Posts from — November 2018

I’m not about to question the authority of Trump and Rick Scott when it comes to fraud. I’ve never paid $25 million to settle a law suit like Trump University, and no one has topped the fine Rick Scott’s company paid for Medicare fraud – $1.7 BILLION. Those two people know a lot about committing fraud, but don’t seem to be able to define it when it comes to elections.

For those who don’t know, there are Republican and Democratic workers at every polling place in Florida. The Florida Secretary of State [appointed by the governor] has monitors in every county to observe the counting of ballots. There have been no official complaints from anybody in a position to observe misconduct.

The Florida law was and is self-contradictory when it comes to deadlines. Supervisors of Elections in the counties have to wait 10 days after the election for ballots mailed on or before the date of the election from an overseas location, but the state has required counting be finished last Saturday. That is for an ‘unofficial’ vote. Now the state has called for a machine recount because three races have differences of less than 0.5%. These deadlines are arbitrary. Scott wants counting stopped because the counties trying to finish are heavily Democratic and his lead is disappearing.

The ballot this year has a dozen ballot measures and a bunch of judges up for confirmation. My ballot was printed on both sides. I voted early and used the sample ballot to make my decision so when I got to the polling station all I had to do was transfer my choices to the official ballot.

It should surprise no one that Palm Beach and Broward counties take a long time to count ballots – they have a lot of voters.

A century ago at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918 the guns fell silent. The Great War, The War to End All Wars, was over…for a couple of decades.

The red poppies of Flanders fields became a symbol of that war and the veterans that returned from it. Known as Remembrance Day in much of the world, the poppies will be in evidence. Remembrance Day observances have more in common with the American Memorial Day as a day to honor those who have died in war.

First called Armistice Day in the United States, the name was changed to Veterans Day, and its purpose changed to honoring those who are serving, or have served in the military. The change was made to avoid a conflict with the existing Memorial Day observance that goes back to the Civil War era.

A heart felt salute to everyone who managed to survive basic training. We can hope that sooner, rather than later, there will be no need for another generation to put on uniforms.

There will be automatic machine recounts of all of the ballots in the races for governor, Senator, and agriculture commissioner as the difference in all three races is below the 0.5% threshold. The recounts were announced by the Florida Secretary of State, who also said that monitors from his office saw no problems the conduct of the election in any of the state’s counties.

We are going to have automatic recounts in both the race for governor and for Senator in Florida. Mail-in ballots from foreign countries are accepted until the 16th at least. With over 8 million ballots cast the opponents are separated by around 20,000 votes in each race. People need to chill out and wait.

It’s the same for the governor’s race in Georgia and the Senate race in Nevada. Relax, this is not microwave popcorn, there is plenty of time.

Trump had his chief of staff, John Kelly, fire Jefferson Beauregard Sessions by publicizing an undated “resignation letter” that Trump asked for at some point in the past. Trump didn’t want to talk about getting his butt kicked in the mid-terms so he starts creating “crises”.

Trump selected Sessions’s chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker to be acting Attorney General, but as Fox legal analyst, Judge Andrew Napolitano and Kellyanne Conway’s husband point out, Whitaker has never been confirmed by the Senate and isn’t eligible to be the acting Attorney General.

Another crisis Trump created involved CNN’s Senior White House correspondent, Jim Acosta. His White House press credentials were suspended after a heated exchange with Trump. Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed it was because Acosta ‘man-handled’ a White House intern. People soon noticed that the video she claimed showed what Acosta did was doctored by Infowars. Even Fox’s media reporter, Howard Kurtz criticized ‘Baghdad Bobbi’ for her incompetent effort.

Vote.org can tell you the status of your registration and where your polling place is located. If you run into problems call the Election Protection Hotline at 1-866-687-8683.

There are a lot of people who don’t want you to vote if you are not a well-to-do white male Protestant. It has taken almost two hundred years to force them back into their caves for the most part, but they come shuffling out every so often to annoy people and we have to remind they aren’t in charge any more.

Remember, remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder, treason
Should ever be forgot.

The British are celebrating the anniversary of the thwarting of the Gunpowder Plot.

A group of English Catholic conspirators including an explosives expert, Guy Fawkes, stashed 36 barrels of gunpowder in the basement of the Parliament building with the intent of blowing up the members of Parliament and King James I during the official opening of Parliament on November 5^th, 1605.

Bonfire Night is celebrated with bonfires and fireworks. Effigies of Guy Fawkes, and occasionally the Pope, are traditionally thrown on the fires. Effigies of modern politicians have made their appearances at the celebration.

As Robert Cecil was involved, I doubt anyone will ever know the truth about the plot.

There are a dozen constitutional amendments on the ballot in Tuesday’s election, numbered 1-7, 9-13. Amendment 8 was removed by the Florida Supreme Court. You can read them in your sample ballot or at Ballotpedia. If you search for Florida amendments 2018 you can get the opinion of your local fish wrapper.

I voted for #3 [Voter Control of Gambling], #4 [Voting Restoration], #9 [Prohibits Offshore Drilling], and #13 [Ends Dog Racing]. The rest are a mixed bag about which I have no strong feelings. In general if it wasn’t clear what the impact would be, I voted no. The only reason for obfuscation is fool people as to your purpose.

The SOP [standard operating procedure] for the military when given a new task is to make a threat assessment. Command wants to know what are the threats that troops will have to deal with to accomplish their mission. For the mission at the border, based on the experience during earlier National Guard deployments, the biggest threat is theft of military equipment by unregulated militias who go to the border in response to caravans.

The military is planning to have troops in place until December 15, but it is unlikely that any significant numbers of asylum seekers will reach the border before January. That makes it even more obvious that this is all about the midterm elections, not national security.

Daylight Savings Time will end in the US tomorrow morning, November 4^th at 2AM. It will become 1AM and you get an extra hour of sleep, unless you work the “graveyard shift” or forget.

Most new devices make the change automatically, although many, like my old clock radio, change under the old system and have to be ignored for a couple of weeks.

“Fall back – Spring ahead”

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” A chant from childhood that wasn’t really true then and is even less true in the era of Trump.

Echidne provides a synopsis of the death and destruction last week caused in part by resurrection of many buried facets of the American psyche by the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

It started before last week with a man citing the ‘Trump Defense’ after being accused of groping a woman on a flight. It continues with Nigeria’s army citing Trump to justify shooting Shia protesters.

Donald Trump’s words can get people killed…

Trump is using another ‘caravan’ moving north as a scare tactic for the election. Part of his plan involves sending the military to the border. He thinks that sending troops to the border will somehow convince people that a few thousand people from Central America going to the US border to seek asylum is an existential threat.

What he has done is take members of the military away from their families for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, and stick them in tent cities. Those tents could be used for the 11,000 personnel displaced at Tyndall AFB by Hurricane Michael, but the “Commander-in-Chief” would rather use them for political theater. This involves thousands of voting age and eligible people having their service abused. It is the sort of disrespect that people don’t forget.