Even though some fellow anchors—among them, his longtime CBS rival, Dan Rather; and his NBC successor, Brian Williams—already have been forced out in disgrace for biased and unethical reporting, none represent the sanctimonious pomposity of the bleeding-heart legacy media as well as Brokaw.
Ironically, after recent comments that seemed to violate the Left’s immigration orthodoxy, it may be that 78-year-old former anchor is left hoisted with his own politically-correct petard.
On Sunday, Brokaw ignited a firestorm of controversy by first saying that much of the opposition to immigration was from those who didn’t want “brown grandbabies.”
He later added that “Hispanics should work harder at assimilation.”
Despite the fact that Brokaw was merely trying to characterize what he regarded as the “right-wing” view of immigration, his moment of senile candor brought widespread criticism from the echo chamber, which condemned the comments as “xenophobic.”
While some praised him for his honesty, Brokaw spent much of Sunday on Twitter apologizing for the comments, but not necessarily inspiring confidence in his mental alacrity.
my tweet portal is whack
i hv been trying to say i am sorry i offended
and i so appreciate my colleague
Last year, Brokaw narrowly avoided the wrath of the #MeToo movement that felled the likes of Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose and scores of other media industry heavy-hitters.
Whether he continues past strike-two remains to be seen.
Few in the Twittersphere seemed ready to accept his “disingenuous” apology.
You misspelled, “I apologize for my ignorant and demeaning glib generalization.”
While the Left often jumps to forgive its own, Brokaw could be overdue as a sacrifice to the gods of wokeness and intersectionality.
But it may be more a quiet phasing out than a public flogging.
For many, Brokaw still represents the public face of NBC News, and top brass would likely hesitate putting the brand at risk for further damage by keeping him on air.
Moreover, as “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd (who is also NBC News political director) has shown with his recent climate-change censorship, there is little patience or appetite for representing diverse views.
Or maybe Brokaw, who also spoke wistfully on the “Meet the Press” panel of having known recently indicted political impresario Roger Stone for many years, was simply taking a page out of the former Trump advisor’s playbook, that no news is bad news:
‘I don’t know what he really cares about, other than holding on to his job…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Former Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who lost her re-election bid last November, blamed the cold-hearted, partisan strategizing of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., for costing her the race.
“He sees his job as only to protect Republican senators and to protect a Republican majority,” McCaskill said of McConnell during an appearance on “Late Night with Seth Meyers” Thursday night.
“In the most political of places, no one is more political,” she continued. “I don’t know what he really cares about, other than holding on to his job.”
One might have said the same of McCaskill—when she had a job.
Although she ran as a centrist, touting her eagerness to cross the aisle, more often than not she voted straight down the party line, eager to serve the Obama agenda and to please lobbying interests like labor unions and Planned Parenthood, to whom she was beholden.
After widely viewed videos from Project Veritas exposed McCaskill as an extremist liberal in the otherwise solid-red, Trump-supporting state of Missouri, voters ousted the two-term senator in favor of Republican state Attorney General Josh Hawley.
McCaskill’s “no” vote on the polarizing confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh less than two months before the election likely was a deal-breaker for conservatives in the state, but while three of her fellow battleground Democrat colleagues had broken ranks on and earlier vote to confirm Justice Neil Gorsuch, McCaskill also opposed him and was criticized on the campaign trail for putting party ahead of voters.
“For a lot of evangelical voters in my state who maybe didn’t see Trump as a role model for their children, they were convinced he’d put people on the Supreme Court that they liked,” McCaskill told Seth Meyers. “And that was really because of Mitch McConnell’s strategy.”
Now, it seems, McCaskill’s years of keeping her true colors bottled up while shoehorned into the role of imposter moderate have finally caused her progressive views to burst.
On the “Seth Meyers” show, McCaskill again went after Trump, calling him a “con” and “very, very weird.”
She regaled the liberal audience with a story about how Trump tried to charm her during White House talks over the president’s tax-cut proposals.
Noticing she was seated right next to him, McCaskill told Meyers, “I’m going, ‘Oh sh**!'”
She said Trump was a gentleman when he entered, offering to pull her chair out for her, but then took it a step too far.
“He leans down and whispers in my ear, ‘I bet no other president has ever done that before,’” McCaskill said.
Some speculate that McCaskill’s savage score-settling may be part of a rebranding effort, perhaps to reclaim a seat in the Senate when Republican Roy Blunt faces re-election in 2022—or in the 2020 Missouri gubernatorial race.
In the governor’s race, she would likely face an un-elected GOP incumbent, Gov. Mike Parson, who replaced scandal-plagued ex-Gov. Eric Greitens last June when he resigned under threat of impeachment.
With her liberal views uncorked, though—not to mention a propensity for pettiness—it could be a true test of the “Show-Me” State‘s values.
Of course, McCaskill would also be in good company if she were to enter the crowded field for the White House amid a bevy of radical leftist former Senate colleagues and a few prominent fellow losers.
North Carolina Congressional Districts as proposed by Common Cause/IMAGE: NC General Assembly
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) After forcing North Carolina to redraw its legislative maps two years ago, an activist group that has repeatedly sued to flip the state Democratic is again asking the courts to intervene because it was unhappy with the results.
But the Left’s latest skulduggery could have a devastating impact on public confidence in an electoral system already fraught with partisan bickering and scandal, according to state GOP leaders.
“If Democratic judges manipulate the State Constitution to expand their party’s power in the legislative branch, we are looking at a full-blown constitutional crisis,” said state Sen. Ralph Hise, chairman of the Senate Redistricting and Elections Committee, in a press release. “That’s the end of the rule of law.”
Common Cause, a national left-wing lobbying organization masquerading as a ‘nonpartisan’ charity, cried racism on the Republican-led legislature that oversaw redistricting following the 2010 Census.
A panel of judges agreed, ultimately demanding a redo of the maps for both the state and federal districts in 2017.
