by | Jan 26, 2024 | Aggregate
Do you know what an implosion is? Let me show you.
That is what is happening to Joe Biden. Let’s start with the domestic implosion taking place because of the flood of illegal immigrants. Texas has deployed the National Guard to its border and is preventing the Federal Government from cutting the barb wire walls the Guard has erected. The Biden Administration sought judicial relief with the Supreme Court, which decided by a 5 to 4 majority to back the Biden Administration. Governor Abbot of Texas responded, “Fuck you.”
Texas is relying on the Constitution, which gives States the right to defend themselves if invaded, even if the Federal Government refuses to act.
Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3
The Texas Guard continues to put up razor wire to hinder illegal migrants from entering the United States.
Abbot is not alone. Twenty two other States weighed in on Abbot’s side. Here’s the map.
. A majority of Americans are pissed off about the Federal Government’s refusal to enforce immigration law. Hell, even Democrat Mayors are crying about this:
Immigration will be one of the deciding issues in the November Presidential election and public opinion is backing Trump, not Biden. If the Biden Administration decides to confront Texas over Governor Abbott’s policies to staunch the flood of migrants it is likely to ignite a national crisis that will be damaging to Biden’s hopes of snagging a second term.
Now to the foreign policy front. Biden and his feckless team are being humiliated by the Houthis. Despite launching a series of bombings inside Yemen, the Houthis are showing no sign of retreating. In fact, they defeated a U.S. Navy effort to escort two container ships through the troubled straits leading into the Red Sea:
“The US Navy has turned both ships around and is escorting them back to the Gulf of Aden.”
Maersk Line Ltd said it was suspending transits in the region until further notice because of the escalation of risk.
“While en route, both ships reported seeing explosions close by and the US Navy accompaniment also intercepted multiple projectiles. The crew, ship and cargo are safe and unharmed.”
While the decision to transit remains at the discretion of individual vessels and companies, it is recommended that US-flag and US-owned commercial vessels remain North of 18N in the Red Sea or East of 46E in the Gulf of Aden until further notice,” the agency said.
Yemen’s position is clear. Any ship headed to Israel will be stopped. Any ship owned by Israel or the United States or the United Kingdom will be stopped. All other ships may pass.
The Biden Administration is flailing in its attempt to stop the Houthis. The world outside the West is seeing the United States as a paper tiger or, if you prefer a fairy tale version, the big bad wolf. Biden is huffing and puffing but cannot blow the Houthi brick house down.
I’m writing this late Thursday night on the East Coast of the United States. By the time most folks read this post, the International Court of Justice is expected to issue a preliminary injunction declaring Israel’s military operation in Gaza is a genocide and that it must cease its military operations. Israel and the United States will ignore that ruling, but its effect will be the further isolation of both countries and will ratchet up the pressure on the Biden Administration to rein in the Israelis.
I think the Biden team now recognizes that it has a major domestic political problem on its hands. While it is true that wealthy Jewish donors continue to give Biden cash, it also is true that Biden is being relentlessly heckled on the campaign trail by Palestinian supporters. Biden is very thin-skinned and may step up pressure on Israel in order to put an end to the protests. He is being regularly lambasted at campaign events and it is creating a image problem of a weak, confused old man that is not going to play well in November.
The post Biden Domestic And Foreign Policy Implosion appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
by | Jan 26, 2024 | Aggregate
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Gabe Sterling chief operating officer (COO) in the office of the Georgia Secretary of State.
Via Behizy: The Georgia Senate Ethics Committee has passed a bill that would remove Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger from the Board of Elections and grant the board authority to investigate him for election law violations
The bill will be voted on by the full senate in the coming weeks and should pass both houses easily.
The bill would also allow the BOE to investigate local election officials as well. More importantly, the Board would have the power to hire their own investigators as opposed to relying on the Secretary of State’s office to do so.
Via George Behizy.
BREAKING: The Georgia Senate Ethics Committee has passed a bill that would remove Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger from the Board of Elections and grant the board authority to investigate him for election law violations
The bill will be voted on by the full senate in the… pic.twitter.com/23q1Zwg2xb
— George (@BehizyTweets) January 25, 2024
Senator Max Burns chairs the Senate Ethics Committee.
WUGA reported:
Georgia’s Secretary of State could find himself under investigation by the State Board of Elections under the terms of legislation proposed in the Georgia Senate.
