Election Cheating

Pennsylvania’s legislature has made clear that undated mail-in ballots are invalid ballots and cannot be counted.

Even so, Pennsylvania’s Progressive-Democratic Party governor Tom Wolf has ordered counties to continue counting undated ballots.

His move comes even after a ruling in a related Pennsylvania case:

Last week the US Supreme Court sided with another Republican politician in the state and invalidated hundreds of mail-in ballots that the state had previously counted even though they lacked a date along with the voter signature.

As the Progressive-Democrat Wolf knows full well, he has no such authority. Here’s our Constitution’s Article I, Section 4:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof….

The State’s legislature makes that decision, not anyone in the State’s Executive Branch—or in the State’s Judicial Branch. Pennsylvania’s legislature has spoken on the matter very clearly: undated ballots are invalid and uncountable. Full stop.

Americans shouldn’t have to go into court as a matter of course to enforce any law, including an election law. The matter of course should be following the law, with resorting to court the exception.

We Americans need to remember this, and remember who thinks laws can be disregarded at convenience, in the elections coming up.

Who’s in Charge?

British Prime Minister Liz Truss and her then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng proposed a serious personal and corporate tax reduction for British subjects. The Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey demurred—loudly—and sent the British securities and debt markets into a tailspin.

As a result of the turmoil, Truss folded, fired Kwarteng, and removed the corporate tax reduction.

That wasn’t enough for Bailey and now the TINAs—Tories in Name Alone—and now Truss has virtually quit the game altogether: she’s now withdrawn all of the tax reductions, even those income tax reductions that would have benefitted the ordinary British subject.

Never mind, either, that the tax reductions would have spurred British economic growth and gone a long way toward getting its high inflation back under control and back down.

Elected Truss doesn’t seem to be in charge. Bureaucrat Bailey does. On the other hand, between the two of them, only Bailey seems to have the courage to stay the course he’s set.

One of those TINAs, a carefully unnamed Conservative lawmaker who won his district in 2019 with a 65% majority had this:

One says that he lies awake at night worrying about being kicked out when the country next goes to the polls.
“I’ve got private school fees to pay and my mortgage is going through the roof[.]”

More worried about his elite status and personal welfare than he is about the job his constituents hired him to do.

And isn’t all of that a sad state of affairs for the British people.

Still only Chit-Chat

Now ex-President Barack Obama (D) thinks it was a mistake to essentially ignore the Green Revolution in Iran in 2009, the Iranian people’s uprising against the tyrannical Ayatollah regime.

That’s awfully … of him to say so, now, 13 years too late for it to matter for the Iranian people or for him to suffer any consequences, even as it comes amid the current protests by Iranian women against that same tyrannical Ayatollah regime.

Now he’s saying,

Every time we see a flash, a glimmer of hope, of people longing for freedom, I think we have to point it out.
We have to shine a spotlight on it. We have to express some solidarity about it[.]

Chit-chat. Obama, and his BFF President Joe Biden (D), still are interested in limiting themselves to yakking about the Iranian people’s efforts. Talk is cheap; what concrete action would today’s Obama or Biden be willing to take?

They’re not quite being silent.

Women’s Rights

The Iranian women are campaigning, with great courage, for their freedom (proximately to dress as they wish, but it’s much broader than that) against the tyrannical, murderous, and terrorism-supporting regime reigning over Iran. Many Iranian men are campaigning with them, and together, they’re struggling for broad freedoms for everyone: the freedom for Iranian citizens of both sexes to make their own, individual, decisions regarding their any of their actions.

The Progressive-Democratic Biden administration is shamefully quiet on the matter, even as it continues to beg on bended knee—from the kiddie table, yet—to be allowed to rejoin the JCPOA, the Obama-era agreement to allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons after expiry of some restrictions.

This is how the Progressive-Democratic Party has chosen to interact with the terrorism-supporting regime, though. An earlier Iranian people’s attempt to fight for individual rights, joined by Iranian women that time (compared to the women’s campaign being joined by men this time), was just as shamefully ignored by an earlier Progressive-Democratic administration.

The last time the Iranian people risked their lives for freedom from the benighted theocracy that subjugates them—the 2009 protests against a stolen election—Washington chose shame. The White House turned its back on the protesters for a week until they gathered near the former US embassy building in Tehran chanting, “Obama, you’re either with them or with us.” This finally evoked a statement of support, but it was too little, too late.

Emphasis on too little. Obama’s words were—by design—empty; he followed up on those words with…nothing at all for the Iranian people, not a minim of actual, concrete support.

Joshua Muravchik is being generous in his op-ed at the first link, though, regarding Biden.

The Biden administration has been more forthcoming in its pronouncements during the current protests, but it can and should do more.

He appears to take Biden seriously in its being more forthcoming. Biden’s pronouncements are just empty words, and not even as articulately snowing as Obama’s prior chit-chat. The Biden administration can and should do more, but it won’t. It’s too desperate to get back into that nuclear weapons authorization agreement.

Those Iranian women—they’re on their own.

It’s not only the Progressive-Democratic Party administrations who are silent, though. Just as shamefully, what passes for the current American feminist movement is just as meekly quiet. And they don’t even have a sham realpolitik motive for it.

Biden’s Union Push

Or maybe it’s Biden’s union putsch.

The Labor Department on Tuesday proposed a rule that aims to reclassify millions of independent contractors as employees. About 20 million Americans work as independent contractors, which have more autonomy than employees and can set their own hours and work for multiple companies at the same time.

But that autonomy is anathema to the Left: it’s much harder to unionize all those independent contractors, much harder to bring them under control until they’re created formal employees and so can be forced into unions in closed shop States. And make no mistake: the Progressive-Democratic Party is bent on eliminating all right-to-work laws so that every State becomes a unionized closed shop State.

This move by the Biden administration is just an early one on its path to making it easier to convert these free market jobs to mandatory union jobs. And to increase government control over average Americans and so to increase Party power.