Days Of Future Passed

Minnesota, 2024: The DFL says 46 days of early voting and “no excuses needed” mail in voting doesn’t make voting (for the DFL) easy enough; demands more:

Given that young adults are least likely to own a car, and many 18- and 19-year-olds do not even have a driver’s license, it can be very difficult for them to reach early voting and Election Day voting sites,” Pursell said as she explained the parameters of the legislation, which is being backed by Secretary of State Steve Simon.

The House Elections Committee voted to place the bill on the general register on a party-line voice vote. The bill has no companion in the Senate. No Republicans in the hearing expressed support for the bill, which one member said amounts to a fiscally irresponsible “unfunded mandate” for counties.

Minnesota, 2030: The Minnesota DFL, claiming early voting and polls that come to you if you’re a prog kid at Gustavus is still not easy enough, proposes to simply enter votes for all newborns for the rest of their lives, on birth (or when they would have been born, if the mother “reproductive freedomed” the baby).

Let’s Stir Up Another Republic-Threatening Hornets Nest: Part II

Since roughly the 2020 election, I’ve simultaneously:

  • Thought something was amiss about the elections; if not Chicago-style ballot stuffing, at least a world of irregularites with the “legal” changes due to Covid – mail in balloting, and the collusion between the DOJ, the Biden campaign, big media and big tech to “shape” the Hunter Biden story, among others
  • Told some of the more extreme election skeptics, especially on the air, “That’s an interesting theory, but until Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani bring an actual case with evidence to court, rather than beclowning themselves, what do you expect we’re going to do about it?”

Three points.

Imperfection

The first point? I made that a few weeks back, when I talked about why I don’t necessairly think “a judge and jury say so” is completely invariably the dispositive last word on any issue. Long story short – judges and juries make mistakes. And that’s ignoring the fact that some prosecutors play fast and loose with the rules, some defense attorneys have no idea what they’re doing, and some judges just want to make their @$%$#& tee times.

Sometimes it gets caught.

The legal system isn’t perfect, but it beats most of the alternatives.

Which may or may not be good enough.

Second: In a separate, seemingly unrelated topic: in Minnesota, most judges are elected. But the candidate pool is intensely circumscribed because, as a lawyer once told me, running a campaign against a sitting judge in front of whom one will one day have to appear in court is pretty much a one-way trip toward spending the rest of your career chasing people who bounce checks.

Judges, by inference – who are charged with being our society’s stentorian impartial guardians of justice and fairness and due process – apparently have the egos of a bunch of middle school “mean girls”.

Reading between the lines: the reputation and social standing of practitioners among other practitioners is as much a part of the judicial system as due process and gavels and the literal letter of the law.

Socially Rigged

So – did the social pressure among lawyers, judges and everyone else in the legal profession that we discussed above affect the election, or the way the courts approached questions about it?

I don’t know. But this article, among others, certainly seems to brag about the power of the Legal Mean Girl caste to bring Big Law into line. Certainly Big Media isn’t going to report on it.

Let’s just say I can be convinced.

Just Remember…

The DFL will repeatedly and systematically cheat in their own elections.

But no way, no how in everyone else’s.

Sheesh. What are you, some kind of Cheetoh-haired Literal Hitler?

Denialists

Berg’s Seventh Law (“When a progressive issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character, humanity or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds“) was written long before I first read Saul Alinski’s “Rules for Radicals”, so I didn’t know that Alinski’s Rule 4, “”Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules”, is more or less the same idea.

The most tiresome, and omnipresent, meme of this election is “a vote for Republicans is a vote against Democracy”, combined with labeling any call for scrutiny of election laws and processes on any level as “election denialism”.

It’s a way of “othering” people – for, in most cases (shaddap about Marjory Taylor Greene – for defending a system of self-government …

…that is under constant attack by the left themselves.

It’s time to start calling out:

  • Electoral College Denialists
  • Minoritarian Senate Denialists
  • Enumerated Powers Denialists
  • Checks and Balances Denialists…

…as the threats to self-government that they actually are.

A Little Good-Ish News, If You Consider “Courts Supporting Common Sense” To Be Good News

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails about yesterday‘s New York Supreme Court ruling:

The New York State Supreme Court struck down a New York City ordinance allowing non-citizens to vote in local elections. What a bunch of haters.

