San Diego/ riverside
OANN Herring
lawsuit?
imperial beach, poor, sea level rise 3 sides GUK [ also tj sewage?]
-=-=-
-=-=
AN 1026
Trump jokes about Iran destroying Los Angeles and San Diego
-=-=
---
AN 9 26
===
A loyal supporter of President Donald Trump has been convicted on nine counts of election fraud, the *San Francisco Chronicle* reported Monday.
Gaea Powell, a Moms for Liberty activist, ran for a county clerk-recorder spot in a small California town, promising that she could improve "election integrity." As the Chronicle reported, "it turns out this conservative candidate wasn’t following election laws herself."
A county jury found Powell guilty of nine felony counts, including lying about her residence, unlawfully registering to vote and fraudulently voting.
It comes from both the 2022 and 2024 elections, when Powell ran for mayor of Arroyo Grande. She claims that she didn't know or attempt to commit fraud.
“I respect the jury’s role. But I am deeply disappointed by today’s verdict,” Powell’s statement said. “I have maintained from the beginning, and I maintain today, that I did not knowingly deceive anyone and did not act with fraudulent intent.”
Powell represented herself in court rather than hire a lawyer. She claimed that there was evidence that could have vindicated her, but that it was "excluded during the trial," the report said.
She claims she'll appeal.
As the report explained, it isn't the first time a conservative candidate who pledged to create strict voting laws has also been found guilty of breaking existing laws.
Trump supporter Tina Peters, a former Colorado clerk, tampered with voting machines and then claimed fraud in the 2020 election. She was commended by President Donald Trump.
Another is Chad Bianco from Riverside County, who was the sheriff at the time and was running for governor when he claimed voter fraud was a huge problem. He then seized hundreds of thousands of ballots. The case went all the way to the California Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled he broke the law.
The justices even went so far as to write that Bianco exposed the ballots to “alteration or tampering” when he illegally seized them.
The heavily Republican senior community in Florida, The Villages, had a small group of four residents caught voting twice in 2020. They voted in Florida in person and in a previous state by absentee ballot.
The Villages conspiracy made the cases politically notable because reports of their activity came as Trump claimed that Democrats had committed widespread fraud to steal the 2020 election.
In 2020, Republican Donald “Kirk” Hartle voted twice in Nevada: once for himself and again under his late wife's ballot.
A 64-year-old Republican woman even went so far as to use the "everybody does it," excuse when she cast a ballot in her deceased mother’s name in 2020. Reporting said she did so because she believed Democrats were committing widespread fraud.
-=-=
---
AN 3 26
In Riverside County, California, Sheriff Chad Bianco — a Donald Trump supporter and former Oath Keepers member who is running for governor of California as a Republican — recently announced that his department had seized 650,000 voting ballots cast in a 2025 election. Bianco, at a, told reporters, "This investigation is simple: Physically count the ballots and compare that result with the total votes reported.""
MS NOW's Steve Benen, in an opinion column published on March 24, argues that Bianco is conducting an "investigation that appears entirely baseless" and could be used as a "template" for MAGA Republicans to challenge election results they don't like.
"For those inclined to be charitable," Benen explains, "there is a relatively benign interpretation of these developments. It's possible, for example, that Bianco is simply trying to generate attention for his longshot gubernatorial candidacy. Relatedly, the sheriff likely realizes that ballot seizures will please the White House, which in turn, may lead to greater institutional support from his party in the coming months. The move, in other words, may very well be little more than an elaborate campaign stunt that will have little practical impact and will be largely forgotten after Bianco loses. But then, there are the less benign interpretations of what transpired."
The "Rachel Maddow Show" producer notes that Bianco's investigation "comes on the heels of Trump sending the FBI to seize election materials in Georgia in response to other assorted conspiratorial complaints."
"The broader concern is that a template is taking shape, offering precedents for law enforcement to start making plans to seize ballots in areas nationwide — after or even during official counts," Benen warns. "What's more, the more frequently this happens, the more Americans may be led to believe it's normal and routine for law enforcement officials to seize and impound ballots — despite the fact that this is neither normal nor routine."
---
---
RWW
CA Gubernatorial Candidate Chad Bianco Claims 'Our Government Was Formed Only For A Christian Nation'
01/14/2026
by
Chad Bianco, who currently serves as sheriff of Riverside County, California, is among the leading Republican candidates running for governor. Bianco is also a Christian nationalist, which was on full display during a recent appearance he made on the His Glory TV network.
"It's been beat into us that there has to be a separation of church and state," Bianco said. "There is, but it's backwards: The government cannot be involved in your church. The government can't tell you you can't go to church. They can't tell you you can't pray. They can't tell you what church you have to go to. That was the founding of our country. The founding of our country was them coming here with Protestant Christian values that formed our country so they could practice freely their religion."
"[That] how they developed the Constitution," he continued. "In all their founding paperwork, it said the government shall stay out of religion. It also said that our government was formed only for a Christian nation. Without Christian values, our form of government will not work. That means that our Christian values absolutely must be in our government."
"Tyrannical government cannot oppress the churches, but our values are supposed to be in our government," Bianco asserted. "You should be electing people that have your values. Not your political party; it's your values. Vote on your values and this country would be basically how it was 200 years ago, 250 years ago now this year. We can turn this around easily if we would all just get out and vote."
Video URL
Bianco's assertion that "all the founding paperwork" declared that "our government was formed only for a Christian nation" is patently false, which is quite obvious given that the Constitution itself explicitly declared that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."
---
brags not vax
https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/tucker-carlson-2657142877/
recall hypoc of fox corp widely reported?
for months, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson tirelessly promoted anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories on his show but wouldn’t say whether or not he had been vaccinated for COVID-19. According to Daily Beast reporters Justin Baragona and Lachlan Cartwright, however, Carlson bragged about being unvaccinated during a Saturday, April 2 appearance at an evangelical Christian fundamentalist megachurch in La Jolla, California.
Certainly, not all Christians are anti-vaxxer extremists. Many Catholic and mainline Protestant churches have helped their members find COVID-19 vaccines. But anti-vaxxer attitudes are common among far-right white evangelicals, including those who attend Awaken Church in La Jolla (a San Diego suburb) and applauded Carlson’s speech on April 2[beat twt]
For more than a year now, Fox News star Tucker Carlson has gone out of his way to avoid confirming whether or not he’s vaccinated,” Baragona and Cartwright report. “This month, however, he bragged about having not gotten a single jab. While speaking at Awaken Church earlier this month, the prime-time star heaped praise on the San Diego megachurch for defying COVID-19 restrictions throughout the pandemic before mocking the need for additional booster shots.”
Carlson’s visit to Awaken Church inspired a protest from Ukrainian-Americans, who were critical of the Fox News host for praising Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to Fox 5 San Diego.
During his Awaken Church speech, Carlson mocked the COVID-19 vaccines as well as their booster shots. Carlson, according to Voice of San Diego, told the crowd, “I skipped the first three, I’m not getting that one either.”
Those comments drew applause from anti-vaxxers in the crowd.
Carlson also told Awaken attendees that he isn’t opposed to vaccines in general, only COVID-19 vaccines.
Carlson said, “I’ve had like a million of them…. I look at these people, like, this just does not make sense at all.And I have no idea what’s up here, but whatever you’re telling me, it’s just not true.”
Baragona and Lachlan Cartwright note, “Additional audio provided to Source Material by the nonprofit investigative outfit confirmed Carlson’s remarks, which further included him citing hishaving grown up ‘next to the Salk Institute in La Jolla’ as evidence that he is ‘obviously’ not opposed to vaccines.”
Although Carlson and others at Fox News have often downplayed the severity of COVID-19, the pandemic has been the world’s worst health crisis since the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918/1919. According to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, the COVID-19 pandemic has killed more than 6.1 million people worldwide — including over 985,000 in the United States. But thanks to COVID-19 vaccines, many of the infections that are occurring at this point are not life-threatening.
https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/as-charles-koch-cultivates-anti-war-image-koch-industries-profits-from-defense-contracts/
no lnx
As Charles Koch cultivates anti-war image, Koch industries profits from defense contracts
Written by Alex Kotch / The American Prospect July 26, 2019
Libertarian billionaire industrialist Charles Koch has gone to great lengths to paint himself as an anti-interventionist. He has funded foreign policy-focused think tanks and university centers such as the conflict-averse Center for the Study of Statesmanship at Catholic University and the Notre Dame International Security Center, which is directed by anti-NATO professor Michael Desch.
Most recently, he teamed up with an extremely unlikely ally, liberal billionaire philanthropist George Soros, to found the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. The Charles Koch Foundation and Soros’ Open Society Foundations each contributed $500,000 to help found the Quincy Institute, which will open in September, along with $800,000 from other donors.
“Political leaders have increasingly deployed the military in a costly, counterproductive, and indiscriminate manner, normalizing war and treating armed dominance as an end in itself,” reads the institute’s website. “The Quincy Institute is an action-oriented think tank that will lay the foundation for a new foreign policy centered on diplomatic engagement and military restraint.”
But Koch Industries, the giant oil, chemical, paper, and electronics conglomerate owned and led by Koch, has been cashing in on Department of Defense contracts. Since 2016, two Koch Industries subsidiaries have gotten federal contracts worth a total of close to $2.3 million to provide the Navy with circuit boards for its ships, according to Sludge’s review of federal contract data from the Federal Procurement Data System.
A Navy spokesperson told Sludge that “circuit boards are used in a variety of ships, submarines and aircraft” but declined to provide additional details regarding the use of the Koch subsidiaries’ electronics.
The two most recent contracts, which total nearly $500,000, went to Camarillo, California-based Interconnect Systems, which Koch Industries subsidiary Molex acquired in 2016. Naval Surface Warfare Systems Crane, a Navy office with a mission “to provide acquisition engineering, in-service engineering and technical support for sensors, electronics, electronic warfare and special warfare weapons,” initiated a $247,350 contract with Interconnect Systems in March 2019 for “digital signal processing computer card[s].” The company had signed a similar contract in September 2018 with NSWS Crane for $243,950.
Interconnect Systems scored a $1 million contract for circuit cards in July 2018 from the Defense Logistics Agency’s (DLA) maritime facility in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. DLA Land and Maritime “manages the supply chain for ground-based and maritime weapons systems repair parts, small arms parts, and fluid-handling systems.”
Nallatech, a subsidiary of Interconnect Systems, has gotten close to $247,000 worth of Navy contracts since 2016. The majority of that money came from NSWC Crane, but some came from the NAVSUP Weapons Support Systems agency, which supports naval weapons systems. NSWC Crane gave Nallatech its largest contract, for $147,000 worth of hybrid processors, in September 2017.
Since 2016, Interconnect Systems and its subsidiary, Nallatech, have gotten $2,260,000 worth of Defense contracts.
Nallatech, which last year integrated with Molex subsidiary BittWare, has received over $617,000 worth of Defense contracts since 2008, the year it was acquired by Interconnect Systems, according to usaspending.gov. The company advertises military and aerospace products such as radar systems for manned and unmanned vehicles that “provide unprecedented situational awareness and target coordination,” as well as a “ballistic digitizer.”
Molex, an Illinois-based manufacturer of electrical connectors, provides parts for a number of industries. In its defense section, the Molex website lists products for use in unmanned vehicles, missiles, and ground vehicles.
Koch Industries, the Quincy Institute, the Charles Koch Foundation, and Open Society Foundations did not respond to requests for comment.
More Navy Connections
A partially Koch-funded foreign policy center at a California state university is also involved with the Navy.
The University of California at San Diego’s Center for Peace and Security Studies got a $3.3 million multi-year grant from the Charles Koch Foundation in 2017, its second year of existence.
“We’re excited about U.C. San Diego and its scholars’ work to better understand emerging issues in security studies and their implications for U.S. foreign policy,” said Charles Koch Foundation Vice President for Research William Ruger in a university news story. Ruger, an Afghanistan war veteran, is in the Navy Reserve.
