‘There will be a lawsuit, and I want to be the lead plaintiff…’
Gavin Newsom / IMAGE: City of Cupertino via YouTube
(Michael Barnes, Liberty Headlines) Promises made, promises not kept.
That’s been the driving theme behind California’s bullet-train fiasco. It began with a climate-friendly voter referendum in 2008 and has since chugged along deeper and deeper into taxpayer-funded debt while failing to deliver on the most basic aspects of the proposal.
The “green” public-transit initiative was supposed to connect San Francisco to Anaheim along a 520-mile rail line at a cost of $33.6 billion. Twelve years later, only 119 miles of rail is expected to be built, and costs have swelled to more than $100 billion.
But the latest broken promise violates a portion of the original ballot measure that stated that future passenger service would not require “operating subsidies.”
State and federal taxpayers were to foot the bill for construction, but proceeds from paying customers were supposed to fund the costs of operating the train and any additional operating costs stemming from connecting rail lines.
Now, Democrat California Gov. Gavin Newsom is shamelessly back-tracking.
Newsom’s plan involves shifting operations to an entity other than the California High-Speed Rail Authority after a proposed electrified portion of the track is built. It’s a paper-shuffling maneuver that circumvents the intent of the initial referendum.
According to the Los Angeles Times, former California Gov. Jerry Brown and other progressive train supporters were adamant that the project would be so successful that it would turn a profit while combating climate change.
That never happened, and Newsom is facing legal push-back for trying to dump future operating expenses onto the same taxpayers whom California politicians have been ripping off for more than a decade.
“It defies the ballot measure approved by voters,” said Quentin Kopp, a former judge and state senator who was a key architect of the bullet train program and former chairman of the High-Speed Rail Board of Directors.
“Once you establish the concept, the sky is the limit. There will be a lawsuit, and I want to be the lead plaintiff,” she said.
‘Of course the governor has been telling people to stay home … it also true she’s been urging New Mexicans to find ways to support local businesses…’
Michelle Lujan Grisham / IMAGE: Bloomberg Politics via Youtube
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) Democratic New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham violated her own shelter-in-place order to buy jewelry from store that should have been closed under her executive order, according to KRQE News 13.
Grisham ordered all nonessential businesses to close on April 3, praising New Mexico’s residents for the “incredible, personal sacrifices that happen every single day because people have limited their ability to work.”
But as it turns out, Grisham allowed at least one business to open so she could purchase jewelry from it, according to an employee at Lilly Barrack.
The governor ordered the jewelry over the phone a week before Easter. The employee then went to the store, got the jewelry, and placed it outside the door of the store where one of Grisham’s aides could pick it up.
The owner of Lilly Barrack said that she was not aware that Grisham had made this request and that no one was allowed in the stores at that time due to Grisham’s shelter-in-place order.
Grisham, however, claimed through a spokesman that her request was reasonable because she had “a longstanding personal relationship” with the employee.
The employee went to Lilly Barrack, “got the jewelry and took it home, left it outside their home and then someone came and picked it up,” the spokesman explained.
Either way, Grisham’s request forced an employee who should have been at home to leave her house, go to a closed store, and interact remotely with one of Grisham’s aides.
Other jewelry stores in the area said they’ve lost hundreds of thousands in sales because they’ve had to limit their business to online sales only. As far as they knew, delivery or appointment-based sales were not an option. But apparently there was a loophole in Grisham’s order that only she knew how to exploit.
Grisham’s office admitted that this transaction was “unusual,” but defended it anyways.
“Of course the governor has been telling people to stay home to the greatest extent possible, it also true she’s been urging New Mexicans to find ways to support local businesses,” her office said in a statement.
UPDATE: Breitbart reports that Joe Biden has cancelled plans to hold an online fundraiser by Mueller investigation prosecutor Andrew Weissmann.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE: (Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Andrew Weissmann—the ex-deep-state operative who leapfrogged from being a Justice Department investigator, to Mueller’s sidekick, to Trump-bashing MSNBC commentator—has another new role: Biden fundraiser.
“It doesn’t get any swampier than this: trying to stage a partisan coup against the president and then raising money for his political opponent,” said Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh, according to American Greatness.
Weissmann was forced to resign his MSNBC post for violating the company policy regarding conflicts of interest—as if there were ever any doubt on where he stood politically—when he agreed to campaign overtly for President Donald Trump’s presumptive 2020 rival, Joe Biden.
