Category Archives: Commentary

Commentary

How much of an advantage will Hillary Clinton get from voter fraud in 2016?

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Hillary will get a boost in the election from dead people voting
Hillary will get a boost in the election from dead people voting

Rachel Alexander writes about it at The Stream.

Voter fraud:

Dead voters may account for a large amount of voter fraud. In September, for example, a Young Democrat in Virginia attempted to register 19 dead people to vote through the organization HarrisonburgVotes. He was only caught when a clerk recognized the name of a deceased World War II veteran he had submitted. The group, which is headed by the chairman of the congressional district’s Democratic Committee, has fired the young man and taken down its website and social media accounts. “This is proof that voter fraud not only exists but is ongoing and is a threat to the integrity of our elections,” said William J. Howell (R-Stafford), speaker of the state’s House of Delegates.

Last month, three dead voters were found on the newly registered or re-registered voting list in Hamilton County, Ohio. They had been added after they had passed away.
Although much of the election fraud is taking place in swing states, fraud continues in states known for the worst election fraud. Chicago, infamous for its dead voters, continues to have the most egregious problems. CBS 2 discovered that “119 dead people have voted a total of 229 times in Chicago in the last decade.” Relatives report they can’t even get their deceased loved ones removed from voter rolls. One man told the station last month that he has asked multiple times to have his dead mother removed from voter registration. Even though she died in 1998, records show she voted in 2010.

In Indiana, officials are investigating hundreds of voter registrations that appear fraudulent. An organization called Indiana Voter Registration Project submitted the registrations, which contain “a combination of fake names, addresses and dates of birth with real information.” Hendricks County Clerk Debbie Hoskins caught the discrepancies and notified law enforcement. The faulty voter registrations have showed up in eight other Indiana counties. The spokeswoman for the organization is Christy Setzer, who has worked as a Democrat strategist for the presidential campaigns of Al Gore, Howard Dean and Chris Dodd.

Another technique, known as double voting or ballot stuffing, lets people vote twice.“You’d be surprised how often people double vote,” Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach told CBS 4 in Colorado. “Two of the cases are serial double voters. I think people discover they can get away with it and keep doing it.” Kobach says some of the voters cast ballots in both Colorado and Kansas, and believes 10,000 people are registered to vote in both states.

Polling officials fraud:

This category includes officials throwing out ballots for illegitimate reasons and allowing ineligible voters to vote.  In 2013, undercover New York City police officers showed up at 63 different precincts pretending to be prohibited voters, but in 61 precincts, or 97 percent of the time, they were allowed to vote (they voted for a dummy name to avoid influencing the election). The officers assumed the identities of dead people, voters who had moved, or felons.

Similarly, in the 2012 election, O’Keefe showed up to a New Hampshire polling place with some assistants, asking for ballots for 10 deceased voters. Their names had not yet been purged from the voting rolls, and poll workers handed them the ballots without asking for ID, a violation of state law.

Elected officials fraud:

In Missouri, Mayor Ted Hoskins of Berkeley, Mo., a Democrat, and his supporters are accused of requiring early ballot voters to submit their ballots in unsealed envelopes, which is contrary to law. Some residents say they were encouraged to fill out ballots and turn them over to Hoskins or one of his supporters. This could allow tampering of the ballots, so prosecutors and the FBI are currently investigating.

Eric Fey, Democratic director of the Election Board, said, “There were different colored inks and some where the ovals were filled in a very distinct fashion and some that were filled in a very different distinct fashion; things that you just don’t see on other ballots.” Fey said the results benefited Hoskins and his allies.

In 2012, Hoskins received the highest share of early ballots of any candidate, 36 percent. The next highest share among mayoral candidates was a mere 14 percent, and countywide, the share of early ballots averaged 8.6 percent. Hoskins defeated his opponent by 517 votes to 418.

Voting machines fraud:

Hackers told CBS how simple it is to hack electronic voting machines. For $15, a voter can buy a card that is capable of manipulating the machine — without ever leaving the voting booth. “I can insert it, and then it resets the card, and now I’m able to vote again,” said Brian Varner, a principle researcher at the computer security company Symantec.

Symantec Security Response director Kevin Haley said the machines can be hacked after all the votes have been cast. CBS reports that only 60 percent of states routinely conduct audits after elections by comparing paper trails. The swing states of Virginia and Pennsylvania don’t even collect paper records, so there is no way to conduct audits.

National Review has another list of voter fraud incidents: (links removed)

Take these cases discovered during just the last month and a half:

San Pedro, Calif.: Eighty-three absentee ballots were sent to different registered voters who all supposedly lived in the same small, two-bedroom apartment.

Pennsylvania: FieldWorks LLC, a Democratic organization, was raided by Pennsylvania State Police for fraudulently filling out registration forms for thousands of voters.

Chicago: An investigation by CBS Channel 2 found people who had been registered to vote after their death — a total of 119 dead people who had voted 229 times.

Virginia: In an examination of just eight out of the Commonwealth’s 133 counties and independent cities, 1,046 illegal aliens were discovered to have illegally registered to vote.

New York: In an undercover video, even Democrats were recently caught complaining about the amount of voter fraud created by New York City mayor Bill de Blasio’s decision to give out ID cards without checking recipients’ identities.

Naturally, under eight years of Barack Obama, nothing has happened to stop this. And that’s not surprising since Obama’s meager “work experience” involved work for an organization called ACORN, which was investigated and sanctioned for aiding and abetting voter fraud.

Commentary

Men on strike: the social changes that caused men to opt out of marriage

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SurveyMonkey election poll cross tabs for unmarried women Nov 2016
SurveyMonkey election poll cross tabs for unmarried women only Nov 2016

I tweeted and shared Dr. Helen Smith’s book “Men on Strike” this week multiple times, and I finished reading it myself. The reason was that it was on sale for $3.29 for the Kindle edition. The book explains a few of the developments that have led to men underperforming in school and in the workplace, and opting out of marriage and fatherhood.

Dr. Helen comes to this problem as a secular libertarian, not as a Christian conservative.

A review of Dr. Helen’s book appeared in Salvo magazine. The review is written by Terrell Clemmons, who has the best Christian worldview of any woman I know – I frequently rely on her advice.

Terrell writes:

While the feminist movement may originally have been about equal respect for both sexes, what it has morphed into, she argues, is female privilege. From rape laws that empower women but not the men they may falsely accuse, to divorce laws tilted in favor of the wife, to the feminization of the U.S. education system, men have become the sex under the gun, while women enjoy the status of a protected class.

But unlike their mothers or grandmothers, men today are not taking to the streets burning their undergarments and shrieking demands (thank God). They’re doing just the opposite, which is far worse. They’re going on strike. The strike zones are manifold:

Higher Education.In addition to the enrollment imbalance, which is approaching a 60/40 ratio of women to men, college has become, in the words of one professor, “a hostile working environment [in which] males increasingly feel emasculated.” Smith quotes a student named John, who had this to say about his college experience: “I had already been cautious around women, having grown up with Tawana Brawley in my backyard and daily stories of sexual harassment; I played it safe and passive every time. But it doesn’t matter. The only way not to lose is to not play. So I’m out.”

Work,including community involvement. With higher female graduation rates and salaries, men today are falling behind their fathers economically and professionally. Consequently, their efforts to prove themselves worthy mates through hard work and higher earnings don’t win female attention the way they used to. Discouraged, too many retreat to a man cave, and inertia sets in from there.

Marriage.Marriage rates are down, and honest men opting out will tell you why. Smith cites a Rutgers University study of single heterosexual men which turned up the top reasons they hadn’t married. They can get sex and the companionship of cohabitation without marriage more easily than in times past, and they don’t want to open themselves up to the risk of divorce and financial loss. It really isn’t that complicated a decision. In fact, it’s often not an actual decision at all. It just happens.

The simplest explanation for the difficulties that boys face in an education system that is dominated by women (teachers and administrators) is discrimination. And in the workplace, the government requires employers to report on male and female head counts, and promote women who are not qualified. I have seen receptionists with tattoos and no college degrees promoted to six-figure manager jobs in companies where I worked.