Senate Bill 358 would give the Board of Elections the power to investigate both the Secretary of State and local elections officials, and how those officials conduct elections. It also gives the Board the power to hire its own investigators instead of relying on the Secretary of State’s office to conduct investigations.
Senator Max Burns, a Republican from Sylvania, chairs the Senate Ethics Committee. He is also a sponsor of the bill. He said that the bill was driven, at least in part, by a debate among Board of Elections members last year.
“Last year, in the December meeting of the state election board, there was some discussion about whether or not the board had responsibility and oversight of the Secretary of State and the Office of the Secretary of State and their elections division.,” Burns said. “They split on that 2-2.”
Burns told his colleagues on the Senate Ethics Committee that the legislation was requested by members of the Board of Elections.
“We received communication from a member of the election board and then the Chair of the state Election Board,” he said. “So the chair of of the state election board in a letter to the Honorable Jon Burns, Speaker of the House and the Honorable Burt Jones, Lieutenant Governor of Georgia, requested that the legislation clarify the responsibility of the state election board and and its role in oversight.”
The bill would also remove the Secretary of State from the State Elections Board.
The post Georgia Senate Ethics Committee Passes Bill to Remove Raffensperger from Board of Elections – And Grant the Board Authority to Investigate Him appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
by | Jan 26, 2024 | Aggregate
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies used to be relegated to liberal college campuses, but in recent years they have infected virtually every aspect of life in America.
These policies are divisive and often racist. Progressives who advance this ideology are taking the country backwards and can’t even see it.
In the case of government agencies, particularly when it comes to law enforcement, these policies should be completely rejected, but instead are embraced. in the case of the FBI, these policies are causing the bureau to lower their standards in ways which seem beyond parody.
The Daily Caller reports:
FBI Hired Barely Literate Candidates, Urged Fat Applicant To Continue Process, Report Alleges
The FBI is reducing hiring standards to the point where it is considering overweight applicants and hiring barely literate agents, a group of current and former FBI agents and analysts allege.
In a report delivered to the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees, the FBI officials describe how Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is being prioritized in the hiring process to the point where standards are being reduced for physical fitness, drug usage, finances, mental health, experience and integrity, the report states.
“To more easily accommodate a larger pool of available applicants, FBI Special Agent hiring standards have been relaxed and requirements measurably lowered in categories that include physical fitness, illicit drug use, financial irregularities, mental health, full-time work experience, and integrity,” the report asserts. The New York Post first reported on the FBI hiring document.
The current and former FBI agents and analysts received the anecdotes described in the report from 20 sources and sub-sources who are either currently employed by the FBI or retired.
Political correctness is dangerous and puts people’s lives at risk.
REPORT: “DEI hires pushed onto the FBI are putting the country’s safety at risk for the sake of being ‘woke’”
h/t @mirandadevine https://t.co/vOYDyGINlN
— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) January 25, 2024
Column’s up: EXCLUSIVE Diversity/Equity recruiting at the FBI has degraded standards in physical fitness, illicit drug use, mental health and integrity, and threatens the FBI’s ability to protect America from harm, says a report by ex- and serving agents https://t.co/lnBdu6aa6w
— Miranda Devine (@mirandadevine) January 25, 2024
All of this must end. It is going to get people killed.
The post REPORT: The FBI Has Lowered Hiring Standards in Ridiculous Ways Due to Woke Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Policies appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
by | Jan 26, 2024 | Aggregate
Guest Author: Defense Attorney Roger Roots, J.D., Ph.D.
Defendant Mark Steyn (in wheelchair), assisted by former Congresswoman Michelle Bachman, R-MN, after court on Jan. 24 (Roger Roots, photo).
“The left” is bankrupting voices on “the right” in lawfare defamation trials around the country.
Multi-million-dollar defamation judgments have recently been imposed against Alex Jones, Rudy Giuliani, Ammon Bundy, and even Donald Trump. And now, a twelve-year-old defamation lawsuit by climate activist professor Michael Mann against Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg has gotten underway in a D.C. courtroom.
Steyn is the conservative writer and spokesman who regularly substituted for Rush Limbaugh on his top-ranked radio program.
Simberg is a former science expert at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C.
The case has been languishing in pretrial motion practice for years and several prior defendants, including the National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, are no longer in the case.
