Harlan Crow collects memorabilia from the Nazis and the communists. The mainstream media only criticized him for one, and gave him a pass on the other.
By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)
April 11, 2023
When I heard about recent news reports that Harlan Crow (a friend of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas) collected Nazi memorabilia, I thought, “Maybe there’s a context to this collecting that isn’t being accurately reported – or maybe not.”
Well, as it turns out, the context is that the media has a double standard when it comes to Nazism and communism. They criticized Crow for collecting memorabilia for one, while giving him a pass on the other.
Wikipedia states:
“Crow’s backyard garden is home to at least 20 statues of authoritarian leaders and Communist icons, including Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong, Karl Marx, Hosni Mubarak, Josip Broz Tito, Nicolae Ceausescu, Walter Ulbricht, Gavrilo Princip, Bela Kun, and Che Guevara. Crow acquired these former public monuments after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. According to Crow, he collects such memorabilia because he ‘hates communism and fascism.’ Crow also owns original paintings by Adolf Hitler, Claude Monet, Rembrandt Peale, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Winston Churchill, and Dwight Eisenhower.”
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_Crow
I hate the media’s double standard for Nazism vs communism.
On the other hand, I love the fact that Crow “hates communism and fascism.” As a libertarian, I view the two as being very similar to each other. I never understood how anyone could hate only one but not the other. If I go to a restaurant and the menu has a bowl of feces and a bowl of pus, I would walk out. And I would never understand any person who was only disgusted by one but not by the other.
On January 6, 2023, SCOTUS will have a meeting to consider hearing a case that could overturn the 2020 U.S. Presidential election. The mainstream media has been silent on this so far.
On January 6, 2023, SCOTUS will have a meeting to consider hearing a case that could overturn the 2020 U.S. Presidential election.
The mainstream media has been silent on this so far.
The case is called Brunson v. Adams.
Sources:
https://womenimpactingthenation.org/brunson-v-adams-scotus-election-integrity-case/
Sotomayor’s false claim that ‘over 100,000’ children are in ‘serious condition’ with covid
Sotomayor’s false claim that ‘over 100,000’ children are in ‘serious condition’ with covid
By Glenn Kessler
January 8, 2022
“Those numbers show that omicron is as deadly and causes as much serious disease in the unvaccinated as delta did. … We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators.”
— Justice Sonia Sotomayor, during oral argument at the Supreme Court, Jan. 7
Several readers questioned these remarks by Sotomayor, made during a hearing on whether the Biden administration’s nationwide rules ordering a vaccination-or-testing requirement on large employers were constitutional. Her remarks came during an exchange with Ben Flowers, Ohio’s solicitor general, as he referred to a brief filed by the American Commitment Foundation, which argued that the rise of the omicron variant had made the vaccine rules less relevant because vaccines do not appear especially effective against it.
The Facts
The brief in question sought to update the court on latest scientific and technical information on the omicron variant, as that had emerged with force after the mandate was proposed. Epidemiologists Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University and Andrew Bostom, who says he is affiliated with Brown University, helped advise on it.
Its key argument, citing data from countries such as South Africa and Denmark, was that omicron cases were 80 percent less likely to get hospitalized (South Africa) and three times less likely to end up with hospital admissions than the delta variant (Denmark). Moreover, the brief argued, the case fatality rate in South Africa plunged dramatically when omicron became dominant.
Flowers, who said he had been twice vaccinated and received a booster, participated remotely after testing positive for covid. His symptoms were said to be “exceptionally mild.”
“My presence here as a triple vaccinated individual by phone” suggested “vaccines do not appear to be very effective in stopping the spread or transmission,” he said, though he added that vaccines are effective at preventing “severe consequences.” That’s when Sotomayor interrupted him to assert “those numbers show that omicron is as deadly and causes as much serious disease in the unvaccinated as delta did.” She argued that “saying it’s a different variant just underscores the fact” a workplace rule was needed.
Actually, as we have shown, that’s not what the brief said. In fact, it even argued that vaccinated individuals might be more likely to catch covid rather than unvaccinated individuals. (The brief refers mainly to people with two vaccine doses as “vaccinated,” not people who also received a booster.) The brief suggests “this may be because unvaccinated, covid-recovered patients have better protection versus omicron than vaccinated patients who never previously had covid.”
