Wednesday, December 29, 2021

Multipliers and Dividers...


 On December 31, 2021, the CDC will withdraw the use of the PCR test for COVID testing. The CDC finally admitted the test does not differentiate between the flu and COVID virus.

Via the CDC website:
In preparation for this change, CDC recommends clinical laboratories and testing sites that have been using the CDC 2019-nCoV RT-PCR assay select and begin their transition to another FDA-authorized COVID-19 test. CDC encourages laboratories to consider adoption of a multiplexed method that can facilitate detection and differentiation of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses. Such assays can facilitate continued testing for both influenza and SARS-CoV-2 and can save both time and resources as we head into influenza season.

Tuesday, December 28, 2021

The January 6th 'Insurrection' and other Leftist Projections...

...worthy of parody and yet wholly reliant upon the believability of faulty memories.
Now I have to ask myself, did Brett Kavanaugh ever make an unsuccessful pass at Christine Blasey Ford?  Probably.  But was it all part of some diabolical rape fraternity truly indicative of a dangerous and disturbing future "pattern of bahaviour" that rendered him unfit for high office?  Definitely not.

Is the first draft of history the most definitive version?  Not necessarily.  I'm sure it depends upon the emphasis that the teller placed upon the subjective impacts of the events.  The problem appears to enter in its' 'universalization' and attempts to use the events to support a greater, yet unrelated, narrative.


The Japanese Join in Celebrating Africa's Covid Avoidance "Miracle"...

...for it can't be as simple as overcoming TDS...

Thursday, December 16, 2021

Democrats Have a Voter Problem in Maryland?


Salena Zito, "Maryland Voters Send a Warning Shot to Democrats"
The problem for Democrats and Biden is they listen too much to the loudest liberal activist voices in the party and ignore the people who put them in office.


OLDTOWN, Maryland—This ancient colonial town nestled along the north branch of the Potomac River could not be more different from the upscale suburbs of Chevy Chase located much closer to the tidal portion.

While both are in the same state, this town of 86 people is more culturally connected to the people and places in West Virginia and Pennsylvania close to this region than the D.C. suburb located in the center of wealth and power in this country.

Yet they do share one recently developing commonality that has gone under the radar of the national press that tells the story of a state, and by default, a country so disapproving of the president and the Democrats that even the bluest of blue-state voters can’t pretend anymore that things are going well.

With a border Biden has refused to visit, crippling inflation that he initially dismissed as temporary, and a broken supply chain that has affected every segment of our lives and our economy, Biden is widely seen by voters as negligent on all of those issues.

His problems do not end there. Ending the war in Afghanistan, a move that had widespread support, was never supposed to be at the expense of American lives. His management of COVID-19 became political instead of managerial, and how he and the Justice Department have addressed parents’ distress with local school boards has sent chills to suburban parents here and across the county.

And the oddest thing is that this administration and its surrogates think all the public are concerned about is passing a massive social spending bill filled with liberal programs that overreach at every turn.

The message is: Once it becomes law, all will be fine.

A bill so massively outside the norms of a traditional social spending bill is not why people voted for Biden, and anyone who says otherwise is peddling spending pornography. Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) would know that if they took the time to listen.

But they don’t.

As one Democratic strategist told me last week, “If Biden can just get a win and pass this bill, voters will be happy,” completely missing why voters are falling away from Biden.

In October, the Goucher College poll conducted here in Maryland showed that since March, Biden’s job approval went from 62 percent to 53 percent, with only 43 percent of independent voters approving of his performance.

The two Democrats representing the state in the Senate, Senator Chris Van Hollen, who is up for reelection in 2022, and senior Senator Benjamin Cardin, were underwater at 44 percent and 46 percent.

Republican Governor Larry Hogan, conversely, is at a robust 68 percent approval rating, up 6 percentage points since the last poll

Hogan has lived up to his promise to be a good conservative manager and not an ideologue. Whether they are here or Baltimore, Hagerstown, Cumberland or the suburbs of Bethesda and the Chesapeake Bay, his voters have rewarded him for living up to his promise.

He won this very blue state’s support in 2014 under very similar circumstances to what happened in neighboring Virginia in its gubernatorial race, an antidote to a party and a White House bent on plowing ahead with overreaches voters never elected them to do.

Barack and Michelle Obama campaigned here against him that year alongside Hillary Clinton, never fully understanding that they were the reason voters were unhappy.

The polling in blue Maryland showing Biden losing the heart of the bluest of voters, a place where the chance of a Republican winning here for president is less than zero, is not an outlier. It is happening all across the country in both red and blue states.

The problem for Democrats and Biden is they listen too much to the loudest liberal activist voices in the party and ignore the people who put them in office. Yet, oddly, it appears they are operating as though they are one and the same.

Tuesday, December 14, 2021

How Credible Are Your State's Election Results?

See how your state stacks up!

Every citizen’s vote is sacred. The vote is how we guarantee that our government remains of the people, by the people, and for the people. Americans need and deserve elections that they can trust. Legitimate voters should be able to vote in privacy without being harassed, secure in the knowledge that their vote will not be lost, stolen, altered, or negated by a vote cast by an illegitimate voter. Americans need and deserve a transparent system in which fraud can be easily detected and false allegations of fraud can be easily dispelled. Americans need and deserve a system in which it is easy to vote and hard to cheat.

In order to help voters, state legislators, election officials, and all Americans who are interested in ensuring a fair and secure election process, The Heritage Foundation has published this Election Integrity Scorecard, which compares the election laws and regulations of each state and the District of Columbia that affect the security and integrity of the process to the Foundation’s best-practices recommendations.

The map pretty well explains just why Democrats seldom lose power in certain states... 

Friday, December 10, 2021

On Wisconsin!

Wisconsin is a case study in the kind of ho-hum execution of elections that chips away at Americans' confidence in our elections.


After a 10-month review of the 2020 election in the Dairy State, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty has compiled its findings — which set off alarm bells about the state’s massive election integrity shortcomings and reveal weaknesses the swing state must shore up before the next election.

The review, which WILL said it approached “without presumption as to what it would find,” included polling, surveys, an inspection of the law, interviews with elected officials, an analysis of almost 20,000 ballots and 29,000 absentee ballot envelopes, as well as a review of tens of thousands of documents obtained through more than 460 open records requests.

“It’s clear many Republicans, like Democrats before them, are convinced that there was a ‘Big Steal.’ And much of the legacy media is of the view that, since there is little or no evidence that Trump won the election, any effort to look into whether proper procedures were followed is just part of the baseless conspiracy-mongering that pushes ‘the Big Lie,’” WILL attorneys wrote in their review of the study’s findings. “But WILL’s review indicates the truth may lie between these two poles.”

While WILL’s work also showed some state election procedures and outcomes to be above bar — including no significant issues with voting machines and limited instances of ineligible people successfully voting — some findings were troubling. Here are the top takeaways.

1. Unlawful Votes Exceeded Biden’s Margin of Victory

Tens of thousands of Wisconsin votes cast in the 2020 election did not comply with state law, especially regarding ballot drop boxes and “indefinite confinement.”

As a recent audit by the state’s Legislative Audit Bureau showed, absentee ballot dropboxes were used prevalently at the behest of the Wisconsin Elections Commission in violation of state law. These dropboxes were connected to an extra 20,000 votes for now-President Joe Biden, with no noteworthy effect for then-President Donald Trump.

Additionally, more than a quarter of a million Wisconsinites acquired absentee ballots and didn’t have to show voter ID because they claimed to be “indefinitely confined” because of the COVID-19 pandemic. That voting status, however, only applies to people who are confined due to “age, physical illness, or infirmity, or is disabled for an indefinite period,” meaning many of those more than 265,000 voters cast an absentee ballot illegally.

According to WILL, “54,259 ballots were cast by individuals who have never shown a voter ID in any election. 3,718 were cast from addresses that were on the 2019 Mover’s List. 7,747 failed their DMV check when they registered.”

2. Ineligible People Voted

While instances were limited, WILL’s review did reveal a number of times ineligible Wisconsinites voted or tried to vote, including 42 deceased people for whom ballots were cast but were rightly tossed out. WILL found 130 times where voters were flagged by Registration List Alerts as felons but cast a vote anyway, plus 129 times where people voted from a commercial address. All of these addresses were mailing centers or post offices, but it’s illegal in Wisconsin to register to vote with a P.O. box.

3. Voter Rolls Were Not Up to Date

Even though Wisconsin is required by both state and federal law to keep its voter rolls up to date, neither local clerks nor the Wisconsin Elections Commission took the necessary action to clean up incorrect registrations in the 2020 election. This means tens of thousands of active registrations were connected to out-of-date addresses.

More than 23,000 ballots came from voters who didn’t pass a check by the Department of Motor Vehicles, meaning a discrepancy in at least the name, address, or date of birth on file with the government agency. Additionally, more than 31,000 Dairy State voters were in the National Change of Address Database and thousands more were still on the Mover’s List.

4. Local Rules Were Inconsistent or Illegal

As Wisconsin voters have witnessed before, a lack of uniformity in election procedures means disparate treatment for various areas of the state, often manifesting in different treatment for rural red areas versus blue hubs.

This is true for the number of hours residents are able to vote absentee, but it’s especially true with so-called ballot “curing.” Although state law doesn’t allow the practice — whereby election officials, who aren’t authorized to do so, “fix” absentee ballots that have mistakes or are missing information — the Wisconsin Elections Commission gave it the green light. That means some municipalities followed the elections commission guidance and tampered with ballots while others simply followed the law and rejected ballots with errors.

Relatedly, far fewer absentee ballots were rejected in 2020 than in prior years.

“Due to the partisan split in absentee voting, WILL estimates that if absentee ballot rejection rates were similar to the rates in 2016, the final election margin would have narrowed by 6,000 votes — making a very close election even closer,” the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty said.

Additionally, as one law enforcement investigation in Racine County found, the Wisconsin Elections Commission suspended special voting deputies from nursing homes, which are people appointed by municipal clerks or elections boards to conduct absentee voting at care facilities. Instead, the commission instructed nursing home staff to break the law by helping residents to vote, a task nobody is permitted to do except the residents’ families or special voting deputies. Law enforcement found an unusual spike in voting in at least one care facility, so the statewide suspension of the special voting deputies indicates that trend could have been pervasive.

5. ‘Zuckerbucks’ Made a Partisan Difference

WILL’s analysis also turned up the “Zuckerbucks” malfeasance that’s been documented extensively by The Federalist and Mollie Hemingway in her book “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.”

The Center for Technology and Civic Life, a nonprofit bankrolled largely by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, doled out conditional private grants to government election offices disproportionately in Democrat-concentrated areas. As The Federalist has noted, there were strings attached to the grants, and the funds were used for Democrat voter outreach, designing and translating ballots, and staffing ballot harvesting, curing, and counting operations.

“When large numbers of voters question the authenticity of an election,” WILL said, those fears “need to be addressed.”

Read the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty’s recommended election reforms here.


Tuesday, December 7, 2021

Vaccine Promo...