Thursday, August 13, 2020



The Universal Mail-In Voting Sham

The major domestic threat to the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.

Last Thursday, President Trump raised the idea of possibly delaying the November 3rd general election date due to concerns about the implications of universal mail-in voting for the integrity of the presidential election. The president tweeted, “With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote????”

The mainstream media and the political establishment were aghast at the thought of President Trump using the coronavirus as a pretext to delay the presidential election. They need to take a deep breath. President Trump told reporters later in the day that he did not want any change in the election date, although he did warn of the possibility of significant delays in the tabulation and announcement of the final result. In any case, only Congress has the power under the Constitution to change the date of a presidential election. There’s no chance of Congress doing so this year. The Democrats’ opposition is a given, of course. But the Republicans in Congress are also adamantly against the idea. "Never in the history of the country, through wars and depressions and the Civil War, have we ever not had a federally scheduled election on time, and we'll find a way to do that again this November 3," said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

So why did President Trump bring up the possibility of election delay in his tweet (with four question marks) in the first place? The reason was to call attention to the dangers of universal mail-in voting that threaten the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. There is a real potential for fraud, to be sure. But even in the absence of widespread fraud, universal mail-in voting faces significant challenges in ensuring a fair election result, starting with its reliance on the all too unreliable U.S. Postal Service (USPS). Moreover, states’ broad authority in the administration of elections in which their citizens vote, including federal elections, does not mean they can throw caution to the wind and dilute the voting power of clearly qualified voters. This will most certainly happen when states introducing universal mail-in voting for the first time in a presidential general election do so without robust safeguards to ensure the integrity of the mail-in process. There is too little time to devise and implement anything close to the safeguards that presently exist for in-person voting and the more limited use of absentee ballots as the exception rather than the rule. There are a few smaller states that have used all or majority mail-in voting for years with safeguards that have proven workable. However, such safeguards cannot simply be transplanted into the systems of larger states overnight.

The U.S. Postal Service has proven its inability to handle properly the huge anticipated volume of mail-in ballots in a timely and uniform fashion across the United States. As a Democratic commissioner and co-chair of the New York State Board of Elections said: “One of the big problems of going to a vote by mail system is that the Boards of Elections are now in partnership with the U.S. Postal Service for conducting the election.” We are still awaiting the final results in a few contests from this past June’s Democratic primary in New York where there was significant reliance on mail-in voting.

A major election law snafu involving New York’s Democratic primary illustrates the U.S. Postal Service’s problems. A class action lawsuit alleges that an executive order issued by Governor Andrew Cuomo in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic broadening the use of mail-in ballots statewide led to confusion at the USPS. The USPS was supposed to ensure election mail was postmarked, even though it was postage paid. The USPS was provided e-mail instructions as to how the postmark should look. New York State Board of Education officials received assurances from the USPS that any ballot envelopes run through their automated machines would receive the necessary marking. But the confused U.S. Postal Service failed to place the required postmarks in thousands of cases. Thus, even though voters filled out their ballots correctly and mailed them in as instructed, the ballots were allegedly invalidated because they were missing the necessary postmarks from the post office.

The result, according to the class action complaint, was the disenfranchisement of “a massive number of voters, without any warning or anything resembling Constitutionally adequate protections.”

New York was not an isolated case. On July 7, 2020, for example, the Office of the Inspector General of the U.S. Postal Service issued a Management Alert entitled “Timeliness of Ballot Mail in the Milwaukee Processing & Distribution Center Service Area.” The alert found that for ballots processed in the Milwaukee area in connection with the April primary election, there were “issues related to the timeliness of ballots being mailed to voters, correcting misdelivery of ballots, an inability to track ballots, and inconsistent postmarking of ballots.”

Looking nationally, the Inspector General management alert identified potential issues in integrating state election offices’ vote-by-mail processes with the Postal Service processes, which could impact future elections. For instance, the alert noted potential concerns with “ballots postmarks, ballots mailed without mail tracking technology, and the ratio of Political and Election Mail coordinators to election offices in certain locations.”

In Ohio, there was evidently an “unintentional missort” of more than 300 ballots, according to the U.S. Postal Service’s chief operating officer, which caused them to be delivered too late to be counted by a county Board of Elections. “An unintentional missort of a tray of Butler County return ballots ultimately contributed to a gap in the mail flow, resulting in the delay,” he said, which he identified as “an opportunity for improvement.” No kidding!

For those Trump-haters who blame post office delays on certain changes instituted by the president’s Postmaster General appointee Louis DeJoy, think again. The examples of post office related problems with mail-in voting described above, as well as breakdowns in other states, occurred before the July 10, 2020 implementation date for the new Postmaster General's changes. We are talking about a record of sheer incompetence that, when replicated on a far larger scale in connection with this year’s general election, could well affect the final results in swing states such as Ohio and Wisconsin.

