‘Chaos and anarchy have no place on America’s streets…’
(Joseph Hughes, Headline USA) GOP congressmen introduced a new bill on Thursday that would make it a federal crime to assault any law-enforcement officer during a riot.
The No Reward for Inciting Organized Turmoil (No RIOT) Act of 2020 was proposed by Rep. Dan Bishop, R-NC, and already has full support from several representatives.
“I join most Americans in being appalled by increasing attacks on our law enforcement nationwide,” Bishop said in a press release.
Current US code establishes strong penalties for assaulting or killing a federal officer.
The new law, however, would update Title 18 to include local and state officers trying to maintain order—with consequences up to and including the death penalty for killing any officer, regardless of state laws.
“I believe that anyone who engages in mob violence should be punished to the fullest extent of the law,” said Rep. Ted Budd, R-NC, one of the bill’s cosponsors.
“Chaos and anarchy have no place on America’s streets,” he continued. “I’m proud to support a bill that boosts the punishment for rioting and looting.”
The No RIOT Act also would seek to hold accountable the organizers of any such riots who use online platforms, including social media, to encourage the violent insurrections.
“There is no tolerance or justification for assaulting officers who risk their lives to protect our communities and assaults of this kind should be met with swift, harsh punishment,” Bishop said.
Donald Trump and Dan Bishop / PHOTO: Jackson A. Lanier via Wikimedia Commons
The measure comes specifically in response to the recent riots that took place under the pretense of protesting the Memorial Day death of George Floyd while in the custody of Minneapolis police.
Those demonstrations quickly escalated into destructive acts of vandalism and claimed the lives of more than a dozen innocent victims.
Mainstream media and left-leaning politicians have largely ignored the violence and destruction stemming from these riots.
But they have not gone unnoticed by the people who live in the cities and counties being ravaged.
Although radical groups linked to the Black Lives Matter movement have pushed to defund police, recent polls have suggested that a majority of Americans—including those in the black community—support the role of law enforcement.
Moreover, polls have indicated that Americans have begun to question the media narrative that BLM, a group founded by Marxist-trained community organizers, is acting in good faith to promote the cause of social justice.
Nearly three-quarters of Americans question whether the movement has done anything to improve the national dialogue on race issues.
Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., another cosponsor of the No RIOT Act, said the recent episodes show that more support for police is needed, not less.
“The recent violent riots, vandalism, murders, autonomous zones, and related crime sprees in large American cities governed by weak Socialist Democrats highlight the importance of law and order,” Brooks said.
“The No Riot Act is another weapon the Department of Justice needs to punish and stop violent rioters,” he added.
The number of police officers filing retirement papers has quadrupled over the past week, creating a bottleneck in the system and forcing the department to cap the number of retirements it accepts.
Nearly 503 officers have reportedly filed for retirement between the day George Floyd died and last Friday, according to the New York Post. And last week, a line of officers was spotted outside the office where police officers file for retirement.
“Apparently, the pension section is only taking a certain amount of people per day, and I think they are backed up till late July, early August,” one officer said, according to the Post. “That’s why you don’t see like 100 a day, because they are only doing like 35 to 40 a day, by appointment.”
The NYPD said that it isn’t denying any cops who do want to retire, but added that it’s asking officers who plan to retire to wait to file for at least another month.
Anti-police protests, riots, looting, arson and violent acts against law enforcement have ensued while Democrat city leaders have sided with radical protestors rather than confront lawless left-wing mobs. So many cops have decided they’ve had enough.
Moreover, city officials like New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio have actively blamed law enforcement for tensions within the city, which makes many men in uniform feel like those up top don’t have their backs. Indeed, de Blasio recently approved a $1 billion “defund the police” budget cut.
“We are all asking the same question: ‘How can we keep doing our job in this environment?’,” said Police Benevolent Association president Patrick Lynch.
“And that is exactly what the anti-cop crowd wants,” he continued. “If we have no cops because no one wants to be a cop, they will have achieved their ultimate goal.”