The Center for Peace and Security Studies also gets funding from the Office of Naval Research’s Minerva Research Initiative. Its current grant, covering 2014-19, is called “Deterrence with Proxies.”
The center’s website describes its work on military automation. “Technologies that supplant human labor in battle—such as UAVs (drones) and ground combat robots—lower military labor costs and limit political risks associated with friendly casualties. The tendency should thus be for military automation to increase the scope of threats or uses of force by the most advanced economies, geographically and in terms of the issues in dispute.”
UCSD has a long and lucrative relationship with the Navy; the Navy’s Naval Information Warfare Systems Command, which works with the defense industry to create new weapons systems, has been headquartered at the university since 1997. Since 1981, UCSD has raked in nearly $250 million from Navy contracts, according to data from the Federal Procurement Data Service.
Political science professor Erik Gartzke, a former Army and Navy officer who runs the Center for Peace and Security Studies, has written papers about “costless combat” drones.
Meanwhile, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Koch-backed corporate bill mill, supported domestic drone use through its proposed Unmanned Aerial Vehicle program.
‘The Case for Private Defense’
“Charles Koch’s anti-interventionist posturing is more clearly understood through his decades-long support of anarcho-capitalist scholars who have developed and championed the call to privatize police and military defense,” said Ralph Wilson, co-founder of the Corporate Genome Project and former research director of activist group UnKoch My Campus.
Koch’s political views are shaped by the Austrian School of economics, which advocates unfettered free markets and small governments. One prominent right-wing think tank that has promoted these concepts is the Mises Institute, which was established in 1982 and is named after one of the 20th century’s leading Austrian economists, Ludwig von Mises.
The late Murray Rothbard, Mises’ close associate and vice president of academic affairs at the Mises Institute for 13 years, argued against the state entirely and advocated a privatized military and police force. Like Rothbard, Mises Institute senior fellow Hans-Hermann Hoppe supports fully privatized security. In a paper first published by the Mises Institute in 1998, Hoppe argues that “collective security is a myth that provides no justification for the modern state, [and] all security is and must be private.”
In a 2002 essay, republished by the Mises Institute in 2010, Mises Institute fellow Robert Murphy made the case for privatized defense. Since then, he has continued to speak on the issue; Murphy held a session called “The Market for Military Defense” at this month’s “Mises University,” an annual free-market-economics boot camp.
Murphy owes much of his career to the generosity of Koch; he’s a research assistant professor at Texas Tech’s Free Market Institute, which is heavily funded by the Charles Koch Foundation (but also, ironically, gets substantial funding from the state government); a senior economist at the Institute for Energy Research, which Koch helped found and which has received funding from the three Koch family nonprofits; and a research fellow at the Independent Institute, which has scored grants from two Koch foundations.
Rothbard and Koch co-founded the libertarian Cato Institute in 1977 but had a falling out in the early 1980s. Still, their spheres continue to intersect, as several other current Mises Institute associates teach in university programs also funded by the Charles Koch Foundation.
Just Another Rebrand?
The Koch family has struggled with image problems for some time. Koch, along with his younger brother, David, has helmed a libertarian-minded political operation for decades, which has helped propel conservative Republicans to state and national office, and helped to found the Tea Party. Koch Industries is one of the country’s biggest polluters and has had to pay over $800 million in fines for environmental, labor, workplace, and other violations.
Because of their poor reputations, Koch Industries and Koch’s political network have undergone a series of rebrands, including Koch’s newest incarnation as a philanthropist who works with both parties to reform the criminal justice system and restrain America’s forever wars. For several years now, Koch has compared himself and his network of wealthy conservative donors to civil rights heroes such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King.
But critics say these recent initiatives are largely distractions from Koch’s core mission, which he has always followed: to cut taxes and slash regulations in order to maximize Koch Industries’ profits.
“Koch Industries has consistently chosen corporatism and profit over their own ‘principled’ libertarianism, whether contracting with the U.S. military or accepting over half a billion dollars in local, state, and federal subsidies,” Wilson told Sludge.
Koch will likely continue to fund think tanks focused on preventing wars, but his company’s simultaneous role in the military-industrial complex should not be overlooked.