Nevertheless, the spike in cases has led to increased hospitalizations, Sotomayor noted during the exchange. Almost 30 percent of intensive-care beds are filled with covid patients as of Jan. 8, according the Health and Human Services Department data.
But then Sotomayor went off the rails: “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators.”
That’s wildly incorrect, assuming she is referring to hospitalizations, given the reference to ventilators. According to HHS data, as of Jan. 8 there are about 5,000 children hospitalized in a pediatric bed, either with suspected covid or a confirmed laboratory test. This figure includes patients in observation beds. So Sotomayor’s number is at least 20 times higher than reality, even before you determine how many are in “serious condition.”
Moreover, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been less than 100,000 — 82,843 to be exact — hospital admissions of children confirmed with covid since Aug. 1, 2020.
Still, the current seven-day average (Dec. 30-Jan. 5) is 797, which is a sharp increase from the week before (441) and represents the peak seven-day average for children, the CDC said. So Sotomayor is not wrong to suggest the rate of pediatric admissions is cause for concern. On Monday, the American Academy of Pediatrics reported a sharp rise in pediatric cases, with many of the children unvaccinated. (Some children are hospitalized for other reasons and then test positive for covid through screenings at the hospital.)
The Supreme Court media office did not respond to a request for comment.
The Pinocchio Test
It’s important for Supreme Court justices to make rulings based on correct data. There has been a spike in pediatric cases with covid, even if the omicron variant appears less deadly. But Sotomayor during an oral argument offered a figure — 100,000 children in “serious condition … many on ventilators” — that is absurdly high. She earns Four Pinocchios.
Four Pinocchios
ACLU changes abortion quote by Ruth Bader Ginsburg to make it gender-neutral
In 2018, Time magazine published the following quote from Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. The bolding is mine:
“The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity. It is a decision she must make for herself. When Government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.”
Original source: https://time.com/5354490/ruth-bader-ginsburg-roe-v-wade/
Archived source: https://web.archive.org/web/20180803070425/https://time.com/5354490/ruth-bader-ginsburg-roe-v-wade/
In 2021, now that Ginsburg is dead, the American Civil Liberties Union has taken it upon itself to change her words in order to make the quote gender-neutral. This is the gender-neutral version that was tweeted by the ACLU. The bolding mine:
“The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a [person’s] life, to [their] well-being and dignity… When the government controls that decision for [people], [they are] being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for [their] own choices.”
Original source: https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1439259891064004610
Archived source: https://web.archive.org/web/20210920003532/https://twitter.com/ACLU/status/1439259891064004610
Here’s a screenshot of the ACLU’s tweet of the gender-neutral version of Ginsburg’s quote:
This is exactly the kind of thing that George Orwell warned us about in his novel 1984.
I never thought that the American Civil Liberties Union would do something like this. On the contrary, those of us who truly support civil liberties tend to be very much opposed to this kind of thing.
Shame on the ACLU.
Justice Clarence Thomas Is the Unlikely Cannabis Supporter on the Supreme Court
Justice Clarence Thomas Is the Unlikely Cannabis Supporter on the Supreme Court
But federal marijuana decriminalization will still have to wait on Congress for action
By David S. Cohen
June 28, 2021
Marijuana legalization has an interesting advocate at the Supreme Court: Justice Clarence Thomas. Today, once again, Justice Thomas indicated his support for cutting back federal laws that criminalize pot. You might think this is good news since Justice Thomas is one of the most conservative Justices on the Court, therefore surely more liberal Justices would agree. But, unfortunately for the movement, his zeal to rethink how this country criminalizes weed has, so far, no other supporters on the Court.
The case today involved a medical marijuana dispensary in Colorado that, even though it was operating completely legally within the state of Colorado, could not take advantage of federal tax breaks for businesses because the federal government considers it to run an illegal drug business. The dispensary challenged the tax provision, claiming that the federal government cannot prohibit medical marijuana in a state, like Colorado, that makes it legal.
