Monthly Archives: June 2023

“I’m saying when the president does it, that means it’s not illegal”

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That’s what President Richard Nixon (R) told David Frost in an interview, those years ago, when Frost asked him about Watergate.

Now, after Progressive-Democratic Party Presidents, guys like Barack Obama and current President Joe Biden, laundered that philosophy through their own agendas, we get to the Progressive-Democrat-run January 6 Committee.

The Democrat-led House Select Committee to Investigate January 6 doctored a key piece of its evidence, adding audio to silent US Capitol Police security footage used to create a dramatic video montage for the opening of its primetime hearings last summer, according to a Just the News review of the original raw footage and interviews.
In at least two instances identified by Just the News, the panel’s sizzle reel that aired live and on C-SPAN last June failed to identify that it had overdubbed audio from another, unidentified source onto the silent footage. Multiple current and former Capitol Police officials as well as key lawmakers and congressional aides confirmed that the closed-circuit cameras that captured the video do not record sound and that it was added afterwards.

And this:

A former spokesman for the January 6 committee told Just the News that the panel was supposed to clearly mark any video that was dubbed with another audio source, and it did so on some occasions in the sizzle reel.

That, though, emphasizes the misbehavior. But marking some videos as dubbed, but not others, the Committee made it seem as though those others were not dubbed, but had audio in the original. It’s hard to believe that Party’s staff were careless or mistaken in this. They knew what they were doing, and they demonstrated the skills necessary to do it.

The depth of the misbehavior:

One video clip from the genuine security footage shows an aerial view of the US Capitol Building without sound as the riot unfolded on January 6. Yet during the hearing the same clip aired with audio of crowd noises.
Another clip shows rioters entering the building through the Senate wing door. Viewers can hear glass breaking and a lot of shouting as the clip played during the hearing, but the Capitol Police and others have confirmed that the genuine and original version of this security footage had no audio.

In any other venue, such misbehavior would be evidence tampering, a very serious felony. However, when members of the Progressive-Democratic Party do it, that means it’s not illegal.

Remember that in 18 months, or so.

NBC News Writers Took the Day Off?

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NBC News celebrated the end of last month with 700 words “analyzing” a Twitter account that parodies New York Progressive-Democrat Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her Twitter account.

…@AOCPress, which is marked as a parody account but looks close to identical to the congresswoman’s real account when users scroll through their feeds. Parody accounts are required to mark themselves as impersonators on their profiles, but that marking gets cut off when viewing the @AOCPress account’s tweets in the feeds of the mobile application.
The account is fooling some of the people who read its tweets—bringing to life some of the fears about Musk’s paid verification system that stripped legacy verified users of their blue check marks. In the replies, there is a mix of responses from people taking the tweets at face value and attributing them to the real Ocasio-Cortez, while others point out that it’s a parody account.

Important, heady stuff. Right up there with another major news outlet’s cover story headline: Monster mom Casey: YES, I LIED ABOUT CAYLEE’S MURDER! That’s from National Enquirer.

Maybe there needs to be an NBC Newsroom (Parody) account.

Oh, wait—that might not take off: NBC News is so good at being its own parody.

“Defense or Democracy?”

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That’s the question the Biden administration is worrying about in Chad.

The Biden administration is in a bind over whether to provide military aid to Chad, one of Africa’s most reliable bulwarks against the spread of Islamist militants and an opponent of Russia’s growing influence in the Sahel region.
Chad’s longtime president, Idriss Déby, was killed in battle two years ago and quickly replaced by his son, violating the line of succession laid out in the Central African country’s constitution. Now, the US government is struggling with the question of whether the ruling junta is too brutal and undemocratic to merit US assistance, or whether the country’s value as a military ally trumps those concerns.

There’s another interpretation of the situation, though, that seems more cogent to this ignorant Texan. That is that the question presents a false dichotomy. No, the reality is that without defense, there can be no democracy.

Without defense, the autocracy that currently reigns over Chad can become entrenched, or the nation can be overrun by the terrorists, whether Islamists like Boko Haram and Daesh-West Africa, or by elements of the Wagner Group. All of these are operating in the country.

With defense, though, Chad has a strong chance of both crushing the terrorists and making the current autocracy an aberration and returning Chad to democratic governance.

Cyber Voting

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New York State Progressive-Democrat Congressmen want to allow absentee voters to return their ballots over the Internet.

Those Congressmen want absentee voters to be able to [emphasis added]

submit ballots for federal, state and local elections using “electronic absentee ballots” submitted by email.

“Government watchdogs” object.

…Reinvent Albany and Common Cause New York said they have “grave concerns” about the proposed legislation. They warned the move would “put the security of New York’s elections at high risk for cyber incidents, and undermine public confidence in election results.”

However well-intentioned such a move might be, those watchdog groups are right about the security failure such a move would present to the sanctity of each voter’s ballot.

They don’t go far enough in their objection, though. Email, even supposedly encrypted email (and who seriously believes the State government is equipped to send and receive encrypted email?) can be hacked. But the real threat is in the enclosed (attached?) ballots. Ballots are too easily forged, and those forgeries, as images attached/enclosed in a putative absentee voter’s returned email, can have malware embedded in them, in a technique known by the cute name “steganography.” Indeed, stenography can embed the malware in the emails themselves.

That malware can contain code that does far more than just infest the ballot or the ballot-counting and -recording and voter registration processes. That malware can be designed—as any script kiddie knows—to spread itself across internal network connections from the voting/voter registration areas of the government’s software to much more lucrative areas of government software and only then execute its mission. That mission can range from a ransomware attack to a denial of service attack to theft of any government data deemed useful by the hacker.

This is an idea whose time should never be.

Hypocrisy

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The Progressive-Democratic mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, has provided a canonical example. Now he’s pretending to be upset by a graduation speech by a City University of New York School of Law graduate that was itself as bigoted as the anti-Semitic speaker.

We cannot allow words of negativity and divisiveness to be the only ones our students hear[.]

This from the man who deliberately, with conscious racism, accused a border State governor of racism for transporting illegal aliens—who volunteered for the trip—to sanctuary cities like the one over which he reigns.

His virtue-signaling is deeply offensive.