Author: admin

A General Dynamics F-16 fighter jet intercepted a plane that breached restricted airspace near President Trump’s rally in Bullhead City, Arizona, Wednesday afternoon. 

Video shows Trump looking up at the sky as the fighter jet fired off warning flares. He told the crowd: “Oh, look at that – they [fighter jet] gave the president a little display.”

MOMENTS AGO: Fighter jet flies over Trump rally in Arizona and appears to fire off flares; crowd chants “USA!” pic.twitter.com/8znBkEJrcb

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) October 28, 2020

After the incident, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) officials tweeted that the plane was intercepted around 1400 MDT after it breached the Temporary Flight Restriction area surrounding Bullhead City.

A second tweet from NORAD said the plane’s pilot was “non-responsive to initial intercept procedures, but established radio communications after NORAD aircraft deployed signal flares.” 

NORAD continued: “The aircraft was escorted out of the restricted area by the NORAD aircraft without further incident.”

(2/2) The violating aircraft was non-responsive to initial intercept procedures, but established radio communications after NORAD aircraft deployed signal flares. The aircraft was escorted out of the restricted area by the NORAD aircraft without further incident. #WeHaveTheWatch

— North American Aerospace Defense Command (@NORADCommand) October 28, 2020

Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

For months the American people have been told that we may not know the winner of the presidential election right away like we normally do.  So if we aren’t going to have a winner on November 3rd, when will we finally have a clear result? 

Well, that is going to depend on how long it takes to count the votes, and that is going to be different for each state.  I know that is a frustrating answer, but every one of our 50 states has different election laws, and things have been greatly complicated in 2020 by the fact that so many people will be voting by mail. 

So far, more than 60 million Americans have already voted by mail, and that number just keeps growing with each passing day.  Some states allow mail-in ballots to be counted before Election Day, but a majority of states do not…

A majority of states won’t start actually counting ballots until the morning of Election Day or after polls close. Most counting rules have remained unchanged this year, though some states have adjusted their timelines due to the pandemic to ease the burden of increased absentee ballots.

So that means that there will be tens of millions of mail-in ballots that will be piled up waiting to be counted in addition to all of the ballots that come in on Election Day.

I feel sorry for those that have to open up all of those ballots and get them counted, because that is going to be a monumental task.

As I discussed yesterday, there are six key swing states that are pretty much going to determine the outcome of this election.  In three of them, the lack of a sufficient head start in counting ballots is likely to greatly delay voting results…

But final results in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan could be unclear on election night because these states are expected to be the three slowest to count the high volume of absentee ballots.

The reason: Pennsylvania and Wisconsin don’t allow the processing of mail-in ballots to begin until Election Day and Michigan only has a 10-hour start, compared to other states that start that can start the process days or weeks in advance.

Whoever wins Pennsylvania is probably going to win the presidency, but it could be quite a while before we get a final result from that state.

You see, the truth is that counting mail-in ballots is much more tedious that running normal ballots through a machine.  There are several steps involved, and each step takes time…

Processing absentee ballots generally includes steps short of tabulating them — such as removing them from the envelope, confirming voter eligibility, matching signatures to what’s on record and scanning them.

And on top of everything else, sometimes unexpected problems occur.

For example, ballot counting machines in one county in Texas have been “rejecting about one-third of mail-in ballots” and authorities are scrambling to get this issue resolved…

Ballot scanning machines are rejecting about one-third of mail-in ballots returned by voters in Tarrant County. The problem has impacted more than 22,000 ballots so far.

Ballot board members are now working in 12-hour shifts to accurately replicate the ballots so they can be counted.

As I have warned before, you will want to vote in person to give yourself the best chance of having your vote actually count.

In addition to everything that I have already discussed, it is important to remember that mail-in votes will continue to be accepted in many states long after Election Day is over.

I know that sounds really bizarre, but this is what is actually going to happen.  In fact, Washington State will count votes that are received as late as November 23rd…

The last day to vote in-person in the general election is Nov. 3. Absentee and mail-in ballots also typically must be received or postmarked by that date, if not earlier, depending on a state’s rules. That leaves some room for mail-in ballots to be received after Election Day. In Washington State, mail-in ballots received as late as Nov. 23 are still valid, as long as they were postmarked by Nov. 3.

National polls have shown that Biden voters are much more likely to vote by mail and Trump voters are much more likely to vote in person.

The votes that are cast in person will be counted very quickly.  Meanwhile, the votes that are sent in by mail will take weeks to fully count.

