Harris Failed to Prosecute Illegal MS-13 Gang Member, He Went on to Murder a Family

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An MS-13 gang member living illegally in the U.S. was arrested but went unprosecuted by then-Attorney General Kamala Harris’ office in CA months before he murdered a family, according to Breitbart News.

On June 22, 2008, Edwin Ramos killed Tony Bologna, 48 and his three teenage sons in San Francisco, California, reportedly because he misidentified them as rival gang members. Despite a plea by Angel Mom Danielle Bologna to seek the death penalty against Ramos, San Francisco D.A. Harris refused and sought a life sentence.

Ramos, three months before the Bologna murders, had a run-in with San Francisco police officers, who warned Harris’ office. Despite the fact that Ramos was a known MS-13 member with multiple run-ins with the law, Harris did not prosecute Ramos, claiming she needed another criminal charge against him in order to prosecute. He was released and went on to kill the Bolognas.

Perhaps if Harris had not secured that office by sleeping with Oakland Mayor Willie Brown, San Francisco could have gotten a competent AG and the Bolognas would still be alive. As the Democrat VP pick who will likely become the de facto President, Harris supports a national sanctuary policy that would shield arrested illegals like Ramos from being deported.

Kamala Harris

57 Known Connections

Accusing President Trump of Racism

On June 11, 2020, Harris joined other Democrats as well as a number of media outlets in declaring that President Trump’s plans for future campaign rallies in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Jacksonville, Florida, were racist — simply because of the locations chosen, and the dates for which the rallies were scheduled. For example, Harris was vexed by the Trump campaign’s announcement that it would hold its first rally in Tulsa on June 19 — commonly known as “Juneteenth,” a day which many African Americans observe as the anniversary of the day when freed slaves in Texas were read the Emancipation Proclamation. In the senator’s calculus, Trump’s choice of that date was a deliberate provocation: “This isn’t just a wink to white supremacists—he’s throwing them a welcome home party,” she tweeted. Democrats and journalists also claimed that the choice of Tulsa as the site of the rally was racist, because in 1921 that city had been the scene of deadly race riots by local whites. Critics likewise objected to a Trump rally scheduled for Jacksonville on August 27, noting that it would coincide with the 60th anniversary of a Ku Klux Klan attack against black activists in that city.

To learn more about Kamala Harris, click here.

EDITORS NOTE: This Discover the Networks column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Bidens and Corleone’s: Two Scandalous Mob Families

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“Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence.” – Thomas Jefferson

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time, they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” –  Frederic Bastia

“I weep for the liberty of my country when I see at this early day of its successful experiment that corruption has been imputed to many members of the House of Representatives, and the rights of the people have been bartered for promises of office.” – Andrew Jackson

“Corruption is worse than prostitution.  The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.” –  Karl Kraus, Austrian writer and journalist

“At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child – miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless.  Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.”  –  P.J. O’Rourke

Communist countries never allow truth to reach their citizenry, only government propaganda.  Authoritarians in mainstream media, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai have censored the Biden family corruption and kept truth from reaching Americans before the election.

Ahh yes, the totalitarians have suppressed the 47-year Biden family corruption of influence peddling.  Sounds like the Clintons and Bidens learned well how to steal while in government “service.”  Several members of the Biden’s clan, including his brother James Biden, his sister-in-law Sara, and his son Hunter, landed lucrative positions or contracts with foreign countries while Joe Biden was a U.S. senator as well as when he served as vice president.  Forty-seven years of selling influence to make the Biden family wealthy.  And half of the remuneration was always split with the “big guy,” obviously Joe Biden.

The president tweeted, “We’ve got to get the Attorney General to act, he’s got to act fast, he has to appoint somebody.  This is major corruption and this has to be known before the election.”  This tweet was followed by a dozen house republicans led by AZ Congressman Andy Biggs to ask AG Barr to appoint a special counsel to investigate Biden’s corrupt dealings.

Any appointment from Barr would likely come from the demonstrably corrupt and biased DOJ itself.  We don’t have time…only two weeks and we face the most important election of our lifetime.  Censorship has kept the American people from knowing that Joe and Hunter Biden peddled their influence into the White House to secure lucrative multi-million dollar deals in China along with Hunter sitting on the board of Burisma in Ukraine.  All of this was exposed by the New York Post via emails they pulled from Hunter’s laptop that was dropped off at a Delaware store for repair and never picked up.   Link

The FBI had Hunter Biden’s computer for a year and did absolutely nothing.  Not only that, but had they even looked at the computer it would have blown up Pelosi, Schiff and Nadler’s Impeachment attempt.  Wray sat on it.  The intel community is still run by the Obama Deep State.

Two foreign countries bought influence through Biden’s son to Joe Biden and gave Hunter Biden positions and contracts he never would have gotten on his own, and everyone in the family who made beaucoup bucks had to fork over half to Pop Biden according to one of Hunter’s texts.  Hunter was selling access to his Vice President father.  Between Ukraine and China, Hunter was making a killing for the Biden family.  Can you imagine what they’d rake in with Joe Biden as President?  And don’t forget corrupt Kalamity Harris!  She slept her way to the top with Willie Brown who helped her gain power and influence in San Francisco.  These two would be the Clinton scams on steroids.  Meanwhile, President Trump gives his salary to veteran causes every year.

Hunter Biden pursued lucrative deals involving China’s largest private energy company, including one that he said would be “interesting for me and my family,” emails obtained by The Post show.  The email is contained in a trove of data that the owner of a computer repair shop in Delaware said was recovered from a MacBook Pro laptop that was dropped off in April 2019 and never retrieved.

John Paul Mac Isaac, the Delaware computer repair store owner who got the laptop, claimed that he came into possession of it on April 12, 2019.  In September, someone Isaac was in contact with, reached out to the FBI. And on December 17, 2019, the FBI took the laptop into custody, and then did nothing with it.  A copy of its contents was made by the shop owner and shared with The Post by former Mayor Rudy ­Giuliani.  Rudy tells the story in the following video.

Video Here:  https://youtu.be/9LuSpHJNPe0

Apparently pornographic images were included in the hard drive.  Rudy turned over copies of Hunter Biden’s inappropriateness with a 14-year-old girl to the Delaware State Police. They turned it over to the Deep State FBI, probably never to be seen again.

Censorship

The public needs to know all of this, but the censorship of Facebook and Twitter, along with mainstream media has shut down the full documentation of the corruption and scams exposed by the New York Post.  And of course, Joe was never questioned about Hunter during his ABC Townhall with George Stephanopoulos.  Twitter, Facebook, and mainstream media are all in the pockets of the Democrats, and 90% of them fund the Democrat Party.  As a matter of fact, top people from both Facebook and Twitter have gone to work for the Biden campaign.  Social media’s outright manipulation of the American public via censorship needs to be stopped…this is not America; this is Communist China and Russia…and is the first tactic in destroying freedom in our Republic.

