Progressive Dark Money

Image credit: cincinnati.com

Joe Schoffstall at The Washington Free Beacon reports:

Liberal billionaires George Soros and Scott Wallace are helping bankroll a new fund hosted by an intricate dark money organization and focused on helping Democrats make inroads with midwestern voters for the 2020 elections.

The deep-pocketed donors moved the money from the Open Society Foundations, Soros's foundation, and the Wallace Global Fund, Wallace's foundation, to the newly launched Heartland Fund, a collaborative effort focused on building "power across the divides of the American heartland" as overall Democratic efforts have veered towards the region.

. . .

Future Majority, a Washington, D.C.-based Democratic strategy center, was also founded to focus on midwestern states in an effort to help "rebrand" the party and provide support to liberal organizations. The group is a registered 501(c)4 "social welfare" nonprofit and also does not have to disclose its donors.

Future Majority is planning to spend at least $60 million during the 2020 election cycle and is receiving help from megadonors Philip Munger, son of Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman Charles Munger, and Dan Tierney, who was the managing director of KGB Holdings, a global financial services company, before it sold in 2017. Munger and Tierney co-chair Future Majority's board.

The headline of this report is “Soros, Wallace Help Bankroll Dark Money Fund Aimed at Midwestern Voters.” Er, Ohio is in the Midwest. Full report is here.

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More censorship at YouTube

Image credit: steemit.com

From Sparta Report:

YouTube is constantly tweaking and changing their algorithm. Most of the time these changes are small and are barely noticed.

Lately, however, YouTubers large and small have been complaining about how little growth their channels have experienced. Apparently, YouTube’s algorithm has been changed to favor mainstream media outlets like CNN over small, independent content creators.

YouTuber Mark Dice reported on this just the other day.

The result is that YouTubers aren’t seeing their channels grow in the way that they should.

Justin Derby of Truth: The Objective Reality has noticed that YouTube’s latest round of censorship means that many YouTubers are gaining more subscribers on their BitChute channels…and he has the evidence to back it up.

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Memorial Day sign

Via social media

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Memorial Day: remembering

photo credit: nbclosangeles.com

We just watched the Memorial Day episode on Watter’s World, and Jesse Watters was doing one of those man-on-the-beach interviews with twenty-somethings. These beach-and-valley boys and girls could not name the country that bombed Pearl Harbor; who we fought in the Revolution; who we were fighting in World War 2; which side won the Civil War; who was US President during WW2, etc etc. Frightening.

We had dinner at our neighborhood pub the other evening, and one of our favorite waitresses asked if we had plans for Memorial Day. We said yes, we were gathering with family for a cook-out and that we would be saluting and remembering our men and women in uniform who gave their lives protecting our freedoms. We had no way of knowing her views, but she immediately responded. She always gathers with her family and she also salutes the military. But she is concerned that younger generations do not know about the sacrifices made by our military to protect America and its allies. We exchanged ideas about how we pass on the war stories to younger generations, but the heartwarming point is that she is very concerned about it and makes it a point to pass on those parts of our history to her kids.  

Happy Memorial Day from Cleveland Tea Party
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As we head into the Memorial Day weekend

Making the rounds on social media:

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“Hate speech” and Facebook

image credit: hubpages.com

Petr Svab at The Epoch Times:

While in the United States, most of what Facebook labels as “hate speech” would be lawful to utter publicly because of First Amendment protections, some European countries have laws against “hate speech,” forcing Facebook to take such content offline. Facebook could theoretically make such content only available to users in locales where it’s lawful, but the company has apparently subscribed to the “hate speech” doctrine, tripling its content policing force to some 30,000.

The document with [Candace] Owens’s name was posted into an internal discussion group set up by former Facebook senior engineer Brian Amerige, who left the company due to disagreements over content policing.

“I’m glad to see the group continues to be used to raise awareness inside the company about Facebook’s slippery slope of a content policy,” he said via the Facebook Messenger app. “In a very sad way, it’s comically predictable to see people listed as ‘extra credit’ to watch and investigate. Evolution into the ‘thought police’ is the inevitable result of their dangerous and ineffective approach to promoting the truth.”

The core issue Amerige hit an impasse on with Facebook executives was their insistence on suppressing “hate speech,” which Amerige deemed misguided.

