Grandpa Knew Best
Article by Clarice Feldman in The American Thinker
Grandpa Knew Best
My grandpa once told me, ”All my grandchildren were born smart. The longer they go to school, the dumber they get.” I thought he was teasing, but now that I’m his age, I see his point: You have to have spent a lot of time in school to be as dumb as the experts on everything including economics, energy policy, and even vote fraud. (and I’m not even getting into academia’s participation in gender bending, history revisionism, pronoun parsing like “birthing parent” instead of “mother.”)
Economics
Ask a first grader if he’d do his household chores if he got the same amount of money or even more from just sitting home and playing video games and you’d get the right answer: No. This is something that escapes the brain trust running this administration. It also escapes the ninnies who write for corporate media. The Jobs Report that came out this week was terrible, making widespread expectations by experts and the media the subject of well-deserved ridicule.
A disappointing 266,000 jobs were added in April, well below the 800,000 to 1 million per month needed to dramatically reduce the pandemic's payroll-employment losses. Indeed, 8.2 million people are still jobless since February 2020 -- the outset of the pandemic. Also, a little used, but important, measure of labor market health, the employment-to-population ratio, stands at 57.9% presently -- a near 40-year low -- compared to 61.1% pre-pandemic, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). This means that millions of workers are sitting idle or are completely disengaged from the labor market.
Did this surprise you? It shouldn’t but it seems to have been unexpected by all these media outlets.
– Axios (5/3/21): “A Jobs report for the ages”
– Reuters (today, before the report was released): “U.S. economy likely created nearly a million jobs in April”
– CNBC (4/29/21): “April jobs expected to top 1 million as consumers boost the economy”
– MarketWatch (5/6/21): “A million new jobs? That’s how many Wall Street thinks the U.S. created in April”
– Barron’s (5/6/21): “Get Ready for a Blockbuster Jobs Report of 1 Million or More”
– New York Times (5/7/21): “Jobs Report Is Expected to Show a Big Gain: Live Updates”
Bonus prediction:
– NYT columnist Paul Krugman (5/6/21): “All indications are that we’re headed for the fastest year of growth since the ‘Morning in America’ boom of 1983-1984. What’s not to like?”
And though not related to the jobs report, this CNN “analysis” piece went live just a couple of hours before the jobs report was released. Not the best timing on this pro-Biden puff piece:
(CNN) As the Republican Party finds new ways to pay homage to Donald Trump and attack democracy, Joe Biden is pushing ahead with the grunt work of building a substantive presidency that could change the shape of America.
With this news, you’d think an administration that wanted to see people getting jobs would rethink its plan of throwing away money to disincentivize work, fuel inflation, and bring back Carter-style stagflation. You’d be wrong. Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for more spending. President Biden said, “I want to put today’s jobs report in perspective.” He claimed this is another step showing “progress” since he took office and proves why we need to print more money and inject it into the economy. The job losses are mainly in the 10 states with Democratic governors who have to hope their constituents are dumb enough to miss the relationship between their policies and their lack of economic gains.
Not completely unrelated to unrestrained money printing and paying people not to work is the rapidly rising cost of energy due to the administration’s war on “fossil fuels.” Biden has set a draconian pledge to cut carbon "pollution" 50-52% compared with 2005 levels. Even if you believe (as I do not) that anthropogenic caused global warming is substantial and deleterious, the goal is senseless. China is not going to cut back on its use of fossil fuels and its carbon pollution surpasses all the developed countries combined. To carry out this pledge, the U.S. would wreck its economy and the hardest hit, as usual, will be the poorest of us unable to afford more costly housing, food, and transportation.
Vote Fraud: This Election Was Brought to you by the Letter Z
If you asked any sentient person what would happen if you gave millions of dollars to counties run by Democrats in battleground states in exchange for turning over to your left-wing designees the right to control election procedures and counting of ballots (in contravention of the constitutions of the affected states and the U.S. Constitution, which places the responsibility for setting election rules with state legislatures), they’d agree that the likelihood that the process would be corrupted was great. And as evidence slowly surfaces of the consequences of the Zuckerberg Foundation’s selective grants and the conditions of those grants, it seems undeniable that there was massive corruption. The Election Wizard made a startling claim this week. In preparing the U.S. Census, the government collects data on citizens who self-report having voted in presidential elections. The latest census report reveals a starling anomaly: Four million fewer people reported having voted in the 2020 presidential election than the official tally shows. Pollster Richard Baris says the Census figures on voting are usually “spot on” and when they missed (by not a great deal) it was on over recorded, not under recorded, that is, they recorded more who voted than actually did.
This anomaly seems not so anomalous as more information is known about voting in Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada.
Wisconsin
Several outfits in Wisconsin have been doing fine investigative reporting on how the election procedures were corrupted. Based on an open records request, 1130 WISN reported that the City of Milwaukee “turned over the administration [of the election] to liberal-leaning groups” one of which was provided with “daily absentee vote data.”
The MacIver Institute reports that an outsider, Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein of the National Vote at Home Institute, edited the Milwaukee absentee voting instructions, a flow chart for vote-by-mail processing, and was handed “exclusive access to the data base in daily reports.”
