Help wanted: independent reporting
The Friday Letter / No. 484/ March 18, 2022Our search of “2020 vote fraud Pennsylvania” in Brave – which claims to be the only remaining browser not to censor challenges to approved government-media propaganda – turns up 20 stories.
Every story has the same theme: Trump's claim of voter fraud is baseless, no matter the source: Democrats, Republican legislators, election officials. And every story shares one or more of these characteristics: wrong, misleading, incomplete, or an outright lie.
Let's review some facts. In violation of Pennsylvania election law, which can only be changed by voter-approved constitutional amendment, election officials accepted 10,000 mail-in ballots that arrived after the 8 p.m. Election Day deadline. A Judicial Watch lawsuit gave evidence that 800,000 ineligible voters remained on the commonwealth's rolls.
Every story blames Trump for protesting the election outcome. None acknowledges the refusal of the Pennsylvania General Assembly, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, or the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene and uphold Pennsylvania election law.
Pennsylvania received 2.6 million mail-in ballot requests in 2020, about 10 times the number in 2016. No-questions-asked mail-in balloting, where identification can't be confirmed, is probably the largest source of election fraud. Nationwide anonymous mail-in voting is a major Democrat Party goal and the key to one-party rule in perpetuity.
Is is becoming increasing clear that Trump won Pennsylvania.
As Deroy Murdock reports at The Daily Signal, “Pennsylvania’s top jurists – five appointed by Democrats, two by Republicans – heard Democrats appeal a lower court ruling Feb. 4 that found no-excuse, mail-in ballots unconstitutional under the supreme law of that land.”
But the real culprits, Murdock notes, are Republicans, who control the legislature. “Whatever their motives, state legislators in Harrisburg simply passed a law to allow no-excuse, mail-in ballots,” he writes about Act 77. The Pennsylvania constitution limits absentee voting to four clearly-stipulated conditions: occupational duties, illness or physical disability, observance of a religions holiday, or Election Day duties.
“Act 77 couldn’t care less,” Murdock says. And neither could either the state supreme court or SCOTUS.
A Pennsylvania Commonwealth court ruled Jan. 28 that “a constitutional amendment must be presented to the people and adopted into our fundamental law before legislation authorizing no-excuse, mail-in voting can be placed upon our statute books.”
Says Murdock, “This judgment confirms what former President Donald Trump and his supporters have repeated since November 2020: Non-legislative, state-level authorities perpetrated vote fraud by changing rules that only state legislators may revise. Nonetheless, Democrats want Act 77 in place, to keep their absentee-vote machine humming along.”
We must gently note an error in Murdock's quote above, though it doesn't change his meaning: The legislature may change the rules only with voter approval through constitutional amendment. You can hang this one on lilly-livered Republican swamp creatures, who caved to the Democrats’ demands.
Short takes on the news
A Black Lives Matter agitator gets several years in prison after pleading guilty to possessing child pornography and psilocybin mushrooms and for destroying evidence, a website called The National Pulse reports. . .
Denver's Democrat district attorney has dropped murder charges against a self-styled, unlicensed security guard who shot dead a Trump supporter during a 2020 rally, the Denver Post reports. The security guard was working for a local TV station. . .
A judge in Utah gave probation to three men who raped or videotaped the rape of a semi-conscious 14-year-old girl, KSL-TV reports. All three are in their 20s, and two are apparently illegal aliens. They had been held since the 2017 incident. . .
Keeping us safe from hate speech. One America News is suing AT&T, the parent company of Direct TV, for canceling its cable TV contract when the current pact expires in April, the Washington Examiner reports. The suit accuses AT&T of breach of contract and violating California's Unfair Competition Law. The suit names AT&T Board Chairman William Kennard, also a board member of the company that owns Dominion Voting Systems, accused of voting fraud in the 2020 election. Kennard worked in both the Clinton and Obama administrations. OAN has launched a $5 monthly internet subscription service to replace AT&T.
With feeling, even if you don't mean it
Gov. Greg Abbott thanked a female general, Tracy Norris, for her “exceptional service” as the state's adjutant general who “faithfully served the Texas Military Department with dignity. . . over her decades of service” – and then he fired her.
Complaints about her leadership in defending the Texas border led to the sacking, with complaints coming from whistleblowers and some of the 10,000 troops on active duty who say the border mission is nothing more than political showmanship, a waste of money that protects only private businesses. Abbott was feeling heat from complaints about his leadership in this affair.
TMD consists of the Army and Air Force National Guards and the Texas State Guard.