“Hate speech can’t be defined consistently and it can’t be implemented reliably, so it ends up being a series of one-off ‘pragmatic’ decisions,” he previously said. “I think it’s a serious strategic misstep for a company whose product’s primary value is as a tool for free expression.”

Read the rest of this report here. As Thomas Lifson at American Thinker summarizes:

Facebook is being exposed as a naked propaganda organ that ought to be treated by law as a "publisher" legally responsible for the content it hosts, and not as a "forum" — the status it currently enjoys, exempting it from libel laws and other downsides to the content it spreads out to the world.

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If today's media covered the original Tea Party

Cartoonist Gary Varvel at TownHall

Election advice from Down Under

image credit: timesofmalta,com

Many news sites and bloggers covered this weekend's surprise upset election in Australia. Polls predicted a win for Labor but the Liberal party (their conservative party) won re-election. One reader on the thread under the Conservative Treehouse's report was on point:

Query says: 

May 18, 2019 at 7:51 pm 

And here’s a hint for the US. 

Australia does manual voting with paper ballots marked by hand, double counted by the Aust. Electoral Commission, with scrutineers from both parties observing. No hanging shards [chads], no second rate voting machines, no boxes of ballots conveniently found to sway a close election. The US merely needs to scale up the operation. That way there are multiple counting sources and no computer algorithm that someone somewhere has a key to.

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Next target: Michelle Malkin

image credit: medium.com

Jeffrey Lord has more on Big Tech censorship at American Spectator:

Facebook has censored Michelle Malkin — for protesting censorship.

. . .

Michelle rejects identity politics out of hand, proudly calling herself an “American.” Amen and Amen! But in the Jim Crow-style of the Left she is what the Left loves to call a “woman of color.” Thus her posting standing up for free speech and opposing censorship has to be silenced. Because, like Diamond and Silk, Michelle Malkin is a threat to the totalitarian mind-set of Facebook rulers who have appointed themselves the Gods of who gets to say what and where.

The battle against the totalitarian mindset that is increasingly, vividly targeting conservatives with social media to unperson and de-platform them has now reached out to get Michelle Malkin.

Read the rest here.

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Today: Armed Forces Day

In the United States, Armed Forces Day is celebrated on the third Saturday in May. It falls near the end of Armed Forces Week, which begins on the second Saturday of May and ends on the third Sunday of May.  

That's today, Saturday, May 18.

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Ways to Stuff the Ballot Box

This blog recently reported that 

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose announced a plan to create a work group that will focus on modernizing the state's voter registration, which would include automatic voter registration. (via Watchdog Ohio)

California serves as a How-To Manual of facilitating voter fraud. Here’s Monica Showalter at American Thinker:

California's election has unsettled many, given the role of ballot-harvesting in supposedly flipping Reagan-country Orange County entirely blue in the last midterm.

But the details rolling out now are getting far more disturbing. RealClearPolitics investigative reporter Susan Crabtree has put together a string of criminalities surrounding the way California runs its elections which makes one wonder if California has adopted the Venezuela Model of electoral governance.

She starts with a sickening new report that California's election was hacked through its "motor-voter" system, the system the state has to register as many votes as possible. If a California resident applies for a drivers license in the state, he (or she) gets registered to vote whether he likes it or not. An applicant can only say 'no' to the registration, not 'yes,' the 'yes' is embedded into the system. It's a set-up that relies on the "honor system" for a voter's claims of valid citizenship to vote and there is no verification. 

Read the rest here. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose’s website is here, with multiple ways to let him know what you think.

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Censorship creep

Thomas Lifson at American Thinker reports (“The next stage in tech overlords' censorship: De-platformingun-PC blogs”):

It's no longer just Facebook, Twitter, and Google who are censoring online content that offends political correctness.  Wordpress.com, a blog-hosting site that offers anyone the opportunity to create and publish a blog at no cost, has decided to de-platform — in other words, kill — a blog that has been operating for 15 years: Creeping Sharia.

As Pamela Geller points out, this move by Wordpress.com is itself an example of the blog's focus of creeping sharia happening in real time.  Shutting down a critic of creeping sharia is an example of creeping sharia.

Related: Newsbusters reports on a development (which may be a start, but doesn’t seem to me to go far enough):

The White House has announced a new system that gives Americans the power to call out foul play by tech companies.  

As of May 15 it read, “SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS should advance FREEDOM OF SPEECH.” 

