Federal agencies used the pretext of foreign interference in the 2020 election to surveil and suppress domestic news. //

America’s speech police are reassembling to once again influence our elections. At the same time the security state is creating potential pretexts for renewed censorship by issuing warnings of cyberattacks that could “hinder public access to election information,” they are also reprising old claims of coming Russian election interference on behalf of Donald Trump.

The little-noticed development comes in a report from the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) on the DOJ’s efforts to “Coordinate Information Sharing About Foreign Malign Influence Threats to U.S. Elections” — a euphemism for the chief law enforcement agency’s prior censorship activities.

Yashar Ali 🐘
@yashar
·
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The U.S. Secret Service is apologizing to a Massachusetts salon owner after an agent covered her security camera with duct tape and broke into her salon by picking the lock so that its bathroom could be used by various people for a two-hour period. //

"And then when they were done using the bathroom for two hours, they left, and left my building completely unlocked, and did not take the tape off the camera," she added. //

Dieter Schultz
3 hours ago
Powers said the Secret Service’s Boston office has apologized on behalf of the agency.
The one thing I didn't hear or read in the article that I should have was that someone was fired from the SS and they had already been charged for breaking and entering and criminal trespass.

I don't care about apologies nor should anybody else.

In a statement after Contraras' ruling, America First Legal’s executive director Gene Hamilton said:

“The Biden-Harris Administration was actively destroying the records of federal employees at the CDC in blatant violation of the law — and we are pleased that the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has ordered a stop to their illegal conduct.” //

DavidW
an hour ago
Here's a question: "How many of the top bureaucrats of the CDC use "low level employee" email addresses instead of their proper email address?" Oh, I'm sure no bureaucrat or politician ever used email aliases. //

jdquick
an hour ago
I tall you what. I think all the federal agencies are broken and I don't see how we can ever recover. The bureaucrats are running the country, the constitution be damned. The USSS didn't record radio transmissions during the Trump assassination attempt. The NIH and the CDC along with the NIAID and the DOD lied about Covid and gain of function. The FBI and CIA lied about J6.... They lied about killing Ashli Babbitt and Byrd got a promotion. They go merrily on their way as the country implodes because of their decisions and yet no one is in jail. DHS lied about the border and flying ILLEGALS all over the country. They have placed an ex-congresswoman (Gabbard) on the terrorist watch list. They can find people who pray at abortion clinics and sentence them to prison. They raid a former presidents residence because of "classified" documents but the meat sack is too senile to be charged as was DJT. I could go on all day but what the hell, no one pays the price except us deplorables. What a bullshit society we are lining in today and the bureaucrats continue to run it into the ground with impunity. If this continues and I see no reason it won't....we don't have long as a country before the wheels fall off the train and we crash like never before.

A recently surfaced recording of a Zoom call between the Biden/Harris team from 2020 reveals disconcerting evidence of the team's intentional targeting and manipulation of voters and relentless bullying of media outlets to control information. //

“One of the smartest things that the party did itself was over the last couple of years, they actually invested in a team that Tim runs… to detect and track misinformation and misinformation narratives in various corners of the internet and then flag them to platforms as a violation of their policy.” //

Matt Orfalea
@0rf
·
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Replying to @0rf
RINKEVICH: "We targeted folks based on online behavioral cues, building out personas, based on the type of content they were consuming, what they were searching, the kinds of websites they were visiting so that we could target folks in real-time as they were exposed to that… Show more

4:11 PM · Aug 7, 2024 //

Matt Orfalea
@0rf
·
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Replying to @0rf
But the Biden team didn't just get the media to forward their deception, they changed real votes. According to Rinkevich, "concern around [Biden's] mental acuity in particular went down by 8 points over the course of our campaign," resulting in "about 200K" votes for Biden. /16

4:11 PM · Aug 7, 2024

In an exclusive breaking story, several Federal Air Marshal whistleblowers have come forward with information showing that former U.S. Representative and Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard is currently enrolled in the Quiet Skies program. Quiet Skies is a TSA surveillance program with its own compartmentalized suspected terrorist watchlist. It is the same program being weaponized against J6 defendants and their families. Quiet Skies is allegedly used to protect traveling Americans from suspected domestic terrorists. //

Air Marshals were first assigned to Gabbard on Jul. 23, a day after she criticized Kamala Harris, Biden, and the National Security State in an interview with Laura Ingraham. FAMs were mobilized on Jul. 24 and assigned to their first flight with her on Jul. 25.