Top White House Aide, Stephen Miller calls this “leftwing fascism” and he’s absolutely right.  There are some things that money can’t buy, like manners, morals and integrity.  Only one man seems to have that kind of class…it’s President Trump, certainly not Joe Biden.

Biden Denials

First the Bidens claimed that it was unverified, then the democrat party joined the fray and said the Russians had a hand in the disinformation.  Adam Schiff believes the smear is from the President via Russia.  He just can’t get off that bandwagon.

Glenn Greenwald stated on Elizabeth MacDonald’s program that even the CIA, headed by Gina Haspel who was mentored by John Brennan, said the documents were a Russian gift to President Trump.  Hogwash!  Almost everything in the laptop has been verified.  The lie was supported by Clapper, Brennan and their gang of 50 intelligence officials all of whom peddled the Russian disinformation to media.  Dismissals are in order.

The Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe has categorically stated, “We do not have evidence of Russian involvement.”

Now There’s More

Former Hunter Biden business partner Bevan Cooney provided 26,000 emails to him—the first of which were published late last week in a Breitbart News exclusive investigation by authors Peter Schweizer and Seamus Bruner. Cooney is currently serving a sentence in federal prison due to his conviction over financial deals he made connected to Hunter Biden and his other partner Devon Archer. Archer, who was also convicted by a jury in federal court, saw his conviction vacated by a federal judge. That conviction was later—just a couple weeks ago—reinstated by an appellate court, which overruled the lower court judge’s decision to vacate it. Archer awaits sentencing.

Cooney provided written authorization to Schweizer to access his Gmail account. He also provided the password and username, and written authorization to publish emails. Schweizer says he believes Cooney was the “fall guy” for the Biden family’s corruption and that the public needs to know what really happened in Hunter Biden’s universe.

Far more will hopefully come out before the election and it won’t be pretty for Joe Biden.

The Debates

The final presidential debate is scheduled for Thursday night with moderator Kristen Welker, from NBC News. Welker’s objectivity has been called into question, particularly after she deleted her Twitter account which included anti-Trump tweets.

Welker spent one Christmas at the Obama White House, and like all other debate moderators chosen by the Debate Commission, including Chris Wallace, she is a democrat.  The moderator will have the option of muting the speech of either candidate, but as of today, October 21, 2020, the Commission has stated that President Trump will not be allowed to bring up Hunter Biden, Ukraine or China.  Fascism is right.

The first debate was on Tuesday, September 29th.  Only a couple days later Trump announced he had been diagnosed with Covid, which makes one wonder how bad he was feeling during the initial debate.  I remember thinking that our president was on stage with the man who was second in charge of the massive coup to destroy his presidency and it was a wonder to me that he remained as cool as he did.

Now, President Trump has to appear on stage again with this treasonous fool who not only was present in the Oval Office with Obama when the coup was arranged, but now the president knows that Hunter Biden’s laptop had been held by the FBI and contained the truth about Ukraine and nothing was done by the intel community.  Not only that, but had anything been done it would have stopped the impeachment in its tracks.  How this man maintains his cool is beyond me.  Evil and hatred surrounds him at every turn.  Pray for him!

Conclusion

Hunter Biden dropped off three computers with liquid damage at a repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware on April 12, 2019. The owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, examined the three and determined that one was beyond recovery, one was okay and the data on the hard drive of the third could be recovered. Hunter signed the service ticket and John Paul Mac Isaac repaired the hard drive and downloaded the data. During this process he saw some disturbing images and a number of emails that concerned Ukraine, Burisma, China and other issues.   A bill was sent, and Hunter never responded after four months.

When the Ukraine crisis surfaced in August of 2019, Isaac knew he had a treasure trove and took it to an FBI office in Albuquerque, New Mexico and was told to get lost.  Later agents from the Wilmington office showed up; Isaac offered them the computer and they declined.  Two weeks later they came for the computer, but when nothing came of it; Isaac contacted Rudy Giuliani’s office and offered him a copy of the hard drive.

The nation’s top government law enforcement agency is irretrievably corrupt.  The FBI needs to be dismantled.

Fortunately, the information from the hard drive is in Giuliani’s hands, and of course the FBI, who will stash it.  The fact that Isaac made copies was the smartest thing he did.

©Kelleigh Nelson. All rights reserved.

PODCAST: Long-Standing Precedents Point The Way For Senate Judiciary Committee To Restrain Twitter

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GUESTS AND TOPICS:

CONGRESSMAN BOB BARR

Congressman Bob Barr represented Georgia’s 7th District in the House of Representatives from 1995-2003. He now practices law in Atlanta, Georgia and is Chairman of Liberty Guard a non-profit, pro-liberty organization. He also heads the Law Enforcement Education Foundation and a consulting firm, Liberty Strategies.

TOPIC: Long-Standing Precedents Point The Way For Senate Judiciary Committee To Restrain Twitter

MARC MORANO

Marc Morano, former Communications Director for the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee and senior aide, speechwriter, and climate researcher for Senator James Inhofe is the executive editor and chief correspondent for ClimateDepot.com, a pioneering climate and eco-news center. The news effort, begun in April 2009, is a special project of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and is the most comprehensive information center on climate news and the related issues of environment and energy.

TOPIC: Climate Hustle 2!

RACHEL ALEXANDER

Rachel Alexander is a political columnist and the founder and editor of Intellectual Conservative. She is a regular contributor to Townhall, the Selous Foundation for Public Policy Research and The Christian Post . She frequently appears on TV and news radio as a conservative commentator, and hosted a radio show on 960 KKNT in Phoenix. She previously served as an Assistant Attorney General for the State of Arizona, corporate attorney for Go Daddy Software. Rachel was ranked by Right Wing News as one of the 50 Best Conservative Columnists and is a recipient of Americans for Prosperity’s RightOnline Activist of the Year award.

TOPIC: Big Tech is working to steal the election from Trump!

©All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: Social Media’s Preemptive Spiking of New York Post Story Shows Bias Against Conservatives Continues

Facebook blocks 120,000 posts under the guise of ‘election misinformation’, rejected 2.2 million ads

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Sounds more like election interference.

When is the GOP going to find their balls and deem social media the public square complying with our first amendment rights? They have done nothing for years. If this had been nipped in the bud years ago, when my colleagues and I were banned, suspended, shadowbanned, terminated etc it would never have gotten so far.

