Tag: 2020 elections

Goldman Sachs vets quietly added to Biden transition

Two are Goldman Sach veterans. Others have worked for consulting firms like McKinsey & Co. and Boston Consulting Group along with one Google and three Facebook employees. One is the daughter of a pair of longtime Biden advisers.

They’re all among the dozens of people Biden has quietly added to his transition’s agency review teams in recent weeks, according to a review of the transition’s website. The team members — which must be disclosed by the transition — offer the most comprehensive picture of who’s building the Biden administration.

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LOOPHOLE ALLOWS BIDEN NOMINEES TO AVOID DISCLOSURES. WILL THEY USE IT?

“DONALD TRUMP HAS presided over the most corrupt administration in modern history,” Joe Biden’s website declared as he ran for president. By contrast, the site said, a Biden administration would “make sure that the principles of equality, transparency, and public — not private — interest drive all government decisions.”

It would be difficult for any incoming administration to match Trump for opacity and self-dealing. But an obscure exemption for executive branch officials from disclosing previous clients may generate an interesting test case for Biden’s commitment to full transparency.

The question is partly whether any Biden nominees will use this exemption themselves to conceal their recent sources of income. Perhaps more important is the question of whether the Biden administration will take steps to eliminate the exemption, thereby foreclosing its abuse by future presidents, Trumpian or otherwise.

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Biden’s Reported Domestic Policy Pick Called For ‘Permanent And Comprehensive Assault Weapons Ban’

Former national security adviser Susan Rice, President-elect Joe Biden’s reported pick to lead the White House Domestic Policy Council, called for a “permanent” ban on so-called assault weapons in a June appearance with two anti-gun groups.

Rice, who served in former president Barack Obama’s administration, appeared in a video with Moms Demand Action and Everytown For Gun Safety and concurred with Biden’s firearm plan that seeks to ban certain semi-automatic rifles, prohibit “high-capacity magazines,” and do away with liability protections for weapons manufacturers and sellers. Rice has reportedly been chosen for the domestic policy role, Politico reported Thursday.

“[Biden has] taken on the NRA twice and won,” Rice said in the interview with Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts. “When he served with President Obama in the Obama-Biden administration, we implemented over two dozen reforms that put curbs on access to guns, but we need legislation, we need leadership in Joe Biden that understands and is passionate about these issues.”

Rice advocated for laws including “universal background checks, the enactment of a new violence against women act, with a permanent and comprehensive ‘assault weapons’ ban, and a ban on ‘high capacity magazines’ that will work to buy back those assault weapons that are out there and ensure that those that remain are fully registered,” she said.

The former security adviser also went on to say it’s “unthinkable” and “outrageous” that such reforms have not been passed to date.

“It’s unthinkable to me that even though the vast majority of Americans favor common sense gun restrictions, universal background checks, bans on ‘assault weapons’, and we have a very powerful lobby that has effectively prevented so much of that from being enacted,” she said. “It’s absolutely outrageous. It makes me as angry as anything.”

Biden’s gun plan includes a full-scale prohibition on “assault weapons” in addition to re-classifying the guns and “high-capacity magazines” under the National Firearms Act, which would impose registration and a $200 tax for those already in circulation. The total cost to U.S. firearm owners nationwide was estimated to be roughly $34 billion if the law went into effect, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

Rice said it’s “vital” to enact the sweeping gun control.

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Michigan Judge Orders Release of Damning Forensics Report of Dominion Vote Tabulation System, Full Forensics Report

After considerable legal filings intended to block the release of a forensic report of Antrim County Dominion vote tabulation systems, a Michigan judge has lifted a gag order allowing the plaintiff, Allied Security Operations Group, to publicly release the findings.

The results of the forensic audit [full pdf here], while limited only to the vote tabulations in Antrim county, are damning for the Michigan system of elections.

According to the audit:

“We conclude that the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results.

The system intentionally generates an enormously high number of ballot errors. The electronic ballots are then transferred for adjudication. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency, and no audit trail. This leads to voter or election fraud.

Based on our study, we conclude that The Dominion Voting System should not be used in Michigan. We further conclude that the results of Antrim County should not have been certified.

[…] The allowable election error rate established by the Federal Election Commission guidelines is of 1 in 250,000 ballots (.0008%). We observed an error rate of 68.05%. This demonstrated a significant and fatal error in security and election integrity.

[…] It is critical to understand that the Dominion system classifies ballots into two categories, 1) normal ballots and 2) adjudicated ballots. Ballots sent to adjudication can be altered by administrators, and adjudication files can be moved between different Results Tally and Reporting (RTR) terminals with no audit trail of which administrator actually adjudicates (i.e. votes) the ballot batch.

[…] A staggering number of votes required adjudication. This was a 2020 issue not seen in previous election cycles still stored on the server. This is caused by intentional errors in the system. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency or audit trail. Our examination of the server logs indicates that this high error rate was incongruent with patterns from previous years.

The statement attributing these issues to human error is not
consistent with the forensic evaluation, which points more correctly to systemic machine and/or software errors. The systemic errors are intentionally designed to create errors in order to push a high volume of ballots to bulk adjudication.

[…] Research is ongoing. However, based on the preliminary results, we conclude that the errors are so significant that they call into question the integrity and legitimacy of the results in the Antrim County 2020 election to the point that the results are not certifiable.

Because the same machines and software are used in 48 other counties in Michigan, this casts doubt on the integrity of the entire election in the state of Michigan.” (source)

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Election Night Errors, How Do You Get Negative Votes

A video has been produced to ask a few very basic questions.  As the tabulations of vote counting is automatically updated to central databases for distribution to media, how do vote counts turn negative?  Errors can be made, but why are all the ‘errors’ going in only one direction.  Vote tabulations should be additive, why are vote totals decreasing?

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WHO THE “RESISTANCE” WAS ACTUALLY ‘RESISTING’ THESE LAST FOUR YEARS

The Resistance™️ was aggressively marketed by cynical liberal spinmeisters like Neera Tanden (who in a brazen middle finger to US progressives is also set to play a role in the Biden administration) with the goal of harnessing and maintaining the enthusiastic grassroots anti-establishment energy of the Bernie Sanders campaign and directing it against Trump.

But what did it actually accomplish? In the end, all the so-called Resisters ended up doing was promoting a bunch of Russia conspiracy theories and an impeachment which failed to remove Trump, all while providing no actual resistance to Trump’s most pernicious policies. They’d yell and shriek on social media and MSM punditry panels any time someone was fired from the administration and falsely get people’s hopes up whenever new information came out about the Mueller investigation, but in terms of actually removing Trump from office or stopping him from doing evil things like starving Venezuelans, assaulting press freedoms with the persecution of Julian Assange, tempting war with Iran and perpetuating the mass atrocities in Yemen, they accomplished literally nothing.

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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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