Doug Santo

Institutionalized voter fraud. That is what ballot harvesting is.

“…As the polls closed on election day last month, six California Republican House candidates, including Representatives Dana Rohrabacher, Steve Knight, and Mimi Walters, were ahead in their respective races. However, as the absentee and provisional ballots rolled in over the intervening weeks, all six lost to their Democratic opponents.

The case of Korean-American GOP candidate Young Kim was one of the most prominent examples. On election night, Kim held an 8,000 vote lead over her Democratic opponent Gil Cisneros, and even attended freshman orientation in Washington, D.C. before watching her lead, and her victory, slowly evaporate over the subsequent weeks.

The results drew the attention of House Speaker Paul Ryan.

“California just defies logic to me,” said Ryan at a Washington Post live event. “We were only down 26 seats the night of the election, and three weeks later, we lost basically every California contested race. This election system they have — I can’t begin to understand what ‘ballot harvesting’ is.”

The stunning turnaround in California, of all states, can be attributed to several factors, as conservative critics like The Federalist’s Bre Payton wrote, but the most significant of those seemed to be the practice of “ballot harvesting.”

Passed as a barely noticed change in the state’s vote by mail procedures in 2016 and signed by then-Governor Jerry Brown, California’s AB 1921 allows voters to give any third party — not just a relative or someone living in the same household, as was previously the law — to collect and turn in anyone else’s completed ballot.

Called “ballot harvesting,” critics say the practice is ripe for fraud. Consider “Lulu,” who was recorded trying to “harvest” what she thought was a Democratic voter’s ballot in Rep. Knight’s district…”

https://dailycaller.com/2018/12/01/ballot-harvesting-california-dems-gop

A well-earned show of respect and a nice gesture.

“…The remains of former President George Herbert Walker Bush will return to Washington in the most dramatic and distinguished fashion possible, occupying the plane that normally serves as Air Force One.

President Donald Trump told reporters of the plan aboard the aircraft as they returned from the G20 summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

‘So what we’re doing with the plane – we land, and then they come in, and these are great people that run these aircraft. They are unbelievable,’ he said.

‘And they’re taking apart – I don’t think this section. The section up front, They’re taking all of the seats out. … We’re sending the plane, this plane, to Houston. And it picks up the casket.’

Earlier on Saturday, Trump said during a photo-op with Chinese President Xi Jinping that the final flight to Washington ‘is a special tribute that he deserves very much. And it’s my honor. And again, he’ll be missed. He’ll be greatly missed. He was a terrific person and terrific man.’…

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6451957/Trump-send-Air-Force-One-plane-bring-former-George-H-W-Bushs-remains-Washington.html

“…Thirty-five years ago Tracy Kidder electrified readers with his “Soul of a New Machine,” which detailed the development of a minicomputer. Today we may be seeing the emergence of another machine, a political variety that could turn the country toward a permanent one-party state.

This evolution has its roots in California, where a combination of Silicon Valley technology, changing demographics, control of media, culture and academia have worked to all but eliminate the once-fearsome state GOP. For all intents and purposes, the California Republican Party has ceased to exist.

But this is not, as some conservatives contend, a case simply of California lunacy. Several once historically conservative states — Colorado, Arizona, Nevada — have been turning ever-bluer in recent elections. The party now barely is able to hold onto seats in places such as Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Florida, while the Midwest, the region that elected Donald Trump, seems to be shifting back to its bluer past…”

https://www.ocregister.com/2018/12/01/the-soul-of-the-new-machine/

https://youtu.be/D815eVH6Kwg

 TOM HARRIS AND DR. MADHAV KHANDEKAR:

“…The U.S. Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA), released last Friday, provides a superb illustration of journalist H. L. Mencken’s (1880-1950) claim:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

The 1,656-page NCA report, produced by a team from thirteen federal agencies, is riddled with imaginary hobgoblins. Especially mistaken is the NCA’s repeated reference to increased warming and extreme weather events, both in the recent past and in the future. The NCA asserts:

Observations collected around the world provide significant, clear, and compelling evidence that global average temperature is much higher, and is rising more rapidly, than anything modern civilization has experienced …

While NASA’s claim that there has been slightly more than 1 degree Celsius (1.8 deg Fahrenheit) of warming since 1880 is likely correct, there has been no additional warming since the new millennium. This is referred to as the “Global Warming Hiatus” by the climate modeling community. Contrary to the outputs of climate models that project continued warming, the Earth’s climate appears to be cooling down, with increasing cold weather extremes worldwide in the last six years.

The past two winters have been especially cold over North America. November 2018 set low temperature records across the contiguous U.S., with three winter storms as of November 28 and the coldest Thanksgiving Week in one hundred years. Among some of the cold records: 19 F (degrees Fahrenheit) was recorded at New York City’s Central Park on November 22, which was the park’s coldest Thanksgiving since 1871; on the same day, the temperature at the top of Mount Washington in northern New Hampshire fell to -26 F, the coldest ever recorded for November. This beat the previous record of -20 F on Nov. 30, 1958.

