RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/fire-brenda-snipes-florida-broward-county-election-supervisor/

Brenda Snipes, the supervisor of elections in Florida’s Broward County, does not deserve to be within a thousand miles of any election office anywhere in these United States. She should be fired at the earliest possible opportunity.

Snipes has held her position since 2003, in which year her predecessor, Miriam Oliphant, was suspended for “grave neglect, mismanagement and incompetence” and, quite literally, marched out of her office. Alas, Snipes has proven no better at fulfilling her duties than was Oliphant. On Friday, a court in Broward County found that Snipes was guilty of violating both Florida’s public-records laws and the state’s constitution by failing to provide mandatory updates to the public, and it ordered the immediate release of the missing information. As that ruling was coming down, Snipes’s office was laying out more lawsuit bait. According to the Miami Herald, an election worker found bags of “uncounted early ballots” in the Broward County office — ballots whose provenance could not be established. Snipes, meanwhile, was busy mixing together rejected provisional ballots and accepted provisional ballots, processing them all together. She justified her decision to add these provisional ballots to the official tally on the grounds that it would be better to include some illegal votes than to nix the legal ones with which, by her own incompetence, they had been blended.

Such behavior is by no means out of character. This year alone, Snipes has been reprimanded by the courts twice: once, in May, for illegally destroying ballots during the 2016 Democratic primary, in violation of both state and federal law; and again, in August, for illegally opening mail-in ballots in secret. How long, we wonder, does it take to establish a pattern?

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/report-broward-elections-supervisor-mixed-good-and-bad-provisional-ballots/

Broward County elections supervisor Brenda Snipes contaminated some 200 valid provisional ballots by combining them with more than a dozen rejected ballots, the Miami Herald reported late Friday.

The Broward canvassing board discovered the mistake when Snipes conceded to Republican attorneys’ demand that she present the board with 205 provisional ballots for inspection Friday evening.

The 205 contaminated provisional ballots were filled out by voters whose information did not appear in the databases at their respective polling stations, but whose registrations were confirmed when election workers called the Broward elections headquarters. As a result of the discrepancy, the ballots were not added to the final count and were submitted separately Friday evening at the request of attorneys representing governor Rick Scott, the Republican senate candidate.

Broward election officials have not explained how the rejected ballots were first introduced to the pool of valid ballots.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/11/10/forget_the_sweet_talk_–_both_parties_will_go_to_the_mat_138614.html

“We have two years to show we can make things work,” Republican Mike Braun told Indiana voters in his Senate victory speech. He is wildly optimistic. Both parties are already on war footing, and, barring divine intervention, they will remain that way until 2020.

Their only bipartisanship is a shared commitment to push hard positions favored by their activist bases and enraged donors. President Trump’s unprecedented fight with the legacy media deepens the division. He attacks with ferocity; they take the bait, fill the airwaves with unremitting criticism, and crush underfoot the wall between hard-news reporting and opinion.

Calls for compromise ring hollow from the politicians who make them. In the same speech, they often issue a call-to-arms, as Nancy Pelosi did in claiming victory. The House’s minority leader, who is expected to take the speaker’s gavel in January, spoke softly and urged bipartisan legislation — but quickly added that she and fellow Democrats would stand their ground on all major issues. Trump did the same, even as he spoke about possible deals on taxes, infrastructure and immigration. If he seriously pursues those deals, he risks alienating the very voters who carried him to victory.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-broward-county-senate-steal-1541809807

Democrats have a hard time accepting electoral defeat. They’ve spent two years claiming with little evidence that Vladimir Putin elected Donald Trump. And now comes a vote-counting debacle in southern Florida that is at best gross incompetence, though don’t rule out an attempt to steal GOP wins for Senate and Governor.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott is about 15,000 votes ahead of Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson for a seat in the Senate. That puts the race in range of an automatic recount under state law. But at 11:30 p.m. on election night, Mr. Scott led by 57,000 votes. The same trend is happening in the gubernatorial race that went for Republican Ron DeSantis over progressive Andrew Gillum, though neither race appeared to be heading for a recount on election night.

The spread has narrowed in the past couple days by what can only be described as a suspect process in notorious Broward County. Three days after Election Day the county wasn’t finished reporting results from early voting, which ended on Sunday.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio was among the first to note the irregularities. Broward won’t disclose how many ballots are left, and “isn’t reporting hourly or regularly, but rather releasing thousands of additional votes, often in the overnight hours, that are chipping away at GOP leads,” as Senator Rubio put it.

