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Monday, January 21, 2019

Birdbrain Box


Why "Democratic Vote Harvesting" Will Be The Biggest Topic Of 2020

During last November's midterm elections, California Republicans in several districts watched election night victories melt into losses thanks to a tactic employed by Democrats called "ballot harvesting," which allows anyone to go door-to-door and collect mail-in ballots on behalf of voters.

Illegal in many states, the practice flipped the Republican stronghold of Orange County completely blue after an unprecedented 250,000 vote-by-mail drop-offs were counted according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

As 2020 approaches, Democrats in Congress want to apply several California voting laws across the country via their "For The People Act," or H.R.1, which would require all 50 states to adopt automatic voter registration based on federal databases - such as those on food stamps. It also mandates looser rules governing provisional ballots, two weeks of early voting, prohibits restrictions on voting by mail, and limits the ability for states to remove voters from rolls.

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Gillibrand Doesn’t Think Trump’s ‘Racist’ Border Policies Were Racist When She Supported Them

Democratic New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand claimed Sunday that despite previously advocating for the same immigration policies as President Donald Trump, his positions are “racist” but hers were not.

“[My immigration positions] certainly weren’t empathetic and they were not kind and I did not think about suffering in other people’s lives,” Gillibrand told Jake Tapper when he confronted her with her conservative immigration platform while serving as the congresswoman for New York’s 20th Congressional District.

“You said Trump’s immigration positions are racist — that’s the word you used, racist,” Tapper said.

“If Trump’s immigration positions are racist, were they racist when you held some of those positions as well?” he asked.

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Democratic Homeland Security Chair: I Would Not Rule Out a Wall in Certain Instances

Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee Bennie Thompson (D., Miss.) said on Sunday that he would not a rule out a border wall in certain instances.

ABC's "This Week" host Martha Raddatz asked Thompson if he would rule out a wall in any negotiations with President Donald Trump.

"I would not rule out a wall in certain instances," Thompson said. "Now the notion that we can't have barriers is just something that's not true, but again, Martha, you have to have a plan and the plan that the president initially started with is where he is now. We don't know where he will be tomorrow."

Trump and Congress remain at an impasse over funding for Trump's proposed wall along the southern border. The standoff has resulted in a partial government shutdown that is now in its 30th day.

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GOP Rep. Zeldin: Cut Off Congress' Pay and You Could Have a Budget Deal Within 45 Minutes

In his Sunday appearance on New York AM 970 radio’s “The Cats Roundtable” with John Catsimatidis, Rep. Lee Zeldin’s (R-NY) commented on the ongoing partial government shutdown, saying if pay for Congress were to be cut off, there would be a budget deal for border wall funding in as soon as 45 minutes.

“It’s difficult to miss one paycheck. It becomes increasingly difficult to miss a second paycheck,” Zeldin told Catsimatidis. “I really do believe that you should lock every member of Congress in a room, bring the president in, no phones, no pay, you’re not leaving until there’s white smoke; you need to negotiate, compromise with each other, with the president. And I think you can have a deal within maybe it’s 45 minutes, maybe it’s four hours.

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Doctor Offers Free Eye Exams for NFL Refs After Blown Call in Saints Loss

An eye care center in Louisiana has offered the National Football League’s referees free eye exams, after the controversial blown call that led to the New Orleans Saints losing the NFC Championship Game on Sunday.

After the officials missed a blatant pass interference call that would have likely won the game for the Saints, Louisiana Family Eyecare offered free eye exams for NFL referees before next season, WWL Channel 4 reported.

“We will GLADLY provide no-cost eye exams to all NFL officials prior to next season to prevent the atrocity that occurred tonight,” Louisiana Family Eyecare wrote in Sunday evening Facebook post. “We would hate for someone else to feel our pain.”

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Gap between rich and poor growing, fueling global anger

Tax systems that put a high burden on the poor mean public services are underfunded, stretching the gap between rich and poor and fueling global public anger, Winnie Byanyima, executive director of Oxfam International, said on Monday.

The Nairobi-headquartered charity said in a report that a new billionaire was created every two days last year, just as the poorest half of the world's population saw their wealth decline by 11 percent.

The report, released on Monday as political and business leaders gather for the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, said governments are increasingly underfunding public services and failing to clamp down on tax dodging.

"Poor people suffer twice from being deprived of basic services and also paying a higher burden of taxation," Byanyima said in an interview.

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True That!


