Tag Archives: freedom

The Fruits of Timidity

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Rebel forces in eastern Ukraine on Tuesday announced that they plan to hold a referendum calling for the creation of a new state known as Malorossiya, which translates as “Little Russia.”

In a statement published on the rebel-aligned Donetsk News Agency, rebel leader Alexander Zakharchenko said that the new state would aspire to include not only the areas under insurgent control, but also the rest of Ukraine.

This wouldn’t be occurring now, had our government and those of Europe hadn’t been so meek in the face of Russian aggression in the two eastern oblasts and then without a whimper accepting Russian partition of Ukraine and occupation of Crimea.

Maybe now, the lot of us will stop bleating about the Minsk accord and remind Russia of its obligations under the Budapest Memorandum.  Maybe now the lot of us will start selling/leasing/granting Ukraine the weapons and supplies it needs to defend itself and to take back from Russia the three oblasts.

Election Fraud vs Election Hacking

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Certainly these are different from each other in method and often (but not always) in purpose, but is there an important difference were these successful in altering our election outcomes or in raising doubt about those outcomes?

I didn’t think so.

Why, then, are so many who should know better so obstructive of the Federal effort to understand the method and extent of election fraud?

There were nearly 150,000 attempts to penetrate the voter-registration system on Election Day 2016, State Election Commission says

That’s the subhead of Sunday’s Wall Street Journal piece on US Election Hacking Efforts. Illinois was hit as badly:

…hackers were hitting the State Board of Elections “5 times per second, 24 hours per day” from late June until Aug 12, 2016…. Hackers ultimately accessed approximately 90,000 voter records, the State Board of Elections said.

Accessed, not simply trying to, as was the case in South Carolina, the state with those 150,000 hack attempts.  In all, at least 21 states (I say “at least;” the WSJ just cited the 21) were targeted, and the intelligence community’s consensus is that the Russians were behind most of the attempts.

That should give an idea of the extent of the hacking at/into our election system.  Isn’t election fraud—another version of influencing or altering our election outcomes at least as serious?  Domestic defrauding of our elections, in some senses, would be even worse; it would be a betrayal by our own.

But so many governors refuse to cooperate with Federal efforts to characterize election fraud.

Go figure.

Free Elections

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The Progressive-Democratic Party version is playing out in California.  The good citizens of the state senatorial district straddling Orange, San Bernardino, and Los Angeles counties want to recall state Senator Josh Newman (D), who voted for a 12/gal gasoline tax increase.  A successful recall also would jeopardize the Progressive-Democrats’ supermajority in each house of California’s legislature, and so the one-party rule that’s currently devastating the state but accruing political power to those Progressive-Democrat incumbents.

Can’t have that.

This is where free elections, Progressive-Democrat style, comes in.

Turnout in special elections typically drops more for Democrats than Republicans. So Democrats last month passed legislation adding procedural hurdles that would delay the recall election from this fall to next June’s midterm primary, when liberal turnout is expected to be higher.

And

Democrats are also imploring the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission to upend a campaign-finance law that voters approved in 2000.
…
Yet Democrats now say legislators should be allowed to donate unlimited sums to their colleagues.

That would allow Progressive-Democrats in the state’s “safe” districts to pour money into Newsom’s defense.  Can you hear the screams from the Left that decried so piteously the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling?  I’m having trouble making them out.

Yeah, this will be a fair and free recall election, all right.

Charlie Gard and the British Government

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Or, Charlie Gard and sovereignty.

Charlie Gard is the baby with a rare genetic disease that has damaged his brain, probably fatally and soon.  The baby’s parents want to be able to try alternative treatments, or in the alternative, be allowed to bring him home to die there with his parents who love him rather than encumbered by the state’s bureaucrats and representatives, his parents also by-the-way present, in an emptily sterile hospital room.

The British government has chosen to not allow any of this: the baby must die in the hospital.  The EU’s Court of Human Rights, in a breathtaking repudiation of its mission, has sided with the British government.  Understand: that the Brit government and the EU in their ruling have sided with the hospital in which Charlie is being held is neither here nor there.  Both the Brit government and the EU Court could have sided with the baby’s parents, and each chose not to.

Which, as The Wall Street Journal put it in their op-ed at the link, raises a question:

Whose baby is Charlie, anyway—his parents’ or the state’s? In this delicate case, Britain’s national care system has elevated technical expertise over parental love.

In this, the WSJ has misunderstood.  It’s the Brit government that has decided, not the bureaucrats of the NHS.  It is the government of the home of 1984 that has claimed this baby, poor Charlie Gard, as its ward.

With the British government’s ruling, it has made parents irrelevant and claimed all children to be wards of the state.  By extension, the British government has made all citizens of Great Britain, raised from early childhood as wards of the state, themselves wards of the state.

The citizens of Great Britain are not sovereign in their own nation.  Only Government is sovereign.

Of What are they Afraid?

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President Donald Trump has formed his commission to look into national-scale voter fraud, as promised, and that commission has asked each of the several States for a potful of voter roll information.  Even though the commission has asked for a broad range of data, it has emphasized that it wants only the data that are publicly available according to the respective States’ laws.

Nevertheless, a significant number of States have chosen to refuse to supply the data.  Virginia Governor Terry McAuliff (D), for instance, wondered with a straight face “what voter fraud?  Who—us?”

I have no intention of honoring this request. Virginia conducts fair, honest, and democratic elections, and there is no evidence of significant voter fraud in Virginia[.] … At best this commission was set up as a pretext to validate Donald Trump’s alternative election facts, and at worst is a tool to commit large-scale voter suppression.

California Secretary of State Alex Padilla also has refused.

…not provide sensitive voter information to a commission that has already inaccurately passed judgment that millions of Californians voted illegally.

Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes:

Kentucky will not aid a commission that is at best a waste of taxpayer money and at worst an attempt to legitimize voter suppression efforts across the country[.]

Look who’s prejudging the outcome of an investigation that’s just getting underway.

I fail to understand why these folks want to obstruct the investigation.  After all, what better way to shut down Trump than to show, via his own commission, that his voter fraud beef is bogus?  Unless the beef is valid, and these guys have something to hide.

Naw.  Couldn’t be.