The move underscores the troublesome line-blurring that was ever-present within the Obama Justice Department, where Weissmann first played a role in helping orchestrate the Russian-collusion hoax by working with Bruce Ohr, an assistant-deputy attorney general, to promote the now-debunked Steele Dossier.
He then became one of several blatantly biased staffers on Robert Mueller‘s investigative team, where he gained a reputation as a prosecutorial “pit bull” and was dubbed by Michael Flynn’s attorney, Sidney Powell, as “the poster boy for prosecutorial misconduct.”
So dedicated was Weissmann to his work—or rather to the ideology behind it—that he went public with his Trump hatred after the Mueller probe concluded, providing “analysis” for the leftist Rachel Maddow network MSNBC during House Democrats’ Ukraine impeachment scheme and subsequent efforts to undermine the current administration.
But American Greatness speculated that it was the recent push-back from the DOJ that may have compelled Weissmann to go a step beyond openly broadcasting his bias to actively working for the president’s Democrat adversary.
Sources including Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., the ranking minority member of the House Intelligence Committee, suggested that Weissmann may be among those facing prosecution for their role in the Russia hoax.
“We’re doing a large criminal referral on the Mueller dossier team that put together a fraudulent report—that knew there was no collusion the day that Mueller walked in the door,” Nunes told Fox News’s Gregg Jarrett recently.
“They set an obstruction of justice trap,” Nunes continued. “There’s no doubt in my mind that we will make a conspiracy referral there.”
As the investigation by special prosecutor John Durham begins to close in on the bad actors who knowingly plotted these seditious schemes and deliberately duped the American people into wasting millions of dollars on the partisan probe, the one-time pit bull now finds himself in the cross-hairs of justice.
Weissmann’s last hope at evading accountability is to restore the corrupt influence within the Oval Office and hope that his political patronage will be returned, quid-pro-quo style, with a presidential pardon should Biden be elected.
‘For far too long right-wing media has dominated our discourse and Facebook news feeds…’
Joe Biden / IMAGE: MSNBC via YouTube
(Michael Barnes, Liberty Headlines) The cognitive deficits of Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee, Joe Biden, have been on full display during the 2020 election season, and so have his technological deficits.
Whereas President Donald Trump has mastered social media and the art of influencing online news cycles, Biden has appeared dazed and confused—if he’s appeared at all.
But progressive Silicon Valley tech billionaires are rapidly stepping up on Biden’s behalf.
Tech gurus like LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz—even Laurene Powell Jobs, the wife of deceased Apple co-founder Steve Jobs—have funded Democratic efforts to oust Republicans and destroy President Trump.
Now, they’re ramping up their deep-pocketed activism, not only to fund the Biden campaign but to wield their centralized power over online information through undisclosed means and murky political start-ups.
According to the far-left website Vox, Silicon Valley elites are spending tens of millions of dollars on sweeping plans to influence the November election.
Funding partisan “news” websites, political-science experiments and a takeover of the Democratic National Committee’s data operations are just some of the billionaires’ election-meddling pursuits that are already underway.
Their efforts are reportedly equal parts loathing of President Trump and exasperation over Biden’s lack of digital competency and awareness.
“Because the Biden campaign is the Biden campaign,” said one Democratic operative involved, “what we are doing on the independent side matters a hell of a lot more than it would previously.”
Perhaps surprisingly, the Democratic mega-donors see themselves as playing catch-up with Republicans rather than building on past success.
In 2016, Schmidt, a prominent Obama-Clinton donor with an estimated net worth of $15 billion, funded a group of top technologists in support of the Hillary Clinton campaign. The effort failed, and many Silicon Valley Democrats, along with some Biden officials, are wary about Schmidt repeating his past mistakes.
This time he’s created an organization called the Democratic Data Exchange to work with the DNC and encourage data-sharing among state parties while improving their digital capabilities.
But all that glitters isn’t gold. Billions of dollars in personal wealth and smug, coastal-tech attitudes aren’t a winning approach with many state-party officials. It’s the same division within the Democratic Party that helped sink Clinton in 2016.
“My problem is when Silicon Valley folks think that they know how to do our jobs better,” Jane Kleeb, the chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, told Vox.
“I would never walk into Google or anywhere else and say, ‘Your model sucks,’” she continued. “I don’t second-guess them, and I’m asking them not to second-guess us.”
The Democratic Data Exchange is a rival program to Hoffman’s data-storage operation known as Alloy.
Reid Hoffman/Photo by Joi (CC)
The controversial Hoffman already has invested $18 million in his political startup. The self-described purpose of Alloy is to collect as much data on voters as possible and influence their voting decisions.
