G’day from Down Under @tedcruz. Thanks for your interest in the Territory. I’m the Chief Minister. Below are a few facts about COVID down here. https://t.co/cGFwBP7Nqx pic.twitter.com/mGNyOxlN41

— Michael Gunner (@fanniebay) October 18, 2021

There’s 3 steps to victory in 2022.

#1 Audit the 2020 election and prosecute voter fraud.

#2 Stop mass mail-in voting which leads to fraud.

#3 VOTE! Don’t sit at home and hand over the victory to Democrats. Flood the polls!

Republicans have to get serious, here’s why:

Cont’d

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) October 18, 2021

Thread continued: “I recently conducted a poll on Georgia’s elections and if my constituents felt their votes would count during a teletown hall. Sadly, 4% said they won’t even vote due to voter fraud. This is WRONG. Legal votes by Rs are just as important as stopping illegal ones. For example in GA’s 2018 election, Brian Kemp beat Stacey Abrams by 54,723 votes. 4% of Kemp’s total is 79,136 votes. If 4% of Republicans stayed home, Stacey Abrams would be governor. Combine that with mass absentee ballot harvesting and Rs never win again in Georgia.”

“The mass mail-in ballots have to stop. Otherwise, Stacey Abrams & Dems will use their orgs to harvest ballots based on new rules. This is not suppressing the vote. That’s purely Democrat deception. Even people on welfare are required to have an ID. Voters can too. That’s why it’s critical that Republican voters still vote. Voices online that are telling you not to vote are doing the Democrats’ dirty work. Stop listening to grifters telling you not to vote. We must root out the fraud, but we also have to VOTE. If we don’t vote, the Democrats win by default. It’s time to audit the 2020 election, prosecute the fraud, end mass mail-in ballots, and FLOOD THE POLLS in 2022.”

Have to love that unintentional shade thrown at Trump about “grifters” telling MAGAmericans not to vote. The unfaithful barbarian is also understating the problem with the 4% number she cites here, as the New York Times reported it was actually “5 percent of Republican voters said they would sit out the 2022 election if the state of Georgia did not conduct a forensic audit of the 2020 election” and another “4 percent said they would consider sitting out the election absent an audit”.

Notice how a wry grin comes across White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki’s face when Fox News reporter (and person who got through school because teachers could deal with his father during parent meetings) Peter Doocy starts talking.  She’s got the “Oh, it’s so cute that he keeps trying!” smile.

And listen to Doocy’s voice after Psaki addresses and quickly brushes aside his premise.  It goes up like Peter Brady after being told he’s grounded for pretending to be a college man to date a friend of Greg’s:  “But Mom!  You’re not listening to me!  Bu… bu… but….!”

“The federal judge overseeing the case into former Rep. Matt Gaetz associate, Joel Greenberg, has agreed to postpone Greenberg’s sentencing citing his ongoing cooperation in the investigation to March of 2022 as both Greenberg’s attorney and federal prosecutors requested. The investigation into whether Rep. Gaetz had sex with an underage girl continues, he has strenuously denied the allegations” reports NBC’s Tom Winter.

“Do not be like those who forgot Allah, so Ally made them forget themselves. Here they really went astray” wrote writes Turkish hacktivist group RootAyyildiz in their digital defacement of the action.donaldjtrump.com page of the former president’s campaign website, which is certainly an improvement over the violence-inciting extremist content formerly published there.

“The Inquirer is not currently referring to attempts by Pennsylvania Republicans to investigate the 2020 presidential election as an audit because there’s no indication it would follow the best practices or the common understanding of an audit among nonpartisan experts. When asked by The Inquirer, lawmakers leading the effort have not explained how it will actually be run, including whether and how best practices will be followed; who will be involved, including the extent to which Republican politicians will play a role; how the review will be documented; how election equipment and ballots, if obtained, would be secured; and what the scope of any review would be. Joe Biden won Pennsylvania by more than 80,000 votes. State and county audits affirmed the outcome, and there is no evidence of any significant fraud” says an aside from the Philadelphia Inquirer’s editors on a Monday article (and presumably others) about the “audit”.

