RUTHFULLY YOURS

• The Democrats stole the election fair and square. Of course I don’t mean that literally; what I mean is that the election was effectively stolen months ago before any ballots were cast when legislatures (and sometimes governors and state courts such Pennsylvania) changed the voting rules to allow expanded mail-in voting, and the cascade of related vulnerabilities that followed. Republican legislatures that went along with these COVID-induced panic changes were foolish if not derelict in their duty. And the Trump campaign was negligent in not fighting against this months ago. President Trump was correct to warn about this outcome. Why wasn’t his campaign better organized to resist this months ago? (I know they did file a few lawsuits, a few of which had some effect, but it wasn’t enough.) I suspect the long-rumored campaign infighting and attention to other things distracted Trump’s senior campaign managers from paying sufficient attention to this.

• Fraud is very easy in our election system. Remember that our elections are run by part-timers, amateurs, and volunteers on the county level in America—and we have over 3,000 counties. In such a diffuse system it is easy to conjure up a few dozen votes here, a few hundred votes there. Or worse. It is at once a glory of self-government in America that we actually conduct our elections in this decentralized way involving tens of thousands of citizen volunteers. It is also astounding that we use such a vulnerable and chaotic system to choose our president.

• So the problem with vote fraud is that a remedy is difficult to apply. There aren’t good remedies. If a race is within a few hundred votes or less, a recount or ballot challenges can work to reverse the outcome, though not often. The plain fact is that once a fraudulent ballot is inside the ballot box and counted, it is very hard to get it back out of the box and un-counted. Fraudulent ballots need to be intercepted before they reach the ballot box. It is likely not possible to disqualify enough ballots to change the outcome in three states, which is what Trump would need. The statistical anomalies of this election are good circumstantial evidence of vote fraud, but exactly which ballots, or which vote totals, do you change, and how?

No court is going to overturn an election result on circumstantial evidence and affidavits of incorrect polling place procedure alone. (I reserve judgment for the time being about the Dominion computer system question.) And the thorough fact-finding necessary for judicial intervention would take time that we haven’t got. This is why both the Constitution and most state election statutes make the legislatures the arbiters of presidential election results.

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/wisconsin-supreme-court-rules-state-erred-giving-blanket-exemption-voter

The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled Monday that state and local election officials erred when they gave blanket permission allowing voters to declare themselves homebound and skip voter ID requirements in the 2020 election, potentially opening the door for Republicans to challenge tens of thousand of ballots.

In a case challenging the practice in Dane County, one of Wisconsin’s large urban center around the city of Madison, the state’s highest court ruled only those voters whose “own age, physical illness or infirmity” makes them homebound could declare themselves “indefinitely confined” and avoid complying with a requirement for photo ID.

The mere existence of a COVID-19 pandemic and shutdown orders was not sufficient under Wisconsin law for all persons to skip the voter ID requirements to seek to vote absentee, the justices ruled.

“We conclude that both the contention that electors qualify as indefinitely confined solely as the result of the COVID19 pandemic and the declared public health emergency and the contention that Wis. Stat. § 6.86(2)(a) could be used for those who ‘have trouble presenting a valid ID’ are erroneous because those reasons do not come within the statutory criteria,” the court ruled.

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2020/12/15/michigan-lawmakers-issue-subpoenas-detroit-livonia-clerks/3912147001/

Lansing — The Michigan House and Senate oversight committees voted Tuesday to issue subpoenas to clerks in Livonia and Detroit as Republican lawmakers bolstered their push to investigate the Nov. 3 election. 

Under the subpoenas, Detroit Clerk Janice Winfrey and Livonia Clerk Susan Nash will have to produce a trove of documents about how they ran their elections by 5 p.m. Jan. 12.

Detroit has been the focus of the attempt by President Donald Trump’s campaign to discredit Michigan’s election with unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud. Livonia, which is also in Wayne County, had similar rates of out-of-balance precincts compared to Detroit.

That means the number of voters tracked in poll books didn’t match the number of ballots cast in precincts. The imbalances are usually due to human errors, voters moving and other administration problems.

“We’re continuing our due diligence to determine if allegations that were made are true or not,” Senate Oversight Chairman Ed McBroom, R-Vulcan, said after the meeting.

“We’ve heard a lot of explanation for how poll books get out of balance,” he added. “This level is something that we want to check into.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/12/16/johnson_vs_peters_this_is_terrible_what_youre_doing_to_this_committee_it_is_what_you_have_done.html

Republican Sen. Ron Johnson blasted Democratic Sen. Gary Peters during a hearing Wednesday for claiming he was pushing Russian disinformation about Hunter Biden and Ukraine.

“You lied repeatedly. You lied repeatedly in the press. That I was spreading Russian disinformation. That was an outright lie and I told you to stop lying and you continued to do it,” Johnson said.

