Art by artists I love and own
Boys will be boys
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Today our grandson, Henry, arrives with his girlfriend. No memos or a while.
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Saving lives is his profession for which he was placed on leave.Kentucky Cop Placed On Leave For Praying In Front Of Abortion Clinic Will Return To Work
A Kentucky police officer will return to work after he was placed on administrative leave for four months over a morning he spent praying outside a Louisville abortion clinic in February.
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I am dumb enough to believe it:
The Case For A Longer-Term Oil And Gas Bull Market
After a long bear market, the energy sector has low capex and is likely setting up for a longer-term bull market, not just a transitory blip. An analysis of every major energy/power source, including ...
And:
I am also dumb enough to believe when someone is chosen/honored to represent our nation and turn their back on it their passport should be taken away because they have, by their perfidious action, denied their own citizenship.
We need to reintroduce the concept of consequences for actions and hold people accountable. That may be a novel idea to some but I grew up being held to that standard.
Today's generation simply tattoos their bodies with meaningless crap.
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I got an e mail from Allen West telling me the Texas tide is turning and they are getting more Reps in Congress. I responded and said in Ga. when the tide turns we find some RINO simply wet his pants.
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New York blows it:
https://nypost.com/2021/06/29/eric-adams-narrowly-edges-garcia-in-preliminary-ranked-choice-results-boe/
NYC mayoral primary race thrown into chaos as BOE botches vote count
By Nolan Hicks, Julia Marsh, Carl Campanile and Bruce Golding
The Democratic primary race for mayor was thrown into chaos Tuesday as the city Board of Elections appeared to have botched the count amid the city’s first ranked-choice election — adding 135,000 pre-election “test” ballots that hadn’t been cleared from a computer.
According to a BOE statement Tuesday night, “it has determined that ballot images used for testing were not cleared from the Election Management System . . .
“The Board apologizes for the error and has taken immediate measures to ensure the most accurate up to date results are reported.”
Preliminary results released earlier in the day showed a total of 941,832 ballots cast for mayor, an increase of more than 140,000 from the 799,827 that were counted on June 22, the day of the primary.
The glaring discrepancy at first went unnoticed until it was flagged by front-runner Eric Adams.
“The vote total just released by the Board of Elections is 100,000-plus more than the total announced on election night, raising serious questions,” an Adams spokesman said.
“We have asked the Board of Elections to explain such a massive increase and other irregularities before we comment on the ranked-choice voting projection.”
In response, the embattled agency scrubbed all the results from its Web site, replacing them with a message saying, “Unofficial Rank Choice Results Starting on June 30.”
Some questioned why the agency even released preliminary results.
Veteran political consultant Sid Davidoff, a former aide to the late Mayor John Lindsay, said: “It’s unclear why the Board of Elections put out these preliminary results today as they are relatively meaningless when you have 120,000 absentee ballots still outstanding.
“It would have been more beneficial for them to wait until they had a complete picture rather than further muddy the waters in an already confusing issue,” he added.
The disarray marked the latest in a long line of screw-ups by the BOE, which admitted violating election laws by purging 200,000 voters from its rolls before the 2016 presidential primary.
During the November 2018 midterm elections, some voters were forced to wait hours to cast their ballots because high humidity jammed new scanners that cost a total of $56 million.
And during the 2020 presidential primaries, the board disqualified 80,000 ballots because officials weren’t prepared to handle the deluge of mail-in votes cast amid the coronavirus pandemic.
State Board of Elections Co-chairman Doug Kellner called the situation “very disappointing” and faulted the BOE’s “lack of transparency with respect to the counting of the ranked-choice-cast voting records.”
“Because they haven’t released them, it’s very difficult to find the source of any error,” said Kellner, a Democrat. “It’s possible that they were missing reports from the original number on election night. Another possibility is that they uploaded the same numbers twice.”
Veteran election lawyer Jerry Goldfeder, who doesn’t represent any candidate, said, “It’s not clear if they’re computer glitches or human error.”“It’s just hard to know what’s going to happen.” he said.
Goldfeder said a manual recount of every ballot cast was “possible, if the vote totals are close.”
