I thought this was an interesting story. In Florida, Republicans won the elections for Senate and Governor. But the people counting votes in Broward and Palm Beach refused to finalize their vote counts. And they are preventing any journalists from filming how they are counting the votes.
Three days after election night, when Gov. Rick Scott delivered a victory speech and held a comfortable margin of votes against Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson, loads of ballots favoring the Democratic candidate mysteriously turned up in Palm Beach and Broward counties — where one official has a history of violating election laws.
State law requires that all early and by-mail votes be tabulated within 30 minutes of the polls closing, but three days later, Broward County Supervisor of Elections Dr. Brenda Snipes still refuses to specify how many people voted, how many ballots have been tabulated, and how many are left to count.
Since Tuesday, 80,000 new votes have mysteriously turned up in Broward County and another 15,000 in Palm Beach County. These newly discovered ballots have been “breaking almost 3-to-1 in favor of Democrats,” narrowing the margin between these two candidates to likely force a recount after Saturday’s noon deadline requiring all counties to turn over election results to the state Division of Elections.
Daily Wire reports that reporters who want to film them counting the votes are being threatened with arrest:
[…][The] Palm Beach Post… explains that elections supervisor, Susan Bucher, broke from normal practice by banning cameras from recording the ballot review process, which Gov. Rick Scott — who is waiting to see if he was elected to the senate — accused of “incompetence.”
Police were brought in to keep journalists out and block their view.
NBCUniversal, Fox Television, and Scripps Media sued Bucher over her refusal to let the media cover the public event. Marissa Bagg, a reporter for NBC 6 Miami, posted the emergency petition on Twitter, writing that the media outlets were suing “Susan Bucher and the Palm Beach County Canvassing Board for refusing to allow us to record video while they review ballots in a public meeting.”
What doesn’t the Demcrat elections officer want the journalists to see? Well for one thing, the two Democrat candidates who lost want the votes of non-citizens to be counted.
During review of provisional ballots to determine whether a recount is justified in the tight Florida governor, senate, and agriculture commission races, Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher identified a voter as a non-citizen and declared that the ballot would not be counted.
Attorneys representing the Democratic candidate for senate Bill Nelson and the Democratic candidate for governor Andrew Gillum objected.
This tweet from Andrew Guest notes that the Broward county election supervisor has a very bad history being fair with elections: (H/T Daily Wire)
Broward County Supervisor of Elections, Brenda Snipes
The tweet has all the links to the stories, and as you can see, they are pretty reliable sources.
Current Florida Governor Rick Scott has filed a lawsuit demanding that Snipes reveal how many ballots Broward county has. She is way over the deadline, and hasn’t revealed the number of ballots.
Man helping a woman with proper handgun marksmanship
Dalrock blogged a splendid post about people who claim that there is a shortage of “good men”. He says that if there really were a shortage of good men, then people who want women to actually get married would be telling women not to delay marriage, but to instead get serious about marrying early, when their ability to attract husband candidates is at its peak.
Dalrock writes:
We can see the same pattern in Dr. John Piper’s recent post Why Are Women More Eager Missionaries?* Piper explains that missionary work has become a pink ghetto:
…the actual situation among most evangelical faith missions is that between 80–85% of all single missionaries are women. It is a rare thing, like two out of every ten, for a single man to make missions his life’s vocation, which results in the overall statistics being that one-third of those in evangelical world missions are married men, one-third are married women, and 80 percent of the last third are single women. Which means that something just less than two-thirds of the total missionary force are women.
Piper’s main concern with the post however is not that there aren’t enough single men doing missionary work, but that women who choose this field aren’t marrying as they would like. Piper complains that the problem for husband hunting missionary women is really an exacerbated version of the same problem all Christian women have, and that is an overall lack of marriageable Christian men…
I’ll save you the quotation of Piper, but his reason why missionary women struggle to find husbands is – SHOCK! – that Christian men refuse to man up. I.e – Piper believes that women can’t find husbands because men are not ready and willing to marry.
More:
But if Piper actually believed… that there was a severe shortage of husband material men, he would focus his attention on helping the women reading navigate this incredibly difficult situation. Overseas mission work may feel empowering for young women, but (according to Piper) single women going into the mission field are greatly handicapping their prospects in an already bleak field. His advice to young women would be to choose which was truly more important to them, being a missionary or finding a husband.
