Judge Lets Former Democrat City Councilwoman Andrea Cardenas Walk Free Despite Guilty Plea for Stealing Over $200K in COVID Relief and Unemployment Funds

A San Diego judge has allowed former Chula Vista City Councilwoman Andrea Cardenas to avoid jail time despite her guilty plea for defrauding the government of over $200,000 in COVID relief and unemployment funds.

Andrea Cardenas, who had been a rising star in the Democrat Party, and her brother, Jesus Cardenas, a former chief of staff to San Diego City Councilman Stephen Whitburn, are at the center of a corruption scandal.

The charges revolve around their alleged fraudulent acquisition of a $176,227 Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan for their venture, Grassroots Resources, a local government and political consulting firm.

According to court documents, Jesus Cardenas misrepresented the nature and scale of their political consulting firm, falsely claiming it employed 34 people.

This lie allowed the Cardenas siblings to siphon off critical funds meant to keep struggling businesses afloat during the pandemic. Instead, these funds were used to line their pockets.

Andrea Cardenas played a crucial role in this deceit. She reportedly altered information provided to lenders, substituting Grassroots Resources’ details with those of a marijuana dispensary, Harbor Collective.

Her involvement didn’t stop there. La Prensa reported that she declared a significant income from Grassroots Resources while simultaneously denying the existence of any employees when the firm pursued a consulting contract with a local public water agency.

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Biden-Harris Administration Defends Big Tech Censorship Pressure Following Zuckerberg’s Admission

The Biden-Harris White House looks determined to justify and normalize the practice of the government colluding with private companies, in this instance Big Tech, to censor speech.

After Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, admitting that his company came under pressure from the current administration to conduct censorship and that he “believes” that was wrong – the White House doubled down on the controversial, and quite possibly, unconstitutional, policy.

In his letter, Zuckerberg chose to focus on Meta censoring content related to COVID-19, and in response, a White House spokesman revealed the government does not share Zuckerberg’s stance that the policy of pressure was wrong.

“Encouragement” is how that’s phrased. “When confronted with a deadly pandemic, this administration encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety,” stated the White House spokesman to media requests.

He further justified the actions described by Zuckerberg as needed because the White House believes private companies, including those from the tech industry, “should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people.”

And with the stage set in this way – the spokesman concluded that these companies are then free to make “independent choices about the information they present.”

But Zuckerberg’s letter to the Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan does a pretty good job of explaining how these “independent choices” get made. Senior figures from the Biden administration, Zuckerberg stated, in 2021 “repeatedly pressured our (Facebook, Instagram) teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire.”

The decision on content removal, and introduction of new rules into platform policies to facilitate censorship, Zuckerberg concedes, was “ultimately ours” –  but made under pressure.

If Meta tried to defy these “suggestions” – the administration showed “a lot of frustration.”

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What Does a Fraudulent Vaccine Safety Study Look Like?

New vaccines should be proven safe before they are accepted onto the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine schedule.

Here is what is actually happening: Vaccine companies are doing studies that claim to demonstrate the safety of new vaccines but are carefully designed and conducted to intentionally hide the toxicity of these vaccines.

To see how this is done, read on.

What does an honest vaccine safety study look like? 

An honest safety study must have a test group that gets the vaccine and a control group that gets a harmless placebo. Injuries and deaths are compared in the two groups.

If the test group has many more adverse events than the placebo control group, the vaccine is not safe.

Most people would be shocked to learn that none of the vaccines on the CDC vaccine schedule have been safety tested in this way.

What does a fraudulent vaccine safety study look like? 

Rule No. 1 for conducting a fraudulent study: Do not have a placebo control group. Here is where the fraud is happening: The “control group” is deliberately given something that is as toxic as the vaccine being tested. It can be an older vaccine or the vaccine ingredients minus the antigen.

The results will show that the injuries and deaths are similar in both groups. That is because they are both receiving toxic ingredients. The new vaccine is then illogically declared safe.

If there is no placebo control group, the toxicity of the vaccine is hidden. This is both clever and diabolical. Can you see it?

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FDA Lets Chemical Companies Decide if Recycled Plastics Are Safe for Food Containers

Recycled content in food packaging is increasing as sustainability advocates press manufacturers to cut their use of virgin plastic.

Since 1990, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the agency responsible for ensuring food contact materials are safe, has approved at least 347 voluntary manufacturer applications for food contact materials made with recycled plastic, according to a database on its website.

Approvals have tripled in recent years, from an average of 7 to 8 per year through 2019, to 23 per year since then, and they continue to climb. The FDA has already approved 27 proposals through June this year.

Other than Coca-Cola, most manufacturers seeking approval are petrochemical giants such as Eastman Chemicals, Dupont and Indorama; and lesser-known plastic packaging manufacturers, including many from China, India and other countries.

The end buyers of the recycled materials aren’t included in the FDA database, but many popular brands are using recycled content. Cadbury chocolate bars come in a wrapper marketed as 30% recycled “soft plastic packaging.”

The Coca-Cola Co. in North America reports it sells soft drinks in 100% recycled PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles, while General Mills says its Annie’s cereal boxes use a liner made from 35% recycled plastic film.

Increasing recycled content in packaging may be good news for the planet, but researchers say the FDA has a lax approval process for plastic food packaging that hasn’t kept pace with the science on chemical hazards in plastics.

The agency’s approval process for recycled plastics is voluntary and ignores the potential risk of chemical mixtures, researchers told Environmental Health News (EHN). Companies can seek guidance on their recycling process, but they are not required to.

