(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The well-publicized, high-stakes special election in North Carolina‘s 9th Congressional District seems to have been a rude awakening for some of its former voters who only now are seeing the effects of Democrat-led gerrymandering forced by the activist courts.
Hundreds of voters from Charlotte and surrounding Mecklenburg County showed up at the polls Tuesday expecting to have their say in the race to fill the last disputed seat of the midterm election, only to be disappointed, reported the Charlotte Observer.
We have had a number of calls this morning of folks wanting to vote in today’s election for the 9th Congressional District. The Town of Huntersville is in the 12th Congressional District.
The historically red 9th district—which wrapped around the affluent southern suburbs of Charlotte, the state’s largest city—was forcibly redrawn in 2017 after left-wing activists sued the state’s Republican-led legislature, claiming racism had factored into the map’s creation during the previous round of redistricting.
Last year’s victory by Republican candidate Mark Harris over Democrat Dan McCready was invalidated after partisan members of the State Board of Elections claimed ballot fraud against a longtime political operative in one of the rural counties within the new district.
In the special election, McCready—now at the tail-end of a two-year-long campaign—faced Republican state Sen. Dan Bishop, as well as two other outside candidates. Outside political-action committees invested millions in TV ads and other get-out-the-vote messaging.
North Carolina 9th District Special Election / PHOTO: Liberty Headlines
The close involvement of President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence made it a mandate on the president’s administration if not a bellwether portending the outcome of his re-election campaign next year.
But while the media has hyped the district’s conservative history, most have remained silent on the redistricting that drastically shifted the electoral dynamics.
So silent, it seems, that even the voters were caught unaware.
Kristin Mavromatis, spokeswoman for the Mecklenburg County Board of Elections, said she was one of the local officials who was inundated with calls from angry voters claiming they had been disenfranchised.However, she shrugged off the confusion, saying it was their obligation and civic duty to be aware of what district they were in.
“Know before you go,” Mavromatis told the Observer. “There is some onus on the voter.”
‘The greatest—and perhaps only—foreign policy accomplishment of the Trump administration has been the development of a coherent and genuinely bipartisan policy toward Xi Jinping ’s China…’
George Soros/photo by Niccolò Caranti (CC)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) George Soros, one of the most reviled villains on the political Left, offered surprise praise to President Donald Trump for his handling of the ongoing trade war with China.
Soros is said to have doubled-down heavily on the Chinese yuan prior to the 2008 crash that ushered in a recession in the U.S. and other Western countries, to the benefit of the Asian market.
But he has since encouraged a hard-line approach to dealing with China and seems to have welcomed Trump’s calls to divest in its rival industries.
“The greatest—and perhaps only—foreign policy accomplishment of the Trump administration has been the development of a coherent and genuinely bipartisan policy toward Xi Jinping ’s China,” Soros began in an op-ed piece published Monday by the Wall Street Journal.
Nonetheless, the billionaire financier—whose so-called philanthropic ventures are heavily invested in open borders and many subversive efforts to disrupt America’s democratic process—said he feared Trump may cave in negotiations by offering concessions to Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei.
“It’s hard to know exactly what’s motivating Mr. Trump,” Soros said, “but he appears desperate for a deal with President Xi to bolster the U.S. stock market and economy to improve his chances at re-election—putting his electoral interests ahead of America’s interests.”
Huawei is currently on the Commerce Department’s “entity list,” which labels it a “national security threat” and prevents U.S. companies from engaging in business with it, CNBC reported.
Soros called on readers to support Republican-led efforts in Congress that would block the company’s removal from the entity list.
“If Republicans allow Mr. Trump to bail out the Communist Party-run telecom giant, they will be abdicating their most basic democratic responsibilities,” he said.
Huawei—along with another sanctioned Chinese company, ZTE—has been a key player in the race to develop the 5G radio network that will replace existing cell-phone and Internet technology over the next few years, rendering old 4G devices obsolete.
Many fear that its technology could surreptitiously aid the Chinese government with spying.
The Justice Department previously filed charges accusing Huawei of corporate espionage and fraudulent trade practices.
Additionally, it may be “a dangerous rival in artificial intelligence and machine learning,” Soros said.
However, the ban on doing business with American companies has given it a disadvantage by blocking crucial access to developing technologies, he added.
“[F]or now it still depends on about 30 U.S. companies to supply Huawei with the core components it needs to compete in the 5G market,” Soros said.
Soros admitted that he, too, had his own business interests in mind by wanting to limit China’s competitive advantage because his “open societies” agenda ran counter to the country’s more totalitarian policies, such as a social-credit system that may restrict travel.
Of course, the 89-year-old plutocrat likely has a considerable financial stake tied to the Asian markets, as well.
In 2011, he wrote that China’s decision to devalue the yuan—generally giving it a competitive edge over U.S. rivals—could also spike inflation in the country, just as it was beginning to surpass Western economies.
China recently announced a plan to do the same as it sought to undermine U.S. tariffs on its products.
That could signal that Soros needs the U.S. to win the trade war in order to protect his investments.