Despite picking up five seats in the state’s 50-seat Senate and 10 seats in its 120-seat General Assembly, breaking GOP super-majorities in both, Democrats were unable to gain control of either chamber in the November 2018 election.
Now, the group has filed another suit asking for a redraw of all 170 districts in the state legislature, with the hope of a more favorable outcome using the court system instead of voters.
Absurdly, said state Republicans, that includes asking for a revision of four House districts from a map that Common Cause endorsed during the earlier court-mandated redistricting.
Pat Ryan, a spokesman for state Sen. Phil Berger, said far from being a principled effort to bolster representative democracy the suit was a blatant ploy to flip the legislature before the next redistricting so that Democrats could enact their own state-level gerrymandering.
“What should really raise a red flag about motives here [was that Common Cause] filed a day, two days, after the election results,” Ryan said.
North Carolina Democrats’ biggest steal of the November election—at least at the state level—may have been the addition of Anita Earls to the state Supreme Court.
Earls, a radical attorney who had helped litigate the earlier redistricting effort in favor of Democrats, won a three-way race with 49.5 percent of the vote after Democrat Chris Anglin switched parties in June 2018, fraudulently running as a Republican and poaching voters from incumbent Barbara Jackson.
The pickup gave Democrats a 5-2 majority on the court, where a partisan elections process was re-instated in 2016.
“They’re hoping that a Democratic judge [will] discover some heretofore unknown” provision in the state constitution that might render Republican-favored districts illegal, Ryan said.
In addition, to the state-level fight, Common Cause also filed suit in federal court over North Carolina’s 13 U.S. congressional districts. Those, too, underwent a mandatory redraw that yielded no additional pickups on election night for Democrats (with the outcome of the disputed 9th District race still to be determined).
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hearRucho vs. Common Cause on appeal, along with a separate case from Maryland, likely in March of this year. Those decisions could help resolve national-level battles over the legality of gerrymandering.
However, even assuming liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is healthy and present for the decision, the swapping of chronic swing-voter Anthony Kennedy for the (presumably) more conservative Brett Kavanaugh likely shifts the high court to the right. Kennedy had sided with the court’s liberal wing in previous redistricting cases.
A failure at the national level would make redistricting with a Democratic state legislature the only shot for left-wing activists of once again turning the Tarheel State a deep blue.
“They probably figure they have a much better chance” through the state courts, Ryan said.
Ironically, he pointed out that Republicans had only been in control of the state since around 2010, when they were able to win outright through the elections process rather than court challenges.
“Democrats controlled the legislature here for 140 years, and they didn’t have a problem with it till they lost,” Ryan said.
It’s one of several hypocrisies the state GOP has noted regarding the legal challenges being posed by the Left.
At a press event last week, state Sen. Dean Arp said the same principle applied to the recent accusations of election fraud in a handful of North Carolina counties.
State Republicans say partisan Democratic elections officials not only were aware of but may have been actively involved in earlier ballot-harvesting operations. But amid accusations that 9th District Republican candidate Mark Harris had contracted with a get-out-the-vote operative who may have used illegal harvesting practices, they feigned shock and refused to certify the race.
Although the state GOP maintains that any alleged irregularities are not enough to change the outcome, Democrats have pushed for a new election, and the Nancy Pelosi-led House of Representatives has signaled it would refuse to seat Harris without conducting its own investigation.
“To call for a new ballgame after you lose is not how you play,” Arp said.
‘It was clear to me that he had singled me out for a confrontation, although I am not sure why…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A teenage boy has spoken out following an unprecedented assault by the left-wing press, which included doxxing his family and his school, for the sin of staring at an adult activist during Friday’s March for Life rally.
Doing its best to ignore the presence of thousands of goose-stepping, anti-Semitic feminazis cursing their way up Pennsylvania Avenue during Saturday’s Women’s March, the press instead fixated over the weekend on what might have been an innocuous encounter between Nick Sandmann, a junior at Kentucky’s Covington Catholic High School, and Nathan Phillips, a Native American elder and outspoken Trump critic.
After video of the exchange hit the internet, the media kicked into high gear to publicly shame Sandmann for triggering and taunting the seasoned leftist protestor, who was drumming near the Lincoln Memorial as part of the concurrent Indigenous People’s March.
Phillips, 64, who has been involved in a number of past protests, including the Dakota and Keystone XL pipelines, was singing songs “urging participants to ‘be strong’ against the ravages of colonialism that include police brutality, poor access to health care and the ill effects of climate change on reservations,” when he claimed a group of schoolboys began to gather near him, according toThe Washington Post.
Phillips told The Post that he felt threatened by the children. “It was getting ugly, and I was thinking: ‘I’ve got to find myself an exit out of this situation and finish my song at the Lincoln Memorial,’” he said.
“I started going that way, and that guy in the hat [Sandmann] stood in my way, and we were at an impasse. He just blocked my way and wouldn’t allow me to retreat.”
Leftist pundits quickly projected their own interpretations of the encounter, many accusing the boy and his friends of “taunting” Phillips.
Facing harassment, Sandmann released a public statement on Sunday rebutting the false narrative that had emerged.
With the permission of Nick Sandmann and their parents. This is being released to the media. Please keep this family in your prayers. pic.twitter.com/xO8iI92C6i
He said that the group, while waiting for its bus to return home to Kentucky, was shouting its school spirit chant to drown out the hateful remarks being directed at them by another group of radicals nearby.
Phillips then worked his way through the crowd and approached Sandmann.
“The protestor everyone has seen in the video began playing his drum as he waded into the crowd, which parted for him. I did not see anyone try to block his path. He locked eyes with me and approached me, coming within inches of my face. He played his drum the entire time he was in my face.”
Sandmann said he, too, was concerned by the escalation. “I was worried that a situation was getting out of control where adults were attempting to provoke teenagers,” he said.