On Thursday a teacher in Broward found a container labeled “Provisional Ballot Box” in a storage area of an elementary school that had been a polling station. The Sun-Sentinel reported Friday that a Broward County election official said there were no ballots in the box, which would be more reassuring if country officials were more transparent.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/271901/worst-person-charge-broward-countys-count-daniel-greenfield

It’s stunning that we’re monitoring the elections of some states because of events that happened generations ago. Meanwhile Broward County is allowed to pull shenanigans like these.

Time after time.

The election supervisor in Florida’s second-most populous county broke the law by destroying ballots cast in last year’s congressional primary involving Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, according to election-law experts across the political spectrum. The congresswoman’s opponent has sued to get access to the ballots.

The case — one of three ongoing independent lawsuits plaguing Broward County Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes’ troubled office — stems from a June lawsuit filed in circuit court by Democrat Tim Canova. He had wanted to inspect the optical-scan ballots cast in his Aug. 30 primary race against Wasserman Schultz because he had concerns about the integrity of the elections office.

Under longstanding federal law, ballots cast in a congressional race aren’t supposed to be destroyed until 22 months after the election. And under state law, a public record sought in a court case is not supposed to be destroyed without a judge’s order.

Snipes’ office, however, destroyed the paper ballots in question in September — in the middle of Canova’s lawsuit — but says it’s lawful because the office made high-quality electronic copies. Canova’s legal team found out after the fact last month.

Here’s how things work in Snipes world.

Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes is a prime example of double dipping in the public trough.

Snipes is earning $4,336 monthly in state pension benefits from her time in the Broward school system. She also gets over $12,000-a-month from her job as supervisor, according to state records.

That’s roughly $200,000 annually…increasing every year.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/democrats-if-we-lost-the-voters-must-be-racist/

Storyline A: “We didn’t lose!” Storyline B: “If we did lose, it’s because you’re a racist!”

The Democratic party’s transformation into an undergraduate intersectionality seminar at Oberlin is proceeding at a remarkable pace. The party’s current strategy is to scream “Racist!” at people voting for Mia Love and Tim Scott while insisting that Jared Kushner’s father-in-law and Benjamin Netanyahu’s best political friend is a scheming anti-Semite.

At issue is the defeat of Andrew Gillum in the Florida governor’s race and of Stacey Abrams in the Georgia governor’s race. Democrats are busily trying to undo those defeats as of this writing (Florida Democrats have a real knack for suddenly discovering caches of ballots from sympathetic voters at the opportune moment) while simultaneously arguing that the reason these two candidates failed is that they are black, and that Donald Trump’s America is just one tweet away from repealing the 13th Amendment.

Senator Bernie Sanders — who abandoned his native Brooklyn for Vermont, the whitest state in the union — insists that white voters are “uncomfortable” voting for a black candidate. Maybe some are. But Barack Obama won more than 100 more electoral votes running against Mitt Romney than Hillary Clinton won running against a man who’d never run for office before. The signals are at least mixed.

There may be a less nefarious explanation: Florida hasn’t elected a Democratic governor since 1994. Alex Sink, the state’s chief financial officer, is at the moment the only Democrat to have been elected to a statewide office in Florida in this century. Georgia hasn’t elected a Democrat as its governor in this century, either. (Georgia went the entire 20th century without electing a Republican governor, and Georgia’s Democratic governors haven’t exactly been covered in glory: The state could have done without the services of Lester Maddox.) Democrats of all hues have had a hard time of it in those states in recent years, for good reason — the policies they support would be catastrophic for Georgia and Florida, two of the most prosperous states in the country. Florida is booming, and Georgia has been named the best state in the nation for doing business for five years in a row. Floridians and Georgians have good reason to be broadly happy with the direction of their governments.

And what were the Democrats offering?

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/09/democrats-will

In a column published the day after the election, former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell warned his fellow Democrats to proceed cautiously after winning the House of Representatives. “Our most fervent supporters hope that we will use our newly found control to investigate almost everything that the Trump administration has done,” he wrote. “Though I understand what has fed this emotion, that would be a grievous mistake if investigations were all we did and we made no attempt to meet the challenges facing everyday Americans.”

But that advice likely will be ignored by a party that has no more use for relatively moderate, older, white men like Rendell. Despite election season slogans about protecting health care and migrant children, Democrats really only care about one thing: Retribution for Trump winning the White House.