More likely, though, is that he stands to gain the most by having everybody lose.
A sustained trade war between the two economic forces would risk triggering another unstable market that would leave him well positioned both politically and economically.
“The reality is that we are in a Cold War that threatens to turn into a hot one,” Soros said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last January.
“On the other hand, if Xi and Trump were no longer in power, an opportunity would present itself to develop greater cooperation between the two cybersuperpowers,” he added.
Charlotte CBS affiliate WBTV reported that 489 ICE detainers were dismissed because they were declined by law agencies between Oct. 1, 2018 and Aug. 17, 2019.
That amounted to around 16 percent of the 2975 prepared detainers that ICE submitted to the state’s 100 sheriff’s departments.
“The level of criminal aliens intentionally released into Mecklenburg and the surrounding counties is alarming,” said a senior official with the Department of Homeland Security who spoke to WBTV on condition of anonymity, “but even worse is that the true extent of this dangerous trend may never be fully realized.”
In order for ICE to maintain the statistics on criminal illegals and enter them into a national database, the agency must first be aware of their having been arrested and detained.
“If an illegal alien is arrested for a crime and is then released by local law enforcement without ever alerting ICE officials, a lifted detainer will never be registered in our systems and the alien may only come to our attention once it’s too late,” the DHS official said.
Most—if not all—of the refusals are likely to have come from a group of five newly-elected Democrat sheriffs who campaigned on platforms of ending ICE cooperation in liberal-leaning metropolitan districts surrounding cities like Charlotte, Durham and Raleigh.
As a result, the state has been a hotbed of debate over the duty of local authorities to cooperate with the federal immigration agency, which has become anathema to some on the far Left.
Calls to abolish ICE peaked last year, not long after President Donald Trump implemented a short-lived policy of family separations at the Mexico border. The move was part of an ongoing effort to close widely abused asylum loopholes that allowed families to be released after no more than 20 days of detention.
As blue states rushed to pass “sanctuary” legislation that would codify their non-cooperation with ICE, North Carolina sheriffs like Mecklenburg County’s Garry McFadden and Wake County’s Gerald Baker hopped on the bandwagon—against the will of their Republican-led state legislature.
In August, the NC General Assembly sought unsuccessfully to pass a law (vetoed by Democrat Gov. Roy Cooper) forcing the sheriffs to cooperate.
Charlotte Sheriff Gary McFadden/IMAGE: Garry Mcfadden 4Sherrif via Youtube
McFadden—whose county encompasses the state’s largest city, Charlotte—drew considerable backlash in the public after some of the immigrants released went on to commit other violent crimes.
In one case, a Honduran national who had been arrested previously for domestic assault forced a nine-hour stand-off with authorities, including a SWAT team.
McFadden and others have maintained that their informal cooperation with immigration authorities on detainer requests and the 287(g) program—a program that deputizes local police to act as immigration-enforcement officials—created mistrust within their immigrant-heavy communities that hindered the fulfillment of their responsibilities.
Detractors—including many of the state’s Republican legislators, ICE officials and a U.S. attorney—have said not only does it renege on the sheriff’s sworn duty to prevent crime, but that it results in a greater presence of federal authorities in the community who must then re-arrest criminals for deportation.
“The reality is that when they obstruct federal law enforcement’s mission of upholding our nation’s laws and keeping American’s safe, the people who lose most are those they’re supposed to put first,” the DHS official told WBTV.
Following the high-profile cases of recidivism by recently released illegals, McFadden deflected blame onto ICE for failing to obtain federal warrants that would force cooperation, as well as the judges who set bond and other terms of release.
McFadden also accused state legislator of racism in passing the cooperation bill, HB 370, since all of the sheriffs in the state who have refused to cooperate with ICE are black. The bill was supported by state Sheriff’s Association.
McFadden whined in August that members of the community had begun to turn on him.
“I have to be more cautious,” he told Charlotte’s WSOC. “I get death threats. I get people openly telling me what they want to do to me and my family.”
He said the immigration battle within the politicized department had drawn its focus away from other areas like gun violence and murders, although correlations are known to exist between those and illegal immigration populations.
“We aren’t even discussing the 70-some murders in Charlotte,” McFadden said. “We aren’t discussing mass shootings. We aren’t discussing school shootings. We are so focused on immigration, we have neglected our community.”
‘It is impossible for a building to fall the way it fell without explosives being involved…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A four-year study by a coalition of architectural scholars reports that fire did not cause the collapse of one of the World Trade Center buildings on Sept. 11, 2001.
Rather, the study said the collapse of WTC 7 was the result of a simultaneous collapse of its support columns—a point sure to stir discussion among so-called truthers, who claim the nation’s deadliest terrorist attack was an inside job.
The project, underwritten by the nonprofit Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, simulated extensively the various scenarios that would have caused the collapse of the 47-story building, which stood just north of the Twin Towers.
“It is our conclusion that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near simultaneous failure of all columns in the building and not a progressive collapse involving the sequential failure of columns throughout the building,” said the study.