Facebook blocks 120,000 posts in fight against election misinformation

The tech giant also rejected 2.2 million ads

By Julia Musto, FOX Business, October 21, 2020:

Twitter, Facebook should change user agreements or lose protections: Congressman

Social media giant Facebook has removed 120,000 posts so far as it fights election misinformation and attempts to prevent a recurrence of 2016, when the platform was exploited by Russian agents seeking to sway the results of the presidential race.

In a Sunday interview with the French weekly newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche, Facebook vice president Nick Clegg said the Menlo Park, California-based company had also rejected 2.2 million ads that were unable to complete the site’s authorization process.

FACEBOOK AND TWITTER REDUCING DISTRIBUTION OF NEW YORK POST HUNTER BIDEN STORY

The tech company is relying on both artificial intelligence tools and tens of thousands of employees to vet content related to the Nov. 3 election.

According to The Guardian, the former British deputy prime minister, who was hired by CEO Mark Zuckerberg in late 2018 to head the social media company’s global affairs unit, also noted that advisory warnings were added to 150 million posts containing false information.

Clegg assured Journal du Dimanche the company had improved since the 2016 presidential election.

“At the time, absolutely no one expected foreign and Russian interference. This experience was traumatic for us and for American democracy,” Clegg said, according to an English translation of his comments confirmed by The Washington Times.

Clegg pointed out that Facebook has since joined with 70 different media outlets, including five in France, in its quest to verify information on its platforms.

Facebook’s fact-checking initiative has been met with mixed assessments, according to The Verge. The program has broadened since it was introduced in 2016 and now includes review of Facebook groups.

Clegg’s conversation with Journal du Dimanche follows a series of policy changes the company made over the summer, including the implementation of an independent Oversight Board in response to increased scrutiny.

Not only has Facebook prohibited new political ads the week before the election, it will also reject ads from candidates President Donald Trump or Joe Biden if either tries to prematurely claim victory.
‘The Next Revolution’ anchor Steve Hilton weighs in on Facebook censoring health information and the reopening process in California. Video

Outside influence has already been detected in the months ahead of Election Day, and The New York Times reported in August that members of the U.S. intelligence community say Russia, China and Iran are all attempting to meddle in the race.

In 2016, the same agencies said that Russia had used digital influence operations to sway voters in favor of President Trump, who has been dogged by that assessment for the past four years. It’s a claim he has routinely denied, dismissing it as “fake news.”

At the end of September, CIA analysis determined Russian President Vladimir Putin is likely continuing to approve and direct interference operations.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Tippecanoe and Biden Too

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President Trump has repeatedly challenged the establishment media to ask Joe Biden to denounce Antifa, and has, of course, found no takers. Meanwhile, the Hunter Biden scandal keeps growing, with credible evidence that Hunter was selling (at exorbitant prices) access to his father while Joe was vice president, but for the most part the Leftist media remains resolutely mum about it. Reporters are too busy asking Joe what kind of milkshake he got at one of his infrequent campaign stops, and pretending as if his near-daily “lids” on campaigning were the most normal thing in the world for a man running for the highest office in the land. All this is unprecedented in recent presidential campaigns, but in many ways we have been here before – 180 years ago.

Rating America’s Presidents discusses at some length the strange and fabled election of 1840, an overlooked source of inspiration for the Biden campaign. The opposition party in those days, the Whigs, were determined to get their candidate William Henry Harrison into the White House not on the strength of his public positions, but rather upon the appeal of the persona they fashioned for him – just as Joe today is supposed to be the affable, kindly, back-to-normal alternative to four more years of what the Democrats characterize as the insane reign of the Cheeto Mussolini.

Like Biden, Harrison had the support of the Deep State. In those days that was the Bank of the United States, an unelected and unaccountable oligarchy that wielded enormous power without ever having to answer to the voters (sound familiar?). Nicholas Biddle, the longtime president of the Bank, directed that in order to avoid being pinned down on the issues and thereby alienating some portion of the electorate, Harrison should speak substantively as infrequently as possible: “Let him say nothing…Let no Committee, no Convention, no town meeting ever extract from him a single word about what he thinks now and will do hereafter. Let the use of pen and ink be wholly forbidden as if he were a mad poet in Bedlam.” Biddle could have been advising Biden’s handlers about how to deal with questions about packing the Supreme Court.

Instead of dealing with the issues, Harrison, who as a Major General in 1811 won the Battle of Tippecanoe against a force of Shawnee Indians, was portrayed as the humble war hero, “Old Tippecanoe.” His handlers trumpeted him as an ordinary man with simple tastes, content with a log cabin and a jug of hard cider. To this the Whigs contrasted a deeply unfair caricature of incumbent President Martin Van Buren as an out-of-touch, champagne-drinking, cosseted aristocrat who had spent public funds on lavish furnishings for the White House. The Whigs held rallies, passed out hard cider, staged marches, and generally made the 1840 election into a party celebrating “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” (John Tyler was Harrison’s running mate).

This was all great fun, but it was also the sum of the Whigs’ appeal to the American people. The Democrats were confounded. One Democrat editorialist vented his frustration: “In what grave and important discussion are the Whig journals engaged?…We speak of the divorce of bank and state; and the Whigs reply with a dissertation on the merits of hard cider. We defend the policy of the Administration; and the Whigs answer ‘log cabin,’ ‘big canoes,’ ‘go it, Tip! Come it, Ty.’ We urge the re-election of Van Buren because of his honesty, sagacity, statesmanship…and the Whigs answer that Harrison is a poor man and lives in a log cabin.”

No one was interested in appeals to reason. Old Tippecanoe ran the table, defeating Van Buren by 234 electoral votes to 60. Van Buren was justifiably appalled by the whole affair, writing in his memoirs fifteen years later: “No one…can now hesitate in believing that the scenes thro’ which the Country passed in that great political whirlwind were discreditable to our Institutions and could not fail, if often repeated, to lead to their subversion.”

Yet here we are now. The Democrats are asking us to vote for good old Joe. Why? Because look how much more polite, how much less mean, he is than Trump! Joe Biden, everybody! The happy man with the easy smile! Barack Obama’s friend! Influence peddling? Antifa riots? Come on, man! Look what kind of milkshake the man got! He’s one of us! Elect him, and then his people will tell you everything you ever wondered about where he stands!

What could possibly go wrong?

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

More People Use a Gun in Self-Defense Each Year Than Die in Car Accidents

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In the USA there are between 2.1 and 2.5 million defensive gun uses every year.

