This story is interesting to me because the only reason that we're hearing about Santos lying -- is because he ran as a Republican.

Of course you could say, "Well, this guy is a politician, and all politicians lie." While this is true, it's important to realize that all people lie. The difference is what people lie about, and to whom.

However; I think that this particular incident might be a little different. I think it's possible that Santos is doing this on purpose. I know what you're thinking, "Is OGRE nuts?" I'm just wondering if this guy is doing this to prove a point. Or, should I say, I hope he's doing this to prove a point. It might be Master Level trolling. He can't be brought up on charges for lying, if that were the case nearly all of congress would be behind bars.

Let's dive a little into what Santos has lied about, or at least what he's lied about and been caught.

Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) grilled embattled Rep.-elect George Santos (R-NY) about why he fabricated his resume and background, questioning whether the New York Republican “had no shame” while hosting Tucker Carlson Tonight on Tuesday.

Santos has come under fire from members on both sides of the aisle for falsifying information about his education, work history, and family history, with a string of Democratic lawmakers calling for him to step down and one of his GOP colleagues pushing for the House Ethics Committee to launch an investigation into potential violations.

“The thing is, congressman-elect, integrity means, yes, carrying yourself with honor, but it means telling the truth, being a person of integrity, and if I were one of those in New York's third district right now, now that the election is over and and finding out all of these lies that you've told, not just one little lie or one little embellishment, these are blatant lies,” the former Democratic congresswoman, who left the party earlier this year, said.

Santos has lied about the exact things that Joe Biden has lied about. That's the only reason that I think that Santos might be doing this on purpose. The media will never cover the lies that Biden has spouted over the years -- which are too many to keep track of, but they might be forced into it if Santos keeps bringing it up.

Santos attempted to pivot the conversation, alleging that President Joe Biden has “been lying to the American people for 40 years,” before Gabbard clapped back and said it was not a party issue, pressing him on his claims on the campaign trail that he was “a proud American Jew,” which he later walked back, telling the New York Post he is a practicing Catholic, but because of his family's background, identifies as “Jew-ish.”

“I've always identified as Jewish, I was raised in practicing Catholic, I think I've gone through this. Even not being raised a practicing Jew I've always joked with friends and circles, even within the campaign I say, ‘Guys, I'm Jew-ish,” he responded.

Gabbard closed out the interview alleging that Santos has not admitted “the depth of your deception” to his constituents, adding that she found it “hard to imagine how they could possibly trust your explanations.”

One thing is obvious. This guy really triggers Tulsi Gabbard! I'm just not sure why. We know he's lying, he admitted it, but that can't be the only reason that she's excessively worried about it. He mentioned Joe Biden and his lies, and Gabbard refused to go there. I found that a little odd. I know that pointing out Biden's lies would seem like beating a dead horse, but most people who weren't following politics in 1987 wouldn't know about the things Biden has lied about, or the staggering frequency. There's a large part of the voting population that has no idea about Biden being called out by the media in 1987.

Take a look:

As you can see, Biden created quite a few problems for himself in the 80s. But it's amazing how quickly people forget, or in this case, video is suppressed and hidden. This video was on YouTube for years, but was pulled when Biden was running for office.

The first part of an old news report highlights how Biden appeared to use the exact words of Neil Kinnock, a British Labour Party leader.

Comparing the speeches, it is tough to imagine that these two men had the exact same thoughts.

And since Kinnock made his speech before Biden made his, there is no way the Labour Party leader was the plagiarizer.

In fact, Biden admits to using Kinnock’s words in a later clip included in the video.

Later in King’s clip, Biden admits to plagiarizing five pages from someone else when he was in law school without accreditation.

And in the last clip of the video, the former VP claims that he went “to law school on a full academic scholarship,” “ended up in the top half my class” and was the “outstanding student” in the political science department. He also claimed to have graduated with three degrees.

The entire thing was a lie, as he later admitted he did not graduate in the top half of his class, was not named outstanding student and did not attain three degrees.

He went to school on a half scholarship, graduated near the bottom of his class (ranking 76 out of 85) and got only one degree, newscasters relate in the clip.

But that didn't stop Joe Biden did it. He's president now, and he lied about more issues than Santos. I guess it's just who you know.

Santos might be a fruitcake, or just doing what's necessary to get elected, I don't know for sure. But what's the difference really? How many "honest" politicians are elected anywhere? How many of those politicians have held true to the promises they made to the people who elected them? Isn't it just as big of a lie to make promises to voters, and never follow through?