Twitter Allows ‘Verified’ Calls for Violence Against Conservative High School Kids

Twitter has spent years assuring the public that it will crack down on trolling, harassment, and violent threats. It’s also pledged to tackle “misinformation” and “unhealthy conversation,” using these loaded terms as excuses to ban a wide range of anti-progressive dissidents from the platform.

But when innocent conservative high school kids are flooded with violent threats, targeted harassment and doxing on the basis of media-promoted misinformation, Jack Dorsey and his staff seem to do nothing — it even briefly promoted the smears.

Over the past 48 hours, an angry mob of Twitter users — many of them with blue check marks next to their name, signaling endorsement of their messages by the company — have flooded the platform with disgusting abuse, violent threats, and calls to harass innocent students of the Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky.

Most of the tweets remain on the platform, which has yet to ask the authors to take them down — much less deverify or ban them, something Twitter has done to conservative activists for far less.

Most of the tweets remain on the platform, which has yet to ask the authors to take them down — much less deverify or ban them, something Twitter has done to conservative activists for far less.

Here are some of the threats and targeted harassment that the platform has enabled to go viral, and still remain on the platform as of this writing on the early afternoon of Monday, January 21:

James: Our Nation Is Not Yet Cleansed of Racism. Here’s What We Should Do.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day offers Americans time to reflect and measure our progress toward building a civil society. An honest examination of history makes it clear that the law has not been able to cleanse our nation of racism.

The 15th Amendment has been in place for more than a century. The landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act has been on the books for over a half century.

Yet just this month, the U.S. House of Representatives felt compelled to pass a formal resolution that “once again rejects White nationalism and White supremacy as hateful expressions of intolerance that are contradictory to the values that define the people of the United States.”

While our founding document states that all men are created equal, clearly not all Americans have bought into that article of faith.

There is a limit to what laws can accomplish. While they instruct as to what we can and cannot do, laws are incapable of guiding our hearts to love our neighbor and our minds to process thoughtful and appropriate communication with our fellow man.

In December 1964, in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the Civil Rights Act the beginning of “a second emancipation.” Forty-five years on, there’s still much emancipating to be done.

Throughout that period, conservative leaders have echoed Dr. King’s call to end racial insanity and the silent hate that continues to divides us. In response to incidents of bigotry and violence, President Ronald Reagan delivered a stern message to “those individuals who persist in such hateful behavior. “You are the ones who are out of step with our society,” he said. “You are the ones who willfully violate the meaning of the dream that is America. And this country, because of what it stands for, will not stand for your conduct.”

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[Kay Coles James is president of The Heritage Foundation. James formerly served as director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and as Virginia's secretary of health and human resources.]

Apologies Roll In For Catholic School Protesters As Fuller Picture Of Events Emerges

It was the hate crime of the century.

Or so some in the media appeared to think, judging by the condemnations and mass hysteria that followed initial footage of a group of Covington Catholic High School students — some of whom were wearing MAGA hats — supposedly harassing an older Native American man.

Except, what may have seemed to be one thing at first turned out to be something else altogether:

WATCH:

MUST READ: Covington Catholic Student Begs Local TV News to Tell the Truth About Native American Incident In DC

A student at Covington Catholic High School sent a letter Saturday to a local TV station that serves that part of Kentucky, Cincinnati-based WKRC-TV, begging the station to report the truth of an incident Friday in Washington, D.C., involving a Native American man and students from Covington Catholic.

The incident took place at the Lincoln Memorial as the students waited for buses to pick them up after participating in the annual March for Life that day. News reports claimed the students harassed a Native American man named Nathan Phillips–a Vietnam veteran–who was trying to perform a religious ceremony. The students and the school have been viciously attacked online with many threats being made to attack the school children.

As happens too often these days, the media got it wrong. Numerous videos show the students being approached by Phillips and a group of fellow Native American activists who were at the Lincoln Memorial for an Indigenous Peoples Rally that had ended earlier. Videos also show the students being harassed by a group of African-Americans who hurled racist and anti-gay insults at the students.

Three screen captures set the scene. The students are gathered by themselves at the Lincoln Memorial...

Judge Jeanine Pirro: 'Nancy Pelosi, you're a shutdown hypocrite'

Politicians are elected to represent us. They are here to protect our interests over their political interests. Refusal to try to work toward compromise is putting politics over people.

President Trump has been at the White House virtually every day working and waiting and trying to make a deal – bending, compromising and offering solutions. The Democrats not only disrespect him, they sometimes don’t even show up. They’ve refused his every overture, put a stake in the ground, proving that politics are more important than putting people back to work.

And as 800,000 federal employees face the loss of a second paycheck this Tuesday, the Democrats disregard their distress by not negotiating to end the partial government shutdown. And that, my friends, is a problem.

It’s even bigger than that. They refuse to negotiate for people who live paycheck-to-paycheck. They don’t consider Americans whose lives, safety, economy, and social service agencies are drained by these uninvited illegal immigrants.

Saturday the president offered yet another compromise to reopen the government: There will be no concrete wall, only steel slat barriers; $5.7 billion for it; $805 million for drug detection technology; $800 million for humanitarian assistance; almost 3,000 additional border patrol agents; 75 new immigration judges; and a three-year extension for TPS and DACA.

The president described in clear and direct language the human crises ranging from 300 of our children dying every week from heroin, 90 percent of which comes through those porous Mexican borders.

More here


https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/judge-jeanine-pirro-nancy-pelosi-youre-a-shutdown-hypocrite-stop-playing-games-and-negotiate

Pro-Life Leaders Gather in Georgetown After March for Life

The question of abortion is not 'when does life begin.' It is 'which human beings deserve human rights.'

Pro-life leaders gathered at Georgetown University for the 20th annual Cardinal O'Connor Conference on Life one day after the March for Life was held in Washington, D.C. Named after the former archbishop of New York, it is the largest collegiate pro-life conference in the United States, bringing together leading pro-life advocates and hundreds of students from around the country.

Aimee Murphy and Herb Geraghty from the non-profit Re-humanize International gave a talk entitled, "Embracing the ‘F' Word: Learning to Love (Pro-Life) Feminism." Re-humanize International is a non-profit and non-sectarian human rights organization dedicated to promoting the consistent life ethic, which entails a commitment to opposing aggressive violence against human beings in all stages of life, including abortion, unjust war, euthanasia, and torture.

Geraghty expresses confidence that science is on the side of the pro-life movement. He finds it interesting when his friends "who are so into science" and passionate about environmental activism, which he supports, then call the baby inside a woman "a parasite or a clump of cells."

Star Parker, founder of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE), hosted a breakout session focused on abortion’s impact on the African-American community.

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Thousands of Migrants Crossing Remote Section of New Mexico Border

El Paso Sector Border Patrol officials report that at least 2,500 migrants illegally crossed the border along a small section of the New Mexico Border. The migrants crossed the border this fiscal year as part of large groups of Central American families and unaccompanied minors near the Antelope Wells Port of Entry.

In an area that normally only sees a few hundred illegal border crossings per year, El Paso Sector officials reported that 25 large groups of migrants crossed the border near the Antelope Wells Port of Entry in the first few months of Fiscal Year 2019. The Border Patrol defines a “large group” as more than 100 people, FOX14 reported.

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United for Life

What I saw at the 2019 March for Life

"Sorry, son, you can’t go back there. Congressmen only," the elderly Knight of Columbus tells me as I attempt to enter the VIP tent at the 46th annual March for Life.

He’s surrounded by a whole cadre of fellow knights, all decked out in white flak jackets with the huge KofC logo on them. They’re trading jokes, shuffling in the mud, and smoking cigarettes. One of them is passing out devotional cards with a prayer addressed to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Maybe in the Senate, it’s easy characterize the Knights as bigots, but out here on the National Mall, I only see dads. They’re handing out hats to cold-eared pro-lifers. They’re praying with the old church ladies. They’re running security with big, dorky walkie talkies.

When SK Patrick Ambrogio leads the 200,000 marchers in the Pledge of Allegiance, the crowd cheers. And they don’t stop cheering for the next hour. Because after Ambrogio—and a blessedly brief Ben Shapiro interlude—Vice President Mike Pence and his wife Karen Pence take the stage to preach the pro-life gospel.

"We gather here because we believe as our founders did that we are, all of us, born and unborn, endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, and first among these rights is the right to life," Pence says.

"I love that guy," the woman behind me says.

"Be prepared to defend life, but do so with gentleness and respect," Pence continues. "They will attack you. They will question your hearts to silence others. But don’t listen to them. Listen to the truth."

More here

Jimmy Carter to Cory Booker: 'I hope you run for president'

Former President Jimmy Carter has offered an early show of support for Sen. Cory Booker as a possible 2020 Democratic contender.