Nonetheless, he calmly stood his ground while trying to avoid directly engaging with the liberal activists.
“I never felt like I was blocking the Native American protestor,” he said. “He did not make any attempt to go around me. It was clear to me that he had singled me out for a confrontation, although I am not sure why.”
Although Sandmann said he never sought to become part of the media spectacle, the fallout has included death threats against him, vicious insults and character assassination, while some have even waged a Twitter campaign targeting his parents, who were not present at the rally.
His name is Nicholas Sandmann and his mother is Julie Sandmann who is the VP of Relationship Management for Fidelity. Oops. https://t.co/JdadYmW10k
The leftist media has been known to exploit children in service of pushing agendas like gun control and climate change. Taking a page from Palestinian terror groups such as Hamas—which often places its missile sites near areas of high collateral damage, like schools—it has effectively used teens like David Hogg as human shields against criticism of liberal policies.
Meanwhile, it is not above inflicting its own damage on whoever happens to stand in the way.
As current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in October, those who oppose the Left’s orthodoxy—by daring to support the president—must be ready to face the unrelenting and merciless consequences.
“We owe the American people to be there for them, for their financial security, respecting the dignity and worth of every person in our country, and if there is some collateral damage for some others who do not share our view, well, so be it,” she told Paul Krugman.
Pelosi is but one of countless Democrats who have gone so far as encouraging activists to “get up in the face” of Republican opponents, resulting in some high-profile cases of bullying.
While forgiving or ignoring the atrocious behavior of progressive activists and justifying the often illegal violations of privacy and property against both public servants and private figures, the media now finds it acceptable to target and destroy innocent, underage victims expressly for the purpose of showing that it can out-bully its opponents with impunity.
A statement of the Indigenous People’s Movement, which organized Phillips’ protest, called the standoff between the elder activist and the teen “emblematic of our discourse in Trump’s America.”
One Washington Post columnist attempted to pin the blame on the immensely successful March for Life, which the teens were leaving to return home at the time of the encounter.
Michelle Boorstein claimed the episode offered clear evidence that the pro-life rally, drawing tens of thousands to the National Mall, had “become too partisan and too aligned with politically conservative figures, Trump in particular.”
It was unclear at press time whether Boorstein and her media cohorts intended to amend their statements following a full disclosure of facts to include condemnation of the Indigenous People’s March or other counter-demonstrations.
The story broke the same day as another damaging hit on the media’s credibility, when the Office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller publicly rebuffed a sensational account by Buzzfeed. Others in the liberal press picked up on the fake report in order to amplify calls for impeaching the president.
Many people are saying that the Mainstream Media will have a very hard time restoring credibility because of the way they have treated me over the past 3 years (including the election lead-up), as highlighted by the disgraceful Buzzfeed story & the even more disgraceful coverage!
It also comes a week after liberal education-school researchers published a dubious statistical study attempting to link a rise in school bullying with support for Trump.
‘It’s going to take a big national event to move things. I mean, we’re at a standstill….’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Call it a Tale of Two Shutdowns. At 28 days, both President Donald Trump and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi remain firmly entrenched in their positions over the $5 billion in requested funding for a southern border wall, which has led to the longest partial government closure in history.
The Democrats, whose votes we need in the Senate, will probably vote against Border Security and the Wall even though they know it is DESPERATELY NEEDED. If the Dems vote no, there will be a shutdown that will last for a very long time. People don’t want Open Borders and Crime!
With no end in sight, the greatest crisis thus far has been that the furloughing of some 380,000 nonessential federal employees might start to become old news.
It has left many Americans wondering: If the government can absorb these losses and still function as usual, what’s next? And exactly how long will this go on?
However, the two sides see the end-game playing out in very different ways: While the Left is pushing fear tactics, prognosticating an epic disaster that could possibly eclipse even global warming, some on the Right see a master strategy in which Trump lays the groundwork for permanently draining the swamp.
‘Macabre Hypotheticals’
Nancy Pelosi/IMAGE: The Washington Post via Youtube
Given his flair for the sensational, it is small wonder that Drudge Report proprietor Matt Drudge found his banner story on Friday in the left-leaning Atlantic.
With the initial wave of shutdown stories having failed to create the necessary public panic, the magazine took a page straight from the Al Gore playbook by torquing up the doom-and-gloom scenarios in a mostly anonymously-sourced rundown of “macabre hypotheticals.”
Wrote Atlantic author McKay Coppins: “For a deal to shake loose in this environment, it may require a failure of government so dramatic, so shocking, as to galvanize public outrage and force the two parties back to the negotiating table.”
The article at times felt like it was dropping suggestions, exhorting its social justice warriors in the Resistance army to take action. Among the possible outcomes slouching toward their inevitable conclusion on Capitol Hill:
A legion of starving masses encamped in Trump shanty towns outside the White House once food stamps expire in March
A maverick TSA worker, more enterprising than usual due to disgruntled desperation, routing a plane into the ground
A backlog of USDA approvals leading to an outbreak of tainted, sub-quality beef
And, of course, terrorism
Likely, the Leftist press would find a way to deflect such a terrorist attack back onto Trump—even if it happened to be one of the many jihadists who entered the U.S. via the unprotected southern border.
After doing all it could to ding the president for creating both sides of this two-way impasse, The Atlantic concluded, “And so the quiet catastrophizing continues. … Even if some of their worst-case shutdown scenarios remain unlikely—there are still plenty of paths forward that don’t include body counts…”
‘This Is All Pageantry’
As President Trump and House Speaker Pelosi proved this week, neither is above trolling tactics in the current appropriations standoff.
Pelosi set out to passive-aggressively pique the president’s ego by disinviting him from Congress for the State of the Union address.
Trump reciprocated by canceling Pelosi’s flight as she was about to embark on an international public-relations mission.
“This is all pageantry,” a Democratic House aide told The Atlantic. “It’s going to take a big national event to move things. I mean, we’re at a standstill.”
