Category: Opinion

On Wednesday night in Carrollton, Texas, a mayoral candidate was arrested for allegedly sending 84 mail-in ballot applications and is now facing several felony voter fraud charges.

Zul Mohamed was running for mayor of Carrollton but has now been charged with 25 counts of knowingly possessing a ballot with intent to defraud, a second-degree felony, and 84 counts of giving false information on a voting application, which counts as a third-degree felony

“Mail ballots are inherently insecure and vulnerable to fraud, and I am committed to safeguarding the integrity of our elections,” said Attorney General Ken Paxton. “My office is prepared to assist any Texas county in combating this form of fraud.”

Investigators from the county and state issued a search warrant for Mohamed’s home and found 25 ballots. According to the sheriff’s office, investigators became aware of a suspicious request for ballots to be sent to a P.O. Box in Lewisville, Texas, allegedly belonging to a nursing home facility. However, when investigators contacted those residents whose ballots had been requested, none of the individuals claimed to have applied for the ballots.

Police say after the box of requested ballots was picked up at the post office they searched Mohamed’s house and allegedly found the box containing the ballots with several of them already opened.

Denton County Sheriff Tracey Murphree made a statement addressing the arrest, “Voter fraud is a serious and widespread issue and cannot be tolerated. The fact an actual candidate for public office would engage in these activities is appalling. We will continue to aggressively investigate allegations of voter fraud.”

Mohamed is currently being held in Denton County jail and if convicted faces up to 20 years in prison.

All across the country governors and mayors are tightening restrictions in response to these growing numbers. Pennsylvania is planning on taking some extreme measures to fight the sharp increase in coronavirus cases which include wearing masks indoors with very few exceptions.

Also, starting Friday, anyone planning on entering the Keystone State must be tested for the virus at least 72 hours before arrival, otherwise, they will be required to quarantine for 14 days. This order will not apply to Pennsylvania residents that commute to neighboring states for work or health care.

These new rules will be largely self-enforced.

▪️ Issuing order requiring anyone who visits PA from another state to get tested w/in 72 hours before entering PA. Pa'ians who traveled to other states must follow same rules when coming home. Does not apply to those who commute to/from another state for work or medical treatment

— PA Department of Health (@PAHealthDept) November 17, 2020

Pennsylvania already has a statewide mandate in place as well as limits on indoor and outdoor gatherings and occupancy restrictions at bars and restaurants.

These new rules will take things a step further because not only are masks required outside where it is not possible to keep a minimum six-foot distance from others but also inside where people from multiple households are gathering, even if they are maintaining a safe social distance.

Pennsylvania, like the rest of the nation, has seen a huge influx of coronavirus infections in recent weeks. Every day the state is reporting more than 5,000 new infections per day, that a 115% rise in just two weeks. Hospitalizations and the number of positive tests are also up sharply which leads to a rise in deaths.

#COVID19 Update (as of 11/17/20 at 12:00 am):
• 5,900 additional positive cases of COVID-19
• 275,513 total cases statewide
• 9,355 deaths statewide
• 2,588,467 patients tested negative to date

More information: https://t.co/7pzosEXhEX

— PA Department of Health (@PAHealthDept) November 17, 2020

Philadelphia officials announced on Monday that a ban would be enforced for indoor gatherings, dining, shutter casinos, gyms, museums, and libraries.

Early in the pandemic Democratic Governor Tom Wolf exacted a stay-at-home order and shuttered every business deemed “non-life-sustaining” but a judge ruled Wolf’s restrictions unconstitutional.

California officials are working to impose the latest coronavirus restrictions and one county official believes that travel and indoor gatherings are the driving force behind the surge in cases.

According to Governor Gavin Newsom, in the last 10 days, the number of daily cases has doubled resulting in “the fastest increase California has seen since the beginning of this pandemic. Last week the state passed one million coronavirus cases.

Newsom’s latest restrictions that were put into effect on Tuesday put 41 of the state’s counties in the strictest of the four-tier system for reopening which is based on the number of virus cases and infection rates. Newsom said that’s up 28 counties since last week.

Despite the newly enforced restrictions some of these counties even moved up multiple tiers as cases surged.