Under Wisconsin law, “each municipal clerk has charge and supervision of elections and registration in the municipality.” This is unambiguous. It is unequivocal. Yet in five of Wisconsin’s largest cities, it didn’t happen.
In May, Racine Mayor Cory Mason -- a hyper-partisan Democrat -- emailed the mayors of Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay and Kenosha to hold a virtual meeting in which “the Elections Administration Planning Grant will be discussed.” That grant, from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) would ostensibly be used to cover the increased costs of running a presidential election during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The mayors met virtually at least four times from May to August to discuss their joint bid for CTCL grant money, but Mason took the lead and even, according to an email from City of Racine attorney Vicky Selkowe, sought to “develop a robust plan for election administration for all five of our communities.”
This would, of course, run afoul of state law, as only the municipal clerks or election boards in the other four communities have the authority to plan for and administer elections, but it was clear that these five cities did not have much regard for state law. According to emails, the Racine Common Council approved the first phase of grant money acceptance on behalf of all five communities, which became known as the Wisconsin Five. All five eventually received CTCL grant money, with Milwaukee getting more than $2.1 million.
It quickly became clear that this money came with strings attached.
According to the agreement the City of Milwaukee signed with CTCL, CTCL set the ground rules for how every penny of the money was to be spent, and Milwaukee was not allowed to “reduce or otherwise modify planned municipal spending on 2020 elections.” In addition, the city was not permitted to “use any part of [the] grant to give a grant to another organization unless CTCL agrees to the specific sub-recipient in advance, in writing.”
CTCL obviously had its own partner groups in mind and didn’t want interference with its vision for how the election would be run.
This is a major legal and constitutional issue, as Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 (which is known as the Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution) holds that “the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.”
In sum:
By accepting CTCL’s conditions for running the election, the City of Milwaukee -- and the other four communities that accepted CTCL money -- violated state law. Nothing in the law allows for this sort of thing, yet it quickly became clear that CTCL, not Milwaukee, was effectively running Milwaukee’s election.
It goes without saying that Spitzer-Rubenstein, who was neither Milwaukee’s clerk nor a member of city government, was not authorized by the Wisconsin Legislature to do any of this.
Here’s what Wisconsin Spotlight’s investigation found:
- A former Democratic operative, Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein, served as a de facto elections administrator and had access to Green Bay’s absentee ballots days before the election
- Spitzer-Rubenstein asked Green Bay’s clerk if he and his team members could help correct or “cure” absentee ballots like they did in Milwaukee.
- Green Bay’s clerk grew increasingly frustrated with the takeover of her department by the Democrat mayor’s staff and outside groups.
- Brown County Clerk Sandy Juno said the contract stipulated that Spitzer-Rubenstein would have four of the five keys to the KI Center ballroom where ballots were stored and counted.
- Brown County’s clerk said the city of Green Bay “went rogue.”
- Election law experts said the city illegally gave left-leaning groups authority over the election.
In Green Bay, Spitzer-Rubentein also was given boxes of blank ballots before the election.
Arizona (Maricopa County)
Maricopa County’s election board, under subpoena to turn over its election equipment and records, claimed this week it did not have “administrative access” to its voting machines. They claimed they had ceded it to their external vendor. That means, if the defense is accurate, outsiders had the ability to perform all the changes and functions in the system -- even the ability to completely control the system logs by deleting or altering them. They’ve also refused to turn over the routers for the computers, something that could result in contempt action by the court. The consistent and increasing efforts by Maricopa County election officials, Democratic Party and now the administration’s DoJ to end the Maricopa audit ordered by the state legislature seems to me a tell that it was every bit as corrupted as the challenges suggest it was.
Nevada
In December, Jesse Binnall testified before the Homeland security and Governmental Affairs Committee on the irregularities in the presidential election there. Among his claims: the rushed mail by ballot (without voter authentication) resulted in 42,000 people having voted twice; 1500 dead people were recorded as voting, more than 19,000 people voted who did not live in the state (figure does not include students or military), 8,000 people voted from nonexistent addresses; over 15,000 votes were cast from commercial or vacant addresses. In sum, he claimed over 130,000 “unique instances of voter fraud in Nevada” and he argued that the figure was “almost certainly higher.” He also cited the testimony of technical employees who said, “the number of votes recoded by voting machines were stored on USB drives and would change between the time the polls were closed" -- that “votes were literally appearing and disappearing in the dead of night.’ efforts to conduct a full inspection of the voting machines was denied.
The Nevada Supreme Court refused to upset the election upon Binnell’s claims. I can't find out whether Vote From Home or any other Zuckerberg-funded outfit was working in Nevada, but Binnall’s claims of people accessing the voting machinery and the great number of seemingly irregular votes sound familiar.
This week allies of Donald Trump announced the creation of the Election Integrity Alliance to combat election fraud and to provide resources “to state legislators and the public on challenges to free and fair elections.” Some states have already tightened up requirements for mail in balloting and authentication (voter ID) and have even made illegal the receipt of outside funding to local election officials.
It’s a start.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/grandpa_knew_best.html
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