National Zero opted for putting “audit” in quotation marks in most contexts related to ongoing efforts to contest the outcome of the 2020 election (among other ways of denigrating them, like “fraudit“), particularly the Cyber Ninjas clusterfuck in Maricopa County, Arizona, but cannot 100% guarantee every single article in which we referred to such attempts affirmatively did as such, particularly when we were using verbatim clips sourced from other publications’ articles.

Gun-totin’ Congresswoman Lauren Boebert (Q-Colo.) has made a habit of claiming God supports her political views.  Fox News hypocrite Laura Ingraham wears a cross around her neck as she spews vile lies about minorities and her political opponents.  Senator Ted Cruz (R-Quintana Roo) seemingly weekly calls on God to bless his allies and to strike down the efforts of people he doesn’t agree with.  Donald Trump used military and law enforcement to clear a group of peaceful protesters from in front of a church so he could get a photo op holding a Bible.

But quietly, First Lady Dr. Jill Biden has practiced her faith out of the limelight, as a Washington Post profile describes.  Dr. Biden spoke to the congregation of Baptist church in West Columbia, South Carolina about her journey in faith, particularly after struggling with the death of her stepson Beau.  She regained her religious practice thanks for a “prayer partner,” Robin Jackson, the wife of the pastor at Brookland Baptist Church whom Dr. Biden had never met prior to a visit to the church in 2019.

While both are devout, President and Dr. Biden do not hide their faith, but unlike most Republicans, they do not use their claimed belief in God as a cudgel to justify a wealth of poisons, like ignoring public health guidelines to protect their friends and neighbors from a pandemic or codifying misogyny to control women’s reproductive rights.  (Dr. Biden was raised by agnostic parents, but attended a Presbyterian church as a teenager.  It’s unknown if she ever converted to Catholicism, her husband’s faith.) 

“Republican lawmakers who control the Michigan Legislature say they ‘vehemently reject’ the plan for the battleground state to award its presidential electors to the winner of the national popular vote. Seventeen of the 20 Republicans in the state Senate and 40 of the 57 GOP lawmakers in the state House signed a letter last week. The legislators’ message, which is addressed to ‘Michigan voters,’ came after a ballot proposal committee announced a petition campaign that aims to have the state join the national popular vote compact. ‘It is imperative that the candidate who receives Michigan’s electoral votes is determined by Michiganders – and not by voters in other parts of the country. Simply put: Michigan’s votes for president must only be determined by Michigan’s voters. The voters of Michigan should not have their will determined by influences of other states. It would be a mistake to abandon a system so essential to our Republic.’ The letter labeled the national popular vote proposal ‘a disastrous idea’ that ‘should remain on the scrapheap of American history’ and would mean Michigan surrenders its ‘relevance’ as a swing state” the Detroit News reports.

These MAGA Republicans are right to be freaking the fuck out, as a petition drive in the state has a solid – if still far from certain – path to passage. If a statewide petition receives the minimum required amount of signatures (340,047 in this case as it’s a fixed percentage of the voting age population) it’s then handed to the state legislature. If it fails, which it will, given the GOP majorities in the state House and Senate, the measure is then put directly to voters in 2022.

NBC News:  “The Supreme Court ruled Monday that police officers in two cases should be shielded from lawsuits claiming their conduct killed one man and injured another.  The rulings, in cases from California and Oklahoma, are a further sign that the court is unwilling to second-guess police officers responding to emergency calls. Both cases resulted in brief, unsigned opinions with no noted dissents.

“In the Oklahoma case, a woman called 911 complaining that her ex-husband, Dominic Rollice, was in her garage, intoxicated, and would not leave. ‘It’s going to get ugly real quick,’ she said on the call.  After three officers responded, Rollice refused to leave the garage and grabbed a hammer. He raised it over his head and took a stance as it he was about throw it, according to court documents. Two of the officers fired their guns, killing him.

“In the California case, police from Union City responded to a 911 call from a 12-year-old girl who said her mother’s boyfriend, Ramon Cortesluna, was in the house with a chainsaw. The girl said she was barricaded in a room with her mother and sister, fearing that he intended to hurt them.  Police eventually ordered Cortesluna out of the house but noticed that he had a knife in his pants pocket. An officer put one knee on the left side of the man’s back, near the knife, for no more more than eight seconds, according to court documents.

The $16 billion Ford Foundations, one of the largest private endowments in the United States, announced Monday that it will fully divest its funds from fossil fuel companies, adding to the social and economic message that the United States is traveling to a clean energy future, the Associated Press reports.

