Tag: pennsylvania

Pennsylvania AG Announces Arrest in ‘Widespread’ Ballot Fraud Operation Days After Midterm Elections

Only days after a midterm election that dragged on for days beyond Election Day, Pennsylvania’s attorney announced the arrest of a Democratic consultant for orchestrating ‘widespread’ ballot fraud that included forging thousands of signatures.

Attorney General Josh Shapiro on Wednesday announced the arrest of Rasheen Crews, a Philadelphia-based Democratic consultant, for charges related to forging signatures on nomination petitions to get his clients on the ballot for the 2019 Democratic primary races in Philadelphia.

“In advance of the 2023 municipal elections, this arrest is an important reminder that interfering with the integrity of our elections is a serious crime,” said AG Shapiro. “By soliciting and organizing the wide scale forgery of signatures, the defendant undermined the democratic process and Philadelphians’ right to a free and fair election. My office is dedicated to upholding the integrity of the election process across the Commonwealth, to ensure everyone can participate in Pennsylvania’s future.”

It is telling that the Attorney General waited until after the 2023 midterm elections to announce the arrest for the 2019 crimes. If the announcement had come earlier, it would have drawn much more scrutiny to a Pennsylvania election process that was far from regular.

“An investigation by the Office of Attorney General found that in 2019, multiple candidates hired Crews to help them obtain the requisite amount of signatures needed for their nomination petitions for the Democratic primary races. Crews recruited individuals to help with the petition work, bringing them to a hotel room and asking them to write names, addresses, and forged signatures on multiple petitions,” Shapiro’s office announed on the arrest. “Crews then had these petitions notarized and filed with the Pennsylvania Department of State on behalf of his clients.”

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Ellen Greenberg ‘suicide’: Pennsylvania court hears arguments in family’s bid to overrule medical examiner

For more than a decade, the family of a woman stabbed 20 times — including 10 from behind — has battled to have the Philadelphia medical examiner’s ruling that her death was a suicide overturned.

Ellen Greenberg, a 27-year-old teacher, was found covered in bruises and stabbed to death in her apartment during a blizzard more than a decade ago. Despite the blood-soaked crime scene, evidence her body had been moved and stab wounds to the back of her skull, investigators found “no evidence of a struggle in the kitchen area or anywhere else in the apartment.”

Dr. Marlon Osbourne, a former pathologist at the Medical Examiner’s Office in Philadelphia, initially ruled the death a homicide, based on the injuries, then backtracked and revised the manner of death to suicide after conferring with city police, according to a civil lawsuit from Greenberg’s family.

An appeals court heard arguments in a civil lawsuit this week and will decide whether it can move to trial.

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Good Samaritan Killed by Violent Cop While Rendering Aid to Shooting Victim

Kenneth Vineyard, 48, is the type of man who would run up to a complete stranger who lay bleeding on the ground and do anything he could to help him. In fact, that is exactly what he did on Sunday when a shooting unfolded in a Walmart parking lot. Unfortunately for Vineyard, however, this would be his last act of kindness thanks to Pennsylvania’s finest — who killed him for it.

Vineyard’s family is now demanding justice after an officer with the Center Township Police Department walked up to Vineyard as he helped a complete stranger and killed him.

“This appears to be another instance of senseless police violence,” said attorney Joel Sansone, according to KDKA.

According to police, Vineyard was at the Monaca Walmart with his fiancé on Sunday afternoon when gunfire erupted in the parking lot. Vineyard was not involved in the shooting. Police said Rashaun Smith, 20, was shot in the abdomen by Yeshua Bratcher, 23, and Vineyard simply ran up to Smith and began rendering aid.

“As the victim of that shooting lay bleeding, a Good Samaritan named Kenneth Vineyard rushed to the victim to render aid,” said Sansone.

Vineyard stopped Smith’s bleeding until paramedics arrived. When paramedics began helping Smith, Vineyard backed away and let them work. That’s when a man in plainclothes — who was a Center Township police officer — approached Vineyard and began barking orders.

