Pennsylvania Voters Reach ‘Peak of Mistrust’ After Voting Machines Glitch for Second Time

Pennsylvania voters are doubting the integrity of local elections in the swing county of Northampton after issues with touchscreen voting devices arose on the most recent Election Day. The glitches were similar to those seen in the county’s 2019 judges race.

Election officials are scrambling to ensure trust in the voting system as voters and local leaders alike are sounding the alarm, a Saturday Politico report revealed.

Northampton used Election Systems & Software touchscreen machines for the first time in 2019 and saw a “programming glitch” that caused a significant “undercount” of votes in the local judge’s race, the publication reported. Then, on November 7, 2023, suspicion grew when voters discovered that their printouts meant to confirm their votes on the devices did not match their choices for two down-ballot judges races.

Electoral workers began processing ballots at Northampton County Courthouse on November 3, 2020, in Easton, Pennsylvania

“In 2019, when the issues came up with the touchscreens, we were told, ‘Don’t worry about it. The cards are recording the votes,’” Northampton County Republican Committee chair Glenn Geissinger told the outlet, referring to the previous glitch incident when voters were told to trust the printouts over the touchscreens.

“OK, you’re telling me now, in 2023, ‘Don’t worry about what’s printed on the card’?”

Social media users are sharing similar sentiments, with one Pennsylvania voter posting to X, “Every. Single. Northampton County voter should sue the county for this travesty. This is disgusting, and these machines cannot be used for another election”:

According to one county executive, voters are at their “peak of mistrust” with the voting system.

“We’re at the peak of mistrust of one another, but until that subsides, counties like ours need to be nearly perfect, and I think this system allows us to do that,” Lamont McClure told the outlet before the vote was certified on Tuesday, arguing that the glitch resulted from human error.

Politico noted that “ES&S and Northampton officials acknowledged that pre-election software testing, which is conducted jointly, should have caught that problem.”

“We deeply regret what has occurred today,” Linda Bennett, senior vice president of account management at ES&S, said at an Election Day press conference.

However, she claimed, “We are sure and positive that the voter selections are actually being captured” because the error supposedly only affected the paper cards.

According to McClure, he asked ES&S to fire the employee responsible for the error earlier in November to avoid a similar glitch in the 2024 election.

“It wasn’t a machine error,” he emphasized to the outlet.

Even local Democrat leaders are expressing mistrust in the machines, with Northampton County Democratic Party chair Matthew Munsey telling the publication, “Since 2019, the theory has been well, that was a big mistake, but we caught it and we’ve implemented new processes to make sure nothing like that would ever happen again.” He added, “I don’t know how we can restore trust with these machines.”

Six state voting rights groups made a statement in November calling for Northampton officials “to explain the voting machine programming error” and demanding a “full investigation and a report to provide...

It’s Suspicious That The FBI And DOJ Didn’t Check Into Christopher Steele’s Leaks To The Press

Would you do everything you could to determine whether you could trust a source who lied to you before relying on him to treat a U.S. citizen guilty of treason?

Here’s a hypothetical question for journalists: Let’s say you managed to convince the translator in the room during the President Trump-Vladimir Putin meeting to speak to you, and you only, on the condition of anonymity, and you’re in the midst of writing an explosive, exclusive story for your publication. As you’re writing, you look up to see BREAKING NEWS on CNN, and listen as Wolf Blitzer reports the story you’re writing, with the exact fly-on-the-wall detail you received from your “exclusive” source.

So what’s your first move? Would you assume CNN must’ve convinced the Russian translator to talk to them and move on with your story without taking any action, or would you call your source to figure out where that CNN information came from? If your source denied talking to CNN, would you believe him and move on, or would you do whatever you could to determine whether you can trust this source on such an important matter? You’d want to know the answer to that question before proceeding, would you not?

A hypothetical question for editors: Let’s say you’re editing an article on a Pentagon policy change and notice a number of paragraphs that you think you may have read before in another publication. You Google the lines and find that your reporter appears to have lifted entire paragraphs of copy from another article.

So what’s your first move? Would you reflect on your reporter’s stellar reputation, assume it had to be a strange coincidence, and simply append an editor’s note saying: “We are aware that passages in this article may appear familiar to the reader, but we’re confident that our reporter would never plagiarize another writer’s work”? Or would you contact your reporter immediately to determine whether those passages were lifted?

If your reporter denied plagiarizing the paragraphs, would you believe him and move on, or would you do whatever you could to determine whether you could trust your reporter before taking any further action? You’d want to know the answer to...

Massive number of Americans say news media ARE the enemy 'More and more people are growing impatient and distrustful of the stories'

David Muir of ABC's 'World News Tonight' tapes a TV interview with Joe Biden on Wednesday, Dec. 22, 2021, in the Cross Hall of the White House. (Official White House photo by Adam Schultz)

President Trump often has called the legacy media in America the enemy of the people.

He repeatedly was in conflict with reporters over their biased questions, implications of wrongdoing and more – all because of their questions that often took on the attitude like the infamous no-win query: "When did you stop beating your children?"

Now a poll shows he was right.

Rasmussen Reports reveals 59% of respondents to a new poll confirm they consider those publications, broadcasters and more their "enemy."

"A majority of voters don’t trust the news they’re getting about politics, and still agree with former President Donald Trump’s denunciation of the news media as 'the enemy of the people'" Rasmussen said.

Its survey found "30% of Likely U.S. voters say they trust the political news they’re getting – down from 37% in July 2021 – while 52% say they don’t trust political news, and 19% are not sure."

The survey of 1,002 U.S. Likely Voters was conducted on May 16-18, 2023 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points.

A column from Paul Bedard of the Washington Examiner explained, "Maybe it’s the softball questions lofted to top administration officials. It could have been the applause and laughter from reporters that greeted President Joe Biden at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner when he bragged about ignoring them.

"Whatever it is, more and more people are growing impatient and distrustful of the stories coming out of Washington."

He explained, "One reason may be the left-wing bias they see in those stories. An equal 52% said that the media favors Democrats by more than 2-1. … The survey is similar to some that continue to ask if, as former President Donald Trump once said, the media is the enemy of the people."