But, some good might come of this. If Santos lies his way into office, and actually does what he says he's going to do, what then?

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Schumer says he expects omnibus to include electoral count overhaul.

Speaking on the Senate floor, Schumer gave the clearest indication yet that the bill known as the Electoral Count Reform Act will be tacked on to the annual spending bill that lawmakers are rushing to finalize ahead of the holiday break.

“I expect an omnibus will contain priorities both sides want to see passed into law, including more funding for Ukraine and the Electoral Count Act, which my colleagues in the Rules Committee have done great work on,” the New York Democrat said.

The bill is one of the most substantial legislative reactions to the ransacking of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Citing ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act of 1887, some of Trump’s backers argued that objections to the electoral vote count that day would have allowed Vice President Mike Pence to set aside some states’ results. Trump seized on those theories, urging backers to rally in Washington the morning of the count. They then stormed the Capitol.

The legislation would clarify that the vice president’s role in counting electoral votes is purely ceremonial, and that he does not have the discretion to set aside any state’s properly certified votes. It would also raise the threshold to hear objections to a state’s electors from just one member in each chamber to 20 percent of Congress.

But there is precedent for not certifying all states' results. As an example, Mark Levin said something to the effect of, "What if it was found that one state manipulated the vote to disenfranchise black voters. Would Pence still certify the election?" His point being that the vice president's job is not just to simply rubber stamp the results of every step, that's why congress gets together for the certification process to begin with. To assume otherwise is disingenuous. Not to mention this has happened before.

Supreme Court Considers Case Seeking to Overturn 2020 Presidential Election.

Supreme Court Justices may well see these approaching storm clouds and conclude that the Court’s intervention is necessary to prevent larger civil unrest resulting from constitutional violations that are undermining public trust and confidence in the outcomes of both the 2020 and 2022 elections. When criminals break the law — state and federal statutes — to rig an election, we are dependent on prosecutions by law enforcement agencies that have sadly become politicized and complicit. When they break the Constitution — the supreme law of the land — to rig an election, the only recourse may be the Supreme Court or military tribunals.

As the Brunson lawsuit argues, all of Congress was put on notice prior to its January 6th vote by more than a hundred of its own members detailing serious allegations of election frauds and calling for creation of an electoral commission to investigate the allegations.

When the results of the 1876 presidential election were in doubt, Congress created a special Electoral Commission made up of five House members, five Senators, and five Supreme Court Justices to investigate. In contrast, in early 2021 Congress had nearly two weeks to investigate before the January 20th date of the Presidential Inauguration. Had Congress waited even just one more day to January 7th, they would have received the long-awaited ODNI report reflecting a split in the Intelligence Community and the DNI’s own conclusion that the People’s Republic of China had interfered to influence the outcome of the presidential election. As Dr. Barry A. Zulauf, the Analytic Ombudsman for the Intelligence Community, concluded at the time, the Intelligence Community shamefully delayed their findings until after the January 6th Electoral College certification by Congress because of their political disagreements with the Trump administration. This paints a picture of collusion and conspiracy involving members of Congress and U.S. intelligence agencies to coverup evidence of foreign election interference and constituting the crime of High Treason.

The Brunson lawsuit does not claim the election was stolen, merely that a large majority of Congress, by failing to investigate such serious allegations of election rigging and breaches of national security, violated their Oaths to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic – an Oath also taken by Supreme Court Justices and members of the U.S. military.

The fact that the Brunson case has made it to the Court’s docket suggests profound concerns about a lawless January 6th Congressional committee, politicized federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and major constitutional violations intended to overthrow an elected government by manipulating the outcome of the presidential election.

While the Brunson case is on the Court's docket, the Uni-Party is moving to make what happened in 2020, where they abdicated their duty -- the law. The question then becomes, how will the court handle the Brunson case, after congress votes to abdicates their constitutional duty? It would be a hard sell to see them hold congress accountable after they have changed the law. They would have to hold them to account for the duties they didn't perform, before the law change.

This move guarantees that future election meddling and fraud will have even fewer backstops.

-- UPDATE --

Congress passes election reform designed to ward off another Jan. 6

Lawmakers have said over and over that they want to prevent another Jan. 6-style attack on the U.S. Capitol from ever happening again.

It took almost two years, but on Friday, as part of a government spending package, Congress passed the first federal elections legislation to that aim.

The omnibus spending bill includes a section that would reform the Electoral Count Act, a 1887 law that governs the counting of Electoral College votes in Congress.

