Residents of Butler County, PA requested nearly 40,000 mail-in ballots - Few have arrived

Butler County, PA in western Pennsylvania voted 66% for Trump and 29% for Clinton in the 2016 election.  In this 2020 election, nearly 40,000 residents of Butler County requested mail-in ballots.  Only 24% of those ballots have been received.  A U.S. Postal System spokesman says that they do not have any record of having the undelivered ballots.  The U.S. Postal System is primarily run by the American Postal Workers Union, which has endorsed Joe Biden.  So the USPS has a strong political bias.  The governor of Pennsylvania has also shown that he has a very strong political bias and the willingness to engage in dirty tricks to swing this critical election toward the inert Joe Biden.  So, is this a massive case of voter suppression?

Of the seven justices on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, five were appointed by Democrats.  Pennsylvania Democrats have had their Supreme Court rule that contrary to Pennsylvania law, mail-in ballots can be received well after election day, which begs for voter fraud.  The PA Supreme Court has also ruled that ballots cannot be disqualified because ballot signatures do not match registration signatures.  Philadelphia is well-known for its ability to deliver 150,000 fraudulent votes that get counted in every presidential election.  All of those fraudulent votes are votes for the Democrats.  The Democrats have long shown that they are completely untrustworthy in elections in Pennsylvania.  With so many tools to corrupt the Pennsylvania 2020 election, massive vote fraud is to be expected.  The nation should insist on a thorough investigation into voter fraud in Pennsylvania.

Post-Mortem Observations on the 2016 Election

Hillary Clinton is claiming that she lost the election because FBI Director Comey re-opened the investigation of her criminal e-mail activities days before the election.  In reality, her speculation and that of many others claiming a single reason for her loss, or for that matter a loss in any close presidential race, is simply silly.  It was a close contest and the loser was the loser for many, many reasons.  Yes, changing one or two choices the candidate made might have made the difference and brought victory instead of defeat.  But, almost always there are many choices any one of which might have changed the outcome of the election.

Broadly speaking, Hillary might have had a more positive attitude toward allowing businesses to grow, and she would have won the election.  In fact, she might well have won the election had she simply not been a threat to those who earn a living in whole or in part due to the coal industry and due to the fracking of oil and gas.  She very barely lost Pennsylvania with its 20 electoral votes and while she lost Ohio rather more decisively, it was still an obtainable state.  Hillary especially lost votes in western PA and in eastern and southern OH, relative to Obama's results.  See the US map on the front page of The Wall Street Journal of 10 November 2016, which color codes the degree of the Democrat vote loss relative to the 2012 election.  These are areas in which coal was long a mainstay to the economy and in which the recent booms due to oil and gas from fracking operations have produced an economic revival.

So, did Hillary lose the 38 electoral votes of OH and PA because she was threatening the fossil fuels and all the service providers of these areas?  Had she won those votes and still lost Michigan, she would have had 270 electoral college votes to Trump's 268 electoral votes, assuming his win in MI holds up.  Her completely bogus and irrational vendetta against these industries may well have cost her the election.  Irrational choices often have direful consequences. As hard as I have fought to argue against the false catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis and such additional bogus claims such as measurable harm from mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants, Hillary's loss of the election due to her desire to destroy the fossil fuel industries is sweet indeed.

Of course, Obama had himself threatened the coal industry, but many people did not take that so seriously back then.  Whatever his predilections, they may have thought that Congress would keep him from destroying the industry.  As it happened, Obama used the regulatory agencies to do that destruction, so a Hillary following him and using the same strategies had to be taken as a more serious threat in this election. In addition, the growth of the oil and gas production in eastern and southern Ohio and in western Pennsylvania was remarkable in the four years straddling Obama's re-election, with the realization of the importance of fracking to the benefiting areas of OH and PA taking some time to occur to much of the population in those areas.  Try as hard as Obama's EPA did to find an excuse to attack the fracking practice, they had limited success in doing so, though pressure among the "environmental" Democrats continues to mount for doing so.  Some unnecessary and wrongheaded regulations based on the catastrophic man-made global warming fraud are in the pipeline now.

Some Democrats like to make a big deal about Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote by about 798,000 votes.  Of course the rules are that one has to win the electoral vote, which requires the candidates to try to appeal to people across the nation.  This requirement helps to minimize factions in politics, which we surely have more than enough of as it is.  It helps to keep candidates from just favoring those who live in high population density areas.  It helps to keep them from stomping on the interests of those who live in low cost of living areas too much.  In other words, it penalizes those who want to exterminate the industries that some people depend upon for a living if they do not live in those high population areas.  It means that if you promote a minimum wage of $15 an hour for the entire nation, you might incur a political cost for the concerns that many people living in low cost of living areas, almost always outside high population density areas, will have about losing their jobs or their businesses.  It even serves as a bit of protection against those who would discriminate against people based on their ethnicity, since ethnicity is not evenly distributed across the country or between low and high population density areas.