The U.S. Post Office recognizes its own shortcomings. But not Barack Obama. In his divisive remarks at the funeral of Rep. John Lewis, Obama demagogued the issue. He took time out to criticize those he said were “undermining the Postal Service in the run-up to an election that is going to be dependent on mailed-in ballots so people don’t get sick.”

The post office’s processing and delivery problems are reason enough to be concerned about the integrity of an election driven significantly by universal mail-in voting. But the problems run deeper than the post office itself. There are no consistent national standards for election officials to follow in administering extensive mail-in voting. Despite problems of its own with in-person voting, at least the person showing up to vote personally signs in and enters the voting booth to cast his or her vote. Put aside the issue of requiring credible voter ID, which affects both in-person and mail-in voting. A state unprepared to deal with huge volumes of mail-in ballots will have no way of even knowing whether the person whose name appears on the mail-in ballot is currently a resident of that state or is the same person who actually cast and mailed in the vote.

In the most liberal states like California, mail-in ballots themselves are sent automatically to all voters in the state. Anything goes. There are no time-tested procedures to reduce the potential for mail-in voter fraud or widespread mistakes, such as mailing ballots to the wrong address or to large residential buildings where they could get intercepted and filled out by someone other than the intended recipient. Without measures to effectively verify the accuracy of a state’s registration rolls and the current addresses and corresponding identities of the intended recipients of the ballots before sending out the mail-in ballots, contaminated election results are inevitable. The election results will also be questionable in the larger number of states where mail-in ballot applications will be sent automatically for the first time to all purported voters who don’t need any reason for requesting the mail-in ballots.

Some states allow a practice known as "ballot harvesting,” which allows any third parties to collect mail-in ballots from groups of voters such as residents in a housing complex or a nursing home and deliver the ballots for them. There is no clear uniform system for tracking who these third parties are and the chain of custody of the ballots between the time they were collected by the third parties and the time they were delivered to the appropriate destinations (assuming they were delivered at all).

At the other end of the spectrum are states that scrupulously limit who can return a voter’s ballot, limit the reasons for allowing someone to cast a mail-in ballot, or require precautions such as witness signatures, notarizations, or copies of voter identification. The ballots of voters in those states – whether cast in person or by mail – may well be cancelled out by invalid mail-in ballots for president accepted by states with sloppy mail-in ballot procedures.

States like Oregon and Colorado that have used mail-in voting extensively during several past election cycles at least have a track record managing large influxes of mailed ballots with trained personnel, technology and logistics infrastructure in place. We can’t say the same about a state like California that intends to plunge ahead into uncharted waters. For years, California was not even in full compliance with the National Voter Registration Act, which requires states to maintain accurate and current voter registration rolls.

There are no consistent national procedural standards for validating the integrity of universal mail-in balloting to ensure that every individual’s legitimate vote is given meaningful effect. In states with grossly inadequate safeguards for handling huge volumes of mail-in ballots, some voters will have their ballots invalidated for faults not attributable to the voters themselves. Other mail-in ballots will be counted even though they were not completed properly by qualified voters or postmarked and delivered by the legal deadline.

Voters across the country in states that have more careful procedures for mail-in voting are likely to find their votes cancelled out by illegitimate mail-in ballots in states with a standardless mail-in process.

The net result of a headlong rush this year to embrace universal mail-in voting across the country will be challenges to the legitimacy of the presidential election that will end up in prolonged litigation.

SOURCE 






The Collapse of the Traditional American Family

The Joint Economic Committee of Congress has just produced an important new study titled “The Demise of the Happy Two-Parent Home.”

The report exhaustively presents data showing the shocking collapse of marriage and traditional family in America and then explores possible explanations for why it has happened.

In 1962, 71% of women ages 15-44 were married. By 2019, this was down to 42%.

In 1962, 5% of women ages 30-34 had never been married. By 2019, this was up to 35%.

In the 1960s, less than 1% of couples living together were not married. Today, it is over 12%.

And the percentage of births to unmarried women has risen from 5% in 1960 to 40% in 2018.

In 1970, 85% of children lived with two parents. By 2019, this was down to 70%.

The relevant questions are: Why should the collapse of marriage in the United States concern us? And why is this happening?

Regarding the first question, it depends on your values. To the large but dwindling number of Americans who care about traditional biblical morality, the collapse of marriage and family, the openness to other lifestyles prohibited by biblical morality, is of concern. It is not a healthy sign about what is happening in our culture.

For those whose concerns are more secular, the collapse of marriage is of concern because the practical results are not good.

A large body of research exists showing the social benefits of traditional marriage and family, and the social costs of their collapse.