This morning the Court decided not to hear this case, leaving the dispensary without the benefit. (Had they decided to take it on, and maybe even ruled in the dispensary’s favor, any lawful business would have been able to take advantage of the tax break — something advocates have been demanding for years.) Without explaining itself, the Court presumably was relying on a 2005 case in which the Supreme Court ruled that Congress could continue to criminalize and regulate local use and production of medical marijuana. The Court’s ruling was based on the concept that Congress can only legislate with respect to national problems, not local ones. The two California women who had grown pot for their own use in that case argued that their medical marijuana was not a national issue — it was just for them and thus purely local. The Court rejected this argument on the basis that the federal government had a strong interest in locking down the entire national market for marijuana, and that even though medical marijuana was legal in California, Congress could still criminalize it under federal law in its quest to stop illegal drugs everywhere.
That decision was 6-3, with Justice Thomas dissenting along with Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Those two Justices are no longer on the Court, but you may have thought that, 16 years after the 2005 case with dozens of states now legalizing marijuana for medical (37 states) and/or recreational purposes (18 states), Justice Thomas may have found others who support his position that the federal government needs to relax how it treats marijuana.
However, based on what the Court did today, it seems he has yet to find any allies. The Court’s decision not to hear this case was, as it almost always is, unsigned and without explanation. Justice Thomas wrote a separate opinion (available here if you scroll to page 28) that no other Justice joined. In that separate opinion, Justice Thomas called out the federal government for its “half-in, half-out regime that simultaneously tolerates and forbids local use of marijuana.” What he is referring to is the fact that the Attorney General has refused to reclassify marijuana to permit use in states where it is legal and other parts of federal law, such as the tax code in this case, continue to treat it as illegal. Yet, Congress has refused to allow federal dollars to be spent enforcing federal marijuana laws in states where it is legal for medicinal purposes, and the Department of Justice has a policy against interfering with state legalization.
To Justice Thomas, this confusing patchwork of federal approaches to state legalization undermines the 2005 Supreme Court decision. That decision was based on a comprehensive nationwide approach by the federal government to prohibit pot in all forms. But now, with the federal government picking and choosing what to do in the face of the state legalization movement, Justice Thomas argued that the justification for federal intervention in this area no longer exists. “Suffice it to say,” he wrote, “the Federal Government’s current approach to marijuana bears little resemblance to the watertight nationwide prohibition that a closely divided Court found necessary to justify the Government’s blanket prohibition in [2005].”
These are encouraging words for anyone who thinks the federal government is overreaching in the way it continues to prohibit and regulate marijuana, especially in the states where laws have been relaxed. However, as exciting at it is to have a Justice of the Supreme Court write these words, until Justice Thomas gains support from other Justices, federal marijuana liberalization is going to have to come from the Attorney General or Congress not the Supreme Court.
SCOTUS rules unanimously against warrantless seizure of guns from someone’s home
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/17/politics/supreme-court-fourth-amendment-case-firearms/index.html
Supreme Court sides with man who said police illegally seized firearms from his home without a warrant
By Ariane de Vogue and Devan Cole
May 17, 2021
Washington (CNN) The Supreme Court on Monday wiped away a lower court decision that held that law enforcement could enter a Rhode Island man’s home and seize his firearms without a warrant after his wife expressed fear that he might harm himself.
A lower court had allowed the search, holding that the decision to take the firearms without a warrant fell within the Fourth Amendment’s “community caretaking exception.”
But Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for a unanimous Supreme Court, held that the lower court’s broad interpretation of the exception “goes beyond anything this Court has recognized.”
While the court has recognized that police officers can perform “many civic tasks in modern society,” there is “not an open-ended license to perform them anywhere,” Thomas wrote.
“The very core of the Fourth Amendment,” Thomas wrote, is the “right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable search and seizure.”
The case involved Edward Caniglia, who in a dispute with his wife in 2015 brought out his gun and put it on the dining room table, asking his wife to shoot him now “to get it over with.”
She declined, and left to spend the night in a hotel. The next morning she could not reach her husband by phone and called the police to ask them to check in on her husband’s welfare. Upon meeting Caniglia, law enforcement believed he posed a risk to himself, and they called a hospital so he could be admitted for psychiatric evaluation. After the ambulance left, they seized his weapons.
Caniglia later sued and said that when police entered his home to seize his weapon they violated the Fourth Amendment because they had no warrant.