The pollster said it's actually a majority of every racial category – "58% of whites, 51% of black voters and 68% of...

Fake Blues: The Media’s Worst Enemy Isn’t the President, It’s Themselves

On Thursday, over 300 media outlets joined in a coordinated effort to push back against President Donald Trump. That will hardly come as a shock to many Americans, as it seems mainstream news organizations have done little else throughout his tenure in the White House. Indeed, the stunt was perhaps the most vivid and explicit demonstration to date of the mass groupthink, negative Trump obsession, and narrative of victimhood that characterize the modern media landscape.

The Boston Globe led the campaign, characterizing it as a response to the White House’s “dirty war against the free press.” A senior editor proclaimed: “We are not the enemy of the people.”

On the latter statement, we can at least agree in principle. The Bill of Rights is explicit that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people … to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” These rights have been broadly interpreted to prohibit government officials and entities of all types from engaging in censorship or suppression of free expression.

Americans should be grateful for those freedoms and protections.

However, the mainstream media has become its own worst enemy by abusing its considerable freedom and squandering whatever goodwill and trust it had with America at large.

In a recent poll of nearly 4,000 Americans, 72% expressed the belief that "traditional major news sources report news they know to be fake, false, or purposely misleading,” with nearly two-thirds attributing the reporting of fake news to the promotion of an agenda. Democrats polled tended to be significantly more trusting of media, while Republicans or Republican-leaning Independents were significantly less so.

That’s not President Trump’s fault. Americans’ trust in media had been falling long before he took office.

And despite the media’s mass pity party for themselves on Thursday, it’s hard to imagine any administration in history that has been subjected to greater press scrutiny – to say nothing of disrespect and vitriol – than the Trump administration. Any suggestion that Trump’s efforts have somehow cowed or suppressed critical coverage of him would be the ultimate example of “fake news.”

What the media is reacting to is not a “dirty war” against them, but a new landscape in which a few well-established, for-profit corporations who claim the high ground of the First Amendment can no longer co-opt or set the terms of the national debate without expecting their own pushback or scrutiny. Americans have awakened to the fact that the self-proclaimed “guardians of truth” must be viewed with a critical eye, and media watchdogs have more tools than ever before to hold irresponsible journalists accountable and to correct the record.

And, yes, we also have an American president who will use tools of modern communication to bring his messages directly to the people and to aggressively counter the tsunami of negative coverage he faces virtually every minute of every day. For many Americans used to watching their chosen representatives be treated like mute punching bags by a sneering, condescending press loyal to the opposition party, it can be bracing to see one finally standing up for himself.

Gun owners in particular have reason to reject the media’s victimhood narrative. We have seen far too many examples of false and misleading media reporting on firearm and Second Amendment related issues to attribute the phenomenon to mere ignorance or laziness. What follows are just a few of the more egregious examples.

Ironically, the most obvious indictment of the media was their inability to report accurately or insightfully on the biggest political story of the 21st Century to date: the success of Donald J. Trump’s insurgent candidacy for the presidency of the United States. It would be an understatement to say they misjudged the depth of discontent arising from the Obama years, the horror with which many regarded Hillary Clinton, or the desire millions of Americans had for a leader who would unabashedly affirm America’s greatness.

Had gun owners taken reporting on the 2016 election at face value, they might have accepted defeat without even showing up at the polls. Then instead of a pro-gun president, they would have had one who believed the same Supreme Court that declared the right to keep and bear arms a fundamental individual liberty was “wrong on the Second Amendment.” Pro-gun Americans’ ability to trust their own instincts and persevere in the face of what the media suggested were hopeless odds literally changed the course of the nation’s history.

Another monumental falsehood perpetrated by the media is that the Second Amendment has nothing to do with the individual right to possess a firearm for self-defense. They did this before the U.S. Supreme Court squarely and conclusively ruled otherwise in 2008 (thereby confirming the prevailing view of the American public), and they’ve continued to do so since then. And to whatever extent they are willing to admit the high court’s precedent makes their own views largely academic, they respond by calling for the outright repeal of the Second Amendment or, more dishonestly, by suggesting that all the gun control they want is completely compatible with it.

But however the media attempt to couch their arguments, they remain nearly unanimous: Congress can and should ban guns, whether that means merely the most popular ones or all of them. Simply put, American gun owners who believe in a robust and meaningful Second Amendment know the mainstream media is and long has been working in the opposite direction. This is a remarkably hypocritical posture for an industry that likes to claim the First Amendment as its mandate and shield.

The third way the media has shown its bias against gun owners is by characterizing them as bad or uncaring people and attacking the NRA in the public square. They have suggested that Americans love their guns more than their own children. They have cast support for gun control (the efficacy of which remains mostly unproven) as a moral imperative. They have called the NRA – and by extension, its millions of law-abiding members – “a terrorist organization” and have accused them of having “blood on their hands” and being responsible for the deaths of innocents. They have advocated for shunning gun owners and the lawful industries that support the Second Amendment, not just in polite society, but through the means of modern commerce. At least one article in the Washington Post even suggested that merely owning a gun makes a person “responsible” for firearm-related violence committed by others.

On top of this are nearly daily examples of reporters’ laughable ignorance, fear-mongering, shady factual claims, and transparently biased “fact-checking” regarding firearms and firearm-related violence in the U.S.

The overall picture is of a media apparatus lacking in judgement, professionalism, trustworthiness, and familiarity with the lives and values of millions of ordinary Americans.

To be sure, there are exceptions, and some reporters work diligently and ethically to report accurate information, even when it goes against the conventional wisdom of their colleagues.

But journalists fretting over their public image have more to fear in the practices of their peers than in any characterizations of their profession coming from the White House. If they want to counter the narrative that they are blindly and single-mindedly focused on hounding a president from office at any cost, openly colluding to...

Former Lt. Col. in Stasi, Wolfgang Schmidt, advises: “The only way to protect the people’s privacy is not to allow the government to collect their information in the first place.”