Texans had the opportunity to replace Abbott with retired lieutenant colonial and unapologetic conservative Allen West but declined. Col. West served a single term in Congress before he was gerrymandered out by the Florida Legislature, which saw him as a threat to the Republican Establishment.
It could be worse. If Robert O'Rourke gets in as governor, there won't be a Texas Military Department. Nor may Texans keep their protective firearms, as he has promised.
Economics 1 oh! 1
I had one semester of high school economics and then took a double major in economics and accounting in college. Without exception, I didn't know the politics of any of my instructors. Except to acknowledge the reality of the Law of Supply and Demand, they never discussed their personal views. How times have changed.
We searched in vain for excerpts from modern high school economics textbooks. About the only thing we found was one of liberal Paul Krugman's behemoth college textbooks. Prof. Krugman holds a Nobel Prize in economics and has taught at MIT, Princeton, and the City University of New York.
As a leftist columnist for the New York Times, he famously warned that Donald Trump's 2016 election would lead to a deep depression. He's a big fan of Keynesian economics, which advocates deficit government spending and low taxes to pull an economy from recession or depression. Otherwise, his textbooks, far as we can tell, are mostly straightforward.
We really wanted to see what's going on in high school econ textbooks, to learn how a whole generation of high school students is indoctrinated to hate capitalism and free markets, to believe that America itself is evil and must be destroyed. The closest we came was this piece by a former teacher at the Heritage Foundation website.
“It isn’t just a matter of actively teaching that America and the West are evil,” Douglas Blair writes. “Suppression of 'wrongthink' is equally as important to the brainwashing process. The young adults who today gleefully tear down statues of the Founding Fathers were incubated in our very own schools.”
Not specific to economics, but you get the drift.
What can parents do about this, other than yank their kids out of government schools? The answer isn't always easy, as we are learning from recent reports that many private schools have adopted the woke cause. And most parents aren't able to provide homeschool, having to work at actual jobs.
Here is what they can do, and it isn't complicated. It does involve a family meeting. We hold ours at the dinner table:
Start by asking your teenager if he's thought about why prices are going up. The answers might reveal what's going on in the classroom. I will bet lunch that the answers will include just about everything but economic reality.
The trick here is to ask questions, not lecture. This requires discipline, because many high school and younger students put more faith in their teachers than in their old fogey parents.
Expect to hear the line that comes from Biden and his press secretary, Jen Psaki, that rising fuel prices are caused by greedy oil companies, and rising meat and milk prices are caused by greedy meat processors and greedy dairy farmers.
And, we suppose, rising fan belt prices are caused by greedy fan belt makers. It must have been one heck of a packed room when these greedy conspirators gathered to jack up prices and put the hurt on ordinary Americans.
Why didn't the corporatists raises prices when Trump was president? These giants are aligned with the Democrat Party. Wouldn't that have been a good time to destroy the economy and the Republican Party?
These are not serious people running this country, but you have to be careful in how you explain reality to the victims of government school propaganda.
When somebody as ignorant as Jen Psaki blames rising prices on corporate greed and is backed up by other ignoramuses such as Biden, Pelosi – and the most ignorant and ill-educated of them all, Sandi Cortez – it's time for the most fundamental economic lesson of them all, the Law of Supply and Demand.
You could lay down a copy of Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics: a Common Sense Guide to the Economy, or Henry Hazlett's Economics in One Lesson, or the funny, entertaining, and educational Freakonomics (all available at Thriftbooks). But since it's unlikely your child will read any of these, a brief, simple discussion is advised.
When goods or services are in short supply, their price rises and people compete for limited supply. When supply exceeds demand, the price falls. This is why gasoline costs more in the summer vacation season than it does in winter.
Start with this question: Doesn't it make sense that if something is in short supply its price will rise? Let's say you really want to see a football game that is sold out. So you go to the stadium and find several people offering tickets at various prices of, say, $50 to $100. The box office price is $20, but those are sold out.
If the scalpers see their tickets going quickly, they might raise their asking price even more. They would certainly do this if they had two remaining tickets and six people wanting them. A bidding war would erupt.
But if nobody wants to pay those inflated prices, scalpers will lower their price. If the scalper has really miscalculated demand, he might even tale less that purchase prices. That's how free markets work. Nobody requires anybody to pay anything. It's the customer's choice.
Thomas Sowell has a clear and brief explanation of how rent control ordinances create shortages and drive up rents in Applied Economics. This is another book written in layman's language that allows more understanding of economics than the fattest textbook and, like the others mentioned here, could be a great resource for homeschool parents.
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