RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/obama_campaigns_for_mcauliffe_in_virginia_making_an_ass_of_himself.html

Terry McAuliffe, memorably characterized as “the unkillable cockroach of the Democratic Party” by PJMedia’s Stephen Kruiser, is not faring well in the polls in his campaign for governor of Virginia. Apparently, neither is New Jersey’s Democrat Gov. Phil Murphy, who’s also running for a second term as governor and who at last count had just a six-point lead, plus a toxic endorsement from The Nation, which declared him “the most progressive governor in America.”  That won’t go over well in Jersey City or Weehawken.

Democrats think these elections are important to their wretched 2022 prospects in Congress and have whipped out their big guns — not flailing Joe Biden, of course — but Barack Obama. New Jersey’s a blue state that’s been the hardest hit by Democrat COVID policies, including the seeding of nursing homes with COVID patients, a man-caused disaster that killed off thousands of elderly people. It’s also been subject to tax hikes. Virginia’s a purple state and Obama’s the man who expanded Washington’s bureaucracies and handed its bureaucrats gargantuan salaries; creating Virginia’s Washington suburbs and turning the historically red state blue. Obama is there to remind such voters of all those good times.

He’s back, and spewing his banal platitudes as well as Trump hate, in the perfect picture of leftist establishment hypocrisy.

Start with the first forked-tongue idiocy, from Fox News:

Former President Barack Obama traveled to New Jersey on Saturday to campaign for Gov. Phil Murphy and claimed that he understands why Americans are questioning when COVID-19 mandates will end.

“The science says it’s the right thing to do,” Obama said in reference to COVID-19 mask and vaccine requirements to a crowd of Murphy supporters in Newark. “You do it because you’re not just protecting yourself, but people you love, people who are vulnerable. But, you know, I don’t know how folks just decide everything’s got to suddenly be political.”

“But I understand why people want to know when this is all going to end,” Obama added

It’s as if 2020 never happened. His argument, like a lot of them coming from him, is old and hackneyed. It’s what officials were saying back in March 2020 when the pandemic began. The nursing home seedings were just beginning and the bodies were being rolled out, but according to Obama, anything that comes out of the mouth of an incompetent, power-hungry bureaucrat with a one-size-fits-all mentality is ‘science.’

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/577995-six-big-off-year-elections-you

A pitched battle between former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) and businessman Glenn Youngkin (R) promises to steal the headlines in November’s off-year elections, while a less competitive race between New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) and former Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli (R) is also drawing attention.

But around the country, voters head to the polls to pick winners in other critical contests, races that will highlight the divides between liberals and conservatives and, in some cases, mainstream Democrats and far more progressive candidates.

Here are the six other contests to watch in November:

Virginia’s House of Delegates

Whether McAuliffe or Youngkin takes the governorship next year, the winner’s ability to pursue his agenda will be determined in large part by the majority in the House of Delegates.

Democrats hold a 55-45 majority in the House right now, meaning Republicans need to pick up six seats to win back control. Some of the contests have attracted millions in spending, an unprecedented amount for what are ordinarily inexpensive contests.

Nearly two dozen seats fall in the battleground category of races that were decided by 10 points or fewer two years ago. Democrats hold 16 of those seats, and Republicans only six. Only five seats — four held by Republicans, one by Democrats — voted for the other party’s presidential contender last year.

The closest-fought districts are clustered in three broad chunks: One in the Northern Virginia exurbs, south and east of Arlington and Alexandria; one south of Richmond, stretching to the North Carolina border; and one around the Tidewater and Virginia Beach.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/23/manhattans-d-a-race-points-to-the-lefts-overstep/

Early voting starts today for the November 2 New York City municipal elections.

The most important race in this election cycle is the Manhattan District Attorney’s race, because the winner in this most important of all our nation’s D.A. offices will determine, in the enormous coming travails, whether this once-great city will survive or perish.

One might think that the mayor’s office would be the key to Gotham’s survival, but I would argue that since the Manhattan District Attorney (not the mayor) is the chief law enforcement officer, then the crises we’ll likely face in the near future will be either exacerbated or ameliorated by policies the District Attorney imposes.

The Democratic ticket for mayor and Manhattan D.A. is fronted by Eric Adams and Alvin Bragg, respectively. Both men represent themselves as moderates so as not to alarm the already rattled voters, but both are effectively Marxist radicals. Adams has gotten a pass on his self misrepresentation by the corrupt media that has been all too eager to help him cover his tracks. 

Adams’ history as a former police officer allows him to claim an ability to repair the disastrous criminal justice policies of the outgoing de Blasio Administration, but an examination of his actual record shows that as a founding member of “100 Black Men In Law Enforcement” his career was dedicated to criticizing the N.Y.P.D. for racism. After leaving the police force, he became a full-time politician and rose to Brooklyn borough president by adopting and promoting the entire litany of delusional leftist causes. His mayoralty would be a continuation of the insane de Blasio policies that most New Yorkers are sick and tired of enduring.

Bragg is another radical passing as a moderate with the protective cover of a sympathetic media. As an Assistant New York State Attorney General he’s proud of his quixotic waste of taxpayer dollars as one of the legion of legal bureaucrats fruitlessly investigating the imagined crimes of Donald Trump. More importantly, he is one of the many villains who defended last summer’s violent riots, murder, rape, looting, and arson.

