Tag: 2020 elections

The defense-industry swamp is eager to engulf the Biden administration

Just days after the presidential election, a new investment firm called Pine Island Acquisition Corporation quietly began trading on the New York Stock Exchange, with the prospect of becoming a notable player in the $2 trillion defense and aerospace industry. The company’s greatest asset was not its relatively modest bankroll goal of $200 million, but its connections — deep ties to policy establishment figures shaping the incoming Biden administration.

In describing itself to potential investors, Pine Island’s prospectus boasted a leadership team with “extensive access, insight, expertise and management skill” in the defense sector.

In the dawning Biden era, that might be an understatement.

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Biden’s HHS Pick Once Said Religious Institutions Don’t Merit The Same Freedoms As Individuals

President-elect Joe Biden’s choice for health secretary said in 2017 that institutions do not merit the same religious freedom protections under the Constitution as individuals, video footage shows.

During his 2017 confirmation hearings to become attorney general of California, Xavier Becerra was questioned on religious freedom protections by Assemblyman James Gallagher, according to video footage posted by the California Family Council.

Gallagher pushed Becerra to explain his stances on legislation such as SB 1146 requiring private religious universities to modify their faith-based codes or face penalizations.

“On religious protections, the protection for religion is for the individual,” Becerra told Gallagher.

“I think it is important to distinguish between protections that you are affording to the individual to exercise his or her religion freely,” Becerra said, “versus protections you are giving to some institution or entity who is essentially bootstrapping the first amendment protections on behalf of somebody else.”

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CNN’S APRIL RYAN OUTRAGED AT REPORTERS DISCLOSING EMBARRASSING COMMENTS BY JOE BIDEN

We have been discussing the open bias shown by the media in the last four years. It is not clear if we can regain the ground lost for journalism as even journalism professors call for the rejection of objectivity in favor of advocacy. This has included shielding Joe Biden from any challenging questions during the recent election. That includes the news blackout on reporting on the Hunter Biden scandal, the subject of my column today in the Hill. CNN’s April Ryan personifies this trend.

Even as the media is facing widespread criticism for burying the Hunter Biden story (and is now doing the same with the Swalwell scandal), Ryan lashed out at confidential sources responsible for leaking a recording of Joe Biden making embarrassing comments about the “defund the police” movement. Ryan is demanding to know who is responsible for allowing the embarrassing comments to be made public despite her past enthusiastic discussion of such leaks against President Donald Trump.

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Biden Has No Legal Authority for an Actual National Mask Mandate

President-elect Joe Biden released his 100-day plan intended to combat the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) on Tuesday evening. That three-part proposal, however, features at least one unworkable premise: “Everyone wears a mask.”

Biden’s proposed national mask mandate was not elaborated on in the initial offering but the incoming administration made an effort to clarify that prong of their plan after several hours of nonstop and trenchant criticism online; from various shades of political opinion.

“My first 100 days is going to require–I’m going to ask for a masking plan–everyone for the first 100 days to wear a mask,” Biden explained in a video posted on Twitter late Wednesday morning.

The soon-to-be 46th president elaborated: “It will start with my signing an order on day one to require masks where I can under the law, like federal buildings, interstate travel on planes, trains, and buses.”

Overall, Biden’s proposal is a bit unclear, contains multiple caveats, and poses definite legal problems.

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Biden Picks Raytheon Board Member To Lead US War Machine

Joe Biden has selected former general Lloyd J. Austin III to be the next secretary of defense, assuaging fears among antiwar activists that the position would go to bloodthirsty psychopath Michele Flournoy as commonly predicted.

As has become the standard ritual for Biden’s cabinet picks, the mass media are holding a parade to celebrate the fact that Austin would be the first Black chief of the U.S. war machine while virtually ignoring the murderous agendas he has facilitated throughout his career.

As head of Central Command Austin actively campaigned to resurrect the Pentagon’s spectacularly failed program of trying to arm “rebels” in Syria to fight ISIS, and in 2014 he backed immunity for U.S. troops from war crimes prosecutions by the government of Afghanistan.

He helped spearhead the Iraq invasion, and he is a member of the same private equity fund which invests in defense contractors as Flournoy and Biden’s warmongering pick for Secretary of State Tony Blinken.

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YouTube will now remove videos disputing Joe Biden’s election victory

On Wednesday, YouTube announced that it will begin removing any content alleging widespread voter fraud influenced the outcome of the 2020 US presidential election.

In the immediate aftermath of the November 3rd election, YouTube came under fire for allowing channels to publish videos making false claims about election results. In one instance, One America News Network, a verified YouTube channel, published a video declaring that “Trump won” the election. At the time, YouTube defended its decision to let the video stand, saying in a statement, “Like other companies, we’re allowing these videos because discussion of election results & the process of counting votes is allowed on YouTube.”

The company went on to say that content from “authoritative news organizations” were “the most popular videos about the election.”

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Biden Labor Candidate Oversaw Fraudulent Payments to California Prison Inmates

A frontrunner to be president-elect Joe Biden’s labor secretary oversaw the payment of nearly $1 billion in fraudulent benefits to California prison inmates.

Julie Su is the secretary of California’s Labor and Workforce Development Agency, which operates the state’s pandemic unemployment system. The system paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent unemployment payments to prison inmates and convicts, prosecutors announced on Tuesday.

The fraud involved over 35,000 unemployment claims filed between March and August under the names of California state prison inmates. The inmates included two serial killers responsible for the deaths of at least eight people, as well as the well-known murderer Scott Peterson, who was convicted in 2004 for killing his pregnant wife. The Sacramento County district attorney called the scandal “one of the biggest fraud of taxpayer dollars in California history.”

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