In 2018, Hoffman helped conduct a nefarious election effort in Alabama during a special Senate election to replace then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
After Democratic Sen. Doug Jones narrowly won, it was discovered that Hoffman funded a secret group that used social media “disinformation” tactics similar to those allegedly made by Russian operatives during the 2016 election.
Hoffman later apologized for his involvement, though he appears anything but remorseful.
Hoffman is now looking to take his proclivities for “fake news” to a new level. His aides have leaked plans for a series of partisan news websites that admittedly “masquerade as journalism.”
Along with allied progressive donors, Hoffman has put $15 million into a group called MotivAI, a digital advertising firm that creates what many consider the same type of misinformation he pushed in the 2018 midterms.
Hoffman has also partnered with Steve Jobs’s billionaire widow to fund another secretive propaganda group called Acronym.
For all the feigned outrage at conservative social-media disinformation, which ostensibly was the basis for recent anti-Trump censorship policies, Silicon Valley progressives are now openly championing election propaganda.
“For far too long right-wing media has dominated our discourse and Facebook news feeds,” said Tara McGowan, founder of Acronym.
“We can’t sit by another cycle and watch a one-sided battle play out online,” she said.
The company wishes to pretend to care about employees’ free expression, while still wanting to … sanction unpopular speech on the sly…’
Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco / IMAGE: Émile Guérin via YouTube
(Joshua Paladino, Liberty Headlines) Twitter claims that “all voices” are “welcome” and “needed,” yet the company rejected a proposal that would have included non-discrimination protections for employees who express unpopular beliefs.
Scott Shepard, who coordinates the Free Enterprise Project, introduced the proposal to protect all viewpoints at Twitter’s annual shareholder meeting this week, the National Center for Public Policy Research reported.
Twitter’s careers page on its website promises open dialogue for its employees, even though the platform does not offer the same protections for users.
“Open platform, open workplace. Healthy conversation is open and honest,” the website reads. “At Twitter everyone speaks their minds, even when it’s an unpopular opinion. That’s because we respect and trust each other enough to make space for disagreement and debate.”
Shepard said that Twitter’s non-discrimination policy includes protections for “gender, race, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, religion, age [and] disability,” but not for unpopular beliefs and opinions.
Twitter officials said additional protections against viewpoint discrimination are unnecessary because the company “make[s] clear to applicants that we will not discriminate on the basis of any legally protected status.”
Yet, conservative and Christian political opinions, which Twitter often targets, do not fall under any of the legally protected categories.
Twitter even targets opinions that simply buck the corporate media’s Official Narrative.
Plus, Shepard said that Twitter has included some protections “that are not required by law,” such as those for sexual orientation and gender identity.
“In other words, it is willing to supplement the legally required minimum for categories when it wants to do so,” Shepard said.
“From these passages on Twitter’s own website, we can only conclude that the company wishes to pretend to care about employees’ free expression, while still wanting to be able to police and sanction unpopular speech on the sly,” he continued.
‘I think a lot of the donor base, on board and coming, would prefer almost anyone but Elizabeth…’
Elizabeth Warren / IMAGE: The Late Late Show with James Corden via Youtube
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., is rumored to be on presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden’s shortlist of vice-presidential running mates.
But choosing her could electoral consequences that outlast Biden’s campaign.
There’s a good possibility that Warren’s Senate seat could be filled by a Republican if Biden chooses Warren to share the ticket.
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker is a Republican, and he has the power to pick anyone he wants to fill her seat should it become vacant.
The state’s leftward tilt means Baker’s replacement would likely be temporary, but even temporary loss would be bad news for Democrats, who are eager to retake the Senate this November.
Establishment Democrats are already concerned about Warren’s VP chances. Wealthy donors reportedly urged Biden’s campaign not to choose Warren—no matter how appealing her progressive agenda might be to leftists.
“I think a lot of the donor base, on board and coming, would prefer almost anyone but Elizabeth,” one longtime Biden fundraiser said earlier this month.
Warren’s extreme, anti-corporate agenda is red flag to many of Biden’s donors, who worry that her leftist policies could cost Biden the election.
Instead, they’ve pushed him toward alternatives perceived to be slightly less radical, such as Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. And because Harris and Klobuchar represent states with Democratic governors, their vacant seats aren’t that big of a concern.
Biden, however, has maintained regular contact with Warren. He plans to hold a big online fundraiser with her on June 15, and she has even begun to reach out to Biden’s Senate allies in the hopes that he’ll choose her, according to The Hill.
Biden has also adopted a few of Warren’s leftist policies, and his campaign hired two of her fundraising advisers in late April.