Unlike Obama, who deliberately sought to enhance public misery during the 2013 shutdown by unnecessarily shuttering funded services, Trump has downplayed it, even injecting sardonic humor into the situation by inviting the NCAA-winning Clemson football team to a self-funded fast-food feast.
Some, such as ESPN, naturally cried “racism” over the banquet.
But The Atlantic gave voice to what most of the Left felt deep in their chafing craws.
“Now that he’s in the fight, Trump seems to be relishing the opportunities for showmanship that the shutdown affords him,” it wrote.
“Why bother governing—a job he has rarely seemed to like—when he can spend all day doling out Quarter Pounders to college-football players, plotting publicity stunts, and trading barbs with political enemies?”
Meanwhile, on the Right, some wondered if behind the showmanship and pageantry, Trump might be setting a trap.
From an optical standpoint, Trump and the Republicans may never be able to prevail in the courtroom of the mainstream media, no matter how many “Chuck and Nancy” memes crop up.
As many have observed, the anti-wall position that Congressional Democrats are now firmly entrenched against is one they have publicly supported in the past, meaning their principled stand is against the president himself.
Trump’s only way, thus, to fulfill a crucial campaign promise may be a bait-and-switch.
….I am doing exactly what I pledged to do, and what I was elected to do by the citizens of our great Country. Just as I promised, I am fighting for YOU!
Indeed, the president may have just such a solution for the border wall by declaring a national emergency and having the Pentagon provide the funding—although it’s likely to be subject to many 9th Circuit injunctions and eminent-domain challenges.
Still, the purpose of a protracted shutdown may be something entirely different than funding the wall if Trump is set on fulfilling another campaign promise: draining the swamp in Washington, D.C.
Bucking ‘The Process’
Donald Trump/IMAGE: The Washington Post via Youtube
Writing for the conservative site American Thinker, Thomas Lifson posed the question, “Has President Trump suckered Democrats and the Deep State into a trap that will enable a radical downsizing of the federal bureaucracy?”
Lifson’s main point of reasoning was a little-known bureaucratic procedure from the federal Office of Personnel Management known as a Reduction in Force. It stipulates says after 30 calendar days a furloughed federal employee may be downsized.
“For all practical purposes, a government RIF is the same thing as a layoff,” explained Michael Roberts on The Balance.
The brilliance of the tactical move stems from the fact that it may be otherwise virtually impossible to fire many government employees. Even if there are performance related reasons, the federal bureaucracy often finds itself slave to the “process” of avoiding lawsuits by transferring, promoting or simply ignoring problem employees.
“Process is what we serve, process keeps us safe, process is our core value,” wrote a a senior Trump administration official in an anonymous op-ed published Monday by the Daily Caller. “It takes a lot of people to maintain the process. Process provides jobs. In fact, there are process experts and certified process managers who protect the process.”
The Daily Caller piece effectively confirmed the theory that Trump had an altogether different game in mind. “The lapse in appropriations is more than a battle over a wall” said the writer. “It is an opportunity to strip wasteful government agencies for good.”
The author noted that many of those within the federal public sector create more inefficiencies than productive contributions. “On an average day, roughly 15 percent of the employees around me are exceptional patriots serving their country. … But 80 percent feel no pressure to produce results. If they don’t feel like doing what they are told, they don’t.”
Even worse, many seek to undermine Trump’s efforts, said the source. “Most of my career colleagues actively work against the president’s agenda. This means I typically spend about 15 percent of my time on the president’s agenda and 85 percent of my time trying to stop sabotage, and we have no power to get rid of them. Until the shutdown.”
Since the reductions, argued the author, government offices have found it necessary to reorganize, and often they have become more efficient as a result.
Likewise, as furloughed employees find themselves without paychecks, many of those seeking to supplement income may simply be reduced through attrition.
“President Trump has created more jobs in the private sector than the furloughed federal workforce,” said the source. “Now that we are shut down, not only are we identifying and eliminating much of the sabotage and waste, but we are finally working on the president’s agenda.”
Late Friday, Trump announced via Twitter that he would be making a major announcement tomorrow concerning the border wall and the shutdown.
I will be making a major announcement concerning the Humanitarian Crisis on our Southern Border, and the Shutdown, tomorrow afternoon at 3 P.M., live from the @WhiteHouse.
Only time will tell how it unfolds, but as long as Trump controls the narrative, the one thing Americans can be certain of is that the ongoing saga is not likely to become old news.
‘One of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency…’
Hillary Clinton/IMAGE: PBS NewsHour via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) In its ongoing efforts to cast daylight on the shady dealings of the Clintons, transparency advocate Judicial Watch has scored another win.
On Tuesday, a federal judge allowed its Freedom of Information case to proceed relating to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to conceal state business during the Obama era.
In greenlighting the discovery phase of the case, which also focuses on the Benghazi cover-up, District Judge Royce C. Lamberth will compel top officials including former national security adviser Susan Rice and her deputy of communications, “echo chamber” architect Ben Rhodes, to respond to Judicial Watch questions.
Rhodes helped craft the notorious talking points that Rice used to mislead the public following the Sept. 11, 2012, assault on the U.S. Embassy in Libya, which killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens.
It was through Judicial Watch’s efforts to pursue transparency in the Benghazi case that Clinton’s private e-mail server initially was revealed in 2015. It ultimately became one of the defining issues of her candidacy for president and may have contributed largely—along with other character flaws—to her election loss.
Longtime Clinton adviser Jake Sullivan and former FBI counterintelligence chief Bill Priestap will also be under the heat lamp. Additionally, several Clinton underlings involved in the creation and maintenance of the private email server are cleared for questioning by the order .
But if Clinton’s past responses to such depositions are any indication, they are unlikely to yield any great breakthroughs. Most of her answers involved either memory lapses or legal objections as to why she could not give a straight reply.
