At around 18 months with my oldest, I began trying to teach her to thank anyone in uniform for their service; police, firefighters, a few security officers have been thanked in the process. Around three years old, we moved on to recognizing “special hats” like the one her great-grandfather wears, indicating past service in the armed forces.

In the beginning, it was tough. My daughter was non-verbal; now she is oh so verbal, I hardly remember the days she was only communicating in sign language. She was also painfully shy, also no longer a problem. What it looked like in those early months was me walking up to an officer, getting on my knees at her level, saying thank you to the officer, and then showing her to do the sign for thank you. A lot of really kind and really patient members of the NYPD (mostly) helped in those early months, waiting for excessive amounts of time and encouraging her with smiles while she worked up the courage to sign “thank you.”

I decided to actually look at some data. Before doing so I set the parameters, looking at all House and Senate elections from 2006 through 2016 and defining very close elections as those in the House where the winner won by 1.5% or less of the total vote, and those in the Senate where the winner won by 1.0% or less of the total vote.

Below is the raw data. Hopefully some Ricochetti with more expertise can tell us whether there is anything statistically significant in the results.

View original artwork here.

I recently became the heir to an old tattered cardboard box sent to me by my uncle’s widow by way of my daughter who had stopped off to see her as she passed through the mountain states on a summer trip. The lady expressed how I “should be the one to have this” and I now have its contents tucked away in different “safe places.” The box contented what was left of “his war stuff.”

There were items that brought memories of when I would take some of them from the dresser drawers at my grandmother’s. One was the seemingly strange piece of German technology which made the weird sound as you pressed repeatedly on its small, geared lever. It fit in the palm of the hand and generated a light when the lever was pumped but it also produced that sound which my uncle recalled as having an almost haunting effect on a dark French night as the Nazis wandered just behind their lines.

 Nearly a week after the election ended in most of the country, it continues in Broward County, Florida. The Republicans won the first vote, but the Democrats are getting ever closer with each subsequent recount. This is the same Broward County that kept recounting votes in the Bush / Gore Presidential election. Bush won the first vote, and every subsequent recount, but (surprise!) the gap got narrower every time the votes were recounted. Every recount ended up with a better result for the Democrat. Every time. That’s a concerning coincidence. But what’s more concerning is that nobody was surprised. The media openly speculated whether this next recount would be enough to put Gore over the top – it never occurred to anybody that the next recount might result in more Republican votes. This casual presumption of voter fraud is scarier to me than the voter fraud itself.

Brenda Snipes (pictured above) has been the Broward County Supervisor of Elections since 2003. She got the job after her predecessor, Miriam Oliphant (pictured at right), was fired for “grave neglect, mismanagement and incompetence.” That is an extremely misleading description of what these ladies are doing. They are not incompetent. And they are certainly not guilty of neglect – they are doing their jobs with dedication and resolve. The problem is that their job is to lie and cheat, in order to see to it that the Democrat Party wins as many elections as possible. Describing their work as incompetent is to participate in the systemic lying and cheating of Ms. Snipes and Ms. Oliphant.

I began writing political essays and columns in 1983. Full of that vigor which accompanies a guy barely 20 years old and on the verge of enlisting in the military, when I wasn’t busy making plans to save the world I was devouring every bit of conservative literature I could find in an effort to understand the historical and philosophical foundation for those ideas I found intuitively coherent and in happy harmony with the ideas that animated America’s founding.

The principle that in America the individual reigns supreme; that the individual may not be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; the historically radical concept that the very raison d’être of government is purely to secure the inalienable rights of the individual — these were things I felt in my bones. To see these ideas affirmed, explained, defended and advanced by great minds from Locke to Montesquieu, Madison to Tocqueville was intoxicating. To read the synthesis of these ideas and their application to the American experience by writers from Whittaker Chambers to Bill Buckley, Russell Kirk to Milton Friedman and so many more, was to bask not only in the accumulated wisdom of the best minds, but to arm myself intellectually, even as I would later arm myself physically (as a Security Forces troop), to defend the nation’s interests and ideals.