By Mike Huckabee
August 6, 2020
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MORNING EDITION
August 6, 2020
By Mike Huckabee
"MASK-UP," KEEP A DISTANCE, AND VOTE IN PERSON
Most reporters covering the White House have a severe illness --- not COVID-19, but Trump Derangement Syndrome, or TDS. The main symptom of TDS, at least as it manifests itself at Trump’s press briefings, is the inability to resist the urge to correct him with fake information, typically DNC talking points.
On Wednesday, during President Trump’s press briefing, it happened again. Someone tried to correct the President as he was answering a question on mail-in balloting. The reporter chimed in, “There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud.” The President, knowing a Democrat talking point when he hears one, called her out on that, saying, “Oh, really? Well, then, you’re reading a different newspaper than me.” Gotta love it.
Let’s try THE NEW YORK TIMES. Thanks to Dan Bongino for calling attention to this piece from the NYT from just a month before the 2012 election –- significantly, long before Trump called attention to the problem –- called “Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises.” Note that this article was talking mostly about absentee voting, which still has more controls than widespread mail-in voting.
Using a primary election as an example, this piece illustrated how easy it is to make a ballot NOT COUNT, just by comparing signatures and deciding the “r’s” don’t match. Lather, rinse, repeat, for as many times as you need votes.
At the time this article was written in late 2012, the use of absentee ballots and other forms of mail-in balloting had tripled since 1980 and accounted for almost 20 percent of all voting.
According to the NYT story, statistics showed that votes cast by mail were less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth. Twice more mail-in votes were rejected than in-person votes.
There’s something called the “margin of litigation” that allows election lawyers to challenge results with the possibility of changing the outcome. We’ve seen that if election results fall within that margin, there absolutely will be a challenge. If you recall the Florida results after the Bush-Gore election, you know what a ridiculous mess it turned into, with election judges trying to second-guess and accept or reject ballots on the basis of how their chads were hanging. Anyone who thinks wishful thinking and subjective analysis didn’t enter into that judgment is living in a fantasy world. That counts as fraud in my book.
Keep in mind, this was in THE NEW YORK TIMES: “Voting by mail is now common enough and problematic enough that election experts say there have been multiple elections in which no one can say with confidence which candidate was the deserved winner.”
The NYT even cited as an example the 2008 election that made Al Franken a U.S. Senator from Minnesota. (Recall that his win was what ended up giving Obamacare the Senate vote. Elections mean things.) Franken won by a mere 312 votes after 12,000 absentee ballots (about 4 percent of those) had been rejected.
In general, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to vote absentee; ironically, this might help explain the NYT’s willingness to criticize it. (To be fair, it might also have something to do with the push by Republicans in the past for absentee voting.) But widespread voting-by-mail has much less oversight than the process that is normally gone through to vote absentee. Some states are just wildly sending out mail-in ballots. Again this is from THE NEW YORK TIMES: “There is general consensus that voting by mail, whatever its impact, is more easily abused than other forms.”
Absentee voting was not meant to be the main way to vote. It’s for people who know they’re going to be away or otherwise unable to come in and vote on Election Day. In a normal election year, early in-person voting accommodates many of those people, and absentee voting takes care of the rest. I don’t think most people have thought seriously about what it would be like if virtually EVERYONE voted by mail. I agree with Bongino that it would be “an apocalyptic disaster.” (I haven’t even mentioned that the American Postal Workers Union has endorsed Biden. That in itself justifies a lack of confidence in the mail-in process.)
Even with the number of people who would normally vote absentee, the idea that “every vote counts” is naive. The only way we can counteract this problem is with a LANDSLIDE victory for President Trump and Republicans down the line.
I've previously linked to the Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database of proven examples of voter fraud from across the country, and in case you didn’t see it or would like to review it in this context, here it is again.
Voter fraud is hard to prove –- better to head it off than try to do something about it afterwards. Though this accounting is not all-inclusive and is limited to proven, not just suspected, cases, it gives an idea of the scope of the problem. In their words, “preventing, deterring and prosecuting election fraud is essential to protecting the integrity of our voting process. Reforms intended to ensure such integrity do not disenfranchise voters and, in fact, protect their right to vote.”
Bongino also had a story from the NEW YORK POST from just two days ago (August 4), with the headline “25 percent of ballots in Brooklyn June primaries invalid.” They’re trying to deal with the mess; here’s an updated story from later that day.
Election Day has always been a day for Americans to celebrate. There’s a certain ritual involved in going to the polls THAT DAY and exercising our right. Even early voting diminishes that a little, I think, and it also encourages people to vote without knowing as much about the candidates as they might if they had waited. Then there's absentee voting, an alternative when one simply cannot go to the polls. (This year, that would include the elderly and others at high risk.) But large-scale mail-in voting is an unnecessary invitation to fraud and must not happen.
Think of the generations of Americans who have risked their lives –- given their lives –- to preserve our precious freedom and our right to vote. In light of that, the VERY LEAST that freedom-loving Americans can do is put on a doggone mask, go to the polls, keep the proper distance, and VOTE, for crying out loud. They’ll have hand sanitizer there, promise.