“Despite simulating a number of hypothetical scenarios, we were unable to identify any progressive sequence of failures that could have taken place on September 11, 2001, and caused 112 a total collapse of the building, let alone the observed straight-down collapse with approximately 2.5 seconds of free fall and minimal differential movement of the exterior.”
Official reports indicated that the building collapsed around 5:20 p.m. after debris from the falling North Tower ignited fires, causing the steel support beams to melt. (The two Twin Towers, on the other hand, collapsed as the result of the impact from being hit by Al Qaeda-hijacked commercial airliners.)
WTC 7 was said to have been the “first and only steel skyscraper in the world to collapse because of fire,” according to a 2008 BBC News story after the National Institute of Standards and Technology released its “conclusive” study, temporarily tamping down truthers’ hypotheses.
Prior to that, conspiracy theorists like “View” co-host Rosie O’Donnell had openly questioned the assertion that fire caused the third building to collapse.
“It is impossible for a building to fall the way it fell without explosives being involved,” O’Donnell said on a March 2007 broadcast of the ABC talk show, as reported by Popular Mechanics.
“For the first time in history, steel was melted by fire,” she said. “It is physically impossible.”
The building, which housed offices for the Secret Service and CIA, rapidly fell inward on itself roughly seven hours after the other two buildings collapsed, leading some to speculate that it was a controlled explosion.
Almost 20 years later, the debate now rages on.
The new AE911 report said that the earlier report based its conclusions on a faulty model.
“NIST over-estimated the rigidity of the outside frame by not modeling its connections, essentially treating the exterior steel framing as thermally fixed, which caused all thermally-induced floor expansion to move away from the exterior,” it said.
The research was conducted through the Institute of Northern Engineering at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. While the recent release is said to be a draft version, the institute is in the process of uploading its complete data, which it will submit for both peer review and public comment before finalizing the report sometime after Nov. 1 this year.
Already, the AE911 website contains ample evidence to support its theory, including testimonials and simulations of the building’s fall.
‘The devil lives in the details if the details that you’re talking about would affect the outcome of something that is about to happen or should happen…’
Joe Biden / IMAGE: The Late Show with Stephen Colbert via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) For weeks after other Democratic primary candidates were well into their campaigns, former Vice President Joe Biden kept politicos in suspense, insisting that he needed to be at 100 percent.
In late February, for instance, he told an audience at the University of Delaware, “I am certain about where the family is. But the second piece is that I don’t want this to be a fool’s errand, and I want to make sure that if we do this—and we’re very close to getting to a decision—that I am fully prepared to do it.”
But on Wednesday, the gaffe-prone, flip–flopping, forgetful front-runner in the Democratic primary said on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” that it was the 2017 clashes between far-right demonstrators and Antifa counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, two years prior to his candidacy, that brought him to 100 percent.
“When those folks came out of the fields carrying torches with contorted faces and carrying Nazi flags and chanting the anti-Semitic bile that was chanted in the streets of Germany in the ’30s and accompanied by the white supremacists and Ku Klux Klan—and, you know, those spewing hate were met by people who said ‘Not in my town’ and a young woman was killed and when the president was asked about it, they asked what he thought, he said, he said, ‘I thought there were very fine people on both sides,’” Biden told Colbert.
“No president—sitting president—has ever said anything like that, making a moral equivalence between haters and those folks who said ‘no, no, not in my town,’” Biden continued, without evidence.
The revision of his own personal history was just the beginning.
Biden’s appearance, on the heels of recent criticism that he made up crucial details in a war story repeatedly used in his stump speeches, was a veritable smorgasbord of inaccuracies, falsehoods, misleading statements and embellishments—as well as a few staggering campaign promises that one only hopes were lies.
On the contrary, Trump unequivocally condemned the violence and hate—the only problem being that, by all accounts except for Biden’s and those of other partisan revisionists on the Left, the violence and hate on display clearly came from both sides.
Charlottesville/IMAGE: Journalism 101 via Youtube
Antifa thugs used projectiles and improvised flame throwers to attack demonstrators who had obtained legal permits to protest against the illegal removal of two Civil War statues, which courts ultimately ruled were protected war monuments.
Nonetheless, radical leftists in the city government gave their best effort to thwart the demonstrators’ First Amendment rights—and to foment the tension and violence.
At least one Antifa-linked professor from the University of North Carolina openly wielded a rifle in the crowd.
The suspicious circumstances surrounding the Left’s deceptive narrative have fueled legitimate false-flag theories about the episode, with some noting that rally organizer Jason Kessler had been an Obama supporter, and that corrupt city and state leaders purposely gave the orders for law-enforcement to stand down during the unrest.
While fear-mongering and stoking racial tension with his misleading claims about Charlottesville proved a convenient vehicle for Biden to attack the current president, he also criticized Trump for doing exactly that.
“I really do believe that we’re in a place that we haven’t been in a long, long time, and the president’s taken us there,” he said. “… And playing on the fears and the, and, and, and, and the, uh, the uh, the divisions in the country is, uh, is, is—that’s not who we are as a country.”