Vineyard told the officer that he had just helped the shooting victim and was trying to make his way back to his fiancé. The officer couldn’t have cared less, however, and violently attacked Vineyard, according to Sansone. The officer reportedly shoved Vineyard to the pavement so hard that it killed him.

“The unidentified man insisted Mr. Vineyard step away and violently pushed Mr. Vineyard to the ground where he struck his head on the pavement,” Sansone said.

According to Sansone, Vineyard’s fiancé began chest compressions immediately while the first responders on the scene jumped in to help as well but he had no pulse. Vineyard was rushed to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead.

Sansone says he has video of the officer shoving Vineyard as well as witness statements that corroborate his claims. “We want the name of the individual who caused this death and we intend to sue him and possibly others,” said Sansone.

“This officer should be immediately suspended pending the outcome of this investigation if the facts are as I’ve been told. He should be arrested and charged with manslaughter at the very least,” he added.

Although state police claim to be investigating the attack, the officer involved has yet to even be interviewed. Yeshua Bratcher, however, has been found, arrested, and charged with attempted homicide, aggravated assault, recklessly endangering another person and a firearms violation.

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Fetterman Predicts ‘Dramatic’ Overnight Comeback, Taps Clinton Lawyer To Fight PA Election Law

Pennsylvania lieutenant governor and Democratic US Senate candidate John Fetterman predicted on Monday that his Republican challenger, Dr. Mehmet Oz, will take an early lead on election day, only for a “dramatic” change to happen overnight as more ballots are counted, according to the Western Journal.

“Counting for ballots cast by mail and early in-person cannot begin until Election Day, thanks to the GOP-controlled legislature — an intentional move to help Republicans baselessly sow doubt about the election results when it suits them,” Fetterman wrote in a memo to “interested parties,” reads a memo from Fetterman, according to the Washington Post.

“Pennsylvania is one of only eight states that bans pre-processing of early mail-in ballots, forcing county officials to wait until 7 a.m. on Tuesday to begin opening returned ballots and scanning them into the system,” he added.

Fetterman pointed to the 1.4 million mail-in ballots requested, saying they will skew heavily Democratic when counted.

The journalistic consortium Spotlight PA reported that roughly 70 percent of the mail-in ballot requests came from registered Democrats. -Western Journal

“The biggest share of absentee and mail ballot requests came from Allegheny County [which includes Pittsburgh] and Philadelphia — nearly a quarter of the total,” Spotlight reports.

“Because Pennsylvania is one of the only states that reports Election Day totals first before ballots cast by mail, and because more populated counties around Philadelphia can take longer to report, we should expect one of the most dramatic shifts in the country from initial GOP support in early results to stronger Democratic gains as more votes are processed,” said Fetterman.

Meanwhile, Fetterman has tapped controversial Clinton lawyer Marc Elias’ firm to challenge Pennsylvania election provisions.

As Jonathan Turley writes;

Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman and other Democrats have filed a federal lawsuit to strike down parts of Pennsylvania’s election law after the state Supreme Court ruled that mail-in ballots with incorrect dates or no dates should not be counted.Fetterman is challenging the state law on constitutional and federal statutes. He has turned to a controversial former lawyer for Hillary Clinton to seek to strike down the provision.

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Pennsylvania Taxpayers Spent $16.7 Million On Trans Treatments For Minors Since 2015

A new public records request reveals how millions of taxpayer dollars have funded controversial “gender-affirming” medical treatments for trans-identifying minors in Pennsylvania. 

The Pennsylvania Family Institute, a non-profit representing family values, filed a right-to-know request with the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services to find out exactly how much taxpayer money has been spent on medically transitioning children and adolescents in the state. The request revealed that since 2015 more than $16.7 million in tax dollars have been spent on puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, and gender-related surgeries for minors.

