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 hacking, fractionalized 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).

I really genuinely truly abhor echo chambers. They’re boring – and, more germane, conservatives don’t improve their arguments by vigorously agreeing with each other.

So I’ve encouraged dissenters to come to this site, to engage, to leave comments.

Now, from 2006 until about 2017, there was an extremely regular commenter who got into a bit of a habit of thread-jacking the comment section.

Initially, I told this person to go start her own blog. Which she did [1].

But it apparently wasn’t enough. She took to thread-jacking in my comment section again – successively ignoring waves of hints: I started with asking nicely. Then I started graying out her comments and annotating them with warnings [2]. Then I started deleting thread-jacks. Finally, I just banned her [3].

Shoulda done it four years earlier, to be honest.

Anyway – I still abhor echo chambers.

But I’ve been gently hinting to, well, some in the comment section for a while now, and it doesn’t seem to be sinking in.

So be advised that I’m going to start deleting thread-jacks.

Want to start your own discussions? Blogs are still free to start. Go for it.

That’s the rule. Enjoy.

[1] She kept it running for about 10 logorrheic years before petering out, apparently finding it was harder than it looked.

[2] Which, truth be told, I doubt she ever saw.

[3] Although the final straw there had nothing to do with this blog’s comment section.

As Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Barack Obama showed us, when you’re seen as “the first” at something (incorrectly, in Ginsburg’s case), you really don’t have to do that much or do it all that well to be revered as an epochal hero.

On the left, anyway.

And Kamala Harris seems poised to continue that tradition.

An initiative to overturn a state ban on affirmative action in California…

…failed.

And it failed largely due to the votes of Latino and Asian voters.

Unexpectedly:

Yet on Election Day, the proposition failed by a wide margin, 57 percent to 43 percent, and Latino and Asian-American voters played a key role in defeating it. The outcome captured the gap between the vision laid out by the liberal establishment in California, which has long imagined the creation of a multiracial, multiethnic coalition that would embrace progressive causes, and the sentiments of many Black, Latino, Asian and Arab voters.

Variations of this puzzle could be found in surprising corners of the nation on Election Day, as slices of ethnic and racial constituencies peeled off and cut against Democratic expectations….Asian-American Californians opposed the affirmative action measure in large numbers. A striking number of East and South Asian students have gained admission to elite state universities, and their families spoke to reporters of their fear that their children would suffer if merit in college selection was given less weight. That battle carried echoes of another that raged the past few years in New York City, where a white liberal mayor’s efforts to increase the number of Black and Latino students in selective high schools angered working- and middle-class South and East Asian families whose children have gained admission to the schools in large numbers.

“There’s more texture to California blue politics than you might think,” said Lanhee Chen, a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University and policy director for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential run. “Identity politics only go so far. There is a sense on affirmative action that people resent being categorized by progressives.”

Latinos, too, appear sharply divided. Prominent Latino nonprofit and civil rights organizations endorsed the affirmative action proposition even as all 14 of California’s majority-Latino counties voted it down.

The fact that some “POC” (and lord, do I hate that term) are defying their progressive overlords’ orders – most notably in the election – has got to be giving Democrats indigestion.

What gives me indigestion is wondering how the Minnesota GOP will screw this opportunity up.

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”.

To some observers, gun rights were on the brink of going viral, and in a positive way, before last March. Gun ownership, gun culture, and the notion that the right to keep and bear arms is not merely an essential, but a normal part of regular civic life, were on the ascendant.

One could even point out that the extreme anti-gun stances in “Blue” America were a reaction to that ascendancy in most of the country.

Then came the twin pandemics – Covid and violence tolerated with a nudge and a wink by Blue city governments…

…and it would seem gun control has, itself, been shot in the foot.

It’s not all good news – given that Biden has pledged to be a gun grabber, Big Left may well see that this may be their last decent chance to disarm the nation.

Downtown Minneapolis boosters are split over the news that Dollar General is putting a store on the ever-more-desolate Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis.

On the one hand, you’ve got the one that chortle at all the “People of Walmart”-style stories they associate with Dollar General – a chain usually associated with towns too small or neighborhoods too poor for a Walmart.

On the other hand you’ve got the “aren’t we better than this?” mob.

