February 21 News
Some encouraging pushback from judges and a governor!
Pastor John Pavlovitz wrote this Stack “No, Christians, God is Not in Control” which was extremely thought provoking and really resonated with me. What do you guys think? Substack article here.
Kash Patel was confirmed as FBI director despite his many very public conflicts. Here’s one he hid. Threadreaderapp unrolled his whole thread with the coverup receipts here.
Missed this tidbit. This is from Twitter, so a screenshot and not clickable.
So I guess J6ers are a bad thing now? I can’t keep track.
Governor Mills for the win!
Just a reminder, or if you’ve never heard of this case, the former KGB ruler of Russia that Donald worships and admires and capitulates to had a Russian-American put in prison for 12 years when she went back to Russia to visit her parents. Her “crime”? She donated $51 to a Ukrainian charity. Story here.
ChaosMonkey #2
The “law and order” guy gets rid of database that keeps track of law enforcement misconduct.
They are trying to normalize it
Good for them. Too bad we have to pay for all the lawsuits going both ways. But hey, DOGE is cutting $55 Billion of waste, right? (heh heh, sarcasm).
Bummer about the judge, but often even his appointed judges rule against him.
Elon’s private security detail gets deputized by US Marshalls. Seth’s follow up post to this says: “I beg people to not be surprised if two years from now—there is no way Elon Musk leaves government in July 2026 as he promises—Musk literally runs an armed federal law enforcement entity commensurate in size with the armed component of the United States Secret Service. He has dictatorial ambitions.”
Missed this tidbit from a couple of weeks ago.
“In a little-noticed directive on her first day in office, Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered a halt to a years-old federal law enforcement effort to combat secret influence campaigns by China, Russia and other adversaries that try to curry favor and sow chaos in American politics.
Buried on the fourth page of one of 14 policy memos Bondi issued Wednesday, the order disbands the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and pares back enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, despite years of warnings by U.S. intelligence agencies that foreign malign influence operations involving disinformation were a growing and dangerous threat.” More here.
NICE! Let’s see if they defy the judge
and this
And this! But since JD Vance has said he knows there will be blowback in the court, I’m sure they have a contingency plan.
WOOHOO, this judge put this jerkwad in his place! We need MORE of this!
Yikes, my husband shared this article from the other day “Trump Hands The World To China: “Just about all of Trump’s policies, both at home and abroad, are rapidly destroying the foundation of American power. The main beneficiary will be the Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who has been planning for the moment when Washington stumbles and allows China to replace the United States as the world’s superpower. That Trump is willing to hand the world over to Xi—or doesn’t even realize that’s what he’s doing—shows that his myopic worldview, admiration for autocrats, and self-obsession are combining to threaten international security and, with it, America’s future.” More here.
Do we really want our mail in ballots going through a “privatized” postal service that Donald sells to the highest bidder (Elon?)
Speaking of election integrity, Peggy Cox found this YouTube from a couple of days ago where Roland Martin had as a guest a cybersecurity expert named Nathan Taylor from Election Truth Alliance, who has a network security degree and his job is data security. We remember Donald saying end of summer that he had enough votes, that his “beautiful Christians” wouldn’t need to vote again because he fixed it, that he had a secret about the election, the comments from Russia about their help, the comment after the election about Elon and the voting machines in PA, Elon’s child repeating about the election when Hannity asked him about Trump winning, “they’ll never know.”
If you are like me and hate listening to long videos, this is the gist of it. We all know there were bizarre results in the swing states that didn’t fit the normal bell curves where there were multiple states and counties that are always blue and voted blue down ballot except for POTUS which didn’t make sense given Kamala Harris’ popularity. Instead of bell curves there were what the industry calls “Russian tails (a term coined by Russian data analysts in potentially manipulated Russian elections). Nathan spells out with multiple charts just how votes were very “off.” The data shows potential manipulation with a portion of the “distribution” missing (he explains it better than I can). Harris is missing a portion of her votes and it’s skewed. There are typical patterns on election night and he explains those and the “red mirage.” There was no bounce back or resurgence of blue as the west coast was counted. It looked algorithmic as the votes crept up.
Every state has their own election system, we have a few types of machines and we have paper trails. That’s how we should be securing our elections. All states have different procedures with checks and balances. But we only use two brands of machines, and 70% of the vote counting machines have had cybersecurity experts mentioning potential vulnerabilities. If you compromise the tabulators you can change the outcome of an election or you can change the data in transit from the tabulators. Either way looks the same on paper. AZ, GA and PA were audited, but they didn’t do what they needed to do (he explains more about 23 min in). We want to validate that the machines are accurate, which is why you should do audits. The audits didn’t appropriately look at the races that had the anomalies. You should use the machines, then immediately conduct audits and appropriately sample the population.
Our system wants recounts, but if you don’t meet a threshold to need a recount and the candidate doesn’t ask for one it doesn’t get done. The paper trail needs to match the voting machines. We need to demand audits at the state level (AGs and Secretaries of State). If we don’t validate this and there was manipulation to the extent that data indicates, it means there are no midterms or next time because if you can manipulate it you choose the winner and there’s no coming back from that because he who counts the vote wins.
A listener asked a question about down ballot voting. Nathan explained that typically Democrats vote all blue down ballot with little budge, straight ticket. Republicans do not do that. That was another anomaly that 1.5 million people vote for all Blue but not president? There is a normal 1% to 2% overperformance for president. When Nathan looked at the numbers in six swing states looking at the drop off vote, Harris would’ve won in those six states. That doesn’t include concerns about mail in ballots not being delivered or voter suppression which he believes was a big deal. Greg Palast is also highlighting those concerns. Nathan has asked his organization send emails reaching out to several Secretaries of State. If there was manipulation, what you would find when you compare to the paper trail is 1) more votes on the paper than recorded, but 2) missing votes for Dems that show up as GOP. Video here (40 minutes).
More waste. We’re paying for a $200 million ad campaign directed toward migrants on Fox News. (Irony?)
As Donald’s poll numbers sink, the Dow also was down big two days in a row. Over 400 yesterday, down 700+ today.
Encouraging!
Gotta love Canada!
OK, I’m maxed out. Hungry pets and humans. I feel a little encouraged. Apparently all of our phone calls to legislators are helping. I love the idea that the GOP has to choose between getting primaried by their constituents or having Donald attack them. They got themselves into this mess. Got to spend time with horses today and get outside. Make sure to focus on self care during this turbulent and unprecedented time!