Forgetting the Record
AFP/Hunter Biden (right) is pictured next to his father and vice president Joe Biden (center) and president Barack Obama (left) in 2010
Biden’s long, speech-like answers continued to attack Trump but rarely tackled the questions Colbert asked.
Asked what lessons his past experiences had taught him, Biden suggested that the American landscape had become unrecognizable in less than three years since the Obama administration.
“America’s changed drastically since we left office, and the problems the next president is going to inherit are fundamentally different than just going back to a pre-Trump era,” he said.
The career politician with more than four decades to his name inside the D.C. swamp sought to stake his claim as someone who would bring the same “hope and change” of the Obama years—but different.
“We’re in trouble around the world, we’ve dissed our allies, we’ve embraced our enemies, we’re in a physician [sic] where we no longer lead by the power of our example at home,” Biden said, again ignoring his own administration’s record for doing precisely those things.
Obama spurned close U.S. allies, such as the United Kingdom and Israel, while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took a “reset” button to Russia and her successor, John Kerry, helped broker a nuclear deal that delivered billions in cash to Iran.
Obama’s administration broke its promises to end wars in the Middle East and gave rise to the even greater threat of ISIS, which swept into power throughout Syria and Iraq after being dismissed as the “JV team.”
At home, the crooked heads of the top intelligence agencies systemically leaked information to cohorts in the liberal media and used false innuendo as the basis to spy on Trump, the candidate of an opposing party’s political campaign.
The ‘Dark Side’ of History
Ralph Northam’s 1984 medical school yearbook
Biden’s selective memory wasn’t limited to the Obama years.
After having drawn much criticism in June for talking about how he had worked closely in cooperation with pro-segregationist Democrats in the U.S. Senate during his early years, he did an about-face Wednesday by waxing poetically about how America had confronted racism head-on during the early 20th century.
However, many racist Democrats continued to serve their party, including Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va.—the longest-serving senator in U.S. history and a former KKK leader—who did not retire until two years into the Obama administration.
“There’s always been this struggle,” Biden said. “American history’s not been a fairy tale. We’ve been down this road before.”
He discussed a 1925 rally in which 30,000 Ku Klux Klan members marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.
‘There were 30-some people in the House who were Ku Klux Klan members, a half a dozen in the Senate, etc.,” Biden continued. “And what happened, though, is—in order to deal with that percentage of the population that’s always been on the dark side—is that the rest of the nation stood up.”
Devil in the Details
Biden addressed his gaffe tendencies in a second segment of the show but downplayed their nature, glossing over his major historical revisions.
“I think it’s fair to go after a political figure for anything, OK? I mean, we stand up and that comes with the territory,” he said.
“But here’s the deal: Any gaffe that I have made—and I’ve made gaffes like every politician I know has—have been not about a substantive issue,” he continued. “They’ve been about other—I’m trying to talk about what other people have done.”
Biden acknowledged fudging minor facts but said he didn’t think it was “relevant” as long as the big picture was accurate.
“I don’t get wrong things like, you know, there is, uh, we should lock kids up in cages at the border,” he said. “… The devil lives in the details if the details that you’re talking about would affect the outcome of something that is about to happen or should happen.”
Lightning Round
In terms of whoppers, Biden saved the worst for last, during what Colbert termed the “lightning round.”
He first claimed, after fifteen minutes of chicanery, that his honesty was one of his biggest assets in the presidential contest since it made him more electable.
“The electability relates to whether or not they think I’m straightforward, whether I’m—whether I’m honest with them, whether I’m going in a position where I do what I say I’m gonna do,” Biden said. “I say what I’m gonna do and I do it, and uh, and so that’s all I, I can say.”
Asked what he would do differently from the Obama administration, Biden instead repeated a patently false claim that Obama’s presidency had been scandal-free.
“Everything landed on his desk but locusts,” Biden said, “and he got an awful lot done—and the biggest thing was, not one single, solitary piece of, of illegitimate action took place in the United States presidency with him.”
Biden also answered affirmatively to a question about whether he would appoint Obama to be president (“He’s fully qualified…”) and indicated that he had asked former First Lady Michelle Obama to be his vice president but later said he was joking.
He also countered the idea that his campaign was one of “incrementalism” versus the sweeping proposals of radical progressives like Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
Biden first said his boldest change would be handling the environment, with a $400 billion investment in climate-change spending.
However, he quickly lost his thread and pivoted to medical research.
“If we took the money that were available to us and we invested in healthcare in a way to find cures—I forgot more about the cancer fight than most people know,” he said.
“We could, in fact, be curing major pieces of cancer, we could be taking out Alzheimer’s,” he said. “We should—there’s so much we can do that is bold —very bold—that I’m the only one proposing.”
Bill ‘would fundamentally change what Uber and ridesharing is…’
Uber drivers lobby for ’employee’ designation in California. / IMAGE: Sacramento Bee via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A California appropriations bill that seeks to regulate ride-sharing services could prove to be another major rift in Democrats’ precarious web of identity politics.