For years, legal scholars have worried the law was poorly written and in need of clarification, and former President Donald Trump and his allies targeted the law's ambiguities in their attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

In the time after voting ended in 2020 and results were certified, Trump and his team argued that then-Vice President Mike Pence had the power to interfere with the counting of electoral votes because the law as it currently stands names the vice president as the presiding officer over the joint session of Congress where those votes are counted.

They passed it, making the job of the Vice President meaningless. There was a reason it was written the way it was, and there's historical evidence that it was used in that capacity before.

Leftists don't want any more impediments to their installed candidates.

What do you think?

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As they say, "It always starts small." As was the case with vaccine passports, they were just a consideration last I heard. However, the idea of a healthcare passport system has grown quite substantially -- outside of public view, with the help of Western Media, and their lack of coverage. This will become one of the largest government power grabs in the history of human-kind. But for some reason, it's not news worthy?

I wrote about this before. In 2020, they were just "possibly" exploring a vaccine passport system. But it was always the case that they were going to require people to show proof of vaccination at some point, and they did in many countries. They were spending large sums of money on it already, and the usual suspects were involved. On the one hand, world leaders are telling people, "No, we're not looking into making a digital vaccine passport system." On the other hand they are spending money on the development -- of a digital vaccine passport system. Nothing to see here.

The Common Trust Network, an initiative by Geneva-based nonprofit The Commons Project and the World Economic Forum, has partnered with several airlines including Cathay Pacific, JetBlue, Lufthansa, Swiss Airlines, United Airlines and Virgin Atlantic, as well as hundreds of health systems across the United States and the government of Aruba.

The CommonPass app created by the group allows users to upload medical data such as a Covid-19 test result or, eventually, a proof of vaccination by a hospital or medical professional, generating a health certificate or pass in the form of a QR code that can be shown to authorities without revealing sensitive information. For travel, the app lists health pass requirements at the points of departure and arrival based on your itinerary.

“You can be tested every time you cross a border. You cannot be vaccinated every time you cross a border,” Thomas Crampton, chief marketing and communications officer for The Commons Project, told CNN Business. He stressed the need for a simple and easily transferable set of credentials, or a “digital yellow card,” referring to the paper document generally issued as proof of vaccination.

It’s also unclear how effective the vaccines are in stopping the transmission of the virus, says Dr. Julie Parsonnet, an infectious disease specialist at Stanford University. So while a vaccine passport app will show that you’ve received the shot, it may not be a guarantee that you safely attend an event or get on a flight.

“We still don’t know if vaccinated people can transmit infection or not,” she told CNN Business. “Until that is clarified, we won’t know whether ‘passports’ will be effective.”

We now know that the vaccines don't stop infection, or the spread of COVID-19. So, the entire basis for the digital passport system is illegitimate. But that hasn't stopped members of the G20 from pushing it anyway.

The leaders from 20 countries at the recent G20 Summit signed a declaration which states they agree to adopt vaccine passports to “facilitate” all international travel.

The current membership of the G20 accounts for more than 66 percent of the world’s population and includes Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, India, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, and European Union.

The two-day summit concluded in Bali, Indonesia yesterday and consisted of talks between the G20 member countries. Klaus Schwab, World Economic Forum (WEF) Chair, also attended.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Technology Review states, “This new social order will seem unthinkable to most people in so-called free countries. But any change can quickly become normal if people accept it. The new normal will be that we are used to the idea that in some cases being able to move around freely is dependent on us being able to show that we're healthy. There will be a greater acceptance, I think, of that kind of public health monitoring.”

Seriously, who says things like, "This new social order...?" How are people not to expect something is up? I thought all of the World Economic Forum, Great Reset, New World Order stuff was a "conspiracy theory." Someone better get a handle on those conspiracy nuts over at MIT!

Vaccine status is not an indicator of overall health. As was pointed out above by Dr. Julie Parsonnet. So, what is the real reason behind this? Why have people show proof of compliance, if that proof doesn't indicate health status?

It's pretty simple really, CONTROL. The people who are pushing these systems will be the same people who will limit one's movement based on compliance, or lack there of, with some government mandated vaccine schedule. It's naïve to believe that any of this is health related. Health was the excuse used to get this tracking system in place, and it's only loosely connected at that.

No government gains new powers, only to give them back. There's no doubt that this system will be used to limit the movement of people based on whether or not they are following government directives. Once in place, it will balloon into a social credit system (like China is toying around with) because health was never truly the goal for this system.