The mainstream media and the big tech companies have been working very hard to mentally prepare us for a massive “blue shift” after Election Day.  One of the reasons why they are so adamant that Trump should not declare victory on November 3rd is because they are confident that Joe Biden will ultimately win once all of the mail-in ballots are finally counted.

In some states we will have final results almost immediately, but in other states counting could take quite a few weeks.

But the counting cannot take too long, because by law election results must be officially certified by certain deadlines…

According to Ballotpedia, citing state laws, six states must certify election results within a week of the general election; 26 states and Washington, D.C., have a deadline between Nov. 10 and Nov. 30; 14 have a deadline in December, and four do not have deadlines in their state laws.

Among key battleground states, those deadlines range from Nov. 11 (Pennsylvania) to Dec. 1 (Nevada and Wisconsin). For potential battleground Texas, it is Dec. 3.

I don’t know how some of those states are going to possibly meet those deadlines.

In particular, I have no idea how Pennsylvania is going to be done counting by November 11th.  Hopefully they have a vast army of counters and a whole lot of coffee.

To give you an idea of how long it takes to count mail-in ballots, just consider what we witnessed in California earlier this year…

Consider this year’s California primary, in which 5.8 million people voted for president. Only 3 million of those ballots were counted by election night; the other 2.8 million votes took an additional seven weeks to count, said John Couvillon, a pollster and political analyst.

If it took California seven weeks to count a couple million mail-in ballots, how in the world is Pennsylvania going to count a similar number of mail-in ballots in just one week?

Personally, I am anticipating that this election is going to be a colossal mess.  As I have been documenting on The Most Important News, voting anomalies have already been popping up all over the nation, and I think that counting all of the mail-in ballots is going to take much more time than anticipated.

And any legal battles over the counting of the votes will just make the process even more painful.

We were once a great example for the rest of the world, but in 2020 we are going to show the rest of the planet the exact wrong way to conduct an election, and that is a real shame.

*  *  *

Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.

Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing campaign exposed the National Security Agency in 2013 for having “backdoors” into commercial technology products. The US spy agency worked with some Silicon Valley tech firms to develop covert methods of bypassing the standard authentication or encryption process of a network device so it could scan internet traffic without a warrant. 

Snowden revealed the NSA’s special sauce in how it conducted domestic and foreign backdoor operations to collect vital intelligence, resulted in the agency reforming its spying process, and had to formulate new rules to limit future breaches and how it conducts spy operations, three former intelligence officials told Reuters. 

However, a recent inquiry into the new guidelines by Senator Ron Wyden, a top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, yielded absolutely nothing as the spy agency dodged questions. 

“Secret encryption back doors are a threat to national security and the safety of our families – it’s only a matter of time before foreign hackers or criminals exploit them in ways that undermine American national security,” Wyden told Reuters. 

“The government shouldn’t have any role in planting secret back doors in encryption technology used by Americans,” he continued:

The agency refused to comment on its updated policies on current backdoor processes. NSA officials did say they were in the rebuilding trust phase with the private sector. 

“At NSA, it’s common practice to constantly assess processes to identify and determine best practices,” said Anne Neuberger, who heads NSA’s year-old Cybersecurity Directorate. “We don’t share specific processes and procedures.”

Three former senior intelligence agency officials told Reuters that before a backdoor operation is conducted, the agency must “weigh the potential fallout and arrange for some kind of warning if the back door gets discovered and manipulated by adversaries.”

Critics of the agency’s spy tools say backdoors create targets for adversaries and undermine US technology trust among buyers across the world. According to Juniper, in 2015, a foreign adversary used the NSA’s backdoor in its equipment. The NSA told Wyden’s aides in 2018 the Juniper incident was a “lesson learned.” 

Reuters cites one of the clearest examples of the NSA working with private tech firms to build backdoors: 

“… NSA’s approach involved an encryption-system component known as Dual Elliptic Curve, or Dual EC. The intelligence agency worked with the Commerce Department to get the technology accepted as a global standard, but cryptographers later showed that the NSA could exploit Dual EC to access encrypted data.” 

What this all suggests is that Snowden’s revelations of NSA’s spy tools really didn’t change the agency’s practices over the last seven years. Backdoors are still being used as the surveillance state marches on. 

Real Vision senior editor Ash Bennington is joined by managing editor Ed Harrison for a special edition of the Daily Briefing. Ed gives an update on his thesis, now that U.S. and European equities have continued to tumble, and analyzes how the halting of economic activity in Europe will likely cause a double dip recession that is very bad for risk assets. Ash breaks down the COVID-19 data on cases, deaths, and hospitalizations, and he and Ed look forward to see whether this past six months of economic recovery is nothing more than an “interregnum” or a “head fake.”

