George Soros gave Ivanka's husband's business a $250 million credit line in 2015 per WSJ. Soros is also an investor in Jared's business.

Saturday, November 26, 2022

Russian citizen is shocked after viewing depravity in Donbass which non-democratic US forces its taxpayers to fund. Russia is loaded with ‘Western’ propagandists selling lies about ‘evil Russia’

8/16/22, “I took a LIBERAL, [Russian citizen] ANTI WAR Protester to see the truth in Donbass:”

 

8/16/22, “I took a LIBERAL,[Russian citizen] ANTI WAR Protester to see the truth in Donbass,and THIS Happened!" John Mark Dougan, You Tube

“This is my most powerful interview yet. I took [Russian citizen] Maria, a fierce liberal, anti-war protester to the FRONT LINES of the war in the Donbass to see things for herself, to speak to the people for herself. This woman, with balls of steel, even walked with me through the streets of Svyatogorsk, with Ukrainian snipers just 200 meters away, to speak to civilians trapped in their basements and bring them food.”

Above, graves of children in a Donbass playground viewed by Maria, the Russian citizen interviewed in video

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Below: 600 held hostage in Donbass hospital basement by Ukraine troops:

Above, basement of hospital in Donbass town of Volnovakha Maria visited where US taxpayer funded Ukraine troops held 600 people hostage for 6 months including children, patients, wounded people, any citizens they rounded up.

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Added: Basement living promised by US puppet, Ukraine Pres. Poroshenko in 2014: “Their children will hole up in the basements – this is how we win the war!” [Eng. subs.]”…"Our children will go to schools and kindergartens–theirs [in Donbass] will hole up in the basements.”…10/23/2014, Speech at Odessa Opera House

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Above, map showing town of Volnovakha, location of hospital in the basement of which 600 people were held hostage by Ukraine troops.

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Below, results of 2010 Ukraine presidential election which were violently overturned by US in 2014:

Above, “During the 2010 Ukrainian presidential election, most people in Donbas [as well as Crimea, and other areas of southern and eastern Ukraine] voted for Viktor Yanulovych,” whom the US violently removed in 2014. The US never asked Donbass or Crimean voters if they wanted their elected president violently overthrown by the UN-backed US nor if they wished to become a US colony subservient to US puppets.US planned its 2014 Ukraine overthrow for two years: It is the degree to which [US oligarch] Soros provided finances, logistics, and other support to the Ukrainian coup plotters in 2012, two years before the Euromaidan uprising, that is noteworthy. OSF and its affiliates provided entire buildings, office space, computers, software, broadband Internet, videoconferencing equipment, vehicles, travel to the United States, and other material for the Euromaidan uprising. This was all done with the cooperation of the US and Swedish embassies in Kiev, USAID, the Carnegie Endowment, the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA), and the Central Intelligence Agency-linked [US taxpayer funded] National Endowment for Democracy (NED).”…In 2015, a year “after the revolution,” Maidan protesters were shocked that oligarchs were still in charge and nothing had improved….“In his March 2015 memo [US oligarch] Soros further writes that Ukrainian President Poroshenko’s “first priority must be to regain control of financial markets,” in which Soros assures Poroshenko that he would be ready to assist:

“I am ready to call Jack Lew of the US Treasury

to sound him out about the swap agreement.””

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Added: Maps of Ukraine and surrounding areas:

Above, map of Ukraine showing Dnieper River

Above, Russian speaking areas highlighted

Above, map highlighting areas in eastern Ukraine.

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Above, map showing town of Svyatogorsk in Eastern Ukraine visited by Russian citizen speaking in video

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Added: “State Dept’s Mission: Coup d’etat, Technocratic Tyranny

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Added: Endless US aggressions are not directed primarily against foreign tyrants: for even as they put on a great show of “liberating” foreign peoples, they are in the process of enslaving the American people.”March 2003, Justin Raimondo

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Tuesday, November 22, 2022

Trump administration’s two deadliest enemies were Jared and Ivanka Kushner, twin vipers known around the West Wing as “the Democrats.” The two quickly ended MAGA as a philosophical or governing force-Michael Walsh, The Pipeline

“The Trump administration was kneecapped by its own naivete and betrayed by its two deadliest enemies, Jared and Ivanka Kushner, the twin vipers known around the West Wing as “the Democrats.””

11/21/22, THE COLUMN: The Sting,” Michael Walsh, Pipeline

to the disaster of 2020,

when the Trump forces refused to take the re-election campaign seriously…

to the most recent congressional elections, in which the GOP barely recaptured the House but blew the Senate again, it’s been one disaster after another. Why, it’s almost been as if the fix has been in the whole time!

It’s not like there was no warning. Once the Democrats miraculously cleaned out the GOP in formerly red Orange County, Calif., in 2018 it should have been clear even to such notable dummies as Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy that

the game was no longer being played on Game Day,

but weeks and even months before,

plus a few days after the polls had “closed.”