There is the oft-quoted observation of Brookings Institution scholar Ron Haskins that American adults who follow three rules—finish high school; get a full-time job; and wait until at least age 21 to get married and have children—have a 2% chance of being poor and a 75% chance of being a middle-class wage earner.

In a recent interview, Nobel Prize-winning University of Chicago economist James Heckman observed: “The main barriers to developing effective policies for income and social mobility is fear of honest engagement in the changes in the American family and the consequences it has wrought. … The family is the source of life and growth. Families build values, encourage (or discourage) their children in school and out. Families—far more than schools—create or inhibit life opportunities.”

Why has traditional marriage and family so dramatically collapsed?

The report examines several possible factors, a major one being the dramatic growth in the welfare state supporting female heads of household.

According to the report, “The value of the safety net for single-mother families is 133 percent higher today than in 1940, and 56 percent higher than in 1960.”

Nevertheless, changes in behavior reflect changes in values. Why do values change?

Gallup has been asking since 1952, “How important would you say religion is in your own life—very important, fairly important or not very important.”

In 1952, 75% said “very important.” In 1970, this was down to about 60%, and by 1978, this was down to 52%.”

It was in this environment of a dramatic drop in Americans’ sense of the personal importance of religion that, in 1973, the Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion.

A wave of court decisions banned religion from the public square. In 1962, prayer in public school was banished.

In 2002 Gallup polling, 45% said to have a baby outside of marriage was morally acceptable. By 2015, this was up to 61%, and by 2019, it was up to 64%.

What seems clear is that the collapse of marriage and family that has been occurring in our nation is not occurring in a vacuum. Values are changing.

For those who are worried about the situation, who want to see marriage and family strengthened again, the beginning must be awareness of the problem. To this end, the Joint Economic Committee report provides an important service to the nation.

SOURCE 






Lance Armstrong’s Bike Shop Cancels Police Contract, Still Expect Cops to Protect from Threats

Last week, the Austin, Texas, bicycle shop founded by cycling star Lance Armstrong announced it was ending its contract with the Austin Police Department. However, since that announcement, the shop made it clear they still expect the police to protect them.

Wednesday, the Austin-based store announced that it was canceling its five-year contract with the Austin Police Department, worth nearly $350,000, and would not be renewing it, the Star-Telegram reported.

But even as the shop canceled its association with the police, it insisted that the police should continue to protect them from threats.

“We are not anti-police,” they exclaimed after saying the police are on the “wrong side of history.” The statement continued, saying, “We do believe our local police force will protect us from the very threats we are receiving right now.”

The management added that they had discussed the idea with employees, then insisted that refusal to work with the police is the “best” way “do our part to keep our customers safe and this city moving in the right direction.”

“Businesses can no longer be non-participants in the communities they serve. We chose what we think will do the most to suture these divides and place our community on the right side of history,” the store, opened by Armstrong in 2008, said in a statement posted to Facebook.

SOURCE 






Transgender Surgery Does Not Improve Mental Health, Academics Belatedly Admit

Last year, a groundbreaking study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry (AJP) claimed to prove that transgender surgery improves the mental health of people suffering from gender dysphoria (the persistent and painful identification with the gender opposite one’s biological sex). Earlier this month, however, AJP issued a “correction” that acknowledged key flaws in the study and admitted that the true results “demonstrated no advantage of surgery.” This represents a severe blow to the transgender ideological takeover of American medicine.

The original AJP article “Reduction in Mental Health Treatment Utilization Among Transgender Individuals After Gender-Affirming Surgeries: A Total Population Study,” written by Richard Bränström, Ph.D., and John E. Pachankis, Ph.D. and published on October 4, 2019, analyzed a newly available dataset from Sweden. The study found that people with gender dysphoria were “about six times as likely” to have a mood and anxiety disorder health-care visit and far more likely to be hospitalized for a suicide attempt.

The study compared gender dysphoric people who did not take cross-sex hormones or undergo transgender surgery with those who did. The authors admitted that “years since initiating hormone treatment was not significantly related to likelihood of mental health treatment,” but claimed that “increased time since last gender-affirming surgery was associated with reduced mental health treatment.”

Yet the study faced severe criticism from many quarters. Dr. Andre Van Mol, adolescent sexuality committee co-chair at the American College of Pediatricians (not to be confused with the pro-transgender American Academy of Pediatricians), served as lead author on one of six letters to the editor of AJP critical of the study’s methods and findings. Van Mol’s team included endocrinologist Michael Laidlaw and renowned psychiatrists Miriam Grossman and Prof. Paul McHugh.

On Saturday, August 1, AJP published a “correction” to the study which is more of a retraction. AJP sought “statistical consultations” on the study and the authors agreed with the criticisms these consultations highlighted. “Upon request, the authors reanalyzed the data to compare outcomes between individuals diagnosed with gender incongruence who had received gender-affirming surgical treatments and those diagnosed with gender incongruence who had not.”

