Tuesday, December 8, 2020

www.wsj.com /articles/no-more-bishop-nice-guy-11607469595 Opinion | No More Bishop Nice Guy Matthew Hennessey 5-7 minutes A family holds hands in prayer during Mass at St. Mary of the Hills Roman Catholic Church in Rochester Hills, Mich., Nov. 1. Photo: David Goldman/Associated Press Listen to this article 4 minutes This feature is powered by text-to-speech technology. Want to see it on more articles? Give your feedback below or email audiofeedback@wsj.com. The Bronx, N.Y. The Supreme Court smacked down Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s arbitrary limits on church attendance in certain Covid hot spots late last month. The decision was a welcome reprieve for religious leaders, who have for the most part bent over backward to accommodate pandemic restrictions imposed by civil authorities. But enough is enough. America’s churches should reopen fully, and they should do it now. Anyone who thought the high court’s 5-4 ruling would end government attempts to squeeze the right to free exercise of religion was wrong. Mr. Cuomo dismissed the decision as “irrelevant” and “political.” California Gov. Gavin Newsom has imposed a 10 p.m. curfew, which would seem to place midnight Mass in the category of a criminal conspiracy. They canceled Easter. Is Christmas next? At my Catholic parish in the North Bronx, the requisite masking is in effect, hand sanitizer is everywhere, and the old regulars are social distancing in the pews. What’s missing are the children. Our parish is healthy. We have a dynamic pastor, several faithful priests, and a vibrant neighborhood loaded with kids and families. During normal times, the 10:30 a.m. Sunday Mass would feature a children’s choir and a corps of young altar servers. It would be held in the auditorium of the parish high school next door, to accommodate a bulging congregation of mothers with strollers and fidgety tweens in soccer uniforms. They’re all gone. The choir is on ice, and a lone adult serves the priest at the altar. Few in the pews are under 50. Perhaps young families have adjusted their schedules and are attending Mass in smaller groups, at different times, or watching online from home. I fear, however, that Catholics who are only marginally attached to the church are slipping away. It’s an unfortunate reality that some Christians only attend services twice a year even when there’s no pandemic on. This year that minimal connection is in danger of being severed. America’s religious leaders should hear alarm bells. In our aggressively secular world, it doesn’t take much to break the habit of regular worship. Communities of faith can’t survive without children. The shuttering of churches in the spring caused untold pastoral damage. Thousands suffered and died alone, without the comfort of a bedside spiritual adviser or a priest to administer the sacraments. The departed went to eternal rest without the funeral masses and family gatherings that are so important to mark the passage of a life. When restrictions were lifted, sign-up sheets and parking-lot services did little to bring the faithful back. We are told lives have been saved by keeping the churches half-empty. Do we know how many souls have been lost? As a Catholic raising five children in the faith, I’m particularly concerned with the future of my church. Restaurateurs and small-business owners are fighting like hell every day to preserve their livelihoods. It’s inspiring to see ordinary people stand up to bullies like Messrs. Cuomo and Newsom. But what are America’s bishops doing to inspire their flocks? What will they do? We are tired of watching our leaders kneel before junior-varsity Caesars. There is no evidence that the virus is spreading in the churches, so my message to these bishops is this: Show some backbone. Open the churches. Get rid of the sign-up sheets. No more roped-off pews. No more 25% capacity. Call the faithful, young and old, to communion. Let the civil authorities try to shut it down. Chain yourselves to the altars if necessary. Be the heroes we need you to be. The alternative is subservience. The alternative is empty pews forever. The pandemic generation may never come back. Mr. Hennessey is the Journal’s deputy editorial features editor. WSJ Opinion: A Thanksgiving Heap of Coronavirus Hypocrisy 0:00 / 3:44 0:00 WSJ Opinion: A Thanksgiving Heap of Coronavirus Hypocrisy WSJ Opinion: A Thanksgiving Heap of Coronavirus Hypocrisy Main Street: What all those politicians caught violating their own Covid-19 rules really tells us. Images: Getty Images/GraphicaArtis Composite: Mark Kelly Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8 Appeared in the December 9, 2020, print edition.

