For example, there’s Michigan:

In the 2022 mid-term elections in Michigan, voters handed control of the Michigan Legislature to the Democrats, giving them a majority in both the Michigan House of Representatives and the Michigan Senate — something that hasn’t happened for forty years. Since then, they’ve been working hand in glove with our notorious Democrat governor, Gretchen Whitmer, including passing a slew of bills that significantly transform election procedures in the State of Michigan and make it easier to commit election fraud, while at the same time making it harder to uncover it.

That’s the ticket. As Turkey’s Endogan once said, “Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off.”

More on Michigan:

The new legislation hands over verification of absentee ballots from an elected bipartisan board of inspectors to city or township clerks. They also significantly expand the powers of election clerks and the Secretary of State. For example, the Secretary of State can now dictate election procedures without going through the formal rule-making process. This greatly increases the potential for fraud and significantly reduces the safeguards against it.

Senate Bill 367 allows clerks in municipalities with at least 5,000 people to process and count absentee ballots eight days before Election Day. The eight-day, pre-election day window will make it very difficult for poll watchers to observe the handling and counting of mail-in votes. (What could possibly go wrong there?) Municipalities will work closely with the SoS, to whom the bill assigns the task of unilaterally “supervising the implementation and conduct of early voting for state and federal elections.” (God forbid that the SoS has entrenched political biases.)

According to Representative Ruth Johnson (R) Holly, MI, these bills remove every instance of the word ‘fraud’ in the previous law and replace them with the word, ‘error.’ Criminality of intent is thus effectively insulated from prosecution and the ability to address election fraud is stripped away. In fact, under Senate Bills 603 and 604, alleged fraud can no longer be used to request a recount.

This not only seems to be doing away with the idea of fraud triggering a recount (which in the case of actual fraud wouldn’t do much good anyway, because if fraudulent votes have been cast they will just be counted again), it also seems to be doing away with bipartisan control over the voting process. But I assume that’s the point and the goal. The Democrats are trying to make it impossible for Republicans to ever get control and use the same mechanisms against them. And so what if the voters come to no longer trust the process. As long as the left can remain in control, the left doesn’t need their trust or their acquiescence.

The post Michigan: sounds like the voting fix may be in appeared first on The New Neo.

This case involved one of the most obvious and egregious examples of entrapment by the FBI that I’ve ever seen. But for political reasons it was absolutely necessary to get a conviction, and so the original hung jury verdict couldn’t be allowed to be the last word. From Julie Kelly:

Legal observers bristled at the one-day jury selection process handled almost exclusively by U.S. District Judge Robert Jonker, who also presided over the first trial. On the first day of testimony, defense attorneys informed the court that one juror was potentially compromised for telling co-workers that he “had already decided the case and intended to ensure a particular result at the conclusion of the trial.” Jonker met privately with the juror and refused to allow either prosecutors or defense counsel from participating in the meeting; he ordered all related filings to remain under seal.

Jonker repeatedly scolded Gibbons and Blanchard for what he viewed as wasting the jury’s time on “crap” lines of questioning. Before the testimony of government witnesses last Wednesday, Jonker took the unprecedented step of limiting the amount of time for cross examination. Blanchard accused Jonker of openly favoring prosecutors while frequently interjecting and interrupting defense counsel. “Limiting us is unfair and it’s unconstitutional, and it doesn’t aid the jury in the search for the truth,” Blanchard told Jonker on August 17 after the jury had been dismissed for the day. “It’s creating a perception of how this case ends.”

The Justice Department also sought a narrower definition of entrapment, essentially asking Jonker to make it harder for the jury to conclude the defendants were set up by the FBI.

The case largely centered on accusations of a wide-ranging FBI entrapment operation…

Let [the government] know this is not what a fair trial looks like in America,” Christopher Gibbons, attorney for Fox, told the jury during closing arguments on Monday morning. “Do not endorse or reward this type of behavior. It is time to end this debacle and it is time to restore Adam’s freedom.”

Joshua Blanchard, Croft’s public defender, noted the government collected 1,000 hours of recorded conversations between FBI assets and defendants but played less than two hours of clips for the jury; one clip was only four seconds long. “The FBI doesn’t exist, it should not exist, to make people look like terrorists when they aren’t,” Blanchard said during his closing. “This whole thing has been a big FBI charade. This isn’t Russia, this isn’t how our country works.”

It is now.