Leftist policies have increasingly pitted one interest group against another, whether it be African–American wage-workers versus illegal immigrants, feminists versus transgender women, Muslims versus LGBT activists or Chinese refugees versus radical pro-abortionists.
Now, another battle is taking shape between the competing forces of socialism and labor unions.
Already, the two sides have clashed over plans such as Medicare for All that would undo the hard-fought boons that Big Labor has negotiated and extorted on behalf of its workers.
The next spat sees proponents of Silicon Valley’s corporate-backed collectivist ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft going up against drivers who seek to unionize and demand benefits, as well as a guaranteed minimum wage.
The current ride-sharing business model views the companies and their app-based platforms as conduits for user-to-user transactions, but increasingly they have evolved to become a major industry unto themselves.
The bill under consideration in the California Senate, AB 5, aims to reclassify the drivers—currently considered independent contractors—as employees, according to Vox.
The legislation was voted out of committee on Friday and sent to the Senate floor.
“If AB 5 passes the full Senate, it would essentially disrupt a business model championed and cherished by Silicon Valley,” said Vox.
“Uber, Lyft, and other app-based gig companies rely on hundreds of thousands of independent contractors to give rides, deliver food, and complete other tasks.”
Although it reportedly lobbied for an exemption, Uber found itself in a delicate position of trying to outwardly virtue-signal to drivers and customers in the state that it was still one of the ‘good guys’ while defending its profit margins.
“Uber is ready to do our part. That is why we have been at the table in California … to propose a truly innovative framework that we believe would preserve Uber’s key benefit for drivers (flexibility) and key benefit for riders (reliability), while improving the quality and security of independent work,” the company wrote in a blog post on Medium.
“California lawmakers should consider drivers’ unique needs first and foremost, and provide leadership with a new model for workers, not just add to the growing collection of industries,” it said.
Uber claimed that the designation as employees would, in fact, stifle the innovations its model proposed and deprive its workers of benefits even better than those that might be guaranteed to employees.
“To be very clear: despite what some are saying, we are not arguing for the status quo, nor are we denying that independent work needs to be improved,” said the blog post. “And a false promise that employment is without its own challenges purposefully ignores the opportunity before California today to modernize the law to benefit workers.”
The company also noted that turning it into a glorified taxi service “would fundamentally change what Uber and ridesharing is.”
And, of course, turning its business model into that of any old company would come with similar trade-offs.
“We would likely have to exert more control over drivers, telling them where to work, how to work, and who they can work for,” said the post.
“Uber would likely hire far fewer drivers than we currently support, and we’d likely have to require a minimum number of hours per week,” it continued. “Scheduling and rigid shifts would become the norm, and Uber would likely prevent drivers from working for other rideshare companies.”
Similar to the ride-sharing dispute in California, another blue-state metropolis has targeted the sharing economy that has sprung up around hospitality platforms like AirBnb.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio was facing criticism for backing new industry regulations that would force the participating lodgings to obtain special permits, subjecting them to the same bureaucratic oversight as hotels.
One of the top supporters of de Blasio’s 2020 presidential campaign, the Hotel Trades Council, a hospitality labor union, was behind the push to tweak the city’s land-use review policies in order to muscle out the competition.
“I think we should extend it as far as we can with the City Council because what it does is it gives us the opportunity to determine what a hotel will mean for a community,” de Blasio said at a recent campaign rally, flanked by the hotel union bosses.
‘Thwarted at the U.S. Supreme Court, Holder has turned to state courts with Democratic majorities to… game the redistricting process…’
Eric Holder / IMAGE: MSNBC via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) North Carolina Republicans resigned themselves to permanent Democratic majorities after abandoning a politically charged courtroom fight over partisan gerrymandering in the historically red state.
A North Carolina case, Rucho v. Common Cause, was one of two heard in the landmark SCOTUS ruling, with the other case challenging Democrat-led gerrymandering in Maryland.
But the high court’s decision left it at the discretion of the state courts to interpret whether their own constitutional bylaws prohibited the party in power from drawing politically favorable maps during the decennial redistricting process—typically done by the state legislatures.
A three-judge Superior Court panel from North Carolina sided with left-wingers in a ruling issued Tuesday for a parallel state-level case, also being pressed by the activist group Common Cause.
“The partisan gerrymandering of the 2017 Plans strikes at the heart of the Free Elections Clause” said the ruling.
“Using their control of the General Assembly, Legislative Defendants manipulated district boundaries, to the greatest extent possible, to control the outcomes of individual races so as to best ensure their continued control of the legislature,” it said.
‘Sue Till Blue’
IMAGE: Screenshot via democraticredistricting.com
Since 2016, an initiative led by former Attorney General Eric Holder and former President Barack Obama under the umbrella of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee has deployed its “sue till blue” strategy by targeting vulnerable red states with court cases. Currently, it has about a dozen states in its cross-hairs.
“This case is the next step in Eric Holder’s drive to use judges to create a Democratic majority,” wrote North Carolina Senate Leader Phil Berger in a press release following Tuesday’s ruling.