The Boston Tea Party was based on “no taxation without representation.” The Declaration of Independence affirms that governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed. The Constitution lays out the formula to determine consent, through voting. The consistent underlying principle is that the people who will be affected by the rules imposed by the government ought to have a say in who makes up that government. And illegal aliens hiding in the city are affected by the rules adopted by the City Council as much as anybody else, so they ought to have a say in who sits on the City Council as much as anybody else.

And why should it end there? Citizens of foreign nations are affected by laws made in the United States Congress: foreign aid payments to their nations; wars waged in their countries; immigration encouraged or not. Why doesn’t every citizen of every nation get to vote for our Congress?

Why should they have to vote at all? That’s a heavy burden for someone who doesn’t read or speak the language, can’t complete the Request for Absentee ballot, can’t afford postage to send it back on time. Why not let US-based voter advocates cast ballots for them? They could bring ballots by the suitcase full, helpfully completed on behalf of all the citizens of the world.

And why bother with paper ballots for all those people? Think of the expense and wasted time, running them through the machines again and again until the right guy wins. Why not simply program the machine to give the desired result and be done with it?

It’s a slippery slope the court has chosen, this notion that only certain people should be allowed to vote. Probably a bunch of MAGA Trumpers on the court. Or worse, Open Borders Libertarians.

Joe Doakes

Don’t be giving Steve Simon any ideas.

Chilling Effect?

Asking for voter ID is the next step toward a government run by the KKK.

Unless you’re actually a DFLer.

Then…:

To be a delegate at DFL State convention, you need:

May be an image of text

Photo ID, proof of vaccination, and qa negative test result?

The DFL does know that Black men are the least-vaccinated population in Minnesota, right?

It’s almost as if they’re trying to…

…keep black men from participating?

The Real Election Fraud

One out of six Biden voters would have changed their votes, had they known about the Hunter Biden laptop story. That would’ve been more than enough to turn a close election into a landslide for Donald Trump.

It’s being noted that, two years later, the New York Times is finally covering the story.

But it was never “disinformation”, nosirreebob.

The idea that this is not the plan, to say nothing of “non-accidental,“ is impossible to the point of being a media unicorn descending from heaven.

We know this, because three weeks after the election, representatives from the New York Times and Washington Post news rooms (speaking in the open, on a national public radio program), declared their mission to be to go to change the walls” of the media, from “passing on the facts and telling the story“ to “denormalizing Donald Trump“.

Do people think there is no connection?

A Matter Of Trust

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The headline is ominous. Without drastic changes….and that’s great for Conservatives, right?
Well, it would be, if voting mattered. Does it? Do you really believe there won’t be a 4:00 A.M.pause in counting ballots, followed by a remarkable leap in Democrat votes? How will we counter that – vote harder?
It doesn’t matter how unpopular Castro was, he always won the election because he controlled the counters. Likewise, all the indicia of election fraud we weren’t allowed to talk about for the past year are still out there, still indicating systemic election fraud, still a problem for the next election.
Joe Doakes

Question: if we, the People , decide that the elections truly are rigged, what do we do?

They Don’t Just Super-Spread Social Toxicity Anymore

After 18 months of warning about “superspreaders” that never panned out, Democrats – in this case, the Texas Fleebaggers – finally put their money where their gaping, unmasked-on-airplanes mouths are:

On Tuesday, Axios reported that an aide to the speaker and a White House official tested positive for COVID-19 after attending a rooftop reception to honor the fugitive lawmakers. Both individuals were fully vaccinated, although a White House official downplayed the staffer’s illness.

“Yesterday, a fully-vaccinated senior spokesperson in the Speaker’s press office tested positive for COVID after contact with members of the Texas state legislature last week,” said Drew Hammier, deputy chief of staff to Pelosi.

The group of 50 Texas Democrats flouted federal regulations implemented by President Biden that require passengers on privately charted planes to wear masks for the duration of a flight. As of publication, no legal action has been taken against them, even though the Centers for Disease Control issued explicit warnings about not wearing masks. The Federal Aviation Administration did not respond to requests for comment from the Washington Free Beacon.

