.
A few items of note/breadcrumbs.
First: 'vote by mail' (and the recently common practice -- since the 2020 'covid era' election -- of days/weeks-long counting of votes) are 'gaming the system' tactics. These are egregiously dishonest actors participating in an egregiously dishonest, corrupt, and broken system.
Here's a story from back in 2020, just prior to the national election, that provided a few revealing details on the racket, subsequently implemented at the national/state levels strategically, where needed:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/20/politics ... index.htmlJudge invalidates Paterson, NJ, city council election after allegations of mail-in voter fraud
Anna Sturla
Published 8:40 PM EDT, Thu August 20, 2020
A New Jersey judge invalidated a city council election and ordered a new one after allegations of voter fraud, according to a ruling issued Wednesday.
The May 12 election for Paterson’s Third Ward city council was “rife with mail in vote procedural violations,” Judge Ernest Caposela said in his ruling, though he left the decision on whether there was voter fraud to the criminal courts.
...
Paterson’s mayor heralded the ruling.
“It was the right ruling. That past election was fraught with fraud,” Mayor Andre Sayegh told CNN. “The City will comply with the judge’s decision and we created the Mayor’s Election Awareness Team to preserve the value of the vote in Paterson.”
A Paterson councilman and the councilman-elect were among four people charged with criminal conduct involving mail-in ballots during the election, New Jersey’s Attorney General announced in late June.
Scott Salmon, attorney for incumbent Councilman William McKoy in the case, told CNN his client was “thrilled” by the ruling.
“That’s the cost of democracy. We’d rather get it right, do it twice, than not get it right,” Salmon said.
The attorney for the councilman-elect agreed.
...
“The Attorney General has charged four individuals in Paterson, NJ—including one sitting city council member and one candidate for city council who nominally won his race—on charges arising from a scheme to collect and illegally mail in hundreds of absentee ballots in that election. That scheme led to a crisis in Paterson, requiring that the city hold another election between the indicted candidate and his opponent because it is impossible to determine just how many fraudulent ballots were cast,” the Trump campaign and Republican Party wrote challenging New Jersey leaders.
“It was a local election in Paterson. Some guys tried to screw with the system,” Murphy said on MSNBC Thursday. “I view it as a really positive data point. They got caught.”
This piece, however subjective in some respects by the author, touches on this recent trend and raises (in my view) a few astute points:
[excerpts]
...
many seem wont to blame election hijinks but i suspect this is more red herring than grand fishy proximate cause and that while i’m sure there was (as ever) skullduggery i suspect it’s likely not the widely dipositive issue so many seem to argue it to be.
we can debate how mail-in ballots changed the nature of elections, and there is obviously a discussion to be had.
and there is no question these changes have favored dems over GOP or that they were chosen to do so, but that’s not automatically the same as cheating or fraud. slanting the electoral laws is a time-honored tradition as old as the athenian agora. this is hardly new news.
is there cheating? of course. always has been. was it enough to swing elections? who knows? maybe a few, probably not this many. (though the fact that the question is so utterly unanswered and systems are so opaque is in and of itself a real issue) but at the end of the day, that’s the playing field...
this has always been an arms race.
and you ignore it at peril.
we can put forward solutions, or we can barrack for in person only paper voting with purple finger ink and the whole 9 yards, but we’re all probably unlikely to get it.
because that’s not what the people who run elections want.
clearly, 90% of the purported rationales for “why we need to do it this way” are obvious sham, but do me a favor and wake me up when THAT becomes prohibitive in government.
of course it’s dishonest, it’s government.but like it or no, we live in the real.
election rules are like the tax code. it’s complex, ever changing, and basically unparse-able and that is a feature, not a bug. it’s purposeful design.
the whole point is for amazon to be able to figure out the quintuple-irish reverse-domicile invert and pay no tax while you get grilled by the IRS for missing $7.29 in interest received on a money market account.
however manipulative it may be, gaming the rules is not the same as cheating and it’s not illegal. just like taxes, that’s just politics. there is avoidance and there is evasion. the line is gray and gets hashed out in semi-competent court.US elections are basically calvinball.
the whole process is to make up the rules as you go.
(and pretending to have just noticed this is just one more tactic in the game)
it might be nasty and counter to the spirit of the intended idea of free and fair elections but this has always been the game in registration, access, bussing, gerrymandering, dead people voting, ballot stuffing, and 40 other things they’ve probably never even let the public hear the names of.the original joke about “i’m glad my grandfather didn’t live to see this, he’d never have voted democrat when he was alive!” probably dates back to the sven snorinson faction of the vinlander party from the daneland thing of 1123.
that’s elections for you and america’s are more bizarre and baroque than most. changing them would be a great idea and solve a lot of problems, but
does the will exist among the states and counties whose purview this is to do so?
i have real doubts.
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/calv ... -arms-race------
A brief note on the DeSantis win. From a purely 'mainstream political' perspective, what politician out there is a viable competitor, or better product, than what DeSantis currently offers? What other Republican, or Democrat, candidate comes close? Particularly for middle class voters with mortgages and dependents, they will unlikely be swayed by anyone else given the decisions he made over the last ~2yrs on the one topic that remains top of mind for many.