Carter's words of encouragement, shared on the New Jersey Democrat's Instagram account, were offered during the senator's road trip through Georgia en route to a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event he's headlining in South Carolina with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. Carter and Booker met after a Sunday school class led by the 39th president.

“I’m very glad to have you here this morning, and I hope you come back. And I hope you run for president," Carter said in the video.

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Fatal Traffic Accident

Date and Time: 01/20/2019 @ 1:22pm

Location: Gumboro Rd (Rt 353) north of Tingle Rd. Pittsville, Wicomico County 21850

Vehicle: White 2012 Chev Malibu, Delaware Registration: 339582

Driver: Anthony Wayne Mumford; (60) of Millsboro, Delaware

Passenger: Mary Sedonia Mumford (68) of Millsboro, Delaware

Pedestrian: Barbara Catherine Parker; (56) of Pittsville, Maryland

Narrative: On 01/20/2019 at approximately 1322 hours Troopers from the Maryland State Police Salisbury Barrack responded to Gumboro Road and Tingle Road, Pittsville, Maryland for a report of a pedestrian motor vehicle accident. Upon arrival, Troopers observed a 2012 white Chevrolet Malibu in the ditch of the south bound lanes facing north. Pittsville Fire Department was already on scene, and transporting the injured pedestrian, Barbara Catherine Parker, to the hospital for life threatening injuries sustained in the collision. Crash team was contacted to respond to the location to assist with reconstructing the accident. The driver of the striking vehicle was identified as Anthony Wayne Mumford of Millsboro, Delaware, and the passenger was identified as Mary Sedonia Mumford also of Millsboro, Delaware. The investigation determined the driver of the vehicle was traveling northbound on Gumboro Road and for an unknown reason crossed the center line of the roadway into the southbound lanes of traffic, striking Barbara Catherine Parker while she was standing at her mailbox. The driver of the vehicle continued driving coming to rest in the ditch on the southbound side of the roadway. Passersby assisted the driver and passenger out of the vehicle and then began to perform CPR on the injured pedestrian. The front of the vehicle sustained heavy damage as a result of the collision. Barbara Catherine Parker died as a result of her injuries at 1355 hours at Peninsula Regional Medical Center. Charges are pending after completion of the investigation.

I Went to the Women’s March. Here Are 6 Things I Saw.

Thousands of people gathered in Washington, D.C., Saturday to participate in the third annual Women’s March.

The organization hosting the March has faced criticism due to its founders’ tiesto Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam who led chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” in Iran.

The Democratic National Committee pulled its partnership from the Women’s March earlier this week.

I checked out the event for The Daily Signal, observing the march and talking with attendees.

During the march itself, attendees chanted, “This is what democracy looks like,” and “Shame on you,” while marching past Trump International Hotel, as well as “What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!”

Here are six things things I noticed:

1. A March for Women Being Made Into a Trump Protest

I found it ironic that a march that describes itself as an event to advocate “women’s rights” included such a large amount of signs and memorabilia protesting President Donald Trump.

Rather than putting the focus on specific women’s issues, the yearly march looked like merely an anti-Trump protest.

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MSNBC, CNN Go From 'Bombshell' to 'Frustrated' After Mueller Disputes BuzzFeed Report

MSNBC and CNN reported extensively on a "bombshell" report from BuzzFeed News that President Donald Trump directed his attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, before shifting gears to a more defensive tone following the report's disputing by special counsel Robert Mueller's office.

BuzzFeed‘s report Thursday night implicated Trump in a federal crime, but Mueller's officereleased a statement the following day saying "BuzzFeed's description of specific statements to the Special Counsel's Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen's Congressional testimony are not accurate."

BuzzFeed is standing by its report in the meantime.

While the cable channels' anchors and analysts took care to say the report was possibly damning "if true" throughout the day on Friday, there was still rampant speculation about potential impeachment, proof of obstruction of justice, and the possible end of the Trump presidency.

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Pelosi Shuns Trump Offer to Swap Amnesty for Wall

President Donald Trump offered to expand amnesty for certain young illegal immigrants in exchange for money to pay for a border barrier as a compromise to end the partial government shutdown.

“This is a commonsense compromise both parties should embrace,” Trump said Saturday in a nationally televised speech from the White House.

Democratic leaders have already said they would oppose the Trump compromise, so the partial shutdown of 25 percent of the federal government will likely continue for a while.

“The radical left can never control our borders. I will never let it happen. Walls are not immoral,” the president continued during the speech. “In fact, they are the opposite of immoral, because they will save many lives and stop drugs from pouring into our country.”

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