Kathryn Garcia swings through the Union Square Green Market earlier in June.Kathryn Garcia has moved into second place with 48.9 percent of the votes.Matthew McDermott
The unofficial results from the first round of voting last week put Adams ahead of Maya Wiley, a former counsel to outgoing Mayor de Blasio, by 253,234 (31.66 percent) 177,722 (22.22 percent).
But Tuesday’s unofficial results, after a total of 11 rounds of ranked-choice counting, had Adams narrowly leading former city Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia by 368,898 (51.1 percent) to 352,990 or 51.1 (48.9 percent), with Wiley and 10 other candidates eliminated.
A total of 219,944 ballots “with no choices left” were listed as “inactive.” But the city still has yet to count more than 124,000 absentee ballots sent by mail.
Garcia told The Post she was “watching diligently” as the BOE tried to sort out the mess.
Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams narrowly edged former Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia to hang onto first place in the Democratic primary under the preliminary results from the Big Apple's new instant runoff system. The BOE eventually took down the tally.
“We knew we were going to have to be patient regardless, but patience will make it so we end up getting every vote counted and I’m committed to that,” she said.
Meanwhile, Wiley adviser Patrick Gaspard unloaded on the BOE, tweeting, “Someone please tell the NYC Board of Elections that the 1900’s just called and would like to get their manual tally sheets back.”
City Councilman Ben Kallos (D-Manhattan) said, “Now is as good a time as any to blow up the Board of Elections, get rid of the patronage and start over.”
Mayoral candidate Eric Adams after casting his vote in the mayoral primary election at PS 81.Mayoral candidate Eric Adams after casting his vote in the mayoral primary election at PS 81.James Keivom
Fordham political science professor Christina Greer lamented the potential damage to what she called “an incredibly important institution.”
“Confidence is at an all-time low and I’m not sure I want to ask how much lower it can go,” she said.
“We’re going to have another election in November and then important primaries in 2022.”
Before the controversy erupted, Garcia celebrated the dramatic shift in her fortunes, saying “we look forward to the final results.
“Once all the votes are counted, I know everyone will support the Democratic nominee and that’s exactly what I intend to do,” she said in a statement. “Democracy is worth waiting for.”
https://nypost.com/2021/06/29/new-yorks-board-of-elections-is-a-travesty/
New York’s Board of Elections is a travesty
By Post Editorial Board
New York’s Board of Elections keeps finding new definitions of the word “fail.”
The group that bought voting machines that didn’t work when it was too humid, that couldn’t keep track of its own technology, that disqualified more than 80,000 mail-in ballots in the 2020 primaries, admitted Tuesday that — surprise — it messed up the first calculation of ranked-choice voting.
The BOE released results that showed Eric Adams with a roughly 15,000-vote lead over Kathryn Garcia. But hold on: The total number of in-person votes was 140,000 more than on Primary Day.
Incredibly, it turns out, those were mostly test ballots that were not cleared from the system before the real vote.
“We are aware there is a discrepancy in the unofficial RCV round by round elimination report,” the BOE said, hours after it had already released the figures.
The official results of the mayoral primaries aren’t expected until July 12, after all absentee ballots are tallied, so there’s plenty of time to count and double-count and triple-count. But it won’t change the fact that the BOE is an embarrassment. It’s a group that has resisted reform and change even as our elected officials sanctimoniously lecture other states about voting rights.
“We ask the public, elected officials and candidates to have patience,” the BOE wrote Tuesday evening.
Sorry, we’re fresh out of it.
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Biden zigs and zags and fades into the dusk of illogic:
https://www.nysun.com/foreign/bidens-own-logic-for-an-iran-deal-is-unraveling/91556/
Biden’s Own Logic for an Iran Deal Is Unraveling Fast
By BENNY AVNI, Special to the Sun
“Iran will never get a nuclear weapon on my watch.” Thus spake President Biden, with the outgoing president of Israel, Reuven Rivlin, by his side at the White House.
Let’s see. If Mr. Biden runs for, and wins reelection (two big ifs), he would be out of office by January 2029. According to the 2015 Iran deal that his negotiators are eager to revive, Iran will be free to legally possess as many nukes as it wants by early. 2031.
Iran, then, is set to become the world’s most menacing nuclear-armed country in a decade (and a de facto nuclear power much earlier.) So obtaining a nuclear weapon would, were the ayatollahs to abide by the articles of appeasement, happen after Mr. Biden, on some other president’s watch.
Vow kept, but danger remains intact.
The once-stated American goal — return to the original 2015 deal and later negotiate a “wider and longer” sequel — has almost completely disappeared from the administration's talking points. Those later negotiations would have extended or removed the JCPOA sunset clauses, limited missile development, and curbed regional aggression.
No dice, says the incoming Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, who makes clear Tehran would reject anything beyond a complete return to the appeasement pact. And no, he adds, he’d meet no official of America, the Big Satan.
For the Islamic Republic, a return to the deal means nothing beyond removal of sanctions and a stream of millions in new cash to replenish its dwindling coffers. Washington insists the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action would slow Iran, including by rigorous UN inspections.
Yet the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, warns that a “linear return” to the 2015 deal wouldn’t suffice to monitor the nuclear program. Even so Tehran is yet to commit to full resumption of an expired deal to allow rigorous IAEA inspections.
Meanwhile advanced centrifuges, once temporarily banned by the JCPOA, are spinning unabated as 60% enrichment gets Iran ever closer to weapons grade enrichment. There’ll be no scaling back until the mullahs say so. Tehran feels it’s in the driver’s seat. So why compromise?
To feign a dynamic change, Mr. Biden over the weekend ordered an air attack on Iranian-backed militias stationed at the Iraqi-Syrian border. It inflicted unknown damage on desert camps and killed a few operatives.
The American attack was immediately answered by the Kataeb Sayyid al Shuadaa militia, which launched rockets on an American-controlled oil field near Deir A Zour, Syria. There were no American casualties.
Washington’s military response to endless Iranian-inspired attacks on American and allied targets in Syria, Iraq, and at sea is quite sporadic. Apart from this weekend, the last air raid happened five months ago.
An anemic show of force is unlikely to impress the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, which is tasked with exporting the Islamic Revolution to the Mideast and beyond. Worse, these attacks are conducted while American negotiators in Vienna eagerly beg Tehran for a deal.
JCPOA supporters in Washington and Europe now argue that Mr. Raisi could do the kind of maneuver that Richard Nixon did in respect of his long-time nemesis Communist China. Only such a “hardliner,” they say, could ink a deal with the Americans that “moderate” predecessors were unable to.
In reality, Mr. Raisi, handpicked by Ali Khamenei to become president and succeed him as Supreme Leader, doesn’t call the shots. Not yet. The 81-year old Mr. Khamenei will continue to call the shots on national security issues until he dies. At that point, Mr. Raisi, his successor and protege, is unlikely to change course.
The State Department ignored Mr. Raisi’s rejectionist stance. Despite fast-expiring provisions of the nuclear deal, Mr. Biden urges its renewal. But weren’t we promised that from now on America would put human rights at the center of our foreign policies?
Mr. Raisi, a former judicial bigwig, is responsible for thousands of mass executions in 1988 and numerous atrocities since. Even so, Washington is more eager to negotiate than highlight the regime’s show of horrors.
On Monday President Rivlin said that on some issues (such as the Iran deal) America and Israel will “agree to disagree.” As the White House plans a meeting soon between Mr. Biden and Prime Minister Bennett, it will be up to Israel to deliver, via its covert methods, the setbacks to the Iranian nuclear program.
Sure, Tehran’s allies in Moscow and Beijing are likely to frown, and the Europeans will quietly seethe, fearing harm to the JCPOA and the prospects for the removal of sanctions, which they so eagerly crave.
To counter that, America’s best course isn’t ineffectual attacks on dusty camps in Syria and Iraq. It is to fully back Israel’s clandestine fight against a nuclear Iran, and point at Mr. Raisi, the killer of thousands of Iranians, a more pronounced hater of the West and Jews than all his recent predecessors. What would be the point of rewarding him for soon-to-expire empty promises on nukes?
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