[In 2018 midterms, GOP wanted to give the House back to democrats, so GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan left 38 races with no Republican candidate on the ballot. Only 3 districts lacked a democrat candidate. Afterward, Paul Ryan went on Fox News grinning. He showed us who's boss].

(continuing): "Early voting, “harvested” voting, “absentee” voting was a Tammany wet dream come to life:

who doesn’t like their chances on Election Day when

more than half the votes are already in the bag

and you know to an absolute certainty where they went?

Add to this the unconstitutional changes to the voting laws rammed through in blue states

during the Covid hoax,

and the Dems were in the catbird seat long before Nov. 8.

The old joke used to be that

the dead vote was critical

in Democratic precincts but now this could literally be true, since the

votes of dead people could already be in the can,

not to mention the candidates themselves,

well before election day….

Polls? We don’t need no stinkin’ polls! Besides, why have a traditional one-man, one-day election—a binding snapshot in time—when you can have

a permanently floating crap game, one in which

you’re always ahead no matter when it stops?

“Cheating” scream the die-hards on the Right, playing right into the hands of those who fixed the game in the first place.

“Stop the steal!” they shout,

when the steal is now part of the game.

The “2000 Mules“…may or may not have existed,

but the point is:

they didn’t matter.

They were simply the fat ladies and strong men of the sideshows,

meant to distract the gullible and easily panicked

into ignoring the fact

that their pockets have already been picked,

their cars stolen and on their way to chop shops in Tijuana,

and their home repossessed.

Thus, as I mentioned last week,

there’s no need for “cheating.”

Thanks to Tammany Hall’s centuries-long perfection of electoral chicanery and the Republicans’ willful blindness,

the system has become the steal.

Typical con men, the Democrats preach the “sanctity” of the vote when what they really lust after is the roundheels of the ballot. There are no virgins in this whorehouse, just the soiled doves of the media who gussy them up for the traveling salesmen and visiting firemen, and then collect their pimp money in the back alley from

the bankers and the lawyers who like the system just fine the way it is.

It’s a great racket: if you play your cards right, you can deal yourself a whole new hand at the closing bell and walk away with all the chips

while you opponent

impotently sputters in frustration.

And should the marks finally catch on and start adopting some of your tactics,

it hardly matters.

California has already shown the way to eliminating the two-party system in its state elections

via the “jungle primary” system,

and just now solidly red Alaska

has “elected” a Democrat to fill its lone House seat thanks to an enormity

called “ranked-choice” voting.

The mouthpiece of the Democrat machine,

the New York Times, explains it all for you:

“Mary Peltola, whose victory in a special election on Wednesday makes her

the first Democrat in nearly half a century to represent Alaska in the House,

won the contest for the remainder of Representative Don Young’s term

with an upbeat campaign that appealed to Alaskan interests

and the electorate’s independent streak.

But Alaska’s new voting system also played

a big role in Ms. Peltola’s

three-percentage-point victory over former Gov. Sarah Palin,

her Republican opponent.

Ms. Peltola, who will become the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress and the first woman to hold the House seat,

won at least in part because voters had more choices.

While more voters initially picked a Republican candidate, that didn’t matter.

Given a second choice, many Republican voters opted for a Democrat — Ms. Peltola — over Ms. Palin… When voters have more choices, they’re less likely to vote along strict party lines, reducing polarization and giving independent-minded or

more centrist candidates a better shot.”...

Bet you didn’t know that

elections will soon no longer be binary;

pretty soon we’ll have as many “choices” as Facebook has genders.

So step right up, suckers and try your luck.

Remember, until the country returns to day-and-date elections, between limited hours,

in person only, with ironclad identification,

there will be no end to this mischief. The Democrats, who boast of being “the oldest voter-based political party in the world,”

are simply better at it than anybody else.

And if nothing meaningful is done, when the GOP loses again in two years, the 2,000 donkeys of the DNC will look at their “friends” at the RNC and say like Henry Gondorff to Doyle Lonnegan: “Tough luck… but that’s what you get for playing with your head up your ass!””

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Michael Walsh is a journalist, author, and screenwriter. He was for 16 years the music critic and a foreign correspondent for Time Magazine. His works include the novels As Time Goes By, And All the Saints, and the bestselling “Devlin” series of NSA thrillers; as well as the nonfiction bestseller, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace and its sequel, The Fiery Angel. Last Stands, a study of military history from the Greeks to the present, was published by St. Martin’s Press in December 2019. He is also the editor of Against the Great Reset: 18 Theses Contra the New World Order, published on Oct. 18, 2022.”
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Comment: Mob rule will be so much nicer, no need for arguments. It was only a matter of time before taxpayers were more formally seen as voiceless slaves of the US military state. Our silence has long been sought by the “Uniparty,” the “bipartisan” establishment, and preached by groups like Bloomberg’s “No Labels.” Always in the same kindly tone used in the 1956 classic movie, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers: It will be so much nicer when everyone thinks alike! You’ll see! No more arguments, no need for them!...Republican voters have never actually had a political party behind them anyway. “Elections” have properly been replaced by a multifaceted mob event meant to stifle individual voices. “Voters” who pay all the bills are effectively silenced. Too bad my father gave up years of his life fighting in WWII for a slave state. Entire US military should be cancelled. US should be broken up into at least 3 parts. This mob rule must end. Image from IMDB, 1956 film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