How is it that so many kids raised on “Harry Potter”, “The Hunger Games”, “Star Wars”, and all the Marvel action figure movies manage to miss a critical point of the stories? The lesson being: If you want to prevail over evil villains, you must have the proper tools to fight back.

Millions of people protect themselves and their families with guns every day in the United States. They choose guns as a means of self-defense for the same reason the Secret Service uses them to protect the president: guns stop bad people from doing bad things to good people.

It’s absurd to speak about the right of self-defense in theory but then deny people the tools they need to exercise that right.

Without a gun, most Americans are defenseless at the hands of a violent criminal. How many of us have training in hand-to-hand fighting, the physical strength, and the mental resilience to react in a fight-or-flight situation to repel an aggressive predator, especially someone who attacks us first and is armed with a deadly weapon?

Does a gun guarantee your safety? No, but it gives you the ability to defend yourself against an armed, physically superior, or mentally unstable attacker (or all three).

Why in the world would anyone not want to have the means to protect themselves and their families against criminal predators and lunatics? Worse yet, why would anyone actively lobby their government to deprive themselves and every other law-abiding citizen of the most effective means to protect themselves?

The gun grabbers are convinced that if we shut down the National Rifle Association and take away guns from law-abiding gun owners, then bad people will no longer have the tools to do bad things.

A gun is a tool, plain and simple. You should own a gun for the same reason you install smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, purchase fire extinguishers, and buckle your seat belt. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Smart people are prepared. Foolish people bring a knife—or nothing at all—to a gunfight.

The gun grabbers say: “There is no evidence that guns save lives.” The truth: If there is no proof that guns save lives, then why does every American law enforcement agency, including the U.S. Secret Service, carry guns? What’s the point of the guns?

There is an old saying in the world of investing: “Do what the smart money does.” This means that when you personally invest, it makes sense to buy and sell the same investments as the “smart money” people—large banks, institutional investors, hedge funds, and investment gurus like Warren Buffett. The idea is that these industry leaders have a better understanding of the marketplace and better access to information than ordinary investors do. And that is usually true.

What do the “smart money” people do when it comes to protecting lives?

Virtually all professionals carry guns—and lots of them. Federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies charged with protecting the streets you walk on all carry guns. The Secret Service protects the president with guns. The federal Department of Homeland Security, with its $44 billion annual budget, issues its own agents handguns and fully automatic rifles (rifles far more powerful than the AR-15s many gun grabbers don’t want you to have to protect yourself).

So, the smart money in the business of protecting lives chooses guns. That’s right. They choose guns!

But if you don’t want to follow the smart money on guns, then let’s turn to the statistical scoreboard. Does civilian gun use help in self-defense against criminals?

The U.S. Department of Justice investigated firearm violence from 1993 through 2011. The report found, “In 2007–2011, about 1 percent of nonfatal violent crime victims used a firearm in self-defense.” Anti-gun zealots attempt to use this statistic to discredit the use of a gun as a viable means of self-defense, and by extension, to discredit gun ownership in general.

But look deeper into the numbers. During that five-year period, the Department of Justice confirmed a total of 338,700 defensive gun uses in both violent attacks and property crimes where a victim was involved. That equals an average of 67,740 defensive gun uses every year. In other words, according to the Justice Department’s own statistics, 67,740 people a year don’t become victims because they own a gun. (I suspect that if more states allowed concealed carry to be widespread, the number of instances of defensive gun uses would be even higher.)

Is it significant that at least 67,740 individuals use a gun in self-defense each year? Well, in 2016, 37,461 people died in motor vehicle accidents in the United States; in 2015, the number was 35,092 people. Mark Rosekind, administrator of the National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration (NHTSA), called those road fatalities “an immediate crisis.” If the NHTSA administrator considers it a crisis that approximately 37,000 people are dying annually from car accidents, then saving nearly twice that many people each year through the use of firearms is simply stunning.

In reality, the Department of Justice findings about defensive gun uses are very conservative. A 2013 study ordered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and conducted by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council found that:

Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence… Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million…in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008… On the other hand, some scholars point to a radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey…”

The most comprehensive study ever conducted about defensive gun use in the United States was a 1995 survey published by criminologist Gary Kleck in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. This study reported between 2.1 and 2.5 million defensive gun uses every year.

Ultimately, the number of defensive gun uses doesn’t matter much to the anti-gun zealots. Whether the number is 67,000 or 2.5 million or anywhere in between, they’ll do whatever they can to dismiss defensive gun uses as insignificant. They want to focus only on the dead people lying in the street rather than those folks who use a firearm to remain standing.

I suspect those people still alive would have a different view.

Reprinted from The Daily Signal

Excerpt from“#Duped: How the Anti-gun Lobby Exploits the Parkland School Shooting-and How Gun Owners Can Fight Back”.

COLUMN BY

Mark W. Smith

Mark W. Smith is a constitutional attorney and author. Smith currently serves as the vice president of the New York City chapter of the Federalist Society and is also a presidential scholar and senior fellow in Law and Public Policy at The King’s College in New York City.

Why America Is Experiencing Two Very Different Economic Recoveries

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Nations across the world are still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic, which triggered a global recession following economic lockdowns enforced by most developed nations around the world.

New estimates put the economic losses at more than $16 trillion, and the United States saw its GDP shrink 9.5 percent between April and June, its largest drop in modern times.

While macroeconomic data is useful, it doesn’t tell the full story. It’s important to understand these economic losses have resulted in severe pain for people around the world, especially the poor.

A new Columbia University study shows that 8 million Americans have slipped into poverty since May, the New York Times reports. Meanwhile, a recent World Bank study projects as many as 150 million people around the world are projected to slip into extreme poverty by 2021.

As the US seeks to rebound from the global recession, it’s worth noting that some states are having more success than others.

Just the News recently published a breakdown of state unemployment data for August (the latest data available). Based on US Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the figures showed that nationally the unemployment rate was 8.4 percent, but the economic pain was not distributed equally across blue, red and purple states.

“Fueled by broader, faster economic reopenings following the initial coronavirus crash, conservative-leaning red states are by and large far outpacing liberal-leaning blue states in terms of putting people back to work,” writes Carrie Sheffield.

Sheffield continued:

“In red states (those voting Republican for president in all four of the last four elections), the combined unemployment rate stood at 6.6%. Among blue states (those that voted Democrat in all four of the last four presidential elections) the figure was 10.5%. Among purple states (all of the others, either split 2 and 2 or 3 wins for one party and one win for the other), the unemployment figure was 7.8%.”

The data also show that of the 10 states with the lowest rates of unemployment, nine have GOP governors (the lone exception being Montana), while 9 of the 10 states with the highest rates of unemployment are led by Democrats (the lone exception being Massachusetts).

