The presidential election in Pennsylvania, long considered one of the pivotal states in the process, is likely to be an unmitigated mess.
In a process created by Democrats, the election has the probability of being hampered by a new mail-in ballot procedure that may take three days to count after the election.
The hottest topic in my Democrat-controlled neighborhood is the number of people who haven’t gotten their mail-in ballots.
To demonstrate how cumbersome the process can be, Democrats, who are depending on this new initiative to get more of their supporters to vote or to obtain a greater ability to get fraudulent votes, have been flooding the airwaves with instructions on how to complete a mail-in ballot.
First, you need to get your ballot before today. Second, you have to mark the ballot carefully. Third, you place the ballot inside one envelope and then put that envelop inside a second envelope before signing and dating the outside.
Leave it to Democrats to devise such a disorganized system!
Even Democrat supporters warn that the complex process may result in as many as 100,000 votes may be ruled invalid.
Democrats appear to be the ones most likely to use the mail-in process, which may bode well for President Trump, who won the state by just over 44,000 votes in the last election.
But the process also could result in more fraudulent votes being counted. At least the courts ruled that people can only submit their own ballots—not those of others as the Democrats had wanted.
The process proved so cumbersome in the primary that several elections took days to determine what had happened.
In a letter to state legislative leaders, Philadelphia elections chief Lisa Deeley said that the new system might result in “electoral chaos” and a “significant post-election legal controversy, the likes of which we have not seen since Florida in 2000.”
Remember those hanging chads?
Earlier this month, the state’s election computers went off line for 40 hours.
County elections officials and voters have regularly complained about a variety of problems with the Pennsylvania Department of State’s voter services website and the state’s voter database, which officials use to process registrations and ballot applications.
At times this year, the system has slowed to a crawl or come to a complete halt, leaving election offices unable to register voters or process ballot requests.
Whatever the case, the Pennsylvania results might be decided in a courtroom rather than a ballot box.
President Trump had it right when he said that something bad is happening in Pennsylvania.
I was raised by parents who kept a close eye on what my brothers and sisters and I watched on television. As we only had two TV sets, that was a very easy task for them as my folks didn’t socialize outside our home much. Until the early 1970s it was especially easy for them as television fare for the medium’s first 25 years was mostly G-rated fare. Otis Campbell’s drunkeness on the Andy Griffith Show was as bad as it got in the 1960s, although interestingly, the character was rarely shown consuming alcohol.
So in 1972 when Bea Arthur’s eponymous character in Maude, in a two-episode storyline became pregnant–she pondered an abortion and then went through with it–my parents made sure that our televisions were tuned to a different station those nights.
Abortion was not only very controversial in 1972, it was illegal in most states, although Arthur’s character lived in New York, where it was not. At that time I didn’t even know what abortion was.
Nearly five decades later, Big Tech and Big Media are trying to control what I see on my computer and portable devices. And because broadcast and cable news often takes its lead from what they view as “elite” media, their decisions effect what I see on my TV.
Our “betters” in the media, working for CNN, MSNBC, as well as onetime somewhat fair but left-leaning print outlets such as the New York Times, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and Vanity Fair, are attempting to limit what information we consume. And in control of the metaphoric off switch is Big Tech, led by Twitter and Facebook.
Stories that are harmful to the reputation to President Donald Trump blare across the media, such as reports on Trump’s tax returns. The New York Times did not publish those returns, but it reported on them. The Old Gray Lady won’t say how it got them, but assuming reports on the returns are accurate, who ever gained access to them and gave them to the Times broke the law. The stories on Trump’s tax returns, where it was reported that he paid as little as $750 in federal taxes, were reported pretty much everywhere by the media, and posted, reposted, Tweeted, and re-Tweeted on Facebook and Twitter.
“Kids, kids, come to the living room! You need to see this news story on TV!”
Contrast Trump’s taxes to reports from the New York Post about the emails it accessed from a laptop that once belonged to Joe Biden’s troublesome son, Hunter. Because Hunter dropped of the computer at a repair shop and never bothered to pick it up, that computer became property of the shop’s owner. Emails found on that computer confirm accusations that Hunter used that Biden name to for influence peddling. Illegal? Maybe not. Sleazy? For sure. And the shop owner did not break the law.
And the media, with the exception of Fox News and other conservative news sources such as Breitbart, ignored or minimized coverage of Hunter Biden’s emails. Last week a Democratic Party shill masquerading as an ABC journalist, former Bill Clinton staffer George Stephanopoulos, didn’t ask Biden about the New York Post revelations. Yeah, I get it, the format was a town hall, but ABC chose the participants and it knew what questions they would ask. Contrast Biden’s friendly treatment to the grilling Trump received from Savannah Guthrie at the NBC town hall the same night. Guthrie is married to Michael Feldman, the traveling chief of staff for Al Gore in the 2000 election. Guthrie brought up Trump’s tax returns, among other things.
That’s bad but what is worse is that Twitter and Facebook for a while blocked the posting and sharing of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden email revelations. And it wasn’t yokels like me who suffered the indignity. Trump’s press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, saw her Twitter account briefly suspended for Tweeting the Post’s Hunter story. The twisted explanation from Big Tech is that the Hunter Biden’s emails were hacked–they weren’t–and that the story was unverified. Remember, the NY Times never actually published Trump’s federal tax returns, which may have been hacked. But the Post did show images of some of Hunter’s emails. Even the New York Post’s Twitter account was suspended for a short time on the day it published the Hunter story.
“Kids…turn off that TV and go to your room!”