Even
The Atlantic begrudgingly agrees:
@JenniferSey
The fact is— it wasn’t a
gamble. @GovRonDeSantis looked at the data and made the right call. It wasn’t dumb luck. It was informed by data & science rather than panic and fear. He viewed health more broadly - not just through lens of one disease.
https://twitter.com/JenniferSey/status/ ... IiYPsZz_1AThis exchange resonates with me, further to the above Re: DeSantis:
@TEAM_CAPSLOCK
·
Replying to @gnocchiwizard
With Covid somewhat in the rear view (though still lurking below the surface), it’s astounding to see ppl downplay R.DeSantis’ response.
National media pounded him for weeks for not closing the beaches during spring break, until he became the least popular gov in the country.
@gnocchiwizard
·
Replying to @TEAM_CAPSLOCK
national media pounded him for an entire year after he decided to open the state up and all these professional propaganda experts in media sat on their hands because they were still being safe (living zoom life until pfizer released their miracle juice)
@TEAM_CAPSLOCK
·
Replying to @gnocchiwizard
Perhaps I’m too narrowly focused, but the most pressing issue for me is governments using emergencies as a pretext to deprive citizens of rights while amassing wealth and power for themselves. It seems to be a worldwide phenomenon. And I want a leader who will fight against it.
@gnocchiwizard
·
Replying to @TEAM_CAPSLOCK
it's a complete transformation of the relationship between government and the governed, where once inalienable rights become contingent on the ABSENCE of an emergency, and the emergency can be anything government says it is, including a seasonal respiratory virus.
...it drives me up the wall that so many people consider it a niche concern. like no, the question is do people have basic rights or can those rights be revoked, without any due process or democratic check, for entire populations with the stroke of a pen?
https://twitter.com/gnocchiwizard/statu ... 23368?s=20The cynical take is that DeSantis is being groomed to be the R version of an Obama, with similar results if he ultimately makes it the the White House.
But for now, it's difficult not to appreciate why he won by such a margin.
------
Lastly (for now), we'd be remiss without including a reference to the brewing shitstorm Re: the FTX/'SBF' scandal, likely to overtake Madoff as one of the most epic scams in recent memory, and it may not be close. We already have a thread here in RI on this topic.
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=42362But as more info emerges (along with disinfo/misinfo, poisoned wells, misdirections, etc.), it appears the current Dem party is at least waist-deep in corruption... even more so than what'd be expected for an Administration/Political Party of a given era.
A couple samples here that scratch the surface -- much more to follow in the weeks/months ahead on this.
Caveat Lectorhttps://www.theblaze.com/news/ftx-sam-b ... um=twitterCollapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX had ties to Ukrainian government, WEF, and top Biden adviser...
Within the span of a few days, FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried – known in the industry as “SBF” – lost nearly all of his $16 billion fortune in what Bloomberg called "one of history’s greatest-ever destructions of wealth."
On Friday, the Bahamas-based FTX was forced to file for bankruptcy after $473 million of its funds were stolen in a hack of the cryptocurrency exchange. Customers rushed to withdraw their funds, but it was too late.
...
Sam Bankman-Fried gives millions to the Democratic PartyBefore his cryptocurrency exchange collapsed, Bankman-Fried was a major financier of the Democratic Party.
MarketWatch reported, "SBF contributed more than $5 million to Joe Biden and groups supporting him during his 2020 presidential campaign. He said he was motivated by Biden’s 'generic stability and decision-making process.'"
Bankman-Fried gave Democrats nearly $37 million in the 2021-2022 election cycle, according to OpenSecrets. SBF was the second-biggest individual donor to the Democrats, only to be surpassed by $128 million from George Soros.In May, Bankman-Fried said he expected to donate "north of $100 million" to Democrats in the 2024 presidential election, but vowed to have a "soft ceiling" of political spending of $1 billion if former President Donald Trump ran again.The Washington Free Beacon reported that Bankman-Fried met with top Biden adviser Steve Ricchetti on April 22 and May 12, according to White House visitor logs.
Gabe Bankman-Fried – SBF's brother who handles the billionaire's political operations – visited the White House on March 7, according to the outlet.
SBF largely funded the Democratic Protect Our Future PAC that only launched in May 2022. SBF's brother said the PAC was formed to "stop the next pandemic."In May, Gabe Bankman-Fried said of the Protect Our Future PAC, "If this is a weird crypto play, I certainly have not been informed about it. I want to stop the next pandemic. That is really my one and only goal here... I think over time, people will realize that."
Bankman-Fried's mother is also a major fundraiser for DemocratsBankman-Fried's mother, Barbara Fried, is a Stanford professor, and has "written extensively on questions of distributive justice, in the areas of tax policy, property theory, and political theory." She is also the co-founder of the Mind the Gap political action committee that was established in 2018 to help Democrats win elections.