Extreme cold was also witnessed in many locales in central and eastern Canada on November 22. For example, Toronto’s Pearson Airport recorded -13.3 degrees Celsius (8 F), 0.9 Celsius (C) colder that the previous record set in 1989. Kingston saw -16.7 C (2 F), breaking the record set in 1880 by 2.7 C. Ottawa recorded -17.2 C (1 F), 1.6 C colder than the record (1895). And Algonquin Park experienced -22 C (-7.6 F), 1.4 C colder than the previous record set in 1929.

The NCA’s projections of catastrophic warming of 5 C over next 80 years is clearly at odds with the current cooling trend that appears to be the reality of climate change.

Even if warming resumes in the near future, a number of peer-reviewed papers now suggest that future warming would be about 0.5 C (0.9 F) to, at most, 1 C (1.8 F) by 2100. This is not dangerous in the least, and certainly not worth dedicating trillions of dollars to try to prevent it by attempting to reduce worldwide human-CO2 emissions…”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/new-u-s-climate-report-a-scientific-embarrassment/

Is Google Already Censoring Search Results?

“…Google employees debated whether to bury conservative media outlets in the company’s search function as a response to President Donald Trump’s election in 2016, internal Google communications obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation reveal.

The Daily Caller and Breitbart were specifically singled out as outlets to potentially bury, the communications reveal.

Trump’s election in 2016 shocked many Google employees, who had been counting on Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to win.

Communications obtained by TheDCNF show that internal Google discussions went beyond expressing remorse over Clinton’s loss to actually discussing ways Google could prevent Trump from winning again.

“This was an election of false equivalencies, and Google, sadly, had a hand in it,” Google engineer Scott Byer wrote in a Nov. 9, 2016, post reviewed by TheDCNF.

Byer falsely labeled The Daily Caller and Breitbart as “opinion blogs” and urged his coworkers to reduce their visibility in search results…”

https://dailycaller.com/2018/11/29/google-censorship-conservative-media/

Or worst political and media class of all time?

Michael Barone:

“…In the wake of the midterm elections, conservative analyst Yuval Levin saw no winners. “It is the weakness of all sides, and the strength of none, that shapes this moment.”

You can see what he means. President Trump hasn’t gotten everything he wanted — no Obamacare repeal, not even the wall — from the Republican House of Representatives. And on one issue or another he’ll probably get something from Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats he couldn’t get from Paul Ryan’s Republicans.

Now, maybe House Democrats will overplay their hand and help Trump win re-election in 2020. And maybe Democrats, faced with a crowded field of presidential candidates, will choose an unelectable nominee.

But even though Republicans gained Senate seats and are in good shape to confirm conservative judges, Trump is weakened by the results. Republicans lost just about every House seat he carried in 2016 by 5 percent or less. And he got only 46 percent of the popular vote.

Do the math. Forty-six minus five is 41. No way a 41-percent candidate gets 270 electoral votes in a two-way race.

It doesn’t have to be this way. CNN analyst Harry Enten points out that Trump’s job approval on the economy at this point is the second highest of recent presidents. But his overall approval is the second lowest. The obvious advice: Behave in a more dignified manner.

But Trump is not alone among national leaders in behaving in a way that makes him weaker than he might be. It seems to be a common, though not quite universal, ailment…”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/whos-to-blame-weak-leaders-weak-institutions-weak-voters

Late stage socialism. Note also Reuters calls Venezuela’s situation a recession. It is closer to total collapse of society.

“…After a woman died while connected to a respirator at a hospital in central Venezuela last month, one of her relatives punched the attending doctor in the chest, blaming her for the woman’s death.

“They think when there’s no equipment or antibiotics that it’s the doctor’s fault,” said the doctor at the Hospital Central in Maracay, 130 kilometers (80 miles) west of the capital Caracas. She requested anonymity for fear of reprisals.

Hospital Central was one of 62 percent of hospitals across the country where doctors say they have suffered attacks by frustrated patients’ relatives, as violent acts in Venezuela’s decaying medical system have become increasingly common, according to a study published on Thursday by a doctors advocacy group.

In addition, 45 percent of hospitals reported robberies and shootings, the report showed, in the latest sign of how Venezuela’s five years of recession have left the country’s hospitals, once among the best in Latin America, in dire straits…”

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-health-idUSKCN1NY2P5

Yesterday: Venezuela Economy Contracted 29.8 Percent in Third Quarter.

Comments on the latest government produced global warming report.

“If these claims [Summary Findings, Chapter 1] were true then how is it that the US has grown so prosperous since the 1900s? You have just finished stating that massive, historically unprecedented climate changes occurred in the past century, especially in the past few decades. It is a matter of historical record that throughout this period the quality of life in the US just kept going up and up. Now you say that the next increment of warming will be completely different and will lead to ruin across the land. No exceptions, no caveats, no qualifications: you are asking the reader to forget the pattern that held up to now and take your word for it that disaster is coming. If you really believe that, then you owe it to the readers to be convincing, not cartoonish and apocalyptic. As one example, the opening phrase “cascading disruptions and damages in interdependent networks of infrastructure, ecosystems and social systems” reads like a Hollywood disaster flick – i.e. fiction. You have a very evocative style, but it sets a tone at odds with the expectation that this is a serious scientific document.”