Lamberth previously had ordered the State and Justice departments to comply in the efforts to establish a discovery plan for the proceedings. In doing so, he expressed, in no uncertain terms, his disdain for the stonewalling and cover-up efforts afoot by the deep-state bureaucracy.
Lamberth called the scandal ““one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency,” and questioned “even now, whether they are acting in good faith.”
In a press release, Judicial Watch said it broadly hoped to use the depositions to learn:
Whether Clinton intentionally attempted to evade the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by using a non-government email system;
whether the State Department’s efforts to settle this case beginning in late 2014 amounted to bad faith; and
whether the State Department adequately searched for records responsive to Judicial Watch’s FOIA request.
The preliminary discovery period will last 120 days, after which another hearing will determine if depositions of Clinton herself and her former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, are also warranted.
The lawsuit is one of many courtroom battles Judicial Watch has under litigation against Clinton and Obama officials.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton recently testified before the (then Republican-led) House of Representatives on the pay-to-play operations of the Clinton Foundation, which intermingled its supposed charity work with Hillary Clinton’s official secretary-of-State duties, as well as likely supplying a slush fund for her 2016 presidential campaign.
‘All we can do is present the truth and hope that the public won’t allow this race to be stolen…’
North Carolina GOP Chairman Robin Hayes speaks to media and supporters in Charlotte on January 15./PHOTO: Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) As North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District approaches its third week without representation, the state’s Republican leaders expressed confidence that their candidate, Mark Harris, had rightfully won the race and should be confirmed as soon as possible.
But they remained less certain on how to achieve that, with the pathways to resolution lying either in the control of the courts, the state’s Democrat Gov. Roy Cooper or the now Democrat-led U.S. House of Representatives.
“All we can do is present the truth and hope that the public won’t allow this race to be stolen,” NCGOP Executive Director Dallas Woodhouse told Liberty Headlines at a press conference in Charlotte on Tuesday.
In early December, when allegations first began to surface about McRae Dowless—a get-out-the-vote operative contracted by the Harris campaign in Bladen County who is alleged to have illegally harvested absentee ballots—both the Harris campaign and the NCGOP leadership acknowledged they were caught off-guard.
Harris’s opponent, Democrat Dan McCready, had conceded the election with no protest, and it was not until the race was due to be certified the week after Thanksgiving that Joshua Malcolm, a partisan member of the N.C. State Board of Elections, called on the board to withhold certification due to irregularities.
“I was sick to my stomach, saying ‘My God, how did this happen?'” said Woodhouse, who went on national media outlets like MSNBC publicly expressing support for a thorough investigation.
“We know now that it didn’t—this was a political setup,” Woodhouse said.
Elections Board Conspiracy
Dallas Woodhouse/IMAGE: MSNBC via Youtube
The GOP leaders point to frequent communication in the months leading up to the election between Malcolm and Jens Lutz, the former vice chairman of the Bladen County Board of Elections, who resigned during the fraud investigation. According to an audience member at the Charlotte event (unconfirmed by Liberty Headlines), Lutz was last seen at the Mexican border.
In addition to revealing Malcolm’s advance knowledge of the fraud concerns in Bladen, Lutz also had been a business partner of Dowless’s in a local political-consulting firm.
Woodhouse said Lutz may have been motivated to get back at Dowless after their partnership dissolved.
“Malcolm obviously conspired with Lutz to keep a local election protest from being filed” prior to the board certification, Woodhouse said.
As for Malcolm’s motive—along with many of the other prominent Democrats who were aware of ongoing fraud concerns before the election—“They clearly wanted to see who won,” Woodhouse said.
He noted that a possible conflict of interest arose from the fact that Malcolm’s daughter worked for the McCready campaign.
“You can shuck off any one of these things that’s kind of coincidence,” Woodhouse said, “but [if] you take the totality of the circumstances, you can’t” dismiss the evidence of malfeasance.
Both Woodhouse and NCGOP Chairman Robin Hayes criticized the Democrats’ stall tactics, exploiting the vaguely worded provisions of the state election law that authorize the elections board to block any certification of an election where “taint” or “irregularities” are suspected.
“Any election would fall if you could just say ‘Someone somewhere did something,'” Woodhouse said. “We don’t think that’s the law. … The investigation can’t be justification for its own existence.”
They also said that despite being given the opportunity to investigate, Democrats, led by Malcolm, had attempted instead to turn the investigation into an indefinite fishing expedition.
“Under the Democrat rules, the investigation never ends,” said Hayes.
Out of Their Hands
Although the elections board initially had set its deadline to complete the investigation for late December, Malcolm unilaterally declared that it would be extended and the evidentiary hearing pushed back until Jan. 11—a week after the new Congressional term had started.
However, a bipartisan three-judge circuit court panel disagreed, and in late December it dissolved the elections board, which it said had unconstitutionally overstayed its own legal charter.
Roy Cooper/Photo by NCDOTcommunications (CC)
A new law takes effect at the end of January that will permit the governor to convene a new elections board under the advisement of the state legislature and the two major parties. But state Rep. Dean Arp, R-Union County, said beyond the General Assembly making its recommendations, it lay entirely within Cooper’s control whether to allow politics to continue to pervade the board.
“We all hope and wish and wait for him to not use the Board of Elections in a partisan manner and to seat someone he may disagree with politically” who could restore the board’s good-faith standing, Arp said.
“I hope the governor steps up and fulfills his constitutional duty. What is absolutely not tenable is leaving the voters of the 9th District” without representation in Congress, he said.
The board’s non-appointed staff has continued to investigate the election fraud matters even though the hearing for January was called off.
Should the matter return to the Board of Elections without Harris having been yet certified, the possibility still looms for a complete do-over of the election.
Republican legislators in Raleigh have debated whether that also should include a new GOP primary.
Playing Dirty
Meanwhile, the Harris campaign—citing past elections with similar circumstances where a local board refused to certify— has asked the court to step in once again.
