Can I change my vote?

The “change my vote” phrase hit peak searches right after the second debate on Thursday –hitting the MAX limit of Google trends.

After Biden was caught lying on fracking & vowed to shut down the oil industry, the searches were particularly strong in Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, Michigan, Georgia, Texas and Wisconsin.

Among the states that do allow voters to change their early ballot after it’s been cast are: Wisconsin; Minnesota; Michigan; Pennsylvania; New York; Connecticut; and Mississippi.


Wisconsin voters who voted early in person can recast their ballot as long as they do so by Saturday, October 31st. The deadline for absentee varies by city. Contact your city clerk for more information.


Minnesota also allows absentee voters to change their minds. The deadline is a week before the election.


In Michigan, absentee voters can change their ballots if they have not yet been processed and tabulated, according to an official at the state’s Bureau of Elections.

If you want to change your absentee vote, contact the office of your city’s clerk’s office. The best chance to change your vote is as soon as possible before 4 p.m. Monday, the day before the election.

Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut and Mississippi: Contact your city clerk to change your vote.

Trump’s Florida crowd stats

Trump’s Florida rally revealed the following stats about the attendees according to the GOP.

Bluster or anecdotal data? If the data is reliable, one imagines that Trump should romp home.

Wouldn’t it be ironic to see the mass mail-in ballots sent to Democrats get returned straight Republican?

Voter registration in key swing states

From March to September 2020, new voter registrations are as follows.


Republicans +195,652 voters

Democrats +98,262.

In 2016 Republicans added 182,983 and Democrats added 163,982 over the same time period.


Republicans +135,619 voters

Democrats +57,985.

In 2016 Republicans added 177,016 and Democrats added 155,269.

North Carolina:

Republicans +83,785 voters

Democrats +38,137.

In 2016 Republicans added 54,157 while Democrats added 38,931.

Florida AG refers Bloomberg to FBI after he pledges to pay fines of felons to allow them to vote


It seems failed Democrat presidential nominee Michael Bloomberg is in hot water after pledging to pay the fines of 32,000 felons in Florida so that they can vote in the election. By law felons who have outstanding court fines or fees cannot vote. 

Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody referred Bloomberg to the FBI to request a criminal investigation. 

The AG’s letter to the FBI included this passage from the Florida Dept of State, Division of Elections:

Even other innocuous offering of an incentive simply to vote could run afoul of section 104.045 or section 104.061, or both, depending upon the circumstances involved. That is, incentives could be offered to a voter in a way that would be designed to directly or indirectly cause the voter or a larger group of voters to vote in a particular manner. In such a case, the person giving the incentive could be guilty of violating section 104.061, Florida Statutes, which makes it illegal to “directly or indirectly give or promise anything of value to another in casting his or her vote.

To the Democrats, the ends justify the means. Never mind the law. Because in their view, if they can get the orange man out of the way, then all will be forgiven.

Pre & Post COVID-19 voter registration trends

Democrat-leaning pollsters, TargetSmart, note that there has been a shift in the trend of voters registering for the Democrats & Republicans.

In Maine, 59% of new voters registered as Democrats pre-coronavirus — but only 40% have done so in the months since.

Democratic Party declines were also seen in Colorado, Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania according to TargetSmart.

Politico reported that in the swing state of Iowa, new voters helped the GOP retake the statewide lead in all voter registrations last month.

We are not talking big numbers to be fair but is this shift indicative of the manner in which the Democrats have conducted their behaviour with respect to lock-downs and lack of proactivity surrounding the George Floyd protests (and riots)?

We will be interested to see how these trends change as we inch closer to the election.

Brittany blasts NY Gov Cuomo with both barrels

Brittany M. Hughes calls it as she sees it. We can’t help but agree on the way the media continues to treat the virus as a political football instead of looking to facts to determine a return to normality (whatever that will be).

Mental Illness = Gun Violence?

As ever, the mainstream media are sensationalizing “mental health” and the connection to gun massacres. Let’s not forget that mental health can be categorized in a broad variety of ways – from mild anxiety, ADHD to PTSD and full blown bi-polar or schizophrenia. The mainstream media would have us believe that Trump wants the keys to the gun cabinet handed over to certified crackpots to go on white supremacist fueled mass rampages. It is easy to say that those who commit these atrocities must be mad. How easy is it to fall for that assumption? Yet the stats say otherwise.

First, what is this bill that has been repealed by Trump? Why is the media making such clickbait hyperventilating news of something that was already enacted c.2 years ago?