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Friday, November 18, 2022

MLB signed long term deal with now bankrupt cryptocurrency FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried, even put FTX emblems on Umpires' uniforms in 2021

7/13/2021,Umpires are wearing FTX patches on their shirts tonight. This is an advertisement and will remain on there for the rest of the season,” sportslogosnet twitter…11/18/2022, FTX files bankruptcy.

Financial terms of the MLB sponsorship weren’t disclosed, though an FTX spokesman told CoinDesk it’s a five-year deal.”.."FTX.US will become MLB’s first-ever umpire uniform patch partner.”

6/23/2021, FTX REACHES AGREEMENT WITH MLB PLAYERS INC. FOR GROUP PLAYER RIGHTS,prnewswire via FTX.US

“Leading Cryptocurrency Exchange Partners with America’s National Pastime to Expand Brand Awareness Worldwide”

BERKELEY, Calif., June 23, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — FTX Trading Limited and West Realm Shires Services Inc., owners and operators of FTX.COM and FTX.US (collectively, “FTX”), and Major League Baseball (MLB), today announced a new long-term, global partnership. FTX.US has partnered with MLB in relation to the US, and FTX.COM internationally. FTX.COM and FTX.US have, together, established FTX as the Official Cryptocurrency Exchange brand of MLB. This deal, 

the first-ever partnership between a professional sports league and a cryptocurrency exchange, was established to create increased brand awareness for FTX

and continued innovation for MLB.

In addition, FTX.US has formed an agreement with MLB Players Inc., a subsidiary of the MLB Players Association that manages all of the commercial activities for the organization.  FTX will have group player rights

which allows the organization to use

highlights of players in content creation.

FTX.US will become MLB’s first-ever umpire uniform patch partner. Beginning with the MLB All-Star Game, presented by Mastercard, on July 13th, an FTX.US logo patch will adorn

all umpire uniforms for regular season, Postseason, Spring Training and Jewel Event games.

This new agreement also provides FTX with worldwide marketing rights associated with MLB marks, logos and special events. Fans will see applicable FTX brand promotion around nationally televised MLB games, MLB.com, MLB Network, MLB.TV, social media platforms and more high impact baseball media. FTX and MLB will announce additional partnership activation details at a later date.

FTX CEO and Founder Sam Bankman-Fried commented on the news, 

“It’s an honor for FTX to be the first cryptocurrency exchange

to be associated with the history and tradition of America’s national pastime.

FTX.COM and FTX.US are excited to enter this first-of-its-kind partnership with Major League Baseball. At FTX, we strive each day to make a positive global impact, and there is no better

partner for us to achieve this goal with than with MLB and its international fan base.

We look forward to announcing further details of our long-term partnership throughout the remainder of this year.”

MLB Chief Revenue Officer, Noah Garden stated, “This is an incredibly exciting announcement for everyone in Major League Baseball

as we partner with a global leader in the early stages of their unbelievable growth.

FTX quickly cultivated itself into a worldwide leader in the ever-evolving cryptocurrency industry and continues to build on 

its already impressive reputation.

Our fans have been early adopters in using new technologies to engage with our game. 

We cannot wait to start collaborating with Sam and the entire FTX team.”

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About FTX.US

FTX.US is a US-regulated cryptocurrency exchange, built from the ground up. Our mission is for FTX.US to grow the digital currency ecosystem, offer US traders a platform that inspires their loyalty and become the market leading US cryptocurrency exchange by volume over the next two years.

To learn more about FTX.US, please visit: https://ftx.us/

About FTX.COM

FTX.COM is a cryptocurrency exchange built by traders, for traders. It offers innovative products, including industry-leading derivatives, options and volatility products, tokenized stocks, prediction markets, leveraged tokens and an OTC desk. FTX.COM strives to be an intuitive yet powerful platform for all kinds of users, and to be the most innovative exchange in the industry.  FTX.COM has grown quickly since its founding, becoming one of the most respected cryptocurrency exchanges in the world in less than 2 years.

To learn more about FTX.COM, please visit: https://ftx.com/

FTX.COM is not available to US residents or residents of other prohibited jurisdictions, as set out in its Terms of Service.

About MLB Players, Inc.

MLB Players, Inc. is the business arm of the Major League Baseball Players Association. The Major League Baseball Players Association (www.MLBPLAYERS.com) is the collective bargaining representative for all professional baseball players of the thirty Major League Baseball teams and serves as the exclusive group licensing agent for commercial and licensing activities involving active Major League Baseball Players. On behalf of its members, it operates the Players Choice licensing program and the Players Choice Awards, which benefit the needy through the Major League Baseball Players Trust (www.PlayersTrust.org), a charitable foundation established and run entirely by Major League Baseball players. Follow: @MLB_Players; @Peloteros_MLB; @MLBPlayersTrust; @MLBPlayersInc and @MLBPlayersMedia.