Biden Administration Urges Supreme Court To Let Cops Enter Homes And Seize Guns Without A Warrant
Biden Administration Urges Supreme Court To Let Cops Enter Homes And Seize Guns Without A Warrant
By Nick Sibilla
March 23, 2021
The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday will hear oral argument in Caniglia v. Strom, a case that could have sweeping consequences for policing, due process, and mental health, with the Biden Administration and attorneys general from nine states urging the High Court to uphold warrantless gun confiscation. But what would ultimately become a major Fourth Amendment case began with an elderly couple’s spat over a coffee mug. (more…)
Michigan, Pennsylvania State Lawmakers Ask Supreme Court to Join Texas Election Lawsuit
Michigan, Pennsylvania State Lawmakers Ask Supreme Court to Join Texas Election Lawsuit
By Janita Kan
December 10, 2020
A group of state legislators and voters asked the Supreme Court on Thursday for permission to join Texas’s lawsuit challenging 2020 election results in four states.
Among the members listed in the request are those who had previously filed lawsuits seeking to de-certify election results either in state or federal courts. These include several voters and Pennsylvania state legislators Daryl D. Metcalfe, Chris E. Dush, and Thomas R. Sankey III, whose lawsuit was dismissed by a state judge.
Meanwhile, a group of Michigan state legislators have also signed on to the brief asking to intervene in the case.
President Donald Trump and his allies have pinned great expectations on the Texas lawsuit, with the president characterizing the case as “the big one.” The court has not indicated whether it would take up the case, even though the justices have original jurisdiction over the dispute. This means that the court has the power to hear the case for the first time as opposed to reviewing a lower court’s decision.
“The Supreme Court has a chance to save our Country from the greatest Election abuse in the history of the United States,” Trump wrote in a Twitter statement on Thursday.
The legislators and voters are not the only people attempting to join the case. Trump and six states with Republican attorney generals—Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Utah—have also asked the top court to allow them to join Texas in the case.
The state of Texas had asked the Supreme Court on Dec. 7 for permission to sue Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin in an attempt to protect the integrity of the 2020 election
The Lone Star State has accused the four states of changing election rules in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Electors Clause, unequal treatment of voters, and causing voting irregularities by relaxing ballot-integrity protections under state law, opening up potential for voting fraud.
“Taken together, these flaws affect an outcome-determinative numbers of popular votes in a group of States that cast outcome-determinative numbers of electoral votes,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton argued in his brief.
All four defendant states have filed their response to Texas’s request, opposing the allegations.
Thirty-nine states have revealed which side they stand on in this election saga, with 18 Republican attorney generals filing briefs backing Texas and 20 Democratic attorneys general supporting the defendant states.
Republican Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost backed neither party but asked the court to review the fundamental question presented in Texas’s request.
So far, five other states with Republican attorney generals—Idaho, Alaska, Wyoming, New Hampshire, and Kentucky—have not taken action in the dispute. But Alaskan Gov. Mike Dunleavy told The Epoch Times in a statement that his attorney general was unable to review the motion in time to take action on the case.
Texas is hoping to obtain a declaration from the Supreme Court that the four states conducted their 2020 election in violation of the Constitution. It is also asking the court to prohibit the count of the Electoral College votes cast by the four states. For the defendant states that have already appointed electors, the suit is asking the justices to order state legislatures to appoint new electors according to the U.S. Constitution.
The proposed intervenors in the case are: Michigan state legislators Gary Eisen, John Reilly, Julie Alexander, Matt Maddock, Daire Rendon, Beth Griffin, Douglas Wozniak, Michele Hoitenga, Brad Paquette, Rodney Wakeman, Greg Markkanen, Jack O’Malley, Joe Bellino, Luke Meerman and Brianna Kahle; Pennsylvania state legislators Daryl D. Metcalfe, Mike Puskaric, Chris E. Dush and Thomas R. Sankey III; Wisconsin resident Ronald H. Heuer; Georgia resident John Wood; and Michigan residents Angelic Johnson, Dr. Linda Lee Tarver, and Kristina Karamo.
This case is cited as Texas v. Pennsylvania (22O155).
Pennsylvania House Leaders File Brief to Support Texas in Supreme Court Lawsuit Against Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania House Leaders File Brief to Support Texas in Supreme Court Lawsuit Against Pennsylvania
By Jack Phillips
December 10, 2020
Pennsylvania’s House speaker and majority leader on Thursday filed an amici curiae brief with the Supreme Court against the state of Pennsylvania and in favor of Texas’s lawsuit against the commonwealth and three other states.