“When Gov. [Tom] Wolf took office, he unilaterally changed state policy to cover things like double mastectomies to remove healthy breasts from minor girls and irreversible experimental hormones for children,” said Emily Kreps with PA Family Institute. “The same drugs used to chemically castrate convicted sex offenders are being funded by tax dollars for minors. This type of ‘care’ is happening right now at major institutions like CHOP, Penn State Health and UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh—especially to children in foster care.”

In 2015, Democrat Governor Tom Wolf took office, nominating Dr. Rachel Levine, a transgender pediatrician, as Pennsylvania’s physician general. Before becoming the Assistant Secretary of Health to the Biden administration, Levine worked for six years to advance “LGBTQ rights,” including access to “gender-affirming” care. Levine has pressed for insurance coverage for medical gender transition at the state and federal levels. From 2015 to 2021, Pennsylvania saw a nearly 5000% increase in spending on “gender-affirming” care for minors under 18.

The request included data from Fee-For-Service (FFS) paid claims, Physical Health (PH) HealthChoices paid encounters, and Behavioral Health (BH) HealthChoices paid encounters available in Pennsylvania DHS’ PROMISe from January 1, 2015, through October 21, 2022.

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The Media’s Cover-Up of John Fetterman

It should now be crystal clear why Democrat John Fetterman refused to take part in more than a single debate with his Republican Senate rival, Mehmet Oz, and why Fetterman insisted on pushing that debate to just two weeks before Election Day—after at least 500,000 Pennsylvania voters had already voted.

Last night’s debate was an unmitigated disaster. 

A disaster for Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor—who appeared confused and could barely manage a coherent sentence, let alone a complete paragraph.

And a disaster for Pennsylvania voters, who didn’t get the tough, substantive debate they deserved, one that would have pushed Oz to explain, among other things, why he was distancing himself from Donald Trump (without whom he wouldn’t be the nominee); his position on abortion; China; and how he plans to bring down gas prices.

Oz had some solid talking points, but they were just that—talking points. But Fetterman lacked even those.

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Pennsylvania Elementary School Training Introduces 5-Year-Olds To Transgenderism

A Pennsylvania elementary school held a training for educators to teach them how to create a “gender-inclusive” classroom and affirm LGBTQ identities, according to documents provided by No Left Turn in Education to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Fern Hills Elementary School in West Chester, Pennsylvania, hosted an Aug. 24 teacher training titled “An Intro to LGBTQ Education: Cultivating Gender Inclusive Classrooms” put on by LGBTQ activist Aneesah Smith, according to documents obtained by the DCNF. The training provided the elementary school teachers with picture books and lessons for kids as young as kindergarten on transgenderism to incorporate into their classroom.

“Why are our elementary school teachers focused on gender ideology rather than teaching our children reading, writing, arithmetic, history and science?” Yael Levin, chief communications officer of No Left Turn in Education, a group focused on parental rights in education, told the DCNF. “Why are our schools even touching on subjects that belong with the parents, especially in children ranging from 5 to 11? And more importantly, why are our children being evaluated based on whether they are using the term gender expression and if they understand the meaning of the word.”

Smith is a “queer, Christian, cisgender, woman of color” and the director of diversity equity and inclusion at Penn State Abington who has been in social justice activism for more than 12 years, according to her website. She hosts a variety of training sessions including “understanding & supporting your LGBTQ+ child” and “cultivating campus climate considering intersectionality,” a workshop on addressing unconscious bias within campus offices and programs.

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Pennsylvania Man Has Not Filed Income Taxes in 17 Years

The Pledge of Allegiance states that America is “one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Liberty, the dictionary says, is living free from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behavior, or political views.

Pennsylvania author Barry Durmaz says he is living his life in liberty. That means, among other things, he has not filed income taxes for the last 17 years, and recently he stopped licensing his car. Instead, he had a custom license plate made that says “Private, DOT exempt, for non-commercial use only.”

As a person of liberty, he no longer consents to disclosing private information to the government or filling out forms for taxes or for a car license.

The married father of five is soon to publish his first book, “What Is An American: How the Virtuous Government of America’s Unseen King Deals a Death Blow to the Evils of Socialism, Marxism, and Communism.” In it, he says the liberty of each individual household is the key to America’s freedom.

