Brian Sussman

Trump’s Tweet Claims Voter Fraud in California: Is He Correct?

President Donald Trump re-tweeted troubling statistics today about the voter fraud in California and, predictably, the left is calling him a liar.

But the truth is on his side.

In January, California and Los Angeles County agreed to purge as many as 1.5 million inactive voter registrations across the state as part of a court settlement finalized with Judicial Watch, a political watchdog.

Judicial Watch sued the county and state voter-registration agencies, arguing that the California government was not complying with a federal law requiring the removal of inactive registrations that remain after two general elections, or two to four years.

Inactive voter registrations, for the most part, occur when voters move to another country or state or pass away but remain on the rolls. The lawsuit alleged that Los Angeles County, with its more than 10 million residents, has more voter registrations than it has citizens old enough to register with a registration rate of 112 percent of its adult citizen population.

The entire state of California had a registration rate of 101 percent of age-eligible citizens.

These ineligible voters continue to receive mail-in ballots which can easily be used to cast illegal votes by family, friends, neighbors, etc.

This is why Trump tweeted that it’s no wonder California is a “blue state.”

Judicial Watch said the California settlement would “clean up election rolls in Los Angeles County and California—and set a nationwide precedent to ensure that states take reasonable steps to ensure that dead and other ineligible voters are removed from the rolls.”

Secretary of State Alex Padilla tried to assure California voters that it would not lead to “unnecessary removal of active and eligible voters.”

“Safeguards remain in place to ensure voter-list maintenance procedures are followed before canceling any voter registration records,” Padilla said in a statement.

Padilla also hailed California as a leader in implementing election reforms to improve voter “participation.”

California Department of Motor Vehicle’s new process of automatically registering people to vote when they get a drivers license, which began in late April of last year, was credited with boosting voter registration and turnout to historic highs.

That so-called motor-voter law also raised still-unanswered questions about the number of illegal immigrants and other non-citizens who may be voting.  California officials still cannot say whether non-citizens voted in the last election, the Sacramento Bee reported .

In January, Padilla confirmed for the first time that his office is actively investigating whether illegal immigrants and other non-citizens voted last year because the DMV erroneously registered them to vote.

Bloated and inaccurate voter registration rolls make it more difficult for the democratic process to work—hampering political groups in their efforts to send targeted mailings and pursue get-out-the-vote efforts.

Such flimsy voter rolls also are keeping California democrat blue.

The Dangers of the Proposed Red Flag Laws

Gun control may be coming to a legislature near you.

In the wake of the recent mass shootings, elected officials on both sides of the political aisle are rallying around “red flag” legislation.

Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs), informally known as red flag laws, are gaining traction in legislatures nationwide. Red flag laws are presented as a common-sense proposal to disarm people who allegedly present a danger to themselves or others around them.

Political leaders assure gun owners red flag laws won’t trample over their Second Amendment rights and are a middle ground solution. But the devil is in the details.  After examining Colorado’s recent ERPO (which appears to be similar to the red flag laws in the handful of states that have passed such laws) I’ve discovered:

  • Almost anyone can request an ERPO without even showing their face or providing their address.
  • The initial report and hearing can be done over the phone, all while the accused is completely oblivious proceedings are taking place to have his or her firearms confiscated. There is no due process at this first hearing – which is the hearing where permission is given to confiscate gun.
  • The first time the accused learns someone has reported them will be when local law enforcement shows up at their door with an order and a search warrant prepared to raid their home.
  • The first time the accused has a chance to defend themselves is two weeks later.  At that point, the burden of proof falls on the accused, not on the petitioner (who can actually provide affidavits rather than appear in court).
  • If the accused is unable to prove themselves innocent, the confiscated firearms will be held for 364 days, during which time the accused only has only a single opportunity to ask the court to lift the order.
  • There is zero accountability for false accusers.
  • This law can easily be used by someone’s stalker or thief to have their victim disarmed.
  • The ERPO will remain on a person’s permanent record even if dismissed.

 

It’s time to recycle our recycling programs and rethink our landfill biases

Recycling centers in California are shutting down.  More than one-fifth of the recycling centers in the state have closed in the past year.  The same thing is happening all over the country.

So what’s causing the closures?

In a nutshell, the biggest buyer of recycling material has been (for decades) China.  China doesn’t want or need our aluminum, plastic bottles, glass, or heavy plastics (PET) anymore. Part of it is they’ve got more than they need; the other part is the process of recycling is a major source of air pollution. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, about 66 million tons of materials are recycled in the US annually, and almost one-third of these materials typically get exported.  For the past three decades, almost half of the entire world’s used plastic has been sent to China.

Interesting isn’t it?  Environmental do-gooders in the USA have cut deals to sell our recyclables to China so we can feel good about recycling over here, while in the meantime the recycled materials cause pollution over there (which in turn supposedly changes the climate for all of us).

In 2017, it announced it would no longer be the “world’s garbage dump,” as the New York Times reported. put it.