#COVID19 update:

– Average daily tests: 164,345

– Average test positivity rate: 4.6%

– Daily case average: 8,198

– Hospitalizations: 48% increase over last 2 weeks

– ICU: 39% increase over last 2 weeks

— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) November 16, 2020

Health officer for Humbolt Country, Dr. Teresa Frankovich, detailed the new restrictions to county residents on Monday, blaming the recent increases on travel and gatherings of crowds.

“This is travel where you’re going to visit friends and family, staying in households, having close contact unmasked, sharing vehicles,” said Frankovich. “I really want to be clear to people that if we want to be able to keep our schools operational, to keep our business community operational, we have to stop the gathering.”

“That’s a particularly difficult challenge at the holiday season but it’s essential to protect our families and our community,” she added.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention presented evidence that supports the idea that transmission of the virus at home is common. According to a recent report, the CDC assessed over 100 households in Nashville, Tennesse, and Marshfield, Wisconson, for five months beginning in April. The agency reported that more than half of all household contacts were infected and “secondary infections occurred rapidly, with approximately 75% of infections identified within five days of the primary patient’s getting sick.”

During an interview on Sunday, Senator Bernie Sanders tried to put as much distance between himself and the idea of defunding police departments even going so far as to say that “nobody I know who’s running for office talks about defunding the police.”

Sander’s statement drew immediate attention on social media with many Twitter users reminding him of past comments from “Squad” member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who said, “Defunding police means defunding police,” when she rejected New York City’s $1 billion budget cut from its police department in June.

Well, Senator, may I introduce you to your closest philosophical ally in the House of Representatives? pic.twitter.com/4lDdGycx6b

— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) November 15, 2020

“It does not mean budget tricks or funny math,” the congresswoman said at the time. “It does not mean moving school police officers from the NYPD budget to the Department of Education’s budget so the exact same police remain in schools.”

Progressives argue that those liberal policies help to stir the party’s core base and are popular among the general electorate which is the attitude that has been repeated many times by Sanders. But on Sunday the self-declared democratic socialist seemed to do a one-eighty on the issue.

“What we talk about is making police officers accountable, making sure that police departments do what they can do best, figuring out how you deal with mental illness, how you deal with homelessness,” he told CNN host Jake Tapper, “whether those are, in fact, police responsibilities, making sure the police officers are not killing innocent African-Americans. That is not defund the police.”

Rep. Ilhan Omar, another member of “The Squad,” has also called for the Minneapolis Police Department to be fully dismantled after the police shooting of George Floyd back in May.

In June Omar told Tapper, “You can’t really reform a department that is rotten to the root. What you can do is rebuild.”

Omar said it was an “opportunity for this city to come together and have the conversation of what public safety looks like, who enforces the most dangerous crimes that take place in our community.”

In Floyd County, Georgia, more than 2,600 uncounted ballots for the 2020 presidential election were found during the state’s recount.

Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is placing the blame on Floyd County election officials who failed to upload votes stored in a memory card from a ballot-scanning machine.

Georgia officials began the recount of nearly 5 million votes on Friday after President Donald Trump and the Republican Party challenged the election results and requested a statewide audit.

The thousands of previously uncounted ballots in the county marks the first significant mishap uncovered in the recount process thus far. Floyd County Republican Party chair Luke Martin called the issue “concerning” but maintained that it “doesn’t appear to be a widespread issue.”

“I’m glad the audit revealed it,” Martin told the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, “and it’s important that all votes are counted.”

So far no other counties have found any discrepancies in ballot counts, with recount numbers closely matching their original figures.

Though President Trump has made claims of voter fraud these newly discovered ballots will likely do little to close the 14,000-vote gap between the incumbent and President-Elect Joe Biden. If Biden is declared victorious, which seems highly likely at this point, he will have clinched the state’s sixteen electoral votes, therefore, flipping a historically Republican southern battleground.

Gabriel Sterling of the Secretary of State’s office told a local news station that the newly counted ballots will only give Trump an additional 800 votes leaving Biden still in the lead. Later at a news conference, Sterling called for the election’s director of Floyd County to step down.

“The secretary of, since this was such an amazing blunder and they had issues in August, would like to see that elections director in Floyd County step down from his position,” he said.

Thousands of county and poll workers in Georgia’s 159 counties have until midnight on Wednesday, November 18 to meet the deadline for the recount.

For the first time during the 2020 election, President Trump almost admitted that J0e Biden had “won,” then immediately goes on to say that the election was “rigged” and that he is not conceding the race.

Trump said in a tweet, “He won because the Election was Rigged. NO VOTE WATCHERS OR OBSERVERS allowed, vote tabulated by a Radical Left privately owned company, Dominion, with a bad reputation & bum equipment that couldn’t even qualify for Texas (which I won by a lot!), the Fake & Silent Media, & more!”

Some on Twitter are questioning Trump’s meaning behind the statement.

Journalist Yashas Ali said, “Did [I] just wake up to Trump’s version of a concession?”

Twitter quickly jumped in and slapped the tweet with a label reading, “This claim about election fraud is disputed.”

Trump later clarified the statement with a new tweet.

He only won in the eyes of the FAKE NEWS MEDIA. I concede NOTHING! We have a long way to go. This was a RIGGED ELECTION!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2020

President Trump’s response came eight days after the Associated Press declared Joe Biden as the projected winner. Trump has refused to concede and instead deployed teams of lawyers to key battleground states to contest the ballot-counting processes but on Friday a federal appeals court in Pennsylvania rejected an effort to invalidate over 9,300 mail-in ballots that arrived after Election Day.

A judge in Michigan also refused to stop the certification of election results in the Detroit area by dismissing claims of fraud caused by the city’s mishandling of absentee ballots.

In Arizona, a judge rejected Trump’s lawsuit seeking inspection of ballots after the campaign’s lawyers acknowledged that the small number of ballots in question would not change the outcome of how the state voted for president.

It would be the third time a judge declined to intervene in a statewide count that showed Biden ahead by over 140,000 votes.

The judges who upheld the three-day extension noted the “unprecedented challenges” that caused “vast disruption” in the nation due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Last week Biden called Trump’s refusal to concede the election “an embarrassment” that will only hurt “the president’s legacy.”

Democratic President-elect Joe Biden and his wife Jill founded the Biden Cancer Initiative in 2017 to “develop and drive implementation of solutions to accelerate progress in cancer prevention, detection diagnosis, research and care and to reduce disparities in cancer outcomes.”

But recent federal tax filings show that during charity’s first two years no grants were given out but millions were spent on the salaries of former Washington DC aides it hired.

During fiscal years 2017 and 2018 the charity took in more than $4.8 million in contributions and in that time spent just over $3 million on the payroll. The president of the group and former Pfizer executive, Gregory Simon, raked in $429,850 in fiscal 2018 alone. That’s nearly double his salary from fiscal 2017.

Former chief of staff for Obama’s cancer initiative Danielle Carnival took home over a quarter of a million dollars in 2018.

Besides the salaries paid to those recruited from the Obama administration, the charity spent $56,738 on conferences and $59,356 on travel expenses in fiscal 2017. The next year those expenses ballooned to $97,149 for travel and a whopping $742,953 for conferences.

Simon claimed that the main goal of the charity was not to give out grants but to find a way to accelerate treatment for all, regardless of their cultural or economic background.

Former vice president Biden lead the Cancer Moonshot Task Force under the Obama administration after the death of his son Beau in 2015. After leaving the White House Biden continued to look for ways to provide “urgent” solutions to treating cancer with the Biden Cancer Initiative.

The Bidens packed the board with leading oncologists and many celebrity cancer survivors, including Jimmy Gomez better known as Taboo from the musical group the Black Eyed Peas.

The charity put its operations on “pause” when the Bidens stepped down for Joe’s presidential run. While the organization is still active Simon stated that without the Bidens at the forefront of operations the charity has lost its edge.

Simon told the Associated Press, “We tried to power through but it became increasingly difficult to get the traction we needed to complete our mission.”

Former first lady Michelle Obama reached out to her husband’s former running mate President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris to congratulate them on their projected win and she couldn’t resist taking a dig at the current administration.

Mrs. Obama wrote on Twitter, “I’m beyond thrilled that my friend Joe Biden and our first Black and Indian-American woman Vice President, Kamala Harris, are headed to restore some dignity, competence, and heart at the White House.”

“Let’s remember that tens of millions of people voted for the status quo, even when it meant supporting lies, hate, chaos, and division,” Obama wrote. “We’ve got a lot of work to do to reach out to these folks in the years ahead and connect with them on what unites us.”

She also reminded everyone of the importance of voting.

“We see now the reality that we can’t take even the tiniest part of our democracy for granted,” she continued. “Every single vote must count — and every single one of us must vote. And as a country, we should be making it easier, not harder to cast a ballot.”

The former first lady urged Americans to stay involved in politics and pointed to January’s runoff elections for Georgia’s two Senate seats.

“So it’s up to us to stay engaged and informed, to keep speaking out and marching on,” said Michelle. “We’ve got to vote in even greater numbers in the upcoming Senate runoffs in Georgia—and every state and local election going forward.”

Former President Barack Obama also commended Biden and Harris for their win.

“I could not be prouder to congratulate our next President, Joe Biden, and our next First Lady, Jill Biden,” Obama said.

Even though Obama didn’t endorse his former running mate until after the Democratic presidential primary was over he did help out during the last stretch of the race by hitting the campaign trail in swing states like Michigan and Florida.

Senator Marco Rubio lashed out at Democrats for criticizing President Trump’s for filing lawsuits in several states to challenge ballot counts he believes to have been illegally altered.

Rubio appeared on “America’s Newsroom” On Thursday and said, “I laugh when the Democrats complain about that.”

“I remember in Florida we had a close Senate election,” he continued. “Chuck Schumer and his party hired a bunch of lawyers and contested it for almost 20 days because that’s what the law allows you to do.”

The Trump campaign had already filed lawsuits in key states like Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada then on Thursday filed more affidavits in Pennsylvania.

The Senator reminded everyone that until December 14 when the Electoral College casts its vote for president, states will continue working to confirm results and in the meantime, anyone with substantial evidence of wrongdoing should come forward

“There’s nothing that the president’s doing that’s illegal or not within his legal rights,” Rubio pointed out. “That’s our laws, so I don’t know what all the freak-out is about.”

Rubio claims that if the shoe were on the other foot, Biden and his campaign would have done the same thing.

“This is the way the system works,” he said. “Let the system work so people can have confidence and our republic can move on.”

Rubio is campaigning for Republicans in the Georgia Senate runoff that will take place in January. Co-host Sandra Smith asked him if he would be making a run for president in 2024. Rubio said for now he will stay focused on getting re-elected to the Senate in 2022 but wouldn’t rule it out as he has run for president before during the 2016 election.

Republican Congresswoman-elect Beth Van Duyne is fed up with internet bullies on social media who think they know better than lawmakers and she hopes the Democrats have the gall stand up against them.

During an interview on “Fox & Friends,” Van Duyne said, ” I’m really hoping that you’ve got Democrats who are willing to stand up and speak out against the radical Twitter trolls that have taken over and hijacked their party with conversations of defunding police and complete government takeover and stripping people of their private health insurance and really looking at gutting millions of jobs across the country.”

Van Duyne lashed out at House Democrats for the “political theatre” of the past couple of years, including attempting to impeach President Trump, arguing that they failed many Americans by refusing to work with Republicans on an infrastructure bill to provide millions of jobs.

The congresswoman beat Candace Valenzuela in the race for Texas’ 24th district House seat. In the days leading up to the election, early voters gave Democrats hope that for the first time in over forty years the party could turn the Lone Star State from red to blue.

“We have always been bullish on Texas and are taking the Lone Star State seriously,” said Biden for President Texas state director Rebecca Acuna. “Trump’s severe mismanagement of this pandemic and the resulting economic crisis has left Texans fed up and ready for change.”

Van Duyne will be replacing Republican Kenny Marchant who is retiring. She said that residents of Texas “have seen a radical agenda.”

“We have seen a tough election across the country where literally hundreds and millions of dollars have been spent against Republicans,” Van Duyne said. “The idea of defunding the police and gutting millions of jobs out of our economy and, basically, government policies that would take a lot of control out of the American people have been what they focused on.”