A brief filed by Pennsylvania House Speaker Bryan Cutler and Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff, both Republicans, requests that the Supreme Court “carefully consider the procedural issues and questions raised by the Plaintiff concerning the administration of the 2020 General Election in Pennsylvania.”
“The unimpeachability of our elections requires clear procedures of administration so that everyone gets a fair shake. Unfortunately, outside actors have so markedly twisted and gerrymandered the Commonwealth’s Election Code to the point that amici find it unrecognizable from the laws that they enacted,” they wrote, adding that the state of Texas “raised important questions about how this procedural malfeasance affected the 2020 General Election.”
In the lawsuit, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton alleged that Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin introduced changes to election laws, deeming them unconstitutional. The suit also contends that by doing so, those states treated voters unequally and created significant voting irregularities by rescinding certain ballot-integrity measures.
Filed on Monday night, the lawsuit is requesting the Supreme Court to declare the four states carried out their respective elections in violation of the U.S. Constitution.
“The states violated statutes enacted by their duly elected legislatures, thereby violating the Constitution. By ignoring both state and federal law, these states have not only tainted the integrity of their own citizens’ vote, but of Texas and every other state that held lawful elections,” Paxton said in a statement announcing the legal petition.
Cutler and Benninghoff, in support of Paxton’s lawsuit, further stipulated that “under the pretextual guise of COVID-19, special interests began attempting to use Pennsylvania courts” to carry out “election procedures of their own choosing,” citing mail-in ballot extensions implemented by Kathy Boockvar, the Pennsylvania secretary of state.
Also on Thursday, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro filed a brief with the court, arguing that Paxton’s assertions are frivolous and an attempt to “disenfranchise voters” in the commonwealth.
“Its request for this Court to exercise its original jurisdiction and then anoint Texas’s preferred candidate for President is legally indefensible and is an [affront] to principles of constitutional democracy,” Shapiro’s brief read. He further argued that Texas hasn’t suffered harm “simply because it dislikes the result of the election, and nothing in the text, history, or structure of the Constitution supports Texas’s view that it can dictate the manner in which four other states run their elections.”
A Summary of the Texas Election Lawsuit
The full text of the lawsuit is at https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/images/admin/2020/Press/SCOTUSFiling.pdf
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/12/a_summary_of_texas_election_lawsuit_.html
A Summary of the Texas Election Lawsuit
By Robert Madsen
December 10, 2020
Texas claims that the presidential elections as held (and as directed by government officials outside the legislature) in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan all flagrantly violated their own election laws by materially weakening or doing away with security measures. Further, according to the U.S. Constitution, the legislature (representing the citizens) of each state has absolute authority and responsibility for how presidential electors are chosen; the will of legislature being expressed through state law.
Texas claims that the violations of election law in these states created an environment where ballot fraud was enabled and likely to occur. The lawsuit lists the violations of law in each of the defendant states and provides evidence of fraud (the number of ballots handled unconstitutionally) in each of the states sufficient to change the outcome of the ballot counts.
Pennsylvania
Facts:
Vote Tally: 3,445,548 for Biden and 3,363,951 for Trump – margin 81,597.
Requests for mail-in ballots 70% Democrats and 25% Republicans.
Mail-in ballots increased from 266,208 in 2016 to over 3,000,000 in 2020.
Violations of Election Law:
The Secretary of State unilaterally abrogated signature verification requirements for mail-in ballots.
PA supreme court changed existing deadline for receiving mail-in ballots from 8:00 PM on the day of election to 3 days after the election and adopted a presumption that non-postmarked ballots be considered as valid.
Election officials in Philadelphia and Allegheny Counties did not follow state law permitting poll-watchers to be present for the opening, counting, and recording of mail-in ballots.
The Secretary of State directed election officials to remove ballots before 7:00 AM on the day of election in order to “cure” defective mail-in ballots. This was done only in Democrat majority counties.
Election officials did not segregate ballots received after 8:00 PM on election day breaking the promise made to the U.S. Supreme Court thus making it impossible to identify or remove those ballots.
