Google's thumb is on the scale

Brent Scher at the Washington Free Beacon reports on continuing censorship on Google:

News that Chicago police charged Jussie Smollett with staging a brutal attack on himself was covered on every network and in every major newspaper, but Google is hiding searches of it from its platform due to concerns of "potentially disparaging" the liberal actor.

A review of Google's autocomplete function on searches of Smollett found no references to anything regarding the hate crime, even though the company's own data show it is the only reason his name was ever searched.

The top suggested searches for Smollett included Empire (a show he no longer has a role in), Mighty Ducks (a nearly three-decade old movie he had a small role in as a child), and his wife (who doesn't exist), the Free Beacon found.

Even with a nudge—adding the letter "H" to indicate an interest in the Smollett "hate crime" or "hoax"—the top suggestions were inquiries into his height and ties to Hawaii.

Full report including potential bias in searches re: Hillary's campaign, the Trump presidency, Harvey Weinstein, and the Covington students is here ; the report includes screen shots of the writer’s search results. H/T Don Surber.

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Update: National Popular Vote Compact

Michael P Ramirez cartoon via scoopnest.com

This blog posted previously on the dangers of the National Popular Vote Compact and its goal of end-running the Electoral College. J.R.Dunn reports on a hopeful development:

. . . on May 30 Gov. Steve Sisolak of Nevada vetoed the bill, which had been passed by the state senate nine days before. This action may very well break the momentum of the march to 270, marking the high tide of the Democrat’s latest attempt to subvert representative democracy.

The Electoral College has outdone the Founder’s fondest hopes for it. Over the past twenty years alone, in has prevented two utterly unworthy candidates from occupying the White House – Al Gore, a flake at the very least, and Hillary Clinton, the most corrupt American politician since Aaron Burr.

Both, of course, were Democrats, which raises a very interesting question, because so too is Steve Sisolak. The motive behind the national popular vote movement is unquestionably a search for a means for the Dems, who can no longer command a national following, to gain the presidency by hook or by crook. So why did Sisolak turn against his own party and its future presidential hopes? Sisolak gave as his reason the fact that  “Nevada’s interests could diverge from the interests of large states,” which at least shows that he was thinking, unlike the governors of Colorado, New Mexico, or Washington, just to mention three.

It has often been pointed out that the end result of the popular vote movement would be national elections effectively decided by New York, Southern California, D.C., and a handful of other high-density districts. The government of the U.S. would be effectively handed over to the Northeast, a few spots on the West Coast, and a couple of Midwestern cities. As a second-order development, media coverage and interest in any other areas would simply cease. Even today, coverage of the flyover states is as minimal as mass media can get away with. Under the new system, it would be nonexistent.

And so would flyover politics. From that point on, all presidential candidates would come from New York, the Massachusetts Bay area, LA, and perhaps Chicago. Politicians from those areas would be the sole recipients of national coverage. 

Everybody else – all the Trumans, the Jacksons, the Coolidges, the Lincolns – would be as unknown as if they were living in the Mato Grosso.

It’s likely that this occurred to Steven Sisolak.

Fingers crossed. Full report at American Thinker is here.

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Good headline news

image credit: breakpoint.org

At Conservative Treehouse: True The Vote Wins Historic $2 Million Settlement Against IRS….

At Legal Insurrection: VERDICT: Jury awards Gibson’s Bakery $11 million against Oberlin College

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Circumventing the Electoral College

Jeff Parker cartoon credit: capoliticalreview.com

The 2020 elections will probably involve so many types of corruption that Al Capone would be envious. Stuffing the ballot box. Voters casting ballots more than once, including in different states. Voting early and often. Counting the votes of the deceased. Tampering with electronic voting machines. There are efforts to grant felons the right to vote – while they are serving their sentence. The Democrats don’t play by the rules, so they are busy trying to change the rules.