Matt Bourne or David Hochman, MLB Communications, (212) 931-7878, mlbpressbox.com, @MLB_PR


Jay Morakis, M Group Strategic Communications, (646) 859-5951, ftx@mgroupsc.com


Silvia Alvarez, Major League Baseball Players Association, (646) 285-1819, mlbplayers.com, @MLB_PLAYERS

 

SOURCE FTX.US

https://ftx.com

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Added: Financial terms of the MLB sponsorship weren’t disclosed, though an FTX spokesman told CoinDesk it’s a five-year deal.”

6/23/2021, FTX Strikes Sponsorship Deal With MLB, Umpires to Wear Crypto Exchange’s Logo,Zack Seward, Coin Desk via Yahoo Finance

“Fresh on the heels of the unveiling of the [Miami Heat] FTX Arena in Miami, the crypto exchange is becoming the Official Cryptocurrency Exchange brand of MLB,” FTX and Major League Baseball said in an announcement Wednesday.

The data-minded traders at FTX crunched the numbers and found sports naming rights to yield the best return on investment for their marketing spending, a source with knowledge of the matter told CoinDesk. Earlier this month, FTX reached a $210 million naming-rights deal with esports team TSM.

Under the baseball deal, FTX branding will appear on all umpire uniforms starting at the All-Star Game in Denver on July 13 and continue into the postseason.

MLB is calling FTX its “first-ever umpire uniform patch partner.”

An MLB spokesman said images of the patch are not yet available.

“FTX.COM and FTX.US are excited to enter this first-of-its-kind partnership with Major League Baseball,”

FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried said in the statement.

“We look forward to announcing further details of our long-term partnership throughout the remainder of this year.”

In a tweet, Bankman-Fried said FTX and MLB have plans on 

“collaborating on products and experiences together.” The deal

includes a provision with the MLB Players Association to “use highlights of players in content creation,” according to Wednesday’s press release.

Naming rights for the Miami Heat arena went for $135 million in a 19-year deal.

Financial terms of the MLB sponsorship weren’t disclosed,

though an FTX spokesman told CoinDesk

it’s a five-year deal.

Calls to the MLB Players Association were not returned by press time.”

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Tuesday, November 15, 2022

Democrats didn’t ‘steal’ 2008 US Senate seat that went to Al Franken after 7 months of recounts and court cases. Dem. lawyers treated each ballot as a client with interests, recount teams assembled months ahead-Ed Morrissey, August 2009

Rather than “stealing” the election, Democrat lawyers simply treated each ballot in the 2008-2009 Minnesota recount as if it were a client with interests. After 7 months of recounts and court cases Democrats won a US Senate seat over an incumbent Republican because they took the matter much more seriously than Establishment Republicans did. The win gave Democrats a supermajority of 60 votes in the US Senate. GOP experienced a similar loss in 2004 in election for governor of Washington State. “Franken had eight to 10 lawyers for every Coleman attorney.”

11/28/2016, Flashback: Have Republicans learned their lessons from the Franken-Coleman recount?,  Hot Air, Ed Morrissey

“In the summer of 2009, the state of Minnesota conducted a recount that had the nation holding its breath.

Would Al Franken unseat incumbent Norm Coleman,

and allow Democrats a filibuster-proof majority in the US Senate?

After seven months, that’s exactly what happened. Townhall Magazine commissioned me to write an investigative cover piece on how Democrats flipped an Election Night deficit into a recount victory. (At the time, Townhall and Salem had not yet bought Hot Air.)

Rather than skullduggery,

I found that Republicans had been outfought

after ignoring lessons from a 2004 defeat in Washington [State].

The painful loss provides lessons for Republicans — but have they learned them? Now that recounts will take place in Wisconsin and perhaps other states, it’s time to recall exactly what happened and what Republicans must do to win recounts decisively. Democrats will come prepared to push to the limits of the law, and Donald Trump had better make sure his campaign is prepared to play at the same level. This will be the first time that the article has appeared since August 2009, 

and the first time ever on line….

FRANKEN’S VICTORY: HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?

As the nation celebrated the end of a tortuously long presidential campaign Nov. 4, 2008, and the decisive result that would eliminate any hint of uncertainty of the winner and loser, Minnesota looked into the abyss of a dead heat for its most important statewide race. Thanks to the long coattails of Barack Obama and

the determination of Minnesota Democrats

to make sure all of their party’s voters’ ballots were counted,

Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) candidate, comedian and political pundit Al Franken had battled incumbent Republican Sen. Norm Coleman essentially to a draw. Only a few hundred votes separated the two men that night, and only a few hundred votes separated them in the end—but those few votes would give Democrats a supermajority of 60 votes in the Senate with Franken’s win.