What do you think?

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Twitter is being treated like some kind of sacred historical archive -- now that Elon Musk has purchased it. Before that Twitter was just Twitter. People posting videos, chatting, arguing, but nothing of significant "need." But that has all changed. The terrifying thought that Twitter could just go poof is now an issue.

This MIT Technology Review article explains how dire the world's circumstances might be if Twitter were to go down.

Almost from the time the first tweet was posted in 2006, Twitter has played an important role in world events. The platform has been used to record everything from the Arab Spring to the ongoing war in Ukraine. It's also captured our public conversations for years.

But experts are worried that if Elon Musk tanks the company, these rich seams of media and conversation could be lost forever. Given his admission to employees in a November 10 call that Twitter could face bankruptcy, it’s a real and present risk.

It’s not just OSINT researchers who are worried. US public agencies’ concern about the loss of their verified status highlights the fact that lots of official statements by governments and public bodies are now made on Twitter first. “There’s no indication that those formal records of government agencies have ever been archived, or indeed how they’d go about doing that,” says Kilbride.

Thomas doesn’t have a good solution to the problem, and as with much of Twitter at present, the outlook isn’t exactly rosy, she says. “We're going to lose such a lot of digital history if Twitter goes kaput without warning.”

A few things to consider. Is published "news" no longer considered a historical record? It's not like all of these world events happened, and were only recorded on Twitter. Another thing to consider, US public agencies release information on government web pages, and this is documented as a matter of law. Twitter is not "responsible" for a history of US government agency announcements.

However, the idea that some things could be lost might benefit some. Consider the man-made disasters that were perpetuated during the whole COVID-19 lockdown. I would be willing to bet that there are a lot of high profile people, who want what was done, and what was done to people to be forgotten. How convenient if Twitter "just happened to go down."

The only reason I say this, is because I have read a few articles claiming that Twitter is going to crash and soon. And it seems more likely than not -- by design.

Whether it’s manual RTs [Retweets] appearing for a moment before retweets slowly morph into their standard form, ghostly follower counts that race ahead of the number of people actually following you, or replies that simply refuse to load, small bugs are appearing at Twitter’s periphery. Even Twitter’s rules, which Musk linked to on November 7, went offline temporarily under the load of millions of eyeballs. In short, it’s becoming unreliable.

“Sometimes you’ll get notifications that are a little off,” says one engineer currently working at Twitter, who’s concerned about the way the platform is reacting after vast swathes of his colleagues who were previously employed to keep the site running smoothly were fired. (That last sentence is why the engineer has been granted anonymity to talk for this story.) After struggling with downtime during its “Fail Whale” days, Twitter eventually became lauded for its team of site reliability engineers, or SREs. Yet this team has been decimated in the aftermath of Musk’s takeover. “It’s small things, at the moment, but they do really add up as far as the perception of stability,” says the engineer.

It’s happening at the same time that the first cracks in Twitter’s edifice are starting to show. It’s just the beginning, expects Krueger. “I would expect to start seeing significant public-facing problems with the technology within six months,” he says. “And I feel like that’s a generous estimate.”

This sounds like a coordinated effort. It looks like "Job Security Programming." These engineers weren't trying to automate the tasks required to keep the site running smoothly, they were doing vast amounts of work manually -- on purpose. This granted them leverage over leadership throughout the company, and helped to maintain the status quo. While in and of itself that's not a "bad" thing, it does mean that the backbone for the system was shotty, and people were incentivized to not fix it.

Twitter was never maintained in a way that reflected much thought into the longevity of data storage. Without 3rd party tools, trying to find past posts was not exactly the easiest thing to do. There was little thought put into making searches a user friendly experience. Just the constant barrage of data.

If Twitter does crash, there stands to be a lot of people who will be enormously happy, because their past indiscretions will be wiped off the Internet, almost permanently. When screenshots of their Tweets are shown, they have plausible deniability. I think that the powers that be want Twitter to go down for two main reasons.

(1.) Perpetrators of lockdowns and vaccine mandates, want to make sure that the recorded history of their actions during the whole COVID-19 era are forgotten. Remember the stories about a COVID Amnesty? They know that they are not getting that, but erasing large swaths of history online would help.

(2.) Musk is turning Twitter into a more free space, and one that is not ideologically controlled. Twitter was great, for the left, because it was a tool for social engineering. Now that Twitter is not steered so "rightly" by those who consider themselves ideologically superior -- Twitter has to go! After all, there are far too many powerful people who want recent history to "go away" sooner rather than later.