Rick Nelson at the Strib kinda straddles the line:

Yes, “tacky” and “depressing” are two words to describe the appearance of a dollar store on what is widely viewed as Minneapolis’ Main Street, a thoroughfare that recently underwent a $50 million makeover. “Distressing” could be another, since the appearance of this type of merchant might be an indication that downtown’s dwindling retail scene is taking yet another step in the wrong direction.

The store’s new home in the Andrus (the historic building formerly known as Renaissance Square) at S. 5th Street and Nicollet Mall won’t be sullied with a glaring yellow-and-black Dollar General logo. Instead, there will be a hip “DGX” marquee, reflecting Dollar General’s curated version of its discount store.

So what does it all mean, for a street that the city of Minneapolis just spent tens of millions of dollars refurbing (and BLM and “Anti”-Fa spent a couple of nights hacking away at)?

Why, it’s almost as if when you treat a major city like an urban studies lab, make driving onerous and parking prohibitive, and treat public safety as a sign of misbegotten privilege even if someone hasn’t burned down your favorite destination (or closed it forever via a hamfisted lockdown), the people from the outlying parts of the city that downtown used to depend on for all that juicy revenue will take their money elsewhere?

A friend of the blog emails:

St Paul City Councilmember Mitra Jalali says that capitalism crushed a local alternative weekly.

I’m scratching my head at this because the print and online versions were free. So, if they couldn’t survive by giving away whatever they had, how did capitalism crush them? One would think something free would “crush” something more expensive. That’s usually what is said of Walmart- they offer things so cheaply that the small businesses can’t compete. In this case, what is the issue? Free publications can’t compete with more expensive subscription news? Or is it actually can’t compete with better sources online that are also free? Is that capitalism? I guess maybe it is because we here in the USA do have lots of choice and are also free to start another weekly in City Pages place. So, if that choice and opportunity bothers Mitra Jalali, just what alternative does she want for us? 

I suspect councilwoman Jalali – who was “Mitra Jalali-Nelson” until having a hint of Scandinavian became a negative in Metro DFL politics – knows this.

I suspect she, like all DFL pols, knows her voters don’t think about it all that hard, and that nobody in the media is ever going to make an issue of it.

This is the correct response to Covid: We’re going to treat it like any other respiratory virus.

It is simply not possible to stop a virus from spreading, or to prevent people from being exposed to it.  Instead, we must focus on protecting those most at-risk from the virus, and treating those sickened by it, as best we can. 

Everybody else – get back to work.

The existence of the virus is not a hoax; the panic response is a political hoax that deliberately sacrifices senior citizens’ lives to terrify voters into electing a man who promises to keep them safe.  It’s despicable.

Joe Doakes

Rahm Emanuel let slip the great Progressive commandment – “never waste a crisis”.

The pandemic was real. So was the Democrats’ adherence to Emanuel.

I maaaaaay just have to raise some money to start distributing a few thousand of these:

And, of course, coating them with a caustic chemical.

…not only that Berg’s Seventh Law is universal and immutable, but that Democrat politicians can and do count on their voters being unthinking lemmings who know neither history nor critical thought.

Barack Obama:

Barack Obama – who won a Nobel Peace Prize before spending eight years making “Hellfire” a more common precipitation in the Middle East than rain, and who did more to clamp down on critical media than anyone since Woodrow Wilson – bags on Trump, who made the first serious progress on Middle East peace in decades, and who ramped down military adventurism..

…the way the increasinly Wilsonian-looking Obama promised, and failed, to do.

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.

…when the Southern Poverty Law Center did actual useful work fighting real injustice.

Those days are at least 30 years behind us. The SPLC today is no less a lefty PR firm than Media Matters or Common Cause.

And it appears the ACLU is well down that same path.

Ilhan Omar thinks we’re the “Klan”:

Omar’s not stupid. She knows that’s not true.

She just knows that CD5 Democrats pretty much believe anything they’re told.

“Masking up reduces rates of infection!”

According to a Danish study? Not significantly:

The recommendation to wear surgical masks to supplement other public health measures did not reduce the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate among wearers by more than 50% in a community with modest infection rates, some degree of social distancing, and uncommon general mask use. The data were compatible with lesser degrees of self-protection.

“OK, but a complete lockdown-level quarantine will do the trick!”

According to a study of the most controllable experimental subjects of all – US Marine recruits at boot camp – not really:

The virus still spread, though 90% of those who tested positive were without symptoms [18 year olds in perfect, military-grade health? Go figure – Ed.]. Incredibly, 2% of the CHARM recruits still contracted the virus, even if all but one remained asymptomatic. “Our study showed that in a group of predominantly young male military recruits, approximately 2% became positive for SARS-CoV-2, as determined by qPCR assay, during a 2-week, strictly enforced quarantine.” 