Kelly adds:

It is unclear at this point whether [defense lawyers] Gibbons and Blanchard will appeal. Their clients face life in prison.

Life in prison.

Please read the whole thing.

The post The feds try try again – and succeed in getting guilty verdicts for the remaining two Whitmer kidnapping defendants appeared first on The New Neo.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer recently vetoed $20 million in anti-abortion line items in the state’s budget meant to support expecting mothers and adoption campaigns, ripping pro-life pregnancy centers often targeted since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last month as “fake health clinics.”

Whitmer, a Democrat, signed the final piece of a $76 billion state budget for the 2023 fiscal year into law Wednesday, centering on investments in the economy, workforce, public health and public safety.

But she scrapped about $20 million using her line-item veto for funding for pro-life causes set aside by Republicans, who control both chambers of Michigan’s state legislature.

Her vetoes included $10 million for a marketing program promoting adoption over abortion, $3 million for organizations that promote “childbirth and alternatives to abortion,” and $100,000 designated for the legal defense of a ban on gender reassignment surgeries or therapies while people are in state prisons.

Remember when abortion supporters said they wanted it to be “safe, legal, and rare“? Gone, gone, gone:

But over the years, abortion rights advocates have pushed back against the phrase. “Safe, legal, and rare” implies that getting an abortion is something that “you should be apologetic for,” reproductive justice activist Renee Bracey Sherman told Vox. “It places the blame on the person who’s had an abortion, as if they just did something wrong to need one, rather than addressing the systemic issue as to why someone might not be able to have access to consistent health care or contraception.”

So abortion became not just legal but something that was perfectly fine, nothing to regret. And note that the quote wants you to assume that people get pregnant without wanting to because they just don’t have access to contraception – which is widely available just about everywhere and is supported by Medicaid.

And since Dobbs, pro-abortion politicians – with Elizabeth Warren leading the pack – have been labeling pregnancy-counseling clinics as “fake” and have now declared war on them. Are we still supposed to call such people “pro-choice“?:

But abortion supporters reveal how shallow their “pro-choice” ideology is when they oppose helping pregnant mothers make, or even learn about, any choice other than abortion. The most recent example is on display in Congress, where four Democrats are targeting pregnancy resource centers, purporting to “prohibit disinformation in the advertising of abortion services.”

“With Roe gone, it’s more important than ever to crack down on so-called ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ that mislead and deceive patients seeking abortion care,” said Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, promoting her bill. “We need to crack down on the deceptive practices these centers use to prevent people from getting abortion care, and I’ve got a bill to do just that,” she added.

Under Warren’s bill, charities could be fined $100,000 or “50 percent of the revenues earned by the ultimate parent entity” of the charity for violating the act’s “prohibition on disinformation” related to abortion. But the legislation itself does not define prohibited speech. Warren’s bill directs the Federal Trade Commission to “promulgate rules to prohibit a person from advertising with the use of misleading statements related to the provision of abortion services.” Warren’s bill would thus turn the Federal Trade Commission into a national abortion disinformation board. Perhaps the task of determining what counts as a prohibited “misleading” statement would fall to the recently unemployed Nina Jankowicz for the remainder of the Biden administration…

Warren also signed on to a letter in which members of Congress tried to pressure Google into suppressing search results for such centers — which was followed by a similar letter from the office of New York attorney general Letitia James.

Warren is in a true-blue state, Massachusetts, so she thinks she can go as far as she wants with this. And maybe she can. But Whitmer is in Michigan, which has a Republican-controlled legislature. Plus, Whitmer is up for re-election in November. But she must think this move shores up her base support, plus I don’t think she’s worried about her Republican opponents, since the strongest ones were knocked out by legal challenges to their petition signatures. I wrote about that in this post (which reminds me; I still haven’t gotten around to Part II because so many other things intervened and crowded it out).

If you look at the polls of each of the remaining GOP candidates against Whitmer, you’ll see that she’s doing very well, although of course it’s early because no actual GOP nominee has yet been chosen. The person who was her strongest potential GOP opponent, James Craig, has been disqualified for the aforementioned petition signature problems, but is going to run as a write-in candidate.

I think Whitmer feels very very confident.

The post Whitmer vetoes bill to help pregnancy clinics appeared first on The New Neo.

And that’s exactly what has happened. I’m not going to bother with the details, because you can just go here and here.

