“Voting System ‘Under Assault'”

So says President Joe Biden (D). He also says protecting it was the “single most important thing to do.”

The single most important thing that we have to do is we have to protect the voting system, protect the sacred right to vote. It’s under assault in ways that I haven’t seen in my entire career.

He’s right.

That assault, however, comes directly from his own Party’s attempt to nationalize how elections are run in each of the several States—in deliberate, cynical contravention of what our Constitution says–and from Progressive-Democrats’ lies about what’s actually in the election reform laws.

Here’s Article I, Section 4, on the matter of who sets the rules for elections:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Place of Chusing Senators.

The Congress cannot write its own laws regarding how States shall run elections in their jurisdictions. Congress can only modify State laws, and then only to ensure compliance with the rest of our Constitution, vis., our Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment. Further, in order to modify a State law, that State law must exist. If Congress writes the Federal law, there will be no State law extant to be modified.

The other part of Biden’s and the Progressive-Democratic Party’s assault on our voting system rests on the fundamental dishonesty of their claims about what the States are doing.

Georgia, for instance, lengthened the weekend hours of early voting and added a Sunday to that early voting period. This is somehow suppressive of the vote, the Progressive-Democrats claim, and they want the expanded hours rescinded.

Georgia also legalized, standardized, and ensured the security of ballot drop boxes—drop boxes which did not exist prior to the Wuhan Virus-impacted 2020 election and whose creation for that election were illegal, having been created by the Georgia Secretary of State and not Georgia’s legislature. This legalizing and regularizing also, Progressive-Democrats dishonestly claim, are supposed to suppress voting, and they must be blocked.

Arizona’s proposed election reform laws would, among other things, prohibit mass mailing of absentee ballots, requiring instead each voter to explicitly request one, a move which would reduce the opportunity of fraud and enhance the safety of actually cast ballots. No, the Progressive-Democrats say; they want those fraud opportunities.

Progressive-Democrat lies about Texas’ moves are similarly broad. The proposed bills expand early voting hours, standardize procedures across counties, require the objectivity of some sort of voter ID with absentee ballots rather than the by-guess-and-by-golly of signature matching, and bar ballot harvesting. These improvements to vote integrity and ballot access are unacceptable to the Progressive-Democrats; they want here, too, their opportunity for fraud preserved.

And on top of all this, Texas’ House Progressive-Democrats, in the name of supporting the vote, have absconded from the legislature and departed the State explicitly to suppress voting on those bill proposals.

All of these expansions of voter access and of vote integrity are just Jim Crow on steroids, Biden says. Go figure.

Not a Bad Gig

Who needs work when Uncle Sugar will take care of you?

Under emergency response legislation, the federal government expanded eligibility for unemployment benefits, extended the number of weeks, and gave bonuses to state unemployment benefits. The expansion will sunset in September, but congressional Democrats have pressed President Biden for an extension.

The current state of affairs according to a report by Alli Fick, a Senior Research Fellow with the Foundation for Government Accountability, is this:

An individual can receive nearly $3,700 a month—or more than $44,000 a year—by staying at home. On top of tax credits, food stamps, and state unemployment benefits, an individual can receive an additional $1,300 per month with the $300 weekly unemployment bonus.

It’s not a bad gig, and nearly anyone can get it. All courtesy of virtue-signaling politicians of both parties.

It can get worse, too. Progressive-Democrats are pushing the trap of free income—universal basic income.

Wuhan Virus Delta Variant

With the panic-mongers in full, baying throat over the Delta variant’s spread, here’s a graph from The New York Times showing new reported cases in Great Britain up through 1 August.

Although the graph is for all variants of the Wuhan Virus extant in Great Britain, the Delta variant has become the dominant strain, and it plainly has shot its bolt and is on the wane.

Scroll down the page at the link for a similar graph on the Wuhan Virus-attributed death rate trend (mostly Delta variant since the start of summer). The mortality rate from the Delta variant never has been high, and it already as plateaued. Although the text in the graph above indicates, via snapshot, a sharp increase (from an extremely low rate to a still very low rate), the mortality rate graph down the page gives a truer picture of the trend.

We care because, in addition to Great Britain being a friend of ours, they’re generally a few weeks ahead of us in the progression of the virus. Our own panic-mongers (As Delta Variant Rages screams even a Wall Street Journal headline) have no rational basis for their hype.

The NYT took these data from Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University.

Back Rent

On the day the moratorium on rent paying, enacted during the Wuhan Virus situation, expired, the aggregated back rent owed as a result of that moratorium amounts to some $15 billion.

There is broad concern for the renters who owe the money, and that’s appropriate as far as it goes. But the concern doesn’t go far enough. What’s lacking is any concern regarding the other side of that coin: to whom all that money is owed.

“To whom” are the landlords, most of whom are mom and pop businesses and individual moms or pops who own a house, or two, that they rent out. Those $15 billion are owed to far fewer landlords than they are owed by renters.

Absent the rent payments, those small-time landlords are unable to pay their own mortgages on the rental properties for which they’re responsible, and in many cases, without that income they’re unable to pay their mortgages on their own homes.

Where’s the concern for them? Where’s the help for them?

The silence deafens.

Color Me Surprised

…or not. It seems Ted Wheeler, the Progressive-Democratic Mayor of Portland, OR, who doubles as the Portland police commissioner, is having trouble finding folks idiot enough willing to work for him in what used to be a critical section of his police facility.

Leaders in Portland, OR, are looking to combat the city’s rising homicide rate by resurrecting a police unit focused on gun violence. But after a year of growing tension within the department, they can’t find enough officers to join.
Since 14 job openings were announced in May, only four police personnel have applied to work with the new version of Portland’s Gun Violence Reduction Team, which was shut down last year amid long-running protests….

Given the few willing, those four have not yet been taken up on their offer.

Daryl Turner, Portland Police Association President has his finger on the problem.

They’re demonizing and vilifying you, and then they want to put you in a unit where you’re under an even bigger microscope

That bigger microscope is the new unit’s very own private citizen-advisory board of woke civilians who would be more interested in the new section cops’ ability to fight systemic racism than in their ability to fight violent crime.

I’m surprised there are any men or women willing to be a Portland cop of any sort as long as Ted Wheeler and the others in his city administration remain in office. They’ve shown they cannot be trusted to support the police in any endeavor.