Evidence of Fraud:
Ballots with no mailed date: 9,005 (no evidence they were sent to a voter)
Ballots returned on or before the mailed date: 58,221
Ballots returned one day after the mailed date: 51,200 (Perhaps not impossible, but highly unlikely for the average voter to receive a ballot, fill it out, place it in the mail and have it returned the next day.)
On Nov 2, the day before the election, PA reports that 2.7 million ballots had been sent out. On Nov 4 that number had increased to 3.1 million — an increase of 400,000 mail-in ballots at election time with literally no reasonable chance of them being used by legitimate voters.
Georgia
Facts:
Vote Tally: 2,472,098 for Biden and 2,458,121 for Trump – margin 12,670.
Mail-in ballots: 65.32% for Biden and 34.68% for Trump.
Mail-in ballots increased from 213,033 in 2016 to 1,305,659 in 2020.
Violations of Election Law:
The Secretary of State unilaterally abrogated signature verification requirements for mail-in ballots.
The Secretary of State authorized opening and processing mail-in ballots up to three weeks before election day when the law prohibits that until after the polls open on election day.
The Secretary of State materially weakened the security requirements for ballot rejection based on signature verification or other missing information.
Evidence of Fraud:
Mail-in ballot rejection rate for missing or inaccurate information or for non-matching signatures decreased from 6.42% in 2016 to .36% in 2020. Rejecting 2020 ballots at the same rate as 2016 would have resulted in a net gain of 25,587 votes for Trump – twice the number needed to overcome Biden’s count. With a six-fold increase in the number of mail-in ballots, reason would indicate that the rejection rate would increase, or at least stay the same, with so many first-time mail-in ballots.
Michigan
Facts:
Vote Tally: 2,796,702 for Biden and 2,650,695 for Trump – margin 146,007.
In 2016 587,618 voters requested mail-in ballots. In 2020 3.2 million votes were cast by mail-in ballot.
Democrats voted by mail at a rate approximately two times that of Republican voters.
Violations of Election Law:
The Secretary of State unilaterally abrogated signature verification requirements for mail-in ballots.
The Secretary of State sent out unsolicited ballots to all 7.7 million registered voters contrary to election law which requires a voter to request a mail-in ballot through a process that includes a signature to be matched with the voter registration.
The Secretary of State also allowed absentee ballots to be requested online without signature verification.
Local election officials in Wayne County — containing 322,925 more ballots for Biden than for Trump — opened and processed mail-in ballots without poll-watchers present.
Local election officials in Wayne County also ignored the strict election law requirements of placing a written statement or stamp on each ballot envelope indicating that the voter signature was in fact checked and verified with the signature on file with the state.
Evidence of Fraud:
174,384 mail-in ballots in Wayne County had no valid registration number, indicating they likely resulted from election workers running the same ballots through the tabulator multiple times.
71% of Wayne County Absent Voter Counting Boards were unbalanced, where the number of people who checked in did not match the number of ballots cast.
Wisconsin
Facts:
Vote Tally: 1,630,716 for Biden and 1,610,151 for Trump – margin 20,565.
Mail-in ballots increased from 146,932 in 2016 to 1,275,019 in 2020.
Violations of Election Law:
The Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) positioned hundreds of unmanned illegal drop boxes to collect absentee ballots. (The use of any drop box, manned or unmanned, is directly prohibited by Wisconsin statute. Any alternate mail-in ballot site “shall be staffed by the municipal clerk or the executive director of the board of election commissioners…” “Ballots cast in contravention of the procedures specified in those provisions may not be included in the certified result of any election.”)
The WEC encouraged voters to unlawfully declare themselves “indefinitely confined” in order to avoid security measures like signature verification and photo ID requirements. Nearly 216,000 voters said they were indefinitely confined in the 2020 election, nearly four times as many as in 2016.
Strict laws requiring mail-in voters to certify by signature including the signature of an adult witness were ignored or circumvented by election officials.
Evidence of Fraud:
One hundred thousand ballots were supposedly missing and directed to be “found” after election day.
Conclusion
Significant violations of election law that were put into place to protect against election fraud is sufficient to invalidate the results of the elections, apart from whatever evidence is able to be gathered in a short time to show actual numbers of fraudulent ballots. Reason would indicate that there is a high number of fraudulent ballots that are impossible to identify, which is why the election laws pertaining to mail-in ballots were established to begin with.