Hillary needs to grow up and realize that she lost the election according to its rules.  Of course, it is too late for her to ever grow up.  But others may still have that within their grasp.  The claim that those extra 798,000 votes mean much is diminished by a number of additional factors.  For one, the Democrats rack up a few hundred thousand illegal votes in presidential elections.  In addition, because the most populous state of California, which is heavily Democratic, had a Senate election in which both candidates on the ballot were very leftist Democrats, the Republicans of that state had much less incentive to go to the polls than did Democrats.  As a result, Trump did not get many votes in California that he would have had if a Republican had been allowed on the ballot in that Senate seat contest.  The Democrats of California have found an interesting way to diminish the meaning of the popular vote for the presidential elections.

It is interesting to note that Republicans in the elections for the House of Representatives received 3.1 million more votes than did the Democrats running for House seats.  The Republicans won 238 House seats to the Democrats 193 seats.  Republicans won 22 Senate seats (counting LA which is not technically decided until December) and the Democrats won only 12. Trump won 30 (counting MI) of the 50 state popular vote contests.  Even with a Republican presidential candidate who was not all that popular, the Republicans trounced the Democrats.  Nonetheless, such a beating can be reversed in the next election cycle if the Republicans do not keep enough of their promises, such as finally repealing ObamaCare and allowing the economy to grow.

High-Risk Local Government and Bankruptcy

One recurring theme of my posts is that when governments expand their operations and powers beyond those needed to provide for the equal protection of our individual rights, they generally do a very poor job of providing the given service, they inevitably end up failing to protect our individual rights, and they fail very unequally in protecting our rights as well.  When governments fail, they often put all of that government's operations at risk.  This is the situation in such states as Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, and California where terrible state debt and massive liabilities clearly exceed the level that taxation can support.  Higher taxes there will simply lead to more economic stagnation and the flight of many capable and often wealthier people from the state with lower tax revenues resulting.  After a point of government ineptitude, there is no way out but to drastically cut even the most legitimate services.

Here is another example of how a local government put its essential services at risk by trying to perform services which should have been left to the private sector.  Responsible local government has no business departing from the few legitimate services such as police protection and the courts, because other activities increase the need for involuntary taxes and also the risk of the failure of the government.  Businesses in the private sector fail more often than not and there is no reason to expect that city, county, and state governments can operate more efficiently than do private sector businesses.  Of course, however badly they operate a business, they can call upon a large tax base to subsidize the poor operation, which will commonly allow a government to avoid acknowledging that they are operating the business they have take on poorly.  This usually leads to further deterioration of the operation of the business with time, since incentives are missing to improve the operation.

The capital city of Pennsylvania, Harrisburg, is considering a Chapter 9 bankruptcy because it lost so much money in one operation it could have left to the private sector that the entire city government is now at risk of collapse.  This case was reported in today's issue of The Wall Street Journal.  Harrisburg incurred a debt of $288 million in an attempt to renovate an incinerator!  It owes $68 million in payments this year on this debt, but its entire annual budget is less than that amount.

Chapter 9 bankruptcy entails:

• A municipal government can reduce its debt even if the chief creditors oppose such a reduction.
• The settlement must have the support of at least one class of impaired creditors.
• An automatic stay of all litigation against the city occurs.
• The city can reject union contracts.
• Bankruptcy prevents judges from forcing asset sales or liquidation of the municipality.
• Pennsylvania's Community and Economic Development Dept. must approve the Chapter 9 bankruptcy and work with the city in the bankruptcy proceedings.
• The city must expect to pay huge fees to lawyers and accountants.
• The outcome of the request for bankruptcy is uncertain.  It could be rejected.
• Assured Guaranty Municipal, which assured the bond payments, will have to make the payments at great loss to it.
• Covanta Energy operates the incinerator and gave the city a loan of $25 million, which the city cannot repay in whole.

City Controller, Daniel C. Miller, favors this Chapter 9 way out of the city's predicament.   The first Pennsylvania municipality to use Chapter 9 bankruptcy was Westfall Township in Pike County.  They faced a legal claim of more than $20 million to a real estate developer.  The settlement was reduced to $6 million over a 20 year repayment period with no interest.  But, its bill from the lawyers and accountants was $600,000.  If its request for bankruptcy had been rejected, the lawyers and accountants fees would have put Westfall Township into even worse shape.

