Another temporary injunction is removed

The New Neo Posted on by

See this:

The Trump administration has been racking up some solid wins before the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals of late. Another was added to the list on Friday as the appellate court vacated a District Court preliminary injunction regarding the administration’s ban on DEIA initiatives. …

… [T]he matter is remanded back to the District Court for further proceedings consistent with the 4th Circuit’s opinion. As with so many of these rulings, this is not the end of the road. The plaintiffs may decide to seek rehearing en banc and/or appeal today’s decision. And even if they do not, the case may still proceed on the merits in the District Court (at least as to the latter two provisions). Still, as they say, a win’s a win. And this is a solid win for the administration.

To me, the most interesting thing about this ruling is that two of the three judges who made the decision were appointed by Obama.

Revisiting Georgia, November 2020

The New Neo Posted on by

The left has tried to bury the controversy, but it’s reared up again.

For example:

The Fulton County Report of Investigation into the 2020 General Election outlines numerous allegations of election irregularities, including the unauthorized ordering of over one million absentee ballots, failure to perform mandatory signature verification, and discrepancies in ballot counts. It details how Fulton County’s election processes violated Georgia law, leading to potential fraud and manipulation of election results. The report raises serious concerns about the integrity of the election, citing missing records, unauthorized access to election systems, and the counting of ballots without proper verification.

It’s long; I haven’t read it. But that summary is disturbing. And here’s a tweet that claims to show a Grok summary of the document’s ten main points:

1. Systems reprogrammed before election, causing failures.
2. Untested systems used for advance voting.
3. Over 1M extra absentee ballots ordered without stubs.
4. Absentee signature verification neglected.
5. 35 tabulator memory cards unlawfully swapped.
6. Security seals cut, fraudulent returns printed.
7. 20,713 unaccounted ballots from advance tabulators.
8. Election records destroyed or not preserved.
9. Absentee ballot image files removed.
10. Qualified write-in votes discarded.

Are these allegations verified, and by whom? It’s hard to get the facts, and the MSM is concerned mainly with the FBI seizure of related documents.

From Roger Kimball:

The FBI has a lot of sifting and sorting to accomplish in the weeks and months ahead. An ongoing court case claims that 150,000 mail-in ballots in Fulton County were suspicious (my cautious word for “fake”) because they weren’t creased and didn’t look like they were marked by hand. Officially, Sleepy Joe was the first Democrat to gain more than 70 percent of the vote in Fulton since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944. The FBI analysis of mail-in ballots might show him to be as popular in Fulton as Castro was in Cuba or Stalin was in the Soviet Union.

There are also hard drives to be inspected and electronic voting machines to be vetted. Remember the allegations that voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems had been hacked? Dominion (now “Liberty Vote”) collected some $787 million in damages from Fox News over the story. It will be interesting to see what sort of follow-up there is to those allegations.

Meanwhile, the Democrats have not been idle. New York Representative Dan Goldman has filed an amendment to prevent the Trump administration from investigating election records, ballot boxes, and voting machines across the country. Yes, really.

I don’t know whether anything will come of this. I do know that without election security that people can trust, there will always be significant doubt. And I also know that the legal system is inadequate to address allegations of election fraud after the fact, which gives extra motivation to those who would commit such fraud.

Benghazi: “Find them and bring them to justice” said Hillary many years ago

The New Neo Posted on by

You may remember Hillary as saying, about the Benghazi killings of four Americans, “What difference, at this point, does it make?” It was infuriating. The context was that she was shrugging off (and misrepresenting) the details, including the motives of the perps, as though it didn’t matter, and supposedly focusing on future prevention. But of course it mattered. If you want to prevent something you have to know who did it and why.

Hillary followed it with the statement that the perps needed to be found and brought to justice. Here’s her testimony;

The Trump administration decided to do just that: find them and bring them to justice, all these years later. That is, at least one of them has been apprehended:

Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Friday that Zubayr Al-Bakoush was flown to the United States overnight and will face federal charges tied to arson, murder, and terrorism for his alleged role in the assault that killed four Americans. …

“We will prosecute this alleged terrorist to the fullest extent of the law,” she said, adding that the message is simple: time does not erase accountability.