“The people peddling Russian disinformation are not on my side of the aisle. Senior Democrat leaders, including ranking member Peters, were involved in a process of creating a false intelligence product that they leaked to the media that accused Sen. Grassley, the President Pro-Temp of the Senate, and myself, of accepting and disseminating Russian misinformation,” Johnson said. “Sen. Peters introduced that false information, Russian disinformation into our investigation record. 50 members of the intelligence community, after our Hunter Biden investigation, and the revelation of his computer say it is Russian disinformation, now we find out, it is a real investigation by the Justice Department.”

“So, it’s just galling and I just have to point out that the purveyors of Russian disinformation – Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the DNC, the Steele Dossier, the Ranking Member Peters accusing Sen. Grassley and I of disseminating Russian disinformation, that’s where the disinformation is coming. That’s where the false information, the lies, the false allegations,” Johnson said.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/16/morning-greatness-senator-ronjohn-to-hold-election-irregularities-hearing-today/

EXCERPT:

Today, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs will hold a hearing, “Examining Election Irregularities in the 2020 Election.” (Here is a link to C-SPAN.) The Committee is chaired by Senator Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican. As I’m sure you know, Wisconsin is one of the states where serious fraud allegations have been alleged so RonJohn is doing his job and holding a hearing to air out the fraud and corruption. Ken Starr will be testifying as will Trump lawyers James R. Troupis and Jessie R. Binnall. Pennsylvania State Representative Francis X. Ryan is on the panel along with Commissioner Donald Palmer of the Election Assistance Commission. We can also look forward to Former Director (2018-2020) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Chris Krebs.

Perhaps you remember the fired Krebs when he was belching out claims that the 2020 election was the most secure election ever in the history of the world. “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes or changed votes or was in any way compromised.” Really? What is remarkable about this statement is that it was made without examining any equipment, records or reading sworn statements from observers and participants. Krebs must have magical powers to make such categorical statements. The Cathedral is obsessed with Krebs as CNN, ABC, and Politico have manufactured shiny puff pieces on him in preparation for the narrative they are going to advertise to you once the hearing his over. Politico wins a Scooby snack with a hit piece on RonJohn. Politico writes, Senator Johnson is “linking himself to President Donald Trump’s election challenge” or put in a better way, he is linking himself to the voters who are furious that their election was a hot mess.

It’s a risky political gamble for Johnson, who is betting that his embrace of Trump through his prior probes and his upcoming election hearing will energize the president’s base, which remains strong in Wisconsin despite Democratic wins statewide in 2018 and 2020. Still, Johnson’s decision to hold Wednesday’s hearing is drawing bipartisan ire as Trump’s allegations of voter fraud continue to crumble in federal court. It also comes two days after the Electoral College sealed Biden’s victory.

Is it a risky political gamble? Johnson doesn’t represent the snots writing copy for the anti-Trump advertisement published in Politico, he represents the people of Wisconsin. They are angry about their election and the fact that Politico wants to turn this into a Trump issue shows how divorced they are from the concerns of regular people. The election “irregularities” are not about Trump, they are about people who want to trust their voting process, a process they use to make their interests known to their representatives.

“So now you’ve got President Trump’s supporters seeing some real problems. There are some irregularities here that need to be explained,” said Johnson. “These issues have to be highlighted and hopefully corrected so that, in the next election, people have, just going into it, greater assurances.”

One has to wonder, why on earth would there be a controversy about examining election integrity? At the very least it looks like media advertorials such as Politico are supporting a coverup and at worse, endorsing the fraud.

Back to the Democrats’ star witness Krebs, this guy was head of the Homeland’s cybersecurity and we had a massive, serious hack across multiple government computer systems when he was on duty. “This is probably going to be one of the most consequential cyberattacks in U.S. history,” one U.S. official said, after the National Security Council held its second meeting in three days about the attacks, which security experts have linked to Russian intelligence. “That’s the view from inside government — that we’re dealing with something of a scale that I don’t think we’ve had to deal with before.”

So how capable and competent is Krebs? Not very, it seems.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/15/reckless-courts-codify-chaos/

Flagrant election cheating in several swing states, it seems, is of no interest to the self-appointed watchdogs of American democracy or even to those specifically tasked with investigating such unlawfulness.

The U.S. Department of Justice, despite its preachy corporate motto, is thus far blind to it. Journalists and professional pundits on both sides of the aisle downplay talk of what has happened as “baseless conspiracy theories” pushed by cult-like Trump loyalists. Most Senate Republicans are eager to move on while ignoring provable instances of voting fraud in their own states and urging the president to concede “for the good of the country.”

Even with a potentially power-shifting Senate election on January 5, no one seems particularly motivated to quickly remedy how absentee ballots have been mishandled, manipulated, and doctored in the 2020 presidential election.

And the entity usually considered the final and most impartial arbiter of injustice in the country—the court system—now, too, is in on the election fix.

Dangerous Precedents

Using COVID-19 panic as the pretext, election officials across the country turned a once-venerated quadrennial tradition into a rogue farce. Nearly 66 million mail-in votes were cast in the 2020 presidential election, double the number from 2016; the overwhelming majority were for Joe Biden.