“Thwarted at the U.S. Supreme Court, Holder has turned to state courts with Democratic majorities to, in his own words, ‘favorably position Democrats’ to game the redistricting process,” Berger said.
Any possible appeal of the recent North Carolina ruling faced grim prospects at the state Supreme Court, where six Democrat justices currently preside and only one Republican.
One of those justices, Anita Earls, had been involved as an attorney in a successful 2016 redistricting effort amid claims of racial gerrymandering, which already forced North Carolina to redraw its legislative maps prior to the 2018 midterm election.
Earls then won her own election to the court last year by unseating incumbent Barbara Jackson under dubious circumstances after another longtime Democrat attorney and activist, Chris Anglin, switched parties right before the filing deadline and split the Republican ticket.
While their plan worked at eliminating a veto-proof super-majority in the state General Assembly, Democrats in North Carolina failed to secure the legislative majorities they had hoped for and again cried foul on the forcibly redrawn districts that they had previously approved.
‘Time To Move On’?
After the latest courtroom defeat, Berger seemed to indicate that the Republican legislators named as defendants in the case would not appeal the ruling, given the unlikely odds of success at the state Supreme Court.
“We disagree with the court’s ruling as it contradicts the Constitution and binding legal precedent, but we intend to respect the court’s decision and finally put this divisive battle behind us,” he said.
“Nearly a decade of relentless litigation has strained the legitimacy of this state’s institutions, and the relationship between its leaders, to the breaking point,” Berger continued. “It’s time to move on.”
Unfortunately, the defeat could spell greater troubles for the GOP if the Democrats succeed in forcing maps more favorable to them that would allow them to steal the state legislature.
Many of the activist organizations involved in the “sue till blue” effort have made clear their intentions are to flip the statehouses during next year’s election so that they will be in power during the 2021 round of redistricting and able to create their own gerrymandered maps.
That would leave Republicans with little recourse except to press their own court battles and hope the partisan judges apply the same standards.
Trouble on the Horizon
Eric Holder & Barack Obama/PHOTO: WhiteHouse.gov
North Carolina’s fight over the electoral maps is likely to be a bellwether for other states—including its northern neighbor, Virginia, where similar Democrat-led redistricting flipped several congressional seats to the blue column in the 2018 midterm election.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a case pressed by Republican legislators in the Old Dominion lacked standing to be heard and that only the state’s Democrat attorney general, Mark Herring, had the authority to challenge the ruling on its redrawn map.
In response to Democratic activism by Holder and his well-funded NDRC, Republicans have sought to cultivate their own anti-gerrymandering organization, helmed by former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a political casualty of the “sue till blue” scheme in his home state last year.
The two exchanged rhetorical blows last week via Twitter, reported The Hill.
Walker began by exposing Holder’s true intentions with a pair of tweets that included a copy of a 2017 IRS form seeking tax-exempt status for the NDRC.
If anyone tells you that @EricHolder is “fighting against gerrymandering” and for “fair maps,” just look at the form his organization filed with the IRS. The truth: their mission is to “FAVORABLY POSITION DEMOCRATS FOR THE REDISTRICTING PROCESS.” pic.twitter.com/1f6J2SnIlX
Without addressing the evidence, Holder issued a denial in response, claiming “Scotty” was fudging the facts.
This is so contrary to the facts -things Scotty doesn’t like- and his own efforts to gerrymander for R’s that it’s laughable. The big lie. Challenge: Say-like me-you will support non-partisan commissions to draw the lines. Politicians not in control. (He didn’t in New Hampshire.) https://t.co/jOscvmxuAi
‘One of the ways you undermine an adversary is to tell them you know all about it…’
James Comey (screen shot: NBC News via YouTube)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Disgraced former FBI Director James Comey used a supposed defense briefing with newly-elected Donald Trump to spy on the president-elect, according to a report from The Epoch Times.
The meeting in question took place at New York’s Trump Tower on Jan. 6, 2017. There, Comey informed Trump of the allegations contained in the notorious Steele dossier, most notably that the Russians had compromising information on him involving “salacious” sex acts.
Three days later, the dossier was leaked to the media and went public, but it was swiftly debunked as poorly sourced and unverified information.
A recent investigation by the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General determined that Comey was indirectly responsible for the leaking of FBI memos that contained classified information to The New York Times.
Other high-ups in the agency during the Obama administration also were determined to have been systematically leaking information—sometimes illegally.
Comey’s deputy director, Andrew McCabe, was later fired for perjuring himself before Congress after lying about his leaking.
Comey was fired less than five months into the Trump presidency, which in turn triggered the nearly two-year Mueller investigation.
While that investigation—after spending an estimated $30 million—found no evidence of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, both DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz and special prosecutor John Durham have continued to investigate the collusion between the Hillary Clinton campaign and the FBI that likely was the source of the hoax.
The Steele dossier, compiled by ex British spy Christopher Steele, was commissioned indirectly by the Clinton camp through partisan research firm Fusion GPS, which used the husband–wife duo of Bruce and Nellie Ohr to transmit it to the FBI.