The previous Obama bill allowed gun retailers to get access to “mental health” related social security benefits paid to potential buyers. There are nine categories of mental disorders covered in the Social Security Blue Book. These include:

Affective disorders

Anxiety Disorders

Autism and related disorders

Mental retardation

Organic Mental Disorders

Personality disorders

Schizophrenia, paranoia, and psychotic disorders

Somatoform disorders

Substance addiction

The idea is that if one had claustrophobia or similar mild anxiety, it would be unlikely to be a factor in causing someone to shoot up a Walmart. In order to get mental health disability checks, the applicant must prove compliance to prescribed medication and that they seek regular treatment from professionals. Why do we automatically assume that mental health status is a direct trigger to mass murder? Simply because it is easy to categorize these events to unhinged crazies and presume that there was ‘illness’ involved.

A study conducted by the National Institute of Health (NIH) in America showed,

Thirty-four subjects, acting alone or in pairs, committed 27 mass murders between 1958 and 1999. The sample consisted of males with a median age of 17. 70% were described as a loner. 61.5% had problems with substance abuse. 48% had preoccupations with weapons. 43.5% had been victims of bullying. Although 23% had a documented psychiatric history, only 6% were judged to have been psychotic at the time of the mass murder. Depressive symptoms and historical antisocial behaviors were predominant. There was a precipitating event in most cases–usually a perceived failure in love or school–and most subjects made threatening statements regarding the mass murder to third parties. The majority of the sample clustered into three types: the family annihilator, the classroom avenger, and the criminal opportunist.”

Recall Cuban Parkland, Florida student Emma Gonzalez admitted she’d bullied the shooter Nikolas Cruz. It doesn’t excuse his actions. Nor hers.

Take cyber bullying stats from the Association of Psychological Science in the US. In 2015 more than 16,000 young people were absent from school daily because of bullying. 83% of young people say cyber bullying has a negative impact on their self-esteem. 30% of young people have gone on to self-harm as a result of cyberbullying. 10% of young people have attempted to commit suicide as a result of cyberbullying.

So the stats tell us in 3 out of 4 cases, mental illness was not the culprit in mass shootings. A violent/bullying, substance abuse based environment was.

As mentioned in the previous post, how is it we can find out about the history of shooters within hours of the terror? Surely the powers at the FBI, NSA etc can monitor the traffic of hate – death lists, death threats etc and use that as the basis of background checks rather than rely on whether someone received mental health related disability cheques? Perhaps someone who is fully healed from a mental illness as a child poses no threat if wanting to hunt or fire at a supervised gun range. Perhaps that individual wants to be a security guard?

Dr Jeffrey Swanson, a professor in psychiatry and behavioral science at the Duke University School of Medicine believes that in the event of unlawful use of a firearm by those with mental illness, 95% likely to turn the weapon on themselves than commit homicide.

He also believes that those who are violent or been charged with assault make far better predictors of homicidal behavior than the outcome of a mental health diagnosis.

In Connecticut, almost 23,300 people were diagnosed with a history of serious mental illness. 7% were disqualified from owning a gun because of that mental record. 35% were banned based on a disqualifying criminal record that wasn’t necessarily linked to the mental illness.

Dr. Swanson closed with,

We need to think of violence itself as a communicable disease. We have kids growing up exposed to terrible trauma. We did a study some years ago, looking at [violence risk] among people with serious mental illness. The three risk factors we found were most important: first, a history of violent victimization early in life, second, substance abuse, and the third is exposure to violence in the environment around you. People who had none of those risk factors ― even with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia ― had very low rates of violent behavior…Abuse, violence in the environment around you ― those are the kinds of things you’re not going to solve by having someone take a mood stabilizer.”

Sadly such is the state of lazy journalism that ‘respected media outlets’ simply infer that those that commit mass murder are simply head cases and giving them access to guns will somehow create a bigger problem. That’s how the mainstream media is portraying a 2-yr old bill to whip up more misunderstanding.

Stopping school massacres in the playground


While kids around America plan to walkout of school to protest for tighter gun control, one sensible police department is putting up this sign. Looking back over school massacres it should not have escaped anyone that the perpetrators are generally the ones that feel betrayed, left out, ignored, bullied or the subject of mockery on social media. In every school such things take place. We’ve all seen the bully and the weakling at play. The “Nigel no friends” taunts.

CM has pointed out the growing rate of single parent households (generally the father) is 40% in the white community and 70% in the black community. Psychological studies have shown boys seem to be more impacted by the lack of a father in the house than do girls. In many cases the perpetrators of these school massacres have had unstable family backgrounds. So these are the kids that are likely dealing with inner feelings of despair and struggling to understand how their place in the world works. Throw bullying on top of this and the feelings of revenge fester, sadly in ways that sometimes end up in Parkland tragedies.

