Therapeutic totalitarianism

 

Nicholas J. Kaster’s column today at American Thinker has a sobering analysis of the local and state governments’ endless mask mandates, lockdowns, and other joys of the never-ending pandemic:

We have entered the seventh month of coronavirus panic, with large parts of America still partly or wholly shut down. What began as a 15-day expedient designed to “flatten the curve,” has gradually become the norm in American life. The goalposts have continued to shift. First, the focus was on hospital overcrowding; then it moved to overall deaths; then it moved to number of positive cases; now it seems to be shifting to the availability of a vaccine. The real endgame appears to be the November election.

. . .

Many have seen parallels in this creeping authoritarianism to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. And indeed, there are some: the obsessive mask conformity, the endless and often contradictory edicts by state governors and mayors, and the tiresome mantras celebrating obedience (e.g., “Alone together”).

But a closer analogy to our current predicament can be found in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Huxley’s novel, published in 1932, 17 years before Orwell’s, envisions a dystopia that is sated but soulless, where the people’s every earthly need is met, but at the cost of their liberty and humanity.

. . .

The idea of a riskless utopia is pure fantasy, of course, but the power that will accrete to the ruling class is very real.

Mr. Kaster’s column is here.

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Where are the alternatives to Facebook?

Dan Bongino is investing in an alternative to YouTube.  I hope he and others also attempt to start up alternative to Facebook.  From the Patriot Post: 

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Today is Constitution Day

Today is Constitution Day. From the Constitution Center website:

On September 17, 1787, the Founding Fathers signed the most influential document in American history, the U.S. Constitution.

Every year, the National Constitution Center hosts the best Constitution Day celebration in the country. We are the place to turn to help you commemorate this historic day while meeting your federal education requirements, at the Center and online!

Live Online Programming

This year students and teachers can join us from anywhere for FREE engaging, educational live programs and award-winning resources. Tune in all week long for engaging and interactive programs, featuring National Constitution Center scholars and other special guests!

Much more at the website with links and resources.

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The Great COVID-19 Hoax

photo credit: Milwaukee Independent 

Some skeptics probably rank man-made global warming/cooling as the world’s Biggest Hoax.  Alicia Colon nominates the COVID-19 lock-down and related control tactics (think: face masks) as the Biggest Hoax.  Both hoaxes are all about money and power.  Her article “Falling for the Biggest Hoax in History” at American Thinker begins:

It will probably take months if not years for the truth of the Covid-19 pandemic to emerge, but when it does will any politician take responsibility for the lies and disinformation or the damage this hoax caused this great nation? I don’t think so, but what it did prove was what happens when the Democrats are in charge. They may not be in the White House but it is the House that wields the power over legislation and our money.  Couple this power with the useful idiots in the mainstream media to promote the widespread hysteria, and we then had the total capitulation of a frightened nation that accepted an unprecedented total lockdown of its existence. Shame on us.

Further into the article:

In previous severe flu seasons, there were much higher death rates yet there were no mandatory lockdowns.  Why do I call this pandemic a hoax?  The only reason why politicians, especially the Democrats in charge, pushed for shutting down the economy was because economic destruction was their ultimate goal. Trump’s strong economy, low unemployment numbers for all Americans was a real obstacle to a Joe Biden victory. Democrats have seized on this pandemic because they never let a crisis go to waste.

Americans have been gaslighted. We can’t take anything reported by the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, CNN, MSNBC, the Drudge Report and the Alphabet Networks as gospel because it’s all designed to frighten and delay the recovery. . . .

Read Ms. Colon’s complete article here.

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Hanson on “Biden: The Great and Powerful”

 

The great Victor Davis Hanson explains the bizarre Biden campaign in “Biden: The Great and Powerful” at American Greatness.  From the article:

So the lightweight Biden was reflated as a sort of centrist hot air balloon to be used to float the hard-Left basket carriage beneath across the election defining line.

But fusion/collusion is not just a matter of a Potemkin veneer. Biden’s agenda is a fantasy creation. His role was to save the party from Sanders, win suburbanites, and pander to the party’s socialist sympathizers of Antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement. That is an impossible task because today’s Democratic Party is a conglomeration of squabbling tribes and looney agendas. 

Biden is now ordered to keep still on the issues of the day, because what he once said to get nominated and please the Left would lose him the election. He wants to defund the police, but not to defund the police. He wants to phase out fossil fuels and end fracking but not to end fracking in Electoral College-rich Pennsylvania. 