Authored by Pat Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

If Joe Biden loses on Nov. 3, public interest in whether his son Hunter exploited the family name to rake in millions of dollars from foreign donors will likely fade away.

It will not matter, and no one will care.

But if Joe Biden wins the presidency, a prediction: By the Ides of March 2021, there will be an independent counsel or special prosecutor named to investigate the Biden family fortunes and how they were amassed.

Why is such an investigation a near certainty in a Biden era?

First, there is a 50-year tradition in America of an antagonistic media and political enemies pulling down presidents they oppose.

Watergate was the prototype – a political bugging of the sort that J. Edgar Hoover used to do as a courtesy for presidents.

Yet, the petty crime and White House cover-up was blown up by a hostile Congress, media and special prosecutor’s office to bring down a president who had just won 49 states and 60% of the nation.

In 1984, Ronald Reagan won a 49-state landslide. But when he lost the Senate in 1986, Washington, D.C., sought to break his presidency and bring him down for sending aid to anti-Communist Contras in Nicaragua. Reagan narrowly escaped to go on and win the Cold War for the West.

An investigation by an independent counsel of President Bill Clinton’s Arkansas land deal metastasized into a sex scandal about which the president perjured himself. This led to his impeachment by a Republican House.

Even before he became president, Donald Trump was the target of an FBI probe. That evolved into the Mueller investigation, which took years to conclude that Trump hadn’t colluded with Vladimir Putin in the 2016 election.

Yet, serious damage was done to Trump’s presidency. And despite the failure of the Mueller investigation to find a smoking gun, Nancy Pelosi’s House impeached the president for a phone call in which he suggested to the president of Ukraine that he might cooperate in a U.S. investigation of what Joe and Hunter Biden were up to in his country.

So it is that America has become a country where if you lose the presidential election, the fallback position is to impeach the victor.

The Third Worldization of American politics is well-advanced.

Yet, the cliche remains true: Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

And Hunter Biden’s business and investment career is like a California wildfire where the smoke can be seen in Colorado.

Consider. While Vice President Joe Biden was President Obama’s point man on cleaning up corruption in Ukraine, son Hunter, with zero experience in the oil and gas industry, was suddenly offered a seat on the board of Burisma Holdings, a corrupt gas company in Ukraine, at $83,000 a month.

In 2013, Hunter accompanied his father to Beijing.

During his stay, Hunter apparently peeled off to arrange for $1.5 billion in Chinese funds to be transferred to an investment fund in which he was an advisor. So claims Trump.

According to a Senate report, in 2014, the widow of the mayor of Moscow transferred $3.5 million to an investment company started by Hunter Biden. Hunter’s lawyer denies it.

Comes now word that Hunter was in business with a Chinese company in 2017 and may have taken in $5 million, while stiffing his partner Tony Bobulinski.

Bobulinski, a former naval officer, claims that Hunter sought to leverage the Biden family name, and that he, Hunter and Joe Biden’s brother Jim were involved in a project to raise cash from the Chinese. Moreover, the former vice president was a silent partner, the “big guy” in the operation whose name was never to be mentioned.

Bobulinski said he met with Joe Biden for an hour to discuss it.

The Biden campaign calls this Russian misinformation.

Bottom line, says Joe Biden:

I have never received a dollar in foreign money. I never used my office or influence to advance my son’s business with foreign entities. I never spoke to my son about any of his dealings in Ukraine, Russia, China or anywhere else.

Major media are either denouncing the allegations as unproven or ignoring the story, the motive for which is apparent. Journalistic duty be damned. We have to get rid of Trump. And anything that jeopardizes that highest of goals should be buried until after Election Day.

However, if Joe Biden is elected, the incentive to cover for him and for Hunter vanishes. The old journalistic enthusiasm for the hunt to bring down another president will reappear, and more information will come spilling out.

And as the claims and counterclaims, and allegations and counterallegations collide, pressure will build for Biden’s Department of Justice to bring in an independent counsel to investigate and separate what is true from what is false and what is unethical from what is criminal.

If Biden wins, son Hunter is going to have an exciting spring.

Iran has launched a major construction project at its controversial Natanz nuclear facility according to satellite imagery featured Wednesday in the Associated Press. Allegedly an underground advanced centrifuge assembly plant is being reconstituted after it was previously destroyed by fire.

