Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Your Weekend Edition roundup includes: the hot new trend of pollsters who, when asked where their numbers came from, simply evaporate (two this week, which is excellent turnover); why corporate media, which once found democracy-ending peril in a handful of Russian memes, has suddenly discovered the virtue of staying calm; two former FBI brass who told Congress one thing under oath and told their own inboxes the opposite, and now get to explain the difference to a federal magistrate; an October sampler of DOJ arrests so long it needs a table of contents; and a Massachusetts wedding mill that ran smoothly for a decade, right up until one particular election ruined the honeymoon.
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The polling industry is either shattering apart or a long-hidden problem is being exposed. We aren’t sure yet. Though corporate media knows all about it —even the New York Times scrambled this week to repair its polling systems— readers were hard-pressed to find much coverage. But exceptions appeared. On Thursday, local ABC-13 Asheville reported, “Polling firm disappears amid media questioning surveys, employees.” A new one.
If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that we want polling companies to be transparent, unbiased, and, whenever we need backup data from them, to immediately disappear in a puff of smoke.
Before we talk about fake polls again, let’s make one thing clear: the stakes. By now, we all know that the worst crime ever to appear in the dark catalog of human malfeasance is election interference. Worst of all, this crime is so easy. You can practically do it without even knowing.
Believe it or not, a single fake Instagram can threaten to overthrow the foundations of democracy, even if only three people see it and two of them were high. Just ask the Russians, whom Democrats have basically convicted of election interference for nothing beyond some TikToks and Facebook posts.
In 2019, former president Jimmy Carter (probably intoxicated from peanut oil fumes) even called Trump an illegitimate president because of Russian social media posts. Headline from CNN:
But what about polls? Polls are far more influential than TikToks. They thunder through corporate media’s echo chamber. Polls grow charts on television like weeds sprouting in a garden. Polls cause donors to give more generously or to withdraw their support. Polls create or erode momentum. Polls increase or suppress turnout.
Polls are intended to persuade voters.
If a fake poll reported by the New York Times actually makes a leading candidate drop out of a Senate primary— isn’t that the worst kind of election interference? If not, then what is?
So you would think fake polls should alarm corporate media, since they represent a clear and present danger to democracy, a threat of the first order and the most immediate and dangerous kind of election interference imaginable?
But nah.
📈 On Thursday, polling aggregator FiftyPlusOne —the same outfit that torpedoed Wedgewood Polls earlier this week— announced it had received an anonymous tip raising questions about another sketchy polling provider— this one called SoCal Strategies. After FiftyPlusOne’s suspicions were aroused, it emailed SoCal a few basic questions.
SoCal went dark.
Twenty-four hours later, SoCal’s website was taken down, its X account closed, and its email accounts went offline. Bye, suckers!
When FiftyPlusOne, trying to figure out how to contact the owner, pulled up SoCal’s Florida business registration, the investigation found that SoCal had told the State of Florida it was out of business in May— even though it kept producing polls through October. They also noticed a bizarre note on SoCal’s Division of Corporations entry, which sounded less like a business status and more like a hostage note:
Normally, when business owners tell the State of Florida they are closing a company, one of the prompts is “describe the occurrence that resulted in the limited liability company’s dissolution.” Whoever closed SoCal wrote (in all caps), “ITS TIME FOR THIS TO END AND FOR US TO MOVE ON. I JUST WANT TO PUT THIS ALL BEHIND.”
Yikes.
But even though it dissolved itself in May, SoCal mysteriously kept submitting polls to newspapers and aggregators— well past “TIME TO END.” Now, suddenly, it is just as mysteriously gone, flown by night. As regular readers will recall, this makes two polling implosions in one week, and three in the last two months.
On Wednesday, the Times reported the Wedgewood story: “Discovery of New Fake Polls Puts a Spotlight on Trust in Surveys.” You don’t say. (It has not yet reported the SoCal story.) This provided the President of the United States a chance to chime in, and he took the obvious jab at the Times.