Wolfgang Schmidt was seated in Berlin’s 1,200-foot-high TV tower, one of the few remaining landmarks left from the former East Germany. Peering out over the city that lived in fear when the communist party ruled it, he pondered the magnitude of domestic spying in the United States under the Obama administration. A smile spread across his face.

“You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true,” he said, recalling the days when he was a lieutenant colonel in the defunct communist country’s secret police, the Stasi.

In those days, his department was limited to tapping 40 phones at a time, he recalled. Decide to spy on a new victim and an old one had to be dropped, because of a lack of equipment. He finds breathtaking the idea that the U.S. government receives daily reports on the cellphone usage of millions of Americans and can monitor the Internet traffic of millions more.

“So much information, on so many people,” he said.

East Germany’s Stasi has long been considered the standard of police state surveillance during the Cold War years, a monitoring regime so vile and so intrusive that agents even noted when their subjects were overheard engaging in sexual intercourse. Against that backdrop, Germans have greeted with disappointment, verging on anger, the news that somewhere in a U.S. government databank are the records of where millions of people were when they made phone calls or what video content they streamed on their computers in the privacy of their homes.

Even Schmidt, 73, who headed one of the more infamous departments in the infamous Stasi, called himself appalled. The dark side to gathering such a broad, seemingly untargeted, amount of information is obvious, he said.

A still-standing portion of the former Berlin Wall
and a guard tower. (Credit: Getty Images)

“It is the height of naivete to think that once collected this information won’t be used,” he said. “This is the nature of secret government organizations. The only way to protect the people’s privacy is not to allow the government to collect their information in the first place.”

U.S. officials have defended the government collection of information since word of it broke in newspaper stories based on documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The records are used only to track down terrorists overseas, officials say. The collection has been carefully vetted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a body of U.S. judges whose actions are largely kept secret. There is no misuse.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, tried to provide an out for President Barack Obama, offering as a possible explanation for the sweeping nature of the U.S. collection efforts that “the Internet is new to all of us.” She was roundly mocked for that statement, and her administration appeared far less forgiving more recently, when similar spying charges were leveled against the British government.

Germans are dismayed at Obama’s role in allowing the collection of so much information. Before his presidency, hundreds of thousands of Germans turned out to hear him speak in Berlin. During a visit last week, the setup was engineered to avoid criticism: Obama spoke to a small, handpicked audience, many from the German-American school. Access to the Brandenburg Gate, the backdrop for his speech, was severely limited, as was access to Berlin’s entire downtown.

As many Germans as heard Obama speak turned out at quickly arranged protests, including one by self-proclaimed tech nerds near the historic Checkpoint Charlie, where U.S. soldiers welcomed visitors from the communist sector of Berlin for four decades with a sign, “You are entering the American sector.” One demonstrator added this coda: “Your privacy ends here.”

The center-left newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung took Obama to task over the surveillance issue. “Governments do not have the right to conceal broad lines of policy,” the newspaper wrote. “President Obama is operating according to an odd maxim: ‘I am doing a lot of the same things that George W. Bush did, but you can trust me because I am the one doing it.’ Not even Obama is deserving of that much trust.”

“Everyone knows that gathering so much information is bullshit,” said Reinhard Weisshuhn, a political activist and foreign policy adviser. “It’s a total breach of trust by the government. This is how a society destroys itself.”

For 15 years, the Stasi tracked Weisshuhn’s every move and conversation. His Stasi file, which he, like many other Stasi targets, reviewed after the Berlin Wall collapsed, ran to 9,000 pages. He was shocked, and he’s quick to stress that the United States shouldn’t be compared to the totalitarian East German state.

“But that doesn’t mean the president gets a free pass,” he said. “The United States is an open society. This is a problem that must be honestly addressed and fixed.”

Weisshuhn shares a common German perception on the scandal: Snowden, who’s been charged under the Espionage Act for leaking news of the domestic spying, isn’t the bad guy.

“In our case, we thought we were being paranoid until we saw what they’d gathered and realized we’d been naive,” Weisshuhn said. “Here, it’s not the whistle-blower who is wrong, it’s the gathering of information.”

Germans, especially those raised in the east, are unconvinced by arguments that the sweeping collection of information is used only to track terrorists. The assertions by U.S. officials that unspecified attacks have been thwarted don’t persuade them, either. They haven’t forgotten the fear of living under a government that used vague threats to justify blanket spying. In East Germany, the threats came under the banner of disloyalty to socialist ideals. In the United States, the monitoring programs come under the banner of anti-terrorism.

Dagmar Hovestaedt is the spokeswoman for the German Stasi Records Agency, which showed 88,000 people last year what the Stasi had gathered on them. She said the U.S. should consider doing the same.

“This is a study on how to deal with the information the NSA is now gathering,” she said of her archive. “To say that the NSA is the equivalent of the Stasi is too simplistic, but the people who are spied on do have a right to know what was learned about their lives, what they had hoped to keep private that was not. Transparency is essential.”

Still, she noted that Stasi victims have a large advantage in finding out what was studied.

“It’s easy to make information available when it was gathered by a state that no longer exists,” she said.

Stefan Wolle is the curator for Berlin’s East German Museum, which focuses in part on the actions of and reactions to the Stasi. What becomes clear when studying the information the organization gathered is the banality of evil: Simple pieces of everyday life are given much greater importance than they deserve when a secret organization makes the effort to gather the information.

“When the wall fell, I wanted to see what the Stasi had on me, on the world I knew,” he said. “A large part of what I found was nothing more than office gossip, the sort of thing people used to say around the water cooler about affairs and gripes, the sort of things that people today put in emails or texts to each other.

“The lesson,” he added, “is that when a wide net is cast, almost all of what is caught is worthless. This was the case with the Stasi. This will certainly be the case with the NSA.”

heh.  from a left wing website:

http://www.popularresistance.org/ex-stasi-officer-envious-of-nsa-spy-powers/

The conclusion is completely wrong here.  With data mining and big data, they can zero in on individuals whose viewpoints they do not approve of, their electronic footprint including every purchase, their location at any time of the day, every email, text message, blog post are now available and can be assembled automatically for targeting.