Andy May:

“…The U.S. Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4) Volume II is out and generating a lot of discussion. Volume II, Impacts Risks and Adaptation in the United States to climate change can be downloaded here (Reidmiller, et al. 2018). Volume I, published last year, on the physical science behind the assessment is here (Wuebbles, et al. 2017).

The mainstream media (MSM) is breathlessly reporting about it using the following template or something similar:

“[Volume II] of the Fourth National Climate Assessment shows how [America/city/state/poor/people of color/old people/young people, etc.] are already feeling the effects of climate change from [wildfires/droughts/floods/disease/hurricanes/etc.].

Examples of these statements can be seen in National Geographic, Science News, the New York Times, etc. These popular reports leave out some very important caveats.

1. The NCA4 results are from computer climate model runs, some of them implausible.
2. The climate models used to compute the effects of human influence on climate have never successfully predicted the weather, weather cycles (such as El Niño or La Niña events), or climate.

All climate models fail to predict the weather or climate, with the possible exception of the Russian model INM-CM4(Volodin, Dianskii and Gusev 2010). This model is mostly ignored by the climate community, presumably because it does not predict anything bad. As you can see in Figure 1, INM-CM4 matches observations reasonably well and that makes it an outlier among the 32 model output datasets plotted. This success also makes INM-CM4 the only validated model in the group…”

“…Climate change is real, climate has changed throughout the Earth’s history and will change in the future. Many times in human history climate has changed more rapidly than it is changing today, these changes are documented hereand here. Probably the best example is from the end of the last glacial period, 11,700 years ago, after the Younger Dyas cold period, when temperatures rose 5-10°C in just a few decades in the Northern Hemisphere (Severinghaus, et al. 1998). This is an astounding 9°F to 18°F in much less than 100 years. Humans adapted and even thrived during this change, which occurred at the dawn of human civilization. Despite this evidence, NCA4 insists that recent warming is unprecedented, this is a clear error in the report…”

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/11/28/an-assessment-of-the-4th-national-climate-assessment/

I agree with this. The Media are complicit out of naivete and a desire for ratings and readers.

“…Junk science — worthless theories or data presented as fact — can be found everywhere, from scientific journals to media reports. It’s become a profitable industry, where scheming researchers get taxpayer-funded grants to find specific conclusions, then those manipulated and fake conclusions are reported back to the public as if they are real, and then policies and recommendations are made that further cost people money.

A good example of this is “research” surrounding sexual assault statistics. Researchers at universities use taxpayer dollars to find out how many women and men are sexually assaulted on campus. They don’t specifically ask if anyone has been sexually assaulted, instead they ask about a wide range of behaviors the researchers then deem to be sexual assault, such as “unwanted” behaviors. The behaviors need not fit into a legal definition of sexual assault or rape, but if respondents answer “yes,” they are considered sexual assault victims.

These “researchers” then report unrealistically high numbers of women to be victims, and the media uncritically broadcasts the findings, which is why you repeatedly see reports that “1-in-5” women have been sexually assaulted during college.

Unscrupulous activists and lawmakers then use these junk findings to make harmful policies. The Obama administration cited the “1-in-5” statistics as justification for removing due process rights and basic fairness from campus sex assault tribunals…”

https://www.dailywire.com/news/38793/junk-science-everywhere-and-media-eat-it-ashe-schow

“…Educated on a legal loophole that lets migrant “families” with kids enter the United States, the Homeland Security Department reported Tuesday that men showing up with kids at the border has spiked 110 percent in just the last two years.

The department noted that children could be used by smugglers and drug traffickers to enter the country.

Families are also using fraud to game the immigration system. The department said that 170 families have been caught lying about their relationships to enter the U.S.

“This data does not show nor does DHS assert that all minors apprehended as part of a family unit are illegitimate, but it does indicate that there is a significant problem that provides DHS the needed authority to protect the best interests and welfare of all children,” said the department.

The statement was aimed at news reporting that has suggested the Trump administration is tear gassing and rejecting families…”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/dhs-110-surge-in-migrant-men-using-kids-to-enter-us-rampant-fraud

This is Straight up Child Abuse

Mom Dresses Six-Year-Old Son As Girl, Threatens Dad With Losing His Son For Disagreeing

“…Six-year-old James is caught in a gender identity nightmare. Under his mom’s care in Dallas, Texas, James obediently lives as a trans girl named “Luna.” But given the choice when he’s with dad, he’s all boy — his sex at birth.

In their divorce proceedings, the mother has charged the father with child abuse for not affirming James as transgender, has sought restraining orders against him, and is seeking to terminate his parental rights. She is also seeking to require him to pay for the child’s visits to a transgender-affirming therapist and transgender medical alterations, which may include hormonal sterilization starting at age eight…”

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/26/mom-dresses-six-year-old-son-girl-threatens-dad-losing-son-disagreeing/