There is one more which to me was the most surprising one in the book – paternity fraud, and the laws that support paternity fraud:

Take the following cases of nonconsensual insemination: Nathaniel from California, age 15, had sex with 34-year-old Ricci, which, due to his age, was legally considered nonconsensual. Emile from Louisiana was visiting his parents in the hospital when a nurse offered him oral sex, if he wore a condom, which she conveniently offered to dispose of for him afterward. S. F. from Alabama passed out drunk at the home of a female friend and awoke undressed the following morning. In all three cases, including the one involving the minor, a woman got sperm and, nine months later, a child, and the man got ordered by a court of law to pay support for eighteen years.

Less devious, but similarly amiss, are those cases in which a man, having been betrayed by his wife or girlfriend, was nevertheless held financially responsible for a child genetically proven to be another man’s offspring. While not as sensational as sperm-jacking, it is another form of paternity extortion.

In each of those cases, the man was found liable to pay child support – including the case of the 15-year-old boy, who was forced to pay child support to his statutory rapist when he turned 18. This is how the court system works, and more and more men are understanding the risks.

I often encounter “pro-marriage” people while gathering stories for the blog. These pro-marriage people come in two varieties.

On the one end of the spectrum are people like Terrell Clemmons and Jennifer Roback Morse, who understand marriage, but who also understand the social changes that have made marriage unattractive for men. Both Clemmons and Morse have a background in STEM fields, so they are able to understand incentives and tradeoffs. They understand that society has to rollback the changes to education, divorce laws, etc. if they expect men to be interested in marriage again. They understand that men are not just accessories of women, but instead have their own desires, feelings and reasons for marrying.

On the other end of the spectrum are feminist men, who are not able to understand the changing incentives that face men in a world that has evolved under the influence of radical feminism. It is just simpler (less thinking) for these men to accept the radical feminism as a given, and then urge men to “man up”. I think a much better idea would be for the “man up” crowd to realize how marriage has changed, and how the schools and the workplace have changed, then make all of these things more attractive to men. It doesn’t do any good to try to “dare” men into jumping off a cliff.

Commentary

What’s the best book a woman can read to prepare herself for marriage?

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Does government provide incentives for people to get married?
A good marriage is more than fun and feelings – it takes planning and work

I found a great lecture by Sue Bohlin, who works at Probe Ministries. The lecture is about the book “The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands” by Dr. Laura Schlessinger. I recommend this book more highly than any other book to Christian women. It really does a lot to give young women a different perspective on men and marriage. Don’t be thrown off by the funny title, it’s really good.

The MP3 file is here. (48 minutes)

Here is a blog post that Sue wrote that captures most of the material in the lecture.

Here’s the introduction:

Talk show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger has written a book that is improving thousands of marriages: The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands. We need this book because millions of wives either don’t know how to love their husbands wisely and well, or they’re too self-centered to see it as important. Dr. Laura credits this dismal condition to forty years of feminist philosophy, “with its condemnation of just about everything male as evil, stupid, and oppressive, and the denigration of female and male roles in families.” While the women’s movement certainly had a hand to play in the disintegration of relationships and the family, I believe the core cause is our sinful self-centeredness, just as the Bible says.

Which is why we need help, and God instructs older women to train younger women to love their husband and children, to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no one will malign the word of God. The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands is a great resource for learning these important values and skills.

And here’s the first part I thought was most important:

A listener to Dr. Laura’s radio show named Edgar wrote, “There are a few things that men want so bad they would do anything for it. I think a good number of men want respect more than love. They like to feel they have some power. I nearly cry when you tell a woman caller to respect her husband. There is so much selfishness in the world—in marriages. Prosperity has allowed women to be so independent, and thus so selfish. I always feel as though I come last—my feelings come last, my needs come last.”

“A good number of men want respect more than love.” God knew this when He made us. His commands to husbands and wives in Ephesians 5:33 reflects each one’s deepest needs: “Each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.” Dr. Emerson Eggerichs of LoveandRespect.com points out that this verse commands a husband to love his wife. Why? She needs love like she needs air to breathe. This same verse commands a wife to respect her husband. Why? He needs respect like he needs air to breathe.

