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Meanwhile, Russia remain a growing threat to world order. (See 1a below.)
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Often words are used that do not truly reflect/connote what is actually happening. Progressive is often one of them. (See 2 below.)
And then:
Stacey Abrams’ SISTER is
Judge Presiding Over Campaign Lawsuits
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Election stealing, character assassination is bad enough but debt will ultimately overwhelm us. (See 3 below.)
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Prager regarding resilience. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)The Common Thread in All Those Florida Election Debacles
One thing Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis have going for them -- besides the obvious lead in vote totals so far -- is history. Republican presidential candidates Rutherford B. Hayes and George W. Bush both eventually ended up carrying the state of Florida in 1876 and 2000, two other prolonged elections.
Even before Brenda Snipes ran elections in Broward County, Florida had real issues with counting votes. My book, Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections, opens by asking, “What is it with Florida anyway?”
I never expected to be asking this question after the 2018 midterm elections. The country is also on edge this year over the outcomes of the Arizona Senate race where Democrat Kyrsten Sinema is slightly leading Republican Martha McSally. Also, Democrat Stacey Abrams won’t concede defeat to Republican Brian Kemp in the Georgia governor’s race, even though it appears Kemp is the likely winner. Razor thin elections create the risk that large portions of voters will view the winner as illegitimate.
Still, only Florida will definitely have recounts, in this case affecting two of the most closely-watched statewide races in the country. Perhaps the biggest common thread for 1876, 2000, and 2018 isn’t numbers and geography. Rather, it’s the Democratic party’s determination to hunt for votes after election day to gain power.
Of course, other states have had past voting problems too. But Florida managed to be one of four states contested in the disputed 1876 presidential election -- eventually decided by Congress. It was the only contested state in the 2000 election -- eventually decided by the Supreme Court.
In one respect, the 2018 midterms are more similar to the 1876 centennial crisis of Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden, since multiples states are in question.
Rather than a recount, the 1876 controversy was about who carried the Florida’s four electoral votes. The other contested states in 1876 were South Carolina, which had seven electoral votes; Louisiana, which had eight; and one of Oregon’s three electoral votes was in question.
Today, “voter suppression” is a bumper sticker slogan the DNC rolls out every two years to raise money and oppose voter ID laws. In 1876, just 11 years after the Civil War, the south was in reconstruction. For the newly freed black Americans, voter suppression was a reality. Democrats were also eager to cheat in those days as well. In Florida, Democrats handed out Tilden tickets decorated with Republican symbols to try to deceive freedmen they believed were illiterate.
After the election, the Republican recanvasing boards determined Hayes won the Florida by 922 votes out of 47,000 cast. However, the Democratic officials found enough votes to contend that Tilden had won the state by 94 votes.
A federal electoral commission made up of five senators, five House members, and five Supreme Court justices voted 8-7 along party line that Hayes had won the electoral votes in all four contested states. After much partisan debate and a compromise to preemptively end Reconstruction in the South, a Democratic House and Republican Senate voted to ratify the commission’s determination and make Hayes president.
In another respect, the Florida mess of 2018 more resembles the 2000 presidential showdown between Bush and Democrat Al Gore. It’s a recount where Democrats insisted that new votes could be found in Palm Beach and Broward counties, among other Democratic strongholds in the state, if they looked and counted enough. Palm Beach and Broward are the two key counties today.
Gore reportedly said in the midst of the 2000 recount, “I’m not like George Bush. If he wins or loses, life goes on. I will do anything to win.”
Similar to Gore, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum conceded defeat then unconceded. Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson never conceded, but, almost echoing Gore, Nelson’s campaign attorney Marc Elias said bluntly of the recount push, “We’re doing it to win.”
In 2000, Democratic lawyers targeted overseas absentee ballots from the military, presumed more likely to be Bush voters. Democrats threatened to sue Seminole and Duval counties in Florida, over technicalities, to stop military vote counts.
Gore campaign operative Bob Beckel thought that there was a way to capture the Electoral College without the Florida recount. He said, “I’m trying to kidnap electors. Whatever it takes.” Beckel and the Democrats were researching the backgrounds of Republican electors across the nation in hopes of persuading them to give the Electoral College vote to Gore. However, Beckel insisted this was about lobbying and not blackmail.
These were both PR nightmares for Democrats, which previously had the upper hand in messaging by insisting every vote be counted.
Counting every vote has been a standby line for Democrats for years, but few folks believe it anymore. Most Americans only believe that every eligible and legal vote should count -- not literally every vote. Whether it’s 1876, 2000 or 2018, the Democrats’ goal is to win and gain power. For that, Elias may deserve credit for honesty.
Fred Lucas is the author of Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections and is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal.
1a)Russia prepares to unleash terrifying unstoppable hypersonic super-nuke capable of destroying a city Jasper Hamill
Russia is about to unleash an unstoppable doomsday weapon which can dodge missile defences and cause an explosion big enough to wipe out a city. Next year, a hypersonic ‘glider’ called Avangard will reportedly go into active service with the Red Banner Missile Division, which is based in the south Urals. This terrifying weapon travels at 20 times the speed of sound and can strike a target anywhere on Earth ‘like a meteorite’, according to Vladimir Putin. The Russian President claimed his nation’s new missile is ‘invulnerable to any air or missile defence system’. A view of Russia’s new missile soaring into the air (Picture: Russian Defense Ministry) The weapon will go into active service next year (Photo EPA/ Kremlin) ‘The scheduled period for placing the lead regiment on combat duty is the end of 2019. Initially, the regiment will comprise at least two systems but eventually their number will rise to their organic quantity of six units,’ a Russian defence industry source told TASS. The weapon is capable of carrying a 2 megaton nuclear warhead which is more than 100 times more powerful than the bomb which wiped out Hiroshima. If dropped on London, it would cause a mile-wide fireball and kill vast numbers of people. A computer simulation of a hypersonic nuclear warhead being released from a booster rocket (Photo: EPA/ Kremlin) Avangard is a two-part system involving a large rocket and a gliding vehicle. It works by using the missile to fly the glider high into the atmosphere, where it detaches and travels towards a target on the ground at hypersonic speeds. The craft is capable of changing its direction as it travels and can reach such a high velocity that missile defences have no chance of stopping it. Russia’s famous ‘Satan II’ missile can carry up to 24 Avangards, which means one fully-loaded nuke would have enough firepower to wipe out all the major cities in a country like the UK. Putin unveiled Avangard this year along with various other new weapons including an underwater nuke designed to swamp coastal cities with huge radioactive tsunamis. This doomsday weapon is inspired by the experimental Soviet T-15 nuclear torpedo, which was dreamed up by the nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov but never put into active service. If the T-15 had been built and unleashed it would produce a wave capable of washing a city like London or New York off the map and turn surrounding areas into an irradiated death zone.
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2) Progressive Politics Are Not Really Progressive – American Greatness
Some progressives lamented the apparent defeat of radical progressive African-American candidates such as gubernatorial nominees Stacey Abrams of Georgia and Florida’s Andrew Gillum by blaming allegedly treasonous white women. Apparently white women did not vote sufficiently en bloc in accordance with approved notions of identity politics tribalism.
2) Progressive Politics Are Not Really Progressive – American Greatness
Some progressives lamented the apparent defeat of radical progressive African-American candidates such as gubernatorial nominees Stacey Abrams of Georgia and Florida’s Andrew Gillum by blaming allegedly treasonous white women. Apparently white women did not vote sufficiently en bloc in accordance with approved notions of identity politics tribalism.
According to this progressive orthodoxy, being female, gay, or minority trumps everything else. But, of course, no one believes in such mythical notions of solidarity, least of all progressives themselves.
White women were expected in Michigan, for example, to vote against a sterling African-American senatorial candidate John James, whose résumé was far more impressive than his victorious opponent, incumbent Senator Debbie Stabenow.
There was no such thing as minorities on the collective barricades when it was a matter of defeating California congressional candidate Elizabeth Heng, first-generation child of refugees, Asian, female, former Stanford student body president, and Yale MBA in her singular bid to unseat a seven-term white male Democratic incumbent.
The outraged identity politics industry has entered the realm of insanity when it screams at the “treason” of white women while bragging that 95 percent of black women voted for a white male Robert O’Rourke against Latino Ted Cruz—while deploring that 59 percent of white women who voted against white male O’Rourke.
In fact, progressive advocates sought to ensure that lots of black, Asian, and Latino men and women lost their senate, congressional, and state house races anytime they were pitted against white-male or white-female left-wing opponents, often with far more power, money, and influence at their disposal.
So dispense once and for all with the idea of the universal sisterhood of identity politics. Or at least recalibrate and redefine minority status as being a progressive of any race or gender first, and, only incidentally, female or nonwhite.
Conform or be Cast Out
Ideology, more even than superficial appearance, is what progressives worship. Most, of course, long ago grasped the reality behind the rhetoric, whether by the borking of Clarence Thomas, the demonization of Allen West, or the decades of vitriol directed at Thomas Sowell. But the latest iteration of progressivism, with its monotonous mantra of “white privilege,” might have deluded young naïve hipsters enough into thinking that the party doctrine of nonwhite victims deserving reparatory compensation was actually serious.
In truth, cynical progressives despise minority and female conservatives for their supposed “ingratitude” in not “appreciating” liberal supposed sacrifice “on their behalf” and they surely hate them as supposed apostates far more than they do white male conservatives.
Nor are progressives earnest about the pernicious influence of “dark money,” at least once it dawned on them that today’s Gilded Age riches are no longer the property of conservative capitalists who built empires in construction, manufacturing, farming, mining, or oil.
Multibillion-dollar fortunes are now usually the domain of progressives who were enriched through globalized high tech, international finance, and media. The ensuing rules are that when the Koch Brothers give money, it is “dark,” and when the masters of the universe at Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and the likes of Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffett, George Soros, or Tom Steyer give far more millions to enhance progressive agendas, the cash is as light as can be.
We saw that disconnect unapologetically in 2008 when the progressive reformer and social justice warrior Barack Obama railed about big right-wing cash, while becoming the largest fundraiser on record and in particular the greatest recipient of Wall Street cash in history. Obama set a precedent of being the first presidential candidate to reject federal campaign financing since the law’s inauguration, in order to ignore all the dark-money restrictions on fundraising that go with it.
Simplified, the progressive notion of campaign cash is as follows: big money is always bad when given to candidates on the right; in contrast, such generosity can become also a legitimate means to the noble end of progressive power. And in terms of the donor, liberal giving offers medieval exemption from the usual progressive charges that “You didn’t build that” or “There will be time for them to make profits. Now’s not that time” or “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.” Give a pile of cash to a Robert O’Rourke, Barack Obama, or Elizabeth Warren, and you most certainly did make that money, and it is surely past time to make more, and there is absolutely no point at which you need worry that you made too much.
Appropriation Follies
“Cultural appropriation” is a favorite progressive slur. Translated from its incoherence it means one culture cannot take as its own cultural legacies and protocols from another, especially if in the appropriation it makes greater profits and or gains greater influence from the transaction. So on Halloween, frat boys are not supposed to wear ponchos. Suburban white girls are not supposed to wear dreadlocks. And would-be white boy rappers are not supposed to sing like Snoop Dogg or Kendrick Lamar.
But these “appropriations” are minor fare and campus talking points among adolescents that do not exist in the real world. I just returned from a Central Valley Walmart in rural California. It would be no exaggeration to suggest that a quarter of the almost entirely Latino female shopping crowd either had blond hair or blond-streaked hair, as if they were expropriating my own Scandinavian Viking heritage. Robert O’Rourke appropriates a Latino nickname and with it by implication a false Latino identity—and all for the better, progressives say. A buffoonish Elizabeth Warren called upon DNA tests to prove her less than 1 percent Native American ancestry apparently to show us that she did not culturally appropriate Indian ancestry for careerist purposes.
So cultural appropriation is little more than a one-way neurosis of the upper-middle class and mostly university crowd. It has no relevance in the real world where daily minorities, as they should if they so wish, simply pick and choose which particular European tradition or protocol they wish to absorb or partially borrow or profit from, whether they be Asians mastering the violin or blacks playing King Lear.
Again, incoherence is the key. If Ted Cruz, up for a tough reelection bid in 2018, had decided to go by his authentically given name of Rafael to pick up key Latino voters, progressives would have damned a conservative Latino for appropriating the nomenclature of the Latino community—in a way they would not for his progressive white male opponent who had created a Hispanic identify out of whole cloth. Did Barry Soetoro appropriate an Indonesian/white identity or a native African one when he recalibrated as Barack Obama? Or both? Or neither?
So there is no such thing as the construct of cultural appropriation. People are human. They make the necessary ostentatious cultural choices on the basis of perceived self-interest.
In a racially obsessed culture of 1960, immigrants named Juan instantly became Johnny and spoke unaccented English; a half century later, in an equally racially obsessed culture of 2018, a third-generation, half-Mexican-American John, who cannot speak Spanish, rebrands himself as Juan as he trills his r’s. Many of my best Greek students at CSU Fresno were first-generation Mexican immigrants, some of them in the U.S. illegally, who, along with me, felt free to expropriate Plato and Thucydides as if they were our own.
Power, Not Principles
Finally, progressivism is not particularly courageous as we are led to believe. Speaking truth to power usually translates as stubbornly clinging to conventional norms. What is courageous today is an unapologetic Christian objecting to on-campus abortion advertising—given the vast majority of his peers and superiors will find suitable retribution for him.
In popular culture, progressivism is the now the staid choice, as it is on campus, in the media, and among entertainers. When CNN White House Correspondent Jim Acosta stages his periodic psychodramatic shout-downs of Sarah Huckabee Sanders or Donald Trump, he is no Edward R. Murrow bucking Joe McCarthy, but rather he is one-upping his progressive like-minded journalists, virtue-signaling to his CNN liberal audience, and scoring career chits with his left-wing bosses and employers.
Progressivism in many professions, certainly on campus, in the news, and increasingly in professional sports is what belonging to the Rotary, Elks Club, or Masonic Lodge was in the 1950s, a sort of easy affirmation of normality and acceptability. When a modern dean writes his weekly memo of anguish about perceived bias on campus, it is no more or less a cry of the heart than that of a Little League director in 1960 reminding players to line up and shake hands after the game. Progressivism is now a state establishment religion, which makes the idea that its slavish devotees are martyrs as absurd as it is comical.
A right-wing late-night comedian? A MAGA college humanities dean? An African-American Republican in the Senate? A traditionalist at Facebook? Those are just the sort of nonconformities that run real career risks.
As with any ossified dogma, no one any longer is bothered that formerly four-legged progressives now strut proudly on two legs. The once radical campus idea of unfettered “free speech” became a boring progressive trigger warning and boilerplate “hate speech,” in the manner that segregated dorms are back, along with segregated safe spaces, along with Trotskyizing history, iconoclastic monument destruction, and Orwellian renaming of any building or street that does not endanger careerism and profit-making.
Progressivism has become little more than a monotonous check-off box that provides safe and boring entre for the powers that be from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, from the NFL to Hollywood, from Harvard to the State Department. Expecting such a dogma to be radical, consistent, or coherent is puerile. The progressive war has always been one over power not principles or even consistent politics.
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3) Here’s The Biggest Problem In American Government. No One's Going To Deal With It.
By Ben Shapiro
On Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported on a development students of American governance have known about for years, but politicians have studiously avoided doing anything about: the United States’ debt will cost us more in the near future than our own national defense. Thanks to the weakness of the global economy in the aftermath of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, tremendous appetite for American debt shielded us from the fallout from our $20 trillion debt – but that could soon be ending. When it does, there will be fiscal hell to pay.
Kate Davidson and Daniel Kruger report:
The Congressional Budget Office estimates interest spending will rise to $915 billion by 2028, or 13% of all outlays and 3.1% of gross domestic product. Along that path, the government is expected to pass the following milestones: It will spend more on interest than it spends on Medicaid in 2020; more in 2023 than it spends on national defense; and more in 2025 than it spends on all nondefense discretionary programs combined, from funding for national parks to scientific research, to health care and education, to the court system and infrastructure, according to the CBO.
In the early 1990s, President George H.W. Bush agreed to tax hikes that killed his political career thanks to the burdens of the national debt. President Trump is highly unlikely to do the same – and neither are Congressional Republicans, whose only major legislative achievement is the tax cuts passed last year.
Moreover, Democrats have no interest whatsoever in paying down the national debt. In fact, it’s exactly the kind of lever they’re looking for to raise taxes should they gain office in the near future. Instead of blaming the actual culprit of our national debt – out of control entitlement spending – Democrats have spent the last decade falsely blaming the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and tax cuts. They’re currently proposing an exponential expansion of our spending on entitlements with programs like “Medicare for All” and free college tuition, which won’t be paid for by anything other than a tremendous middle class tax hike. Democrats want Nordic social democracy; they’re going to have to push Nordic tax rates in order to achieve it.
Furthermore, as the Journal reports:
Debt as a share of gross domestic product is projected to climb over the next decade, from 78% at the end of this year—the highest it has been since the end of World War II—to 96.2% in 2028, according to CBO projections.
By way of contrast, Spain, a country with serious fiscal problems, stood at debt-to-GDP of 99.6 percent last year.
Now, some commentators have been sanguine about the possibility of such debt. They say that a little fiscal handiwork will do the trick – simply cut the budget a little, revert to strong economic growth, and the rest will be fine. But that’s ignoring the structural problem of our debt, which is far more ruinous than it was in 1991. We can only stave off serious restructuring for so long.
But there’s no political benefit to staving off the debt for either side. Republicans lose ground when they talk about restructuring entitlements; Democrats want to expand entitlements. The American public is simply unready to talk about doing what we must in order to ensure America’s continued economic growth and strength, particularly at a time when our population is rapidly aging. That’s why Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) will leave Congress with his chief political ambition, entitlement reform, unfulfilled.
What will the consequences be? The continued Europeanization of American politics, as taxes and spending inevitably rise in tandem. The only difference between the parties will be Republican calls for austerity measures at the margins, and Democratic calls for massively higher taxes and higher spending.
We’ve been playing a pyramid game. In the next decade, that pyramid is going to cave in on us.
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4) Building Resilience: 5 Ways to a Better Life
In case you hadn’t noticed, life is difficult and unpredictable. So, how do you move forward in such a complex and confusing world? UCLA Medical School psychiatrist Dr. Stephen Marmer offers 5 tips for coping with life’s unwelcome surprises.
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