Rep. August Pfluger
@RepPfluger
·
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Our country was millimeters away from a presidential assassination.

My bill ensures all presidential candidates are protected and requires the Secret Service Director to be confirmed by the Senate.

USSS Directors MUST be capable and apolitical.
12:59 PM · Aug 5, 2024 //

Robbie Mouton
@mcgmouton57
·
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Senators Chuck Grassley(R-IA) and Catherine Cortez Masto(D-Nev.) have introduced the 'Protect Act' that would require Senate confirmation for all future USSS Directors. This would remove it from being a presidential appointment and bring it line with other federal law enforcement… Show more
12:00 PM · Jul 27, 2024

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the president signed into law the Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act, bipartisan legislation to provide a major boost to the future of nuclear energy in America. //

The ADVANCE Act will:

Facilitate American Nuclear Energy Leadership by:
Empowering the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to lead in international forums to develop regulations for advanced nuclear reactors.
Directing the Department of Energy (DOE) to improve its process for approving the export of American technology to international markets, while maintaining strong standards for nuclear non-proliferation.
Support Development and Deployment of New Nuclear Energy Technologies by:
Reducing regulatory costs for companies seeking to license advanced nuclear reactor technologies.
Creating a prize to incentivize the successful deployment of next-generation reactor technologies.
Requiring the NRC to develop a pathway to enable the timely licensing of microreactors and nuclear facilities at brownfield and retired fossil-fuel energy generation sites.
Directing the NRC to establish an accelerated licensing review process to site and construct reactors at existing nuclear sites.
Preserve Existing Nuclear Energy by:
Modernizing outdated rules that restrict international investment.
Strengthen America’s Nuclear Energy Fuel Cycle and Supply Chain Infrastructure by:
Directing the NRC to enhance its ability to qualify and license accident-tolerant fuels and advanced nuclear fuels that can increase safety and economic competitiveness for existing reactors and the next generation of advanced reactors.
Tasking the NRC to evaluate advanced manufacturing techniques to build nuclear reactors better, faster, cheaper, and smarter.

Josh Hawley @HawleyMO
·
🚨🚨 NEW - Whistleblower tells me Secret Service Acting Director Rowe personally directed cuts to the USSS agents who do threat assessments for events. Whistleblower says those agents were NOT present in Butler - and some of them had warned of security problems for months
3:33 PM · Aug 1, 2024 //

According to Hawley's letter, the normal evaluation by the Secret Service Counter Surveillance Division (CSD), the division that performs threat assessment of event sites before the event occurs, was not done. 

The whistleblower claims that if personnel from CSD had been present at the rally, the gunman would have been handcuffed in the parking lot after being spotted with a rangefinder.

The whistleblower also said it was Rowe who was responsible for cuts to the CSD, reducing the manpower by twenty percent, and he didn't disclose that during his congressional testimony. 

The whistleblower explained there were continuing security concerns about how they were dealing with Trump coverage and that people who spoke up about it faced retaliation.  //

You can see from this angle just how exposed Trump (and Copenhaver) were and you can see a person moving on the roof with a direct line to them. This is what the Secret Service coverage (or lack thereof) allowed.

In the video taken at 6:08 p.m. on July 13, the person appears on the roof of the building adjacent to where Trump is speaking and can be seen walking from the 1:00 second mark to about the 2:50 second mark.

Thomas Crooks allegedly then fired three minutes later, at 6:11.

It’s supposed to make the title transfer a breeze and help Californians avoid those tedious trips to the DMV.