📉 Corporate media is flummoxed. It has no idea what to make of all this. One laughable entry appeared in yesterday’s USA Today, which reported, “Fake polls: Should America be worried about survey integrity?” (What do I always tell you about headlines that pose questions? Don’t hold your breath for an answer.)
You’ll love this— USA Today, an integral cog in the most pessimistic media machine in human history, found a silver lining. It repeated those words three times in the story, including in a section header. Here’s the quote from its optimistic expert:
You have to admire this heroic effort to find the bright side. “Paradoxically” —terrific!— “the more fraud is prevalent, the more people are realizing the value of the scientific method.” Haha! It was like saying that, paradoxically, the more useless counterfeit $100s the ATM spits out, the more people realize the value of the banking system.
When it comes to the economy, Iran, Trump, germs, AI —you name it— the media is more consistently pessimistic than that depressed donkey who followed Winnie the Pooh around. But when it comes to undeniable proof of widespread fake news spread around by corporate media like toxic peanut butter, poisonous fake polls undermining elections and democracy itself— well, look at the silver lining! Paradoxically!
They’re still doing it! On Thursday, MS NOW reported a +11 point “blue wave” for Democrats based on a New York Times poll:
There’s a compelling theory floating around that all these fake pollsters are winking out right before it’s time to pay the piper, when the midterm results once again fail to show the Democrats’ blue wave and a bunch of disappointed Polymarket bettors are looking for someone to blame. I can’t say one way or the other, but it sure makes you think, doesn’t it?
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Yesterday I promised more October arrest stories, and I intend to deliver. We’ll shift to arrests of mostly (but not all) Democrats who, unlike yesterday’s crop, are not elected officials. We’ll start with what was arguably the best news: the deep staters. Yesterday, the Washington Post reported, “Former FBI officials charged with lying to Congress about Hunter Biden laptop inquiry.”
Yesterday, the DOJ “charged two former FBI officials with making false statements to Congress,” WaPo reported, “that allegedly hindered a House committee as it was investigating President Biden’s son Hunter.” The pair aren’t just any old random FBI officials. Nikki Floris led the intelligence division in the FBI’s Washington field office. Bradley Benavides was the deputy assistant director for counterintelligence.
Deep state termites.
Floris and Benavides were released on Friday morning after self-surrendering in lieu of arrest and making their initial appearance before a federal magistrate. They each face up to five years for lying to Congress.
The DOJ has been doing a lot of work, a surprising new development that many of us believed was only possible when tracking down January 6th tourists. It filed a 27-page statement of facts against the two former FBI officials. It was damning. It carefully listed statements from their sworn congressional testimony right next to source documents where they said the exact opposite.
For instance, Floris told House investigators in 2023 she’d never seen a Grassley-Johnson report about Hunter’s laptop. But over two years earlier, she’d emailed that report to Benavides under the subject “Ukraine report,” with the note “Just dropped this am.” She also attached a summary of the alleged $7 million Burisma bribe she later said she knew nothing about.
In a separate declassified September 2020 chat, Floris wrote, “I’m basically running a shadow government across the FBI at this point.” Around then, she helped kill an FBI Albany report about China making fake driver’s licenses for Biden mail-in votes. Her reason for squashing the report: it “will contradict Director Wray’s testimony.” Ruh roh.
In 2023, Benavides told House investigators that the first time he’d heard about the laptop was two days earlier when preparing to testify, from Wikipedia. But on October 22, 2020, Benavides sent a calendar invite titled “To Discuss Laptop” to the Justice Department’s Hunter Biden point man, and then met him in person at FBI headquarters.
His FBI successor, Laura Dehmlow, said she “would certainly say that Brad Benavides was aware” the laptop was real. His Clintonesque 2023 reply: “I don’t know what ‘real’ means.”
Both were promoted after Biden’s election. Benavides became deputy assistant director for counterintelligence, and later left for a “Senior Risk Manager” job at Amazon.
Prosecutors had until 2028, so charging them 10 days before the midterms was obviously a choice. I would call it a good choice, for the sake of irony if for no other reason. Corporate media headlines framed the pair as victims of retaliation. NBC called them “frequent targets of Trump allies.” The AP called the charges the latest “splashy and politically charged” actions. Politico’s lede swerved into the 2020 election, “which Trump has falsely claimed was stolen.”