“Too many Americans have seen their accounts suspended, banned, or fraudulently reported for unclear ‘violations’ of user policies,” it continued before delivering a bipartisan message that freedom of speech is a right held by all Americans. “No matter your views, if you suspect political bias caused such an action to be taken against you, share your story with President Trump.”

The submission form begins with a survey asking users to submit their names and confirm that they are citizens of the United States. It then asks whether they were censored via major Big Tech platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. It also listed an option for “Other” acknowledging that there are plenty of other platforms which deplatform users.

It then asks, if possible, for a link or screenshot of the restricted post. 

In a reversal of Trump’s earlier praise of Twitter as a way to reach his audience free of being filtered by the media, this White House page asked users for permission to send newsletters via email so that the administration “can update you without relying on platforms like Facebook and Twitter.”

The Trump administration said it was “fighting for free speech online,” while the liberal Washington Post characterized the new system as part of Trump’s “war against Facebook, Google and Twitter.” 

Rest of the report is here. Hmm. Either these companies need to be trust-busted, or they need to be subject to regulation by the FCC.

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Stephen Moore goes to Cleveland

Stephen Moore recently withdrew as a nominee for the Federal Reserve Board, but he had a look at Cleveland in his report on “Ohio The Comeback State” at Townhall:

I recently traveled to the Cleveland area and the renaissance of this once-Rust Belt city is remarkable and visible to the naked eye. The downtown area was bustling with economic activity and building cranes. Great restaurants, a vibrant music scene, museums, wonderful and accessible sports stadiums and swanky new office buildings and condominiums.

Research by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland documents that thanks to the increase in jobs in construction and manufacturing, the unemployment rate is down to 5.1% and the "labor markets remain healthy." Per capita GDP rose 3.4% in 2017 and the per capita GDP is closing in on a record-high $70,000 a year.

Cleveland certainly has its problems, but it’s nice to read some good news. The rest of Mr. Moore report is here.

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Happy Mother's Day

image credit: pinterest.com

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First Amendment under attack again

image credit: sott.net

Today’s targets: James Woods and Pamela Geller. Via 100 Percent Fed Up:

He has over 2.1 million followers and is one of the most active and important conservative accounts on Twitter, but conservative actor James Woods is finished with Twitter until Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, stops being a “coward,” and affords conservatives the same free speech rights as liberals in his platform.

. . .

“Twitter demanded that I rescind my tweet paraphrasing Emerson,” Woods said in a statement to The Daily Wire. “It now seems they have chosen to delete that tweet from my account without my permission. Until free speech is allowed on Twitter, I will not be permitted to participate in our democracy with my voice. As long as Jack Dorsey remains the coward he seems to be; my Twitter days are in the past.”

President Trump and his outspoken, conservative son Don Jr., both came to the defense of James Woods over his censorship on Twitter.

Don Jr. pointed out the hypocrisy of the social media giants censoring the voices of popular conservatives while allowing terror groups to openly post on their platforms. Tweeting directly to Twitter and Facebook, Trump Jr. asked if they consider James Woods to be more dangerous than Hamas?

It’s interesting how @twitter and @facebook both seem more concerned with silencing non-violent people who hold political opinions they disagree with, than violent terrorist organizations and the people that support them,” Donald Trump Jr. tweeted. “Is @RealJamesWoods really more ‘dangerous’ than Hamas?”

And Pamela Geller was censored on Facebook. After complaints, her post was restored. Just another “mistake” by Facebook.

Ms. Geller’s advice:

Attention readers: Challenge ever ban, appeal every deletion. Do not stand by while left wing corporate managers and paid foreign operatives strip us of our unalienable rights as Americans.

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Mark Steyn on “The Big Shut-Up”

image credit: webjunction.org

More censorship this way comes, and Mark Steyn nails it:

In this week of second-birthday celebrations for The Mark Steyn Club, the thing most worth celebrating is mere existence: We haven't yet been vaporized. Every day the Big Shut-Up advances: Last week Facebook eighty-sixed Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, Paul Joseph Watson and for good measure Twitter suspended the Hollywood contrarian James Woods. It's a bit unfair on poor old calypso conspiracist Louis Farrakhan, who found himself de-platformed with all the right-wing haters just because Speech Commissar Zuckerberg needed a bipartisan figleaf. He won't require that much longer, and indeed Big Social is growing ever more brazen in its preference for monitored speech over free speech. (See, for example, Google's thuggish and moronic censorship of the Claremont Institute.)