The Mann v. Steyn trial is scheduled to extend into February. But the biggest bombshell of the trial may have dropped on Wednesday, January 24.
An attorney for Simberg asked Dr. Mann how much Mann was paying for his attorneys and if Mann would have any legal debts from the case.
Michael Mann admitted that he hadn’t paid a penny for the several law firms representing him over the past 12 years or to the four lawyers (and several staff people) representing him at trial.
And Mann said he would have no legal debts from the case regardless of whether he won or lost.
The courtroom audience was stunned. Steyn and Simberg appeared shocked as well. By some accounts, Steyn has already spent several million dollars defending himself.
The years of litigation appear to have taken a physical toll on Steyn as well; he has suffered three heart attacks and is now relegated to a wheelchair. There are at least ten lawyers participating in the trial: four for Mann, four for Simberg, and two assisting Steyn—who is technically pro se (acting as his own attorney).
The admission by Mann begs the question of who is paying for Mann’s massively expensive lawfare defamation case against Steyn and Simberg. The trial is being closely watched by high-profile individuals and groups on all sides of the climate debate.
Bill Nye “The Science Guy” is visibly sitting in the audience, supporting Mann. Former Congresswoman and presidential candidate Michelle Bachman is also watching the trial, obviously supporting Steyn.
Bill Nye.
Unlike the defamation trials of Rudy Giuliani, Alex Jones, and Ammon Bundy, it appears that the Mann v. Steyn trial will offer something of an actual examination of the merits. Some of the biggest names in climate science (and skepticism) are listed as potential witnesses, including Mann himself, Raymond Bradley, Naomi Oreskes, Roger Pielke, jr., Judith Curry John Christy, Steve McIntyre, and Ross McKitrick. The judge, Alfred Irving, appears fair enough.
Professor Mann, now of the University of Pennsylvania, alleges Steyn and Simberg defamed him back in 2012 by authoring columns which linked Mann’s infamous “hockey stick” temperature graph to the horrendous child rape case of Penn State football trainer Jerry Sandusky.
Like Sandusky’s loathsome activities, the questionable climate claims of Dr. Mann were mostly brushed under the rug by administrators at Penn State, where Mann taught at the time. Both Steyn and Simberg, and other writers around the world, including even the Chronicle of Higher Education, drew the same analogy. But Mann sued only the conservatives.
From the first appearance of Mann’s infamous hockey stick temperature graph, many learned scientists recognized the graph as an imaginative farce. Mann and other global-warming theorists claimed to have grafted ancient tree-ring, ice-core, and sediment data onto modern thermometer data to give the appearance that global temps have been flat, steady, and cool for a thousand years until the past 50 years when temps have shot up steeply. Yet the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) adopted Mann’s ridiculous chart in its 3rd Assessment report in 2001. Skeptics around the world have recognized the hockey stick as an agenda-driven concoction.
The global warming doomsday religious community is plainly hoping the Mann v. Steyn trial will dampen criticism of “The Science.” Stay tuned!
A selection of scientist Michael Mann’s daily tweets (obtained by Tony Heller of Realclimatescience.com).
The trial continues into February.
The post Stunning Testimony in the Mann v. Steyn Defamation Trial: Climate Alarmist Mann is Not Paying a Penny for his Army of Lawyers! appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
by | Jan 26, 2024 | Aggregate
J. Alex Halderman explaining how to hack into an electronic voting machine in a previous lecture.
In Part 1 of this series on the explosive testimony and demonstration of University of Michigan Professor Dr. J Alex Halderman in the federal lawsuit Curling v. Raffensperger, The Gateway Pundit covered more in-depth the ease of exploiting the “BIC pen hack” and, further, the simple and inexpensive creation of voter, poll-worker, and, most importantly, technician Smart cards to attack the Dominion ICX BMD or ballot marking device.
Part 1 can be read here.
But there was much more revealed in Judge Totenberg’s courtroom regarding the vulnerabilities of these electronic voting devices.
To summarize Part 1, Dr. Halderman was able to use a simple BIC ball-point pen to reboot a Dominion ICX BMD by simply inserting it into the power button on the back of the machine and hold it down for five seconds. This rebooted the machine into Safe Mode and allowed Super User access, granting the attacker almost unlimited abilities to manipulate data on the machine.
Professor Halderman was also able to use a Smart card purchased for $10 online and a $20 USB Smart card Reader from Amazon to program voter cards that could be used over and over again, county-wide. He also made a poll-worker card and, most importantly, a technician card that would also grant “Super User access.”