Their base wants it, too. Exit polls showed a plurality of voters used their ballot to protest President Trump; two-thirds of voters who supported a Democratic House candidate said they want Congress to begin impeachment proceedings and remove Trump from office, an idea supported by key Democratic lawmakers poised to take over powerful committees. Revenge-seeking henchmen in the 116th Congress will be more interested in serving subpoenas than safeguarding pre-existing conditions. (The joke’s on you, my fellow suburban moms who voted for Democrats because you think they really care about your family’s health care coverage. LOL.)

It will be all investigations, all the time—a two-year grudge match between Congress and the Trump Administration. The games already have begun.

Subpoenas As Far As the Eye Can See
From subpoenaing Trump’s tax returns to probing former and current cabinet officials, Democrats and the media are salivating over all the damaging headlines they think they can generate just as the 2020 presidential race gets underway. The House Oversight Committee alone has at least 60 subpoenas ready to go when Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) takes over.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/11/linda_sanchez_withdraws_bid_to_become_chair_of_house_democratic_caucus_after_husband_indicted_on_theft_of_public_funds.html

Scandal has struck the leadership of the House Democrats as they prepare to take over that body. Representative Linda Sanchez, just re-elected to her ninth term in Congress representing a heavily Hispanic district in Orange County, California, was hoping to become the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House. But those plans have crashed and burned as her husband has been indicted for stealing public funds. Mike Lillis of The Hill reports:

The U.S. attorney’s office in Connecticut announced that a grand jury returned two indictments against five people for misusing taxpayer funds in connection with the Connecticut Municipal Electric Energy Corporation (CMEEC), an electric utilities co-op. One of those charged is James Sullivan, Sanchez’s husband.

Hours earlier, Sanchez, the vice chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, had withdrawn her bid to replace outgoing Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.) as chairman of the caucus next year. She cited “an unexpected family matter.

Later in the day she issued a clarifying statement.

”Earlier today I learned that my husband is facing charges in Connecticut,” she said. “After careful consideration of the time and energy being in leadership demands, I have decided that my focus now needs to be on my son, my family, and my constituents in California.”

The House Democrats are left with two other candidates for the chairmanship, both of them African-Americans: Rep. Barbara Lee of Berkeley and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, of Brooklyn and Queens. Lee inherited her seat in Congress from Rep. “Red Ron” Dellums, perhaps the farthest left member of Congress ever, for whom she worked as an aide for many years. Hakeem, formerly a corporate lawyer, won his seat representing Bedford-Stuyvesant and other heavily minority areas, after the retirement of veteran congressman Edolphus Towns. Hakeem raised large amounts of money from Wall Street and out-of-state donors, and beat out a rival who was regarded as anti-Semitic by much of the New York Democrat establishment.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/11/07/democrat-rashida-tlaib-dances-with-palestinian-flag-at-victory-party/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+breitbart+%28Breitbart+News%29
Video of Democrat Rashida Tlaib dancing wearing the Palestinian flag at a victory party emerged Tuesday evening, after she won a largely uncontested race for the open seat in Michigan’s heavily Democratic 13th congressional district.

Tlaib is one of two Muslim women elected to Congress on Tuesday, along with Ilhan Omar, who replaced outgoing Rep. Keith Ellison in Minnesota’s 5th congressional district. Ellison was the first Muslim elected to Congress. Both Tlaib and Omar have extreme anti-Israel views. Tlaib is the first Palestinian-American elected to Congress.In the video, Tlaib delivered a victory speech in which she acknowledged her family watching from abroad in the Palestinian Authority-administered West Bank. She dedicated her victory, in part, to the Palestinian cause: “A lot of my strength comes from being Palestinian,” she said.

After Tlaib won her primary race in August, she published several anti-Israel tweets, and re-tweeted a fan who declared that Tlaib’s “first fight was for Palestine, always Palestine.”

Tlaib explicitly supports the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel and its replacement of a unitary Palestinian state. That position caused her to lose the endorsement of the far-left group J Street — which, while often adopting anti-Israel positions, nominally supports a two-state solution.

One other Palestinian-American was on the ballot on Tuesday: Ammar Campa-Najjar, the grandson of a Palestinian terrorist who was Yasser Arafat’s deputy and was involved in the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Germany, lost in California’s 50th congressional district.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.