Pirro echoed that warning, stressing that the case is not over simply because years have passed. “The Benghazi saga was a painful one for Americans. It has stayed with all of us,” she said. “And let me be very clear, there are more of them out there.” Pirro said she and Patel have remained in contact with the families of the four Americans killed and vowed that investigators will continue hunting down those still at large. “Time will not stop us from going after these predators, no matter how long it takes,” she said. “We owe that to the families who suffered horrific pain at the hands of these violent terrorists.”

Traffic counter shenanigans

The New Neo Posted on by

Tech stuff is not my strong suit. But as the owner of a blog, I’m forced to tackle it.

Years ago I had a kindly web developer helping me now and then, a relative of a relative. Most web developers of any skill will only take on large projects, and mine never was large. Now he’s unavailable, and so when something goes wrong I break out into a cold sweat and start pacing around and yelling at no one. And then I have to fix it myself.

The latest involved my site meter. My traffic used to be higher years ago. But natural attrition among older readers, fewer links to me, and perhaps better bot detection have reduced the traffic count.

But it’s still decent, although far from huge, and it’s been stable for several years. It goes up when there’s a big link and down a bit on weekends, but otherwise it’s quite predictable unless the blog goes down for a while. I don’t check it every day, but it shows traffic for a month.

Yesterday I checked it and was shocked to see that my traffic for the day was about 30% of the usual. That’s quite a dropoff. I couldn’t figure it out, and right up until yesterday the traffic was at the normal level.

Then I noticed that the people who administer the tracking site said that they had just installed a newer and even better bot blocker. So apparently, fewer bots were being counted, although they had supposedly been effectively blocked before.

Was it possible that over two-thirds of my traffic has been bots all this time? This was profoundly disturbing. Had I been living in a dream world till now?

I contacted the site and they suggested re-installing the code. It took me hours to figure out how to do that, but I did it. Unfortunately, there was no change. I also noticed that all the traffic that was being reported was said to be coming from “Icloud Private Relay,” which turns out to be a sort of VPN connected with Safari on Apple. So it seems the counter was filtering out all visitors but those.

I finally figured out something I think fixed it; I’ll skip the boring details. Now other visitors are being recorded as coming in from other sources. But I’ve lost faith in the counter.

I could install a different counter, and have many times. But every single one gets a wildly different count, and I’ve come to distrust all of them. Or, I could ignore traffic entirely and be grateful that you’re all here, however many of you there are.

The Virginia playbook: run as a moderate, govern as a radical

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s how it works:

Spanberger’s very first order of business was reversing Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s Executive Order 47, which had allowed for coordination between the Virginia State Police and the Department of Corrections and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That coordination was important because it allowed the federal and state governments to cooperate to remove people in the country illegally who had committed additional crimes. That it was necessary for Spanberger to make it harder to deport criminals is a tell that her moderate campaign commercials will instead translate into a much further left administration.

Spanberger isn’t alone in moving Virginia sharply leftward. Both branches of the state legislature are now also controlled by Democrats, and they’re introducing policies that no one campaigned on. House Bill 863 would reduce minimum sentencing for rape, manslaughter and child pornography. If Spanberger ran on “let’s let rapists off easy,” the Virginia electorate somehow missed it. In fact, Spanberger’s campaign ads highlighted her law enforcement experience and that she’s a moderate who works with both sides of the political aisle.

More at the link.

Spanberger is in for four years.

Her approach makes Mamdani’s look good – at least, he campaigned on a radical platform. Maybe not as radical as the way he’ll govern, but close enough. Spanberger was more duplicitous. But voters don’t seem to learn; then again, maybe this is what the majority of Virginians really want. I doubt it, but maybe.

This author certainly perceived in advance what Spanberger was going to be doing; the following was written shortly before the election:

… [F]ew politicians, including Democrats, have been as partisan and divisive as Spanberger. The Heritage Action for America scorecard has given Spanberger half the rating of the average House Democrat, marking her as one of the most progressive Democrats in Congress and noting she has reached across the aisle far less than her Democrat colleagues. …

Under Governor Glenn Youngkin, Virginia has empowered parents, restored sanity to schools, and bolstered safety. Spanberger wants to reverse it all, returning to an extremist agenda for the state. Virginians deserve better than a governor who endangers girls and women while defending illegal gangsters and scandal-plagued allies. Her moderate mask is off—voters can see the truth.