THE ZUCKERBERG/PLOUFFE PLAN….. CAN THEIR ELECTION MANIPULATIONS BE CURED WITHOUT AN EXTENSIVE, STATE-BY-STATE, ENVELOPE AND PAPER BALLOT REVIEW/RECOUNT? The story begins in January 2017 when David Plouffe, was hired to lead the advocacy efforts of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a “charitable” organization established by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Plouffe described his plans [ A Citizen’s Guide to Defeating Donald Trump ] for 2020 which outlined efforts to be implemented in key Democratic strongholds in the swing states that would ultimately decide the election, such as Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Minneapolis. Due to extensive efforts by investigators and attorneys for the Amistad Project of the nonpartisan Thomas More Society, who have been following Zuckerberg’s money for the past 18 months, it is possible to expose the inner workings of this operation. Under the pretext of assisting election officials conduct “safe and secure” elections in the age of COVID, Zuckerberg funded [for tax deduction purposes, “donated “] $400 million — as much money as Congress appropriated for the same general purpose — to several “nonprofit” organizations founded and run by left-wing activists. The primary recipient was the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which received the staggering sum of $350 million. Prior to Zuckerberg’s donations, CTCL’s annual operating expenses averaged less than $1 million per year. Following Plouffe’s plan, Zuckerberg and CTCL wrote detailed conditions into their grants that precisely dictated exactly how elections were to be conducted, down to the number of ballot drop boxes and polling places. The Constitution gives state lawmakers sole authority for managing elections, but these grants put private interests firmly in control. Amistad Project lawyers tried to prevent this unlawful collusion by filing a flurry of lawsuits in eight states prior to Election Day. Unfortunately, judges put those lawsuits aside without consideration of their merits because the plaintiffs had not yet suffered “concrete harm” in the form of fraudulent election results. The law had no remedy to offer because these lawless schemes had not yet reached fruition. Then CTC sought Republican-leaning jurisdictions to give its donations a veneer of bipartisanship. Of course, the number of votes in play in those counties paled in comparison to those in the liberal counties. Philadelphia County alone, for instance, projected that the $10 million grant it received from CTCL would enable it to increase turnout by 25-30 percent — translating to well over 200,000 votes. High-ranking state officials simultaneously took significant steps to weaken ballot security protocols, acting on their own authority without permission or concurrence from the state legislatures that enshrined those protections in the law. In Wisconsin, Democrat Secretary of State Doug La Follette allowed voters to claim “indefinite confinement” in order to avoid having to provide a photocopy of their ID when requesting an absentee ballot. The exemption was intended for legitimate invalids, but COVID offered a convenient excuse for circumventing the law, despite the fact that Wisconsin had no pandemic-related lockdown rules that would have rendered anyone “indefinitely confined.” The impact was far-reaching. About 240,000 voters claimed the exemption in 2020, compared to just 70,000 in 2016. In Michigan, Democrat Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson unilaterally voided the legal requirement that voters provide a signature when requesting an absentee ballot, establishing an online request form. She then took things a step further by announcing that she would “allow civic groups and other organizations running voter registration drives to register voters through the state’s online registration website,” granting partisan groups such as Rock The Vote direct access to Michigan’s voter rolls. In Pennsylvania, election officials in heavily-Democratic counties that received CTCL funding allowed flawed mail-in ballots to be “cured” — that is, altered or replaced — prior to Election Day. In other counties, officials rightly interpreted this as a flagrant violation of state law. On the night before Election Day, less than 24 hours before polls were due to close, Democrat Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar sought to imbue this illegal practice with the appearance of validity by issuing a statement authorizing counties to contact voters who had cast improper ballots. Even if Boockvar had the statutory authority to do this, which she did not, the timing of her memo made it impossible for rural counties to take advantage of it to nearly the same extent as urban counties. In numerous states, officials also consolidated the vote-counting and ballot-curing process in sporting arenas and other large venues, rather than the ward- and precinct-level offices that normally handle the job. Although this made absolutely no sense as a pandemic-related safety measure, officials cited COVID as their rationale. Consolidating the vote-counting tied the other efforts together. Instead of a manageable number of ballots being transported to small offices and counted in the immediate presence of observers from both parties, truckloads of ballots were brought to a single location, inevitably resulting in confusion and commingling of ballots from various sources. Securing those ballots from the time they left voters’ hands to the time they were officially counted should have been the top priority of election workers, but it’s not even clear whether there were logs kept identifying which ballots were delivered by which trucks and when. If such logs even exist, they have not been disclosed. At the same time, election officials claimed that they were adhering to legal requirements that observers be “in the room” during the counting process while using COVID as an excuse for relegating those observers to the “penalty box,” far from the actual counting and curing. This was particularly egregious when it came to ballot “curing,” a process that actually involves election workers filling out brand new ballots on behalf of voters whose ballots purportedly could not be read by machine. This could have been due to something the voter themselves did, such as spilling coffee on the ballot. It also could have been due to something that election workers themselves did, such as crumpling ballots to prevent the machines from receiving them, just as a vending machine rejects crumpled bills. It’s impossible to know exactly what happened, because Republican observers were denied meaningful access to the process — and in some cases literally locked out of the counting rooms while election workers obscured the windows with cardboard. These election workers, it should be noted, were paid directly by CTCL’s grants. These supposedly impartial arbiters of our electoral process were on Zuckerberg’s payroll. All of this may sound like the stuff of fiction — the sort of thing one would expect from a cinematic thriller or a spy novel. Sadly, it’s the reality that our country is faced with increasingly aggressive intervention into our electoral process on the part of Big Tech oligarchs and activists with deep pockets and shallow motivations.

