The head of Iran’s nuclear program is assassinated

The New Neo Posted on by

Today we have the news that Israel’s Mossad has assassinated the head of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. Reports are that his vehicle was “stopped by explosives” and then he was shot. I would like to know further details – such as who these agents were and how they discovered exactly where Fakhrizadeh would be – but I very much doubt we’ll ever learn.

Israel isn’t messing around. With the Trump-negotiated Abraham Accords giving Israel a bit of breathing room for the moment, and yet with the Iran-loving Biden poised to take charge, Israel doesn’t want to leave Iran in a good position to take advantage of a Biden presidency.

One of the many many many things I have dreaded when contemplating the possibility of a Biden win is its effects on the Middle East. The nightmare of the Obama years come back, only with less charisma and even less competence.

You know you’ve been ingesting too much politics when you have dreams like this

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve immersed myself in reading, thinking, and writing about politics for a long time now; close to two decades for the reading and thinking part and close to seventeen years for the writing. Sometimes it feels as though I’m merely chronicling a decline, but it remains compelling to me. The last few months have been especially stressful, for obvious reasons.

But I don’t usually dream about politics, at least not that I remember. Last night, though, I had a very vivid dream that went like this:

I’m reading a blog (already, that’s a crazy thing to dream about, isn’t it?). I read a post that says that some state legislature run by Republicans (I can’t see which state it is for some reason) is taking a voice vote to say that the election in that state was completely above board, no problem, despite the fact that there have been hundreds of allegations of fraud and a lot of suspicious behavior. The post I’m reading in the dream points out that a voice vote is the refuge of cowards.

I go to another blog and then another, to see if they can corroborate the story. It’s hard to find any more about it, and I begin to wonder whether it’s true or not. Then I wake up, and it takes me a minute or two to realize it was only a dream.

I need to get out more.

The day of the leftovers

The New Neo Posted on by

Since there have been fewer large get-togethers for Thanksgiving this year, I assume people have fewer leftovers because they haven’t cooked huge turkeys. Then again, there are probably more people who do have leftovers, because more people have done their own cooking in their own homes.

Which means that it’s turkey soup day at my place. A modest amount compared to many turkey soups of yesteryear, but nevertheless it will get made. There will also be a little turkey salad for a sandwich or two.

But I say a resounding “No!” to turkey tetrazzini. I know that some people love it and consider it obligatory post-Thanksgiving fare. But it’s a food I first encountered in the dorm dining hall and came to dread. I don’t tend to like creamy foods – except for ice cream, of course – and all the turkey tetrazzini that ever crossed my path has been creamy. Your mileage – and poundage – may differ.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The New Neo Posted on by

This year has been rough in many ways, and the future is uncertain. But there are still many things for us all to be thankful for despite all that. I wish you a wonderful Thanksgiving Day and feast – large or small – filled with friends and/or family of your choice.

Trump pardons Flynn

The New Neo Posted on by

There was absolutely no reason for Trump to wait around any longer and submit Flynn to any more legal torment, and so Flynn has been pardoned.

I’m glad. I would have been even more glad if Judge Sullivan had done right by Flynn and dismissed the charges against him, and if Trump was set on the path to his second term and therefore didn’t need to do this. Unfortunately, though, this needed to be done because a Biden administration was almost certainly going to continue the unjust persecution of Flynn. That’s what Sullivan’s stalling was all about, and the en banc U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit allowed him do it, which is a disgrace.

Here’s the story:

Just moments ago, President Trump announced that he’d granted a full pardon to retired General Michael Flynn…

This puts a final end to a four-year persecution of a man who has devoted his life to the service of his nation and whose innovations in the use of intelligence operational planning saved untold U.S. lives in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

Here’s Trump’s tweet:

I am being completely serious when I add that I think Trump might do well to consider giving Flynn’s son a blanket prospective pardon, too, even though he’s not been indicted or tried for anything. I would not put it past the Democrats to go after his son as was originally threatened, now that Flynn himself is out of their reach.

[NOTE: I expect the Democrats to try to indict Trump for something, but it will probably be at the state level in NY, and he can only issue pardons for federal offenses.]