Apparently they couldn’t see the truth. Or perhaps they did see it, and that’s what they chose.

What’s up with Trump and Iran?

The New Neo Posted on by

I admit I haven’t been pleased with what’s going on lately from Trump on Iran. My main beef has been that he appeared to encourage the demonstrators with promises of help and then, when many were massacred, did nothing. I don’t think he caused the killings, which would have happened anyway. And he may have had good reasons for pulling back. But the whole process has left a distinctly bad impression and sends a weak, blustery message.

Trump is often blustery. But he’s not often weak.

And then, after the empty threats, it seemed (and still seems) odd to me that he appeared (and appears) to be willing to negotiate. Hadn’t he learned how fruitless that is with Iran? Does he think he can work some sort of magic with the mullahs? Or is he playing for time with another goal in mind?

Reports are pretty much useless, IMHO, because each party is posing and putting a spin on it that could be false. But if you read this sort of article, based partly on NY Times reporting, you get a gloomy feeling. Here’s a sample:

he U.S. delegation, led by Steve Witkoff, on Friday, conducted two rounds of inconclusive talks with the Iranian regime negotiators in the Gulf Arab state of Oman amid alarming reports that Tehran is relocating its weapons-grade nuclear material and rebuilding its ballistic missile stockpile. …

Iran appears to be dragging the negotiations, gaining time to crush the popular uprising and secure its nuclear and missile stockpile. The Guardian (UK) quoted Iranian negotiators, saying that “[f]urther talks are on the cards at a time and date yet to be determined.”

The regime seems pleased with how the talks are going. “It was a good start to the negotiations. And there is an understanding on continuing the talks,” Iranian Foreign Minister, Abbas Aragchi, said following the talks on Friday.

From the 1979 U.S. Embassy hostage ordeal to the Obama-Kerry nuclear deal, the Mullah regime has always played for time while counting on the other side to make concessions or lose focus.

This isn’t esoteric information. Trump and his negotiators surely know it, unless they’ve lost their minds. Those who hate Trump and think he’s stupid probably don’t find these developments odd, but since I neither hate him nor think he’s stupid, at least so far, I am both surprised and puzzled.

The most benign explanation I can come up with is that it’s Trump himself who is playing for time, perhaps based on some Israeli information. Another less-good possibility is that he is so taken with the role of peacemaker that he’s making some poor calculations.

Guess what? There’s fraud and waste in red states too

The New Neo Posted on by

This should come as no surprise:

Tapscott reported that the most startling takeaway from the 2024 audits (the latest available) was that “the results for the red states are strikingly similar to those of the blue states.” He noted that a sampling of those results “suggests huge waste, fraud, and corruption problems in how blue and red jurisdictions alike manage federal social welfare and other benefit fund programs.”

It shouldn’t be that difficult to put proper controls into the system. One has to conclude there’s little will to do so.

There are some interesting responses in the comments to the linked post. Several commenters point out that red states have blue cities with large populations, and that might be where the fraud occurs. Another commenter points out that some laws around these federal programs make it difficult to check up on the people receiving funds. And here’s another comment:

These programs were created in a high trust era where the public/taxpayer could mostly expect the bureaucracy not to allow fraud. Back then they’d still report shenanigans to supervisors who’d call in the cops and arrest the fraudsters. Today? Most of the bureaucracy is either enabling the fraud out of ideological conviction or too scared to report it b/c they’ve seen how other whistleblowers got hammered for sticking their head up. Many of the programs rely on aspects of ‘honor system’ v harsh audits. There’s many programs which offer instant acceptance based on approval for a different program…so if you scam your way into a single program you are automatically eligible for others without any scrutiny. These structures invite fraud.

Some or most of that is probably true.

The WaPo Dies In Darkness

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s a sad day at the WaPo:

The Washington Post told staffers today that it was moving forward with a sweeping round of layoffs that was part of a “broad strategic reset” of the storied newspaper, which will include eliminating the sports desk, severely cutting back on its international coverage, dismantling its books section, and restructuring its local news team.

The WaPo had a sports desk?

More:

However, after emails were sent to staffers on Wednesday morning, it is expected that roughly one-third of staff — about 300 of the roughly 800 journalists in the newsroom — will be laid off, with some staffers saying that this was a “bloodbath”.