Former Lt. Col. in Stasi, Wolfgang Schmidt, advises: “The only way to protect the people’s privacy is not to allow the government to collect their information in the first place.”

Wolfgang Schmidt was seated in Berlin’s 1,200-foot-high TV tower, one of the few remaining landmarks left from the former East Germany. Peering out over the city that lived in fear when the communist party ruled it, he pondered the magnitude of domestic spying in the United States under the Obama administration. A smile spread across his face.

“You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true,” he said, recalling the days when he was a lieutenant colonel in the defunct communist country’s secret police, the Stasi.

In those days, his department was limited to tapping 40 phones at a time, he recalled. Decide to spy on a new victim and an old one had to be dropped, because of a lack of equipment. He finds breathtaking the idea that the U.S. government receives daily reports on the cellphone usage of millions of Americans and can monitor the Internet traffic of millions more.

“So much information, on so many people,” he said.

East Germany’s Stasi has long been considered the standard of police state surveillance during the Cold War years, a monitoring regime so vile and so intrusive that agents even noted when their subjects were overheard engaging in sexual intercourse. Against that backdrop, Germans have greeted with disappointment, verging on anger, the news that somewhere in a U.S. government databank are the records of where millions of people were when they made phone calls or what video content they streamed on their computers in the privacy of their homes.

Even Schmidt, 73, who headed one of the more infamous departments in the infamous Stasi, called himself appalled. The dark side to gathering such a broad, seemingly untargeted, amount of information is obvious, he said.

A still-standing portion of the former Berlin Wall
and a guard tower. 

“It is the height of naivete to think that once collected this information won’t be used,” he said. “This is the nature of secret government organizations. The only way to protect the people’s privacy is not to allow the government to collect their information in the first place.”

U.S. officials have defended the government collection of information since word of it broke in newspaper stories based on documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The records are used only to track down terrorists overseas, officials say. The collection has been carefully vetted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a body of U.S. judges whose actions are largely kept secret. There is no misuse.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, tried to provide an out for President Barack Obama, offering as a possible explanation for the sweeping nature of the U.S. collection efforts that “the Internet is new to all of us.” She was roundly mocked for that statement, and her administration appeared far less forgiving more recently, when similar spying charges were leveled against the British government.

Germans are dismayed at Obama’s role in allowing the collection of so much information. Before his presidency, hundreds of thousands of Germans turned out to hear him speak in Berlin. During a visit last week, the setup was engineered to avoid criticism: Obama spoke to a small, handpicked audience, many from the German-American school. Access to the Brandenburg Gate, the backdrop for his speech, was severely limited, as was access to Berlin’s entire downtown.

As many Germans as heard Obama speak turned out at quickly arranged protests, including one by self-proclaimed tech nerds near the historic Checkpoint Charlie, where U.S. soldiers welcomed visitors from the communist sector of Berlin for four decades with a sign, “You are entering the American sector.” One demonstrator added this coda: “Your privacy ends here.”

The center-left newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung took Obama to task over the surveillance issue. “Governments do not have the right to conceal broad lines of policy,” the newspaper wrote. “President Obama is operating according to an odd maxim: ‘I am doing a lot of the same things that George W. Bush did, but you can trust me because I am the one doing it.’ Not even Obama is deserving of that much trust.”

“Everyone knows that gathering so much information is bullshit,” said Reinhard Weisshuhn, a political activist and foreign policy adviser. “It’s a total breach of trust by the government. This is how a society destroys itself.”

For 15 years, the Stasi tracked Weisshuhn’s every move and conversation. His Stasi file, which he, like many other Stasi targets, reviewed after the Berlin Wall collapsed, ran to 9,000 pages. He was shocked, and he’s quick to stress that the United States shouldn’t be compared to the totalitarian East German state.

“But that doesn’t mean the president gets a free pass,” he said. “The United States is an open society. This is a problem that must be honestly addressed and fixed.”

Weisshuhn shares a common German perception on the scandal: Snowden, who’s been charged under the Espionage Act for leaking news of the domestic spying, isn’t the bad guy.

“In our case, we thought we were being paranoid until we saw what they’d gathered and realized we’d been naive,” Weisshuhn said. “Here, it’s not the whistle-blower who is wrong, it’s the gathering of information.”

Germans, especially those raised in the east, are unconvinced by arguments that the sweeping collection of information is used only to track terrorists. The assertions by U.S. officials that unspecified attacks have been thwarted don’t persuade them, either. They haven’t forgotten the fear of living under a government that used vague threats to justify blanket spying. In East Germany, the threats came under the banner of disloyalty to socialist ideals. In the United States, the monitoring programs come under the banner of anti-terrorism.

Dagmar Hovestaedt is the spokeswoman for the German Stasi Records Agency, which showed 88,000 people last year what the Stasi had gathered on them. She said the U.S. should consider doing the same.

“This is a study on how to deal with the information the NSA is now gathering,” she said of her archive. “To say that the NSA is the equivalent of the Stasi is too simplistic, but the people who are spied on do have a right to know what was learned about their lives, what they had hoped to keep private that was not. Transparency is essential.”

Still, she noted that Stasi victims have a large advantage in finding out what was studied.

“It’s easy to make information available when it was gathered by a state that no longer exists,” she said.

Stefan Wolle is the curator for Berlin’s East German Museum, which focuses in part on the actions of and reactions to the Stasi. What becomes clear when studying the information the organization gathered is the banality of evil: Simple pieces of everyday life are given much greater importance than they deserve when a secret organization makes the effort to gather the information.

“When the wall fell, I wanted to see what the Stasi had on me, on the world I knew,” he said. “A large part of what I found was nothing more than office gossip, the sort of thing people used to say around the water cooler about affairs and gripes, the sort of things that people today put in emails or texts to each other.

“The lesson,” he added, “is that when a wide net is cast, almost all of what is caught is worthless. This was the case with the Stasi. This will certainly be the case with the NSA.”...