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SALLY YATES PREVARICATES BEFORE THE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE
Gregg Jarrett has an excellent write-up of former deputy Attorney General Sally Yates’ testimony on Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. It’s a must-read.
To put it mildly, Jarrett was not impressed with this Obama holdover at the DOJ. “Like Comey,” he said, “Yates was a model of prevarication and insincerity...She minimized her own negligence and incompetence while blaming everyone else.”
Her strategy was so transparent that it even amused at times. She threw James Comey under the bus (which does seem like a pretty appropriate place for him, but still), and she cast herself as a Pollyanna who just didn’t know about the problems with the so-called evidence in the “Russia” case. Give me a break.
In “Yates World,” George Papadopoulos really is “connected to Russian intelligence”; the wiretapping of Page wasn’t surveillance of the Trump campaign because Page was a FORMER campaign associate; and Michael Flynn was not truthful with FBI agents Strzok and Pientka. Also, there was no bias on the part of FBI agents. None of this is true. Is Yates the Queen of Denial, or is she concocting an insanity defense in the event she is charged?
NOT THE NARRATIVE WE ARE BEING FED
A new Gallup poll found that 61% of black Americans want the police to maintain the same amount of time they currently spend in their communities. Another 20% of blacks want the police to spend MORE time in their communities. Only 19% want the police to spend less time in their communities.
A large majority of blacks think that we need police reform, and 37% aren’t confident that they’d be treated with courtesy and respect if they interacted with the police. But that doesn’t mean they want the police to go away. In short, they think there are problems, but you don’t solve them by doing away with the police and leaving citizens to the mercy of gangs and criminals and the protective abilities of unarmed social workers.
To put it in even fewer words: unlike a leftist city council, they’re not nuts.
PRESIDENTIAL ENDORSEMENT TIME
Some Presidential endorsements are starting to come in, and they practically tell the story of this epic contest all by themselves. Police unions that normally back Democrats are lining up for Trump. The American Postal Workers’ Union’s national executive board voted to endorse Biden, which should really fill you with confidence in the trustworthiness of mail-in ballots. And most impressive of all, Joe Biden just picked up the coveted endorsement of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA.
Party leader Bob Avakian says Biden and the Democrats are still “representatives and instruments of this exploitative, oppressive, and literally murderous system of capitalism-imperialism,” but communists must vote for Biden because it’s imperative to remove the “Trump/Pence regime.” Or maybe he looked at a list of Joe’s campaign advisors and realized it contained a treasure trove of “useful idiots.”
Well, I think that should tell you who to vote for. In fact, since Democrats claimed to be so outraged over a false claim that Trump was a puppet of former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, I assume they’ll now want to put their anti-communist concerns to good work by voting to reelect him instead of the candidate openly endorsed by the head Communist Revolutionary.
"FACT-CHECKERS"
If you’ve read my newsletter for a while, you won’t be surprised that I put the term “fact-checkers” in quotes. That’s because many “fact-checkers” these days don’t check facts so much as reinforce leftist opinions by citing biased sources to brand anyone who disagrees with them as being misinformed or a liar. We know this because what we do is check actual facts. For instance, if a story claims that a prominent person said something outrageous, we track down the original quote in context, in its entirety. Sometimes, that means we correct or don’t use a story from a conservative news source. But most often, it means we correct a liberal news source. Or sometimes, a so-called “fact-checker.”
The bias of “fact-checkers” is something that many conservatives have come to hold as conventional wisdom, but now, Sharyl Attkisson of Real Clear Investigations has taken a deep dive into their backgrounds and dug up solid evidence that all those assurances of non-partisan objectivity are anything but factual.
The study confirmed that media “fact-checkers” (surprise!) lean left. The claim of objective fact-checking is largely “illusory” and amounts to a “circular feedback loop of verification” in which “like-minded journalists or often Silicon Valley gatekeepers” rely on a small group of partisan news sources and political activists to control narratives and shape and censor information. One obvious example: for monitoring media bias, the far-left activist group Media Matters is treated as a trustworthy, reliable source for “fact-checkers” such as NewsGuard, while the conservative Media Research Center is ignored.
Facebook uses the World Health Organization as a source to fight “disinformation” about the coronavirus, even though we know the WHO has engaged in multiple incidents of spreading misinformation itself. Facebook also claims that members of its new oversight board “were chosen for their expertise and diversity” and “must not have actual or perceived conflicts of interest that could compromise their independent judgment and decision-making.” Yet 18 of the 20 have ties to George Soros’ far-left Open Society Foundations, while none have taken conservative stances on any controversial issue.
Google’s “fact-checking” group First Draft was not only started by the extremely liberal parent company, but it’s also supported by liberal nonprofits, including the Soros groups, and it routinely cites biased news sources to discredit non-leftist views. Its digital director frequently tweets and retweets “anti-American rhetoric and progressive positions.” First Draft even referred readers to an article that pushed the false claim that President Trump encouraged people literally to drink bleach.
This study simply confirms what anyone who’s been paying attention already knows: a great deal of today’s so-called “fact-checking” is just leftist advocacy in camouflage. This is why we have to spend so much time here fact-checking the “fact-checkers.”
BIBLE VERSE OF THE DAY (KJV)
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