This process would challenge Minnesota’s pride in its clean politics and test its confidence in its electoral system. More, it would eventually show that

the upstart politician prepared better than the experienced, seasoned statesman

and that Republicans failed to learn lessons from Washington state in 2004 about how to fight recounts. In the end, the difference would come down to

how hard each campaign was willing to fight—within the rules—in order to prevail.

In the days immediately after the election, the Coleman campaign was dismayed to see the vote totals change repeatedly—and always in favor of Franken. On Election Night, Coleman had held an unofficial 726-vote lead.

The next day, that dropped to an official 477.

Within a week, his lead dropped to 215, thanks to errors like the one committed by Pine County’s Partridge Township, where election officials simply left a digit out of the hundreds place for Al Franken’s votes in counting ballots by hand, adding another 100 after the initial count.

However, going into the recount, Coleman held that narrow lead and had every expectation that the recount would not change the results—as history shows, recounts rarely do, although in an election where almost 3 million ballots were cast, the margin of error for a 215-point lead seemed very thin indeed.

In large part, though, that confidence came from the knowledge that most Minnesota voters cast optical-scan ballots, which work in several ways to eliminate error. Voters fill in bubbles next to the candidates’ names and feed the ballot into the counting machines located in the precincts. If the ballot cannot be read, the ballot gets spit back into the hands of the voter, who can request a new ballot to correctly complete. Optical-scan ballots can quickly be counted and recounted mechanically and, unlike punch-card ballots, do not degrade from repeated handling. Counting machines can rapidly complete their work and transmit results back to the counties.

Minnesotans had every expectation that they could avoid a Florida 2000-type controversy and not just have a clean, reliable election, but a clean, reliable recount, if necessary. In that, Minnesota largely succeeded, albeit painfully and not without criticism of its processes. However, the real historical parallel was not the hotly disputed presidential election between George Bush and Al Gore in Florida but a 2004 gubernatorial race in Washington

in which Democrats put to use the lessons of Florida—

lessons Minnesota Republicans failed to heed.

AN EVERGREEN LESSON

As previously noted, most recounts do not change Election Day results, but the norm did not prevail in the election between Dino Rossi [R] and Christine Gregoire [D] in 2004. The two candidates for governor in Washington came down to a 261-vote lead for Rossi when the initial election results were certified Nov. 17, 2004, and

only 42 votes

separated the two when the first machine recount was completed Nov. 30.

Gregoire then demanded a manual recount, which took a month to complete. When it was over,

Gregoire had captured the lead, and

Rossi challenged the results in court.

The Washington election crisis did have key differences from the Minnesota Senate election four years later. While the conduct of the election itself in Minnesota was mostly considered fair, allegations of improprieties had filled the Rossi-Gregoire battle.

Much of the focus in Washington fell on the

issue of illegal felon voting, which both sides claimed had skewed the results in favor of their opponents.

Both sides took those challenges to court, but

Rossi’s team made a critical error. They assumed that the very notion and the

alleged scope of illegal felon voting would be enough to convince the judge to throw out the election

or, failing that, to proportionally deduct votes from each candidate

to correct the size of the alleged distortion.

Judge John Bridges did neither. Instead, he stuck to the statute and considered only cases

where each side could substantiate specific illegal voting.

Rossi’s team had not presented any,

where Gregoire’s team found a handful of illegal felon votes for Rossi

and presented testimony to support the challenges. As the Seattle Post-Intelligencer put it afterward,

Rossi spent millions of dollars and five months of court time

to lose four votes and the election.

Democrats grasped a valuable lesson: learn the law, do the groundwork and overwhelm the opposition through massive amounts of

vote-specific arguments.

TWO VERY DIFFERENT TEAMS

Four years later [2008], the Coleman team faced off against the Franken campaign, but as recount volunteers tell Townhall, they represented two different approaches. The Coleman recount team was staffed by Minnesota veterans

used to the collegiality of the state’s political establishment.

Franken, ironically, had built a team of seasoned national professionals, people who understood how Gregoire won the election challenge in Washington and had every intention of applying those lessons.

Scott Johnson of the Power Line blog introduced the Coleman cast in an April National Review column: “[T]he attorneys who publicly led Coleman’s team through the recount (local lawyers Fritz Knaak and Tony Trimble)

appeared like Pop Warner players going up against an NFL team.

When Coleman filed the election contest challenging the result of the recount, he brought in a new lawyer—the respected local criminal-defense attorney Joe Friedberg—to represent him in the election-contest trial. This has not proved a winning formula.”

In contrast, Franken had his team

prepared for a recount even before Election Day

and had assembled, well, an NFL team to conduct it. In fact, as Doug Grow reported for the left-leaning MinnPost.com, Franken’s team began strategizing for a recount when the race became razor-thin two months earlier:

“Many not only give [campaign manager Stephanie] Schriock credit for the success Franken had in closing the gap during the campaign but in being so

well positioned to succeed in the recount process. The first recount plans were being

drawn up as soon as September.

The day after the election, Schriock and the entire Franken staff had put the plan in place.

“[Marc] Elias, the top legal adviser for Team Franken on the recount,

was involved before the polls were even closed.

Schriock also had set in motion her plan that, at its peak,

had 2,000 people working as either volunteers or in paid positions,

to be in the field to observe recounting at polling places across the state.

All were trained.

“There was never—not for a second—a letdown between the campaign and the recount.”

The Franken team had a clear mission. Since they were behind in votes, they needed to either find new Franken votes or discredit Coleman votes in order to close the gap. Learning from the Gregoire campaign, they trained their volunteers to understand the limits of Minnesota law

and to aggressively challenge

ballots.

Coleman’s team, on the other hand, had a much more delicate mission, as they explained to their volunteers. Each of the precinct workers interviewed for this story had the same description of the instructions given by the campaign:

Do not get overly aggressive in challenging ballots.

They did not want to be seen as the campaign that “disenfranchised” Minnesota voters,

as successful ballot challenges do by removing ballots from the count.

One Coleman volunteer explained the instruction as an explicit message from Team Coleman that

“we don’t expect to be in the business of suppressing Franken votes, and

we’re not trying to find new Coleman votes.…Don’t go out of your way to make what we think will be frivolous challenges.”

This instruction came specifically about overvotes—instances where a voter filled in two or more bubbles on the same race, which would have led the counting machines to reject the ballot for that race.

Franken’s team latched onto the overvotes

and tried to argue on as many as possible that

the intent of the voter was to support Franken. Coleman’s team knew from the beginning that Franken’s volunteers would use this strategy, another Coleman recount worker said, but believed that

“we should not engage them like that.”

But according to Minnesota law, as the state discovered during the process, the question of voter intent on overvotes is a legitimate area of challenge in a recount. In this case, it appears that both campaigns understood the parameters of action,

but Coleman’s team simply didn’t want to avail itself of the

entire range of action allowed by Minnesota statutes.

They trained their recount volunteers to engage only on the most obvious cases and to refrain especially from giving the appearance that the Republicans wanted to invalidate ballots on a massive scale.

Predictably, this led to many missed opportunities for Coleman challenges.

Because of the training received, the GOP volunteers assumed that many of the Franken team’s challenges in the precincts were invalid and would be tossed out by the Canvassing Board, the bipartisan panel that ruled on each challenged ballot.

They were shocked to see the types of challenges later upheld by the panel,

and they lamented the passive manner

of the Coleman team’s recount effort, especially in the opening days. One volunteer estimated that he could have produced between 10-20 ballot challenges himself that the Canvassing Board would have upheld, based on their later rulings.

Franken’s team didn’t rest on its organizational edge during the recount, either. They gathered information from all the precinct recounts, even using tally sheets to note trends on questionable ballots, and apparently analyzed them overnight. Coleman volunteers recall seeing coordinated efforts to focus on new issues almost every day from their counterparts during the process.

“These guys seemed to be professional recounters,”

one Coleman worker said,

and while that wasn’t literally the case, Franken got some seasoned precinct veterans—from Washington. “A lot of them [lawyers and other volunteers] had been involved in the Gregoire recount,” especially in the Minneapolis precincts, said the Coleman worker. Because Minneapolis was a heavily DFL city, the Franken campaign expected to reap more votes there, a hope that largely went unfulfilled, according to another volunteer.

Team Coleman had recount experience—in Minnesota. Rep. David Minge, DFL, lost a close election to Republican Mark Kennedy in 2000, which triggered a recount. Unlike the Franken-Coleman contest, it did not attract national support staff, and that recount was mostly a collegial affair, with both sides trying to exemplify Minnesotan values of fairness. The Coleman team had a number of Minge-Kennedy veterans but did not have the kind of hardball experience that Franken got from the Gregoire team.

The hand recount lasted 14 days, from Nov. 20 to Dec. 4. During that time, the volunteers never got an explicit message to get more assertive in their approach, but a sense of urgency eventually made it into the precincts. Some of that urgency came from a natural inclination to give a tit-for-tat reaction to the more aggressive Franken volunteers, “typical game strategy,” as one put it.

Eventually, Coleman managed to catch up to the count of challenged ballots, but as the volunteers point out, the quality of the late challenges were likely not as good as the opportunities missed earlier in the process. That would put Coleman at a serious disadvantage with the Canvassing Board. By that time, however, the die had been cast.

FRANKEN TAKES THE LEAD

At the end of the hand count, the Canvassing Board took center stage. Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, DFL, a man known for his partisan bent, appointed a well-balanced judicial panel to hear the recount challenges from both campaigns.

Two of the judges had been appointed to the bench by Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty,

one by independent former Gov. Jesse Ventura and another who had won her seat on the bench by election. For the most part, the panel took its job seriously enough that only a handful of the hundreds of decisions made on ballots were not unanimous. Even Ritchie appeared to sense that partisan actions at this juncture could create chaos in the process and put the entire effort in jeopardy of getting rejected entirely in the expected legal contest to come.

The first action from the board was a demand to both campaigns to reduce the number of challenges. Initially, more than 6,000 ballots had been challenged by both teams, and

eventually they brought it down to about 1,500.

Immediately, Coleman ran into problems with the Canvassing Board.

The team of aggressive, well-trained Franken volunteers had its match in the panel that intended to try to discern voter intent, if at all possible, rather than adopt the more “common-sensical” approach urged by Coleman trainers to their volunteers. While the Canvassing Board kept an eye towards consistency, they also

felt a mandate to determine voter intent, especially on overvotes,

a role given them by Minnesota statute

despite the rather clear and unambiguous nature of the optical-scan system. That mandate fit perfectly with the Franken approach, which used the limits of the law to argue for overvotes to count for Franken rather than get tossed or counted for Coleman—an effort not matched by their opponents.

By the time the Canvassing Board completed their work,

Franken had taken the lead by 49 votes

and the question of absentee ballots had arisen.

Franken alleged early in the recount process that thousands of absentee ballots had been erroneously rejected and wanted the recount process to address that. Coleman objected, stating that the question should come up in the contest process, which comes after the recount in Minnesota law.

Inexplicably, the Minnesota Supreme Court on Dec. 18 [2008] ordered the recount process to address the issue and declared

that the campaigns should try to agree on a standard for accepting erroneously rejected absentee ballots

rather than have the state enforce the standards themselves. As Scott Johnson notes, the Coleman campaign should have stood its ground at this point:

“The Minnesota Supreme Court held that absentee ballots identified by local officials during the recount

as wrongly rejected should be included in the recount subject to agreement of the parties (and also subject to the possibility of sanctions on the parties’ lawyers for withholding agreement in bad faith).

“The Coleman campaign had argued (correctly, in my view) that previously excluded absentee ballots should not be included in the recount. The Coleman campaign was caught flatfooted by the Minnesota Supreme Court’s December decision. Coleman should not have agreed to the inclusion of a single one of these ballots until he secured some agreement on the uniform treatment of absentee ballots.

Instead, Coleman’s team agreed to the inclusion of 933 of 1,346 previously rejected absentee ballots identified by local officials during the recount as having been improperly rejected.”

Johnson says that the court had practically handed the Coleman team the election at this point:

They could have used that ruling to block further consideration of absentee ballots until the contest phase.

Just a day later, however, the Canvassing Board calculated

that Franken had jumped into the lead based on ballot challenges.

Nevertheless, the inclusion of a portion of the absentee ballots put

Franken’s lead from a tenuous 49

to a relatively stronger 225—

where it would remain for more than three months.

SHIFTING STANDARDS

On Jan. 5, 2009—two months after the election—

the Canvassing Board certified the election results, showing that

Al Franken had unseated incumbent Norm Coleman by that 225-vote margin.

A day later, Coleman filed his election contest, the next legal step in fighting the results, and promised a tough campaign to “count every vote.”

Coleman’s court case rested on several premises, but primarily that Minnesota’s counties used varying standards in accepting absentee ballots as valid. As a remedy, Coleman wanted more of the rejected absentee ballots opened and counted,

which he insisted would provide him with the extra votes he needed to win.

Unfortunately for Coleman, his attorneys took much the same tack as Dino Rossi’s 2004 legal team.

Instead of finding individual ballots and making individual cases for inclusion,

the Coleman lawyers attempted to focus on “categories” of ballots to gain acceptance of large blocs of previously rejected ballots, many of which had been demonstrated to fail against the statutory requirements for inclusion. Those statutory requirements include matching addresses between registration information and the absentee ballot, a proper and valid signature on the external envelope of the ballot, validation of the voter registration for that precinct and the establishment that the voter had not voted in person or with another absentee ballot.

Eric Black, who covered the trial for MinnPost.com, explained that Coleman’s team argued for a consistent low standard of acceptance for absentee ballots in order to get the broadest number of new ballots to count. “At one point, they were arguing that if you were alive on Election Day and at a Minnesota address, your absentee ballot should count, and that that was the only way you could get it to a standard that could be applied uniformly,” Black recalled. “It would require you to ignore a great many things that the statutes require.”

Coleman’s team argued that his team deserved that remedy

based on the lack of uniformity of treatment of absentee ballots between the counties.

Because some invalid ballots got counted in Franken-leaning counties, they said, the only remedy was to count all of the ballots that matched the lowest denominator of acceptance on Election Night. In essence, they argued that the judges should deliberately violate the law in order to remedy earlier violations of it, whether intentional or accidental.

At the same time, Franken’s team worked to find more examples of absentee ballots they could request for opening during the contest, but

they went after cases on an individual basis.

Again, this parallels Rossi/Gregoire, where the

Democrats understood that they needed to remain on offense even in the contest phase.

