Home town referees at work

The Friday Letter #514 / Oct. 14, 2022

St. Peter and Satan agreed to a baseball game. Satan wanted to play the game on neutral grounds between a select team from the heavenly host and his own hand picked players. “Very well,” said the gatekeeper of Heaven. “But you realize, I hope, that we've got all the best players and the smartest coaches.”

“I know,” Satan answered unperturbed. “But I've got all the umpires.”

Umpires can be cranky. Bill Klem was working the plate in a Washington Senators home game, and a woman in the stands behind him was unhappy with his calls. “If I was your wife I would put poison in your coffee,” she carped.

Klem turned around and faced the woman through the backstop fence. “If you was my wife, I'd drink it,” he said.

In a piece this week at American Greatness, Brian Robertson says “The panic is palpable” as Democrats face “a Republican blowout,” noting that “the reckless cabal in charge of the Biden Administration has clearly run out of political ammo.”

Democrats are worried about their Senate candidates in Wisconsin, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. Two of them are off-the-charts leftist lieutenant governors who favor the anarchy of gutted police departments in line with the domestic terrorist group Black Lives Matter. The Georgia candidate, incumbent Raphael Warnock, doesn't like white people any more than he apparently likes his ex-wife, whom he ran over with his car. He self-identifies as a Christian preacher. All three seem comfortable with the idea of erasing our national borders and allowing anyone from anywhere to vote in our elections.

Republicans can win these three races. They note that except for Trafalgar, polls are unreliable because they consistently under-count Republican voters. On the other hand, polls don't adjust for the fraud factor. In 2020, some combination of outright ballot fraud and the refusal to follow their own election laws handed these states' electoral votes to Biden. Evidence surfacing since the election makes it clear that Trump was the likely winner in all three.

Aside from the partial victories of a court slap down of the Wisconsin Election Commission and Georgia's tepid reforms (fraud-producing unattended drop boxes are still allowed), Republicans have every reason to fear unpleasant surprises next month.

Because Democrats have the umpires.

We have known for more than two years that masks don't stop the spread of the CCP coronavirus. If you wonder why so many people still walk around in public wearing them, think of this as a polling device. These are reliable Democrat voters who blindly follow the state's diktats.

Almost 15 million mail-in ballots were unaccounted for in 2020, Fred Lukas reported last year at The Daily Signal. Congressional Democrats want to unconstitutionally nationalize elections and make no-questions-asked, identify-free mail-in ballots permanent, a continuation of the “emergency” they manufactured in 2020. This is the key to creating a one-party state.

Someone should explain why only Republicans don't think their votes count. Being more disciplined, Democrats know that every vote, legal and illegal, does count. When some of my Republican friends say they didn't vote in such-and-such election because it didn't matter and their vote would not have changed the outcome, Democrats have the clear advantage. This is another reason why polls can be so inaccurate. They assume that the people expressing their preference will actually show up to vote.

Early Americans didn't have mail-in balloting. The concept of ballot fraud was foreign to them. They had to get off their duffs, hitch up the wagon, and trudge through the rain and snow to vote. And look what they produced: the greatest, most free and prosperous society in recorded history.

And then look what happened when a state like Oregon switched from in-person to mail-in balloting: A decade of Democrat rule, the homeless defecating in the streets, rising violent crime, a complete breakdown in civil order. Ignorant people who otherwise wouldn't be bothered now found it pain-free to cast a ballot for their sugar daddies at the welfare office, which even pays the postage.

Developments on the propaganda front

“Writers for a D.C.-based media operation run by prominent Democratic operatives are behind a sprawling network of ostensible local media outlets churning out Democrat-aligned news content in midterm battleground states,” Axios reports.

We could ask, so what's new? In fact, telling the difference between the new concoctions and traditional slanted journalism isn't so easy. Consider this piece from the Milwaukee Metro Times:

Wisconsin is entering a boom cycle in renewable energy development. From utility-scale solar projects that will replace aging infrastructure to plans for the manufacturing of the needed component parts here, progress is now a question of “when?’”and “how?” instead of “if?”

Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) signed into law by President Joe Biden recently, the answer to ‘how?’ has become clearer: That progress will be made by Wisconsin workers who will be paid family-supporting wages and benefits.

The wave of clean energy development that Wisconsin will see in the next decade will certainly reduce our carbon footprint as a state. Climate activists are correct in lauding this landmark legislation as the most impactful effort to combat climate change in American history.

But it’s so much more than that. This is a jobs bill. A union jobs bill.

From where we sit, this story could have appeared at NPR or the New York Times.

More from the Axios report:

The sites are focused on key swing states with elections in 2021 and 2022: Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.

Each follows a similar template: aggregated local news content and short write-ups about local sports teams and attractions – interspersed with heavily slanted political news aimed at boosting Democratic midterm candidates and attacking Republican opponents.

Of course, we would never be so biased in The Friday Letter.

Talking things over

So (the new way to begin every sentence), in a strategy session Monday, our entire staff of two was discussing an idea proposed by one of us to change the Friday Letter's course to put more emphasis on the most urgent threats to our two-party system: ballot fraud and poor supervision of elections.