If you’ve been trying to follow the RussiaGate scandal, both Floris and Benavides were front and center in the FBI’s scandalous skunkworks. Floris and Benavides, for example, were among the eight officials who approved the “Round River” report that collected informant reports on Hunter Biden and labeled them Russian disinformation. Round River was the FBI operation that compiled a giant spreadsheet of Republicans it labeled “conduits of disinformation.”
One of the group’s planning emails suggested using the Hunter informants “to send information of our choosing back upstream.” It’s not disinformation when we do it. Floris enthusiastically replied, “Looking forward to the conversation!”
I’ll bet she’s not looking forward to these conversations. The hunters have become the hunted.
🔥 Just in October, DOJ arrested or charged around a half-dozen more government employees and insiders. Here’s what I found:
🔥 DOJ did an even wider sweep from just October —roughly three weeks— of healthcare and covid fraudsters. This is where a few Republican donors popped up, a fact I note for perfect fairness, and which eliminates the media’s “revenge” narrative. These, by the way, are only a sample. The DOJ said it charged over 40 in its SNAP sweep, and 15 in its Southern California healthcare roundup.
I suspect that most of the “unknown” party affiliations were Democrats, but I lacked time to run them all down. For fairness, I left them ambiguous.
🔥 But the biggest group of DOJ (and state) charges and arrests were of illegal alien voters and election fraudsters. According to NPR, DOJ charged 113 noncitizens this month. Here’s the partial table:
To give you an idea, here are the six names charged on Thursday in Ocala, Florida, which is a short drive south on I-75 from where I live. All are green-card holders:
Jamie Sosa Sardina, Cuba
Luis Manuel Perez, Cuba
Martha Haydee Desantis, 81, Ecuador (no relation to the governor)
Lise Marie Johnson, Canada
Diane Curley, Canada
Pedro Franco, Brazil
A few of the names from yesterday’s charges in Pennsylvania:
Artur Kopacz, Poland
Osmal Loy, Cuba
Yehuda Peer, Israel
Alfredo Santiesteban, Cuba
Joyce Donovan, Kenya
Inna Henry, Russia
Nourten Kuruju, Greece
Nina Nyawara, 21, Kenya
Joyce Pitts, 80, Netherlands
🔥 The Massachusetts case earned a little more description. On Thursday, the Times of India reported, “$38,000 to $40,000 per fake marriage: Massive fraud ring for facilitating Green Card busted in Massachusetts. US citizen was selling ‘American Dream’ and investing money in Dominican Republic.”
In Fall River, Massachusetts, romance never died. It was just billed by the half-hour. Federal prosecutors said 43-year-old Jennifer Gonzalez ran a matrimonial assembly line for more than a decade, cranking out 18 to 20 sham marriages a year at about $40,000 a pop, for a total of more than $6 million.
Call it a destination wedding. Brides and grooms who had never met walked into a Massachusetts courthouse as strangers and walked out with a fast lane to a green card. (Ms. Gonzalez kept the gift registry.) On October 21st, as part of a nationwide marriage-fraud sting, the DOJ charged six people and arrested five. (The sixth, Jaylin Hill, was easy to find, since he’s already in state prison on an unrelated gun charge.)
Since her multi-million romantic hustle wasn’t quite good enough, prosecutors said Gonzalez also collected more than $120,000 in food stamps. Isn’t our American charitable impulse nice? She invested all the money into real estate in the Dominican Republic, which the DOJ’s press release called “her country,” even though the Times of India called her a “US citizen.” I’ll leave that discrepancy up to you.
The best part was the FBI’s wiretapped recording, in which Gonzalez explained her business model better than any economist could. She said she “stopped doing weddings at the end of 2024… that’s when Trump was becoming a president.” Whoops!
So for ten years the fraud ran as smoothly as a Dominican cigar factory. Then one man won an election, and the industry temporarily closed for renovations. What can I tell you? Elections have consequences.