Users will soon be able to claim their digital titles via the DMV’s application, track and manage them without getting to the office, according to an Avalanche blog post. The time to transfer vehicle titles drops to a few minutes using blockchain rails in the backend from two weeks via the traditional process, a DMV spokesperson said in an email. //

However, given the recent spate of Microsoft outages and other hacking reports, I am a bit nervous about digitizing without serious hard copy backups. Given how expensive cars have become and how critical having one is to people’s lives and livelihoods, extreme caution should be used before proceeding.

The unintended consequences of this move could be devastating if there are significant issues with the system.

It is also disturbing to note this move is also part of Governor Gavin Newsom’s plans to even have more control over our lives….under the banner of protections. ///

What about people who don't have smartphones, or computers, or Internet ? What happens when there is actual fraud, how do you unwind that? Do people still get paper backup copies of titles?

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee held a joint hearing Tuesday to examine the totality of the goat-rope that was security for former President Donald Trump at Butler, PA, on July 13, which led to him being wounded by a rifle bullet (see Sen. Kennedy Hilariously Destroys FBI Over Whether Trump Was Shot: 'It Wasn't a Murder Hornet?') and coming within millimeters of death.

The hearing did not shed a lot of light on the events of July 13. Everyone agreed that the Secret Service accepted responsibility but not so much as to do anything about it; //

All in all, the picture painted was one of a Secret Service management structure that deprived the Trump campaign of requested resources for security because they could. The security coordination for the rally was slipshod and lackadaisical, with no apparent attempt to establish a unified command and operations structure for the different law enforcement agencies involved. //

Not everyone saw a petty, vindictive, blundering command structure in the Secret Service as the proximate cause of the killing of one rally participant and the wounding of two others and a presidential candidate.

Lindsey Graham used his opening statement to insist that someone needed to be fired:
[Video]

Fair enough. But Graham devoted his first question to giving the acting Secret Service director Ronald Rowe carte blanche to ask for more money. //

The Secret Service currently has a budget in excess of $3 billion. Delaware's budget is $4.5 billion. //

Let's review the bidding. The Secret Service has stonewalled the Senate and House in providing details on the assassination attempt. The Secret Service communications apparatus blatantly lied to Congress and the nation. Secret Service agents were diverted from Trump's outdoor rally to beef up the protection for Dr. Jill, who was engaged in what can only be called counter-programming in a secure hotel in Pittsburgh. The site security plan ignored a big f-ing building a mere 140 yards from the speaker's dais. Counter-sniper teams were only made available the day before the rally and did not have time to produce a site plan. No one has been fired. The overwhelming odds are no one will be fired because most of these foul-ups were brought on by decisions made at Secret Service headquarters.

The answer is not more money. As we've seen from history, more money begets more arrogance and more incompetence. The answer is a massive haircut that cleans out the headquarters and eliminates any task that is not a core function of the agency specified by federal statute. If the Secret Service doesn't have adequate resources to protect presidential candidates, maybe their role should be reduced to providing a small command-and-control cell with the actual security provided by something like the successor to Blackwater Worldwide.

As Ronald Reagan said, "If you want more of something, subsidize it; if you want less of something, tax it."

Activists with Reform Pharma, an initiative of the nonprofit Children's Health Defense, descended onto ComicCon in San Diego on Friday and Saturday. The group was adorned in pop culture costumes and distributed free copies of a full-color comic book based on the true events of the discovery of an illegal biolab last year, a story extensively reported by RedState. Over two days, activists held signs and handed out 10,000 copies of the new comic outside of the convention center.

The Reedley incident unfolded in this small Central Valley town near Fresno, where city code enforcement Officer Jesalyn Harper uncovered a clandestine bio-lab. Harper, a central figure in the comic book adaptation titled "The Known Unknown," along with other officers, discovered violations and suspicious activities in what was supposed to be a vacant warehouse. The illegal operation was linked to a group of Chinese nationals, including a fugitive.

Inside the lab, authorities found nearly 1,000 lab mice and a range of biohazardous materials, including unlabeled vials containing potentially infectious agents such as COVID-19. //

Additionally, the nonprofit has made the 16-page comic book available online to view, download, and share. https://reformpharmanow.org/comic/

On Saturday, legal scholar and writer Jonathan Turley laid out the details of a House Judiciary report detailing the efforts of several shadowy organizations to censor right-leaning content on various social media platforms, and those efforts are an affront to anyone who understands the concept of free speech.

Few Americans have ever heard of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, let alone understand how it shapes what they read and hear in news and commentary. That may soon change.

An alarming new report of the House Judiciary Committee details this organization’s work to censor conservative and opposing viewpoints in the media by targeting figures such as Joe Rogan and entire social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter).

It is part of a massive censorship system that a federal court recently described as “Orwellian.” The sophistication of this system makes authoritarian regimes like China’s and Iran’s look like mere amateurs in censorship and blacklisting. //

One of the most insidious efforts has been to strangle the financial life out of conservative or libertarian sites by targeting their donors and advertisers. This is where the left has excelled beyond anything that has come before in speech crackdowns.

This is dangerous. This is using the weight of government to suppress free speech. This isn't about policies made in a vacuum by these social media companies. This is about government actors, as Mr. Turley notes, including the president down to unnamed members of his administration and, we feel certain, members of Congress in effect using these organizations to lean on the social media companies. They are targeting the platform's income streams - advertising - and they are succeeding at it. //

Dutch Letter
3 hours ago
“To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness, without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical (imaginary) idea.” - James Madison

We are no longer a virtuous people and we no longer elect virtuous representatives. We vote for who is the lesser of two evils in every contest, and we do not protest but on assigned days when voting is allowed. We have become complicit actors in our own doom.
Of course, we commiserate, and complain to each other, yet closer to the abyss we creep.

As we passed the late Chief Justice Earl Warren’s portrait on the wall, Secretary Rumsfeld commented to me that his friendship with Gerald Ford, who served on the Warren Commission, and his subsequent tenure as Ford’s Chief of Staff is what convinced him government conspiracies were impossible. He said no one in government can keep a secret. They either spill the beans or get exposed.

All these years later, Democrats are learning the lesson Secretary Rumsfeld told me. Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame now admits Democrats have told him for eighteen months that Joe Biden is not fit to serve a second term. Former Meet the Press host Chuck Todd now reveals that two years ago a Biden Cabinet Secretary told him Biden was not fit to serve a second term. George Clooney, in the New York Times, admits that even at the fundraiser for Biden that Clooney hosted a month ago, Biden’s decline was obvious.

What is obvious, too, is how much deceit the American press corps and Democrats have engaged in. A month ago, at the Clooney fundraiser, a video from a Hollywood entertainment reporter went viral. It shows Biden being led off stage by Barack Obama in an awkward manner. Conservatives highlighted the video. Democrats insisted it was not true. The media largely sided with Democrats. Now, George Clooney admits the Biden at that fundraiser was not the Joe Biden of 2016 or even 2020. Jon Favreau, the Obama staffer, now says on CNN he was at the fundraiser and Biden’s physical decline was obvious. A month ago, the American press corps insisted that was not so.

There is an alternative to shock therapy that has proven to be effective in addressing a debt crisis in the long term. The alternative is to enact effective fiscal rules constraining deficits and debt accumulation. The Swiss debt brake has proven to be the most successful of these rules-based approaches to fiscal policy. Three decades ago, Switzerland experienced unsustainable growth in debt. They responded with a debt brake that caps the growth in spending at the long-term rate of growth in the economy. Over a transition period, the Swiss were successful in bringing expenditures into balance with revenues and in stabilizing and reducing debt. //

The Swiss debt brake is very much a bottom-up approach to reform. Debt brakes were first enacted at the cantonal level and only later at the federal level. The debt brake was incorporated into the Swiss Constitution through a referendum with support from 85 percent of voters. The debt brake provides for a transition period in which expenditures are brought into balance with revenue. The debt brake has automatic triggers, reducing spending when deficits exceed a tolerance level. Deficit spending is permitted in response to emergencies, but the deficits must be offset by surplus revenues in the near term.

the official "Biden-Harris HQ" account, which I'm now convinced is run by White House pool boy Andrew Bates, went after Donald Trump over something called "Project 2025." What exactly is that? It's a transition proposal created by the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups that includes reclassifying thousands of partisan federal employees so they can be replaced by the incoming executive.

Biden-Harris HQ @BidenHQ
·
CNN: Project 2025 is a playbook for what the first days of a second Trump administration would look like. They want to dismantle the administrative state and give more power to the executive branch. That would include sending agencies like the Department of Justice after his… Show more

5:10 PM · Jul 3, 2024 //

Officials and staffers who are so vapid that they don't even know that the "administrative state" is under the direct authority of the executive branch. In other words, "Project 2025" is just the president being the president. Nowhere in the U.S. Constitution is there mention of an all-powerful, untouchable "administrative state" that stands alone as another branch of government. To even suggest that is totalitarian, and the phrase itself is usually derogatory.

Not to the Biden campaign, though. They are embracing the "administrative state" because they believe they have a right to control the country even when they lose elections. Who you vote for doesn't matter. All that matters is some overpaid, underworked career "expert" in some agency somewhere. Think about how ridiculous that is. It's supposedly "authoritarian" to reform the administrative state through constitutionally-appropriated executive power, but it's not authoritarian for an administrative state to wield unaccountable power over Americans. //

ConservativeInMinnesota
21 minutes ago
The fact that Project 2025 is being called out already means that it scares the deep state. That means the Heritage Foundation is doing something right with it and deserves our support.

Montana radio host Aaron Flint pointed out that replacing Biden with another Democrat will still leave in power the people currently using him like a presidential skin suit. That’s also true, to a large extent, of replacing Biden with Trump. //

However, because we’ve already had the benefit of a Trump presidency, we can see that even a president as vigorous and defiant as he struggled to truly exercise authority over the people and institutions that, constitutionally speaking, the president commands.

Some of the most egregious examples of this occurred among cabinet-level national security types. Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman under Trump Gen. Mark Milley was one of the worst offenders. Washington Post and New York Times reporters say, according to excerpts from Haley McLean, that Milley deliberately stayed in his position to sabotage voters’ elected commander-in-chief, saying to staffers of Trump, “I’ll just fight him” and “I will fight from the inside. //

Milley also disobeyed Trump’s order to pull U.S. troops from Afghanistan, setting the stage for the disastrous Afghanistan pullout Milley oversaw under Biden that seriously damaged U.S. foreign policy goals, killed 13 U.S. soldiers, and left stranded thousands of American citizens. //

In my new book, I point out that scholars such as Christopher Caldwell have shown that for more than a century the United States has been living under “two Constitutions.” One is the original Constitution that secures consent of the governed, rule of law, and government of the people, by the people, and for the people. The second Constitution, or regime, is that of the “living Constitution,” which I explain is essentially totalitarian because it recognizes no limits on its powers.

That second regime now has the upper hand, and it is run by this cabal of unelected bureaucrats who believe they have the right to saddle, ride, and spur Americans and bend us to their will. They don’t care what we vote for. We’re getting what they want regardless of how we vote. That goes for Congress, too, whom the deep state also treats like window dressing and who usually lives up to that cynical expectation.

So yes, the deep state is shamefully using Biden as their puppet president. But they believe they have the right to ignore the Constitution and voters even when the president isn’t a walking cadaver. For people who know that when the Democrat press starts shouting something it’s proof the opposite is true, this puts a pretty dark cast on all the Democrat shrieks about “democracy.”

Courts no longer owe deference to an administrative agency's interpretation of its ambiguous statutory mandate. //

The Court held that the Administrative Procedures Act, which governs the operations of administrative agencies,

requires courts to exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, and courts may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous; Chevron is overruled.

Thomas agreed with the Court’s decision but wrote separately “to underscore a more fundamental problem: Chevron deference violates our Constitution’s separation of powers, as I have previously explained at length.”