Fusion GPS, the group that hired former British spy Christopher Steele to investigate whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 election, received hundreds of dollars of coronavirus relief funds through the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program.
Records obtained by ProPublica show that Bean LLC, the parent company for Fusion GPS, applied for and received anywhere between $350,000 and $1 million.
Fusion GPS reportedly claimed that it needed the money to retain 15 employees.
The firm, which effectively acted as the middle-man between the Hillary Clinton campaign and the FBI, using backdoor channels to deliver opposition research to the Justice Department, was paid handsomely for its 2016 efforts to smear Trump.
Steele’s research, full of salacious innuendo from questionable sources within the Kremlin, was commissioned by the Perkins Coie law firm, which represented the Democratic National Committee.
Dr. Fiona Hill, the former expert on Russia for the National Security Council, even admitted during President Trump’s impeachment proceedings that the Steele dossier was a “rabbit hole” full of Russia disinformation.
But every time Republicans have tried to investigate the dossier or its connections to Fusion GPS, its founder, Glenn Simpson, and others have refused to answer questions.
This is just the latest example of PPP abuse throughout the coronavirus pandemic.
That included the George Soros-backed leftist propaganda outfit Media Matters for America, which received between $1 to 2 million dollars. Planned Parenthood clinics in more than two dozen states also received funds. So did sneaker brand Yeezy, which is owned by billionaire rapper and declared presidential candidate Kanye West.
Businesses owned by politicians on both sides of the political spectrum also borrowed from the program. Among them were a minor league baseball team owned by the family of Ohio’s GOP Gov. Mike DeWine; a communications company with ties to New Jersey Democrat Gov. Phil Murphy; and a group that manages resorts and wineries owned by California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Ironically, while the PPP loans were put in place to offset the economic losses from mandatory closures, Newsom also drew criticism over the fact that he had allowed his own Napa Valley-based PlumpJack Winery to remain open while forcing others to shutter during the pandemic.
‘Any “antiracist” movement that disregards how working- and middle-class African Americans define and pursue the good life is not worth its name…’
If you listen to mainstream news media and Democrat politicians, African Americans are united behind the radical group Black Lives Matter.
But multiple polls are telling a different story.
One of the chief claims of BLM and its supporters is that police are ruthlessly targeting black Americans and that law enforcement must be defunded and abolished.
The group’s organizers consider themselves abolitionists and have even vowed to abolish prisons.
“The prison industrial complex routinely targets and harms [b]lack people, immigrants, disabled people, sex workers, queer and transgender people, and poor people,” according to a statement on Rewire News.
But do peaceful, non-Marxist revolutionaries in the broader African–American community believe that the police are engaged in systemic “violence and torture” against black people?
Not if you ask them—which no one in the media seems to be doing.
Multiple polls show that African–American attitudes toward the police are anything but aligned with Black Lives Matter, even if they view the police as treating them unfairly.
Four polls, in particular, debunk the narrative, which Republicans like Maine Sen. Susan Collins continue to parrot. Collins recently claimed that African Americans believe “they can be killed anywhere at any time by anyone, but especially by law enforcement.”
But they do not, according to Michael Javen Fortner, a black liberal and author of “Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment.”
Fortner has pointed to a 2019 Pew survey showing 44 percent of blacks reported being “unfairly stopped by police” because of their race, though 54 percent said, “No, has not happened to me.”
He also cited a Monmouth poll that was taken after the police-involved death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota in May.
Forty-four percent of African American respondents said that they or an immediate family member has felt “harassed by police,” but a majority did not share that view.
“When asked, ‘How satisfied are you with the job your local police department does,’ 21 percent said ‘very satisfied,’ 51 percent said somewhat satisfied, 12 percent said somewhat dissatisfied,” Fortner highlighted from the Monmouth poll.
Only 5 percent of the respondents said they were “very” dissatisfied.
The center-right Powerline blog notes two other recent polls showing similar results.
In 2019, the left-leaning Vox media group conducted a poll that undermines the organization’s own left-wings reporting.
Despite being the racial group with the most unfavorable view of law enforcement, a majority of the black participants wanted more police officers in their neighborhoods.
The Vox finding wasn’t a fluke. A 2015 Gallup poll found that not only did blacks with unfavorable views of police want more police officers patrolling their living areas, but they were more likely to want them than African Americans who viewed police favorably.
More recently, a 2020 Yahoo News/YouGov survey taken after the death of George Floyd found a stunning 50 percent of all black respondents believed “we need more cops on the street.”
“Any ‘antiracist’ movement that disregards how working- and middle-class African Americans define and pursue the good life is not worth its name,” Fortner concluded about Black Lives Matter.
‘Lawless autonomous zones have no place in America. Any city or state that tolerates one should be legally on the hook for any tragedies that happen…’
(Michael Barnes, Liberty Headlines) Murder. Rape. Felony assault. Arson.
The list goes on, but a new bill would allow victims in so-called Black Lives Matter-inspired “autonomous zones” to sue cities and states for failing to protect them.
If the victim is killed, as in the case of two Seattle autonomous zone teenagers, then the deceased person’s spouse, parent or child can sue.
“The first order of government is to secure the blessings of liberty,” said Roy.
“Any state or city that takes federal funds and fails to enforce the laws should both lose those funds and be liable for the harm they have allowed to occur, including those allowing lawless ‘autonomous zones’ to be created,” he added.
The bill, also co-sponsored by North Carolina GOP Rep. Ted Budd, is a legislative fix for the astounding cowardice Democrat mayors and governors have shown in the face of rioters, looters and violent extremists.
In Seattle, Mayor Jenny Durkan and Gov. Jay Inslee, both left-wing Democrats, ceded territory to anarchists and race radicals in the city’s Capitol Hill area, which was aptly named CHAZ, or the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.
CHAZ then become CHOP, or the Capitol Hill Organized Protest. But murders, looted businesses and other serious crimes persisted, and elected officials hid behind sovereign immunity laws that protected them from accountability.
But the victims and their families will have to live with their losses long after the destruction is physically repaired and the mayhem subsides.
The congressmen’s bill will attempt to prevent other autonomous zones from occurring both now and in the future.
Chip Roy / IMAGE: CSPAN via YouTube
“Lawless autonomous zones have no place in America. Any city or state that tolerates one should be legally on the hook for any tragedies that happen,” said Budd.
“This bill would be a strong incentive to local jurisdictions to break up any remaining lawless zones or prevent one from being established in the first place,” he said.
‘While he joined in massive marches in the streets last month, he has now blocked Republican grassroots activists from peaceably assembling…’
Democratic Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner shut down the Texas GOP’s state convention next week, citing concerns about the rising number of COVID-19 cases in the state. Turner, however, had no problem attending a massive Black Lives Matter protest in the city just a few weeks ago.
Turner announced on Wednesday that he and the city attorney had reached out to Houston First, which owns the center where the Texas Republican Party was supposed to meet, and convinced the corporation to cancel the event.
“These are some very serious times,” Turner said, according to the Texas Tribune. “Simply, the public health concerns outweighed anything else.”
When asked why he had waited until the week before the convention to act, Turner claimed he didn’t want to “make it seem like [he was] going out of [his] way to close the door.”
“This is a political convention, and the last thing you want to do in the midst of a pandemic is to politicize it,” he said.
But that’s exactly what he’s done, according to Paul Simpson, the chair of the Harris County GOP.
Simpson pointed out that Turner had participated in a massive protest after the death of George Floyd, and called his “hypocritical flip flop on public gatherings” a “political stunt.”
“While he joined in massive marches in the streets last month, he has now blocked Republican grassroots activists from peaceably assembling even under the most strong health safeguards,” Simpson said. “The mayor should not abuse power for political ends.”
The Texas GOP said it is now looking at alternative options.