This particular group seems to me to conform more to the Timothy McVeigh type of anti-government thinking than anything else. At least one is apparently an anarchist who hates Trump:

Trump is not your friend, dude. It amazes me that people actually, like, believe that when he’s shown over and over and over again that he’s a tyrant. Every single person that works for government is your enemy, dude.

I suspect that’s the basic sentiment of the entire group.

Doesn’t matter. The blame-Trump narrative is set for most people. Biden himself said it, as did Whitmer, and although I’ve not done an exhaustive search (I’ll leave that to you this time), I don’t imagine that the MSM is keen to get the truth out and counter the impression.

This is the way we’ve seen it work, over and over. A public that’s been exposed to this for many many years doesn’t read this particular story in a vacuum, either. It’s a building block that’s piled on top of the many many other building blocks that have been put in place over many years, to create and then to strengthen an edifice of lies that’s sturdy and nearly impervious to attack.

The post More lies getting halfway around the world appeared first on The New Neo.

Prior to this – and maybe even now – Whitmer was a rising star in the Democratic Party:

In February 2020, she was selected to give the Democratic response to President Donald Trump’s 2020 State of the Union Address. She is the national co-chairwoman of the Joe Biden 2020 presidential campaign.

Looking at that Wiki bio, I don’t see anything in particular that would distinguish her from other liberal Democrats in terms of predicting that she would have a more draconian COVID response than the others. And yet here we are:

Among the complaints was that Whitmer had prohibited sale of seeds and other garden supplies at a time when vegetable gardens need to be planted. Executive Order 2020-42 is titled, “Temporary requirement to suspend activities that are not necessary to sustain or protect life,” and it is quite specific about which activities are and are “not necessary.” Stores with “more than 50,000 square feet” (e.g., Walmart, Lowes, Home Depot) are ordered to close areas of the store “by cordoning them off, placing signs in aisles, posting prominent signs, removing goods from shelves, or other appropriate means” that sell carpet or flooring, furniture, and “garden centers and plant nurseries.” So if grandma went to Walmart for groceries and hoped to pick up some tomato plants or cucumber seeds while she was there — sorry, grandma! You could get a thousand-dollar fine and 90 days in jail for disobeying Whitmer’s orders.

Posting photos from a Walmart in Grand Rapids showing the now-banned seeds cordoned off with yellow tape, one Twitter user declared, “@GovWhitmer has banned us from growing our own food. This is [bleeping] insane.” Another user posted a photo indicating that it’s now apparently forbidden to sell American flags in Michigan. Barbecue grills, lawn chairs — anything in the garden section is now streng verboten in Michigan. References to Whitmer as a “dictator” proliferated on social media over the weekend as Michigan residents came to grips with the consequences of the governor’s draconian order.

There’s much more at the link. It explains that the vast majority of Michigan’s deaths are in Detroit and the rest of the state has been doing rather well, but the rules are for the entire state. The arbitrary and illogical nature of the rules is staggering; they seem to have been designed merely to flex the state’s muscle, showing the people who’s boss – because they don’t seem to have much connection to actual control of the disease.

And then of course there’s this:

Last month, the governor actually threatened the licenses of medical professionals who prescribed the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) for coronavirus patients. A week later, however, Whitmer was trying to secure supplies of HCQ from the federal strategic stockpile. Erratic, arbitrary, deaf to criticism — she has thoroughly botched Michigan’s response to this crisis, and yet, despite her blatant failure, there is talk that Whitmer is on the list of potential running mates for presumed Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

I think the latter is because (a) she’s a woman, and a fairly attractive one; and (b) as previously mentioned, she’s been a big Biden supporter.

The more interesting question to me is why Whitmer has had such a terrible reaction to the threat of COVID. It’s not just because she’s a female Democrat; there are others who fit that description and I haven’t heard much if anything that distinguishes their responses.

I don’t have an answer to my own question because I know very little about her, and if any of you have some insight please feel free to explain. But my observation is this: many people both in public and private life, but particularly in public life, are interested in gaining power over others. And many will use a crisis to increase that power, which they enjoy wielding.

It’s not always possible to tell in advance who these people will be. But there will be such people, and Whitmer is one of them. Their stance doesn’t come from having greater intelligence or skill or foresight, and they can be more insecure or less insecure. One of the roots might be the need to control. Another is a lack of interest in protecting liberty. The two together make a very bad combination.

[ADDENDUM: A petition to recall her has gained a lot of signatures. People don’t want Nurse Ratched as governor.]

The post What’s up with Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan? appeared first on The New Neo.