Evidence suggests the disparity stems in large part from the different ways states are approaching the coronavirus. Red states, particularly ones like South Dakota, Utah, Oklahoma, and Idaho, have been much less inclined to restrict economic freedom during the pandemic. Blue states, on the other hand, have been the most proactive in limiting economic activity in an attempt to limit the spread of the virus. This includes states such as California, New Jersey, Rhode Island, New York, and Connecticut.

Join us in preserving the principles of economic freedom and individual liberty for the rising generation

One might argue that these states could have had high unemployment rates before the pandemic, but BLS data from earlier this year show this is not the case.

Government figures from January 2020 show that just two states had unemployment rates higher than 5 percent—Alaska (6.1%) and Mississippi (5.7 %). Meanwhile, the blue states of California (3.9%, New Jersey (3.5%), Rhode Island (3.5%), New York (4%) and Connecticut (3.7%) had rates of unemployment close to the national average.

The data suggest that the economic recovery of many US states is being inhibited by government regulations designed to limit the spread of the virus. A recent Wall Street Journal article also recently pointed out that the strong economic recovery in the South “is at least partially due to less fear of the virus.”

While it’s unclear if these regulations are having a positive effect—New Jersey and New York have the highest COVID-19 death tolls in the country, and Rhode Island and Connecticut are not far behind—the consequences of government imposed lockdowns have been abundantly clear for months.

The most recent unemployment data are one part of a larger economic picture that shows, so far, red states are doing a better job of balancing the need to save both lives and livelihoods,” said Rachel Greszler, an economist for the Heritage Foundation.

“[W]e’ve seen blue states using a pandemic as an opportunity to expand government control, impose excessive lockdowns not rooted in data, favor politically connected groups and allies, and demand federal bailouts for decades of poor budgeting instead of taking responsibility and confronting their problems head-on,” Greszler told the Washington Examiner.

As lawmakers in American and around the world continue the difficult work of trying to limit the spread of the virus without causing further destruction, we should remember that the cost of curtailing economic freedom is high.

Just ask the 8 million newly impoverished Americans.

COLUMN BY

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune. Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

VIDEO: SUMMING THINGS UP — Boiling it all down.

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TRANSCRIPT

Church Militant (a 501(c)4 corporation) is responsible for the content of this commentary.

A programming note before we begin: Church Militant will be covering the currently scheduled last presidential debate this coming Thursday live as we have done all the previous debates.

Coverage will begin at 8:30 p.m. ET with a pre-debate analysis. That will go for roughly 30 minutes until the debate begins (which we will carry on our site).

Then, immediately following the debate, we will return for a full hour of analysis and commentary.

One thing to keep a very careful eye on will be the conservative reports of the Hunter Biden laptop hard drive and allegedly damning emails proving Joe Biden’s years of corruption involving the Chinese Communist Party.

Again, this Thursday, 8:30 p.m. ET, debate coverage will be live from Church Militant — your go-to Catholic source for news and information.

For today, a brief introduction: One of the things that happens when you’re in media is various interview requests come in looking for deeper insight into current stories of import.

This past Friday, Church Militant did an interview with Rob Gocklin (the “blue-collar Catholic”) who asked some of the best questions we’ve been asked here about the current state of the culture, the Church and the campaign — a sum-up of things as they stand right now.

Rob is a down-to-earth, straight-up, plain-spoken Catholic dedicated every bit as we are to righting this ship.

Enjoy.

EDITORS NOTE: This Church Militant video is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Retiring Police Officer Gives His Badge to honor President Donald J. Trump

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The police and their unions across America support President Donald J. Trump. He is the law and order President for all Americans.

WATCH:

©All rights reserved.

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Dems Are In Full Panic Mode

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After the 2016 presidential election, Democrats were consumed with anger, indignation, and a burning unquenchable fury. They had basked in smug satisfaction during the previous eight years as Barack Obama began to fulfill his campaign promise of October 28, 2005 of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” from our Democratic Republic into a socialist utopia. And they were blind with rage that Hillary had been denied the next eight years to complete the mission.

Even more infuriating was the fact that everything the 2016 victor stood for was a repudiation of nearly a century of leftist strivings. In fact, candidate and then President Trump promised to overturn the Regressives’ most cherished “values,” including sky-high taxes, open borders, a weakened military, flawed foreign treaties, ongoing wars, the illiteracy roadmap called Common Core, and generations of impoverished, uneducated, imprisoned Blacks, et al.

THE WORLD’S BIGGEST TEMPER TANTRUM

Rejecting nearly 250 years of the peaceful transition of presidential power, Democrats launched a four-year war against President Trump, manufacturing a Russian-collusion hoax, a Ukraine hoax, a Stormy Daniels hoax, an impeachment hoax, on and on. All came to naught, but their efforts did expose the deep systemic corruption at the highest reaches of the Obama regime––corruption involving crimes as serious as sedition and treason!

“Coincidentally,” on the heels of the impeachment failure came the China virus, not only bringing our economy––and the entire world––to a halt, but giving rise to unrestrained violence by bought-and-paid-for anarchist groups such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter in about 15 Democrat-run cities.

Then, President Trump tested positive for the corona virus and was hospitalized to the everlasting––and unseemly––glee of his opponents. However, that glee was short-lived as the president also triumphed over this assault, left the hospital after three days, and has been out campaigning in full Ironman mode ever since.

DEMS NOW IN FULL PANIC MODE

It is only a couple of weeks till the presidential election and the anger that once animated Democrats has been replaced by fear––stark, bug-eyed, white-knuckle, deadly fear and dread.
Wherever their marching orders come from––leftist billionaire globalists, or China, as writer Daniel Greenfield spells out––they have now been reduced to holding their collective breaths in the hope that:

  • Joe Biden can stay vertical and passably sentient till November 3rd,
  • His VP choice, Kalamity Harris, can continue to conceal her close ties––familial and political––to Communist China,
  • The escalating Hunter/Joe/Burisma scandal doesn’t get even more explosive and scandalous, as writer Andrea Widburg predicts it will, or, as she wrote: ….the e-mails “also indicate that his father pimped Hunter to foreign governments to act as a bagman for bribes”…not to omit Hunter’s alleged appetite for child pornography.

Journalist Jack Cashill asks: Can Democrats Sell Their Worst Candidate Ever? “For all their talk of empowering women and minorities,” he writes, “leftists have used their vast media, tech, and deep-state power to sell America a corrupt old white guy of diminished mental capacity…by suppressing the fact that––by any standards––Biden is a pedophile, a plagiarist, a liar, a hypocrite, and––by the left’s standards––a racist, sexist, warmonger as well as a credibly accused sexual predator.”