Of course these media and tech big shots are our “betters.” Jeffrey Toobin, a CNN analyst and New Yorker writer, a product of Harvard University, is one of them. But yesterday Toobin was suspended by CNN and the New Yorker after exposing himself and more–click here for the X-rated details–during a Zoom call simulating election night scenarios. Toobin is a scumbag. He had an extramarital affair with Casey Greenfield, the daughter of journalist Jeff Greenfield. Okay, I know, Trump has been unfaithful while married too. But Greenfield bore his child, which Toobin only acknowledged after a DNA test, and only then began paying child support. And while pregnant Toobin offered to pay for her abortion.
American media can do much better than Toobin and his fellow “betters.” I will write another entry on the sad state of the media after the election.
But right now we’re headed to Chinese government-style control of the media by the left.
A free press and free association are two things that French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville saw as two key safeguards in his landmark 19th-century work, Democracy in America.
But Big Tech and Big Media, as well as the increasingly far-left Democratic Party, are trying to minimize both.
We live in a perilous time.
UPDATE 7:30pm EDT: Correction, the New York Post Twitter account was “not suspended for a short time” as I wrote earlier. There are no new Twitter entries from @nypost since October 14. If the account has been suspended it clearly has been locked out. This is censorship.
The @nypost, the oldest and one of the largest news outlets in America, has been frozen out of Twitter for 6 days.
The Jussie Smollett outrage has not gone away. But the dropping of charges by Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx for the alleged hate-crime hoaxter, since reinstated after the appointment of a special prosecutor, are not the biggest campaign issue facing the suburban Chicago Democrat as she faces Republican and retired judge Pat O’Brien in the general election in November.
Rather it is the revolving door, or if you prefer, catch-and-release philosophy in regards to criminals used by Foxx, who was elected in 2016.
Disclosure: In the ’16 Democratic primary Foxx defeated incumbent Anita Alvarez. Her husband is a friend of mine.
Earlier this month Foxx backed out of a televised debate scheduled for later this month, bemoaning “Trump-like name calling and fear mongering” by O’Brien. Such behavior by the GOPer lives only in her head. It’s unclear if Fox will participate in a second debate scheduled in October.
The state guideline for charging shoplifters in Illinois is $300. In one of her first actions, Foxx raised that to $1,000. Shortly afterwards–and most notably well before the two rounds of looting that struck Chicago this summer–shoplifting flash mobs began popping up in the city. Other criminals are receiving light bonds and overly generous plea deals. Crime, not surprisingly, is skyrocketing in Chicago and the Cook County suburbs.
You see bits and pieces of the prosecutorial malfeasance by Foxx in the local media but to really get to the truth about her you need to read these two blogs, CWB Chicago and Second City Cop.
Here are a few examples of Foxx-trocities from the former.
After the August outbreak of widespread looting in Chicago even Mayor Lori Lightfoot, a fellow leftist, and her police chief, David Brown, questioned Foxx’s prosecutorial philosophy.
Pat O’Brien is telling the truth.
Republicans face daunting odds in heavily-Democratic Cook County. In 2016 Hillary Clinton captured nearly 75 percent of the vote. But the Daily Herald–man, that must have been a horrible debate for Foxx–has endorsed O’Brien, as has the Chicago area’s most-read newspaper, the Chicago Tribune. The Chicago Sun-Times, which is partially owned by the Chicago Federation of Labor, backs Foxx. I feel compelled to mention that the group that owns the Sun-Times purchased the paper three years ago for $1.
And sure it’s just one home, but I feel the need to mention that on my way to work I drive past a home in Niles that is dominated by yard signs for Democratic candidates and liberal causes. All but one of them. There’s a Pat O’Brien placard on that lawn.
O’Brien has a chance.
John Ruberry regularly blogs from Cook County at Marathon Pundit.
As DaTimes delves into the illicitly obtained tax returns of Donald Trump, the news organization has failed to analyze the finances of Joe Biden, who heralds himself as the “common man.”
That common man and his wife made more than $30 million over the past two years through book deals and speeches, costing about $100,000 a pop.
What is appalling is all the information about the Biden family and its shenanigans that DaTimes fails to follow up on, preferring instead to continue its partisan attacks on Trump.
As the former vice president rolled out his tired speeches for another run, POLITICO analyzed the sleazy back story of how Biden’s family took advantage of his government positions.
That story is far more than Hunter’s recent antics in China and Ukraine. The story goes back to Biden’s first days in the Senate.
As POLITICO puts it in the 2019 investigation, “[V]entures, over nearly half a century, have regularly raised conflict-of-interest questions and brought the Biden family into potentially compromising associations. This investigation offers the most comprehensive account to date of the politically tinged business activities of Biden’s brother and son, and is the first time former associates of James and Hunter have alleged that the pair explicitly sought to make money off of Joe’s political connections.”
As Joe was entering the Senate in 1973, including a seat on the Banking Committee, his younger brother James operated Seasons Change night club with help from unusually generous bank loans.
From 2001 to 2008, Hunter worked as a Washington lobbyist for the banking industry—a period when Joe pushed a sweetheart deal on bankruptcies that benefited his son’s employer, MBNA.
James and Hunter take over Paradigm Global Advisors as Joe sat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Paradigm was the first of several such companies that James and Hunter used to expand into China, Ukraine, and elsewhere, riding on the coattails of Joe’s government position.
With his brother as vice president, James joined HillStone International, which in 2011, obtained a $1.5 billion deal to build houses in Iraq.
In 2013, Hunter traveled to Beijing with his father on official business. While there, he introduced his father to his Chinese business partner, Jonathan Li of Bohai Capital, with whom he had concluded a lucrative real estate deal.
In March 2014, Russia invaded Crimea’s Ukrainian peninsula, and Joe led the Obama Administration response. A month later, Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings gave Hunter Biden a lucrative board position worth $600,000 a year.
Perhaps DaTimes should expend the same amount of effort in unraveling the Biden family’s fortune as it did on Donald Trump.
Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog 