The Virginia Board of Elections rule allowing officials to count ballots that arrived without a postmark up to three days after the election was illegal, a state judge ruled.

Virginia Circuit Court Judge William Eldridge ruled the state’s late mail-in ballot law violated state statute and permanently banned the law in future Virginia elections, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) announced Monday. PILF sued the state’s board of elections in October on behalf of Thomas Reed, a Frederick County, Virginia election official. //

The board of elections proposed the rule during an Aug. 4 meeting and related guidance was sent to election officials statewide on Aug. 13 informing them of the change. PILF sued on behalf of Reed on Oct. 9, according to a news release.

On Oct. 28, one week before the Nov. 3 federal elections, Eldridge blocked the law due to the PILF lawsuit. Virginia was therefore prevented from counting late ballots without postmarks, PILF spokesperson Logan Churchwell told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

our Constitution is the foundation of this country and who we are,” she continued. “It is what guarantees us our civil liberties, our freedoms that are endowed to us, not by any man or person in government, but are endowed to us by our Creator, and so this is something that we must all unite around.”

“This is something that we recognize that those who stormed the Capitol on January 6 trying to stop Congress from fulfilling their constitutional responsibilities, they were acting as domestic terrorists undermining our Constitution,” Gabbard told Carlson. “As you pointed out in my video, those like John Brennan, Adam Schiff, and others are also acting as domestic terrorists because they are also undermining our Constitution by trying to take away our civil liberties and rights that are guaranteed to us.”

Hedge funds are not “mutual funds” or “money market funds.” They typically manage money only for “high net worth individuals” which is a term defined by the SEC. So the people who have money invested through hedge funds tend to be at the top of the market food chain. Investment amounts go from $1 million up to billions of dollars invested by a single person or family. These are not individuals trading stocks online with Charles Schwab or E*Trade.

“Shorting” a stock means literally “borrowing” a stock that belongs to someone else, selling that stock on the open market, and then waiting to see if the price of that stock will fall. If/when it does, the “short seller” can purchase shares in that stock at the lower market price, “cover” the open position by returning shares to the owners from whom they were borrowed, and keep the difference between the “sale” and “repurchase” prices as profit.

Problems are created for “short sellers” when the price does not fall. As the price of the stock goes higher, the “short seller” must come up with the difference between the price it sold the borrowed shares at, and the price at which it needs to purchase shares to return to the original owner. If a short seller shorts a stock at $100 a share, and the stock goes up to $120, the short seller must come out of pocket with the extra $20 to buy the share to return it to the owner from which it was borrowed. That is how a “short seller” loses money.

When you buy a stock, you know it can only go to $0 so you are able to quantify your total risk from the purchase.

When you short a stock you cannot, in all cases, predict how high that stock might go — you cannot quantify your total risk from the short. That’s why shorting is different — and riskier.

Red West VL
2 hours ago
Hedge Fund pools the funds of large numbers of millionaires and billionaires to allow them to manipulate market prices by moving huge volume as a collective push. It's called high finance.

Reddit pools the funds of large numbers of every day people to allow them to counter the manipulation of market prices by Hedge Fund by moving huge volume as collective push. It's called a crime.

That's how this works. My kid got into this with a couple of his friends in college. Knew full well what it was... knew there were ZERO fundamentals to support any of it and he decided to put a few hundred bucks into it for the hell of it. Bought in again the other day. He's now made as much as he spent on his first car and ready to get out. Where'd the money come from? Redistribution of wealth. They BROKE a hedge fund... $13 billion dollar hedge fund... gone.

This is what happens when the smart kids "occupy wall street", instead of a bunch of meth addict freaks living in public parks and setting up rape tents whining that they can't find a job with their gender studies degree. Is it smart? YEP. Is it wise? NOPE. But I completely get it... and I love it.

trading on some stocks was suspended, and there were rumblings of an SEC investigation of private individuals who had the temerity to wear neck-beards and soiled undies instead of Brioni suits while playing shenanigans on the stock market. They were not impressed. //

PoliMath
@politicalmath
it really is quite a remarkable coincidence that WallStreetBets just happened to have just enough "hate speech" to get shut down by Discord at exactly the moment when Wall Street would have preferred to have it shut down

2020 Presidential Election Lawsuits Related to Election Integrity (Public Version 1-28-21)
Trump as Plaintiff:
Case Name and Number Date Filed Topic * Decided on Merits ** State Issue(s) Disposition Ruling Favored Date of Last Order Status

Yes – he said things. Those journalists who likened themselves to firefighters or the soldiers storming the beaches of Normandy were sure rendered by spoken words. It was the common theme throughout his administration, that Donald Trump was ‘’attacking’’ the free press. While true that he had stern words and harsh criticisms for the media – frequently in non-Presidential fashion – what were his actions, exactly? //

Funny how the journalists threatened with censorship never manage to shut up about it. But while the press loves to go on about how oppressed they were under President Trump we are seeing disturbing examples of calls to limit expression and clamp down on specific outlets — from the press.