But obviously, character is not what Democrats care about, as demonstrated by eight straight years of watching Bill Clinton spit in Hillary’s face every single day with his serial affairs, or Barack Obama trot around the world bad-mouthing the country that gave him everything.

What they care about, as evidenced brazenly over the past four years, is getting rid of the guy who exposed their deep corruption, the better to avoid their inevitable prison sentences!

ALL HANDS ON DECK!

In short order, the now-hysterical Democrats have jumped into action.

Classy Democrats like Kristopher Jacks, Chairman of the executive committee of the Colorado Democrat Party, threatened violence and murder if Trump wins, or as he said,  “Guillotines, motherf…r.” Kind of reminds you of Madonna’s equally classy threat about burning down the White House, doesn’t it?

But Jacks and Madonna and their quite numerous ilk are small potatoes. The bigger fish are also in full panic mode:

  • Quick, they demand of their media whores: Report a rise in Covid-19 cases and NOT A WORD about Hunter Biden.
  • Hurry, they call to Twitter: Shut down the president’s multi-million-followers account and that of his press secretary, and also the account of White House physician, Dr. Scott Atlas, for daring to suggest fact-based information that contradicts the leftists’ so-called experts on Covid-19.
  • Attention, they tell their pollsters: Increase those Biden-Kalamity numbers!
  • Head’s Up, they call to tech giant Facebook: Kill the ads and positive messages about Trump.
  • Yoo Hoo debate moderators: With Trump, get out your machetes!
  • Listen Up, they say to their ballot harvesters and voter-fraud experts: quadruple your efforts. Of course, they are thrilled to read reports of their successes, such as reported by Mark Tapscott: New Data Analysis Finds 353 Counties With 1.8 Million More Registered Voters Than Eligible Citizens.

ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES

Why this desperation? Because the Democrat poohbahs also read the inside polling numbers and know things are looking grim for their basement-dwelling candidate. They are especially terrified because they know that a Trump victory will bring the two outcomes they fear most:

  • A swift avalanche of overdue indictments and ultimate imprisonments to all the corrupt operatives of the Obama regime––including Obama and Biden, as well as the corrupt functionaries they appointed in the FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, State, et al.
  • An absolute death sentence for the Democrat Party as it is currently constituted.

That’s why the Democrats are quaking with fear and dread––and we are all seeing it play out in living color as the few days till the election elapse.

After all the treachery, violence, duplicity and hypocrisy that Democrats have displayed not only since citizen Donald J. Trump and his magnificent wife Melania descended the elevator in Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for POTUS, but for the past four years of the Democrats’ manic, vulgar, obsessed and irrational behavior.

Right now, it is fascinating to see these leftists in their full infantile-dependency mode, calling on their mommies and daddies in the media, big tech and the Big Daddy billionaires to save them.

Given the choice between the systemic corruption and hate-America mentality of the left and the burgeoning peace, prosperity and love-America administration of President Trump, pulling the right lever on November 3rd is a no-brainer!

©Joan Swirsky. All rights reserved.

On the Nature of Complicity

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Randall Smith: In the future, will America’s bishops renounce their failure to condemn politicians who support abortion as German bishops have recently done for their former support of Nazism?

In a column last year titled “Politicizing the Eucharist?” I pointed out that no one now claims that when Archbishop Rummel of New Orleans excommunicated three Catholics for publically encouraging people to defy his order to de-segregate the Catholic schools, he was “politicizing the Eucharist.”  Rather, Rummel is now praised highly for his singular courage, especially since his condemnation was so contrary to the more “accommodating” views of many of his fellow southern Catholics.

I also mentioned Cardinal Adolf Bertram, the ex-officio head of the German episcopate in the 1930s, who ordered Church bells rung in celebration of Nazi Germany’s victories over Poland and France and who sent greetings to Hitler on his 50th birthday in the name of all German Catholics, an act that angered his fellow bishops Konrad von Preysing and August von Galen.

The subject of whether the bishops should speak out publically against the treatment of the Jews arose at a 1942 meeting of the German bishops at Fulda. The consensus was “to give up heroic action in favor of small successes.”  In the 1933 Reichskonkordat between the Holy See and the German government, Church leaders pledged to refrain from speaking out on issues not directly related to the Church.  Repeated violations of the Konkordat on the part of the government, including closing churches and church schools, did not change their minds. And it also didn’t keep bishops like Bertram from endorsing government actions they favored, such as opposition to communism and the subjugation of Poland.

If you imagine I am being too tough on these German bishops, then perhaps you should read the twenty-three-page report made public last May by Germany’s Council of Catholic Bishops in which they admitted “complicity” by their predecessors who did not do enough to oppose the rise of Nazi regime and its mistreatment of Jews.

In eighty or ninety years, will future U.S. bishops be submitting a similar document of their own, confessing the “complicity” of their predecessors who did not do enough to oppose the abortion regime?  Will Catholics of that time be as baffled about our present bishops and prominent Catholic politicians as we are about the accommodationist Catholics of Nazi Germany?

How could Catholics of that time have failed to understand the evil staring them in the face? And why did they “accommodate” a regime that had labeled Christianity, and Catholics in particular, as “enemies of the state”?  Was it perhaps because so many leaders of the regime had been raised Catholic and some were still rosary-carrying church-goers?

Who, in retrospect, would not look back in shame at a German bishop who called questioning the Catholic commitments of Catholic Nazi leaders “offensive because they constitute an assault on the meaning of what it is to be Catholic.” Because “being Catholic means loving the Church; being Catholic means participating in the sacramental life of the church; being a Catholic means trying to transform the world by the light of the Gospel”?

And yet those are the words of our own Bishop McElroy of San Diego about those who question Joe Biden’s Catholicism.

And we transform the world in the light of the Gospel how?  Is it not by opposing the killing of innocent human beings?

In retrospect, we would suspect that a bishop who had said about the treatment of Jews, as Bishop McElroy has about abortion, that “To reduce that magnificent, multidimensional gift of God’s love to a single question of public policy is repugnant and should have no place in public discourse” had little or no serious concern for the lives being lost.  “Sure, abortion is bad, but what about global warming!”  “Sure the ill-treatment of Jews is unfortunate, but what about the future of Europe!” Wouldn’t we consider that to be repugnant?

What would anyone say now about a Catholic politician as prominent as Mario Cuomo if, during the 1930s in Germany, he had said:  “I accept the Church’s teaching about Jews, but must I insist others do so?  Our public morality. . .the moral standards we maintain for everyone, not just the ones we insist on in our private lives – depends on a consensus view of right and wrong.  The values derived from religious belief will not and should not be accepted as part of the public morality unless they are shared by the pluralistic community at large by consensus.” That statement would have worked equally well for Catholic segregationists in the American South.

