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The Sizzle: A Captain's View on Today's News (12/31/2022)
Topic: Translating the B.S.
12/31/2022
In this installment:
*Arizona’s Corrupt Election Yields a Curious Recount
*Political Commenters Are Asleep to Election Corruption
*Trump’s Tax Returns Are Out - And No One Cares
Arizona Recount Wraps Up
Three recounts in Arizona were finalized this week, and the results announced Thursday. Republican candidates Tom Horne and Liz Harris prevailed in their recounts for state superintendent of public instruction and state representative, respectively. Abraham Hamadeh, Republican candidate for Attorney General, came up 280 votes shy of upending Democrat Kris Mayes’s victory after a substantial discrepancy was resolved in heavily Republican Pinal County. Recounts were ordered for these races because the top two candidates were within a half point of one another.
THE SIZZLE: This discrepancy from Pinal County is not insignificant. In fact, it reduced Hamadeh’s margin of “defeat” from 511 votes to 280. In other words, the gap between the two candidates was reduced by 45.2%.
Pinal County attributed the discovery of 507 votes between the two candidates, of which Hamadeh took 392, to “human error.” How convenient – just like no guilt can be inferred when a government official denies wrongdoing in Arizona, we can just take the word of elections administrators who attribute screw-ups to “human error.” It is also convenient that, in this unending battle for election transparency, that Katie Hobbs, in her Secretary of State role, demanded that recount results be delayed in being unveiled to the public. This reeks of impropriety, especially after Americans saw the carnage of Maricopa County’s election firsthand in Peter Thompson’s court. Imagine if all election day ballots were counted and Maricopa’s corruption were uncovered just how big Hamadeh’s margin would become.
Morris Misses the Mark
Dick Morris penned an op-ed about how President Trump has been handed the White House for 2024 thanks to a series of events constituting political malpractice, ranging from the Twitter Files reveals that are ongoing and extending through the reckless Omnibus bill that is looked upon glowingly by creatures in Congress. Morris apparently has not reconciled the conduct of the last three federal elections to reality and writes as if Trump legitimately lost the 2020 election. Again, Donald Trump had 74 million votes in 2020. If he lost that race, he would have been the first incumbent president since Grover Cleveland in 1888 to gain net new votes from the previous election and lose.
THE SIZZLE: There were plenty of big reveals leading up to the 2020 election pertaining to Hunter Biden’s (and by extension, Joe Biden’s) corruption and capitalization on his father’s prestigious name and former positions, and those didn’t alter the outcome of the election, primarily because it was gamed to ensure Trump didn’t get a second term. All actions currently underway in the world of electoral politics stem from Trump’s 2016 win and have resulted in key positions in the electoral college states being filled up by political operatives who ensure their states are won by who needs to win them. Katie Hobbs winning the Secretary of State race narrowly in 2018 after days of counting mail-in votes was a play aimed at influencing the 2020 and 2022 races in Arizona. Those who pen op-eds that remain stuck in a pre-2020 political world, in which political outcomes are influenced by world events, fail to understand that true election reform must take place for Americans to have confidence in election outcomes, and by extension, political forecasts predicting them.
Trump’s Taxes Are Out!
Democrats in Congress have violated the privacy of a private citizen by releasing six years’ worth of his tax returns against his wishes. The big reveal, which leftists across the country have anxiously awaited for years, has already created a boomerang effect, with a majority of Americans viewing it as a politically motivated revenge hit. For maximum effect, here is some of the “spin” from CNN:
The returns, long shrouded in secrecy, were released to the public on Friday by the House Ways and Means Committee, the culmination of a battle over their disclosure that went to the Supreme Court. They confirm a report issued from the Joint Committee on Taxation that Trump claimed large losses before and throughout his presidency that he carried forward to reduce or practically eliminate his tax burden. For example, his returns show that he carried forward a $105 million loss in 2015 and $73 million in 2016.
The thousands of pages of documents from the former president’s personal and business federal tax returns – which spanned the years 2015 through 2020 – provide a complex web of raw data about Trump’s finances, offering up many questions about his wealth and income that could be pursued both by auditors and Trump’s political opponents.
The rest of the article focuses on his claims regarding personal loans made to family and his foreign bank accounts.
THE SIZZLE: Wile E. Coyote finally got the Acme machine to deliver the roadrunner’s tax returns, and no one cares. Frankly, if Trump’s tax returns showed massive sums paid to a reckless federal government so they can bankroll benefits for illegal aliens and the defense of foreign nations, many who view Trump as someone with a fresh problem-solving perspective would probably doubt their support of him. President Trump clearly used finance professionals to legally limit his tax burden, and trust me, had he violated the tax code in any substantial way, he would have been flagged while in office, since the only thing that mattered to the administrative state during his term was bringing him down. Every American should now demand to see the tax returns of every single federal elected and appointed official.