Science is, of course, asking questions and testing theories as rigorously as you can. Two studies do not cause science to “settle”.

But the way the media is misreporting these studies, if they report them at all, is a little galling.

2019 – Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself

2020 – Biden Didn’t Win

Can’t wait for 2021.

Joe Doakes

If the Dems win both of those Georgia Senate races, you won’t have to wait long.

After a session of being neutered and stripped of their leadership positions by the increasingly metro-dominated DFL, there’ve been rumors bouncing around CD8 circles that Senators Bakk and Tomassoni were going to bolt the DFL.

And according to Tom Hauser, that may be in the near offing…:

…although not quite to the point of joining the GOP.

Rumors are bouncing about as to which party the “Independent Caucus” will work most closely with – but either way, Bakk and Tomassoni are going to be the most popular guys on Capitol Hill when the session starts.

It doesn’t seem a stretch that on issues of mining and gun rights – and, likely, a few more – the Senate has gone from 34-33 GOP to 34-31-2, and the DFL agenda just got even farther out of reach.

What’ll it mean for Governor Klink’s emergency powers?

My guess – and it’s only a guess – is that the House DFL will dig in harder and get more extreme.

Thoughts?

… this is one of the better explanations of critical theory I’ve seen:

On the other hand, I have a little doubt that it’s going to trigger some progressive…

New Yorkers are leaving NYC in record numbers.

I’ve added emphasis in a few places:

City residents filed 295,103 change of address requests from March 1 through Oct. 31, according to data The Post obtained from the US Postal Service under a Freedom of Information Act request.

Since the data details only when 11 or more forwarding requests were made to a particular county outside NYC, the number of moves is actually higher. And a single address change could represent an entire household, which means far more than 300,000 New Yorkers fled the five boroughs.

Whatever the exact number, the exodus — which began when COVID-19 hit the city in early spring — is much greater than in prior years. From just March through July, there were 244,895 change of address requests to destinations outside of the city, more than double the 101,342 during the same period in 2019.

As long as they don’t bring their infantile New York politics with ’em…

Memory is a survival trait.

Squirrels remember where they buried the nut, so they can eat it later
to survive the winter.  Those that don’t, die.

Children remember burning their finger, so they treat fire
respectfully.  Those who don’t, burn to death.

Conservatives remember past public policy disasters, so we can avoid
repeating them.  We use monuments and books to help us remember.

Liberals remember . . . nothing.  Nothing ever happened before they were
born, except slavery, which was bad and therefore everything that
happened before they were born, is bad.  So it must all be torn down and
thrown out and replaced with something that sounds better.  And it must
be done right now, because Liberals have no patience for history lessons
or experience or hard-gained wisdom.  Why would they need any?  What
could possibly go wrong?

Half the population believes President Trump bungled the Covid response
by failing to impose a travel ban and nation-wide lock-down in January,
when Covid hit the news.  They literally cannot remember that we spent
January dealing with impeachment, or the World Health Organization
telling us Covid was nothing to worry about, or hand washing and
elbow-bumps as sensible precautions, or all the Democrat protests over
banned flights from China.  They believe 200 million Americans died of
Covid because they don’t remember differently.

Loss of memory is an anti-survival trait and half our society is eagerly
embracing it.  This does not bode well for the continued existence of
the nation.

Joe Doakes

I’m not sure it’s entirely fair to say “Progressives” (I’m not gonna continue debasing the term “liberal” – the left did enough of that) have no memory.

Orwell showed us how important controlling history – our “collective” story about ourselves – was to a would-be tyrant. This has been borne out in countless socialist and totalitarian regimes – knowing the wrong history could be a lethal error.

Having the correct memory, the one one is told to have, correctly and punctually, is a survival trait, historically (ahem) on the left.

Not sure where this graphic came from, but it’s one of the best bits of journalism I’ve seen lately.

On the left – real science.

On the right…

…NPR’s, and the rest of the media’s, version of “science”.

I should do a similar one for journalism and “journalism”.

Chicago major Lori “Walker” Lightfoot shuts down Thanksgiving, but defends going to Biden rallies.

Because science.

Joe Biden’s “Cancer Charity” appears to be about as legitimate as the Clinton Foundation.