A Montgomery County judge offered to hold the convention at a venue in his community. But if worse comes to worst, the Republican Party said it plans to hold its convention virtually if the convention cannot meet in-person.
‘We celebrate Black Hawk’s legacy by offering ongoing reverent examples of Native American culture…’
In light of recent controversy, the NHL’s Chicago Blackhawks announced this week that they will not be changing their team name.
The team name honors a real-life Native American, Black Hawk of Illinois’s Sac & Fox Nation, the team said in a statement.
“We celebrate Black Hawk’s legacy by offering ongoing reverent examples of Native American culture, traditions and contributions, providing a platform for genuine dialogue with local and national Native American groups,” the team added, according to CNN.
There is a “fine line between respect and disrespect,” but it is not wrong to honor the legacy of a nation or man as the Blackhawks have done, the team continued.
The MLB’s Cleveland Indians said that they will be revamping their entire image, even though the original team name was in part a tribute to the success of Louis Sockalexis, a former Native American star in Cleveland.
Despite this, the team’s manager, Terry Francona, said that it’s time the team moves on.
“I know in the past, when I’ve been asked about, whether it’s our name or the Chief Wahoo, I think I would usually answer and say I know that we’re never trying to be disrespectful,” Francona said.
“And I still feel that way,” he continued. “But I don’t think that’s a good enough answer today. I think it’s time to move forward. It’s a very difficult subject. It’s also delicate.”
The NFL’s Washington Redskins—a team that has held out despite years of perennial complaints from left-wing groups—also agreed this week to undergo a “thorough review” of its team name after facing pressure from its stadium sponsor, FedEx.
Dan Snyder, owner of the Redskins, has long defended the name despite this criticism, but the demands from FedEx and other major sponsors—including Nike—seem to have have outweighed the principle.
“This process allows the team to take into account not only the proud tradition and history of the franchise but also input from our alumni, the organization, sponsors, the National Football League and the local community it is proud to represent on and off the field,” Snyder said in a statement on Friday.
Omar has paid Tim Mynett $878,930.65 in consulting fee services since she first ran for Congress.
This year alone, she has paid him $292,814.99 for digital advertising, fundraising consulting, and research services, according to the Federal Election Commission filings.
She married Mynett—her third husband—in March after denying allegations, first confirmed by Mynett’s ex-wife, that couple had been conducting an affair.
Omar divorced her estranged previous husband, Ahmed Hirsi, last fall, after the rumors first surfaced.
The freshman congresswoman’s payments to Mynett prompted an ethics complaint in August, but because the FEC allows lawmakers to work with and hire their family members or spouses, the payments are technically legal.
If the FEC did decide to investigate, however, Omar would need to prove that she his paying Mynett just as much or as little as she would pay a different consultant of no relation.
Omar has continuously denied any wrongdoing, blaming criticism of her affair and continued payments to Mynett on “rightwing Twitter trolls.”
My relationship with Tim began long after this work started.
We consulted with a top FEC campaign attorney to ensure there were no possible legal issues with our relationship. We were told this is not uncommon and that no, there weren’t.
Mynett’s ex-wife, Beth, insisted that Omar is not above scrutiny and that her financial dealings’ specially as they relate to her campaign, should be scrutinized.
“On reflection Defendant’s more recent travel and long work hours now appear to be more related to his affair with Rep. Omar than with his actual work commitments, averaging 12 days per month away from home over the past year,” Beth Mynett wrote in her divorce filings.
‘Joe Biden’s decade-long war against Catholic nuns and the Little Sisters of the Poor is finally over…’
After the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday in favor of faith-based organizations’ right to claim religious exemptions for contraceptives, Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden said that he would undo the exemption and force religious Americans to go back to court.
The Trump Administration is proactively working to strip Americans of their health care in a time when so many need affordable coverage the most.
It’s cruel — and it’s unacceptable.
— Team Joe (Text JOE to 30330) (@TeamJoe) July 8, 2020
The ruling validated President Donald Trump’s executive policy change, undoing the Obama-era mandate that required employers to cover contraceptives in their health insurance plans.
The Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic order of nuns, litigated the Obama-era mandate for nearly 10 years before the Supreme Court finally ruled in their favor this week. But in a statement on Wednesday, Biden argued that the ruling undermines access to contraception and the legacy of the Affordable Care Act.
“If I am elected, I will restore the Obama-Biden policy that existed before the Hobby Lobby ruling: providing an exemption for houses of worship and an accommodation for nonprofit organizations with religious missions,” Biden said.
He was referencing an earlier Supreme Court case against the Christian-base craft chain Hobby Lobby, in which the justices decided 5-4 that family-owned corporations that run on religious principles are exempt from the contraceptive mandate.
Biden then claimed that removing religious exemptions, like those protected by the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling and its Little Sisters of the Poor ruling, would still allow for a balance between employers’ objections and access to contraceptives for women who want it.
“The accommodation will allow women at these organizations to access contraceptive coverage, not through their employer-provided plan, but instead through their insurance company or a third-party administrator,” he said.
The Trump campaign, however, said that Biden would use this supposed balance to declare “war” on charities that disagreed with the Obama/Biden administration.
“Joe Biden’s decade-long war against Catholic nuns and the Little Sisters of the Poor is finally over,” said Ali Pardo, the Trump 2020 campaign’s deputy communications director.
“Today’s Supreme Court ruling is a landmark win for religious liberty,” Pardo said. “Unlike Joe Biden, President Trump has been a staunch defender of religious freedom since taking office and will always fight to defend communities of faith.”
‘The terrain of presidential contests is littered with nominees who saw a poll lead in the spring turn to dust in the fall…’
The leftist media’s brazen and cynical attempt to manufacture crises that will take down President Donald Trump in November have a good chance of backfiring, according to a professor at Long Island’s Stony Brook University who accurately predicted the 2016 outcome.
Helmut Norpoth, who boasts on The Primary Model of having accurately predicted five of the past six election cycles since 1996, first weighed the impact of the pandemic in March to reach his conclusion.
However, unlike the endless projections from so-called scientists about the virus’s health toll, the intervening four months have not prompted Norpoth to revise his political assessment, reported Mediaite on Tuesday.
He maintains that in a head-to-head matchup with presumptive Democrat nominee Joe Biden, the president stands a 91% chance according to his model.
“The Coronavirus outbreak appears not to have damaged Trump’s re-election prospects,” Norpoth wrote in an abstract to his analysis.
“To the contrary, his job approval rating ticked up and still holds at 49% in the May Gallup Poll,” he continued. “… In fact, the battle against the virus may help his re-election prospects by casting Trump as a wartime president, as happened with other presidents.”
Shifting Tradewinds—and Strategies
Indeed, Trump’s approval achieved a rare feat in the Gallup poll for May by surpassing his disapproval as the outrage over lockdowns shifted to blue-state governors.
In response, left-wing strategists and their media allies shifted tactics by suppressing coverage of the virus for several weeks and actively encouraging dangerous gatherings among vulnerable minority populations during recent race riots.
Black Lives Matter protest in San Francisco/Photo by vhines200 (CC)
The onslaught of anarchist demonstrations and the “woke” mob’s recent cultural attacks have emboldened the media to use racial discord as another political bludgeon, and the most recent figures see Trump’s approval ratings back to where they were during the height of the House Judiciary Committee’s partisan Ukraine investigations last fall.
But a growing backlash against the overreach of groups like Black Lives Matter, which has revealed itself to be a pro-Marxist political entity rather than a vehicle for positive social change promoting equality and unity, could lead to another upswing in the near future.
A separate poll released Wednesday by Monmouth University noted that while 8 in 10 respondents agreed in late June that Trump had not improved racial divisions, 74% felt the same about Black Lives Matter.
Significantly, the poll did not even ask about Biden, who either by his own lack of vision or by strategic media design has remained a non-factor in the national dialogue.