The Ford Foundation joins the Harvard University endowment ($52 billion) fund and MacArthur Foundation ($7 billion) which announced last month their plans to disinvest in fossil fuel-related companies, including distributors, refineries and harvesters.

“As with any significant decision in a dynamic organization, this choice did not come without trade-offs,” Ford Foundation President Darren Walker said in a statement posted on the organization’s website.  “Although just 0.3% of the Ford Foundation’s endowment is directly invested in fossil fuel companies, we take our duties as fiduciaries seriously and we’re mindful that if we put restrictions on our investments, we may forsake some amount of return for future generations.”

https://twitter.com/RyanAFournier/status/1450123157906526209

Bloomberg: “Eswatini, Africa’s last absolute monarchy, shut schools indefinitely as pro-democracy protests intensified. Lessons are suspended with immediate effect, Prime Minister Cleopas Dlamini said in a statement. The unrest comes four months after police and the army acted to crush similar widespread demonstrations in the kingdom. The pro-democracy protests have escalated recently with pupils and public-transport workers joining the calls for change. King Mswati, 53, who’s ruled the South African neighbor for more than 35 years, has dismissed the demands and rights groups have accused his security forces of abuses, including killings and beatings.”

“‘Despite the violent crackdown that we saw in June-July, the young people of Eswatini have come back and are persistent about their demands,’ Dewa Mavhinga, southern Africa director for Human Rights Watch, said by phone from London. ‘This is an indicator that the king is in an increasingly weaker position because he has not been able to make the protests go away.’ Two members of parliament on the forefront of calls for democracy and who were arrested in July on terrorism charges are due to appear in court for a bail hearing on Tuesday, the Eswatini Observer reported.”

“The Justice Department said Monday that people ‘lionizing’ the Jan. 6 rioters are heightening the risk of future political violence. ‘Indeed, the risk of future violence is fueled by a segment of the population that seems intent on lionizing the January 6 rioters and treating them as political prisoners, heroes, or martyrs instead of what they are: criminals,’ Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Roman wrote in a court filing, ‘many of whom committed extremely serious crimes of violence, and all of whom attacked the democratic values which all of us should share.’ The statement came as part of a 28-page argument supporting the pretrial detention of Cody Mattice, a defendant charged with ripping down metal barricades and assaulting police during the attack on the Capitol.”

“It’s an indirect broadside at Republicans who have sought to whitewash the violence committed by supporters of former President Donald Trump during the assault on the Capitol. Trump himself has argued alternately that his supporters were ‘hugging and kissing’ police – rather than committing the approximately 1,000 assaults prosecutors say occurred – and has baselessly claimed that left-wing agitators caused the violence. Trump has taken up the cause of Ashli Babbitt, the Jan. 6 rioter shot dead by a Capitol Police officer as she sought to breach the House chamber. And other Republicans in Congress have embraced claims that the Jan. 6 defendants are ‘political prisoners,’ arguing without evidence that the Justice Department has treated them harshly because of their politics, rather than their conduct” – Politico.

Definitely not a shithole country… https://t.co/C31HB3LzfU

— Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) October 18, 2021

Totally dunked on them, right? Millions of Haitians definitely saw this tweet and said to each other “Wow, we got shaded so badly by sex god Congressman Matt Gaetz. Damn. He really showed us.”

“Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has supported exhaustive audits of the 2020 results to look for evidence of voting irregularities that repeated reviews have failed to produce. Still, she has told colleagues that she was surprised by a recent survey of Republican voters in her district, according to one person who spoke with her about it” the New York Times reports.

“The internal survey found that 5 percent of Republican voters said they would sit out the 2022 election if the state of Georgia did not conduct a forensic audit of the 2020 election – a demand that some of Mr. Trump’s hard-core supporters have made. Another 4 percent said they would consider sitting out the election absent an audit. The possibility that nearly 10 percent of Republicans could sit out any election – even one in a solidly red district like the one held by Ms. Taylor Greene – was something Republican strategists said they found alarming.”