“This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations,” the Post’s former executive editor Marty Baron said Wednesday. “The Washington Post’s ambitions will be sharply diminished, its talented and brave staff will be further depleted, and the public will be denied the ground-level, fact-based reporting in our communities and around the world that is needed more than ever.”

Now more than ever we need the WaPo’s propaganda, Baron seems to think. After all, the NY Times, The New Yorker, the Boston Globe, the Atlantic, the AP, and about a thousand other pro-left news outlets can hardly be expected to go it alone.

Speaking of the AP, here’s a sorrowful meditation by Dan Perry, a former editor at the AP, on what’s going on at the WaPo and why:

We faced a test over the past thirty years: Did we educate ourselves to value truth (and civility and justice and progress)? Do we care enough to pay enough to keep the machinery of reliable information going — the way we do for beer and sneakers? And guns in dumb places and guaranteed healthcare in smarter ones? Turns out that we did not.

“Reliable information” – he’s referring to the WaPo as a purveyor of reliable information. The irony could not be greater.

More:

People did not subscribe to The Washington Post because it was “digitally savvy.” They subscribed because it was authoritative, relentless, surprising, and serious. They subscribed because it had foreign correspondents who knew their regions, investigative reporters who knew their institutions, and editors who knew when to say no.

Actually, people subscribed to the WaPo because it told them what they wanted to hear, and what they wanted to hear was that Trump was evil and ultimately that he was in prison. The latter never happened, Bezos tried to make the paper slightly less leftist, and it lost some of the audience to which it had been catering – and began cratering.

Perry adds:

… [Bezos seemed to have] a belief that enforced “even-handedness” would broaden the audience and stabilize revenue. It did the opposite. Subscribers left in droves and trust eroded, with nary a Trumpist jumping on board. The Post lost identity at the moment it most needed clarity. People do not subscribe to legacy institutions for timid neutrality; they subscribe for intellectual confidence and moral seriousness.

As I said, they subscribe for confirmation of their already-existing belief system. But I think Perry is right that becoming a bit moe fair and balanced was never going to increase the WaPo’s revenue.

Completely foreseeable result of the Epstein files dump

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “Mike Plaiss.”]

From an editorial in the WSJ:

The Justice Department’s release of the so-called Epstein files has gone pretty much as skeptics warned. The feds published another three million pages on Friday. Such investigatory materials are usually kept private to protect innocent victims and witnesses—a lesson that Congress will now relearn at their expense.

Though the Justice Department sought to redact sensitive information, Congress mandated disclosure in 30 days. The Journal reports that last week’s documents initially failed to black out the names of at least 43 victims of Jeffrey Epstein, “including many who haven’t shared their identities publicly or were minors when they were abused by the notorious sex offender.” Some of their addresses or email addresses were posted.

The files also included “dozens of unredacted nude images,” showing the faces and bodies of “young women or possibly teenagers,” the New York Times said. The Justice Department scrambled to fix the oversights. “You’re talking about pieces of paper that stack from the ground to two Eiffel Towers,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Fox News. “We knew that there would be mistakes.”

Meantime, heinous accusations are circulating against prominent people, without any evidence they’re true. Since Epstein died in 2019, prosecutors have had time to chase real leads. The Epstein emails that show elites privately cozying up to a wealthy sex offender are embarrassing, but the government isn’t supposed to be in the business of posting scandalous raw evidence without a verifiable criminal case.

And yet this is what way too many people demanded. And now anyone who had dealings with Epstein is fodder for gossip and incorrect assumptions. Some are completely innocent. Some did smarmy and embarrassing but legal things. Casting the first stone is often so much fun, though, and good for clicks.

As Republican Representative Clay Higgins said when he voted to not release these files (apparently the only member of Congress to do so): the release “abandons 250 years of criminal justice procedure” and “will absolutely result in innocent people being hurt.”

The only good result I can see is that it should shut down demands for more – although there probably are many people who, disappointed in the evidence of actual crimes, think there’s still a big coverup and more files exist that would really implicate the elites, the Jews, or whomever is their particular target du jour.

I don’t like any of this, and I’ve written as much many times before (a typical example of such posts of mine can be found here).