Instead of trying to convince the judges to allow ballots outside of the law,

Franken’s lawyers found more ballots from the rejected pile to argue for inclusion within the law.

The three-judge panel hearing the contest unanimously found that Coleman had failed to prove his case

that extraordinary relief would substantially change the outcome of the election.

They bluntly wrote

that Coleman’s legal team failed to prove its case at all,

saying, “There is no evidence of a systemic problem of disenfranchisement in the state’s election system, including in its absentee balloting procedures.” To add insult to injury, they had

added 87 more votes to Franken’s lead nine days earlier, widening the gap to 312 votes,

after opening up 351 absentee ballots,

which is all that the panel said had been proven necessary to count by either side. The judges had, in the end,

focused on individual ballots rather than categories and generalities, just as Judge Bridges had done in Washington four years earlier.

Had the contest succeeded, would Coleman have won enough votes to upend Al Franken? The Coleman team asked the chair of economics at St. Cloud State University, King Banaian, to testify in support of their statistical analysis. Banaian, contacted only after the Coleman team filed the contest, had just a week to prepare and presented evidence that the distribution of rejected absentee ballots showed something other than chance at work, which would have bolstered Coleman’s insistence on extraordinary remedies. Franken’s team successfully challenged Banaian’s status as an expert on statistics

and moved to exclude his testimony.

That might have been just as well, because Banaian’s study of rejected absentee ballots indicated that Coleman had a very slim chance of succeeding even had they opened the nearly 5,000 ballots Coleman first requested. Initially, Banaian calculated that Coleman could argue for the inclusion of almost 2,000 absentee ballots of the 12,000 rejected on Election Day, based on higher rejection rates in some counties than the state average for that election. Assuming that the vote distribution matched that of the general vote in each of the counties,

Coleman could gain only 94 votes—far short of what he needed.

Banaian says, “That is why, in my opinion, the Coleman team requested opening 5,000 ballots instead.” But that would have generated only a net gain for Coleman of 166 votes, assuming a matching distribution once again— still short of the final 312-vote gap. Banaian puts the likelihood of winning enough votes out of the 5,000 ballots to overcome even the intermediate 225-vote gap at “only 0.8 percent or about 125-to-1 against.” Coleman’s team had pinned those hopes on a motion to reverse the inclusion of what they alleged were 133 double-counted ballots. Had the contest panel agreed with them and had the count not moved to 312 votes, Banaian still put the likelihood of reversing the election at “about 3-to-1 against,” not a convincing case for any judge to throw out the statutory requirements for absentee ballots and allow correctly disqualified votes into the count.

Norm Coleman appealed his case to the Minnesota Supreme Court to no avail and dropped his legal case June 30 [2009].

Al Franken took his seat in the Senate a week later [in July 2009].

DON’T KNOW HOW TO WIN

The truth about the Minnesota election is that it was statistically a dead heat, which magnified the problems inherent to all elections. Most elections do not have close enough outcomes for the irregularities to matter. Even the best systems in the best states have their issues, and while Minnesota will work to improve the shortcomings exposed in the recount,

it can never be made so perfect that a close election will have no problems in counts, absentee ballots and other issues.

But was the election really “stolen”? Republicans around the country repeatedly alleged that Franken had cheated in the recount,

but the Minnesota Republicans actually involved tell a very different story.

“They [Franken’s team] looked at it

in the way extraordinarily good attorneys look at a case, one remarked.

“Our clients have interests. It’s our goal to get those interests pushed to the fore.

Our job is not to be objective or fair.”

The legal analogy is a good one, another volunteer confirms. In the Minneapolis precinct in which she worked, she said that at times the

Franken campaign seemed to have “10 lawyers for every volunteer working.

In fact, the precinct officials had to put tape on the floor to keep the lawyers from interfering with the recount process. Another volunteer estimated that in his precinct

Franken had eight to 10 lawyers for every Coleman attorney.

This disparity put the two different missions in stark relief. The Franken campaign saw this as

an adversarial process not unlike a court case,

while the Coleman team saw it as something else entirely.

Rather than steal the election, the lawyers were there to make their case on

each and every ballot.

The message from the Coleman team was that they were there to ensure overall fairness, acting

more like judges or referees than the counterpoint adversaries to the Democrats.

Franken did not “steal” this election in the recount process.

The Republicans lost this election because they failed to learn from their mistakes in Washington four years earlier and

because they failed to realize

how serious Democrats are about winning recounts for significant political offices.

The Democrats have made it a major adversarial business, working much like defense attorneys or litigators do to find every legal advantage available to them in order to prevail.

As long as Republicans continue

to handle election recounts as an afterthought,

act like referees

rather than stakeholders

and fail to match resources with their opponents, they will lose these close elections.

And if Republicans insist on believing that fraud rather than their own mistakes

led to the recount loss, they will fail to learn this lesson—

and lose the next one as well.”

 

 

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I'm the daughter of a World War II Air Force pilot and outdoorsman who settled in New Jersey.