I suspect that Twitter will have some kind of "massive outage" and be reborn as a new platform. Elon Musk has stated that he wants to make Twitter into a one stop shop for "everything." It's doubtful that Twitter could be easily adapted into Musk's "X" platform, it would make more sense to start over.

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News papers are a thing of the past. Many once "printed" news publications have mostly transitioned to the internet to sell their content. These news outlets are putting up paywalls in an attempt to stay afloat. Such as:

• New York Times
• Washington Post
• Huffington Post
• Bloomberg
• Financial Times
• Wired

Just to name a few.

While it seems like paywalls might bring in lots of revenue, they're not. Many of these leftist news publications are bleeding money fast. With decreased views, there are few options.

This has become a point of contention for many on the left.

Paywalls (and their tendency to depress the spread of credible sources on social media, in turn creating an information landscape tailor-made to amplify less credible sources) became a large topic of discussion during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when disinformation was moving at breakneck speeds. A year into the pandemic, Columbia Journalism Review’s “What the pandemic means for paywalls” examined the state of access to credible news:

A year [before March 2021], major publications across the United States partially or completely lowered their paywalls. The idea was that information about the outbreak of covid-19 had life-saving potential, and so it should be available to everyone, not just to subscribers—a fraction of news readers who tend to be the wealthiest and most highly-educated. Lowering paywalls was ethically sound. But it now raises important questions for media outlets: How long can they afford to keep their journalism free? And how will they determine which reporting is “essential” to the public?

[…]

That seemed to happen for The Atlantic, which received early praise for removing its paywall on coronavirus stories … as the months went by, the coronavirus proved not to have been the only subject requiring intense service-journalism: police brutality, Black Lives Matter protests, and the presidential election all carried life-or-death stakes … recently, even pandemic stories have been paywalled; a recent visit to The Atlantic showed that some articles were free, others not.

Like the 2019 tweet, CJR observed that access to news was often skewed to favor partisan outlets and sources:

Only conservative news is "partisan?"

The willingness to remove barriers may cast doubt on the common presumption that paywalls are an unfortunate necessity in journalism, an essential public good that is expensive to produce. And paywalls do not affect all readers the same way. As Current Affairs pointed out last August [2020], “The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free”; many left-leaning publications that thoroughly research and fact-check their articles paywall their journalism, while right-wing media disseminates conspiracies and racism to anyone who’ll click. Only about sixteen percent of news-readers in the United States pay for subscriptions, which means that everyone else is locked out of knowledge, and likely to encounter a disproportionate amount of far-right fodder, often strewn with misinformation.

This above highlights show exactly why their viewership has decreased. Journalism is not to "determine which reporting is “essential” to the public." That's controlling a narrative, not journalism.

Similarly, the left never names these "right wing news publications" they claim are racist. Naming which sites are "racist" would spark debate, and prove the accusation wrong.

Then there's the issue of "Fact Checking." Fact checking is a word game. It involves carefully reframing an issue, to make the narrative seem legitimate. Fact checkers NEVER tell the whole story. If they did, they would be out of business.

Fact checkers often label stories as "False" based on an arbitrary value. For example, an article might claim that Jeffrey Dahmer killed MANY people over a period of years. A fact checker would say, "False, Jeffrey Dahmer killed 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991." The initial statement is true, Dahmer did kill many people over a period of years. However the "Fact Check" is designed to keep people from reading further. They are hoping that all the reader will see is "FALSE." It's a game. And it's not about facts. Fact checkers are there to frame reality, and sway public opinion, not provide facts.

I look at this paywall issue as a great thing. It means that the leftist propaganda news outlets have fewer readers and less influence on public opinion. More people are drifting over to more conservative news sources. Most importantly, people are starting to do their own research. That is the last thing the left wants.

However; if you are a blogger, like me, or someone who needs to site left wing news outlets to get your point across -- there is a workaround. I often use left-wing publications to prove my points, because the people who need to be "convinced" of the truth are more willing to trust them. From time to time, the leftist publications are forced to publish the truth.

12ft.io is a paywall proxy.

How does it work?

The idea is pretty simple, news sites want Google to index their content so it shows up in search results. So they don't show a paywall to the Google crawler. We benefit from this because the Google crawler will cache a copy of the site every time it crawls it.

All we do is show you that cached, unpaywalled version of the page.

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