Wyoming GOP censures traitor Liz Cheney, says vote to impeach Trump ‘violated trust of her voters’

A majority of the Wyoming Republican Party’s central committee voted in favor of censuring Rep. Liz Cheney during a hearing Saturday that the lawmaker decided to skip, because apparently she answers to nobody but herself.

During the hearing, 66 of the committee’s 74 members voted to censure Cheney for dishonoring former President Donald Trump by voting to impeach him last month.

“We need to honor President Trump. All President Trump did was call for a peaceful assembly and protest for a fair and audited election. The Republican Party needs to put her on notice,” committee member Darin Smith said during the hearing, as reported by the Associated Press.

“Does the voice of the people matter and if it does, does it only matter at the ballot box?” fellow committee member Joey Correnti reportedly added.

The Wyoming GOP resolution said Cheney “violated the trust of her voters, failed to faithfully represent a very large majority of motivated Wyoming voters, and neglected her duty to represent the party.”

The committee also called on her to “immediately” resign, vowed to “withhold any future political funding” and demanded she refund any donations she received from state/local GOP offices during the 2020 election, according to CNN’s Daniella Diaz.

The censure resolution has reportedly been endorsed by every Wyoming county GOP office that’s “heard” it.

“No county in the state has heard this resolution and ultimately voted it down. Seventy percent of the counties in this state took it up, and every single one passed it. That is the voice of the people,” Carbon County Republican Party Chairman Joey Correnti IV reportedly said after the vote, according to the Casper Star-Tribune.

By being censured, Cheney has officially joined the ranks of the likes of Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, South Carolina Rep. Tom, Michigan Rep. Fred Upton, and Washington Reps. Jaime Herrera Beutler and Rep. Dan Newhouse.

All five congressional Republicans have also been censured in their respective states for having voted to impeach...

Nickelodeon Promotes Transgender Programming to Kids

The halcyon days of the past seem much calmer, peaceful and within reach compared to the never-ending and unpleasant culture changes of today. My generation of Americans was raised in the church and taught to live and act according to the moral and ethical prescriptions written in the Holy Bible. It was a life guide for business, relationships and how one should carry themselves. Looking back at the greatest generation and the one that came afterward, it is evident those time-tested values duly prepared these Americans for true greatness — so well that even the Father above would look down and smile, which is far from what can be said about today’s generation.

Today’s young people are misguided by false promises of perfection and utopic idealism. These unattainable ideals lead to accepting all things and maintaining standards of nothing, both big and small. Just 36% of millennials claim they belong to a church, according to Gallup. From a cursory level, this may seem as if today’s generations just aren’t concerned with their labels. However, they are indications of the trappings of a society headed toward moral decline.

I recently viewed an Instagram post by Robby Starbuck of a Nickelodeon video of a transgender person promoting the transgender lifestyle. I found this video disturbing, not because I don’t recognize the different types of people in the world, but because children shouldn’t be thinking about sexuality this way. Kids should enjoy their childhood without the corruption of public figures seeking to push a specific gender. The network’s programming is aimed at children as young as 2 years old, yet they’re promoting values that many parents may find unacceptable or may not be prepared to teach their kids. In essence, Nickelodeon has removed parents’ ability to trust their network to air child-friendly and safe content.

I’m reminded of the Bob Dylan song “The Times They Are-A Changin’,” and they most certainly are — and in unexpected ways. A new culture is birthed with each new generation, but not all that is new should be embraced. It is crucial to have a set of standards about the norms and customs of behaviors that we embrace as a society. None of this is to say that we should permit discrimination in any way. Still, it is to say that this confusing messaging could lead to gender identity crisis or, worse, a child making a terrible mistake about their gender or body parts they will later regret.

Parents must take a stand and make it clear they don’t support what Nickelodeon is doing. They should boycott Nickelodeon by deleting their apps and blocking the channel on their televisions. There is just no place for this with young kids who will have to navigate a complex world with decreasing moral and ethical teachings. Parents should be the ones to discuss this with their children when they see fit, not a network created to provide entertaining and educational content for our children.

Children should be off-limits, and networks like Nickelodeon must be held accountable if people of moral standing have any leg to stand on. Children are vulnerable, easily influenced and unaware of what adults know, which is all the more dangerous and concerning. There is a time and place for everything. This outrageous agenda demands that we all boycott Nickelodeon.

Parents need to be aware of what their children are watching and reading at all times. Parents could trust television content when I was younger, but those days are long gone; we are ceding the ability to raise kids who can be just kids. We have to stand up against this indoctrination and make it clear that we have to...

Conspiracy?

Haitian President Jovenel Moïse assassinated in his home

Tanzania's President John Magufuli who urged citizens 'to pray coronavirus away' has died

 

Please speak softly, for they will hear us

And they'll find out why we don't trust them

Speak up dear, 'cause I cannot hear you

I need to know why we don't trust them

IRS scandal is a violation of Americans’ trust

U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn

It is with a heavy heart and disappointment that I write this. In May 2013, we confirmed the IRS was targeting conservative nonprofit groups. We were originally told this was the work of two rogue employees in Cincinnati. However, as Congress and others have worked to peel back the layers, we learned this activity originated in Washington, D.C., and involved coordination between multiple agencies.

In addition, a senior Internal Revenue Service official has twice stood before Congress and invoked the Fifth Amendment. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen has stated that House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa’s investigation would produce “a lot of irrelevant, vast volumes of material.” Last week, Koskinen testified that the IRS lost volumes of Lois Lerner’s emails and that the hard drive to her computer had been “destroyed.” Given these facts, I believe a special counsel should be appointed.

The power for appointing a special counsel rests with the U.S. attorney general. First, a “criminal investigation” must be “warranted.” Second, the prosecution would raise a “conflict of interest” for the Department of Justice. Third, the “public interest” is best served by the appointment of a special counsel.

While Lerner has every right to plead the Fifth, Congress is not a court of law and we have every right to speculate about her reasons for doing so. Silence can be deafening.