One of us had a brilliant idea: Run lots of stories on voting irregularities occurring around the country. Make people furious. Make them pressure their state legislators to clean up their election practices by getting rid of early and mail-in voting, drop boxes, ballot harvesting, machine counting and complicated, unreliable computer processing, same-day registration laws that doesn't require photo ID, and any other procedure that compromises election integrity.

Pressure the states to use paper ballots and have them hand-counted and recorded on Election Night.

Why should I, as a resident of (name of state) be concerned about election law in Michigan or Pennsylvania, one of us asked. I can't change what they do in those states. This one of us was concerned that we could write all day long about these matters and most people would never read it.

Good points. In the end, we agreed to keep plodding on with what we've been doing since 2009.

At the same time, Americans in every state have the absolute right and legal standing to demand election honesty in every other state. Never mind that the Supreme Court ruled otherwise in Texas v. Pennsylvania. Led by AG Ken Paxton, Texas was joined by 17 other states in claiming that by refusing to follow its own election laws, Pennsylvania illegally handed its electoral votes to Biden, violating the constitutional rights of voters in other states.

Both the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and SCOTUS refused to hear the case. That doesn't make their decisions any more right than Plessy v. Ferguson or Dred Scott v. Sandford.

Voters in Nebraska are rightly outraged that Georgia's corrupt and incompetent Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, helped throw Georgia's electoral votes to Biden to feed his hatred of President Trump.

(Case in point: WTOC-TV reported in April 2020 that Raffensperger's office sent out 7 million unsolicited absentee ballot applications to registered voters.)

A long time ago in a place far away, around 3 and 4 BT (Before Trump) and continuing well into Trump's presidency, leaders in both parties were concerned about flaws in our voting system. As quoted by Mollie Hemingway in Rigged, Democrat Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon told a 2018 C-SPAN audience that “Forty-three percent of American voters use voting machines that researchers have found have serious security flaws, including back doors. These companies are accountable to no one. They won't answer basic questions about their cybersecurity practices and the biggest companies won't answer any questions at all. Five states have no paper trail, and that means there is no way to prove the numbers the voting machines put out are legitimate.”

That was, of course, when Democrats were certain that Trump stole the 2016 election. They changed their tune in 2020, claiming still today – with help from faux conservative newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post – that the 2020 election was fair and honest. And yet we know that evidence is clear that Trump did not lose Georgia, for example.

“Trump actually won the state,” says political consultant Mark Roundtree, who ran anti-Trump Raffensperger's campaign for secretary of state. Loyal as he may be to Raffensperger, he's not going to risk his reputation by signing on to the Never-Trump Lie.

As for Georgia voters, they can do no worse than to allow the Democrat to become secretary of state. True, she opposes voter identification, as do most Democrat politicians. But she is a known quantity. Voters can get rid of her in due time. We know she will encourage ballot-box stuffing and anonymous absentee votes. How will that be any worse than Georgia's scandal-plagued 2020 election? Only the Georgia General Assembly can enact strict laws that protect election integrity. Better to have a plain-spoken leftist Democrat than a Republican who speaks with forked tongue.

Election fraud update

The Colorado Secretary of State's office mailed voter registration instructions to about 30,000 non-citizens living in the state, Just the News reports. “Make sure your voice is heard this November,” reads the postcard, apparently sent by the Department of Motor Vehicles. An unidentified source blames a formatting error. The joke could be on non-citizens caught trying to vote, however: Federal law requires deportation with little regard for intent.

Kathy Salvi is the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate seat in Illinois, but her name doesn't appear on the ballot in Schuyler County, Just the News reports. Salvi is demanding answers. Her defeated primary opponent is listed as the Republican opponent. Surprise. This is Illinois.

Short takes on the news

Led by anti-Trump Chief Justice Roberts, SCOTUS refuses to hear Trump's appeal of an appeals court order which denied Trump's request for a special master to review documents seized in the FBI raid on his Mar-a-Logo home. Items seized include Trump's passport and private letters. . .

She won't give it up. Lame duck Rep. Liz Cheney, defeated in her re-election primary and kicked out of the Republican Party, says there is “new evidence” that Trump obstructed justice in the Jan. 6 Capitol demonstrations, The Daily Mail reports. She wants to haul Trump before the star chamber inquisition, soon to die a merciful and long-overdue death. . .

NBC affiliate KNOP-TV fires its news director and co-anchor after it learns she collected signatures on a pro-life petition at her church, St. John's Lutheran, in Curtis, Neb., The Blaze reports. Melanie Standiford said she wanted to make Curtis “a sanctuary city for the unborn.”

Revealed: Why the United States hasn't won a war since 1945. In a tweet, the highest-ranking Army enlisted man, Sgt. Major-of-the-Army Michael Grinston, countering Tucker Carlson's remarks that the U.S. Military has become feminized, revealed that “Women lead our most lethal units with character. They will dominate ANY future battlefield we're called to fight on. Tucker Carlson's words are divisive, don't reflect our values. We have THE MOST professional, educated, agile, and strongest NCO Corps in the World.”

Quote for today

“In an age, and a regime, in which propaganda and censorship are foundational sources of rule, the power to police opinion is quasi-governmental. They are information warfare specialists, backed by big money, and their role is to constrain what you get to hear in part by smearing and slandering dissidents. One may not pay them much heed, but others who also have power over what the public gets to hear do, hence their vitriol matters.” – Michael Anton at American Greatness.

The Friday Letter is published at USSA News