We learned that commands to manipulate the Dominion ICX BMD could be automated – simply insert the card and it will do the rest. Further, nothing was needed that wasn’t public information to complete the programming.
These cards would require some expertise to program, but once the counterfeit cards are made, anyone could insert it into the machine and exploit the vulnerability automatically.
Here again is the transcript from the court hearing and Professor Halderman’s testimony.
But there has to be a way that these attacks could be detected, right? Not necessarily.
No Evidence of Exploitation
Dr. Halderman then demonstrated how he can delete portions of the system’s audit log in order to delete any evidence that he had accessed and modified the system. Dr. Halderman testified:
Professor Halderman: “So now I’m back in the technician menu…and what I’m going to do is I’m going to go to the file manager and open the ICX’s audit log file. This is one of the log files that the machine creates, and I’m going to open it with the on-screen text editor.
What I have just done with the technician card is I have loaded this technician card with the automated commands that I want to run in a way that they appear in the audit log. But I’m going to open the audit log and edit it with the on-screen text editor.
I’m actually going to highlight a portion that came from my card and hit the cut button to move it to the machine’s clipboard. And I’m going to save the audit log just to show you that I can delete portions of the audit log with the on-screen text editor.
Dr. Halderman described it as deleting log entries “that would otherwise be evidence of some malfeasance.” He can cover his tracks from anyone being able to discover the access he had and what he was able to do to the Dominion ICX BMDs.
Seemingly for demonstrative purposes, Dr. Halderman performed each step manually, but he testified that it can be done “programmatically”. Insert the card and let the machine do the rest. He also testified that he can quickly insert a command that would “take the other automated commands out of the log file that were copied from my technician card and execute them.”
The Bash Bunny
Next, Dr. Halderman demonstrated perhaps the most serious of the vulnerability exploits, in this author’s opinion, at least.
The following demonstration was not done live in court, but rather through a continuous video recording utilizing the Fulton County Dominion ICX BMD (ballot marking device). This video was played live before the court.
The “attacker” in the video reached behind the printer that accompanies the Dominion ICX BMD and unplugged the USB cable and plugged in what is called a Bash Bunny. The device looks like a big USB stick, but with the Bash Bunny, the “attacker” is “able to load it with a sequence of commands that it will then send to the device as if it were a keyboard.”
“…The Bash Bunny will start driving the device, and you can see that it is moving through a sequence of things on the screen. This is the USB device controlling it.
And it is going to go through and modify settings, as I describe in the report. It is going to then open a terminal, get superuser access, and take steps to install malicious software that is stored on that same USB device.
Now, the USB — the malicious software is a version of the ICX application that we have — we have extracted from the machine and slightly modified it to add some malicious functionality. And the Bash Bunny device is installing the malicious version of the application on the machine and replacing the version that regularly would function.”
All of this was done automatically. The “attacker” simply plugged in the USB device and it completed its installation and replacement of the software in less than two minutes. Once the Bash Bunny is programmed, there is no special skill required to initiate this attack.
The Bash Bunny costs about $100 and can be utilized without removing or tampering with any of the seals on the Dominion ICX BMD. As Dr. Halderman testified, an “attacker” can utilize a cable coming off the printer to connect the Bash Bunny rather than removing a seal and connecting it directly to the Dominion ICX BMD. That connection is not typically sealed, according to Dr. Halderman.
Part 3 of this series will follow.
During the testimony of Dr. Halderman, attorney David Oles was not permitted to ask any questions of Dr. Halderman. Oles represents co-plaintiff Ricardo Davis of VoterGA.org. Yesterday, The Gateway Pundit reported that Oles was able to get proffers submitted to the court regarding Dr. Halderman and Dr. Philip Stark’s testimonies.
The Culling vs. Raffensperger Lawsuit: Evidence of Voting Machine Vulnerabilities and Fulton County 2020 Election Issues Entered into the Federal Record | The Gateway Pundit | by Brian Lupo
The trial that includes this explosive testimony and live demonstration is currently underway in the Northern District of Georgia in Judge Amy Totenberg’s court.
The post Part 2: Full Scope of Dominion Voting Machine Hack in Federal Court is FAR Worse than Just the BIC Pen Hack – Audit Logs Can Be Edited appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