Numerous lawsuits have detailed how state election laws, particularly those related to mail-in ballots, were broken. One would think that given Biden’s slim margin of victory in three states—only about 250,000 votes separate Biden from President Trump in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—judges sworn to uphold the rule of law might exhibit at least a passing interest in exhausting all the evidence.

After all, if Americans can’t depend on the Justice Department or their state attorneys general, Democrats in those three states, or even local Republican leaders to come to the rescue, surely the black-robed referees perched on the bench will step up, right?

Wrong. Not only are the courts dismissing lawsuits, judges are setting dangerous precedents that will have more election-eroding consequences later.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-will-we-do-without-trump-11608073543?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

EXCERPT:

This Day in Political History

Four years may seem like a long time ago, and perhaps it was given the changes since then in American politics. By mid-December of 2016 Hillary Clinton and her supporters had accepted the results of the November presidential election and were treating America’s president-elect with graciousness and respect.

Just kidding. On this day in 2016, the FBI secretly recorded a conversation between a bureau source and Trump associate Carter Page. Two months earlier, the FBI had used a bogus Clinton-funded dossier of Russian collusion claims and misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court into approving the first of several warrant applications focusing on Mr. Page.

Mrs. Clinton would continue for years promoting fact-free Russia conspiracy theories about her political rivals. And back on Dec. 15, 2016, many of her supporters were still seeking to prevent the winner of the November election from taking office. Calvin Woodward and Rachel La Corte of the Associated Press reported on an effort among Democrats to derail Donald Trump’s victory at the Electoral College. According to the AP report:

Republican electors are being swamped with pleas to buck tradition and cast ballots for someone else at meetings across the country Monday that are on course to ratify Trump as the winner. AP interviews with more than 330 electors from both parties found little appetite for a revolt…

The interviews found widespread Democratic aggravation with the electoral process but little expectation that the rush of anti-Trump maneuvering can stop him. For that to happen, Republican-appointed electors would have to stage an unprecedented defection.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/the-embarrassing-russian-disinformation-canard/

To help Biden win, former top intelligence officials, aided by a derelict media, deliberately misled the public.

If there’s one thing that the Hunter Biden laptop episode has proven, it is that former directors of the Central Intelligence Agency aren’t as adept at evaluating evidence as advertised.

Five former directors or acting directors of the CIA signed a letter asserting that the laptop, first reported by the New York Post in the weeks before the election, “has all the classic hallmarks of a Russian information operation.”

More than 50 former senior intelligence officials, including former director of national intelligence James Clapper, endorsed the letter, which was used by the Biden campaign and the press to discredit the damning emails about Hunter Biden’s business dealings.

The signatories should have thought better of their missive when they felt compelled to include the line, “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement.”

That also should have tipped reporters off to the fact that the letter was rank speculation masquerading as informed analysis. But true to form, they happily ran with it instead.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/protect-election-integrity-censor-anyone-who-daniel-greenfield/

Last week, Google’s YouTube announced that “supporting the integrity” of the election required it to censor anyone alleging that “widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of a historical U.S. Presidential election”.

By historical presidential election, Google meant this one. Democrats are still free to allege that they would have won in 2000 or 2016, if it hadn’t been for the chads or the Russians.

A huge tech monopoly closely tied to the Democrats, which was sued by the Trump administration over its illegal abuses, censoring critics of the Democrat election fraud is protecting and supporting something alright, but that thing is very definitely not integrity.

Election integrity, like fact checking, is one of those curious terms whose meaning was ‘Orwellianized’ in the last decade. Fact checking used to mean media organizations checking their facts before they published a story. Now the media has mostly done away with internal fact checking and uses fact checking to describe its efforts to censor conservative media.

Election integrity traditionally meant verifying the integrity of the process, but is now being used to mean silencing anyone who questions the integrity of the election. In both cases a term that meant protecting the integrity of an internal process has been turned inside out to mean covering up for the corruption of the internal process by censoring its outside critics.

That’s the new integrity.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/is_the_whole_government_in_on_this_fraudulent_election.html

Every once in a while, most of us wind up in situations where we are completely baffled.  It may be a simple situation, such as having looked literally everywhere for our reading glasses, and not having found them.  Did they violate the laws of physics and just vanish?  One knows that that cannot be true, and yet, as the old saying goes, once one has ruled out every logical possibility, only the illogical remains, no matter how unlikely it is.  

Another situation is the one we are in now.  Any informed person, with a modicum of sense, can see that the presidential election results, at best, are not to be trusted and at worst are rampantly fraudulent.  Yet it seems that court after court, and investigative agencies one after the other, are turning a blind eye.  Are they violating the laws of physics?  

It turns out that the reading glasses did not disappear; they were in place, but pushed up, on one’s forehead all along.  There was a logical explanation after all.  

And sadly, it turns out that the courts and government agencies were not turning a blind eye.  They have been, all along, part of the fraud.  No matter how unlikely that seems, it is the only answer remaining.