This new analysis “demonstrated no advantage of surgery in relation to subsequent mood or anxiety disorder-related health care visits or prescriptions or hospitalizations following suicide attempts in that comparison.”

In what appears to be a desperate attempt to preserve the study, AJP minimized the monumental change in this conclusion, merely admitting that its pro-transgender conclusion was “too strong.”

Given that the study used neither a prospective cohort design nor a randomized controlled trial design, the conclusion that “the longitudinal association between gender-affirming surgery and lower use of mental health treatment lends support to the decision to provide gender-affirming surgeries to transgender individuals who seek them” is too strong.

In a press release responding to the correction, the American College of Pediatricians argued that “the study, and transgender affirming interventions, now seem invalidated.”

Indeed, the correction does invalidate the original conclusion of the study, much-touted last year for its pro-transgender results. Many activists inside and outside of the medical field are extremely invested in such studies to bolster the transgender narrative since basic biology undermines it.

According to the transgender activists who have spread throughout America’s medical establishment, gender dysphoria is devastating for a patient’s mental health, and the only way to help such a patient is to encourage transgender identity as the resolution of that dysphoria. Rather than encouraging a person to accept his or her biological sex, these activists claim that the best way to combat depression and prevent suicide is to encourage a cross-sex identity, even to the point of providing cross-sex hormones and performing dangerous experimental surgeries.

These activists claim that the root problem is a lack of acceptance — gender dysphoric people experience depression and commit suicide because society does not accept their cross-sex identification. Societal acceptance and experimental “treatments” to “affirm” an identity at odds with a person’s biological sex are the only hope for struggling people.

But this argument is insane. Many people who once identified as transgender and later embraced their biological sex (known as detransitioners) have come forward, lamenting the irreversible changes they made to their own bodies in search of a false identity. Their tragic stories seem reminiscent of anorexic girls who endanger their health by starving themselves, falsely thinking that they are fat.

Real-Life Victims of the Transgender ‘Cult’

“I am a real, live 22-year-old woman, with a scarred chest and a broken voice, and five o’clock shadow because I couldn’t face the idea of growing up to be a woman, that’s my reality,” admitted Cari Stella in a personal YouTube video. A man who formerly identified as a woman and had his male genitals removed and replaced with a facsimile of female parts later lamented his “Frankenstein hack job.”

Some misled doctors are actually harming kids as young as 8 years old by giving them so-called puberty-blocking drugs. Dr. Michael Laidlaw, an independent private practice endocrinologist in Rocklin, Calif., said of such drugs, “I call it a development blocker — it’s actually causing a disease.” He told PJ Media that this “treatment” causes hypogonadotropic hypogonadism, a condition where the brain fails to send the right signal to the gonads to make the hormones necessary for development.

“An endocrinologist might treat a condition where a female’s testosterone levels are going to be outside the normal range. We’ll treat that and we’re aware of metabolic problems. At the same time, an endocrinologist may be giving high levels of testosterone to a female to ‘transition’ her,” Laidlaw explained.

Even in its initial version, the AJP study admitted there was no evidence that cross-sex hormones improve mental health. Now, the authors have admitted that even surgery does not necessarily help.

Late last year, James Shupe, the first American to officially change his legal sex status to “non-binary,” petitioned to have his male sex once again recognized on official documents.

“Despite six years of hormonal treatments, my sex was immutable, and I remained the same biological male I was at the time of my birth. In hindsight, my sex change to non-binary was a psychologically harmful legal fiction, and I desire to reclaim my male birth sex,” Shupe wrote in his petition.

Detransitioners exist, and they prove that societal acceptance of transgender identity and experimental “treatments” like transgender surgery are not the only solution to gender dysphoria. Ultimately, human beings are either male or female, down to the cellular level. The few people who suffer from disorders of sexual development (referred to as intersex) are not evidence of a “third sex,” nor is their existence an argument for transgender identity.

The rush to embrace transgender identity has caused serious problems in the medical field. Last year, a pregnant woman rushed to the hospital with abdominal pains. Since she identified as a man, however, the doctors immediately dismissed the idea that she could be going into labor. They did not give her the treatment she needed, and the baby died. Tragically, the doctors took the entirely wrong lesson from the experience. Rather than returning to the basic acknowledgment of biological sex, they insisted that this woman was “rightly classified as a man,” and that doctors simply can’t assume that “men” won’t be pregnant.

The retraction of this AJP study undermines the medical argument in favor of redefining basic biology. It should serve as a wake-up call to the medical community, showing that the dangerous transgender movement is not worth its high cost.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here
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