When an FBI informant offered that “Massachusetts is the best place,” Ms. Gonzalez agreed, explaining, “this state is a sanctuary, you get health insurance, you get a lot of help as an immigrant here.” Thanks, suckers! I mean taxpayers!
“Trump doesn’t like this state,” she added, unnecessarily.
Democrats have spent decades insisting that border enforcement doesn’t deter anybody. It turns out they never asked the people being deterred, and one of them just explained the whole scheme to the FBI on a wiretap.
So what do you think? Yesterday I said the “where are the arrests” black pillers owed the class an apology. Or at least a statement of regret. Well? We’re still waiting.
Have a wonderful weekend! C&C shall return on Monday morning with an all-new roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.
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I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and His kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and teaching. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths.
— 2 Timothy 4:1-4 LSB
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Lord, I ask you to please remove the scales from the eyes of those who claim Christianity yet are blind to obvious violation of your law and choose to support evil policies. As you changed my heart and opened my eyes to my own ignorance all those years ago through someone I worked with, help me be somebody else’s “someone.” In Jesus’ name, amen.
Although I try hard to stay positive I struggle with the cold weather setting in. I know how important staying positive is and believe it or not I try not to be negative, but last winter my natural gas bill was 1500 dollars per month to heat my 1800 sq. ft. cape style home. Governor Healy this year excepted another 4 large donations from my energy supplier, Eversource, and approved a significant increase for Eversource’s gas and delivery charges, I’m not sure how I can possibly pay even more for Healy’s corrupt greed. Her and the utility companies are a mafia. It’s hard to hear her say how much she’s saved the people of Massachusetts on their utility bills, what a filthy dirty liar. I always pray for people, this year I’ve added a prayer for Gods help that I some how can make ends meet this winter. I feel horrible for people even older than me that have a fixed incomes. I’m afraid Maura Hold It Healy couldn’t care less for them. But enough with my problems.
My Saturday Nice Post
Accepting forgiveness for things that I’ve messed up is always tough for me. Too often I don’t think I deserve it. God sending His Son to forgive us our sins is the most powerful gift ever given to us. We all have to gain the will to accept it and not only accept it but to give it as well, forgiveness is freeing.
I recently came across this story of forgiveness. I hope you like it.
There was an older man that was in and out of a hospital in the Sierra Mountains in California. On a very stormy night he was admitted to what would be his final days.
A nurse at the hospital called her minister at the rectory, Father John Omalley, who said he would make the trip through the flooding wind swept rains. With streets flooded and roads closed, the normally 20 minute drive ended up taking 3 hours.
Father Omalley finally got to the hospital at 3 in the morning and was told the man was not at all friendly and had no family. Father Omalley, as he walked by the room turned and went in. He said excuse me sir I was passing by and thought I’d stop in and see how you’re doing. The man looked up and said it’s 3 in the morning you know I’m dying. Father Omalley said is there anything you need to make right. The man wouldn’t say a word so the Father said some prayers and began to talk about the storm, sports, eventually the man began to join in on the conversation.
3 hours went by and the man finally opened up and said Father I need to get something off my chest. He said 31 years ago I worked as a switch man at a railroad station. It was late at night, 2 days before Christmas, and the crew and I that were on that night were drinking heavily. They needed someone to go out and make the switch so that an incoming freight train would go around and continue North. This man, named Tom, volunteered, went out and accidentally hit the wrong button. The freight train ended up slamming into a passenger car that had stalled on the tracks killing a young couple and their two daughters. He said nobody has ever known what really happened that night. I’ve lived with the guilt and the shame for over 30 years. I’ve never been big enough to admit to the family that it was my fault and how sorry I was. God could never forgive me for what I’ve done.
There was a long pause, Father Omalley took the man’s hand and said Tom the people that were in that car were my parents and my two older sisters, and if I can forgive you God can forgive you as well.
It’s truly amazing how Jesus suffered to take away the sins of man. No mistakes we’ve made are too big for Gods mercy. This is Gods Grace and undeserved favor. Have Faith in God. Hope you all have a blessed Saturday.
J.Goodrich