Recently, it was revealed that Lerner sent an email titled “DOJ Call” on May 8, 2013, to Nikole Flax, chief of staff to acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller at the time. Lerner advised that she received a call that day from Richard Pilger, director of the election crimes branch at the Department of Justice. Pilger inquired how DOJ could work with the IRS to construct criminal cases against nonprofits they believed were engaged in political activity.

Lerner had already clarified that conservative nonprofits were being targeted when she wrote “Tea Party Matter very dangerous” in a Feb. 1, 2011, email. Pilger told her “DOJ is feeling like it needs to respond” to a “Senator Whitehouse idea” raised at a congressional hearing. Pilger’s actions are troubling. They suggest the existence of a coordinated effort between the IRS and Department of Justice to criminally prosecute conservative groups. This presents a serious conflict of interest. Attorney General Eric Holder should recuse himself out of an abundance of caution.

I believe the public interest would be well served by appointment of a special counsel. The pile of evidence suggesting that conservative organizations were unfairly targeted has left a cloud of corruption hovering over the IRS. People have always feared the IRS. It has access to sensitive financial information of millions of Americans and the authority to enforce its mandate through audits and the seizure of taxpayer money. Also, Koskinen’s comments suggest that he will not seriously comply with congressional subpoenas.

Exclusive from Gen. Flynn: If We Don't Act, 2% of the People Are About To Control the Other 98%

I was once told if we’re not careful, 2 percent of the passionate will control 98 percent of the indifferent 100 percent of the time.

The more I’ve thought about this phrase, the more I believe it. There is now a small group of passionate people working hard to destroy our American way of life. Treason and treachery are rampant and our rule of law and those law enforcement professionals who uphold our laws are under the gun more than at any time in our nation’s history. These passionate 2 percent appear to be winning.

Despite there being countless good people trying to come to grips with everything else on their plates, our silent majority (the indifferent) can no longer be silent.

If the United States wants to survive the onslaught of socialism, if we are to continue to enjoy self-government and the liberty of our hard-fought freedoms, we have to understand there are two opposing forces: One is the “children of light” and the other is the “children of darkness.”

As I recently wrote, the art and exercise of self-governance require active participation by every American. I wasn’t kidding! And voting is only part of that active participation. Time and again, the silent majority have been overwhelmed by the “audacity and resolve” of small, well-organized, passionate groups. It’s now time for us, the silent majority (the indifferent), to demonstrate both.

The trials of our current times, like warfare, are immense and consequences severe and these seem inconquerable.

As a policewoman from Virginia told me, “People don’t feel safe in their homes and our police force is so demoralized we cannot function as we should. In my 23 years with my department, I have never seen morale so low.”

Another woman from Mississippi told me that we need our leaders to “drop a forceful hammer. People are losing patience. It simply must be stopped! Laws MUST be enforced … no one is above the law.”

Don’t fret. Through smart, positive actions of resolute citizen-patriots, we can prevail. Always keep in mind that our enemy (these dark forces) invariably have difficulties of which we are ignorant.

For most Americans, these forces appear to be strong. I sense they are desperate. I also sense that only a slight push on our part is all that is required to defeat these forces. How should that push come?

Prayers help and prayers matter, but action is also a remedy. Our law enforcement professionals, from the dispatcher to the detective and from the cop to the commissioner, are a line of defense against the corrupt and the criminal. It is how we remain (for now) in a state of relatively peaceful existence.

We must support them with all our being. They are not the enemy; they bring light to the darkness of night through their bravery and determination to do their jobs without fanfare and with tremendous sacrifice.

The silent majority (the indifferent) tend to go the way of those leading them. We are not map- or mind-readers; we are humans fraught with all the hopes and fears that flesh is heir to. We must not become lost in this battle. We must resoundingly follow our God-given common sense.

Seek the truth, fight for it in everything that is displayed before you. Don’t trust the fake news or false prophets; trust your instincts and your common sense. Those with a conscience know the difference between...

How Obama is clearing the VP field for Susan Rice

The Ringleader Wants De Facto Third Term.

Joe Biden’s campaign recently delayed his self-imposed August 1 deadline to announce his running mate. Biden’s handlers were under pressure from Senator Kamala Harris and Representative Karen Bass to name them. The Biden brain trust delayed the announcement so surrogates could discredit Harris and Bass. That opens the door for Obama’s choice: Susan Rice.

Former President Barack Obama, indispensable to the campaign, knows Biden lacks the cognitive skills to govern, and his tenure will likely be brief. Like four years ago, Democrats have convinced themselves President Donald Trump cannot win. For Obama, Biden’s running mate will be our next president. Obama must control that person to continue his socialist transformation of America and protect himself from exposure for undermining candidate and President Trump.

Handicappers and bettors pick Harris as the front-runner. They are wrong, not because of Biden, but because of Obama. He needs Biden to select someone he can control and trust. That is Rice.

If Harris or Bass were selected, they would want to manage the campaign and then not pass Obama the keys to the Oval Office. Their agendas may align, but either would demand control while Rice would continue as a reliable subservient partner.
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For traditionalists, Rice’s drawbacks are that she has no base in the party, has never raised money, and has never held elective office. She is a policy wonk, not a politician. However, nothing about this election is traditional. Unable to defend Rice’s real credential—her loyalty to him—Obama has activated the Democrat attack machine. The establishment political left and the media are discrediting Rice’s opponents, without leaving his or Biden’s fingerprints on the murder weapon.

An example was how Obama and the Democrat establishment torpedoed self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders. Their media partners suddenly focused on his socialism, leading other Democrats to bemoan his unelectability.

As chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Bass cannot be so directly engaged. Instead of suffering attacks by Democrats, Bass appeared on Meet the Press and was promptly fed to the media sharks.

Host Chuck Todd blindsided Bass, “you sound a lot tougher on Castro now than you did when you described him as ‘comandante en jefe’ when he died.… You said you didn’t quite realize how sensitive folks were in South Florida about...

Trust And Respect Is Earned...

I Don't Trust Or Respect Any Of These Usurpers..