Therefore as much as these kids feel aggrieved and angered enough to march and beat up on politicians, the NRA, it’s members and sponsors perhaps this meme of #walkupnotout is the real lesson that will go far further than banning guns outright to prevent such disasters in the future. These kids who are willing to make a plan over months and years to get their subjective justice won’t stop just because they can’t lay their hands on a firearm. Cars, knives, bomb making or any other means will still be available to them.

So to David Hogg and his fellow student activists don’t forget that to prevent further such atrocities perhaps the most powerful weapon to disarm is actually yourselves taking a step to befriend the outcasts you know exist.

NRA membership searches up 4900%


At the time media outlets went all guns blazing on the National Rifle Association (NRA), CM warned that it most likely would cause a knee jerk reaction in the opposite direction. We speculated that the hike in membership fee likely reflected a surge in members. As tragic as the Parkland shooting massacre was, CM said that ‘shaming’ NRA members en masse would only make them dig in deeper. As it turns out searches for NRA membership has surged 4900% since Feb 14. People are sick and tired of being bullied into feeling guilty about things they haven’t caused.

CM also mentioned that FedEx had the right approach by not giving in to open threats by student David Hogg calling people to boycott brands who supported the NRA. FedEx openly made their position on guns known but said they aren’t in the business of ramming their politics down the throats of others. Allowing individuals to make personal choices is always better than beating them into submission on any issue.

Many other corporates looked utterly hypocritical in cowtowing to this social pressure. The NRA members to date have undoubtedly served corporate interests well for all the right reasons of profitability. Is it any wonder honest members are upset to have sanctimonious corporate apparatchiks give them unsolicited lectures on responsibility?

Moves by sporting goods stores like Dick’s to ban AR sales and raise the age limit to 21yo looked sensible from the outside. However they had multiple massacres over decades to make that call. The current CEO has been in charge since 1984. Why the u-turn in his conscience? Indeed the company did temporarily suspend sales of ARs after Sandy Hook in 2012 but kept retailing them at the company’s Field & Stream outlets before selling them again at Dick’s. If one looks at its website one can still buy a pump-action shotgun. Not very consistent.

Surely  if Dick’s feels so strongly about gun control perhaps it should stop selling them period. 95% of firearm related murders are committed with handguns. Statistically they’d be better off banning sales of pistols.  There are 50,000 (mostly individual) gun stores in the US who will gladly sell ARs to customers. One seriously doubts that Bob’s Guns in West Virginia will cut off his nose to spite his face until the law forces him too!

According to the Crime Prevention Research Center, murders in US appear to be very concentrated: 54% of US counties (representing 11% of the population) in 2014 had zero murders, 2% of counties made up 51% of the murders, ironically in states with the strictest gun controls – Illinois, NY and California.

The failure to communicate is obvious. Progressives believe that pointing fingers will win the day. Shaming, boycotting and vilifying the very people they wish to convince to put in place more common sense gun laws are given no voice. So the deplorables exercise their voice by doing the exact opposite and signing up in droves to protect what they perceive is the open theft of their freedoms.

As mentioned in earlier posts, ignoring the state of kids growing up in broken homes, surging drug abuse and onerous political correctness being driven through the school system by creating a scapegoat in the NRA only reinforces the rift to reaching any workable solution.

So more hearty congratulations to the left. Until they begin to engage in the debate rather than shut it down look forward to yet further failures in pushing their agenda. God gave us two ears and one mouth so we would listen more and talk less. By thinking the gun debate would be a bullseye for control, they’ve inadvertently turned the weapon on themselves.

Security measures in US schools – shocking stats


Let’s get one thing clear. Whether victims of shootings are kindergarten kids, school students, work colleagues or old age pensioners, the sheer act of it points to an increasingly sick element of society. To take innocent lives because of one’s own sense of subjective injustice can’t be justified. That’s hardly an earth shattering revelation. However what is actually going on at schools when it comes to securing students safety? The stats are mind boggling.

A 2017 study by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reported the following,

In the 2013–14 school year, 93 percent of public schools reported that they controlled access to school buildings by locking or monitoring doors during school hours. Other safety and security measures reported by public schools included the use of security cameras to monitor the school (75 percent), a requirement that faculty and staff wear badges or picture IDs (68 percent), and the enforcement of a strict dress code (58 percent). In addition, 24 percent of public schools reported the use of random dog sniffs to check for drugs, 20 percent required that students wear uniforms, 9 percent required students to wear badges or picture IDs, and 4 percent used random metal detector checks.

Breaking down some of the categories in the chart 5.5% of primary schools use sniffer dogs to check for drugs!! Over half of high schools have random drug searches. 9% of high schools have metal detectors. How did it get to this? Is taking such preventive action having an impact?

In 1994, the federal government began requiring schools to introduce safety programs in an attempt to crack down on violence on school grounds. Many schools introduced metal detectors to check for guns, knives and other weapons. The year after the measures were introduced, violent deaths on high school campuses across the United States halved.

