The “boring” pandemic – A rioter receives his sentence – Investigations about various events of the 2020 election – Rejection of the motion to dismiss Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit – Evening statistics
Tucker Carlson has recently called upon his viewers and upon Americans in general to stop chattering about COVID because it is “boring.” I don’t see that a disease that has caused about 50 million infections and well over 800,000 deaths in this country alone is unworthy of interest; but never let it be said that I shut my ears to sage counsel. So here are some other topics for consideration:
Robert Scott Palmer, one of the January 6th rioters, has been sentenced to 63 months in prison for assaulting a police officer with a fire extinguisher, a wooden plank, and a pole, the longest prison term to date handed down to any of the participants of the insurrection. His sentence is still unduly lenient for someone guilty of treason; but at any rate he has been charged with a felony instead of trifling misdemeanors, so that is so much gained. Palmer, incidentally, has sent a letter to the judge expressing remorse for his actions and denouncing Trump for lying about the election results. “They kept spitting out the false narrative about a stolen election and how it was ‘our duty’ to stand up to tyranny,” Palmer wrote. “Little did I realize that they were the tyrannical ones desperate to hold onto power at any cost even by creating the chaos they knew would happen with such rhetoric.”
It appears, also, that the investigation by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis into Donald Trump’s extensive attempts to overturn the 2020 election results, having lain dormant for months, is becoming active again. Various reports say that she is likely to empanel a special grand jury to review potential election interference, including the infamous call with Trump asking Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes.“
And Trump’s diehard ally Sidney Powell is undergoing troubles of her own with our court system. A federal investigation is examining the finances of Defending the Republic, an organization founded by Powell to fund her “Kraken” lawsuits to overturn the 2020 election. A grand jury has been empaneled, and subpoenas and documents requests have gone out to multiple individuals as recently as September. Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne, who briefly served as Defending the Republic’s CEO, says he had his own concerns about the group’s finances. In a telephone call with QAnon enthusiast Lin Wood that Wood surreptitiously recorded, Byrne claimed that Byrne, Michael Flynn, and Flynn’s brother Joseph Flynn quit the group in April after Powell refused to allow an audit of Defending the Republic’s accounts. “I gave her a laundry list of things she had to clean up and told her she had to get an auditor,” Byrne told Wood on the call. The record of this call has been turned over to the investigative committee, which will doubtless show it the attention it deserves.
There is additional judicial pushback from the events of the past election in the form of the rejection of a motion from Fox News to dismiss Dominion Voting Systems’ suit against the network for its defamation of the company. Fox News, it may be remembered, avidly supported Sidney Powell’s claim that the Dominion had changed votes in the 2020 election through algorithms in its voting machines that had been created to rig elections for Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, a claim that does not have a shred of evidence to support it and which was rejected by William Barr himself, Trump’s own Attorney General. As a result of this decision, Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit is able to continue unimpeded, with the potential result of Fox News paying several million in damages.
Such are the items of today’s journal entry. I trust Tucker Carlson will be gratified to learn how diligently I have followed his advice. Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 273,958,134; # of deaths worldwide: 5,360,416; # of cases U.S.: 51,609,170; # of deaths; U.S.: 826,675.