Of course a Chapter 9 bankruptcy may allow the city of Harrisburg to go on.  But, after the loses that creditors and bond guarantors will take, the city will still be in a tough situation.  First, it will still have to pay a substantial amount of money.  Second, it will have impaired its credit for quite some time.  These factors are likely to force a reduction of other services the city has provided its residents.  Some of these impaired services are likely to be its legitimate services.  In addition, the city's irresponsible actions will certainly hurt its creditors and those who invested in them.  Governments have no business causing such harm.

All of this grief could and should have been avoided by simply leaving to the private sector what is the private sector's.  Leave unto Commodore Vanderbilt what is Commodore Vanderbilt's.  Leave unto J. J. Hill what is J. J. Hill's.  Leave unto John D. Rockefeller what is John D. Rockefeller's.  When government leaves unto the private sector all functions which are not legitimate to it, any risk is taken only by those who have chosen to undertake it voluntarily and the legitimate functions of government are not put at risk.

Can a State Government Even Feed its Legislature?

While trying to look up the size of the House cafeteria which Pelosi has just had new LED light fixtures installed in at a cost of $140,000 with a so-called less than 10-year payback time, I stumbled across an article noting that the vendor, Aramark, holding the Pennsylvania State House contract to run its cafeteria service has failed another of a series of food-serving safety inspections.

The Liberals (Progressives, Socialists) and some others are constantly seeking to have governments at all levels expand their powers and the scope of their control over the lives of the People.  Usually, this is with the claim that private citizens or the private sector has had a failure of some sort.  Yet, they are never deterred in the least by the much greater number of failures of government or by the degree to which those failures are cemented in place by institutions.  Failures in the private sector usually result with individuals trying again with a lesson learned or a voluntary association such as a corporation either righting itself or being replaced by a younger and more nimble company which has done a better job of learning from its mistakes.  But, government just keeps plowing along, making the same mistakes over and over and never learning a thing.  The fact that Aramark is still running the Pennsylvania State House cafeteria is a fine micro-example.

Regional Electricity Sources in 2008

The 2008 power sources for electricity in the Pennsylvania - New Jersey - Maryland Interconnection Region according to Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. are:

Coal 51.2%
Nuclear 33.2%
Natural Gas 6.4%
System Mix 4.3%
Oil 0.3%
Renewable Energy 4.7%

The breakdown on the renewable energy is:

Hydroelectric 2.8%
Wood or Biomass 1.5%
Captured Methane Gas 0.3%
Solid Waste 0.1%

Geothermal, solar, and wind are all reported as 0.0%. Clearly this mid-Atlantic region is going to be in a heap of trouble when Obama bankrupts the coal-fired electric power plants! My laboratory is going to be in a heap of trouble with much less power, erratic power, and much more expensive power. Our electric bill is one of our bigger expenses each month already. As I have complained here before, we have suffered from unreliable power over the last few years thanks to childish Maryland policies in regulating the power utility companies. Since those problems were brought on largely by energy cost increases and the desire of state government to shield the voters from the consequences, imagine what Gov. O'Folley's mandates for more alternative energy and Obama's similar mandates are going to do to the power costs and availability in the future throughout this area.

We have a future it is awful to contemplate. However much each politician waves his magic wand, the portion of our power coming from solar and wind power will not become impressive. It will remain puny, since each is too unreliable and too expensive. Of course, it might be that I am wrong and one or both of these politicians is such a great scientist and businessman that he will develop cheap, reliable alternative energy in the nick of time. If you are one of their supporters, you might hold your breath until they do. I am not obligated to do so, since I have consistently noted that these men are so little able to recognize reality that it is very fair to assess them as insane.

The situation will not be very different in many, in fact most, other areas of the U.S. Coal is cheap and reliably available and natural gas is a very serviceable adjunct. Both create CO2 when burned, so both sources will be condemned or made outlandishly expensive with CO2 scrubbing requirements. All this destruction is justified with a false theory that emissions of CO2 due to man's use of fossil fuels are causing a catastrophic global warming. In fact, natural forces have caused the preponderance of such warming as has occurred globally and urban heat island effects have made that warming appear much greater than it has actually been. Not that such warming as has occurred should not be welcome. The CO2 should also be welcomed as further plant fertilizer. But, no, the alarmist religion requires that the activities of man be shrouded in guilt, so warmth and healthy plants are both painted catastrophes.