When the accused tyrant Donald Trump had multiple accounts shut down (in ironically tyrannical fashion) you had Alexander Nazaryan proposing extending a blacklist to include a number of journalists with whom he disagrees.

At ABC News Rick Klein ominously proposed that it was not enough that Trump was not reelected. ”Getting rid of Trump is the easy part. Cleansing the movement he commands is going to be something else.’’ //

And over at CNN Oliver Darcy is diligently lobbying cable providers and satellite networks such as Comcast and Direct TV to take down his competitive news networks. He is actively calling to have FoxNews, Newsmax, and OANN removed from channel packages.

All of this greatly exceeds any action we saw from President Trump regarding the press. //

When the very people accusing President Trump of dangerous attacks are engaging in activities which are far more threatening we are falling into a rabbit hole where fewer things make sense anymore.

We’ve been following the amazing story of what some Redditors over at the forum Wall Street Bets have been doing to hedge funds.

The Hill’s Saagar Enjeti did an terrific breakdown of the story if you haven’t been following it or want to see a really good analysis of what happened and why people are mesmerized by it.

“Wall Street is shook b/c multi-billionaires who reckless gambled are getting screwed…they cant stand that someone other than them is making money…it reveals how much of a sham this all is,” Enjeti said.

It’s pretty hard not to see the story in little guys sticking it to folks who have tried to work over the system to their own advantage and there are some amazing stories already about what they are doing with the money.

In a Daily Wire op-ed on Wednesday, titled “Shapiro: This Is Not Normal,” the conservative activist took apart the notion that Joe Biden — specifically, the Biden presidency — is “normal.” As Shapiro sees it, Biden’s presidency so far is anything but.

“Now, the media inform us, we have been graced by the most normal normal person to have ever normalled: President Joe Biden. Biden, they proclaim, is utterly boring, nondescript, barely worthy of coverage. His administration, too, is paradigmatically normal.

“Yascha Mounk of The Atlantic tweets, ‘It is so nice to have a boring President.” Alleged media watchdog Brian Stelter asked this week whether Biden is “making the news boring again,” adding, “The Biden White House is clearly a break from the chaos and incompetence of Trump world.'” //

On a personal level, Biden is clearly more “normal” than Trump — although treating Biden, a career politician worth nearly $10 million, as the height of normality is rather stunning.

“The goal for the establishment media isn’t to point out merely that Biden is a sort of American Everyman. It’s to use that supposed normalcy to disguise the fact that his agenda is absolutely abnormal.

The dirty little secret of the Trump administration is that despite Trump’s personal abnormality, his agenda was well in line with past precedent, and with mainstream American opinions on everything from taxes to military policy. //

“Joe Biden may be a relatively normal guy,” Shapiro wrote, in closing, “But none of this is normal.” “And pretending it is,” he correctly observed, “represents just another way for the media to reject legitimate criticisms of an administration seeking radicalism right off the bat.” //

Catturd ™
@catturd2
2 days ...

• 60,000 jobs destroyed.
• U.S. gas and oil industry being destroyed.
• Women's sports destroyed.
• Troops forced to sleep in parking garages.
• Ramping up Middle East wars again already.
  vs
  But orange man tweets were hurting my special whittle feelings. //

“Within the first five days of his presidency, he issued 30 executive orders, compared with four for Trump, five for Barack Obama and zero for George W. Bush.

“Those executive orders included endorsement of radical reinterpretation of American history; killing the Keystone XL pipeline, along with its attendant estimated 11,000 American jobs; forcing the military to allow troops to undergo gender reassignment surgery…

“[A]nd forcing federally funded institutions to allow biological men who identify as transgender to compete alongside biological women, among others.

“He is reportedly pursuing an immigration plan directed toward reopening America’s borders. He has staffed his Cabinet by intersectional box-checking.

Pitzer gave the AEC a backhanded slap by calling it “reasonably efficient by general governmental standards,” and stated that its monopoly in atomic energy had delayed atomic reactor development.