Woodhouse said he was hopeful that this would resolve the matter before the elections board (which likely would include Malcolm as chairman again) reconvenes. “Based on the court’s precedent, they’ll certify,” he said.
Even so, other roadblocks stand in the way that could, once again, catch the GOP leaders off-guard. Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives have indicated that they may yet refuse to seat Harris without first conducting their own investigation.
McCready’s team also has secured as a lead attorney Marc Elias, whose notorious work with contested elections has resulted in several high-stakes national GOP victories being overturned.
Democrat attorney Marc Elias/IMAGE: Maxwell School of Syracuse University via Youtube
Elias first rose to prominence in the Minnesota election that gave Al Franken the Democrats’ 60th seat in the U.S. Senate in 2008, a filibuster-proof super-majority that paved the way for the unobstructed passage of legislation like Obamacare.
Elias also helped defend North Carolina’s Cooper in the 2016 gubernatorial race against Republican Pat McCrory’s accusations of widespread ballot fraud—which Malcolm at the same time motioned for the Board of Elections to dismiss.
Woodhouse said that the state GOP had been in communication with its national counterpart, but he signaled that no long-term strategy existed for defending the 9th District seat from the Left’s subversive maneuvers.
“We don’t play dirty like this,” Woodhouse said. “We think we won the election. We had the votes.”
Hayes said it posed a “difficult challenge” that Democrats had sought to “bury this under an avalanche of outside money.” But he commended the media’s work in shedding light on the corruption coming from the other side.
“The press has really dug into this to help to blunt” the efforts by Democrats both within and outside the state to steal an election, Hayes said.
Although the NCGOP leaders were adamant that Harris should be certified in the absence of clear evidence to overturn the initial result, they said they did not object to an investigation into the state’s election fraud troubles continuing after that.
However, Hayes said, “the investigation needs to follow a logical conclusion with defined, specific objectives and defined, transparent outcomes.”
‘It is not difficult to understand what is so ominous and even tyrannical about the FBI investigating domestic political figures…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Journalist Glenn Greenwald made his name working with whistle-blower Edward Snowden to expose the National Security Agency’s routine domestic spying program during the Bush and Obama presidencies.
Now, he is taking on the corrupt FBI for investigating President Donald Trump.
“It’s the FBI’s job to investigate possible crimes under the law or infiltration by foreign powers, not ideological sins,” Greenwald wrote in a story published on The Intercept.
Greenwald, a former Guardian reporter and founding Intercept editor, has often roiled the Democratic establishment by attacking the deep-state and liberal dogma while obstinately refusing to fit the narrative of a right-wing conspiracy theorist.
His latest piece comes after a New York Times hit job on Friday reported that the FBI in 2017, after Trump’s firing of Director James Comey, opened an investigation into whether the president was, either knowingly or unknowingly, a Russian agent.
The Times article did little to move the chains or add new information into the mix, other than confirming that the Andrew McCabe-led FBI, in using an investigation to retaliate, was as much a political animal as many on both sides of the aisle had long suspected.
Nonetheless, partisan nitwits in the press did all they could to puff it up into hyperbole of Chicken Little proportions in order to justify coverage, the welcome counterpoint to a week riddled with “Chuck and Nancy” memes.
Just now @MalcolmNance said the truth concisely and directly on @MSNBC : This is, without exception, the worst scandal in the history of the United States.
Trump and several other White House officials called the innuendo a ludicrous hoax.
“This is absurd,” said Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. “James Comey was fired because he’s a disgraced partisan hack, and his Deputy Andrew McCabe, who was in charge at the time, is a known liar fired by the FBI. Unlike President Obama, who let Russia and other foreign adversaries push America around, President Trump has actually been tough on Russia.”
Greenwald’s article, which was linked atop the Drudge Report on Monday, connected the current Russia probe to a long continuum of politically motivated FBI cases dating back to J. Edgar Hoover’s attacks on Franklin Roosevelt’s World War II-era vice president, Henry A. Wallace, and Richard Nixon’s Watergate-era opponent George McGovern.
“It is not difficult to understand what is so ominous and even tyrannical about the FBI investigating domestic political figures whose loyalties they regard as ‘suspicious,'” Greenwald wrote.
Although the amnesiac leftist press has frequently declared the Trump allegations to be unparalleled and unprecedented in American history—despite there having been no evidence made public to implicate the president in any of the alleged misdeeds—such smear tactics have, in fact, been fairly commonplace, Greenwald said.
“Trump is far from the first time that the FBI has monitored, surveilled and investigated U.S. elected officials … The FBI specialized in such conduct for decades under J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the agency for 48 years…”
It has since been discovered through Congressional inquiries that the FBI’s basis for investigating Trump—including its application with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court for clearance to eavesdrop on him—may have been based off of the unsubstantiated, now debunked, information in the Steele Dossier.
The FBI assumed payments on the dossier, a compilation of opposition research compiled by a former British intelligence operative, after the Democratic National Committee ceased commissioning the research following the November 2016 election.
In testimony before Congress, however, Comey dismissed the influence of the Steele Dossier, claiming the FBI had begun investigating Trump earlier, when another British asset of the FBI’s, Stefan Halper, spoke with Trump adviser George Papadopoulos about rumors that the Russians had hacked into the servers of the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Regardless of which British operative provided the speculative intelligence, Greenwald said the point remains the same concerning the politicization of the FBI and its weaponization of investigations against American political adversaries.
“Even if you’re someone who hates Trump’s overtures toward Russia or even believes that they are the by-product of excessive subservience to the Kremlin, the dangers of having the FBI take on the role of investigating that rather than the political wings of the U.S. political system should be obvious,” he said.
Although Greenwald said he strongly favors an independent investigation, such as the Mueller investigation, to ascertain whether Trump cooperated with Russia during the campaign, the president also has several times decried the potential conflicts of interest that arise from it, including Mueller’s chumminess with Comey and his own pursuit of the FBI post.
