The Minnesota Senate election was very close: GOP incumbent Norm Coleman led liberal ex-comedian Al Franken by just 725 votes. As a result, Franken demanded a recount. The Minnesota Canvassing Board is mischievously changing the result of the election by treating clear votes for Coleman as non-votes, or even as votes for Franken. Liberal blogs like Daily Kos are already celebrating the anticipated result of the shenanigans: a Franken win. The Minnesota Secretary of State, who oversees voting, is backed by the left-wing groups MoveOn.Org and ACORN. ACORN has a long history of voter fraud and financial fraud. Local election officials have also contrived to inflate Franken’s vote totals, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Seizing the Minnesota Senate seat will give Democrats a commanding majority of 59 seats in the Senate, allowing them to defeat almost all filibusters. If the Democrats get a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, they’ll pass so-called “card-check” legislation, abolishing the secret ballot in elections over whether to unionize a workplace. Congressional leaders and Obama have backed card-check legislation, which could lead to intimidation and bullying aimed at employees who do not want to work in a union shop. Clayton Cramer, who grew up in a union household, explains why the “card-check” bill favored by liberal lawmakers and Obama may lead to physical intimidation of workers, and recounts how workers in the past were subjected to beatings and worse for criticizing union conduct or declining to join a union.
The Powerline blog features continued coverage of the Minnesota Senate election shenanigans. A Bloomberg News commentary also discusses the shenanigans in Minnesota.
USA Today has an editorial opposing a massive proposed bailout for the automakers. The automakers would be leaner, more efficient, and more able to survive in the long run if they filed for bankruptcy in order to abrogate their absurdly generous union contracts, rather than being bailed out by taxpayers to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. Airlines keep operating all the time after filing for bankruptcy. By contrast, when England bailed out its automakers in the 1970s, at great cost, the results were disastrous and unsuccessful. But the unions want Obama to support a costly taxpayer bailout of the automakers, and so he is pushing for it. Given the union-backed incoming Democratic Congress, he’ll likely get it. But Declan McCullagh explains why bailing out Detroit is a dumb idea.
The Democrats are approaching a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, having apparently picked up the Alaska Senate seat they seemed to have lost on election day. They already have 57 Senate seats, but will pick up at least one, and perhaps as many as three, additional seats. They may pick up an additional seat in Minnesota, as a result of voter fraud, as the Wall Street Journal explained yesterday. (We previously chronicled suspicious occurrences in the vote-counting process, which is overseen by an official with ties to MoveOn.Org and the left-wing group ACORN, which has a history of voter fraud and financial fraud).
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In Minnesota, votes are appearing, seemingly out of thin air, for the liberal Senate candidate (and onetime comedian) Al Franken. Attorney Scott Johnson says that “the election appears to be in the process of being stolen.”
Incumbent Senator Norm Coleman led in election-day results, but his lead keeps shrinking and shrinking, and is now down to an infinitesmal 200 votes out of more than 2 million votes cast.
For example, a bunch of new votes suddenly appeared in Minnesota’s Mountain Iron precinct. But as Attorney John Hinderaker notes, “Mountain Iron uses optical scanning, so the Coleman campaign asked for a copy of the tape documenting the ballots cast on election night. St. Louis County responded by providing a tape that includes the newly-added 100 votes, and is dated November 2–the Sunday before the election. St. Louis County reportedly denies being able to produce the genuine tape from election night, even though Minnesota law, as I understand it, requires that tape to be signed by the election judges and publicly displayed.”
(As John Lott notes, it’s doubtful that the new votes are valid, but previously overlooked, ballots. If they were, one would expect the vote totals for other candidates, not just Franken, to rise as well. But even as new votes for Franken suddenly appear, other vote totals remain almost the same. Franken is getting nearly 3 times as many “newly-discovered” votes as Obama, for example.)
Minnesota’s Secretary of State, who oversees the election process, was backed by the left-wing groups MoveOn.Org and ACORN. (ACORN has a long history of voter fraud and financial fraud).
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