need to be ready to push back against the ungodly policies that are sure to come [from the Biden administration].

These are days for God’s people to stand up and to be courageous like never before.

That would include the peoples’ representatives such as Morrisey and Boebert.

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SEE ALSO: https://www.massresistance.org/docs/gen4/21a/Bidens-LGBT-agenda-using-invented-language/images.html

 

Populist Stock Market Revolt WIPES OUT $12B From Globalist Elites as Nations REBEL Against Big Tech!

★★★ THE POPULIST REVOLT HAS JUST BEGUN ★★★

Populist Stock Market Revolt WIPES OUT $12 BILLION From Globalist Elites as Nations REBEL Against Big Tech! Wow! In this video, we’re going to take a look at what many are calling the GameStop Uprising that effectively pushed back against predatory billionaires, how nationalist-populist governments around the world are actively pushing back against Big Tech oligarchs, and how all of this points to nothing less than the fact that the worldwide populist revolt is just beginning; you are NOT going to want to miss this!

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