Trump has also attacked Mueller’s partisan staff, which at one point included Lisa Page, who was forced to leave after it was revealed that she had swapped countless anti-Trump texts with her lover, then-FBI counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok.
When is Bob Mueller going to list his Conflicts of Interest? Why has it taken so long? Will they be listed at the top of his $22,000,000 Report…And what about the 13 Angry Democrats, will they list their conflicts with Crooked H? How many people will be sent to jail and……
‘The assumption of these reports is that the election of Donald Trump stimulated an increase in bullying behavior…’
Photo by jglsongs (CC)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) It’s a foregone conclusion that extreme liberal bias has not only infiltrated but taken over at many academic institutions.
Although college campuses have long been regarded as radical indoctrination centers, the effect is now trickling down to the nation’s primary and secondary schools. One source is the ludicrous education-school programs, typically required for teacher certification, that have given way almost entirely to promoting a progressive agenda and liberal pedagogical philosophy.
Case in point would be two educational “researchers” at the University of Virginia and University of Missouri who recently made it their mission to prove that the mean bully President Donald Trump, with his always one-sided—never reciprocated—rhetoric, was actively harming children while their deplorable parents were too busy reading the Daily Stormer to notice.
They wasted no time getting at their true purpose in looking at the data: “The assumption of these reports is that the election of Donald Trump stimulated an increase in bullying behavior.”
An Unjust Justification
Shockingly (or perhaps not), the researchers cited numerous other studies, including dispatches from notoriously partisan leftist groups like the National Education Association and the Southern Poverty Law Center, that also fixated on the same premise: Not only is Trump a bully, they aimed to prove, but his uncultured, uneducated supporters were aping his every move.
“[I]t seems likely that persons who share the president’s views and supported his election would be most likely to echo his statements and attitudes in their own behavior,” said the authors, without providing justification for this assumption.
They went on to mention Nazis and Russians—clearly the two most prevalent influences on Trumpist thought, because all their academic friends agree it’s so—and reached the conclusion that if the middle-schoolers in Trump-supporting districts were not themselves unrepentant racist bigots, gay-bashers and wife-beaters just yet, then certainly their parents must at least be. “It is plausible that some of these efforts affected adolescents or adults who had influence on adolescents, especially their parents.”
Manipulated Methodology
After the exercise in scholarly onanism that was their research justification, the pair finally got into the methodology. Their research was based on surveys of 100 questions on school climate that nearly all Virginia public school students (except for the ones in alternative programs) were compelled to complete—unless, at the discretion of the school, they decided they would rather select a sampling of students.
Their research went in two directions: first, could they use a district’s political leanings as a predictor for bullying; and second, could they observe any change in bullying levels in the data before and after the 2016 election.
They quickly concluded the obvious: that schools with whiter (i.e. more homogenized) and more rural populations—as well as those where parents had wisely avoided expensive university indoctrination centers and entered instead directly into the real world—tended to support Trump more.
There was a weaker correlation between affluence (measured by the number of students on the free-lunch program) and Republican support. However, the state’s (and also the country’s) wealthiest districts—including Loudoun, Fairfax, Arlington and Alexandria—happen to be in the exurbs of Washington, D.C., where they are able to profit immensely from a large, centralized federal government, one of the key tenets of a Democratic platform. Thus, wealth in Northern Virginia is directly linked, via taxing and spending, to the influence of the Left.
I don’t care that most of the workers not getting paid are Democrats, I want to stop the Shutdown as soon as we are in agreement on Strong Border Security! I am in the White House ready to go, where are the Dems?
Throughout their analysis, the researchers made reference to their “adjusted” rates, having weighted certain demographic factors to distort the picture of bullying prevalence. The aim seemed to be finding ways to drive down the prevalence in blue districts—many of which had a larger and more diverse population—by disproportionately factoring “Republican” qualities into their correlation coefficient.
Faulty Findings
Naturally, in most of the manipulated data points they found moderate correlations and increases in affirmative responses over time to support their preordained conclusion that Trump was turning kids into bullies.
However, they surprisingly saw a major drop between 2015 and 2017 in teasing about sexual topics, despite the fact that many on the Left have attacked Trump as a misogynist.
Overall, the number of students in red districts who said bullying was a problem remained exactly the same before and after the election. The researchers dismissed this as a statistical anomaly. “Those results do not necessarily contradict our findings. If prevalence rates increased in some localities but decreased in others, there might be no overall change.”
But they acknowledged that despite their statistical acrobatics in adjusting and torquing certain variables, their findings lent only “modest” support to their initial assertions.
Ultimately, they were able to contort the data to link students’ self-reported perceptions of identity-based bullying with a district’s political leanings. “Specifically, students reported a higher prevalence of being bullied and were more likely to report observing that their peers were teased or put down because of their race or ethnicity.”
Even so, the reasons and circumstances behind the bullying remained purely speculative. “These findings are correlational and cannot establish a causal relationship,” they noted.
Lingering Questions
Was it that there was a greater prevalence of bullying or simply more awareness and reporting of it?
As media reports clamored about what a bully Trump was and the #MeToo movement waged a full-fledged assault on masculinity, as classroom teachers and administrators continued to cultivate students’ entitled snowflake mindset and researchers continued to ask if they were totally sure bullying wasn’t a problem, might those have created a trickle-down hypersensitivity to their own grievances?
How might other mitigating factors, such as affluence and homogeneity, have impacted bullying perceptions while removing politics from the equation?
Despite the assumption—without evidence—that it is Republican kids doing the bullying in those red districts, could it be that, mirroring the overall U.S. society, those on the Left simply became more vicious when in the minority?
Of course, the study also fails substantially in addressing what bullying in predominantly blue districts may look like.