Truth is, recycling is expensive and time-consuming. It requires a tremendous amount of water and energy, in addition to money and effort to build the proper infrastructure to do it properly. Also, due to the falling costs of oil prices, virgin plastic (made from oil) is actually cheaper to make than using recycled materials.

In the early ’90s, China saw a monetary opportunity to use its cheap labor. The country began buying recycled plastic, then had small factories in China use the scraps to create inexpensive, plastic exports like shoes, bottles, hoses, and gadgets. The US used to send 4,000 shipping containers of recycled goods to China a day.  As of 2016, China was importing 40 million metric tons of recycled goods annually, according to the United Nations.

But the Chinese government has recently has been steering the country away from low-value economic sectors like waste and is focusing more on higher-earning industries like tech. In the process of becoming the center of everyone else’s trash, the country has also been exposed to mercury, lead, and other dangerous substances contributing to pollution. Since January 2018, China has banned the import of most plastic and papers. It also tightened its restrictions on accepting other materials, like scrap metal. This ban has forced some of the world’s biggest companies to rethink plastic. Corporations including Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Nestlé, and PepsiCo have started using reusable packaging. The European Unionplans on placing a tax for plastic bags and packaging as a response to the Chinese ban, and grocery chains like Trader Joe’s are trying to minimize plastic usage.

As a result, more than 450 recycling centers in California have closed and more are expected to shut down in the coming year. The same thing is happening across the country.

By the way, it’s estimated that 44-percent of the junk we place in the recycling bin is unable to be recycled.  Soiled and greasy materials, plastic wrapping material, and plastic and glass that have contained hazardous fluids of all sorts are not recyclable.

California is one of 10 states that have recycling centers or redemption centers. When consumers buy beverages, they’re charged a five or ten-cent deposit. To recoup that deposit, consumers can return their empty bottles and cans to a recycling center. Activists in California are now concerned about the poor and homeless who roam streets and rummage through dumpsters looking for beverage containers which they can redeem at the centers.  California’s government is ridiculously considering creating a taxpayer-funded subsidy to keep these recycling centers afloat.

We are not running out of landfill space

Today, 1,654 landfills in 48 states take care of 54 percent of all the solid waste in the country. One-third of them are privately owned. Landfills are no longer a threat to the environment or public health.  State-of-the-art landfills, with redundant clay, impermeable liners, and leachate collection systems, have now replaced all of our previously unsafe dumps.

More and more landfills are producing pipeline-quality natural gas. Waste Management and other companies have turned waste sites into energy facilities. The new plants capture methane gas from decomposing landfill waste, which is then sold to local energy companies to create electricity for hundreds of thousands of homes.

Holding all of America’s garbage for the next one hundred years would require a space only 255 feet high or deep and 10 miles on each side.  Some of America’s finest urban parks, amphitheaters and golf courses rest atop former landfills.

We are not running out of landfill space.

Global Warming Alarmist Becomes Skeptic

Proving there are scientists, even award-winning ones, who dispute the idea of catastrophic global warming, check out this one.

Former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientist Dr. Rex Fleming is one of them.  He recently crossed the line from global warming alarmism to skepticism.

Even though Fleming holds  a Ph.D. in atmospheric science, his work has been banned by major scientific groups.  He is the author of The Rise and Fall of the Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change.  Fleming blows the whistle on manipulation of data within NOAA, and accuses a few individuals of “fiddling” with ocean and atmospheric data under the Obama Administration.

According to Fleming, the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, refuse to publish scientific papers from scientists (like him) it considers “deniers.” So he had to travel to Europe to have his 2018 paper on climate change peer-reviewed and published.

In a story published by Newsbusters, Fleming suggested the reason more scientists aren’t shifting away from anthropogenic global warming theory (AGW) is that they’re “in this groove of getting funds for huge, bigger computer systems to run these massive climate models. And they want their salaries to increase. They don’t want to change.”

“It’s been a wonderful gravy train” for scientists since the 1970s, Fleming added.

Fleming also criticized alarmists for targeting the fossil fuel industry for several reasons. He said one political reason was to push socialism.

“They’re using a calamity as a measure to get people’s attention,” he said. “So the climate is a good one to use. Because the media and scientists have wrongly, without any proof, have assumed this is the problem.”

The Truth About Baltimore and other Democratic-Run Cities: this week on the Hidden Headlines Podcast

Last weekend President Donald Trump called out iconic African-American Congressman Elijah Cummings for his failure to to anything about the poverty, crime, and rat-infested city of Baltimore.

For his actions Trump was predictably called a racist.

In this episode of Hidden Headlines I share the statistics that proves Baltimore is a “hole” created by “demo-rat” politicians (just like so many other big cities run top-to-bottom by members of the Democratic Party).

(illustration from the Washington Times)

Some of those stats include:

  • Baltimore is Top-10 in terms of rat infestation
  • Baltimore is Top-5 in murder
  • One-third of Baltimore high schools do not have ONE student proficient in math

You can listen to Hidden Headlines at iTunes, GooglePlay, Spotify, Soundcloud, or right HERE.