If that Catholic politician in 1930s Germany had available to him the “seamless garment” argument used by Mr. Cuomo, he might have said, “I grant that the treatment of Jews may have a unique significance but not a preemptive significance.”  “The Jewish question is an important issue for Catholics, but so is the question of the injustice of the reparation payments we have been forced to make along with all the resulting hunger and homelessness and joblessness, all the forces diminishing human life and threatening to destroy it.”

All the forces diminishing human life and threatening to destroy it?  Like . . . oh, I don’t know . . . abortion?

Who, in retrospect now, wouldn’t find such a “Catholic” politician either an obvious liar or a delusional hack?

If you find my comparison between the Catholics who enabled the Nazis and modern Catholics who enable abortion troubling, perhaps you should read Anne Applebaum’s article in The Atlantic titled “History Will Judge the Complicit.” Take out all the tendentious stuff about the numbers at Trump’s inauguration and a phone call with the Ukrainian ambassador and replace it with Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden’s support for abortion and for policies that result in the closure of faithful Catholic institutions, and then change the title to “On the Nature of Complicity: Abortion’s Catholic Enablers and the Judgment of History.”

That judgment is unlikely to be any kinder to them than it has been to their German predecessors.

COLUMN BY

Randall Smith

Randall B. Smith is a tenured Full Professor of Theology. His book Reading the Sermons of Thomas Aquinas: A Guidebook for Beginners is available from Emmaus Press. And his book Aquinas, Bonaventure, and the Scholastic Culture at Paris: Preaching, Prologues, and Biblical Commentary is due out from Cambridge University Press in the fall.

EDITORS NOTE: This The Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2020 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

PODCAST: Twitter, Facebook Censored Trump 65 Times!

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GUESTS AND TOPICS:

CHERYL CHUMLEY

Cheryl Chumley is online opinion editor for The Washington Times, the author of “The Devil in DC: Winning Back the Country From the Beast in Washington” and of “Police State USA: How Orwell’s Nightmare is Becoming Our Reality,” and a 2008-2009 Robert Novak journalism fellow with The Fund for American Studies. She is also a licensed private investigator and principal of Chumley Investigations.

TOPIC: SOCIALISTS DON’T SLEEP!

DR. STEPHEN SOLOWAY

Dr. Stephen Soloway has dedicated his life to helping patients and colleagues, and patients who visit him from six countries and many U.S. cities. Dr. Soloway’s devotion to patient’s needs have earned him Top Doctor Awards every year since 2003 and he is regarded as one of the leaders in the Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Delaware area for Rheumatologic care. He recently completed his appointed to the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition,

TOPIC: The Horrors of American Healthcare!

DAN GAINOR

Dan Gainor, Vice President for Business and Culture for the Media Research Center, a veteran editor whose work has been published or cited in the following media: Congressional Quarterly.com, Investor’s Business Daily, Chicago Sun-Times, New York Post, Washington Times, Orange County Register, San Diego Union-Tribune, Dateline Washington, Janet Parshall’s America, Thom Hartmann Show, American Family Radio, CNBC’s “Power Lunch,” CNN’s “Paula Zahn Now” and Fox’s “Hannity & Colmes” and “Fox Business Live.”

TOPIC: Twitter, Facebook Censored Trump 65 Times!

©All rights reserved.

RELATED VIDEO: Media embrace Big Tech censorship instead of pushing back.

Zuckerberg Funds Used To Pay Pennsylvania Judges Overseeing Ballot Counts

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HARRISBURG, Pa./PRNewswire/ — Plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit have filed a motion seeking a restraining order to block the use of private funds from billionaire Mark Zuckerberg for use in local election management, a statutory responsibility of state officials including the Pennsylvania Legislature.

VIEW FEDERAL LAWSUIT BY AMISTAD PROJECT PDF

The motion, filed on October 19 in U.S. District Court, Middle District of Pennsylvania, highlights how a grant for $10 million from the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) explicitly requires the City of Philadelphia to open no fewer than 800 new polling places – and failing to do so may require the City to forfeit the grant money. The funding from Mark Zuckerberg also pays for judges to oversee ballot counts and the outcome of disputes that arise regarding the eligibility of ballots in the election.

“The Center for Technology and Civic Life is using Mark Zuckerberg’s millions to require the City of Philadelphia to open 800 new election offices and hire judges who will oversee ballot counts and rule on ballot disputes based on their own admission in court documents,” said Tom King, the legal counsel representing the plaintiffs in the case. “Municipal leaders have ceded their role as a local authority to CTCL with powers that rightfully belong to the people of Pennsylvania through their representatives in Harrisburg by effectively inviting this partisan billionaire into the ballot counting room,” he concluded.

“We are fighting Mark Zuckerberg around the country where he is using CTCL, a nonprofit founded and managed by Obama-affiliated operatives, to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to leftist strongholds in several battleground states to determine the outcome of the election,” said Phill Kline, Director of the Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society, which is supporting the litigation. “This is a scheme engineered by partisan activists under the guise of COVID-related support. The privatization of the election undermines the integrity of the election,” he added.

BACKGROUND

The plaintiffs in the case, the Pennsylvania Voters Alliance and several officeholders and candidates, previously filed a complaint against Centre County, Delaware County, and the City of Philadelphia, and Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Kathy Boockvar, in Civil Action No.: 4:20−CV−01761−MWB.

The grants to Philadelphia and the counties are part of a $350 million contribution by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, which is being funneled into leftist strongholds selectively in several swing states to turnout voters for liberal politicians. This strategy may tilt the results of the presidential election in the most critical battleground states in the nation, including Pennsylvania.

The Thomas More Society, a not-for-profit public interest law firm, is providing financial support for litigation in numerous federal cases seeking to block Mark Zuckerberg’s blatant attempt to influence the outcome of the presidential election.

For more information on this and related issues, go to got-freedom.org.

©All rights reserved.

NYC POGROM: De Blasio’s Inspectors Flood Jewish Neighborhoods, Every Jewish School Visited

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Dozens of schools were harassed by de Wilhelm Blasio’s jackboots, circa Berlin 1930s.

If inspectors were unable to access the building, the yeshivas were given a summons for a court appearance along with a $15,000 fine.

INSPECTORS FLOOD BORO PARK AND FLATBUSH: Every Yeshiva Being Visited Today

YWN has been inundated with reports of inspectors flooding the Flatbush and Boro Park “red zones” on Monday.