The rioting, Biden insists, is due to police brutality but not due to it entirely. Trump’s COVID policies killed thousands, but Biden’s own bromides are either identical or would be less effective. 

And on and on, as Biden is made to wink and nod to the Left that his only role is to get them elected before collapsing at the finishing line. 

The media thinks this will work, and so owns the project. Biden will stay sequestered, visit a key state occasionally, pop out of the plane to say he is “barnstorming” Michigan or Wisconsin and then fly back into his Biden bunker for more Zoom puff interviews—and hope progressive polls show that he can endure weekly bleeding until November 3.

Every four or five days the media will blast the airways with, “Trump is ripping out mailboxes,” “Trump won’t concede and will have to be forcibly removed,” “Trump insulted our war dead as ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’ as he hid from the rain to keep his hair dry.” Most recently Bob Woodward’s book queued up for its turn of 72 hours of smears, right after gab-bag Jeffery Goldberg’s anonymous sources faded out. 

Will this joint project of progressive ideologues of the Democratic Party and the major media work? 

Read the complete article here. 

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Not just any yard sign

Sent from my friend Shirley who drove around the Perry area and found this creatively festooned barn (click to embiggen):

 

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Michael Anton on “The Coming Coup”

 

Michael Anton is the author of The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return. He was interviewed on Mark Levin’s “Life, Liberty, and Levin” on Fox.  He was a great guest, so I looked up his essay on American Mind, “The Coming Coup?”, which starts off:

Democrats are laying the groundwork for revolution right in front of our eyes.

As if 2020 were not insane enough already, we now have Democrats and their ruling class masters openly talking about staging a coup. You might have missed it, what with the riots, lockdowns and other daily mayhem we’re forced to endure in this, the most wretched year of my lifetime. But it’s happening.

It started with the military brass quietly indicating that the troops should not follow a presidential order. They were bolstered by many former generals—including President Trump’s own first Secretary of Defense—who stated openly what the brass would only hint at. Then, as nationwide riots really got rolling in early June, the sitting Secretary of Defense himself all but publicly told the president not to invoke the Insurrection Act. His implicit message was: “Mr. President, don’t tell us to do that, because we won’t, and you know what happens after that.”

All this enthused Joe Biden, who threw subtlety to the winds. The former United States Senator (for 26 years) and Vice President (for eight) has not once, not twice, but thrice confidently asserted that the military will “escort [Trump] from the White House with great dispatch” should the president refuse to leave. Another former Vice President, Al Gore, publicly agreed.

One might dismiss such comments as the ravings of a dementia patient and a has-been who never got over his own electoral loss. But before you do, consider also this. Over the summer a story was deliberately leaked to the press of a meeting at which 100 Democratic grandees, anti-Trump former Republicans, and other ruling class apparatchiks got together (on George Soros’s dime) to “game out” various outcomes of the 2020 election. One such outcome was a clear Trump win. In that eventuality, former Bill Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, playing Biden, refused to concede, pressured states that Trump won to send Democrats to the formal Electoral College vote, and trusted that the military would take care of the rest.

The full essay is here. 

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Katie Hopkins on Breaking Back In

 

 photo from the Front Page article

Katie Hopkins is a much-needed breath of fresh air and a shot in the arm.  She’s been censored, abused, and quarantined, but she is traveling in the US, and her report “Breaking Back” at Front Page Magazine starts off:

The time for asking permission is over. Waiting for approval has to be a thing of the past.

It’s a way of thinking that has served me well in recent weeks breaking back into the USA and beginning a rolling speaking tour across the States. My mission is to support Donald J. Trump. But I have been taught by my audiences that there is something far more important to do. My mission is to gather people together and remind ourselves who we really are. And we are the side of love, laughter and light.

The things I am learning along the way have given me a burning new faith and optimism which perhaps can only be gleaned by being amongst people and by defying the very rules that seek to keep us apart.

Brits are currently banned from the USA - even those with visas. It is not a Muslim ban (although my country will be a Muslim majority in twenty years). It is a corona ban, on the basis that inflated British COVID death rates made the British Isles appear as the epicenter of some infernal plague. We have ‘The Science' to thank for that.

It became impossible to sit at home as a passive observer when everything we know and love is being fought for on the other side of the Atlantic. At some fundamental level, I needed to be a part of this fight. I needed to break back into America.

There is no way to overstate the significance of the election faced by American people in November.

The 2020 Presidential election is a tipping point for Western Civilization. It marks the last stand of the right against the very wrong, of law and order against anarchy and chaos, and democracy over socialism. It is not political but biblical in proportion.

. . .

Read the rest here.  What a pick-me-up.  

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Gary Varvel: remembering 9/11

Artwork via Townhall

# # #

And the lockdowns continue

 

Dennis Prager’s column at Front Page Magazine has updates on the China virus lockdowns; he  highlights the insanity in his state of California, but New York, New Jersey, and Michigan are just as bad.  And Ohio is still requiring masks, social distancing, etc.  Why?

Why can people eat with no mask in an airplane -- inches, not six feet, from strangers -- but cannot eat in a California restaurant, which is so much bigger than the inside of an airplane, while sitting six feet from others? Because [Gov.] Newsom ordered it, the Los Angeles Times supports it and, like sheep, Californians have accepted it.

. . .

I conclude with the words of a Swedish medical doctor, Sebastian Rushworth:

"Covid is over in Sweden. People have gone back to their normal lives and barely anyone is getting infected any more. I am willing to bet that the countries that have shut down completely will see rates spike when they open up. If that is the case, then there won't have been any point in shutting down in the first place ... Shutting down completely in order to decrease the total number of deaths only makes sense if you are willing to stay shut down until a vaccine is available. That could take years. No country is willing to wait that long."

Except that so far, the US is still mostly shut down.  Read the rest here.

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Gary Varvel cartoon on the lockdown

 A great cartoon by Gary Varvel at Townhall:

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All About Voter Fraud

 

A friend of mine just asked for some links to reports and information relating to voter fraud, especially as it affects this election cycle.  I put together this list of links, most of which have appeared on this blog, but here are key reports for reference.

This Legal Insurrection report cites the claim that voter fraud is a myth. Here is one first-hand account that shows how it is done: “Confessions of a voter fraud: I was a master at fixing mail-in ballots” by Jon Levine at the New York Post.

John Solomon lists cases of recent election fraud at Just The News.

Project Veritas (James O’Keefe) has taped undercover videos about social media and Google interference. 

Robert Epstein is a longtime liberal and an expert on how Google (and FB) can interfere with elections; he is quoted at Breitbart.

And here is how the Democrat party is setting the table; click here.

If you are in Cuyahoga County, click here to learn about temporary employment opportunities at the Board of Elections. 

# # #

Cleveland’s Trump boat rally

Cleveland joins the list of cities holding Trump boat rallies.  Here are photographs from this afternoon:

 

Click to embiggen.

Images by PatDooley Photography at https://www.facebook.com/Pat44113

UPDATE:  And click here for a report with video of New Jersey's Trump boat parade. 

 

Chuckle of the Day

 Meme from social media:

# # #

COVID-CON job

art credit: thebanningmuseum.org

Brian C. Joondeph, M.D. at American Thinker covers the “Fear Porn” from Drs. Fauci and Birx and the corrupt media, and he concludes:

In the past week, two pillars of the COVID Con collapsed: deaths and positive tests. Back in April, the news was all about death counts. Fox News ran a death tally on the screen, much like the running score of football game. Cable news shows talked about nothing but rising death counts, spreading fear porn to justify recommendations for staying at home and shutting down the U.S. economy.

. . .

The NY Times found, “Up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus.” Yet lockdowns of businesses and schools continue based on these wildly inaccurate numbers.

Is this purposeful or incompetent? I suggest the former. President Trump downplayed testing in favor of therapeutics such as hydroxychloroquine. The Democrat-media establishment immediately pushed for more testing and told everyone that hydroxy was as deadly as cyanide.

Fox News crank Neil Cavuto said of hydroxy, “It will kill you.” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, claiming an “evidence-based” approach to combating the Chinese flu, pushed for “testing, testing, testing.” Yet both of those admonitions were fear-based, not evidence-based.

Here we are now with deaths and positive cases overstated by 90 plus percent, all to create fear and uncertainty ahead of a presidential election. How many excess deaths can be attributed to media gaslighting? How many people delayed necessary medical care or cancer screening, afraid to leave their homes over the daily barrage of fear porn from CNN and Fox News?

This is information warfare, weaponizing medical data to influence an election, regardless of the cost in lives and economic damage. But the Big Con is being exposed, darkness to light. Hopefully voters are noticing and awakening to the con pushed by the left and the media.

Read Dr. Joondeph's column here.

# # #

Joe Biden’s Pittsburgh event

 A Tale of Two Camera Shots!  These images were shared by Sundance at Conservative Treehouse.  

What you saw on TV:

This is the image that actually reflects the event:

# # #

Another Biden Word Salad

It’s funny but it’s not funny.  Matt Palumbo at The Bongino Report:

Joe Biden finally emerged from his basement once again today, to, among other things, blame President Donald Trump for the riots occurring across the country. How President Trump is responsible for riots being carried out by people who hate him remains a mystery, but it appears that Democrats realized that these riots were damaging them in the polls so they finally began pretending to care about the destruction.

It wouldn’t have been a Biden event without a notable and quotable gaffe, and he provided one for us.

Attempting to slam President Trump’s coronavirus response, Biden said “Covid has taken this year, just since the outbreak, has taken more than 100 years, look, here’s, the lives, it’s just, when you think about it. More lives this year than any other year for the past 100 years.”

Shakespeare couldn’t have worded it better.

Now I can’t imagine why so many on the left don’t want Biden to debate…

The report here includes the CNN video.

# # #

Voter Fraud: With Evidence

Deborah Weiss published an article the other day at FrontPage Magazine, “Voter Fraud: With Evidence.  Ms. Weiss used to “work on the congressional committee which deals with contested elections.”  Her article concludes:

It is a lie that Trump and the Republicans want to "suppress the vote." It is clear that he wants to protect the integrity of each citizen's vote. Any effort to ensure vote integrity is framed as voter suppression by the Democrats. The only votes Trump wants to "suppress" are those that are fraudulent and those are the ones that the Democrats need in order to win.

To make matters worse, in their usual Alinskyite way, the Democrats have propagated the narrative that Trump doesn't want post office voting because he wants to steal the election, when clearly it is they who want to do this, as the confusing, diluted, mail-in voting scheme serves no other purpose. In the event that the Democrats win, they'll claim victory even if Trump challenges potentially illegal votes. But in the event they lose, they'll argue that Trump "stole" the election. There's a reason that Biden already hired 700 election attorneys to prepare.

Further, many Democrat states are reducing the number of polling stations drastically, so you'll likely have to wait on very long lines November 3rd. Most will have the option of voting in person early under this new voting regime, and under the circumstances, that is what I suggest. The Democrat scheme to have all mail-in ballots with no safeguards, in my view is designed to cause chaos and confusion in the outcome of the most important election in our lifetimes. It is an attempt to undermine confidence in our system and destabilize our country. Unfortunately, I see only two outcomes: 1) Biden wins and we become a socialist country, losing America as we know it forever or 2) Trump wins and there will be riots across America, amidst accusations of a stolen election. Hillary Clinton has already advised Biden not to concede the election “under any circumstances.” America is no longer "We the people." It is the tale of two cities, with only "us" and "them." We live in scary times.

Read the rest here.

RELATED: “Confessions of a voter fraud: I was a master at fixing mail-in ballots” by Jon Levine at the New York Post.

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That’s a wrap: RNC

 

Most of you probably watched most or all of the conventions.  Over at PJ Media, several contributors were live-blogging, and Bryan Preston’s closing comments were spot-on:

President Trump closed out the greatest speech of his career and the strongest political convention either party has produced since I have been watching political conventions. 

Both parties faced numerous logistical and structural problems thanks to the COVID pandemic. The Democrats allowed COVID to confine them to crummy Zoom calls, empty speeches in dark and empty rooms, cloying and shaming rhetoric, and a depressing spirit.

The Republicans tore up the script and came up with a better one, that had no time for hacks and grifters. It brought real Americans with real stories forward. It showcased American history and pride. It showed us Fort McHenry. It unabashedly supported citizens, public safety, the possibility and joy of redemption, the agony of loss, the power of unity, and our nation's role in the world. 

The RNC convention could have been blighted by COVID as the Democrats' was. But the parties have a different character. The Democrats sank into the mire because that's who they are. The Republicans rose above it because that's who we are. Democrats want Americans as victims. Republicans want Americans as victors. 

# # #

CNN's Baghdad Bob moment

Just in case you somehow missed this one...

# # #

Maximo Alvarez at the RNC

We watched most of the RNC speakers last night.  The one that moved us the most was this one.  RightSide video and intro via Sundance at Conservative Treehouse.

Maximo Alvarez is a Cuban immigrant whose family fled totalitarianism from both Cuba and Spain. Last night, Mr. Alvarez spoke directly about candidate Joe Biden and the Democrats’ dangerous slide towards socialism and the far left. Mr. Alvarez knows personally how President Trump is fighting to keep the American dream alive.

A powerful and emotional message directly from the heart.

# # #

Republican National Convention links

Mike Miller at RedState posted the roster of speakers for the RNC this week.  Click here.

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse has posted resource & streaming links for the convention starting  today.  Click here.

# # #

The mailbox and postal service hoax: Life Liberty and Levin

Mark Levin’s episode of Life, Liberty, and Levin this evening was outstanding.  His two guests addressed (1) the mailbox hoax and (2) the hydroxychloroquine “controversy.” Both guests were most excellent, and President Trump just linked to the first segment on the postal service with Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation (his second guest was Dr. Harvey Risch, professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine):

Click here for the President's twitter link. 

# # #

 

Joe Biden’s ONE truth

Photo credit: WSJ.com

Daniel Greenfield watched Joe Biden’s speech accepting the Democratic party’s nomination for President.  Most of Mr. Greenfield’s comments are critical of the DNC imaginary convention as well as Creepy Joe’s remarks and political history.  His article at Front Page Magazine concludes:

Joe Biden did speak one truth in his acceptance speech.

“This election will determine what America is gonna look like for a long, long time,” he said.

Cities under Democrat control are burning now. Stores are closed and businesses are bankrupt. Imagine what it will look like if they have the absolute power to determine the fate of America.

The Democrats are nasty and proud of it. They are proud of what they have done in Portland. They are proud to have torn down statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. They are proud to have defaced churches and synagogues. And they can’t wait to show us how nasty they can really be if they once again have absolute power over the entire United States

Mr. Greenfield’s article is here.

# # #

DNC convention aftermath: a diagnosis

 

Charles Schulz cartoon via Pinterest.com

The DNC virtual convention was apparently obnoxious, filled with liars and scolds, etc. The reports I read made me glad to have had the TV on another channel.  The post-convention wrap-ups have been both entertaining and alarming.  This post mortem by Julie Kelly at American Greatness starts off:

A healthy political party—just like a healthy individual—has certain traits and habits that nourish overall wellness. A diversity of interests, a sense of humor, a curious mind, a measured temperament, and an occasional endorphin-release from physical activity are just a few things that contribute to the fitness of a human being. The same kind of characteristics should be found on a collective scale in a thriving, muscular, and stable political party.

None of those qualities, however, can be detected in the present-day Democratic Party. 

For all the squawking about Donald Trump’s alleged unfitness for office and insistence that the Republican Party is populated with zombie-like Trump cultists, in reality it is the Democratic Party that needs an extended stay at a detox facility to cleanse its sickly mind and body.

The party’s ailments have been on full display this week. Look no further than the freakish music video that closed out the first night of the Democratic National Convention. Billy Porter, a gay black Broadway star, and geriatric Steven Stills of Crosby, Stills, and Nash teamed up to remake Stills’ 1966 classic, “For What It’s Worth.”

The video was a performative display of the party’s schizophrenia: A white ’60s counterculture icon and a Dracula-costumed POC LGBTQ activist offering an inharmonious version of a Vietnam-era tune as the official anthem for the candidacy of a feeble establishment codger and his unaccomplished cackling sidekick quickly shredding their faux moderate façade in fealty to the party’s lunatic fringe of America-hating nihilists.

Somebody call a doctor.

The Democratic Party is not well. Joe Biden is neither mentally nor physically healthy enough to run the country, yet the party remains in denial. Biden’s conduct should raise all sorts of red flags but party stalwarts are hellbent on dragging him across the finish line in November in an almost cruel act of selfishness.

While Democrats willfully ignore Biden’s fragility, the party is fixated on every move, utterance, and tweet from Donald Trump in a way that any mental health professional would diagnose as obsessive.

Their rage often is expressed in alarming public outbursts. From tearing up a State of the Union address to threatening to “impeach the motherfucker” and calling for “unrest in the streets” against Trump supporters, the Democratic Party is controlled by emotionally unstable people who behave more like mad stalkers than rational adults.

They have one hallucination after another. For three years, Democrats rocked back and forth wrapped in a collusion straightjacket mumbling about the Russians(!) and lighting candles for Special Counsel Robert Mueller. One Democratic leader made up phone conversations between Trump and the Ukrainian president; one presidential candidate pretends to be Native American.

Now, metal mailboxes disappear before their very eyes.

. . .

Read the entire column here.

# # #

Irrelevant Dinosaurs

image credit: Daily Kos

At American Greatness, Liz Sheld takes aim at the GOPe, a/k/a establishment Republicans, including those addressing the Democrat convention this week:

“Democrats electrify party base with showcase of irrelevant dinosaurs 
(i.e., Bill Clinton and John Kerry)”

. . . Politics is first and foremost about who has power (elected officials, deep pocket corporate interests and their influencer flacks) and who doesn’t.  Since Trump is an outsider, the industry and it’s soldiers can’t cash a bank of IOUs they would normally have on a professional politician. It’s better for these fake Republicans and their auxiliaries to be in the minority of a status quo system. In fact it’s better for all the establishment Republicans to be the minority of a status quo system, they would much rather lose the White House and both chambers so they can be king of the losers. It’s easier for them, they don’t have to do anything, they have no responsibility and can always point to their helpless position as a minority as cover for their ineffectiveness.

But the nerve of these traitors, turning on the people who voted for them while pretending to represent their interests is astronomical. How many people who voted for John McCain (59,948,323 votes) also voted for Donald Trump (62,979,879)? I’m guessing a lot and those people probably thought McCain was going to advance mutually held political positions he pretended to have. Alas, it was always just a sham, these Republicans speaking at the DNC were never about conservative or classical liberal positions, they were only using a gimmick to get their power and that’s why the country delivered a throat punch to the political establishment named Donald J. Trump. At the same time it’s sickening to see but also refreshing that voters have an opportunity to see exactly how these politicians play which is for their own power grab, relevancy and the big bucks of their corporate patrons.

Read the rest here.

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Fraud-by-mail

 

Stephen Green, a/k/a Vodkapundit, posted his “Insanity Wrap#29” today at PJ Media.  Here’s part of his section on mail-in voting, or as he puts it “Fraud-by-mail”:

An election without trust is barely worth holding — if that.

Insanity Wrap finds none of these virtues in mail-in balloting.

Mail-in ballots get sent out according to a process invisible to the voters.

Yes, you received a ballot with your name and address on it, but did someone else at your old house or apartment receive one with your name on it, too? If so, what happened to it?

Who “helps” older or infirm people fill out their ballots in private?

Were extra ballots printed? If so, what happened to them?

What happens to your ballot after you drop it, as yet uncounted, into a USPS box?

Where does the counting take place, and by whom?

The postal workers union just endorsed Joe Biden — can it be trusted?

If you don’t know — if you can’t know — the answers to any of these questions, then how much do you trust the process?

Insanity Wrap believes the move to mail-in voting isn’t so much about stealing elections. Democrats have always proven willing (and oftentimes able) to come up with enough mystery ballots to win a close contest.

Instead, mail-in voting is about reducing the level of trust the public has for the result of any and every election.

When trust in free elections is reduced low enough, the people will be ready for something…

…else.

What that “else” is, Insanity Wrap would rather not know.

Full column is here.

# # #

Face mask control

 Seen on social media:

# # #

The Postal Service Isn't a Voting System

 

art credit:  americanexperiment.org

Over at Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield makes good points about the Democrat party’s goal of shifting all voting to vote-by-mail:

Not that such a system would be remotely trustworthy, but states like Nevada signing off on ballot harvesting obviously don't care about trustworthy.

It's 2020. You can safely and reliably order everything from burgers to luxury cars to your home. And yet we vote the way we used to a century ago because for all the Dem prattle about accessibility, they want control of the process, and they don't want to take the simple step of verifying the legitimacy of who may be voting.

So instead we have a train wreck of their own making in which Democrats make unrealistic demands of the Postal Service and then throw a tantrum.

Read the rest here.

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The Hodge Twins on Cannon Hinnant

 The Hodge Twins post topical videos all the time on YouTube.  They are informative and funny.  This one (7:16 minutes) is on the more serious side, as they are commenting on the shooting of Cannon Hinnant.  However, considering the daily deluge of Black Lives Matter propaganda, they are also showing the bias and corruption in the media.

 # # #

Biden meme

 Meme via The Patriot Post.  (It's subtle, almost like "Hidden Pictures.")

# # #

True Colors

 

Vintage A.F. Branco cartoon via Legal Insurrection

Color me surprised!!!  From Hannah Bleau at Breitbart:

Michelle Obama, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and former Gov. John Kasich (R) are among a handful of influential speakers slated to headline the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) virtual convention.

 # # #

Pat Cross cartoon says it all

Pat Cross cartoon at Townhall:

# # #

COVID Hyperbole Syndrome

Cartoon credit: Cartoonstock

Lionel Shriver’s column at The Spectator is titled “Never Has  Virus Been so oversold:  I’d like to sign on with COVID’s agent. What a publicity budget.” She sets forth the grotesque trade-offs we are seeing in both the US and the UK – with no end in sight.  An extract:

The more relentless these micro-managing policies of ‘social distancing’ (an expression I’ve come to loathe), mandatory masks, continued closures and capriciously restored regional lockdowns apparently on the basis of a miserable uptick of 14 extra cases, the more we relocate what had lurked far at the back of our minds to the front: other people are sources of contagion. We used to live with that fact. But this on-going risk of mixing with other human beings we’re now, apparently, to find intolerable.

I’m currently in New York, where the medical paranoia is sustained, and social life is nearly nonexistent. This week, a rarity, a couple came inside our house. They didn’t sit down, didn’t stay long, and were careful not to touch anything. When they left they were clearly relieved, and immediately doused themselves in hand sanitizer. I don’t think it’s going to be any different next summer. Google, for example, has already advised its employees to work from home for the next 12 months.

The graph of new cases in the UK roughly leveled off throughout July — but it has not plateaued at zero. The PM gives every indication that only zero will do. Thus as long as the coronavirus persists, the fearful prophylactic measures will continue. In trade for this valiant vigilance on our behalf, we merely have to sacrifice: our friends. Any new friends. All live performance — music, plays. Restaurants. All occasions, like proper weddings, funerals, birthdays and extended-family celebrations. Travel. Colleagues. Any search for love. Any moving communal experience, like festivals. Dentistry. A functional National Health Service. Oh, and the economy — and in case you need translation, that means the country, full stop.

Boris’s ‘nuclear option’ of another total national lockdown remains on the table. Why on earth? The one constructive conclusion to draw from this debacle is that long, indiscriminate national lockdowns to suppress infectious disease are a catastrophe. Yet the most horrifying consequence of COVID-19 could be that lockdown — which once applied only to prisons — becomes officialdom’s established knee-jerk response to any new contagion.

There will be a new contagion, too, and a new one after that. How many times can you send the national debt soaring, devastate small business, paralyze government services — including healthcare — and cancel for months on end the civil liberties of an erstwhile ‘free people’? In preference to this repeated carpet-bombing, a literal nuclear option might at least get the agony over with fast.

Read the full column here (h/t Instapundit).

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President Donald Trump in Ohio today

ospreys overhead

police patrol

Air Force One (C32 a/k/a/ Boeing 757 -- the smaller one) at Burke

Images by PatDooley photography

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Woke vs. awoken

photo credit: foxnews

From guest blogger Pat:

Leo Terrell was woke but now he has awoken. He's not alone.

People are seeing the destruction wrought on major American cities by looters and rioters, led by Antifa shock troops armed with hammers, bear spray, blinding lasers, commercial fireworks, Molotov cocktails, and more while protected by shields, helmets, industrial quality gas masks and the ability to blend into a larger crowd of BLM protesters for protection. 

The MSM [mainstream media] support Antifa and BLM and hide from public view the violence committed by those radical groups. When Rep. Jim Jordan showed a video of the violence at a House Judiciary Committee hearing in Congress, the MSM cut away. The head of the Committee, one Jerrold Nadler, flat out denied that the protests were anything but peaceful.

But, the MSM no longer has a monopoly on the news. Citizen journalists, bloggers, talk radio and even local TV channels are reporting on the destruction, which largely impacts poorer neighborhoods. The locals are figuring out that the white Antifa radicals that attacked their local supermarket, drugstore and police precinct are not fighting to improve their lives. Nor are the mobs that follow, under the umbrella of BLM, that loot and destroy these neighborhood foundations. 

BLM, Antifa and the MSM may be the woke darlings of today's Democrat party but they have awoken a silent coalition of all races and creeds that rejects divisive rhetoric and violence and wants a civil society restored. Despite the best efforts of the woke tech giants, it will be restored on November 4th, 2020.

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