In addition, the FDA relies on manufacturers’ test data when it approves materials, leaving companies essentially in charge of policing themselves. Meanwhile, some studies show that recycled plastic can harbor even more toxic chemicals — such as bisphenol-A (BPA), phthalates, benzene and others — than virgin plastic.

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WOAH: Far-Left Presidential Candidate Cornel West Says Kamala Bribed Him to Drop Out, Offered Him a Job and Debt Payoff

Leftist presidential candidate Cornel West has claimed that Kamala Harris attempted to bribe him to drop out of the race, even going as far as offering him a job in her administration and a promise of paying off his campaign debts.

In an interview with independent journalist Jordan Chariton on the Status Coup News podcast, West made a series of shocking accusations following the close of last week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

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What Is Secret Service Hiding About Trump Assassination Attempt?

It’s been six weeks since the attempt on former President Donald Trump’s life at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and the American public’s questions about the nature of the attack and the security failings that led to Trump’s brush with death largely remain unanswered.

Jason Chaffetz, a Fox News contributor and former Utah congressman who once chaired the House Oversight Committee, joined “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the apparent security failures and ongoing investigations into what transpired in Butler on July 13.

“I thought the extraction was very slow. I thought it was fairly pathetic,” Chaffetz told The Daily Signal. “It’s been illuminated more now that even though he was the Republican nominee, even though he was the former president, he wasn’t getting the full protective detail that a sitting president would get. And I have a problem with that.”

Chaffetz thinks the failures are structural. Poor recruitment and training, as well as heavy workloads, create a perfect storm for the kinds of security lapses witnessed on July 13 in Butler, Chaffetz suggested. These problems have long plagued the Secret Service.

When Chaffetz chaired the House Oversight Committee, he conducted the largest investigation into the Secret Service’s operations in American history. The investigation resulted in a more than 400-page report, “United States Secret Service: An Agency in Crisis.”

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Mark Zuckerberg Confirms Biden Administration Pressured Facebook on Censorship, Admits to Throttling Hunter Biden Story

In a revealing letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg has addressed significant controversies surrounding the platform’s content censorship practices, especially concerning actions taken during the 2020 presidential election cycle and the COVID-19 pandemic.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

Zuckerberg confirmed that senior officials from the Biden Administration exerted “pressure” on Facebook to censor specific content related to COVID-19, criticizing the administration’s approach. Despite the external pressures, Zuckerberg emphasized that the final decisions on content moderation lay with Facebook, admitting regret over some of the decisions made under this pressure.

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Mark Zuckerberg ‘Regrets’ Censorship of COVID Info & Hunter Biden Laptop Story

Mark Zuckerberg sensationally admitted that the Biden White House pressured Facebook to censor content about COVID-19 and the Hunter Biden laptop story and that he now regrets it.

In a letter to the House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg said the social media giant was “repeatedly pressured” by the government to blacklist information after Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021.

“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid-19 content, including humour and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” wrote the Facebook founder.

Such information included claims that the virus emerged from a Chinese lab, something which subsequently became one of the most likely scenarios, as well as content that questioned the efficacy and safety of the COVID jab.

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NYT Uncritically Reported Israel’s Version of Golan Bombing

As the US-backed genocide in Gaza continues, US media assist in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to widen the war, parroting the words of the aggressor. A consequential example of US press support for escalation was Western media’s coverage of the July 27 strike that killed 12 Druze children on a soccer field near the town of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights.

Israel and the US immediately blamed the Iran-backed Lebanese organization Hezbollah for the strike—citing Israeli intelligence reports of an Iranian Falaq-1 missile being found at the soccer field (BBC7/28/24).

But, in a move that Hezbollah expert Amal Saad called “uncharacteristic” (Drop Site, 7/30/24), the group adamantly denied responsibility for the attack. Saad, a lecturer in politics at Cardiff University, noted that targeting the Syrian Golan Heights—where many inhabitants are hostile towards Israel—would be “illogical” and “provocative” for Hezbollah. Further, if the organization had accidentally committed an attack, Saad pointed to a precedent of the group issuing a public apology in a case of misfire, with the organization’s leader, Hassan Nasrullah, visiting families of victims.

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Biden Pentagon spokesman insisted Afghan withdrawal wasn’t chaotic but his emails say otherwise

The Pentagon’s chief spokesman has long insisted there was no “chaos” during the bungled U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, but his own email correspondence shows senior officials were acutely aware that conditions in the country were chaotic and spiraling into deadly violence, according to newly obtained government documents.

These memos and emails chronicle political efforts by the Biden/Harris administration to soft-pedal the truth to the American people about its first major foreign crisis. The documents were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request from the nonprofit watchdog Functional Government Initiative.

The memos show, for instance, that while then-DOD Undersecretary of Communications John Kirby tried to jaw-bone reporters to portray the Afghan withdrawal as orderly like President Joe Biden had promised, he was receiving briefings from diplomats and military officials in theater who were frantic to stabilize a crisis, particularly at the Kabul airport were evacuations of Americans were taking place.

One State Department situation report emailed to Kirby on Aug. 16, 2021 — 10 days before a suicide bomber killed 13 U.S. Marines — referred to “breaches” and “flightline insecurity” at the airport that resulted in the exchange of gunfire that killed five Afghans and may have wounded an American soldier. “The crowd was out of control, the firing was only done to defuse the chaos,” the email reported, citing an official U.S. statement released inside the country.

“Hundreds have flooded the flight line and in at least one case, have forced themselves onto at least one US mil (and other civilian) aircraft. Crowds continue to run alongside planes, including mil aircraft,” the report added. Several Afghans clinging to U.S. aircraft fell to their deaths.

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