Tag: elections

Vote-Buying Scheme Exposed: Stacey Abrams Admits on MSNBC Biden EPA Handed Her $2 Billion to Buy New Home Appliances to Reduce Electric Bills Just Months Before the Election

In a jaw-dropping admission on MSNBC, failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams proudly revealed that the Biden administration’s EPA funneled nearly $2 billion into a program she spearheaded to replace home appliances—just in time for an election year.

During an interview with left-wing host Chris Hayes, Abrams proudly recounted how the Biden administration greenlit her project, Vitalizing DeSoto, a so-called “climate justice” initiative that handed out free home appliances to a select group of residents in a small Georgia town.

But the real bombshell? This taxpayer-funded windfall was part of a larger effort to implement the Democrats’ radical climate agenda under the guise of “helping” Americans with their electric bills.

President Donald Trump, in a fiery rebuke, called out the scheme for what it is—a politically motivated slush fund designed to curry favor with voters using taxpayer dollars.

“Take a $1.9 billion to recently created Decarbonization of Homes Committee headed up—and we know she’s involved. Just at the last moment, the money was passed over by a woman named Stacey Abrams. Have you ever heard of her?” Trump said during his joint address to Congress.

Rather than deny her involvement, Abrams openly confirmed it, boasting that her pilot program successfully provided government-funded appliances to 75% of DeSoto’s residents.

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Romania – The first “post-election” democracy?

In December 2024, a Romanian court cancelled the second round of the planned Presidential election and annulled the completed first round, citing (totally theoretical) “Russian interference”.

This caused massive protests in Romania, as you can imagine. The first round had been won by right winger Călin Georgescu following a social media-based campaign, and he was predicted to quite easily win the second round as well.

The Romanian opposition – denied a likely victory – took their case to the European Court of Human Rights.

Then, earlier today, the ECHR threw the case out without even hearing it. Apparently, the Romanian courts were perfectly within their rights to simply indefinitely postpone their election on the basis of unproven allegations, and all those people who already voted and wanted to vote again can just go to hell.

This is the ECHR, which lectures the world on rights and democratic norms on the regular.

And everyone is apparently just fine with it. It’s crazy.

Imagine the outrage in the media if Putin or Trump had suddenly cancelled elections they looked like losing because “they weren’t going to be fair”.

Anyway, now Călin Georgescu has been arrested, and his supporters are taking to the streets, while  the Romanian government is set to crack down on “conspiracy theories” and other “misinformation”.

This anti-election narrative is growing outside of Romania too.

Ukraine, of course, hasn’t had any elections in years either. They also outlawed certain political parties, religions and television channels. Meanwhile, laundering billions of dollars/pounds/euros through the Ukrainian government to boost the bottom line of arms manufacturers is considered “defending democracy”.

Last month, former EU chairman Thierry Breton remarked that they had already had to cancel the Romanian elections, and might have to do the same in Germany. (As it happens the “right side” won in Germany, so I guess that election was fair).

To a smaller extent, nine local elections across the UK have been “postponed” for at least a year for unknown reasons.

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Ohio GOP Lawmaker Files Bill To Revise Voter-Approved Marijuana Law With Less Sweeping Changes Than Senate-Passed Measure

A Republican Ohio lawmaker has introduced a rival bill to Senate-passed legislation that seeks to amend the state’s voter-approved marijuana legalization law. And the proposed changes in the House measure are less sweeping—for example, maintaining the current allowable amount of cannabis plans that can be grown at home by adults.

Rep. Brian Stewart (R), chair of the House Finance Committee, is sponsoring the new 120-page cannabis bill.

Unlike the Senate proposal from Sen. Steve Huffman (R) that moved through the full chamber late last month, Stewart’s legislation would not alter a provision of the current law allowing adults 21 and older to grow up to 12 plants for personal use by cutting that amount in half.

However, it would reduce the maximum THC limit for cannabis extracts from 90 percent to 70 percent, as News 5 Cleveland first reported.

The Senate bill would lower the maximum household plant limit for home cultivation from 12 to six, but it similarly calls for the same reduced THC cap. Both bills would also make it so only 350 dispensaries could be licensed in the state.

“While there will obviously continue to be good faith debate and disagreement over the pros and cons of legalization, a majority of our constituents have made it clear to us that they support legal adult-use marijuana that is taxed at a reasonable rate, that is regulated by the state to ensure products are as safe as possible and that can, if desired, be grown at home,” Stewart said during a press briefing on Thursday.

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Marijuana Consumers Are Under Attack In Multiple States, And It’s Time To Fight Back

Seventy percent of Americans, including majorities of Democratic and Republican voters, say that marijuana should be legal for adults. Yet this legislative session, lawmakers from both parties are placing cannabis consumers in their crosshairs.

In Republican-led states like Montana, Nebraska, Ohio and South Dakota, lawmakers are seeking to either repeal or significantly roll back voter-approved legalization laws. In Democrat-led states like California, Maryland, Michigan and New Jersey, lawmakers are seeking to undermine existing legalization markets by drastically hiking marijuana-related taxes.