  • Respect means treating someone in a way that builds him up and doesn’t tear him down, never denigrating or attacking.
  • Respect means always treating the other person with the dignity they deserve as a person made in the image of God.
  • Respect means grasping that a man’s needs and wants are every bit as valid and important as a woman’s needs and wants.
  • Respect means not venting to others, especially the children. One woman wrote to Dr. Laura, “No emotional outlet is worth damaging my husband’s reputation.”

There are three A’s that men long for from their wives: attention, affection, and affirmation. Respect involves paying attention to what they do simply because they’re the ones doing it.

Yes, respect is very important to men, but the thing is, a woman can’t respect every man equally. She should choose a man who does things that are respectable. Then respecting him will be easy. Sometimes, women overestimate how easy men are to change after marriage. It’s better to just pick one who does all the important things instead of thinking that you can pick a good-looking one and make him do the important stuff like be faithful to you, hold a steady job, save money, argue without getting angry, etc. later. Men don’t change much, so pick one who does things that you respect and then give him respect.

And this part also seemed important to me:

A man named Roy wrote to Dr. Laura with some good advice for wives: “If you can’t accentuate the positive, at least acknowledge it. The world is full of messages to men that there are standards we don’t meet. There is always another man who is more handsome, more virile, or more athletic than we are. None of that matters if the most important person in our life looks up to us, accepts us as we are, and loves us even though we aren’t perfect. . . . All I know is that the husband who has a wife who supports him and praises him for the positive things he does is the envy of all the other men who have to live with criticism, sarcasm, and constant reminders of their failures.”

Men desperately want and need the support of their wives. This is reflected in what God reveals in His Word when He says, “It is not good for man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.” And through the apostle Paul, God instructs wives to relate to their husbands in a way that meets this need when He says, “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.”

Submission is basically giving support with a willing, cooperative heart.

A wife’s submission includes knowing her gifts and strengths, and using them to serve her husband and family.

Service has a bad name, but both husbands and wives are called to serve God first and then each other; husbands are called to sacrificially love and serve their wives with Jesus as their pattern.

So what does support look like?

  • Believing in him. Telling him, “You have what it takes.” Being his #1 fan.
  • Cultivating a cooperative heart.
  • Being generous and openhearted—willing to use your gifts and strengths to help him succeed.
  • Understanding the importance of making him look good: never saying anything negative in public.
  • Creating a home that’s a safe haven from the world.
  • Having a warm heart with a positive, cheerful demeanor. Women set the temperature of the home; we are thermostats, not thermometers, of the family. (On the other hand, Proverbs says “A quarrelsome wife is like a constant dripping on a rainy day; restraining her is like restraining the wind or grasping oil with the hand.”)
  • Being interested in him and his life.
  • Showing thoughtfulness. What does he like? Do it.
  • And though by no means exhaustive, it also means being a person of faithfulness and integrity. That means keeping your promises and being dependable. As Proverbs 31 puts it, “Her husband has full confidence in her and lacks nothing of value.”

Support and encouragement is SO important to a man. A man can continue to function fine if the whole world opposes him, but not if the woman he loves doesn’t support him. When a man falls in love, a woman has to realize the enormous power she has over him, and be careful not to hurt him. Men are vulnerable to the woman they choose. Although they look pretty tough on the outside, they can easily be hurt by insults or discouragement.

Parting thoughts

So, this lecture and the book are good, but young women should also seek out the advice of older Christian women who have been married successfully for some time. Read Titus 2:3-4 – the Bible encourages older women to mentor younger women! This is really important because we are in a time where young women are often pulled by the culture in many wrong directions, and they need help from people who know what they are doing.

One last point – I actually bought the audio version of the Dr. Laura book and noticed that it was just over two hours long. It turns out that the audio version is abridged – it is not as complete as the actual book. I noticed that Sue was quoting from the book passages that I had not heard in the audio recording. So, if you want the full content, get the book, not the audio recording.