Will the researchers conduct a similar examination after the recent midterm elections on the bullying language used by liberal extremists like Rep. Rashida Tlaib, or the violent mob mentality of Antifa—or will those data points once again be “adjusted” in their next study?
And let’s not forget the soft prejudice that went unreported on the survey: the frequency with which conservative or pro-Trump students—although less likely to feel targeted over demographic factors—are systemically discriminated against and bullied for their beliefs by many teachers in both liberal and conservative districts.
What might a statistical examination of the Universities of Virginia and Missouri reveal about the research institutions’ tolerance of dissenting beliefs versus the prevalence of intellectual bullying?
Contrived Conclusion
The conclusion of the report is to enthusiastically express support for the racist, Eric Holder-initiated policy—euphemistically titled “positive behavior intervention”—of refusing to suspend minority students and penalizing schools with higher minority suspension rates, regardless of reason.
Many teachers struggled with the radical shift in school-discipline enforcement, which undermined authority, leaving them saddled with negative behaviors and disruptive students who interfered with the learning environment. Is it possible that this change in policy from the Obama era, forcing disruptive students to remain classrooms, may have had more to do with the rise in bullying than the ascendance of Trump to the presidency?
Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos recently announced she was ending the Holder rule and again empowering the schools—rather than the Justice Department—to use their discretion in how best to address localized discipline matters.
Data-Driven Decline
The publisher of the study—and of many academic journals—is SAGE Publishing, whose founders, George and Sara McCune, are equally known for the foundation where they shovel money into pet causes such as open borders.
But increasingly, those academic journals are now being questioned over their vetting and screening methods—with several having been forced to retract fake articles—not to mention their prejudices against research conclusions that might counter the liberal dogma.
As issues such as climate-change have continually revealed, flawed and biased researchers often use their own form of bullying to arrive at the so-called scientific consensus.
Numbers are easy to manipulate, and false conclusions based off of specious variables are a dime a dozen. Until the researchers themselves can be trusted to maintain scholarly integrity, such politically motivated efforts as these only harm perceptions of scientific and academic research.
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) After the knock-down, drag-out confirmation battle for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh nearly tore the nation asunder, the White House and Senate are preparing for another, potentially even more divisive, showdown.
The two GOP-led branches are cautiously conferring on a list of possible nominees—and urging allied groups to be prepared—if health concerns force the ailing Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 85, to leave the bench, Politico reported.
The names would be culled in part from Trump’s earlier shortlist, which included Seventh Circuit judge Amy Coney Barrett.
But with Democratic activists having anticipated a Kavanaugh nomination as early as 2012, there is a greater sense of urgency now to avoid being railroaded by any surprise tactics that the Left may have had ample time to formulate.
At the same time, the Republican leaders must tread carefully while Ginsburg is still recovering from her recent cancer surgery in order to avoid sparking the righteous indignation of well-organized and well-funded liberal radicals, who spent weeks protesting in and around Capitol Hill last fall.
“They’re doing it very quietly, of course, because the idea is not to be opportunistic, but just to be prepared so we aren’t caught flat-footed,” one anonymous source told Politico.
Ginsburg, who took the unprecedented step of attacking Trump as a candidate, is unlikely to step down willingly, even if incapacitated, meaning the seat would become open only upon her death.
Chief Justice John Roberts said despite Ginsburg’s missing the start of oral arguments for the first time ever this week, she remained engaged in reading briefs, filings and a transcript of the proceedings.
Trump tweeted his well-wishes to her in December.
Wishing Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg a full and speedy recovery!
Bucking a long tradition in which members of the opposition party avoided partisan fights over Supreme Court appointments (with only a few prior exceptions from Senate Democrats), both of Trump’s replacements—Neil Gorsuch for the conservative Antonin Scalia, and Kavanaugh for the moderate Anthony Kennedy—were near party-line votes.
With Gorsuch, protestations over the denial of Obama nominee Merrick Garland forced Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to implement the nuclear option—a simple 50-vote majority rather than a 60-vote, filibuster-proof super-majority. Gorsuch eventually garnered 54 votes, with a handful of red-state Democrats breaking ranks.
The Kavanaugh vote was even tighter, with moderate Republicans being accosted and facing death threats for supporting the judge in the face of unsubstantiated, 30-year-old sexual-assault accusations. The 51–49 vote saw only one Democrat (Joe Manchin of West Virginia) and one Republican (Lisa Murkowski of Alaska) going against their caucuses.
John Malcolm, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, told Politico that the fight to fill Ginsburg’s absence with any conservative would be worse yet. “It would be a brutal confirmation,” he said.
Although Republicans netted three Senate pickups in the recent midterm election, giving them a 54-vote majority, the fact that Ginsburg’s successor would likely be her ideological opposite—effectively picking up a seat—hearkens back, once again, to the last big confirmation battle of the pre-Trump era.
“[I]f you are replacing Justice Ginsburg with a Trump appointee, that would be akin to replacing Thurgood Marshall with Clarence Thomas,” Malcolm said. “It would mark a large shift in the direction of the court.”
Like the liberal civil rights icon Marshall, who retired for health reasons during the George H.W. Bush presidency, Ginsburg has been the subject of much adulation on the Left, including books, speaking tours and a recent Hollywood biopic.
Politico said many of the prospective nominees to replace Ginsburg were women, which theoretically would derail the likelihood of sexual-assault claims such as those faced by Justices Thomas and Kavanaugh.
Leftist intersectionality theory posits that it would be impossible for a member of a minority class (e.g. gender-identity, race, sexual orientation, citizenship status) to commit such an act of victimization—unless it were against a member of another minority group even higher on the grievance taxonomy.
But with Trump Derangement Syndrome at fever-pitch, even a transgender illegal alien nominated by the president would likely come under intense scrutiny, requiring both a spotless record and an unflappable demeanor.
Given the Left’s propensity for heated rhetoric and mob violence, owning a secured, well-stocked underground bunker might also be a plus for any jurist unfortunate enough to be nominated.