Then in 1999, the Columbine High School shooting reset the bar on violence inside the schoolyard. Armed with shot guns, machine guns, pistols and pipe bombs two students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, murdered 12 students and one teacher before committing suicide. Listening to interviews of those who survived, the answer was the same – the two were regarded as outcasts. It was later shown that they were on anti-depressant medication and had committed multiple felonies. An excellent documentary done by Zero Hour chronologically runs through their mindset

In May 2002, the Secret Service published a report that examined 37 U.S. school shootings showing strikingly similar signals. The findings were:

1) Incidents of targeted violence at school were rarely sudden, impulsive acts. Prior to most incidents, other people knew about the attacker’s idea and/or plan to attack.

2) Most attackers did not threaten their targets directly prior to advancing the attack.


4) Most attackers had difficulty coping with significant losses or personal failures. Many had considered or attempted suicide.

5) Many attackers felt bullied, persecuted, or injured by others prior to the attack.

6) Most attackers had access to and had used weapons prior to the attack.

7) In many cases, other students were involved in some capacity.

8) Despite prompt law enforcement responses, most shooting incidents were stopped by means other than law enforcement intervention.

Trump’s suggestion of arming teachers seems ludicrous to outsiders. To have holstered teachers (boils down to a question of how many would want to ‘carry’ in the classroom) or armed sentries in front of schools hardly sends the right messages about teaching respect. Then again with the ever growing surge of kids growing up in single parent households (currently 40% of white households and 70% of black households) in the US the psychological studies point to an increase in dysfunctionality in kids because of a lack a stable guardian to keep them on the rails.

Banning guns or enforcing gun free zones won’t prevent future massacres. Will America need 100% of schools to have airport style security with pat downs, ion scanners and prison style walls to prevent would be perpetrators breaking in? Maybe they will if families keep breaking down and disgruntled delinquent teenagers feel they need to vent.

Yet come between some Americans and the 2nd Amendment and all manner of excuses to justify ownership surfaces. As an Australian, my country is often highlighted as a success story of mandatory gun confiscation after the Port Arthur massacre in 1996.

Yes Australia hasn’t seen a massacre since yet there was never a big problem in the first place. 661,000 firearms were removed from circulation. Or 1 gun for every 33 people. In the US it is c.1 gun for every person in circulation. Even if a third of households have them we are looking at 1 gun per 3 people in the US.

The Aussie government offered $500/gun average. If Trump ran the same programme (albeit 21 years later) and taking into account inflation then conservatively at $1,000 a gun he would be looking at a cost of $320bn. To put that in perspective the annual US military budget is around $680bn. So a combined spend of $1 trillion.

Yet as tragic as the Florida shooting is, mainstream and social media has turned this into a cesspit of vile abuse and misinformation.

Whether it be the conspiracy theories of high school student David Hogg being a CNN planted child actor, Trump’s hand written  notes or kids threatening to march on Washington the whole tragedy is turning into a debacle. While we should be mourning the deaths of 17 innocent students at the hands of a lunatic, the media seems more focused on Trump bashing and posting memes of Republicans in the pockets of the NRA.

If guns in schools have been an issue since the 1990s, we have had ample numbers of administrations who could have acted but didn’t. If the 14 gun massacres that occurred under the Obama Administration when the Democrats had control of the House and Senate  resulted in no action being taken why the song and dance by Democrats today? Sounds like political point scoring at its worst.

This isn’t or at least shouldn’t be a partisan issue. This is an issue of a breakdown in social values. By allowing single parent households to simply and easily marry the state through generous subsidies, parental responsibility is being thrown out the window. To be fair automatic weapons are hardly a requirement for a civilian population but let’s deal with the real issues behind why so many students are being massacred rather than just the method of how they commit the atrocities.

Banning guns seems so simple to cure the problem but as the stats above make clear, the solution is far more complex than armed teachers, rent-a-cops at school gates and metal detectors. Parents need to start taking far more responsibility and the media needs to start focusing on keeping it real.

It is disturbing to turn a tragedy into yet another excuse to crank up Trump Derangement Syndrome. He may have handled the messaging poorly (as he does with most issues) but let’s look at the history. Almost 20 years have gone by since Columbine High and despite countless repeat events, where has the same level of outrage been? Exactly. Nowhere. Tragedies should never be used for political gain. Where is the dignity for the dead? Perhaps we can just boil the whole behaviour surrounding the awful event as merely “moving with the times”. It is the term we seem to hear for every other excuse to shut down sensible debate.

Ultimately it is for Americans to decide to vote for parties that will change laws for the greater good. The rest of the world can shake their head and waggle the finger at America’s gun laws but perhaps they should focus on how good they’ve got it at home by comparison.