As readers may have noticed, I don't do Facebook posts or Tweet: We have social media accounts but we use them only to link to content here or to promote radio, TV and stage appearances. To be honest, I don't really understand why so-called "conservatives" write (for free) on Facebook and Twitter, providing the Big Social cartel with more free content and thus enriching them and cementing their near total control of the Internet. Nor do I understand why Dennis Prager, for whom I have almost boundless admiration, sued YouTube for giving his Prager University videos insufficient prominence. Conservatives demand that YouTube cease "de-monetizing" their videos. For what it's worth, the first time I was de-monetized on YouTube, I self-de-monetized all my other videos on the platform. Because whatever percentage of ad revenue you might get from them, YouTube takes more - much more. So you're getting pennies while they're getting even more stonkingly mega-rich: Conservatives who think more YouTube revenue is the way to close the gap don't seem to grasp that they're actually widening it.

In the end, the solution to Facebook and Google/YouTube is to break them up before they police every aspect of human existence on the planet. And right now the only prominent politician pledging to do that is ...Elizabeth Warren. In the meantime, in our modest corner of the Internet, our policy is to try and do as much as possible independent of the Big Tech oligarchies - because anything else just accelerates the shrinking number of entities that control access to all information.

A decade ago, we free-speechers were fortunate enough to fight our battles in Canada just before Facebook and Twitter came along and wrecked the Internet. Today, Twitter's main function is to provide a pretext for destroying random lives pour encourager les autres.

. . .

These are very dark times for a meaningful culture of free speech. Its subordination to identity politics and political correctness is now taken for granted by the Institute of Directors, Rugby Australia, the Philadelphia Flyers and on and on. In such a world I am grateful still to be here, and I thank all of you who swing by each morning even as the lights flicker and die around a once lively Internet.

And today we read that David Horowitz (Freedom Center, Front Page Magazine) has been suspended from Twitter. Anyway, read the rest of Steyn’s column here.

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Another bad idea: renaming Columbus Day

Robert Higgs at cleveland.com reports:

A typically united City Council divided Monday night over a non-binding resolution calling for the city to recognize the second Monday in October as Indigenous Peoples’ Day rather than Columbus Day.

Councilman Basheer Jones proposed the resolution, saying he wished to recognize that a culture already existed in North America when Italian explorer Christopher Columbus arrived in Oct. 12, 1492.

Council approves most proposed resolutions with little or no comment, but Jones’ proposal struck a nerve with colleagues Matt Zone, a second-generation Italian American, and Mike Polensek, who also is of Italian descent.

Zone spoke for several minutes in opposition to the resolution. He said that he grew up celebrating Columbus Day as a proud symbol of immigration to the United States. And it was a day important to Italian Americans who themselves had to endure bigotry in this country.

“It now is a universal theme with all people who come into this country,” Zone said. “One of the highest honors I ever had was in 2015 when I was the grand marshal in the Columbus Day parade.”

Zone said he had no problem doing something to honor indigenous people, but not at the expense of Columbus Day.

. . .

(Full report is here.) But it’s not about identity politics, in this case Native Americans vs Italians. It’s about using identity politics to push another attempt to erase the history of America. Yes, of course, Native Americans were here before Columbus, but it was the Old World coming to the New World that marked the inception of the early European settlements that led to the founding of the United States.

If you live in Cleveland, find your councilman here. The general phone number for council members is 216.664.2840. Give ‘em a call.

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Cartoon of the day

AF Branco cartoon of the day at Townhall and Legal Insurrection

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Fake groups

image credit: ojnetworks.com.au

A word of caution from our friends at Ohio Jobs & Justice Pac:

So many fake groups raising money via email requests making you believe they are associated with Trump, people in the administration, conservative, etc. Don't give a dime to anyone you can't call up personally or know you can contact directly. People are wasting tons of their money thinking they are helping when they may only be helping RINO's, globalists, or scammers enjoy the high-life on your wasted money.

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Censorship on the march

John Nolte at Breitbart has more bad news (“Poynter [Institute] Temporarily Pulls Blacklist with a Big Lie and Promise to Return”)

“Marketers can create blacklists,” Poynter helpfully points out, but since your blacklist might not be as comprehensive as our blacklist here’s a handy blacklist that will allow you to blacklist those we believe should be blacklisted.