The agency then used the information to launch its own investigation into the Trump campaign, including the wiretapping of at least one campaign adviser, Carter Page.
In a warrant application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court, it falsely cited the Steele dossier as a verified source.
But The Epoch Times said that Horowitz’s report on Comey, released last week, revealed even more evidence of spying—not only with his direct knowledge, but conducted by the then-FBI director, himself.
“Comey told Horowitz that the information he obtained from his conversation with Trump ‘ought to be treated…[like] FISA derived information or information in a [counterintelligence] investigation,'” said The Epoch Times in an article posted Sunday.
“In other words, his meeting with Trump had very direct surveillance overtones and intentions—and directly counters what he had testified to Congress,” it said.
Comey previously insinuated before a Republican-led congressional investigative committee that the aim had been to offer full transparency to Trump.
“He needed to know this was being said,” Comey testified. “I was very keen not to leave him with an impression that the bureau was trying to do something to him.”
He reportedly told Trump point-blank at the meeting that he was not under investigation.
However, in subsequent public accounts by Comey himself, he struck a more antagonistic tone, relaying how he had met with then-President Barack Obama and CIA Director John Brennan to determine whether to divulge the dossier allegations to Trump.
They agreed to do it because “one of the ways you undermine an adversary is to tell them you know all about it,” Comey told an audience at Queens University in March.
Comey also met with key FBI players involved in the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into Trump—among them, McCabe and chief counsel James Baker—where they decided that he should use the meeting to gather additional intelligence.
“Multiple FBI witnesses recalled agreeing ahead of time that Comey should memorialize his meeting with Trump immediately after it occurred,” said the IG report.
As soon as he left Trump Tower, Comey began composing the first of the series of memoranda intended to undermine Trump, some of which he later leaked to the media.
“Comey said he had a secure FBI laptop waiting for him in his FBI vehicle and that when he got into the vehicle, he was handed the laptop and ‘began typing [Memo 1] as the vehicle moved,'” said the IG report.
Although the IG’s office referred Comey for prosecution previously, the Justice Department declined. The new report, while it confirmed the leaking had occurred, stopped short of saying Comey violated the law.
Comey took to Twitter afterward to, once again, mislead the public with a deceptively worded statement suggesting that the memos did not contain classified information and that the report exonerated him.
DOJ IG “found no evidence that Comey or his attorneys released any of the classified information contained in any of the memos to members of the media.” I don’t need a public apology from those who defamed me, but a quick message with a “sorry we lied about you” would be nice.
‘Although Democrats already rocketed into the House majority last November, this do-over election means much more for the Republicans, who are desperate to avoid an embarrassing setback…’
Dan Bishop/YouTube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Less than a year ago, left-wing media feigned shock as Dan McCready, the Democratic candidate in North Carolina‘s 9th Congressional District, came within a thousand votes of winning the historically red district.
It was one of many ‘bellwether’ races during the 2018 midterms that were supposed to be a mandate on the halfway point of President Donald Trump’s first term.
Now—after the state election commission invalidated the race that saw Republican Mark Harris defeat McCready amid questions of absentee ballot fraud—the press is at it again with McCready’s new opponent, state Sen. Dan Bishop.
“[A]lthough Democrats already rocketed into the House majority last November, this do-over election means much more for the Republicans, who are desperate to avoid an embarrassing setback in a critical 2020 state,” declared a breathless NBC News article on Saturday.
Midterm Shenanigans
While it is reasonable to assert that last year’s turnover of 40 House seats in Congress—as well as several governorships—to Democrats was a statement on Trump’s presidency, the spin on the Left conveniently left out several major factors that added important context.
Among these was the fact that Trump’s loss of seats was paltry compared to the losses faced by presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in their first midterms.
When the numbers are fully crunched, there is a natural disadvantage for the sitting president’s party in midterms that is as clear as the coattail election-year advantage.
While Trump’s loss fell on the upper end of the historical averages in the modern era, several other behind-the-scenes moves by Democrats helped it along.
North Carolina’s Congressional districts/IMAGE: USA Today via Youtube
This included Democratic efforts to use the court system to forcibly redraw districts in several red states where it claimed racially or politically motivated gerrymandering had benefited the GOP.
North Carolina was one of these states, and its 9th District—which had drawn a narrow swath half-circumscribing the city of Charlotte in suburban areas densely populated by white, affluent voters—suddenly became far more rural.
Democrats had pressed for the redistricting after claiming that the Republican-led legislature had factored race into the map in order to minimize opponents’ political power. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision, and the new district maps were approved in 2017.
The dual effect of this was both diluting the suburban GOP voter base and making the existing base more conservative than previously.
But the result was also a much more narrowly split district that could play into the hands of fake blue-dog Democrat McCready, who won the suburbs by a margin of nearly 5,000 votes.
That, in turn, gave new legs to the false media narrative about Trump’s political headwinds entering into his own re-election.
Shifting Electorate
Mark Harris / IMAGE: WRAL screenshot
Harris, a Baptist minister who also happened to be pro-Trump, shook the NC Republican establishment when he unseated incumbent Robert Pittenger prior to the 2018 election.