At American Thinker, David Horowitz of FrontPage Magazine explains the Democrat party’s plan to end-run the Electoral College. It’s a must-read. Here’s the opener:

While you were sleeping, the Democrats (abetted by some deviant Republicans) have been working on a plan that would destroy the diversity of the American political system and bring the nation to the brink of civil war. The plan is called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, and tens of millions of dollars have already been spent over several decades trying to implement it. Fourteen blue states and the District of Columbia have already joined the Compact, which means they are 70% on the way to making their proposal the law of the land.

The Democrats’ plan is designed to eliminate the influence of the Electoral College in choosing the nation’s president, no doubt because while Hillary won the popular vote she failed [to] win necessary votes in the Electoral College. Eliminating the influence of the Electoral College would end the diversity now embodied in the federal system with its division of powers between Washington and the fifty states. 

The fact that a party which presents itself as a defender of diversity should be leading the charge to eliminate the nation’s most powerful source of diversity should be all that is required to understand the threat their agenda poses to what has been the nation’s constitutional way of life for 232 years.

The Electoral College and the division of powers are features of the Constitution. But the National Popular Vote movement does not propose to amend the Constitution because it doesn’t have the votes to do that. Instead, in the name of “democracy,” it proposes to circumvent the Constitution and its requirement of large national majorities for amending what has been the fundamental law of the land. Think how Orwellian that is, and how concerning it should be for anyone believing the Founders created the most practical, realistic, democratic, diverse and successful polity the world has ever seen.

This is how the Democrats’ circumvention of the Constitution and its provision for an Electoral College would work. Instead of abolishing the College, which would require the support of two-thirds of the states, they are hoping to put together a coalition of states representing 270 electoral votes that would agree to award all their votes to whoever wins the national vote. In other words, if the popular vote is won by 10 votes, every state in the Compact would award 100% of their votes to that party, even if a majority of the voters in their state voted against them.

The bottom line (and goal) of this devious plan is to eliminate the influence of rural voters or “Middle America” and create an electoral lock for the large urban population centers, e.g., California and New York, which would then decide the direction of the country.

The rest of Mr. Horowitz's article is here. The good news: Ohioans dodged a bullet this time, as the organizers dropped plans to try to get the issue on the ballot in November 2019:

[April 2019] Secretary of State Frank LaRose announced in a press release Tuesday that the amendment had been formally withdrawn by its backers, Ohioans For Making Every Vote Matter. The group said in a statement there wasn't sufficient time to gather enough signatures to qualify for the Nov. 5, 2019 ballot.

On Twitter, LaRose called the decision "nothing but good news." 

"The only thing this flawed amendment would have accomplished is to make sure your vote for president is essentially meaningless," he wrote.

The bad news: This issue surely will not go away.

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A salute to our military

Here a few fading photographs taken on this blogger's father's Brownie Box. He was the skipper of LCT 2454 that delivered troops and equipment onto Utah Beach on June 6, 1944. Today marks the 75th anniversary. 

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Why we remember D-Day

Photo credit: Real Clear Defense

Lots of reports on commemorations of D Day this week. Here's a succinct report by Emma Watkins and Alexandra Marotta in a column for The Daily Signal:

If the invasion of Normandy had been unsuccessful that day, Europe might have remained under Nazi control, and our world might look much different today. That battle was the tipping point needed to liberate Europe.

The American troops who fought in D-Day were not fighting to liberate their own land. They fought to preserve the free world.

Most of those troops probably didn’t wake up that morning anticipating that their sacrifice would change the world. They got up knowing only that they had work to do.

That’s a valuable lesson for a generation that often sees going to work as an obligation, rather than an opportunity to effect change.

Some 6,603 American troops were killed, wounded, or missing in action in the Normandy invasion. They fought for a cause that was larger than simply securing the beaches. That sacrifice is often taken for granted today. It is essential that we do not let the significance of what was achieved on D-Day be forgotten.

Read the rest here. Recently discovered color photographs of D-Day (see above photograph) and the Liberation of Paris are here. 

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Remembering D Day this week

cartoon by Tom Stiglich via Townhall

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