FALSE FLAG COMING? DHS Warns of ‘Heightened’ Terror Threat From COVID Policy Skeptics, Election Fraud Reformers

On Monday, the federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released an advisory warning of a “heightened” terrorist threat from COVID skeptics and election fraud reformers.

“The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM) introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors. These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence,” the DHS wrote in their warning released on Feb. 7.

DHS listed “the proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions” as the top cause for their terror advisory.

“For example, there is widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19. Grievances associated with these themes inspired violent extremist attacks during 2021,” they wrote, providing no supporting evidence to bolster their claim.

They added that “COVID-19 mitigation measures—particularly COVID-19 vaccine and mask mandates—have been used by domestic violent extremists to justify violence since 2020 and could continue to inspire these extremists to target government, healthcare, and academic institutions that they associate with those measures.”

“Some domestic violent extremists have continued to advocate for violence in response to false or misleading narratives about unsubstantiated election fraud. The months preceding the upcoming 2022 midterm elections could provide additional opportunities for these extremists and other individuals to call for violence directed at democratic institutions, political candidates, party offices, election events, and election workers,” the DHS advisory claimed.


If it was not already obvious enough that the DHS produced this document for the political propaganda purpose of dehumanizing their political opposition, they also stated that “a small number of threat actors are attempting to use the evacuation and resettlement of Afghan nationals following the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan last year as a means to exacerbate long-standing grievances and justify attacks against immigrants.”

The DHS stated that they are working with private institutions, such as monolithic tech corporations, in order to institute Big Brother and choke the free flow of information in response to this supposedly heightened threat.

“DHS is working with public and private sector partners, as well as foreign counterparts, to identify and evaluate MDM, including false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories spread on social media and other online platforms that endorse or could inspire violence,” they wrote.

This advisory is highly alarming and could signal that a false flag attack is imminent. With the delegitimized Biden regime cratering and the Democrat Party becoming loathed by the American people, this could be their last desperate gambit to...

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Behind ‘Anti-Racist’ Math Push Liberal education collective claims asking students to show work is racist

A radical new push to purge math curricula of allegedly racist practices like showing your work and finding the correct answer is bankrolled by one of the nation's most prominent nonprofits: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Gates Foundation is the only donor mentioned on the homepage of A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction, a group of 25 education organizations whose curriculum states that asking students to show their work and find the right answer is an inherently racist practice.

Over the past decade, the Gates Foundation has given upward of $140 million to some of the groups behind Pathway, whose antiracist resources are the basis for a new teacher training course offered by the Oregon Department of Education.

The Education Trust, a California-based group that promoted the September release of Pathway's antiracist "toolkit," has received $86 million from the Gates Foundation, including a $3.6 million grant awarded in June.

Teach Plus, another group dedicated to creating an antiracist culture in K-12 schools, has received more than $27 million from the Gates Foundation. The group's board members include former Democratic congressman George Miller and Obama-era secretary of education John King Jr.—who is also the president of The Education Trust.

WestEd, a nonprofit committed to dismantling "systemic barriers" in schools, has received more than $35 million from the Gates Foundation since 2009. UnboundEd, an organization dedicated to helping teachers "disrupt systemic racism" in the classroom, has received nearly $14 million in grants from the Gates Foundation since...

Biden Administration is proposing requiring banks to report virtually all their customers’ bank account information and activity to the IRS regardless of the customers’ consent

Consumer Alert

Washington proposes new bank reporting of all personal and business financial account info to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Let Congress know your privacy matters.

Contact Congress Now

Policymakers in Washington have proposed requiring banks to report virtually all their customers’ bank account information and activity to the IRS regardless of the customers’ consent.

While community banks do not endorse such broad IRS access to their customers’ account information, consumers need to be aware of the potential effects of this proposal.

Mandating new, broad bank account reporting to the IRS would infringe on the privacy of bank customers, push more people away from a banking relationship and overload the IRS with more personal information about American citizens than it can possibly process or keep safe from a data hack.

To be heard in Washington before this bank IRS reporting regime is enacted, you can send the following customizable message directly to your members of Congress and ensure your voice is heard.

Consumers Express
Opposition

Morning Consult-ICBA polling found:
67% of voters oppose IRS proposal
64% don’t trust IRS to monitor financial info
54% don’t trust IRS to keep financial data safe

Resources to Help Fight Back

Talking Points

Consumer Advocates Say

Consumer groups are speaking out against the broad, untargeted nature of the bank IRS reporting regime proposal.

"In practice, the IRS’s task would be daunting and, in fact, bury the agency in a sea of unproductive information."

-Steven Rosenthal of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution’s Tax Policy Center

"They are collecting information about everybody, and I don’t know why it is necessary to collect information about everybody."

Legacy Outlets Add Two More Botched Hit Pieces To A Pile Of Stinky Reporting On Trump

The Washington Post and New York Times each completely botched a hit piece on the Trump administration in recent weeks, as a result of shirking basic journalism standards.

Chuck Todd’s accusation that conservative outlets are to blame for the public’s growing lack of trust in the media was still in a steaming pile on the ground when two of America’s biggest papers had to scramble their way to corrections this week.

Both The New York Times and Washington Post had to perform reconstructive surgery on stories critical of the Trump administration. The botched reports indicate a different cause for the public’s lack of trust in the media: a years-long trend of exaggeration, innuendo and flat out false reporting on Trump.

The Washington Post reported in late August that the Trump administration is cracking down on passports at the border, in contradiction to official government statements and other publicly available facts. That story is still unraveling. And last week, The New York Times falsely framed Nikki Haley as responsible for an expensive curtain purchase that was in fact made by the Obama administration. Both outlets overhauled the stories and issued lengthy corrections.

In both cases, journalists shirked reporting standards as basic as reaching out to key players in the story, or putting the facts in their proper context. They exemplify the trend of bad reporting that has come to mark the established outlets waging open war on Trump, and is no doubt fueling distrust in the media — perhaps to a greater extent than the established press would like to admit.

Let’s go through these two reports one by one.