Poynter’s list includes… Breitbart News, the Media Research Center, Pajamas Media, Washington Examiner, The Daily Wire, The Blaze, Red State, Project Veritas, Newsmax, Zero Hedge, LifeSite, Judicial Watch, Frontpage, The Washington Free Beacon, The Daily Caller, and the Drudge Report…

But nowhere on this list will you find the establishment media outlets — CNN, NBC, the Washington Post, Politico, the New York Times, MSNBC, etc. —  responsible for blowing the biggest stories of the last five years:

·         The Trayvon Martin Hoax

·         The Hands Up, Don’t Shoot Hoax

·         Donald Trump Can’t Win

·         The Russia Collusion Hoax

·         The Brett Kavanaugh Serial Rapist Hoax

·         The Covington High School Boys Hoax

Poynter’s blacklist was only about one thing, had only one goal — one — and that was to tell advertisers to starve alternative media, alternative thought and ideas to death.

But here’s the real news, Poynter is not retracting its McCarthyite blacklist in shame — oh no… Poynter is promising to return with a better and bolder blacklist:

Therefore, we are removing this unreliable sites list until we are able to provide our audience a more consistent and rigorous set of criteria.

“Rigorous” or righteous? This report is one of several over the past months concerning ongoing efforts to blacklist or de-platform or otherwise shut down a debate. For example, see Daily Caller report here. Iain Murray at Instapundit has another:

Leftist activists have forced a vote at the Mastercard AGM next month to establish an Orwellian “Human Rights Committee” aimed at cutting off the rights of anyone they disagree with. The initial aim is to choke off the income stream to right-wing activists.

Master Card? Well, if Facebook, Google, Twitter, and YouTube can get away with blocking our First Amendment rights, and companies such as Dick’s Sporting Goods bow to political correctness, what will stop Master Card?  

UPDATE from Breitbart's James Delingpole: 

Facebook is Big Brother.

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Cuyahoga County Council to ban plastic bags!

If California thinks it’s a good idea, I am probably against it. Here’s the report from Courtney Astolfi at Cleveland.com:

Cuyahoga County Council is poised to pass a countywide ban on single-use plastic bags after all the members of a council committee on Wednesday voiced support for the ban.

Four members of the Education, Environment, and Sustainability Committee signed on as co-sponsors of the ban during the Wednesday hearing, and Council President Dan Brady told cleveland.com he expects the measure to pass.

Committee Chairwoman Sunny Simon and Councilman Dale Miller are the primary sponsors. Signing on Wednesday were Brady, Council Vice President Pernel Jones Jr., and councilwomen Shontel Brown and Cheryl Stephens, giving the measure the six votes needed for passage.

A simple majority of the 11-member council is needed to pass legislation.

Contacted Wednesday, a spokeswoman for County Executive Armond Budish could not immediately say whether Budish supports the measure or whether he would sign the ordinance into law.

If signed into law, the ban would go into effect on Oct. 1 to give retailers time to use up their supplies of plastic bags, and allow time for community education.

The last time Council attempted to curtail the use of plastic bags was a 2017 proposal by Simon and Miller that would have added a 10-cent fee per plastic and paper bag. But that measure faced heavy pushback and never made it to out of committee.

Brady on Wednesday said he believed the proposed ban had garnered a “broad consensus.”

Jones and Stephens said they have received calls and emails in support of the ban from both urban and suburban residents of the county.

Simon acknowledged that the ban would be a difficult change for county residents. But she said it was a necessary one, and likened the environment in America to Paris’ fire-damaged cathedral of Notre Dame.

“This is our cathedral,” she said. “Teddy Roosevelt saw this as something as a legacy that we have to preserve. This is our future.” [hyperbole, anyone? -DP]

The ban applies to all single-use plastic bags and paper bags that are not 100 percent recyclable or made from at least 40 percent of recycled material.

The ban would not apply to plastic bags that customers bring with them to retailers, and bags used for carry-out orders of prepared food or restaurant leftovers.

It also would not apply to plastic bags used for newspapers, perishable items such as produce and meat, garbage, dry-cleaning, pet waste, prescription medication and bags provided at curbside pick-up or points of delivery and bags used for legally transporting partially-consumed bottles of wine.

Exclusions notwithstanding, what’s next? Plastic straws? (Rest of the report is here.)

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