Since their arrival in Washington, D.C., six of the Texas Democrats have tested positive for COVID-19. The whereabouts of the Texas Democrats are unknown, and the public does not know how many people they infected during their trip to the nation’s capital. Texas state representative Gene Wu, a prominent member of the group who has shared news articles on Twitter about coronavirus strains entering the country while on the lam, did not respond to a request for comment.

Of course, their mission – gundeck the election reforms via foul means in a way they could never do via fair – remains accomplished.

Call it “divine retribution”.

Implausible

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Writer Peter Grant passes along a fascinating premise for a novel. The only problem is it’s so outrageous that it would be instantly dismissed as a tin-foil hat conspiracy and therefore is too implausible even for fiction.

Except . . . remember the Somali day care scam? And the mailbox registrations in the Phyllis Kahn race? And every business rents their mailing lists nowadays, right?

Could you craft a political action thriller in which nefarious schemers use fake voters to elect a fake President to take over the country? You could be the next Robert Ludlum.

Joe Doakes

Remember: with progressives, yesterdays joke (or fictional plot) is today’s proposal and tomorrow’s law.

Good News / Bad News

The good news: there are jurisdictions in this country where election integrity is non-negotiable.

The bad news: it’s for high school homecoming royalty elections.

While employed as an assistant principal at Bellview Elementary School in the same county, [Queen candidate’s mother Laura Rose] Carroll accessed the school district’s internal system to cast fraudulent votes for her daughter [Emily Rose Grover] so that she would win, officials said. The investigation began in November when the Escambia County School District reported unauthorized access into hundreds of student accounts, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

Investigators found that in October, hundreds of votes for the school’s homecoming court were flagged as fraudulent, the news release said. There were 117 votes from the same IP address within a short period of time, the investigation found.

Ms. Grover and her mother face up to…

…are you ready for this…

16 years in prison for rigging a high school homecoming royalty vote.

The FBI agent that presented false information to a FISA court, leading to a fraudulent FBI investigation that contributed materially to the rage that led to much of the electoral BS of this past eight months? He got probation.

And five’ll get you ten that school requires voter ID next year.

So Let’s Get This Straight

The DFL and the Teachers Union – pardon the redundancy – is rejecting the idea of allowing high school kids to take their standardized tests from home…

…because there’s no way to make such an important bit of work reliable and honest.

Democratic senators said Minnesota’s testing provider, Pearson Education, would not be able to develop a remote testing option in the next few weeks. It would be impossible to control the at-home environment like a classroom to monitor for cheating, they said.

“You can’t have anything on the board that would give a student an unfair advantage. How can we ensure that is going to happen at home?” said state Sen. Mary Kunesh, DFL-New Brighton.

Huh.

Gotta hand it to the DFL. They know the value of keeping institutions, the ones vital to democracy, un-sullied by essentially sending them home on the honor system.

Yessirreebob.

Facts: Growing In Office

I feel so stupid.  I completely fell for the tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory that the election was stolen.  But as this article makes clear, the election actually was SAVED

All those unsubstantiated Republican claims that an informal alliance of left-wing activists and business titans got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding; fended off voter-suppression lawsuits; recruited armies of poll workers; successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line; helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks; and after Election Day, monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not challenge the result including pressuring state legislators to certify dubious election results – they’re all true.  They did all those things and more.  But that’s a Good Thing.  Because they saved the election from Trump winning.

I wish I’d understood this last Fall.  I wasted so much time fretting over laws of statistics and suitcases of ballot and cardboarded-over windows but none of it mattered.  Things went exactly as planned. 

So I’m embarrassed at my credulity but one good thing came of it – I won’t have stand in line to cast my vote ever again, not when the big-shots have decided what the outcome should be and taken steps to ensure it.  So that’s nice.

Joe Doakes

Last week on his podcast, Ben Shapiro noted something I’d picked up when late, long-banned, forever-exiled commenter Dog Gone was trying to act as this blog’s “fact checker” – the difference between “true” and “false” usually boils down to whether a conservative or a progressive said it, regardless of the veracity of the fact itself.

Burma, Shaved

Have you heard about the election controversy?  Votes cast by ineligible persons?  Outdated voter registration lists allowing fraudulent votes to be cast?  Warnings before the election of “widespread violation of the laws and procedures of the pre-voting process.”  Election officials saying, “There is no evidence” to brush aside allegations of misconduct?  Democrats in Congress threatening to punish those who question the election results?