After considering the Bible, history, and the U.S. Constitution, Durmaz has come to believe that ultimate liberty is faith and self-government, or self-control. That comes from being independently dependent upon God.

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NBC News Asks Twitter, TikTok to Censor Videos of John Fetterman Speaking

NBC News falsely claimed that footage of John Fetterman struggling to speak during a recent rally was “doctored” and urged social media companies to censor. Fetterman, who suffered a stroke earlier this year, has struggled with public speaking while recovering, something the senate hopeful has himself admitted to. The outlet flagged videos of Fetterman speaking to Twitter and TikTok, baselessly claiming that they were in violation of their political misinformation policies. TikTok complied and removed the videos.

NBC News took issue with highlight reels of a recent Montgomery County rally in which Fetterman struggled through parts of his speech. The outlet accused one prominent conservative social media account of deceptively editing video of speeches to “create the perception that what he was saying was nonsensical.”

The report accused social media platforms of ignoring their own policies “against political misinformation” in allowing the videos to stay up.

NBC News Deputy Editor of technology Benjamin Goggin wrote, “Deceptively edited videos that have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on Twitter and TikTok exaggerate the speech issues that have plagued John Fetterman, the Democratic nominee for Pennsylvania’s open U.S. Senate seat, after he had a stroke in May.”

Explaining the alleged edits, Goggin claimed they consisted of “cutting out the sound of the audience to make it appear as if he had abruptly stopped speaking (some of the stops occurred when he was pausing during moments of applause and crowd reaction, according to unedited videos seen by NBC News).”

The NBC News reporter singled out popular digital strategist Greg Price, whose supercut of Fetterman’s speech had been 600,000 times when the report was published.

Goggin claimed that the videos violate Twitter and TikTok’s policies “against political misinformation,” and the outlet flagged these videos for the platforms itself. TikTok ultimately removed the videos from its platform.

“So NBC News decided to accuse me of doctoring videos of John Fetterman that I posted. (I didn’t doctor anything),” Price wrote in a tweet. “They also reached out to Twitter to try and get them censored.”

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War on churches: Pennsylvania town cracks down on feeding the homeless

A lot of powerful people in this country think it’s really important to put religion in its place. They reduce the free exercise of religion to the freedom of worship, and they argue that faith should be strictly private. They also believe that a church building must be exclusively for worship and not for any of the other aspects of people living out their faith.

Pottstown, Pennsylvania, is a working-class town of 20,000 between Philadelphia and Reading. It has more than its share of poverty, which is why Christ Episcopal Church and Mission First Church run robust aid programs, especially during and after the pandemic. The churches give out free meals to the public once a week, provide counseling and mental health support, and hand out groceries, toiletries, and other staples for free.

But the Pottstown government is having none of it. According to local law, a church building can be used only for worship and “those accessory activities as are customarily associated” with worship. In June, a zoning officer sent a violation notice instructing the churches that they must cease their good deeds or go through the zoning hearing board to seek a variance.

“Civil action will commence with the Districts Justice if these violations are not corrected,” the zoning officer wrote in a letter.

Local governments have a long and storied history of stopping religious congregations from serving the poor. Mike Bloomberg wouldn’t let a synagogue donate bagels to homeless shelters. Dozens of other cities have outlawed feeding the homeless.

Pottstown’s actions against the churches are particularly striking because they don’t even involve a safety or food regulation. Instead, the town is attempting to weaponize the very definition of what a church building is in order to prevent worshippers from using it to follow the command of Jesus Christ: “When I was hungry, you fed me.”

“It is the opinion of this office that the use of the property has changed and, by definition, is more than that of a Church,” the zoning officer wrote. He included the zoning code’s definition of a church: “A building wherein persons assemble regularly for religious worship and that is used only for such purposes and for those accessory activities as are customarily associated therewith.”

It’s a horribly crimped view of what a church is, and it’s a view the churches’ leaders reject.

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