The Washington Post is standing by its August 29 report that the Trump administration is cracking down on potentially fraudulent passports, although it is marked by a stunning number of reporting failures, detailed most thoroughly by The Huffington Post on Monday. Reporters and editors on the story got facts wrong, misled readers, left out key data contradicting the premise of the article, and failed to reach out to the family of a deceased man accused of fraud in the story.

The initial story claimed the Trump administration is taking unprecedented action against thousands of Hispanic people living near the southern border suspected of having obtained false U.S. birth certificates. It was based largely on anecdotal evidence from immigration lawyers working in the area who said they are seeing a surge in the number of passports under scrutiny.

Within hours of its publication, a Slate reporter pointed out the practice of denying passports to people issued birth certificates from midwives suspected of fraud began under the George W. Bush administration, and continued through the Barack Obama administration. The story was corrected Aug. 31 to reflect this error. The story also asserted the Trump administration is newly targeting people delivered by a Texas doctor suspected of fraud, but HuffPo reports that practice also predates this administration.

After the State Department released numbers contradicting the story’s premise a few days after publication, editors added a new claim — that the Trump administration was...

How Corrupt is a Corrupt Media?

The media has ceased to exist, and the public plods on by assuming as true whatever the media suppresses and as false whatever the media covers.

he current “media”—loosely defined as the old major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post, the network news channels, MSNBC and CNN, PBS and NPR, the online news aggregators like Google, Apple, and Yahoo, and the social media giants like the old Twitter and Facebook—are corrupt.

They have adopted in their news coverage a utilitarian view that noble progressive ends justify almost any unethical means to obtain them. The media is unapologetically fused with the Democratic Party, the bicoastal liberal elite, and the progressive agenda.

The result is that the public cannot trust that the news it hears or reads is either accurate or true. The news as presented by these outlets has been carefully filtered to suppress narratives deemed inconvenient or antithetical to the political objectives of these entities, while inflating themes deemed useful.

This bias now accompanies increasing (and increasingly obvious) journalistic incompetence. Lax standards reflect weaponized journalism schools and woke ideology that short prior basic requisites of writing and ethical protocols of quoting and sourcing. In sum, a corrupt media that is ignorant, arrogant, and ideological explains why few now trust what it delivers.
Suppression

Once a story is deemed antithetical to left-wing agendas, there arises a collective effort to smother it. Suppression is achieved both by neglect, and by demonizing others who report an inconvenient truth as racists, conspiracist “right-wingers,” and otherwise irredeemable.

The Hunter Biden laptop story is the locus classicus. Social media branded the authentic laptop as Russian disinformation. That was a lie. But the deception did not stop them from censoring and squashing those who reported the truth.

Instead of carefully examining the contents of the laptop or interrogating Biden-company players such as Tony Bobulinksi, the media hyped the ridiculous disinformation hoax as a mechanism for suppressing the damaging pre-election story altogether.

Joe Biden’s cognitive state was another suppression story. The media simply stifled the truth that 2020 candidate Biden was unable to conduct a normal campaign due to his frailty and non-compos-mentis status. Few fully reported his often cruel and racist outbursts of the “lying-dog-faced-pony-soldier” and “you ain’t black”/“terrorist” sort.

The #MeToo media predictably quashed the Tara Reade disclosure. In fact, journalists turned on her in the manner that they previously had insisted was sexist and defamatory “blame-the-victim” smearing.

Joe Biden has long suffered from a sick tic of creepily intruding into the private space of young women and preteen girls: blowing their hair, talking into their ears, squeezing their necks, hugging in full body embraces—all for far too long. In other words, Biden should have expected the Charlie Rose or the Donald Trump Access Hollywood media treatment. Instead, he was de facto exonerated by collective media silence. To this day, despite staffers’ efforts to corral his wandering hands and head, he occasionally reverts to form with his creepy fixations with...

It's A Trust Issue..

Let's Discuss Trust, CLICK HERE

‘Everyone Knew This Was F*cked:’ Elon Musk Releases Twitter’s Internal Convos on Hunter Biden Laptop Censorship

Elon Musk’s Twitter released internal discussions about censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story Friday night via journalist Matt Taibbi.

The documents reveal widespread internal and external concern at the suppression of the story, a decision made without CEO Jack Dorsey’s knowledge and spearheaded by Vijaya Gadde, then the head of Trust & Safety — Twitter’s top censor. The thread is ongoing at the time of this writing and can be found here:

The documents, mostly internal communications from Twitter and emails with external parties, showed widespread unease with the decision and concerns about how it could be explained to lawmakers and the public.

Several key points from the thread so far:

• The decision to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story was made without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey
• Trust & Safety chief Vijaya Gadde, long believed to be the driving force of censorship at the company, spearheaded the decision.
• Numerous top Twitter employees, especially from the communications and policy teams — whose job is to maintain relations with lawmakers and the press — expressed concern at the decision.
• Immediate warnings from Twitter’s Washington D.C. contacts followed, including an email from Democrat representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) who warned the decision had generated “huge backlash” on capitol hill, and expressed concerns about Twitter undermining the freedom to publish.

Aside from Rep. Khanna’s communications, which imagined a future in which newspapers would be unable to publish hacked evidence of war crimes, other Democrats reportedly complained that Twitter had not gone far enough in its censorship of the press.

“Khanna was the only Democratic official I could find in the files who expressed concern,” said Taibbi.SUBSCRIBE

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An email from Carl Szabo, one of the tech industry’s top lobbyists in D.C., told Twitter that Democrat lawmakers he spoke to in the aftermath of the decision all believed “social media needs to moderate more,” and complained that the Hunter Biden story had been allowed to travel as far as it did.

Szabo summarized the concerns of Democrats: “They let conservatives muddy the water and claim the Biden campaign look corrupt even though Biden is innocent.”

When pushed on how government might legally press social media companies to censor, Democrat lawmakers reportedly said “the First Amendment isn’t absolute.”

This lines up with what Democrats attempted to do after Biden took office: use the power of the federal government to force more censorship on social media, including the infamous “disinformation governance board” of DHS. The Biden administration is now facing lawsuits from Republican attorneys general arguing it used its power to undermine the...