If Piper really believed that there were a shortage of marriage-minded, marriage-capable Christian men, then Piper would be counseling women who genuinely want to marry to make marriage a priority when they are younger, prettier and more fertile. Some women say that they want to get married “some day”. But the hidden truth is often that they just want to delay marriage in order to have fun and thrills, until they get tired of it. And then they just expect a suitable man to show up right when they need one. But do men want to marry a 35-year-old woman when they are 40 as much as they want to marry a 23-year-old woman when they are 25?
More Dalrock:
Piper even tells a story which would be a perfect way to teach this lesson. He describes a single woman named Gladys Aylward who went to a place where she found no marriageable men, and then blamed single men for not following her and proposing marriage:
“Miss Aylward talked to the Lord about her singleness. She was a no-nonsense woman in very direct and straightforward ways and she asked God to call a man from England, send him straight out to China, straight to where she was, and have him propose to me.” I can’t forget the next line. Elisabeth Elliot said, “With a look of even deeper intensity, she shook her little bony finger in my face and said, ‘Elisabeth, I believe God answers prayer. And he called him.’” And here there was a brief pause of intense whisper. She said, “‘He called him, and he never came.’”
Now, that experience, I would guess, is not unique to Gladys Aylward.
If Piper really believed that Christian husbands were scarce, he would be sharing this anecdote to warn young women of the foolishness of moving away from the pool of men they hope to choose a husband from and then expecting God to send the man of their choosing across the world to propose. If we were in a culture of scarcity of good men, this would be the obvious lesson from this story. But we live in an age with unshakable confidence that good men are not only available all around us, but will always be abundant. If Piper believed that the husband Miss Aylward was praying for was surrounded by real life English women eager to win him as a husband, this story wouldn’t be complaining about why he didn’t drop everything, fly to China, and propose to a woman he had never met. If Piper believed that the man was sought after as a husband in England, he would be pointing out the foolishness of Miss Aylward flying off to China and then wondering why a man she had never met didn’t show up to propose once she decided she wanted to marry.
Miss Aylward either needed to accept that being a missionary in a secular country meant not marrying, or she needed to focus on marriage first when she was attractive to men as a life partner. Many women are propositioned for sex after they hit their mid-30s, but few of them are asked to marry. This is because men need women more when they are just starting out in their careers than when they are established in their careers.
Many women have no appreciation of how investing in a husband early causes him to be loyal to her when she is older. Women think that a husband will show up when she is ready, and be loyal to her even though she was absent during the hardships of the first decade of his career. A woman can do a lot of good for a man when he is starting out in his career and trying to save money for a house. But when those years have passed, the man’s ability to work and save have been largely set – without anyone’s help. If he went through those years single, then he typically will have earned less and saved less than a married man, because he did it without a wife’s support. Men do better in their careers and finances when they have a wife’s support. Especially in the early career, which is more stressful because of the lack of work experience. If a woman wants a man to be faithful and loyal, then she needs to choose a man who needs her, and invest in him using her youth and beauty to support him during his critical 20s and early 30s. Men respond to support during the critical years with lifelong fidelity and loyalty.
Toss-up Senate races to be decided on Tuesday (Source: RCP)
I think it’s almost beyond dispute that the Republicans will lose the House of Representatives on Tuesday, but the Senate is still in the balance. Above is a list of the toss-up Senate races. If you are in one of these states then you really need to vote today.
Republican candidates (by state)
Arizona: Martha McSally
Florida: Rick Scott
Indiana: Mike Braun
Michigan: John James
Minnesota: Karin Housley
Missouri: Josh Hawley
Montana: Matt Rosendale
Nevada: Dean Heller
NewJersey: Bob Hugin
Ohio: Jim Renacci
Tennessee: Marsha Blackburn
Texas: Ted Cruz
WestVirginia: Patrick Morrissey
Wisconsin: Leah Vukmir
When I look over this list, the names that really stand out to me are Ted Cruz and Marsha Blackburn – two conservatives with proven records on pretty much everything I care about. But there are also some interesting new candidates, especially John James. He’s in a tight race against Debbie Stabenow, a career politician.
John James is an Apache helicopter pilot and business owner
Fox News talked about him a bit in an article about the 5 of the races where the underdog has a chance at defeating the entrenched incumbent:
Ahead of Election Day, Republican John James gained steam in his quest to unseat longtime incumbent Sen. Debbie Stabenow. The Michigan Democrat has held her seat since 2001 and led James by double digits last month — but recent polling reflects a tightening race.