Vox published a glowing article about Mind the Gap in January 2020 titled: "Inside the secretive Silicon Valley group that has funneled over $20 million to Democrats.""What is also unusual is that Mind the Gap is led not by highly experienced political hands, but by academics with no professional backgrounds as fundraisers," the Vox article reads. "The group’s leaders are a pair of Stanford law professors: Barbara Fried, who has no apparent campaign experience, and Paul Brest, the former president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Graham Gottlieb, a Stanford fellow who served in junior roles for former President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign and in his White House, is its executive director."
Vox notes, "Backers include people like Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, San Francisco power broker Ron Conway, and a coterie of major Democratic donors from across Silicon Valley, including fundraiser Amy Rao."
The FTX connection to the Ukrainian government and WEFCuriously, the Ukrainian government launched a cryptocurrency donation website in March that was backed by FTX.
CoinDesk reported in March, "'Aid for Ukraine,' which has the backing of crypto exchange FTX, staking platform Everstake, and Ukraine’s Kuna exchange, will route donated crypto to the National Bank of Ukraine, Everstake’s Head of Growth Vlad Likhuta told CoinDesk. Ukraine’s crypto-savvy Ministry of Digital Transformation is also involved."An Everstake press release stated, "Aid For Ukraine is cooperating with the cryptocurrency exchange FTX which converts crypto funds received into fiat and sends the donations to the National Bank of Ukraine. This marks the first-ever instance of a cryptocurrency exchange directly cooperating with a public financial entity to provide a conduit for crypto donations. Earlier this month, FTX already converted $1 million worth of SOL and transferred it to the National Bank of Ukraine."Bankman-Fried said at the time:
At the onset of the conflict in Ukraine, FTX felt the need to provide assistance in any way it could. By working with the Ministry of Digital Transformation to set up payment rails and facilitate the conversion of crypto donations into fiat currency, we have given the National Bank of Ukraine the ability to deliver aid and resources to the people who need it most. We are grateful for the opportunity to work with Sergey and the Everstake team as they continue to work tirelessly in helping Ukrainians as they suffer from this conflict.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) lists FTX as a partner, and provides a link to the exchange's website.
Sounds very much like a money laundering operation, eh?
If
The Blaze is not to taste, perhaps the Financial Times offers a bit more legitimacy:
https://www.ft.com/content/428c7800-c72 ... 76fea6e263Sam Bankman-Fried’s fall cuts off big source of funds for US Democrats
FTX entrepreneur has emerged as the second-biggest donor to liberal groups after George Soros
Stefania Palma and Courtney Weaver in Washington, Caitlin Gilbert in New York
16 HOURS AGO
Sam Bankman-Fried stormed on to the US political scene with multimillion-dollar donations that led lawmakers, particularly Democrats, to believe he was ushering in the next generation of donors. But in a matter of days, his business empire collapsed into bankruptcy and the prospect of millions more in donations evaporated.
Before the fall of Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange FTX, the entrepreneur had emerged as the second-largest donor to Democrats after George Soros. He had vowed to give up to $1bn to political candidates linked to causes he supported, a pledge from which he later backed away.
He also became one of the most prominent crypto representatives in Washington, supporting digital asset legislation and hiring former regulators as advisers.
Bradley Beychok, co-founder of the Democratic super political action committee (Pac) American Bridge 21st Century, said Bankman-Fried “came on the scene out of nowhere [and] became a large supporter of different causes and candidates very quickly,” adding that he had built an “organised campaign”.
But a liquidity crisis that has forced the 30-year-old’s $32bn business empire into bankruptcy has erased a potential pool of funds linked to a seemingly reliable player in an often volatile industry.
“Sam didn’t live up to his commitments,” said one Democratic lobbyist working in the crypto space. Bankman-Fried’s grand spending promises had been “more bluster than action”, the lobbyist added.
The entrepreneur was the second-largest donor to Democratic-leaning groups during the latest midterm elections, spending $36mn. Soros spent $126mn, but the Pac he supported with that large donation only spent about $15mn this cycle.
The majority of Bankman-Fried’s donations, about $27mn, went to the Protect Our Future Pac, which supported candidates that prioritised pandemic prevention, one of his interests. It endorsed 25 Democrats in congressional races this cycle, of which 18 have so far won their respective races. Chief among these were Virginia representative Abigail Spanberger and Florida representative-elect Maxwell Frost, who at 25 will be Congress’s first Generation Z member.
...
very much a developing story, with a number of sordid details/speculation [SBF's
currently unknown source(s) of funding/initial capital; his potential use as a stooge to faciltiate more stringent regulation/centralization in the crypto space as another incremental step forward towards CBDC; FTX as money laundering vehicle between Biden Admin and the Ukraine; potential ties to Epstein human trafficking/blackmail operations, etc.] to be expanded, or not, in the weeks ahead, likely in the appropriate thread(s).
---
Side-note: it may be welcome news to a number of you (or otherwise it may garner little more than an indifferent shrug -- I've no delusions of
grandeur here in this niche forum that somehow persists...), but I'll need to cut myself off from posting for a bit, as I've a number of work-related and personal matters that will need to take priority over online ruminations.
God speed.