Postal ballots in Georgia: PO boxes, Republican ballots gone astray, and signature matching

The New Neo Posted on by

Georgia is ground zero right now, not only because of the election fraud investigations being done and cases that are being filed, but because of the two runoffs scheduled for January. They could determine the entire future of the nation, and that’s not hyperbole at all. If the Senate goes, all bets are off – although all bets might be off even if the GOP wins one or both of those seats. We are on perilous ground for the foreseeable future. But without those Georgia seats, it’s very bleak.

And you can bet that any sort of fraud that isn’t prohibited and effectively prevented before then will be attempted in January. The stakes are that high, and the money is flowing to the Democrats.

Here are two articles on what is alleged to have gone down in the November 3rd election. The first involves post office boxes, among other things:

[About a thousand] people registered and voted in Georgia using addresses of postal facilities or businesses, while making it look like they were residential addresses, according to a former Trump campaign official whose team analyzed the states’ voter data.

The addresses listed on the voter rolls included information that didn’t make sense for the actual locations, but on paper made the addresses look like residential ones, according to information published by Matt Braynard, former data and strategy director for President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign.

“Georgia: We have identified over a thousand early/abs votes cast by individuals whose registered addresses are in fact at post offices, UPS, and FedEx locations, wilfully disguising the box numbers as ‘Apt,’ ‘Unit,’ etc.,” he said in a Nov. 22 tweet…

Braynard previously reported that large percentages of registered Republicans in several battleground states said they returned their absentee ballots, even though the states’ data indicated they hadn’t.

Of the 1,137 Pennsylvania GOP voters reached by telephone who did request a ballot, nearly 42 percent said they mailed the ballots back, although state data shows the ballots weren’t received or counted, he said…

In Arizona, 50 percent of Republican voters reached over the phone had the same story, as well as 44 percent in Georgia, nearly 33 percent in Michigan, and 20 percent in Wisconsin.

What happened to these ballots? That’s a huge percentage in many states. And even if those voters subsequently voted in person, it seems to me that the “missing” ballots could have been used by other people (or “people”) to vote for Biden.

And then there’s signature matching, something mentioned in this post of mine from earlier today:

Trump and his campaign have repeatedly complained that the risk-limiting audit was meaningless without an examination of the signatures on the ballot envelopes.

“President Trump and his campaign continue to insist on an honest recount in Georgia, which has to include signature-matching and other vital safeguards,” Trump’s legal team said in a statement Saturday. “Without signature-matching, this recount would be a sham and again allow for illegal votes to be counted.”

“If there is no signature-matching, this would be as phony as the initial vote count and recount. Let’s stop giving the people false results. There must be a time when we stop counting illegal ballots. Hopefully it’s coming soon,” the statement continued…

Sterling said however that an audit to check the signature matching of local officials wouldn’t be easy but could be feasible if there is evidence it’s needed. Signatures on envelopes could be checked by auditors against signatures on voters’ registrations.

It will be unconscionable if signature matching isn’t done. But even if it is done, and many envelopes and/or applications have the wrong signatures, there is no way to match those with the ballots that went with them because we don’t use identifying numbers or codes or anything of the sort. So we have the problem of figuring out what the remedy would be if the number of invalid ballots is found to be significant. I don’t think any court would be ordering a new presidential election in the state – even though in Georgia, an election is going to be happening in early January for those Senate seats. The whole thing is maddening, and it’s the reason I’ve said that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

What can be done about January? Already it is said that there has been a record number of absentee ballot requests for the runoffs in Georgia: 788 thousand. How many are valid? How many are to PO boxes? Will signature matching be available if there’s a challenge?

Is anyone working in this now to ensure election integrity?

And every Republican legislature in the country must focus on tightening election laws for the next cycle, or all is lost. Democratic legislatures will be working to make the loose laws more permanent and even loosen them further, of that you can almost certainly be sure.