Saturday, December 5, 2020

www.washingtonexaminer.com /news/trump-latest-republican-to-claim-voter-fraud-in-democratic-cities-with-courts-hesitant-to-intervene Trump latest Republican to claim voter fraud in Democratic cities, with courts hesitant to intervene by W. James Antle III, Politics Editor | | December 05, 2020 04:14 PM 6-7 minutes President Trump isn’t the first Republican to allege voter fraud in big Democratic-controlled cities or to face charges that he is seeking to disenfranchise minority voters in those communities. On election night in 1994, Ellen Sauerbrey looked poised to become the first Republican governor of Maryland since Spiro Agnew. But a late batch of votes, mainly from Baltimore, came through to put the Democrat over the top. Sauerbrey alleged fraud and challenged some 11,000 votes. Her opponent’s winning margin was less than 6,000. In 1982, Democrat Adlai Stevenson III came within 5,000 votes of toppling Illinois Republican Gov. Jim Thompson, who had led by double digits in pre-election polls. While it was Stevenson who sought a recount because he was behind by a slim margin statewide, subsequent investigations suggested at least 100,000 illegitimate votes were cast in Chicago, where the Democrat won 3 to 1. Detroit is the focal point of the Trump campaign’s election challenges in Michigan, where there have long been allegations of irregularities and generalized corruption. In 2013, Democratic Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was convicted on 24 counts of mail fraud, wire fraud, and racketeering.p> Republicans have complained about urban Democratic political machines adversely affecting election integrity for decades. Democrats have increasingly argued that the real fraud is Republican attempts at voter suppression, especially in minority communities. In Georgia, where Trump is contesting the presidential election results, Democratic leader Stacey Abrams has accused GOP Gov. Brian Kemp of effectively stealing the 2018 gubernatorial election from her by the means. The courts are historically hesitant to overturn election results. In the Maryland case, a judge acknowledged there were some irregularities and said problems in Democratic-run Baltimore “must be immediately addressed if the citizens of this state are to have confidence in the electoral process.” But the judge refused to invalidate the results, saying there was “simply no evidence of any systematic omissions or a pattern of misconduct throughout the state.” In Illinois, despite the U.S. attorney at the time saying the number of illegitimate votes cast in Chicago could have exceeded 100,000, only 65 people were indicted and 63 convicted for election-related crimes. In this particular case, the Republican won the rest of the state by a big enough margin to overcome any big-city voter fraud. Allegations of voting skullduggery are a large part of Chicago’s city lore, including claims about the 1960 presidential election. “Urban blue centers have an incentive to cheat and/or skirt the rules set down by the various state legislatures because of machine politics and the need to deliver for the Democrat Party nationally, but also because the chances of being prosecuted are so rare since the courts at all levels have shown themselves so hesitant to weigh in on election matters,” said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell. Courts have tended to set a very high bar for the judicial invalidation of elections. "This is a dangerous path we are being asked to tread," wrote Brian Hagedorn, a conservative justice who sided with the liberals on the Wisconsin Supreme Court in rejecting a lawsuit by a pro-Trump group not affiliated with the campaign. "The loss of public trust in our constitutional order resulting from the exercise of this kind of judicial power would be incalculable." The U.S. Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore in 2000 and the Illinois Supreme Court in the contested 1982 gubernatorial election rejected the losing party’s request for additional recounts and let the existing vote lead stand. There is also the civil rights concern of throwing out votes in heavily black and Hispanic precincts. N. Charles Anderson, the executive director of the Urban League of Detroit & Southeastern Michigan, told the Washington Post that the Trump campaign’s efforts to challenge votes in Detroit constituted an “all-out assault” on the black vote. Further complicating Trump’s legal battle is the fact that he made gains in some of the big cities that are central to his claims compared to 2016 while losing ground in the suburbs. Henry Olsen of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center attributed Trump’s narrow losses in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania to “suburban vote slippage.” Trump also made inroads with black and Hispanic voters nationally. The Trump team does have the option of persuading Republican state legislators in some of the contested battlegrounds that their elections were fundamentally flawed and that they should seat GOP electors instead ahead of the Electoral College vote. Democrat Joe Biden has declared victory and is recognized as the president-elect, with even Trump ultimately acceding to the beginning of a transition process even as he refuses to concede. Attorney General William Barr, a Trump appointee, said last week that the Justice Department has “not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election” to date. Yet, Republicans were rattled by a Georgia surveillance video purporting to show concealed boxes of ballots being added to the count. A top elections official in the state disputed the claim. “Trump has shed light on a broken and failed 50-state hodgepodge of voting standards and procedures,” said Republican strategist Bradley Blakeman. “This should be a wake-up call for the need for National Uniform Voting Practices Law.”

Friday, December 4, 2020

Arizona Legislature Calls for Immediate ‘Forensic Audit’ of Dominion Voting Machines

Public hearing on election integrity in Phoenix, Ariz., on Nov. 30, 2020. (Mei Lee/The Epoch Times)

Arizona

Arizona Legislature Calls for Immediate ‘Forensic Audit’ of Dominion Voting Machines

By Jack Phillips

December 4, 2020 Updated: December 4, 2020

The Arizona House and Senate have called for an audit of the Maricopa County election software and equipment following allegations of fraud and other irregularities presented by President Donald Trump’s team earlier this week.

In a news release Friday, GOP leaders of the Republican-controlled legislature sought an independent audit of Dominion Voting Systems software—used in Maricopa County—called for the audit.

State Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita, a Republican said that Maricopa County’s Board of Supervisors “is supportive of conducting an independent audit of their voting software and equipment,” adding: “It is important we maintain all of the voting public’s confidence in our elections, and this is a positive step.”

House Majority Leader Warren Petersen, a Republican, said that “a significant number of voters believe that fraud occurred,” citing “the number of irregularities” that allegedly occurred in Maricopa County and elsewhere in the state.