There is no remedy to correct the Nov 3rd election because ballots that did not adhere to election law cannot be identified as separate from those that did. An accurate count of legal ballots that were cast cannot be made. Therefore, as directed in the Constitution, it falls to the legislature of each state to choose electors as has been done in the past. Failing that, each state may determine not to submit any presidential electors.
The Texas lawsuit claims the odds of Biden overcoming Trump’s lead and winning any of the states after the point indicated was one in a quadrillion. And therefore, the odds of winning all four was one in a quadrillion to the fourth power. The lawsuit did not provide information on how that number was determined. This may seem an exaggerated to some. It is enough to state that the odds of winning any one of the states was highly unlikely and the odds of winning all four were extremely unlikely. For example, if the odds of winning any one of the states was numerically much less extreme but still highly unlikely, say something like one in twenty, then the odds of doing that in all four states would be 1 in 160,000. Twenty beans in a jar: 19 white and 1 black. Reach in without looking and be lucky enough to pull out the one black bean. Chances of doing that again is 1 in 400. Clearly indicative of cheating if someone claims to have done that four times in a row. As I said the statistical analysis behind the claim of odds of 1 in a 1,000,000,000,000 are not given so I cannot speak to that. But even if the odds were orders of magnitude better than that, they were still astronomically small. At any rate, the merits of the lawsuit do not depend on any certain level of odds of Biden overcoming a lead that had been established by 3:00 A.M. the day after election.
Splitting 5 to 4, Supreme Court Backs Religious Challenge to Cuomo’s Virus Shutdown Order
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/26/us/supreme-court-coronavirus-religion-new-york.html
Splitting 5 to 4, Supreme Court Backs Religious Challenge to Cuomo’s Virus Shutdown Order
In earlier rulings related to coronavirus restrictions in California and Nevada, the court had taken the opposite approach. But its membership has changed since then.
By Adam Liptak
November 26, 2020
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court late Wednesday night barred restrictions on religious services in New York that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo had imposed to combat the coronavirus.
The vote was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the court’s three liberal members in dissent. The order was the first in which the court’s newest member, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, played a decisive role.
The court’s ruling was at odds with earlier ones concerning churches in California and Nevada. In those cases, decided in May and July, the court allowed the states’ governors to restrict attendance at religious services.
The Supreme Court’s membership has changed since then, with Justice Barrett succeeding Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in September. The vote in the earlier cases was also 5 to 4, but in the opposite direction, with Chief Justice Roberts joining Justice Ginsburg and the other three members of what was then the court’s four-member liberal wing.
In an unsigned opinion, the majority said Mr. Cuomo’s restrictions violated the First Amendment’s protection of the free exercise of religion.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said Mr. Cuomo had treated secular activities more favorably than religious ones.
“It is time — past time — to make plain that, while the pandemic poses many grave challenges, there is no world in which the Constitution tolerates color-coded executive edicts that reopen liquor stores and bike shops but shutter churches, synagogues, and mosques,” Justice Gorsuch wrote.
The court’s order addressed two applications: one filed by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, the other by two synagogues, an Orthodox Jewish organization and two individuals. The applications both said Mr. Cuomo’s restrictions violated constitutional protections for the free exercise of religion, and the one from the synagogues added that Mr. Cuomo had “singled out a particular religion for blame and retribution for an uptick in a societywide pandemic.”
The restrictions are strict. In shifting “red zones,” where the coronavirus risk is highest, no more than 10 people may attend religious services. In slightly less dangerous “orange zones,” which are also fluid, attendance is capped at 25. This applies even to churches that can seat more than 1,000 people.
The measures were prompted in large part by rising coronavirus cases in Orthodox Jewish areas but covered all “houses of worship.”
In a letter to the court last Thursday, Barbara D. Underwood, New York’s solicitor general, said that revisions to the color-coded zones effective Friday meant that “none of the diocese’s churches will be affected by the gathering-size limits it seeks to enjoin.” The next day, she told the court that the two synagogues were also no longer subject to the challenged restrictions.
Lawyers for the diocese questioned “the fluid nature of these modifications and the curious timing of the governor’s latest modification,” and they urged the court to decide the case notwithstanding the revisions.