‘When large, powerful social media companies censor opinions with which they disagree, they exercise a dangerous power…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A day after Twitter implemented its duplicitous new policy for fact-checking President Donald Trump, the president struck back with an executive order to hold the notoriously biased social-media giant more accountable for its own practices.
This will be a Big Day for Social Media and FAIRNESS!
The website Protocol appeared to have obtained in advance a leaked draft version of the order, which called out online platforms for “invoking inconsistent, irrational, and groundless justifications to censor or otherwise punish Americans’ speech.”
However, the order not only held to task Twitter for its double-standards and censorship against conservatives.
It also criticized platforms like Google that were “profiting from and promoting the aggression and disinformation spread by foreign governments like China” as the president seeks to hold the Asian super-power fully accountable for its cover-up of the coronavirus.
Trump’s order sought to clarify the vague statutory immunity that many virtue-signaling Silicon Valley megaliths have claimed via the Communications Decency Act.
Currently, it allows these online platforms to assert “publisher” status and receive First Amendment freedom from many forms of oversight while simultaneously denying some users that same right by claiming they are private companies able to set their own arbitrary community guidelines.
Twitter / IMAGE: myoldtechchannel via YouTube
The law stipulates that such publishers are permitted to make “good faith” efforts to filter specific violations of content that are considered “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable.”
But the new order charges that those going outside the scope of the law to further censor speech should be designated as “editor” instead of “publisher,” and therefore subject to legal constraints such as defamation laws.
“When an interactive computer service provider removes or restricts access to content and its actions do not meet the criteria … it is engaged in editorial conduct,” said the order.
“By making itself an editor of content … such a provider forfeits any protection from being deemed a ‘publisher or speaker’ … which properly applies only to a provider that merely provides a platform for content supplied by others,” it said.
The executive action also proposes several other changes including:
A comprehensive review of federal advertising dollars spent on the tech platforms
Additional measures empowering the Federal Trade Commission to penalize platforms that exhibit bias
Establishment of a panel to review complaints of unfair or deceptive practices like user “watch lists”
Trump noted in the order that such platforms have become essential services to many, but that the current practices they engaged had the potential to do more harm than benefit.
“In a country that has long cherished the freedom of expression, we cannot allow a limited number of online platforms to hand-pick the speech that Americans may access and convey online,” said the order.
“This practice is fundamentally un-American and anti-democratic,” it said. “When large, powerful social media companies censor opinions with which they disagree, they exercise a dangerous power.”
After long benefiting from the ideological imbalance, though, the Left made clear that it had no intention of relinquishing its advantage without a fight.
Prior to the release of the executive order on Thursday, Breitbart reported on the launch of a new activist group called Accountable Tech that aimed, in true Orwellian fashion, to do just the opposite of its name by lobbying to ensure that platforms continued to be unaccountable for their censorship.
The dark-money-funded group filed as a tax-exempt “social welfare” organization, but its two listed employees were tied to a long list of partisan causes and campaigns.
Despite the blatant lies apparent in the group’s mission statement, Twitter had not yet, at press time, “contextualized” any of its tweets with a “fact check.”
.@accountabletech will push for social media platforms to take immediate, meaningful, and achievable actions to better serve the public & live up to their founding ideals.
‘After media reports appeared that suggested a change in CDC’s view on transmissibility, it became clear that these edits were confusing…’
Coronavirus / IMAGE: KHOU 11 via YouTube
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) Just one week after publishing guidance that suggested it was unlikely COVID-19 could spread via surfaces, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention flip-flopped yet again.
Earlier this month, the CDC said on its website that the coronavirus “does not spread easily [from] touching surfaces or objects.” This was, of course, after the CDC had argued the coronavirus could live on surfaces for up to three days.
Now, the CDC has updated its website to say that it “may be possible” to contract COVID-19 by touching a contaminated surface and then touching your eyes, nose or mouth.
Somehow this flip-flop is the media’s fault, according to the CDC.
“After media reports appeared that suggested a change in CDC’s view on transmissibility, it became clear that these edits were confusing,” the agency said in a statement. “[Surface transmission] is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads, but we are still learning more about how this virus spreads.”
This isn’t the only thing the so-called experts have gotten wrong. Three scientists are now saying that a 6-foot distance might not be enough to prevent the spread of the coronavirus—a recommendation originally made by the World Health Organization.
If these scientists are correct, the WHO will have been proved wrong yet again. This is, after all, the group that parroted communist China’s talking points and assured the world that the coronavirus could not spread via human-to-human contact in the early days of the outbreak.
And let’s not forget about health officials’ ever-changing guidance on face masks. In February, U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams tweeted that masks “are not effective in preventing the general public from catching coronavirus.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, made a similar claim in March, telling 60 Minutes that the general public “should not be walking around with masks.”
Now, however, health officials are encouraging everyone to wear masks in public, and many businesses and stores across the country are requiring them upon entry.
‘If those things were not true, then she may not have qualified as an expert…’
Tara Reade/IMAGE: YouTube
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) A California district attorney launched an investigation this week into whether Tara Reade, the former congressional staffer who has accused presidential candidate Joe Biden of sexual assault, gave false testimony as an expert witness.
Reade provided testimony as an expert witness in domestic violence cases for Monterey County for years under the name Alexandra McCabe, according to the county’s chief assistant district attorney, Berkley Brannon. Now, Brannon is wondering whether Reade lied about her credentials to qualify as an expert.
“We are investigating whether Ms. McCabe gave false testimony under oath,” Brannon said, according to Politico. “I will not provide details about the investigation or provide updates until it is complete.”
Brannon’s investigation was launched in light of recent reports questioning whether Reade lied about completing her bachelor’s degree and taking the bar exam. Defense attorneys have reportedly asked Brannon to subpoena Reade’s academic records so they can determine whether Reade was telling the truth about these accomplishments.
If she was not telling the truth, Patrick McKenna, the executive director of the Sixth District Appellate Program, told Politico he might challenge certain convictions in which Reade was involved.
“If those things were not true, then she may not have qualified as an expert or had the defense attorneys known about these things, they could have asked her about these things in court. It would go directly toward her credibility,” he said.
Brannon said her office doesn’t know just how many cases Reade testified in.
“We have no database or search engine to use to determine in how many cases she testified,” Brannon said. “However, that effort is ongoing.”
Democrats have used these recent reports to undermine the credibility of Reade and her allegation against Biden.
The Biden, former vice president and presumptive Democrat presidential nominee, has denied her allegations. However at least four independent sources, supported by a court document and a television clip from the 1990s, have corroborated Reade’s story.
‘I don’t agree with its message and I don’t like the misleading use of facts in its narrative…’
Michael Moore / IMAGE: MSNBC via Youtube
(Michael Barnes, Liberty Headlines) Liberal firebrand Michael Moore got a taste of YouTubecensorship on Monday when his latest film project was taken down because it exposed the renewable-energy industry.
Moore has a long history of cashing in on left-wing anti-American documentaries, but this time his activism upset Silicon Valley and Wall Street progressives.
In the past, Moore blamed traditional America and law-abiding gun owners for a horrific school shooting in Bowling for Columbine (2002). He used the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to slander President George W. Bush prior to his reelection in Fahrenheit 911 (2004), and he praised Fidel Castro’s communist Cuban regime for its socialized health care system in his film Sicko (2007).
His latest film, called Planet of the Humans, was banished from the world’s largest video website—which is owned by Google, the world’s largest internet search engine—after a complaint from a photographer who claimed his work was featured in the film without his permission.
“I don’t agree with its message and I don’t like the misleading use of facts in its narrative,” photographer Toby Smith told The Guardian.
A few seconds of Smith’s video, Rare Earthenware, was reportedly used.
But director Jeff Gibbs says the copyright violation is just a ruse to bury Planet of the Humans because it runs afoul of corporate and political climate change interests. By Monday, the film had gained more than 8 million views.
“This attempt to take down our film and prevent the public from seeing it is a blatant act of censorship by political critics of Planet of the Humans,” Gibbs said in a statement.
“It is a misuse of copyright law to shut down a film that has opened a serious conversation about how parts of the environmental movement have gotten into bed with Wall Street,” he said.
In one instance, the film depicts the Shiguai coal mine in Inner Mongolia, China, and shows how coal and rare earth mining are used to destroy the environment and place workers in unsafe conditions while making solar panels and wind turbines.
Moore is facing a firestorm of criticism from his usual media and environmentalist allies.
Among the chief complaints are his assertions that solar and wind power are as harmful to the environment as fossil fuels and that many environmentalist organizations are in the pockets of politically-connected, taxpayer-supported renewable energy companies.
Conservatives and free-market leaning groups have long substantiated such claims and endured the censorship and abuse that Moore is now subjected.
A Harvard study has debunked many of the proposed benefits renewable energy is supposed to offer, and evidence that government-subsidized renewable programs cause more pollution than fossil fuels has long been understood.