The centrist Pittenger had taken a firm stance against the Trump wave, but that was not the death-blow in his congressional career so much as the prior year’s redistricting, which stretched his district deep into the backwoods of rural Carolina.
On paper, the 9th District may have gained conservatives, but the split between the middle-of-the-road suburban voters and the more conservative voters east of Charlotte became apparent in the 2018 race between Harris and McCready, which was punctuated by an influx of funding from outside donors that flooded McCready’s campaign coffers.
Despite his opponent’s fundraising advantage, Harris narrowly won—until a partisan member of the state elections board claimed fraud in the newly added rural districts, where he, himself, had deep ties to a corrupt ballot-harvesting ring that had previously benefited both Democrat and Republican candidates.
This led to a dramatic hearing, during which Harris—whose son was forced to testify against him—withdrew from the race, citing the impact on his health.
Bishop, a conservative veteran of the state General Assembly, emerged as the candidate best equipped to take on McCready and his massive war-chest of outside donations.
Like Harris, Bishop has conservative bona fides that play well in the rural counties. He also has a solid base of support in southern Mecklenberg, the county that houses Charlotte, which sent him as its representative to Raleigh.
However, his ideological differences with Pittenger’s brand of Republican politics (the previous GOP congressman backed another challenger and made claims about Bishop that resulted in the threat of a lawsuit) may yet create problems in the fast-growing outskirts of Charlotte.
False Narrative
Dan McCready/IMAGE: MSNBC via YouTube
Even just a whiff of vulnerability is enough to launch a media feeding frenzy of articles doting on how the dynamic and dauntless McCready campaign has persevered in the district, which has voted Republican since the early 1960s.
NBC astoundingly managed to turn the fact that Bishop had overcome a substantial deficit and brought the race to an even split into yet another reason to cast McCready as the heroic underdog in the “Battle of the Dans.”
“McCready began the race far better known than Bishop, indicating Bishop probably has more room for his support to grow—especially considering the 9th District voted for Trump by double digits,” it said.
Should Bishop win the race, it would mark, for all intents and purposes, the addition of a brand-new reliably conservative district—potentially as valuable to Trump as the 11th District where Trump’s close confidant Mark Meadows, the chair of the House Freedom Caucus, holds court in the western part of the state.
But, unsurprisingly, it would not be newsworthy to find that the district had grown more conservative, despite all odds, since that wouldn’t fit the mainstream media narrative.
“Fresh off losing their majority and beset by a new wave of retirements, Republicans badly need a morale boost,” NBC News wrote.
“… But it’s not just about the House: Trump’s re-election depends on North Carolina, and a Democratic upset would be a genuine sign of danger for the president heading into 2020,” it said.
‘As it turns out, sushi prices are a fairly reliable proxy for the cost of living in a given area…’
Photo by adactio (CC)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Left-wing economists have made much of the gathering storm of recession signals, blaming the policies of President Donald Trump, including his trade war with China, for the pinch on consumer purse-strings.
One former Federal Reserve official has gone so far as to encourage the top U.S. bank to crash the economy in order to force the president’s hand on trade issues—or better yet, force him out of office.
But the analysis of another Asian market—the price of sushi—tells a different tale.
The Fed—which maintained near-zero interest rates for nearly the entirety of former President Barack Obama’s term, keeping his stagnant economy on life-support, has progressively raised its rates amid the booming Trump economy.
Those rates, in turn, raise the price of everything down the line as it costs banks more to borrow money, which they then inflict on their own borrowers.
Yet, the Fed has insisted that the inflation rate has barely budged since the rate uptick.
While the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which tracks the consumer-price index, suggests the average rate on the year is less than 2 percent, “anybody who has been to a restaurant, supermarket or paid a rent check over the past decade can tell you: Prices are rising much faster than the CPI would have you believe,” wrote ZeroHedge.
It cited the price of sushi as a novel but reliable indicator of consumer habits, more reflective than the basic staples like bread and milk listed in the CPI.
“As it turns out, sushi prices are a fairly reliable proxy for the cost of living in a given area,” said ZeroHedge, reporting on the “Sushinomics” statistics maintained by Bloomberg.
By that standard, the cost of living had increased nearly 3 percent, with some growing markets, such as Charlotte, North Carolina, seeing the cost rise as high as 6.7 percent.
The overall gap between the sushi prices and the CPI data was the highest it has been since the metric started being recorded in 2011. That 6.5 percent difference either signals that the fish morsels are becoming more valuable as a commodity or that the CPI numbers are being under-adjusted.
However, the deceitful financial games being played by deep-state bureaucrats and financial puppet-masters could prove catastrophic.
ZeroHedge said that the hidden inflation costs are literally eating into the savings of consumers, so that another major economic downturn could have nothing to cushion the blow.
President Donald Trump has severely criticized the Fed for its refusal to lower the rates, with Trump even questioning whether Fed Chairman Jerome Powell was a worse adversary for the U.S. economy than China’s Xi Jinping.
….My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?