President-elect Joe Biden‘s cancer charity spent the majority of its money on staff payroll and gave none to research, it has been revealed.

First reported by The New York Post, tax filings viewed by DailyMail.com showed that The Biden Cancer Initiative amassed $4,809,619 in contributions, but spent $3,070,301 on salaries.

Joe and Jill Biden founded The Biden Cancer Initiative in 2017 to help find a cure and ‘solutions to accelerate progress in cancer prevention.’

This might’ve been a great story to have gotten out there, I dunno, a couple weeks ago…

Democrats in the Senate couldn’t get President Obama’s judicial
nominations approved under the old rules, so Chuck Schumer changed the
rules.  Republicans saw the rule change and used it to President Trump’s
judicial nominations approved.  Rule changes cut both ways.

Democrats couldn’t get Joe Biden elected using legitimate ballots, so
they kicked out poll watchers and dumped half-a-million phony ballots in
key counties to steal the election.  Democrats refused to play by the
old rules in this election.  Republicans, seeing this . . . what?  Will
keep playing by the old rules in the next election?  That means losing
for certain.  Even die-hard RINOs like Pierre Delecto and Susan Collins
aren’t that stupid.

In 2022, if Republican activists block polling places armed with
AR-15’s, burn down Democrat poll watchers’ homes, storm into vote
counting centers to throw ballots on the floor amidst thousands of fake
ballots . . . who can complain?  The old rules no longer apply, remember?

And if Democrat activists try to do the same but Republican activists
resist and innocents are killed in the cross-fire . . . is this truly
how we want future elections to run?

Will there even BE future elections?  Will President Harris allow them? 
The rules have changed . . . .

Joe Doakes

It’s only “paranoid” until it comes true.

“Anti”-Fa and the parts of BLM that are more forthright about their Marxism make no bones about the fact that it’s a revolution they want.

Violence?

With or without, they are clearly fine either way.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is standing, socially distanced, in line at the Q-Fanatic Barbeque in South Minneapolis. Focused on the smell of the delicious brisket, he’s caught by surprise as Avery LIBRELLE walks in behind him.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Oh, shhh….sure enough, it’s Avery. What’s new…

LIBRELLE: You wingnuts are paranoid. [Switches to that condescending coo-ing voice that “progressives” use as they parrot this particular chanting point] Nobody is coming for your guns.

BERG: Why do you say that?

LIBRELLE: You said the same scare tactic of Obama, and he never came for your guns.

BERG: Obama had some blue seats in red states to defend – had he let slip his inner id on guns, he’d have extincted them. Well, extincted them faster, because in a lot of America a “blue state Democrat” is a little like a “dodo bird driving an AMC Gremlin”.

LIBRELLE: So – he didn’t come for guns!

BERG: He was a lot of things, but not politically stupid.

LIBRELLE: Biden is even more centrist on the issue than Obama was. So no [switches back to the condescending coo-ing voice] Nobody’s coming for your guns.

BERG: So that’s your final answer.

LIBRELLE: Of course. Paranoid wingnut.

BERG: Got your phone handy?

LIBRELLE: I lost it. Let’s use yours.

BERG: Naturally. [Pulls up Joe Biden’s campaign site, scrolls down to paragraphs 6-10]. Go ahead and read that.

LIBRELLE: [Silently mouths the words]

BERG: Either you’re lying and he is coming for our guns, or he’s lying on his campaign website.

LIBRELLE: Well, of course he’s coming for…those guns.

BERG: So in one line, you’ve gone from [mocks the cooing tone] “nobody’s coming for your guns” to “we’re coming for the guns a bunch of people who don’t know the difference between a firing pin and a crochet needle think you don’t really need to have“. That was fast.

LIBRELLE: [Mocking tone] All right, you got me. Joe Biden’s gonna break into your house and take your guns.

BERG: So in two lines, we’ve gone from “Nobody’s taking your guns” to trying to mock me for catching in covering, badly, for your own lie.

LIBRELLE: Trump banned bump stocks.

BERG: Bad Trump. Don’t change the subject.

LIBRELLE: Hey, can you lend me ten bucks?

BERG: Why?

LIBRELLE: I need to run over and buy some spray paint to paint to paint “Meat is Murder” all over this place.

BERG: Ask them [BERG points a thumb toward unamused counter guy]

LIBRELLE: Oh, great idea. I…

But BERG has already left.

And SCENE.