Barnes on the law and the election fraud cases

The New Neo Posted on by

This video is long. But Barnes knows a lot about election law, which is more than I can say for most people – and that includes me. I have no idea whether he’s correct with his evaluations of Powell and Giuliani et al, the cases, and the future for Trump. But he’s always interesting and if you’ve got the time and inclination I suggest you watch at least some of this video:

Barnes says that challenges to signature matching for the mailed ballots will be key, because the rejection rates in the big cities were suspiciously low. I’m not sure exactly how signature matching is done. I assume that signature matching procedures and rules are different in the different states, but right now the lawyers are concentrating on Georgia. Usually there’s a typical rate of rejection of mailed-in ballots, and if a district has a much much lower rate it becomes likely that a lot of ballots there were accepted that should have been invalidated. In the case of Georgia, for example, Barnes says the low number of rejections in certain districts was probably enough to swing the election without any other type of fraud having to be alleged.

NY 22, we’ve got a problem

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not just NY 22 that has a problem, of course. This election made that crystal clear. But NY 22 has a particularly acute form of the problem:

In a tight race with candidates separated by about 100 votes, election officials marked counted contested ballots with Post-It Notes, which then fell off leaving courtroom mayhem…

The problem going on with New York’s 22nd Congressional District is something out of a movie. Oswego County Supreme Court Justice Scott DelConte uttered something no one wants to hear:

“We have a serious problem on our hands.”

I’m not kidding. It involves sticky notes on absentee ballots in Oneida County:

“The concern is over absentee ballots in Oneida County, where the board of elections commissioners testified they cannot establish if some absentee ballots that were marked were included in the original count…

“12 News Senior Reporter Josh Rosenblatt reported, “when asked how the court should determine if these ballots were previously included in the counting if they don’t have a sticky, the commissioner responded, ‘you can’t’.”

Got that? They marked them with Post-Its that later fell off.

We’re dealing with great minds here.

Happy two-days-before-Thanksgiving!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a slightly-edited reprint of a previous post.]

For me this year, Thanksgiving is going to feature a small gathering. Very small – two people. And so there won’t be a stuffed turkey, there will be turkey parts (all dark meat, which is what I prefer) and a modest amount of stuffing cooked outside the turkey. And it won’t feature this particular stuffing, which is something my family used to make quite a bit.

But I’m putting up the recipe anyway, in case you’re having a regular turkey and want something quite different. It’s sweet; I think it was originally for duck or goose. But it’s very yummy. I don’t have an actual recipe with amounts or anything like that, because it varies according to your needs and your tastes, but here it is: a large quantity of cut-up Granny Smith or any variety of tasty apples, cooked in a large pan in a fair amount of sherry as well as a ton of butter till a bit soft; and then mixed with prunes, almonds, and Sara Lee pound cake reduced to small pieces by crushing with the hands. That’s it.

I happen to like Thanksgiving. Always have. And although we’re wrestling with some very somber and sobering things this year, all of us probably still have a lot of things for which to be thankful. It’s a holiday for anyone and everyone in this country – except, of course, people who hate turkey. There are quite a few of those curmudgeonly folks, but I’m happy to report I’m not one of them.

Since I like to eat, I am drawn to the fact that Thanksgiving is a food-oriented holiday with a basic obligatory theme (turkey plus seasonal autumnal food) and almost infinite variations on that theme. Sweet potatoes? Absolutely—but oh, the myriad ways to make them, some revolting, some sublime. Pie? Of course, but what kind? And what to put on it, ice cream, whipped cream, or both?

For me, ordinarily (although not this year) there is one traditional requirement—besides the turkey, of course. There has to be at least one pecan pie, although eating it in all its sickening sweetness can put an already-sated person right over the top. And the cranberry sauce has to be made from fresh cranberries (it’s easy: cranberries, water, and sugar to taste, simmered on top of the stove till mushy and a bright deep red), and lots of it (it’s good on turkey sandwiches the next day, too).

Thanksgiving is one of the few holidays that has a theme that is vaguely religious—giving thanks—but has no specific religious affiliation. It’s one of the least commercial holidays as well, because it involves no presents. It’s a home-based holiday, which is good, too, especially this year.

I wish you all a wonderful Thanksgiving Day, with friends and/or family of your choice, and just the right amount of leftovers!

Joe’s best friend was – and is – the MSM. But it’s not America’s.

The New Neo Posted on by

The media has treated Joe Biden in a manner so gentle that it far eclipses even the fawning obeisance they paid to Barack Obama. And although the MSM may have low ratings and Americans may not trust the press, at least half of them are highly highly influenced by it – something I’ve observed time and again in my friends and family, who regularly don’t even know of certain news stories and/or events I might bring up.