By: Yeshiva Today, October 19, 2020:

By 11:30AM, inspectors from the NYC Department of Buildings had already visited nearly two dozen Mosdos Hatorah.

Initial reports state that inspectors are asking to enter the buildings, and if denied, they are given a summons for a court appearance in a few months along with a $15,000 fine.

Highly credible sources tell YWN that the inspectors were provided a list from the State that has the names and addresses of every single Yeshiva, and were hoping to visit each one today.

YWN had no information if any Yeshivas were even open.

YWN has been inundated with reports of inspectors flooding the Flatbush and Boro Park “red zones” on Monday.

By 11:30AM, inspectors from the NYC Department of Buildings had already visited nearly two dozen Mosdos Hatorah.

Initial reports state that inspectors are asking to enter the buildings, and if denied, they are given a summons for a court appearance in a few months along with a $15,000 fine.

Highly credible sources tell YWN that the inspectors were provided a list from the State that has the names and addresses of every single Yeshiva, and were hoping to visit each one today.

YWN had no information if any Yeshivas were even open.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Federal Appeals Court Reminds Judges Not to Change Rules Before or During Election

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The Supreme Court advises that judges should not change state and county election rules right before an election, a Cincinnati-based appeals court has reminded a lower court.

The Ohio case, like others this election season, involves the use of ballot “drop boxes” and restrictions that officials may put on them while attempting to maintain the integrity of state elections.

In a split decision, 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard Griffin, writing for himself and Judge Amul Thapar, said: “The Supreme Court has repeatedly emphasized that lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter election rules on the eve of an election.”

Why did District Court Judge Dan Polster, a Clinton appointee, need the Oct. 9 reminder from the 6th Circuit panel?

How are socialists deluding a whole generation? Learn more now >>

Because, as Griffin put it, “Here, the district court went a step further and altered election rules during an election.”

Here’s what happened.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose issued a directive that allowed ballot drop boxes to be placed only in a county’s election office in secured, monitored settings.

LaRose reasoned that under Ohio law, an absentee ballot could be returned only by mail or by “personally deliver[ing] it to the [election] director.”

In LaRose’s view, this last requirement meant that any drop box had to be located at a county’s election board office.

Polster disagreed, issuing what some called a “scathing decision” that required LaRose to allow drop boxes at additional locations. In the process, the district court judge summarily rebuffed concerns about election fraud, saying that LaRose “has not advanced any legitimate reason to prohibit a county board of elections from utilizing off-site drop boxes and/or off-site delivery of ballots to staff.”

Polster also refused to stay his decision—put it on hold—to allow Ohio officials to appeal.

That’s when Griffin and Thapar, the 6th Circuit judges, stepped in to stay Polster’s decision themselves, dissolving his preliminary injunction and reminding their fellow judge of his proper role.

“Federal courts are not ‘overseers and micromangers’ of ‘the minutiae of state election processes,’” they wrote, and “The district court in this case altered election rules during an election and in disregard for Ohio’s important state interests.”

The two appeals judges made clear that even though LaRose’s directive allowed a ballot drop box to be placed only at the board of elections office, “Ohio voters are not required to use a ballot drop box to vote.”

Ohio is generous with its absentee voting rules even though “there is no constitutional right to an absentee ballot,” the judges said, adding:

Voters may (1) vote in person on election day, (2) vote in person for more than four weeks before election day, (3) mail in an absentee ballot; or (4) drop off an absentee ballot at a drop box. Thus, a limitation on drop boxes poses at most an inconvenience to a subset of voters (those who choose to vote absentee and physically drop off their absentee ballot).

Griffin and Thapar said that even if subjected to some form of heightened scrutiny, Ohio’s restrictions on drop boxes “easily pass constitutional muster.”

Moreover, contrary to Polster’s claim, the Ohio secretary of state had advanced legitimate concerns that supported his directive, the 6th Circuit judges said.

First, the directive “promotes uniformity,” which has been “consistently” recognized as a legitimate state interest in running “orderly” elections.

Second, the directive “promotes the state’s efficiency interests in administering elections,” given the long list of complex responsibilities of elections officials. That “efficiency interest is particularly important where, as here, voting is already in progress,” the judges wrote.

Third, “limiting drop boxes to one location per county promotes the accuracy of the election” since “voters who return a ballot to the wrong drop box run the risk of having their ballot rejected.”

And finally, the secretary of state’s directive “promotes the security of the election,” the two judges said. Ohio “never before used off-site drop boxes” and requiring them at the last moment would “require on-the-fly implementation of new, untested security measures.”

The danger of allowing unmonitored, unsecured drop boxes for absentee ballots was demonstrated recently in Virginia. There, the state board of elections issued a warning to voters Oct. 5 that six outdoor mail collection boxes had been broken into during the prior weekend, mailboxes that may have contained absentee ballots.

Judge Helene White, the third judge on the 6th Circuit panel, wrote a dissenting opinion disagreeing with Griffith and Thapar.

White said she would have upheld the lower court’s injunction because she believed that the decision on how many ballot drop boxes should be placed, and where, should be left up to county boards of election. White seemed unconcerned that this could lead to inconsistent rules throughout the state.

But as Griffith and Thapar pointed out, “the district judge in this case altered election rules during an election and in disregard for Ohio’s important state interests.”

Griffin and Thapar are right. Federal judges shouldn’t alter the rules at the 12th hour—especially after an election has begun.

COMMENTARY BY

Zack Smith

Zack Smith is a legal fellow in the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation. Twitter: .

Hans von Spakovsky

Hans von Spakovsky is an authority on a wide range of issues—including civil rights, civil justice, the First Amendment, immigration, the rule of law and government reform—as a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and manager of the think tank’s Election Law Reform Initiative. Read his research. Twitter: .

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A Note for our Readers:

Democratic Socialists say, “America should be more like socialist countries such as Sweden and Denmark.” And millions of young people believe them…

For years, “Democratic Socialists” have been growing a crop of followers that include students and young professionals. America’s future will be in their hands.

How are socialists deluding a whole generation? One of their most effective arguments is that “democratic socialism” is working in Scandinavian countries like Sweden and Norway. They claim these countries are “proof” that socialism will work for America. But they’re wrong. And it’s easy to explain why.

Our friends at The Heritage Foundation just published a new guide that provides three irrefutable facts that debunks these myths. For a limited time, they’re offering it to readers of The Daily Signal for free.

Get your free copy of “Why Democratic Socialists Can’t Legitimately Claim Sweden and Denmark as Success Stories” today and equip yourself with the facts you need to debunk these myths once and for all.

GET YOUR FREE COPY NOW »

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.