Bragg is a “no bail” advocate (which means turning violent recidivist predators loose immediately after arresting them) and espouses the kind of “prison reform” that set over 70,000 hardened criminals free from this city’s jails last year to prey upon the hapless citizenry.

Most elections in a democratic republic are designed to install public servants who address the concerns of the legitimate voters. To the degree that we have free and fair elections, this year the voters’ prime demand would be public safety (and when I write “safety,” I don’t mean safety from the “unvaccinated”). 

The Left’s increasing extremism across the board has led to such public dissatisfaction that Democrats actually might not win (assuming the aforementioned “free and fair elections”). My informed sources, including cognoscenti in both parties, point to a wealth of anecdotal evidence of voter discontent. Furthermore, in every mayoral election here in living memory, various big media outlets (both print and broadcast) have commissioned and released polling results, at least for the mayoral race. This year there’s been nothing of the sort. Savvy analysts have concluded that the polls look so bad for the Democratic slate that they have been quietly suppressed.

When we examine the D.A.’s race in this light, the Republican candidate, Thomas Kenniff, may not look like such a long shot after all.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/20/leftist-shadow-governments-control-a-lot-more-than-our-elections/ 

This kind of tax-exempt political interference is now standard practice for the world’s far-left ultra-rich, and it’s affecting a whole lot more than elections.

Many Americans are awakening to the fact that we seem to have no local control of a lot of local things: public schools, our terms of employment, local governments, local elections. That last one popped again recently with the release of my colleague Mollie Hemingway’s deeply reported 2020 election investigation book, “Rigged.”

That book, and some great corroborating independent reporting, show that 2020 election chaos was part of an effective and well-funded plan to help Democrats win by rigging the playing field. One key strategy deployed to that end has become default on the left yet still often goes unremarked and unchallenged. It’s called “advocacy philanthropy.”

In the 2020 election, Facebook zillionaire Mark Zuckerberg used this strategy to deploy nearly half a billion dollars to help Democrat activists infiltrate local government election apparatuses, literally paying for election equipment and the salaries of partisans who counted ballots. This kind of tax-exempt political interference is now standard practice for the world’s far-left ultra-rich, and it’s affecting a whole lot more than elections. It’s constructed essentially a shadow government that pits elected officials against their voters on behalf of moneyed interests.

How the Rich Influence Politics With ‘Philanthropy’

In the past two decades, large foundations have begun to “engage more directly with the political process by supporting advocacy organizations, investing in the implementation of major policy reforms, and ensuring that their research investments are targeted to advance specifc policy priorities,” document politics professors Sarah Reckhow and Megan Tompkins‐Stange in a 2018 paper. These large foundations are predominantly run by leftists, including Bill and Melinda Gates, Zuckerberg, and George Soros.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/14/zuckerbucks-101-how-a-media-mogul-took-over-the-2020-election-and-why-gop-leaders-must-never-let-it-happen-again/

The last election was unacceptable. And before the next one, more Republican leaders must wake up to the mess that was created in 2020 and refuse to accept another sloppy round.

MADISON, Wis. — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis reaffirmed his state’s commitment to election integrity on Tuesday, especially keeping tech giants and their partisan CEOs from corrupting local elections. Given what we know now about how Mark Zuckerberg and other left-wing actors commandeered election operations in blue hubs of swing states in 2020, other states would do well to follow DeSantis’s lead — and Wisconsin is a good case study in why.

No conversation about 2020 election integrity — or about the integrity of future elections, for that matter — is complete without understanding the full picture of how Facebook CEO Zuckerberg strategically bankrolled and staffed local government election offices, which are in charge of voter registration, voting, and vote counting. He did this through two primary front groups, a process Federalist Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway painstakingly outlines in her new book out this week, “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.”

The Zuckerberg Infiltration

Here’s how it worked. Zuckerberg gifted nearly half a billion dollars to two left-wing groups that then gave the money to government election offices. One of these two groups was the Center for Technology and Civic Life. By the September before the election, Zuckerberg and his wife had given it $350 million, meaning the small organization’s prior revenues of $1.8 million exploded by roughly 20,000 percent.

The cash, or “Zuckerbucks,” wasn’t an unconditional donation, however. There were strings attached, which amounted to Democrat get-out-the-vote efforts, mass mail-in voting, and ballot “curing,” whereby election workers “fix” mail-in ballot problems after the ballot has been submitted.

These dollars also didn’t flow indiscriminately to needy areas of the country but largely to government election offices in the biggest cities of swing states, where the majority of Democrat voters are concentrated. Those funds were used for Democrat voter outreach, designing and translating ballots, and staffing ballot harvesting, curing, and counting operations.

Make no mistake, CTCL is no apolitical actor. All three of its founders previously worked for the New Organizing Institute, a now-defunct organization that was run by ex-Obama staffer Ethan Roeder and funded heavily by left-wing behemoths such as George Soros to train leftist activists in digital campaign strategy and with war games for election success.

The Washington Post championed the New Organizing Institute as “the left’s think tank for campaign know-how” and “the Democratic Party’s Hogwarts for digital wizardry.” These descriptors aren’t surprising given that its board was also composed of leftist leaders.