Both an EPIC-MRA poll and a Mitchell Research & Communications poll from late October showed Stabenow in the lead by just 7 points. An Emerson poll had her up by 9 points. In comparison, an EPIC-MRA poll had Stabenow ahead by 23 points in September.
“John James is giving 43-year politician Debbie Stabenow the fight of her political life, and there’s zero question she’ll be running scared these final days,” Tori Sachs, James’ campaign manager, told Fox News in a statement.
Jake Davison, the editor of Inside Michigan Politics, told Fox News that James, an Army veteran, is “an absolute star” who has “the base really fired up.”
James has been endorsed by President Trump and multiple people in his administration have hit the campaign trail for the Republican candidate. The Ending Spending Action Fund super PAC, funded by GOP mega-donors, also launched a $1 million advertising campaign buy for James ahead of the election as strategists told Politico the race is closer than some may expect.
Fox News has ranked the race as likely Democrat.
If you’re in Michigan, you really need to make an effort to get this man elected on Tuesday. We rarely get rock star candidates like this, and we need to pull out all the stops to send him to the Senate.
Surprisingly, James isn’t the only pilot we’re running – we also have former squadron leader Martha McSally, who flew the A-10 Thunderbolt in combat. She’s running for Senate in Arizona. Her race is currently a toss-up, because her radically leftist opponent is pretending to be a Republican in spite of her hard-left record.
Patrick Morissey in West Virginia is also seeing a late surge against Joe Manchin, who voted against de-funding Planned Parenthood.
Why should you vote Republican?
Famous conservative Ben Shapiro, an orthodox Jew, listed 10 reasons why people should vote conservative, for Real Clear Politics.
His list:
The Courts
The Investigations
Impeachment
The Economy
Foreign Policy
Polarizing Culture Wars
Attacks on Religious Liberty
The Twisting Of Social Media
The Democrat-Media Complex
Mob Rule
The ones I care the most about are the courts and religious liberty. I do not want to be compelled by leftists (whose salaries I pay with my taxes) to act as if I am a secular leftist. I am not a secular leftist, and I want to be able to work and save without having to act like a secular leftist.
Let’s look at some of his points:
6. Polarizing Culture Wars. We’ve already seen the Democrats suggest that mob politics is the new normal. We’ve seen the Democrats capitalize on racial issues to polarize the country; we’ve seen them try to divide Americans by class and sex as well. With the platform of Congress, look for Democrats to attempt a series of divisive maneuvers intended to relaunch the culture wars in new and frightening ways.
8. The Twisting Of Social Media. Democrats have made a habit of threatening our biggest social media companies with investigations and regulations should they fail to crack down on conservative perspectives. Democrats, angry at Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss, blamed companies like Facebook for so-called “fake news,” and attributed Clinton’s utter incompetence to the impact of Russian bots. Democrats don’t believe any of that, but they’ve frightened social media companies into cracking down on free speech, as a leaked report from Google to Breitbart News showed this week. Social media companies are deeply afraid of Democrats punishing them for failing to target conservatives. Don’t be surprised if those social media companies escalate their efforts to do just that.
9. Radical Growth of the Democrat-Media Complex. We already know that the mainstream media institutions are dominated by Democratic supporters. And we know that those Democratic supporters will parrot any talking points the Democratic Party pushes. But with Democrats in power pushing every line of attack simultaneously, the media’s never-ending firehose of anti-Republican propaganda will merely widen the nozzle. If you’re worried about media bias now, wait until Democrats control the Congress and put President Trump in their sights.
10. Mob Rule. Democrats believe that they must lash out in anger in order to win in 2018. If they do win, they’ll double down on that anger, hoping it carries them to victory in 2020. Like the mobs invading the Senate and the steps of the Supreme Court? Enjoying top Democratic officials nodding and smiling at crowds harassing Republicans in restaurants? Get ready for much, much more. The only way to shut down the Democrats’ new mob rule strategy is to stop them cold at the ballot box.
Think about the way that things have been going in the culture. The secular left owns the public schools, higher education, Hollywood, hedge funds, the mainstream media, big government, the courts… they occupy all of the commanding heights of culture. If you think that they won’t use that power to coerce you, you’re mistaken. And you only have to look at what happens to Christians and conservatives in Europe, Canada and other countries where the left rules. Be sure that you take time to vote today, and share something on your wall to encourage everyone you know to vote as well.