If the MSM hasn’t covered them, they don’t exist. And of course the media’s slant on the stories they do deign to cover tends to affect people more than most people realize, too.

So the infuriating findings of this study should come as no surprise:

According to an explosive new study the Media Research Center (MRC) released on Tuesday, the legacy media’s suppression of eight key election-related news stories effectively handed the presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden. According to a poll conducted by The Polling Company on behalf of MRC, a whopping 17 percent of Americans who voted for Joe Biden would not have done so had they been aware of just one of these stories…

The Polling Company surveyed 1,750 Biden voters in seven swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Six of these states (all except North Carolina) have been called for Biden. The poll found that a whopping 82 percent of Biden voters were unaware of at least one of the news stories, while only five percent said they did not know about all eight…

The poll raised these eight news stories: Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegations against Joe Biden; Joe Biden’s involvement in the Hunter Biden corruption scandal; Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) getting rated the most leftist senator; 33 percent GDP growth in the third quarter of 2020; 11.1 million jobs created from June 5 to October 2; the Middle East peace deals with Israel that led to three Nobel Peace Prize nominations for Trump; U.S. energy independence; and Trump’s successes with Operation Warp Speed in fighting the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.

These were not obscure stories, either. They were big. And I wonder how much the respondents read of any news, actually. Perhaps a lot of people simply are generally uninformed. After all, they may be busy living their lives.

Note, however, that only 17% would have changed their minds had they known of these things. My own experience with talking to friends is that literally nothing would have changed their minds this year. Trump was evil and had to be gotten rid of, and replacing him with anyone would have been just fine. So Joe Biden would do, and it didn’t really seem to matter much who Joe was and what he stood for, as long as he was a Democrat.

And no, my friends are not stupid, certainly not in the conventional sense. Nor are they evil. Their worldview is mostly shaped by the MSM and by their friends and family who believe the same things they do. I’m a weird outlier, and although most of them tolerate me and even think I’m intelligent, I believe they think I’ve been taken over by something strange and inexplicable, even though many have heard my explanations.

I truly feel that the MSM is responsible for a great deal of what has happened to America, and that they have a lot to answer for. Not that they’ll ever be tasked with answering it, any more than Joe Biden will be subject to their grilling.

Another infuriating story of Pennsylvania voting fraud

The New Neo Posted on by

Not that we need another one of these tales. But this makes one particular method of accomplishing fraud clear. It also makes it clear that the liberal PA Supreme Court seems demented. But a demented decision in the cause of furthering the election of Joe Biden is no vice, right?

You be the judge (would that you were). Here’s more on the PA court decision I’m referring to:

The Trump campaign argued that observers were stationed too far away to actually see the process of counting votes, and a lower court initially agreed with them, ordering that they be allowed closer to the process. The state Supreme Court, which had previously rejected other Republican arguments, vacated that lower court order on Tuesday.

“We conclude the Board did not act contrary to law in fashioning its regulations governing the positioning of candidate representatives during the precanvassing and canvassing process, as the Election Code does not specify minimum distance parameters for the location of such representatives,” the court wrote in its majority order. “Critically, we find the Board’s regulations as applied herein were reasonable in that they allowed candidate representatives to observe the Board conducting its activities as prescribed under the Election Code.”

The Trump campaign called the ruling “inexplicable” and signaled the legal battle wasn’t over.

“This ruling is contrary to the clear purpose of the law,” Jenna Ellis, a campaign senior legal adviser, said in a statement. “The lower court rightly recognized that the intent and purpose of the Pennsylvania law is to allow election watchers from both parties to actually see the ballots close enough to inspect them, and thus prevent partisan ballot counting in secret.“

“It’s inexplicable that five justices on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court would conclude that watchers observing from distances up to 100 feet away is reasonable,” Ellis added. “We are keeping all legal options open to fight for election integrity and the rule of law.”

I wouldn’t call it “inexplicable.” There’s an explanation: they’re Democrats. And the law, as Mr. Bumble said, can be “a ass – a idiot.” It’s certainly an ass when partisans and sophistry rule.