He described how material production reactors, with their complex chemical processing systems, had been built in less than three years during wartime. During that time of rapid progress, he said, if there was a disagreement about which of two courses of action were best, both of them were followed.

In the succeeding years, following either route needed to be preceded by an “exhaustive series of preliminary studies” that added layers of cost to the project. Salaries, overhead and other cost components always accumulate during delays.

He noted how it took six years from the end of the war to build anything that could generate electricity, and even then it was a tiny reactor that produced just 100 kilowatts of power in December, 1951.

“The slowness,” Dr. Pitzer declared, “did not arise from a lack of designs for power reactors which reputable scientists and engineers were willing to build and test. It came rather from an unwillingness of the commission to proceed with any one of these designs until all of the advisers agreed that this was the best design.”

The speaker likened the present setup, with a multitude of committees advising the Atomic Energy Commission, to an automobile equipped with a separate brake lever for every passenger. //

Stewart Peterson says
January 18, 2021 at 12:14 PM

Conversely, from the perspective of the people conducting the approval process:

Nobody ever gets fired for doing nothing. However, people get fired for exceeding their authority all the time. Lawyers are arguing over where the line is, and the line never stops moving, and all previous decisions are reviewable and the people who made them are fireable, on the basis of a legal standard that didn’t exist at the time the decision was made.

So what do you do? If there is anything at all novel about what the applicant wants to do, you insist to the applicant that you have no authority to act on their application. This only changes once you have a directive, in writing, from someone above you. That person is unlikely to make such a directive unless they’re such a short-timer that they won’t get fired when the rules are reinterpreted. This is how political appointees get exasperated with minor and obvious decisions being kicked up to them instead of being resolved three levels below, where by any logic they should have been.

What it looks like to the applicant is that old political cartoon of the officials standing in a circle and pointing to the next guy. (You go to the Department of X. They say, “X doesn’t have authority to do that. Y does. Ask them.” You go to the Department of Y. You go there and they say, “Y doesn’t have authority to do that. X does. Ask them.”) Meanwhile, the organization as a whole drops the ball. No individual person in it has any incentive to act in the group’s interest.

I call this the “organizational infield fly rule.”

Much of the anti-nuclear activism in the courts is effective precisely by creating this type of doubt in the minds of the NRC staff – not by changing policy. All they have to do is create that question in the back of a junior manager’s mind: “will I be fired if I sign this?”

The path of least resistance? Appoint another committee to write another report.

It is a safe bet that virtually any op-ed on China or Iran or a few other foreign countries appearing in any of the major outlets is the product of a foreign intelligence service, and the outlet serving it up has a good idea that is the case. They do it because they are fundamentally disloyal to the nation and dismissive of normal Americans who they think are too stupid to understand much of anything…though, for the life of me, I’ve never understood how anyone with a journalism degree was ever able to convince themselves that they were an intellectual elite.

Mediaite
@Mediaite
Nasdaq CEO Suggests Halt to Trading to Allow Big Investors to 'Recalibrate Their Positions' to Combat Reddit Users //

Such manipulation of stock prices would be highly illegal if attempted by a typical investor in any manner, yet our elites seem to believe they can do whatever they want to benefit their fellow elites. And who could blame them for believing that? The SEC certainly isn’t going to stop them. In fact, the SEC is “assessing” the Reddit users, not the fact that market leaders may move to manipulate matters to save themselves. The full weight of the federal government isn’t going to come down on those trying to game the system. Instead, it’s going to come down on those who simply saw a legal opening and made money off the “wrong” people, i.e. the hedge funders. //

Austin Petersen 🇺🇲
@AP4Liberty
When Wall Street billionaires get rich that's the free market. When regular people get rich at Wall Street's expense, they say we need regulation. //

Spike Cohen
@RealSpikeCohen
Seeing NASDAQ, banks, & regulators begin to halt trading over the Reddit WSB $GME stock rally proves that we don't have a free market.

We have a controlled market that is gamed to benefit banks and hedge funds, and if you don't invest the way they tell you to, they'll ruin you. //

Republicans need to get with the program on this. People are sick and tired of seeing a select class of people game the system while everyone else plays by a different set of rules. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong to be a billionaire. It does mean that there should be no shortcuts. Markets shouldn’t be shut down to help the privileged when that courtesy is never extended to normal people. You want a free market? Let’s have a free market, not the crony capitalist garbage the GOP has so long defended.