Lawyers for the synagogues said Mr. Cuomo should not be allowed to “feign retreat” when “he retains the unfettered discretion to reimpose those restrictions on them at a moment’s notice.”
In a dissenting opinion on Wednesday, Chief Justice Roberts said the court had acted rashly.
“Numerical capacity limits of 10 and 25 people, depending on the applicable zone, do seem unduly restrictive,” he wrote. “It is not necessary, however, for us to rule on that serious and difficult question at this time.”
“The governor might reinstate the restrictions,” he wrote. “But he also might not. And it is a significant matter to override determinations made by public health officials concerning what is necessary for public safety in the midst of a deadly pandemic. If the governor does reinstate the numerical restrictions the applicants can return to this court, and we could act quickly on their renewed applications.”
In a second dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, said Mr. Cuomo’s restrictions were sensible.
“Free religious exercise is one of our most treasured and jealously guarded constitutional rights,” she wrote. “States may not discriminate against religious institutions, even when faced with a crisis as deadly as this one. But those principles are not at stake today.”
“The Constitution does not forbid states from responding to public health crises through regulations that treat religious institutions equally or more favorably than comparable secular institutions, particularly when those regulations save lives,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. “Because New York’s Covid-19 restrictions do just that, I respectfully dissent.”
The larger question in the two cases was whether government officials or judges should strike the balance between public health and religious exercise.
In a concurring opinion in the case from California in May, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that government officials should not “be subject to second-guessing by an unelected federal judiciary, which lacks the background, competence and expertise to assess public health and is not accountable to the people.”
But in a recent speech to a conservative legal group, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who had dissented in the earlier cases, said courts had an important role to play in protecting religious freedom, pandemic or no.
“Whenever fundamental rights are restricted, the Supreme Court and other courts cannot close their eyes,” Justice Alito said this month, rejecting the view that “whenever there is an emergency, executive officials have unlimited, unreviewable discretion.”
In ruling against the diocese, Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis of the Federal District Court in Brooklyn said the case was difficult. But he concluded that he would defer to the governor.
“If the court issues an injunction and the state is correct about the acuteness of the threat currently posed by hot-spot neighborhoods,” the judge wrote, “the result could be avoidable death on a massive scale like New Yorkers experienced in the spring.”
In refusing to block the governor’s order while the two appeals went forward, a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit drew on Chief Justice Roberts’s concurring opinion in the California case. Since the restrictions on churches were less severe than those on comparable secular gatherings, the majority wrote in an unsigned opinion, they did not run afoul of constitutional protections for religious freedom.
In dissent, Judge Michael H. Park said Mr. Cuomo’s order discriminated against houses of worship because it allowed businesses like liquor stores and pet shops to remain open without capacity restrictions.
Chief Justice Roberts rejected a similar argument in the California case. The order there, he wrote, “exempts or treats more leniently only dissimilar activities, such as operating grocery stores, banks and laundromats, in which people neither congregate in large groups nor remain in close proximity for extended periods.”
Judge Park responded that the order in the California case, coming as it did in the context of an emergency application that was decided in summary fashion, had limited force as a precedent. Moreover, he wrote, it had been “decided during the early stages of the pandemic, when local governments were struggling to prevent the health care system from being overwhelmed.”
In asking the Supreme Court to step in, lawyers for the diocese argued that its “spacious churches” were safer than many “secular businesses that can open without restrictions, such as pet stores and broker’s offices and banks and bodegas.” An hourlong Mass, the diocese’s brief said, is “shorter than many trips to a supermarket or big-box store, not to mention a 9-to-5 job.”
Ms. Underwood responded that religious services pose special risks. “There is a documented history of religious gatherings serving as Covid-19 superspreader events,” she wrote.
Indoor religious services, Ms. Underwood wrote, “tend to involve large numbers of people from different households arriving simultaneously; congregating as an audience for an extended period of time to talk, sing or chant; and then leaving simultaneously — as well as the possibility that participants will mingle in close proximity throughout.”
Still, she wrote, religious services are subject to fewer restrictions than comparable secular ones. “Among other things, in both red and orange zones, casinos, bowling alleys, arcades, movie theaters and fitness centers are closed completely,” she wrote.
Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog 