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.
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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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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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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Unfortunately, since the most recent (primary) election in Ohio relied on mail-in ballots, there is now precedence. This report by Joseph Klein at Front Page Magazine provides useful talking points in the event that the Secretary of State decides to try to lock in mail-ballots for the November 2020 election.
. . .
So why did President Trump bring up
the possibility of election delay in his tweet (with four question marks) in
the first place? The reason was to call attention to the dangers of universal
mail-in voting that threaten the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.
There is a real potential for fraud, to be sure. But even in the absence of
widespread fraud, universal mail-in voting faces significant challenges in
ensuring a fair election result, starting with its reliance on the all too
unreliable U.S. Postal Service (USPS). Moreover, states’ broad authority in the
administration of elections in which their citizens vote, including federal
elections, does not mean they can throw caution to the wind and dilute the
voting power of clearly qualified voters. This will most certainly happen when
states introducing universal mail-in voting for the first time in a
presidential general election do so without robust safeguards to ensure the
integrity of the mail-in process. There is too little time to devise and
implement anything close to the safeguards that presently exist for in-person
voting and the more limited use of absentee ballots as the exception rather
than the rule. There are a few smaller states that have used all or majority
mail-in voting for years with safeguards that have proven workable. However,
such safeguards cannot simply be transplanted into the systems of larger states
overnight.
The U.S.
Postal Service has proven its inability to handle properly the huge
anticipated volume of mail-in ballots in a timely and uniform fashion across
the United States. As a Democratic commissioner and co-chair of the New York
State Board of Elections said: “One of the big problems of going to a vote by
mail system is that the Boards of Elections are now in partnership with the
U.S. Postal Service for conducting the election.” We are still awaiting the
final results in a few contests from this past June’s Democratic primary in New
York where there was significant reliance on mail-in voting.
. . .
In Ohio, there was evidently an “unintentional
mis-sort” of more than 300 ballots, according to the U.S. Postal Service’s
chief operating officer, which caused them to be delivered too late to be
counted by a county Board of Elections. “An unintentional mis-sort of a tray of
Butler County return ballots ultimately contributed to a gap in the mail flow,
resulting in the delay,” he said, which he identified as “an opportunity for
improvement.”
. . .
The examples of post office related
problems with mail-in voting described above, as well as breakdowns in other
states, occurred before the July 10, 2020 implementation date for the new
Postmaster General's changes. We are talking about a record of sheer
incompetence that, when replicated on a far larger scale in connection with
this year’s general election, could well affect the final results in swing
states such as Ohio and Wisconsin.
Read the entire report here.
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