No, not Trump.  Myanmar (formerly Burma) where military officers have seized control, declared a one-year state of emergency, plan to hold fresh elections under supervision, and pledge to turn over control to the winner.

Apparently, their senior military leadership believes supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some fraudulent electoral ceremony.   When they see the electoral process so blatantly corrupted that it robs the people of their right to self-determination, the military takes their oath to uphold and defend the Constitution seriously enough to intervene and force a do-over to vindicate the people’s Constitutional right.

What a bunch of haters. 

Joe Doakes

Burma/Myanmar is a decades-long expose not only of the failures of socialism, but of the western Left’s myopia about the people they’s supposed to consider heroes.

Click Baited

I confess, I am often tempted by those click-bait ads.  This site advertises the 10 Greatest Sports Cheaters.The authors act as if it’s a big deal, as if the cheaters were some kind of villains and the people who called out the cheaters were some kind of heroes.

Who cares?  You lost.  Whether you lost fair and square or the other guy cheated to rob you of victory, what difference does it make?  Move on.  Try harder next time.

Besides, you have no proof, and even if you did, we don’t want to hear about it. Questioning the result only undermines public confidence in the sport.  In fact, your continued harping about it is so tiresome, we’re shutting down your social media account and if you don’t zip it, we’ll get you fired from your job.

Nobody likes a sore loser.  That’s not who we are. 

Joe Doakes

To suggest otherwise is seditious. Maybe even Treason.

Against sports, natch.

Questioning The Narrative

A few people have asked me why those wacko idiot Trump supporters don’t
believe Biden won the election fair and square. I can’t speak for other
wacko idiot Trump supporters, only for myself:

An election is announced.
Voters cast ballots in person and by mail.
Election observers gather to watch the ballots being counted, to ensure
it’s done fairly.
Election officials order observers out of the counting room.
Election officials put cardboard over the windows so observers can’t see in.
Election officials secretly count the ballots by machine and announce a
result.
The losing candidate doubts the result.
The losing candidate requests a manual recount with ballots individually
verified.
Instead, election officials run the same ballots through the same
machines again.
The losing candidate requests access to the software to verify the result.
Election officials order the software logs wiped.
The losing candidate requests access to the paper ballots to verify the
result.
Election officials order the paper ballots shredded.
Citizens post videos and swear affidavits that election fraud occurred.
Statisticians and computer techs give expert opinions that election
fraud occurred.
The court declines to review any evidence from the losing candidate for
lack of ‘standing’ meaning he can’t bring his case until the Secretary
of State certifies the election results.
The Secretary of State certifies the machine results.
The court declines to review any evidence from the losing candidate on
the grounds of ‘laches,’ meaning he waited too long to bring his case.
The state legislature de-certifies the machine result and sends its own
result to DC.
Bureaucrats in the National Archives decide to accept only the machine
results.
Congress accepts the machine results and declares the losing candidate lost.
The ‘losing’ candidate and his supporters exercise their First Amendment
rights to protest.
Violence breaks out, which is blamed on the ‘losing’ candidate despite
his calls for peace.

After seeing these events, millions of Americans join the ‘losing’
candidate in doubting the machine results and suspecting the ‘losing’
candidate actually won the election but his victory was stolen from him
by fraud committed by Election Officials. Liberals declare people who
question the machine results are obtuse, they’re dumb, they’re idiots
and retarded. People who question the machine results are banned from
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram; blocked from Google ads and YouTube
videos; accused by prominent politicians of plotting to overthrow the
government; a national media figure declares the government should take
away their children to be sent to re-education camps; a congresswoman
demands they be blacklisted from future employment; and the media calls
for the ‘losing’ candidate’ family to be criminally prosecuted, their
assets confiscated, their business forfeited.

My response my questioner is: seeing the chicanery, the coverup and the
vicious vindictiveness toward all who seek to verify the election
results, how can you believe Biden won the election fair and square?

Joe Doakes

The usual answer is “why are you a Nazi”.

Let’s see how the usual suspects in the comment section manage.

What A Difference Four Years Makes

The New York Times, 2020: “Our elections are unimpeachably honest and fair and not problematic at all”.