“A Miami school that made headlines for saying it would penalize teachers who got the COVID-19 vaccine is now requiring students who get vaccinated to remain home for 30 days after each dose. Parents of students at the Centner Academy recently received a letter from its Chief Operating Officer that read in part, ‘…if you are considering the vaccine for your Centner Academy student(s), we ask that you hold off until the Summer when there will be time for the potential transmission or shedding onto others to decrease.’ The letter also spelled out a quarantine rule for parents who still choose to vaccinate their children. ‘Because of the potential impact on other students and our school community, vaccinated students will need to stay at home for 30 days post-vaccination for each dose and booster they receive and may return to school after 30 days as long as the student is healthy and symptom-free.’ Centner Academy first made headlines in April when the school’s owners told their staff to hold off on getting vaccinated.”

“‘We’re not telling teachers that they can’t get [the vaccine], we’re just simply asking that they hold off a little bit,’ said Joshua Hills, a parent and Centner Academy employee, back in April. The school owners said the reasoning was over concerns on side effects and fears that those who get the shot will infect those who don’t get it. ‘What happens 30 days after they get vaccinated? What kind of nonsense is this?’ said Dr. Aileen Marty, an infectious disease expert at Florida International University. ‘Where did they get that? There’s nothing in the recommendations to that… they made that up. That’s science fiction, not even science fiction because it’s pure fiction'” – WSVN.

IGN: “While Dune was originally set to be released on HBO Max on October 22, the film will now release one day earlier on October 21 to match the Thursday night theatrical screenings. As with many films, the first showings for a Friday release date usually begin the Thursday night before, and now HBO Max subscribers will get to see Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel beginning on October 21 at 3pm PT/6pm ET.”

“General Colin L. Powell, former U.S. Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, passed away this morning due to complications from Covid 19. He was fully vaccinated. We want to thank the medical staff at Walter Reed National Medical Center for their caring treatment. We have lost a remarkable and loving husband, father, grandfather and a great American” says a post from Powell’s family on his Facebook page.

David Graham, The Atlantic: “One of my favorite things about covering political rallies is that they typically start with a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. For anyone above school age, occasions to recite the pledge with a large group of people are irregular, and the ritual serves as a good reminder of what politics is about at its best, no matter how divisive what follows might be. The pledge at a rally for the Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin in Virginia on Wednesday was different. At the beginning of the event, which Steve Bannon hosted and Donald Trump phoned into, an emcee called an attendee up onstage and announced, ‘She’s carrying an American flag that was carried at the peaceful rally with Donald J. Trump on January 6.'”

“Attendees then said the pledge while facing the flag. (Youngkin didn’t attend, and later tepidly criticized the moment.) In the immediate aftermath of the failed January 6 insurrection, Trump flailed in his efforts to interpret the day’s events. He praised the participants even as the riot was ongoing, saying, ‘Go home; we love you.’ He insisted (despite ample video footage) that what had happened was a peaceful protest – some demonstrators were pacific, while many others were not – though he has also falsely claimed that antifa and Black Lives Matter had instigated a riot. He praised the protesters for courageously fighting back against what he insists, again falsely, was a stolen election, but also criticized police for using excessive force. Out of this murk, a unified mythology has begun to form. Trump hasn’t so much resolved the contradictions as transcended them. To him and his movement, January 6 was a righteous attempt by brave patriots to take back an election stolen from them. The day’s events produced a martyr – Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force veteran shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer as she tried to enter the Speaker’s Lobby of the House. The rioters who remain imprisoned, meanwhile, are ‘political prisoners.’ Now objects carried that day have become sacred too.”

Associated Press:  “China’s economic growth sank in the latest quarter as a slowdown in construction and curbs on energy use weighed on its recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.  The world’s second-largest economy grew by 4.9% over a year ago in the three months ending in September, down from the previous quarter’s 7.9%, government data showed Monday.

“Factory production, retail sales and investment in construction and other fixed assets all weakened.  Construction, an industry that supports millions of jobs, has slowed since regulators tightened control last year over borrowing by developers.  One of the biggest, Evergrande Group, is struggling to avoid defaulting on billions of dollars owed to bondholders. That has fueled fears about the health of other developers, though economists say the threat to global financial markets is small.

“Manufacturing also was hampered in September by power cuts imposed by some major provinces to avoid exceeding official efficiency goals.  Private sector forecasters have cut their growth outlook this for China, though they still expect about 8%, which would be among the world’s strongest.”