A mystery blast and fire on July 2nd had disabled operations at the facility, which later in the summer Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization declared was an act of sabotage and not due to an accident. It’s widely believed that Israeli intelligence was behind the sabotage to disable advanced centrifuge operations there.

Recall that before and after the fire which caused severe damage, setting back the development of advanced uranium enrichment centrifuges, there was a series of ‘mystery’ explosions and fires at various military and industrial sites across Iran, raising suspicions of a major Israeli or even US-backed covert campaign to destabilize the country’s defense and nuclear energy infrastructure.

While the White House exit from the 2015 nuclear deal (JCPOA) and recent ‘maximum pressure’ campaign was aimed at derailing what Washington claims are Iran’s nuclear ambitions, it appears to have done the opposite and strengthened Tehran’s resolve, also while under crippling sanctions.

As the AP underscores, the timing of the construction efforts couldn’t be worse for the Trump White House: “The construction comes as the U.S. nears Election Day in a campaign pitting President Donald Trump, whose maximum pressure campaign against Iran has led Tehran to abandon all limits on its atomic program, and Joe Biden, who has expressed a willingness to return to the accord.” 

Daily, moderate-resolution images from @planetlabs do appear to show construction occurring near the Natanz Fuel Enrichment Plant. Waiting on a high-resolution image to be certain. https://t.co/roh3wJ4Ip1 pic.twitter.com/nYWJwN3ZQj

— Jeffrey Lewis (@ArmsControlWonk) October 28, 2020

The report says further, “The outcome of the vote likely will decide which approach America takes. Heightened tensions between Iran and the U.S. nearly ignited a war at the start of the year.” Biden is seen as the candidate most likely to reenter the JCPOA agreement assuming Iran walks back its enrichment to come under caps stipulated by the Obama-era deal.

“Since August, Iran has built a new or regraded road to the south of Natanz toward what analysts believe is a former firing range for security forces at the enrichment facility, images from San Francisco-based Planet Labs show,” AP details. 

“A satellite image Monday shows the site cleared away with what appears to be construction equipment there,” it says of the Planet Labs images.

Iran’s leaders have meanwhile maintained its nuclear development is purely for peaceful nuclear energy needs and not in pursuit of nuclear warheads. Historically and into recent times the Ayatollahs have declared nuclear weapons as ‘un-Islamic’ — though this has done little to convince the US or Israel.

Amid crashing NBA viewership now that basketball has become a venue for “in your face” (whether you asked for it or not) political activism, it will not come as a surprise that NBA revenues are also slumping and according to financial numbers shared with teams and obtained by ESPN, NBA’s revenues dropped 10% to $8.3 billion for the 2019-20 season.

Among the biggest reasons for the revenue loss were an $800 million loss in gate receipts and a $400 million loss in sponsorships and merchandise, and in a surprise twist, the NBA’s losses also included $200 million “net negative impact” from the loss of a partnership with China following Daryl Morey tweet promoting Hong Kong freedom a year ago. This explains why some of the NBA’s most vocal domestic social justice warriors are also so bizarrely mute when it comes to China’s trampling of basic human rights: all players have a vested financial interest and incentive to keep their mouths shut when it comes to any China criticism. Which may also explain why said SJWs are so much more vocal when it comes to bashing injustices in their own country as a diversion for their hypocrisy.

But if the 2019-2020 disaster was bad, 2020-2021 is shaping up to be nothing short of horrific: as the NBA and National Basketball Players Association discuss start dates and financial amendments to the collective bargaining agreement, ESPN writes that “the potential for a grim financial landscape without fans in the 2020-21 season looms over the league.”

This would have devastating financial consequences for the league and certainly NBA players: if the 2020-21 season advances without fans and accompanying gate-night receipts, the league expects a projected 40% loss in overall revenue, or approximately $4 billion.

This will also have rather dire consequences for the NBA’s all too generous compensation packages: according to the report, talks about the salary cap and luxury tax levels for next season remain at the core of discussions between the NBA and the NBPA. Had the league and players’ union followed the normal formula to determine this season’s salary cap – linking it to overall league revenue – sources told ESPN that it would have fallen to around $90 million – down from about $109 million in 2019-20.

Dropping to that level would have put almost every team into severe luxury tax territory, and it would have left very little available money for this off season’s free agents.

The sudden hit to NBA players’ bank accounts is not expected to last: the league anticipates a revenue rebound in 2021-22 (at the earliest). That, however, is contingent on a vaccine/cure for covid. Oh, and China not being angered by NBA players criticizing Beijing again of course.