New York Times, 2016: “Not only did the Russians install Donald Trump, but we’ll show you how they probably did it by doing it ourselves:

I could keep saying “Democrats and the NYTimes (ptr) can reverse themselves all they want, because their target audience is unthinking lemmings”…

…but I’m starting to feel like I’m repeating myself.

The Cure For What Ails Us

The cure for election fraud is scrutiny.  Make sure every ballot is legitimate, then count all legitimate ballots.  The process takes place in two parts.

First, scrutinize the paper ballots, same as we did in the “hanging-chads” count in Florida.  This requires three steps:

Step A: segregate ballots where the chain of custody is unclear.  If the elections officials can’t prove that the ballots in this box were slid into the voting machine at the Como Precinct, transferred to a locked box by John, transported to the County Elections Office by Stephanie, opened there by Roger, scanned by Trudy and re-locked, then stored by Darlene until the recount; then we cannot be confident they are legitimate ballots.  They might have been fraudulent ballots smuggled in under cover of darkness.  Segregate them for separate counting when and if the court decides to include them.

Step B: segregate ballots that lack procedural compliance: missing signature, spoiled ballot, arrived late, back-dated, etc.  They might have been accepted in violation of the law.  Some of these might be allowed, some might be rejected, but they cannot be dumped into the general mix.  Segregate them for separate counting when and if the court decides to include them.

Step C: make the court decide which ballots to count, which to exclude.  It’s critical to do this BEFORE the counting begins, to avoid influencing the decision. The last thing the public wants to hear is: “It doesn’t matter because it won’t overturn the results of the election.”  We don’t know that yet; we haven’t done the manual recount.  Make an impartial decision on the merits of the ballots, not the results you anticipate.

Finally, do a manual recount of each group of ballots.  Do NOT scan them into the voting machines.  The machines have a known history of vote switching.  Senator Klobuchar complained about it.  And counting machines are vulnerable to errors caused by missed software updates, on-line hackingfractionalized voting, and security breaches.  At this point, we have no guarantee the machine counts were correct so we must verify them by a manual recount, eyeballs on paper. 

Yes, it would cost a fortune.  Do you want an honest election or a cheap one?

Joe Doakes

This will require a clean GOP sweep at the polls in 2020. There is no other way. Steve Simon is hiding too much (on the behalf of the DFL, natch).

Mistakes

Clerk: “Here’s your change.”

First Customer: “Hey, you shorted me.”

Clerk: “Sorry, my mistake, here you go.”

Clerk: “Here is your change.”

Second, Third, Fourth Customers: “Hey, you shorted me.”

Clerk: “Sorry, my mistake. Here you go.”

All Customers: “There is something going on here.”

Store Manager: “No, we just make a lot of innocent errors, always in our favor.”

Policeman: “Nothing to see here. Move along.”

Reporter: “Haters claimed without evidence that the store systematically short changes people.”

Joe Doakes

When you bring an allegation, they say “bring it to court”.

When you bring it to court, they say “it doesn’t meet the standard set in a law that was written by the party that benefits from the corruption”.

I suspect when and if that gets fixed, it’ll morph to “it wasn’t peer-reviewed”.

Weight

I’m not a computer programmer and don’t pretend to be; therefore, this is a serious request for an answer from a person who was a knowledgeable computer programmer BEFORE the election (not an instant expert on computers today, the Constitution last week, and epidemiology the week before).

The State of Michigan admitted 6,000 votes were switched from Trump to Biden in one county. They explained it was because the county clerk failed to install a software. The ballots were properly counted when scanned, but vote totals were incorrectly reported.

My question: if the software is a simple addition program, totalling up the number of votes for each candidate, what kind of a programming “glitch” could make it switch votes from one candidate to another, but not all of them, only some of them?

Also, if the software knows how many ballots were scanned, how can some of them be omitted from the total?

I ask because some people are claiming there are algorithms available to generate Switched and Lost ballots, which may have been present in the software used in the voting machines. Is that even possible?

Joe Doakes

I won’t claim to be an expert – but I’m trying to imagine the JAD session (because you just know it was a JAD session, amirite, geeks?) where they described the requirement for the system to be able to finesse totals for weighting, estimates of lost ballots, and other inputs derived from, er, modeling.