The violation, Thomas elaborated, stemmed from Chevron‘s mandate that judges surrender their judicial responsibility “to exercise . . . independent judgment in interpreting and expounding upon the laws.” //

The challengers also argued that Chevron is an abdication of judicial responsibility because courts have the duty to interpret the law, but Chevron deference substitutes the agency’s interpretation. The challengers criticized Chevron for “upend[ing] basic principles of constitutional due process of law” because it required deference to an agency’s interpretation when that agency is a litigant before the court. //

ThePrimordialOrderedPair | June 28, 2024 at 1:04 pm

Chevron is overruled.

Most important decision in decades … 4 decades, precisely.

And courts in the future need to keep in mind, in addition to this, that Congress is disallowed from delegating any of its Constitutional authority to any other entity unless specifically allowed to do so in the Constitution. To do so is to, de facto, amend the Constitution.

The past week has been the legal equivalent of the firebombing of Dresden for the administrative state.

In short order, many of the reasons we gradually, like a frog in a pot of boiling water, transformed from citizens into subjects have been demolished.

To put it bluntly, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are cannibalizing the entire federal budget. //

CBO increased the estimated budget deficit for the current fiscal year by $408 billion and the 10-year budget deficit by nearly $2.1 trillion. //

The (bloated) spending bills passed in March added nearly $1.3 trillion to the 10-year deficit, as higher spending this fiscal year leads CBO to assume (not incorrectly, in most cases) that spending will continue at those higher levels in the future.

Spending on Medicaid and Obamacare subsidies will increase deficits by $511 billion in the coming decade, in large part because more people will continue signing up for “free” coverage. The budget office also noted that “the recent surge in immigration [has] made more people than CBO previously estimated eligible for” Obamacare subsidies, accounting for an increase in projected enrollment. //

To put it bluntly, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are cannibalizing the entire federal budget. Unless and until Congress stops the “Mediscare” rhetoric and gets serious about reforming these programs, our financial situation will continue to get worse. And Lord help the next generation if we don’t wake up and come to our senses sooner rather than later.

 DC_Draino
@DC_Draino
·
One of Trump’s White House lawyers now openly confirms he was secretly working against him to stop the DOJ from investigating 2020 election fraud

This is the Deep State in action to remove Trump

They wanted zero federal investigations of 2020 election fraud & got their wish

Tom Fitton @TomFitton
Former WH lawyer confirms he, behind Trump's back, organized threats of mass resignations to successfully thwart Trump from appointing an acting attorney general (@JeffClarkUS) who would seriously investigate 2020 election. https://politi.co/3Txnk93. //

Plans are no doubt underway for the second Trump administration. Those plans rightly include cleaning house of anyone who might be tempted to undermine that administration in any way. Democrats will call it "revenge." But Donald Trump will be able to quote one of his predecessors and say, "I won." //

American Accountability Foundation
@ExposingBiden
·
🚨WE ARE DECLARING WAR ON THE DEEP STATE

The Left is having a category 5 meltdown over this.

Here's what we're doing, and why we're doing it:

Our investigators at the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) are currently working on building a list of rotten bureaucrats at the… Show more
10:11 AM · Jun 24, 2024 //

Democracy is where the people rule, via their elected leaders, not where the bureaucrats rule. //

Ribs_of_Rock
5 hours ago
So the head of a federal government employees union (the most unconstitutional thing I’ve ever heard of) is saying that firing unelected bureaucrats is seeking to undermine democracy. Democracy being a system of government based on people voting on leaders and political issues. Once again I think that we overestimate the factual knowledge of the opponent. While they may be possessed of great base cunning and shrewdly manipulative with the aid of their vile media accomplices, they somehow seem to think that democracy is a system of government controlled by democrats. This is a remarkably idiotic thing to say and I can’t believe that the evil union head doesn’t know better. We are tasked with persuading or counteracting a vastly ignorant group of “voters” who vote due to government pressure and government largesse.