More recently, the mainstream press has ham-handedly attempted to balance the racial protests with an uptick in COVID cases, noting a surge among—surprise—young people and minorities, who were the primary demonstrators.
Because those under 65 have less risk of succumbing to the disease, barring any underlying risk factors that might compromise the immune system, they have downplayed the death rate and the likely causes of the surge, while focusing on trivialities like mask-wearing that are, again, intended to snipe at Trump-supporting skeptics.
Cyclical Patters and Anomalies
Norpoth warned that the disruptive effect of the coronavirus—with Democrats angling to renew lockdowns and extend the cancellation of things like schools, religious gatherings, sporting events, campaign rallies and political debates well into the fall—may cause him to revise his data in the future.
However, he outlined several other more reliable metrics that his model used under normal circumstances to give the edge to the incumbent president.
While it has only been active for the past quarter-century, The Primary Model relies on data tracking the cyclical patterns in elections, noted the Gateway Pundit.
Its data sets extend back nearly two centuries, since popular elections and the two-party system first took root in the 1828 race between Democrat Andrew Jackson and Republican John Quincy Adams—a rematch of the 1824 election, in which the outcome wound up being reversed.
Norpoth has applied the model retroactively to every election from the past 108 years.
“This model gets it right for 25 of the 27 elections since 1912, when primaries were introduced,” he told Mediaite.
Of the two in which it failed, both involved noted electoral anomalies: John F. Kennedy’s 1960 victory over Richard Nixon involved the first televised debates—a factor that historians have long ascribed for helping seal the “Camelot” candidate over the future Watergate perpetrator—then the incumbent vice president.
Future presidents John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon debate in 1960. / IMAGE: JFK Library via YouTube
However, more notably, records have suggested that the Kennedy political machine involved a sophisticated ballot-stuffing operation coordinated by the Massachusetts senator’s brother—and future attorney general—Robert F. Kennedy.
Even so, Kennedy won the official popular vote by only 112,827 ballots, or 0.17% of the total vote. In fact, Nixon carried four more states than Kennedy.
In the 2000 race between George W. Bush and Al Gore, the incumbent—albeit less-than-charismatic—vice president once again lost by the narrowest of margins to the affable scion of an elite political dynasty.
Bush carried 10 more states but allegedly lost the popular vote by 543,895, or 0.5% of the total. And the Electoral College victory came down to a single state—Florida—where the question of hanging chads and voter intentions drew out the race for weeks until the Supreme Court intervened to stop the count.
A Decisive Margin
Not surprisingly, given the impact of ballot questions in both of those narrow races, Democrats have pushed for an all-mail system in the upcoming election that would empower them to use their discretion in key swing states where they strategically oversee the certification process.
However, Norpoth said he was confident that Trump would prevail in a landslide that would leave no room for vote-fraudsters to sway the outcome.
President Donald Trump gestures to the audience during a rally in Charlotte, NC, before Super Tuesday. / PHOTO: Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines
He projected that Trump’s Electoral College margin, which was 304 in 2016, giving him a decisive win over Hillary Clinton, would expand to 362—nearly as big a win as his predecessor, Barack Obama, had in his first campaign, the 2008 victory over Arizona Sen. John McCain.
As with Obama’s win, Norpoth said Trump’s biggest advantage remains the enthusiasm within his base—and the party at large. By contrast, Biden’s brutal primary win in a crowded field suggested the exact opposite.
“The terrain of presidential contests is littered with nominees who saw a poll lead in the spring turn to dust in the fall,” Norpoth told Mediaite. “The list is long and discouraging for early frontrunners.
Biden’s losses in the two earliest nominating contests—Iowa and New Hampshire—signaled a strong ambivalence to his manufactured appeal, as if voters were simply settling for him.
And, as conventional wisdom would dictate base on recent political history, Norpoth said there was no reason to weigh the constantly fluctuating opinion surveys, which are consistent only in their leftward skew.
“Polls and poll-based forecasts all handed Hillary Clinton a certain victory,” he noted.