In all cases, elected officials are treating cannabis consumers as targets, not constituents.

These concerted attacks on state-legal marijuana markets are an explicit reminder that the war on cannabis and its consumers remains ongoing and, in some cases, is escalating. Our opponents haven’t gone away; in many cases they’ve simply regrouped and tweaked their strategies–such as by advocating for arbitrary THC potency caps or calling for new criminal penalties for consumers who don’t obtain their cannabis from state-licensed dispensaries.

Those who oppose legalization have also become bolder and more cynical in their tactics. No longer convinced that they can win the hearts and minds of voters, they are now frequently seeking to remove them from the equation altogether.

Earlier this year, Republican lawmakers in South Dakota sought to repeal the state’s voter-initiated medical cannabis access law, despite 70 percent of voters having approved it. The effort failed, but only by a single vote.

In Nebraska, lawmakers are also considering legislation to roll back that state’s voter-approved medical marijuana law and the state’s Republican attorney general has urged lawmakers to ignore the election results altogether.

In Ohio, GOP lawmakers in the Senate recently approved legislation to rescind many of the legalization provisions approved by voters in 2023. Changes advanced by lawmakers include limiting home-cultivation rights, imposing THC potency limits and creating new crimes for adults who share cannabis with one another or who purchase cannabis products from out of state.

In Texas, Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued several cities, including Dallas, for implementing voter-approved ordinances decriminalizing marijuana possession. As a result, local lawmakers in various municipalities–including Lockhart and Bastrop–are ignoring voters’ decisions to rethink their marijuana policies rather than face potential litigation.

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Rep. Pete Sessions to Introduce Make Elections Secure Act – Would Eliminate Voting Machines and Ensure Hand-Marked Paper Ballots – Severely Restrict Mail-in Voting

The Gateway Pundit has obtained a draft copy of the Make Elections Secure Act (MESA), authored by Representative Pete Sessions (TX-17), which would repeal the outdated Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002.

Among other things, it would also almost entirely eliminate electronic voting machines and ensure each voter casts their ballot on a hand-marked paper ballot with a manual hand-count.  Exceptions for machine use would be permitted for voters requiring accessibility accommodations due to disabilities.

The bill, which would also apply to primary elections, also “restrict[s] mailed ballots to specific eligible voters with stringent verification process.”  As of now, those are outlined as active-duty military stationed outside their voting jurisdiction and those with a physician-certified medical condition that would prevent in-person voting.

MESA would also provide accountability to the public by ensuring “maximum transparency by providing public access to all election processes and comprehensive Election Data, including unscrambled ballot images and cast vote records, with at least five days for officials to upload data.”

During the 2020 election and those ensuing, election officials often denied access to certain public records or quoted exorbitant prices for public records requests.  Garland Favorito and VoterGa have been engaged in a years-long battle to simply examine the physical paper ballots in the state of Georgia for the 2020 Election, despite a Supreme Court ruling that VoterGa did, in fact, have standing to bring their case.  That decision was made in December of 2022, sending the case back to the lower courts where it’s been waiting for an assignment ever since.

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Canary in the Coal Mine: Romania’s Dying Democracy

The commitment of Washington’s European allies to democracy is increasingly fragile, if not hypocritical, as Vice President J D Vance highlighted in his speech to the Munich Security Conference last month. That problem is most acute in Romania. In the first round of the country’s presidential election on November 24, 2024, Calin Georgescu, the candidate of a right-wing populist party, unexpectedly led the field. In addition to having populist social views, Georgescu is an outspoken critic of NATO. His “apostasy” on that issue makes him especially unacceptable to Romania’s political establishment and its U.S. supporters.

The United States was already busily expanding its Mihail Kogalniceanu military base at Constanta in southeastern Romania to eclipse even Washington’s long-time principal European base, Ramstein, in Germany. The expanded facility in Romania would be 50 percent larger than Ramstein, and it would bring a massive U.S. military presence much closer to Russia. U.S. and Romanian officials were not pleased about the prospect of having those plans aborted by a new, less friendly government in Bucharest.

To make matters even worse for the two parties in the current governing coalition, the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and the National Liberal Party (PNL), both of them failed to place a candidate in the runoff round. Instead, Elena Lasconi, a reformer representing another “minor” party took the other runoff spot. Thus, the establishment parties would not be able to focus their fire exclusively on Georgescu in the hope of inflicting a decisive defeat on the maverick.  Instead, whichever outsider prevailed in the runoff would not be from the usual governing elite or be a reliable client of the United States and its NATO partners.

The response of the beleaguered establishment forces was to get the country’s election commission, which the PSD and PNL dominated, to nullify the first round election results.  Romania’s Constitutional Court, which the PSD and PNL also dominated, ratified the election commission’s edict just two days before the runoff round was to be held. Instead, the Court rescheduled that round for May 4, 2025.  Both the Commission and the Court alleged that the election had been tainted by “Russian interference.” However, neither body cited tangible evidence of such interference on Moscow’s part, much less established that the alleged meddling was sufficiently egregious to nullify the election results. As New York Times reporter Andrew Higgins concluded: “The court’s intervention came after Romania’s security service released declassified intelligence reports that pointed to possible Russian interference in the election campaign but provided no solid evidence of that.”

