Category Archives: politics

No Voter Fraud?

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s one case—a single incident, but much too large a case to be dismissed for that.

Paterson, NJ, with a population of 145,000, last month held—rather, is holding, since the city isn’t done counting votes—an election for City Council, among other positions. The election was done by mail-in voting since the Powers that Be considered the city’s Wuhan Virus situation that serious.

16,747 vote-by-mail ballots were received, but only 13,557 votes were counted. More than 3,190 votes, 19% of the total ballots cast, were disqualified by the board of elections.

Nineteen per cent of the votes have been tossed.

Why?

Over 800 ballots in Paterson were invalidated for appearing in mailboxes improperly bundled together—including a one mailbox where hundreds of ballots were in a single packet. The bundles were turned over to law enforcement to investigate potential criminal activity related to the collection of the ballots.
The board of elections disqualified another 2,300 ballots after concluding that the signatures on them did not match the signatures on voter records.

There’s more:

Reporting by NBC further uncovered citizens of Paterson who are listed as having voted, but who told the news outlet they never received a ballot and did not vote. One woman, Ramona Javier, after being shown the list of people on her block who allegedly voted, told the outlet she knew of eight family members and neighbors who were wrongly listed. “We did not receive vote-by-mail ballots and thus we did not vote,” she said. “This is corruption. This is fraud.”

And

There were multiple reports that large numbers of mail-in ballots were left on the lobby floors of apartment buildings and not delivered to residents’ individual mailboxes, further casting doubt on the integrity of the election.

But who cares, right? It’s only 3,200 votes that were…wrong.

In a single ward of one council seat race, 24% of the votes cast were tossed by the State’s Board of Elections.

One case? Not so much. Statewide, across all of its 31 elections, the Elections Board had to “disqualify” 9.6% of the mail-in ballots cast. Even with Paterson’s failures discounted, the Statewide failure rate is over 8%.

Mail-in ballots, which have none of the controls of absentee ballots, are a petri dish for the voter fraud that Progressive-Democrats insist is a right-wing conspiracy.

Statehood for DC?

Posted on by
Reply

That’s the House Progressive-Democrats’ plan. They voted on the thing last Friday.

One of the rationalizations for the move is this, from the District of Columbia’s “shadow senator” Paul Strauss:

DC [he’s cited as saying], created in July 1790, pays more federal taxes than any other non-voting territory and does not receive proportional services for their population, which is larger than those of Wyoming and Vermont.
“We are essentially a donor state,” he said.

That’s not an argument for statehood, though. It’s an argument for ending the transfers of citizens’ and their business’ tax monies from one State/territory/District to another other than in times of regional emergency.

What’s being carefully avoided in the discussion is the fact that this new State, were it to come to pass, would provide two Progressive-Democrat Senators to the Senate—and that’s why it’s Progressive-Democrats who are making the push. The same problem would exist were DC just as partisan, but Republican, and Republicans were making the push, and the solution would be just as invalid.

To answer James’ Madison’s Federalist 43 concerns about a State housing the Federal government, Strauss says this new State would exclude the Federal government’s facilities—just surround them entirely:

…Capitol, White House, and other federal buildings would remain in its own neutral area, with only the surrounding area being part of the new state….

Nah. If the politicians are serious about the region simply needing the benefits of statehood, that “surrounding area” should be returned to Maryland and Virginia, from which they were carved in the first place in order to form the District.

There’s no need to create a new State.

Victory for Competitive Free Market Pricing

Posted on by
Reply

So far, hospitals will be required to publish the prices they negotiate with their insurers. This will facilitate the public’s ability to comparison shop for hospital procedures and services so as to drive down costs to the public through competition.

The American Hospital Association had sued in Federal court to block a new Trump administration rule that required such publication, but the judge presiding, Carl Nichols, granted the government’s motion for summary dismissal.

Aside from withstanding the inevitable sequence of appeals, a significant part of what’s left, now, is a requirement for hospitals to publish their success rates for various types of procedure and service.

And We Believe Him

Posted on by
Reply

Late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel has been outed: he did black face a few years back and a mock rap Christmas song in which he used “n—-” lots of time.

Now the Precious Ones are shaking their fingers at him very firmly, and he, having already absented himself from his show for a separate violation of woke-ness, is saying words of apology for those prior crimes.

Actually, though, Kimmel’s apology (really more of a counter attack against those presumptuous enough in his eyes to object to his past) is wholly unnecessary. The ones who should be apologizing—with a true and honest apology—are the Woke/Racist/Sexist Left who manufacture out of the æther racist (in Kimmel’s case), or sexist, or offense du jour… beef where none exists.

After all, Kimmel’s jokes were in bad taste, and they weren’t funny except to a special few, but at bottom, there was nothing racist about them. They were just bad taste, unfunny jokes.

An Independent DoJ

Posted on by
Reply

Some pundits are complaining about a DoJ run by an Attorney General that is becoming a President Donald Trump ally rather than leading an independent Cabinet facility.

They’re misunderstanding, if not distorting, the situation.

These, for instance:

While those allies [of Attorney General William Barr] believe the attorney general’s actions are justified, they worry he is inviting excessive scrutiny that will undermine his agenda and do nothing to help the Justice Department’s already bruised morale.

Not at all. If the actions are justified, scrutiny—”excessive” or otherwise—is no excuse for not taking them.

In addition, if entrenched careerists in DoJ are unhappy with the changed corporate culture, they’re free to be unhappy on someone else’s payroll.

 

[Jonathan Turley said,] “This is a failure to consider the optics and impact of this type of announcement….”

This is not a failure at all. A major part of depoliticizing DoJ after the Eric Holder/Loretta Lynch depredations and the failures of the Jeff Sessions/Rod Rosenstein tenure is to take actions because they’re the right things to do, independently of “optics” or “impact of this type.”

 

Inside the Justice Department, Mr. Barr…is known for impatience when his orders aren’t quickly carried out.

Imagine that—insisting the Department move with all deliberate speed instead of the glacial pace of politics.

This is what independence looks like, and neither Progressive-Democrats nor deep-rooted bureaucrats like it.