“Especially concerning,” he said, “are the allegations made surrounding the vendor Dominion,” adding that the county needs to carry out a “forensic audit on the Dominion software to make sure the results were accurate.”

The Epoch Times has reached out to Dominion for comment following Petersen’s statement. Maricopa County has not immediately responded to a request for comment.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Legislative Leaders call for audit of Maricopa County election software and equipment #AZSenate #AZleg #Election @AZHouseGOP pic.twitter.com/wDlr7v0fDT

— AZSenateRepublicans (@AZSenateGOP) December 4, 2020

Previously, Dominion’s CEO and a spokesman have said it’s not possible to change votes from one candidate to another, as some witnesses claimed in affidavits and in legislature hearings across the United States. They also denied being able to monitor, in real-time, the tabulation of votes and have also denied that Dominion employees have access to the tabulation efforts, saying only county employees do.

In the letter, Petersen was joined by Senate President Karen Fann, a Republican, in calling on the county to audit the results.

Their statement said that Maricopa supervisors have to “move expeditiously” on the forensic audit. The Electoral College will vote to certify the election on Dec. 14.

On Monday, Maricopa GOP Chairwoman Linda Brickman, for example, told the Legislature in an event hosted by President Donald Trump’s lawyers, saying that she and her Democratic partner saw “more than once” Trump votes default and shift to Joe Biden as they were entering votes into Dominion machines from ballots that the machines couldn’t read.

“I observed, with my Democratic partner, the preparation of a new ballot, since the original one was soiled, or wouldn’t go through the tabulators. I read her a Trump Republican ballot, and as soon as she entered it into the system, the ballot defaulted on the screen to a Biden Democratic ballot,” Brickman told lawmakers on Monday. She said that her testimony was submitted in a sworn affidavit under perjury.

“We were never told what, if any corrective action was taken,” Brickman asserted. “All I know is the next day, I was called outside the room that I was working in for signature verification by a supervisor who said, ‘I understand you caused some problems this week and you thought our machines were not working correctly.”

Previously, Trump’s legal team and other lawyers have alleged that Dominion systems are compromised, which triggered a bevy of counter-statements from Dominion that they’re false.

Arizona Legislature Calls for Immediate ‘Forensic Audit’ of Dominion Voting Machines

Public hearing on election integrity in Phoenix, Ariz., on Nov. 30, 2020. (Mei Lee/The Epoch Times)

Arizona

Arizona Legislature Calls for Immediate ‘Forensic Audit’ of Dominion Voting Machines

By Jack Phillips

December 4, 2020 Updated: December 4, 2020

In a news release Friday, GOP leaders of the Republican-controlled legislature sought an independent audit of Dominion Voting Systems software—used in Maricopa County—called for the audit.

The Epoch Times has reached out to Dominion for comment following Petersen’s statement. Maricopa County has not immediately responded to a request for comment.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Legislative Leaders call for audit of Maricopa County election software and equipment #AZSenate #AZleg #Election @AZHouseGOP pic.twitter.com/wDlr7v0fDT

— AZSenateRepublicans (@AZSenateGOP) December 4, 2020

In the letter, Petersen was joined by Senate President Karen Fann, a Republican, in calling on the county to audit the results.

Their statement said that Maricopa supervisors have to “move expeditiously” on the forensic audit. The Electoral College will vote to certify the election on Dec. 14.

Previously, Trump’s legal team and other lawyers have alleged that Dominion systems are compromised, which triggered a bevy of counter-statements from Dominion that they’re false.

MILG-POPS

Tuesday, December 8, 2020

Saturday, December 5, 2020

Friday, December 4, 2020

Arizona Legislature Calls for Immediate ‘Forensic Audit’ of Dominion Voting Machines

Arizona Legislature Calls for Immediate ‘Forensic Audit’ of Dominion Voting Machines

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