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Ohio GOP Leaders Claim Bill To Roll Back Marijuana Legalization Law Doesn’t Disrespect Voters

Ohio’s Senate president is pushing back against criticism of a bill that would scale back parts of a voter-approved marijuana legalization law, claiming that the legislation does not disrespect the will of the electorate and would have little impact on products available in stores.

“My definitive message is: If you want to go purchase marijuana products from a licensed dispensary, that is going to be unchanged by Senate Bill 56,” Senate President Rob McColley (R) said on a podcast posted on Friday. “The only difference you’ll notice is the packaging may not look as appealing to children, but you’ll still be able to buy the same products.”

McColley was speaking on a The President’s Podcast, produced and published by Ohio Senate Republicans. He and host John Fortney, the communications director for the Senate GOP caucus, spent the first half of the podcast defending SB 56, which would amend the cannabis law passed by voters in November 2023.

Among other changes, the bill would halve the number of plants that adults could grow, add new criminal penalties around cannabis conduct and remove select social equity provisions in the law.

The Senate approved the proposal on a 23–9 vote last week.

Critics, such as Sen. Bill DeMora (D), who spoke against the measures on the Senate floor, contend that the plan “goes against the will of the voters and will kill the adult industry in Ohio.”

Fortney began the podcast by acknowledging “a lot of controversy around Senate Bill 56,” asserting that “all it did was preserve access to what the voters approved in November of 2023, the initiated marijuana statute, and put some safety and security parameters around it for—of all things, Mr. President—children.”

“The far left, the Democrat narrative, the narrative of the legacy media, has been, ‘Republicans are trying to take away what the voters approved,’ which is patently false,” Fortney continued. “What a lie.”

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Echoes Of Trump: Georgescu Charged With Inciting Insurrection

Following the dramatic arrest of Călin Georgescu while on his way to submit his papers to file as a candidate in Romania’s rescheduled presidential election in May, the Prosecutor General’s Office of Romania has charged the country’s leading presidential candidate with inciting insurrection. The situation mirrors the one faced by Donald Trump in the run up to the 2024 election, except that in Romania’ fragile “democratic” system the charges may very well lead to the globalist elites maintaining their power unless massive external pressure is brought to bear.

In charges reminiscent of Communist show trials in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the authorities have charged Georgescu with “spreading false information,” and establishing a “fascist” organization, both popular catch phases of the radical left.

Listed among Georgescu’s other “crimes” is “promoting, in public, the cult of persons guilty of committing crimes of genocide against humanity and war crimes,” as well as “the act of promoting, in public, fascist, legionary, racist or xenophobic ideas, conceptions or doctrines,” because he has not followed the globalist narrative concerning Romanian history. Georgescu has said that Marshal Ion Antonescu, who bravely fought against the brutal Soviet rape of the country should be considered a national hero. It should be noted that Antonescu was a Romanian patriot who was only convicted of “war crimes” in a Communist show trial that resulted in his execution.

The purpose of these charges is to try to eliminate Călin Georgescu as a presidential candidate because he is the greatest threat to the country’s globalist establishment. Georgescu was released but has been placed under “judicial supervision” for 60 days in a move that is clearly a slap in the face to democratic values.

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Oregon Resumes Automatic Voter Registrations After Errors Registered Noncitizens

The Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) resumed automatic voter registrations on Feb. 27, saying it had strengthened the system to prevent the registration of noncitizens.

Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek in October 2024 ordered a pause of the process after an audit discovered some individuals were automatically registered to vote despite not providing proof of U.S. citizenship. Officials later disclosed they’d identified additional individuals, taking the total to about 1,600.

The DMV said it has strengthened its system to minimize the risk of more noncitizens and others who have not provided proof of citizenship being registered. This includes hiring a voter registration integrity analyst and modifying the internal interface, which the agency says will reduce the likelihood of DMV staff selecting the wrong option.

Since the pause was imposed, the DMV has sampled new records and manually compared them with information collected from customers. The DMV said that no new mistaken registrations have been found so far.

“We believe these enhanced processes and permanent system changes, along with DMV’s observations and measurements regarding their effectiveness, provide adequate confidence that data integrity … is sufficient to reinstitute the process,” Deloitte, which the governor hired to review the system, said in a report.

“As a partner to Oregon’s Secretary of State, Oregon DMV is proud of the role it plays in helping U.S. citizens engage in our elections,” Oregon DMV Administrator Amy Joyce said in a statement. “We will continue our work to ensure the Oregon Motor Voter process is more secure and reliable than ever.”

The Oregon Secretary of State’s Office is also trying to prevent noncitizen voter registration.

The office said it has added more steps, including a daily confirmation step.

“The new protections we are adding today will help us catch and fix government data entry errors faster. These are first steps, focused on getting the fundamentals right. I will continue to dig into the system and take action whenever I can to strengthen our voter rolls and prevent future mistakes. Our highest priority is – and must always be – protecting the integrity of Oregonians’ fair, secure, and accessible elections,” Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read said in a statement.

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