Friday, November 25, 2022

Politics Though a Turkey Coma

Well, not a lot of politics survived Thanksgiving Day (I'm giving thanks), and what there is is rather scattered and not well focused.

Fox reports With rail strike looming, Biden says he has 'not directly engaged,' contradicting White House press secretary "President Biden's comments come after White House claimed president 'directly involved' in negotiations" Somebody's lying. John Solomon at JTN House GOP plans to turn tables from Trump tax return fight, track Hunter Biden's money to father, "Fight for secret bank records aims to compare payments to presidential son from foreign interest to benefits to Joe Biden, key investigator says." Fair is fair.

"This isn't a fishing expedition," Comer told the John Solomon Reports podcast this week. "We have every reason to believe that Hunter Biden was paying for living expenses for Joe Biden, a significant amount of living expenses. And we want to verify that."

Comer said the pursuit is ripped from the Democrats' playbook.

"The Democrats have set a precedent on this," he explained. "They filed suit forcing former President Trump to have to turn over his tax records. So the Democrats have already set a precedent for bank records and tax records."

At the War Room, Hunter Biden Invested In Virtual Healthcare Company Receiving Six-Figure Contracts From Biden Administration, Emails Show He Leveraged ‘US Government’ Connections To ‘Increase Revenue.’ From SLAY, Elon Musk to Publish Twitter’s Internal Discussions on Hunter Biden Laptop to ‘Restore Public Trust’. That should prove amusing. The great VDH at Am Think, The Same Old, Same Old Déjà Vu, "We know the story of the special counsel appointed to investigate Trump, like so much else today, before it’s even written."

Weeks into the investigation, the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, or MSNBC will darkly inform their audiences that “unnamed sources close to the investigation tell us that “a bombshell” is about to go off.

Perhaps the “stunning development” will be similar to the fake “walls are closing in” scoop about the conspiratorial pinging in Trump tower from the Alfa Bank in Russia, or the “game-changer” Christopher Steele-fed, pee-pee, Moscow hotel room fable.

Yet one thing that will be different this time around is that the Biden Administration is in power. Attorney General Merrick Garland remains an unapologetic, embittered partisan. He is fresh off siccing a now-weaponized FBI on school kids’ parents and various MAGA enemies of the state.

After two prior failed impeachment trials, a failed special counsel’s investigation, and a failed and biased January 6 committee probe, Washington government lawyers know that their last and only Wile E. Coyote chance of catching the Roadrunner and now presidential candidate Trump is to get at least something into the hands of a Washington, D.C. jury.

NYPo, Carefree Ivanka Trump makes waves as she rebuffs dad: ‘Ivanka isn’t budging’. Basically, the social shunning by Democrats worked.

“She feels it’s bad for her family … and negative in general in her circle of friends.”

The source added that Ivanka didn’t gain any friends during her and Jared’s brief stint as unpaid presidential advisers in the White House.

“She wants as normal a life as she can arrange for her and her family … she’s unhappy about becoming a political target,” the source said.

At Da Wire, Trump Says DOJ Should Spill All Its Secrets About Mar-A-Lago Raid After ‘Repeated Leaks’ To Media “The idea that the Government must keep the details of the affidavit from Plaintiff is further undermined by the repeated leaks by DOJ of selected and misleading information,” it continued. “The Government’s conduct alone justifies the release of the affidavit to Plaintiff.”

The Victory Girls see Dems Drop Cheney Like WKRP: Turkeys Away! 

Breitbart sees a bright spot in the otherwise dim midterms as Republicans Appear to Defend Every House Seat Won in California in 2020. And City Journal is touting The GOP’s Urban Gains "Republicans improved their electoral performance in cities."

At RCP Jeb Bush is pushing Ducey’s Record: A Model for Governors. At Haut Hair, Capt. Ed comments [Hmmmm …. Ducey passed on a chance to run for the US Senate against Mark Kelly, a race he could have easily won. Now former Florida governor Jeb Bush offers this valediction immediately after the midterms. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. — Ed]. So is he being pushed for Preznit? Crazier things have happened; remember Carter?

Thomas Buckley at I&I, Fraudulent, Illegal, Unconstitutional, Unconscionable, And False: A Short Tour Of Government In Action

An example of flouting rules and long-standing practices can be summed up in two words: ballot access.

The sudden and radical changes in the way the people vote have caused a crisis of trust in this country not seen since Watergate (another example of illegality). Crisp clean professional vote tabulation goes a very long way to ensuring that people trust the system and the results, a fact that cannot be understated, while modifying those systems for such nakedly political purposes creates cracks in the bedrock of trust that our democratic republic needs to survive.

Politicians and activists and consultants understand that gray begets gray and gray areas can be very useful places to be when it comes to counting votes. Systems – any systems, not just voting ones – that are more complicated and obtuse are more prone to manipulation.

At ET, Appeals Court Clears True the Vote Leaders of Contempt

A U.S. appeals court has cleared two True the Vote leaders of contempt, overturning a judge’s order.

U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt ordered Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips of True the Vote jailed after he found them in contempt for not fully complying with a temporary restraining order that they, in part, reveal the identities of all persons who accessed information from Konnech, an election software firm.

Phillips named one of the people but he refused to name another, saying that the latter is an FBI informant. Engelbrecht said she thinks she knows who the person is but declined to identify the person.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit later ordered the release of Engelbrecht and Phillips while declining to immediately rule on the contempt finding.

From ET,  Kari Lake Files 1st Lawsuit After Election: ‘They’re Trying to Run Out the Clock’ 

Lake sued Stephen Richer, the county’s recorder, and other officials in Arizona Superior Court. She’s asking the court to compel the officials to promptly produce records on the administration of the midterm elections, which featured widespread issues in the state’s largest county.

“Given instances of misprinted ballots, the commingling of counted and uncounted ballots, and long lines discouraging people from voting, as demonstrated in the attached declarations, these records are necessary for Plaintiff to determine the full extent of the problems identified and their impacts on electors,” the 19-page suit states.

Maricopa County officials have acknowledged that tabulators across many polling sites stopped working properly on election day. Among the advised solutions was voters placing their ballots into a box to be counted later. Declarations attached to the new suit from poll observers say that workers mixed counted and uncounted ballots in the same container at the end of the night.

Another solution to the tabulator problem was a voter checking out of a site and utilizing a mail-in ballot. To try to figure out the extent of the problems, the Lake campaign on Nov. 15 requested information such as all records related to voters who checked into a site and who also submitted a ballot by mail. The campaign sent another request on Nov. 16. None of the records have been produced yet, which violates Arizona law that public record requests must be fulfilled “promptly,” the suit states.

“We need information from Maricopa County,” Lake said on Steve Bannon’s “War Room.” “They ran the shoddiest election ever, in history, and we want some information. We’re on a timeline, a very strict timeline when it comes to fighting this botched election. And they’re dragging their feet. They don’t want to give us the information, so we’re asking the courts to force them to give us the information.”

Brenden Purdy at Law and Liberty exposes The Flaws of Ranked Choice voting. "RCV is confusing and leads to paradoxical outcomes that do not appear to reflect the will of the voters." But it does reflect the desires of the Democrats who seek to impose it. Hamilton Craig at Compact writes In Defense of Political Machines from a right-wing perspective. At least the buses run on time.

Linked at Pirate's Cove in the weekly Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup and links.

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