A WordPress Blog-THE CHURCH MILITANT Ephesians 5:11-"And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them". This Christian News Blog maintains a one stop resource of current news and reports of its own related to church, moral, spiritual, and related political issues, plus articles, and postings from other online discernment ministries, and media which share the aims to obey the biblical commands to shed light on and refute error, heresy, apostasy, cults, and spiritual abuse. ALL CONTENT FROM HTTPS://RATHEREXPOSETHEM.BLOGSPOT.COM MOVED TO THIS NEW BLOG, MAY 2020
Longwood Gardens 2024 Christmas Walkthrough Tour! Enjoy this year’s beautiful holiday tour of the country’s most beautiful gardens! Longwood Gardens is located in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania!
The cost of Pennsylvania’s Senate recount is expected to cost around $1 million in federal funds.
Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt said that statewide recounts are triggered if the votes are within a 0.5% margin.
Senator Bob Casey (D-Pa.) and Senate-elect David McCormick (R-Pa.) were separated by 0.43% votes, with a maximum of 80,000 provisional and mail-in ballots still left to be counted.
According to the Department of State, as of 4 p.m. local time on November 14th, Casey received 48.53% of the vote with 3,359,086 votes, and McCormick had 48.90% with 3,385,115.
Schmidt stated that the last recount in the state between McCormick and cardiothoracic surgeon Mehmet Oz, known on television as Dr. Oz, cost Pennsylvania taxpayers $1.053 million.
In this case, about 7 million ballots will be subject to recount, and counties will begin counting on November 20th and must finish by November 26th at noon. They also must report their data to Schmidt by November 27th at 12 p.m.
During the recount, Schmidt said that counties will use “a different method or different equipment to tabulate the results” than they used in the initial tally to identify any potential issues.
Schmidt also noted that the results of the recount will be published online on November 27th, the day before Thanksgiving. Meanwhile, the state website’s election returns page will be updated as counties update their unofficial vote tallies from the original count. These updates are separate from the recount.
Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Bryan Cutler slammed Casey for declining to waive the costly recount.
“Throughout his entire career, Sen. Casey has publicly called for the enforcement of the rule of law and the upholding of judicial norms,” said Cutler. “The facts and the law are clear: The election was free and fair; Dave McCormick is our new U.S. senator; a costly, statewide recount is unnecessary and duplicative; and Democrat-controlled counties are now openly defying the courts and the plain language of the election law to try and overturn a legal election result.”
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A Pennsylvania judge ruled in favor of allowing Elon Musk’s political action committee to continue giving out $1 million per day to registered swing state voters who signed the petition, pledging to support free speech and gun rights.
Ronald of Clarkston, Michigan received $1M for signing our petition to support the Constitution.
Every day until Election Day, one person who signs up will be selected to earn $1M as a spokesperson for America PAC.
District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Pa.) sued to block the contest in Philadelphia on October 28th, arguing that Musk’s process of handing out money was a scam “designed to influence a national election.”
“This was all a political marketing masquerading as a lottery,” Krasner continued. “That’s what it is. A gift.”
Judge Angelo Foglietta ruled that the contest was not an “illegal lottery,” as America PAC's lawyers successfully argued that the funds were given to the best spokespeople within the MAGA movement.
“The $1 million recipients are not chosen by chance,” stated America PAC attorney Chris Gober. “We know exactly who will be announced as the $1 million recipient today and tomorrow.”
“There is no prize to be won, instead recipients must fulfill contractual obligations to serve as a spokesperson for the PAC,” Gober added during the hearing.
Krasner responded by showcasing Musk at an October Trump rally, telling rally-goers that the money would be “randomly” awarded, rather than deliberately picked.
“That doesn’t sound like a spokesperson contract,” Krasner added.
Musk has already doled out $16 million since the giveaway began on October 19th, with the final winner to be announced on Election Day.
The Pennsylvania ruling was a huge win for the Trump campaign in a critical swing state carrying 19 electoral votes, which certainly has the potential to decide the outcome of the election.
Musk’s giveaway falls under a gray area under election law, which prohibits paying individuals to register to vote, however, in order to get the funds, voters only have to sign the petition, rather than register to vote.
The U.S. Department of Justice previously warned Musk’s PAC that the scheme could potentially violate federal law, but federal prosecutors have yet to take any action.
America PAC lawyers also argued that the two remaining winners will be from individuals living in Arizona and Michigan, which would mean the Pennsylvania lawsuit wouldn’t have an affect on the ability to continue the giveaway in other states.
“The only people protected by Pennsylvania law are in Pennsylvania,” stated Richard Briffault, a Columbia Law School professor.
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The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has blocked an attempt to allow mail-in ballots without a handwritten date from being counted in the 2024 election.
Friday's decision reverses a previous Commonwealth Court ruling that had declared the requirement for a handwritten date on ballots unconstitutional. Following an appeal by the Pennsylvania GOP, the state Supreme Court’s ruling now ensures that undated mail-in ballots will not be counted in the upcoming election.
Justice Kevin Dougherty criticized the Commonwealth Court for its decision.
“‘This Court will neither impose nor countenance substantial alterations to existing laws and procedures during the pendency of an ongoing election.’ We said those carefully chosen words only weeks ago. Yet they apparently were not heard in the Commonwealth Court, the very court where the bulk of election litigation unfolds,” Dougherty wrote.
“Today’s order, which I join, rights the ship. It sends a loud message to all courts in this Commonwealth: in declaring we would not countenance substantial alterations to existing laws and procedures during the pendency of an ongoing election, we mean what we meant and meant what we say,” he continued.
Pennsylvania Republicans praised Friday’s ruling, claiming that Democrats have repeatedly attempted to undermine the requirement for a handwritten date on ballots.
State officials supporting the counting of undated ballots argue that this change would simplify the process for election workers.
Prior to the court’s ruling, the Pennsylvania Department of State submitted a brief advocating for the change.
“The requirement that county boards set aside mail ballots with declaration-date errors — and particularly the requirement that they set aside mail ballot envelopes with ‘incorrect’ dates — imposed a significant burden on county boards. Election workers must manually review each ballot envelope to determine whether it has a ‘correct’ date,” the brief said, according to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star.
Friday’s decision marks the second time this month that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has halted Democrat-supported attempts to remove the dating requirement.
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Editor’s note:American campuses are awash in a crisis of Jew hatred.Ineffectual college administrators have taken tentative steps to try and rein in the proponents of terror on their campuses, but they have yet to confront the most obvious source of this poisonous Jew hatred—their own radical faculty who have not only called for an end to Israel but have outright celebrated the barbaric bloodshed of the terror group Hamas.
The Freedom Center is exposing these radical, pro-terror faculty as the Top Ten Hamas Loyalist Professors. We will be publishing one school per day as a series on Frontpage. Huda Fakhreddine, an associate professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania, is #4 on our list.
#4: Huda Fakhreddine, University of Pennsylvania
An associate professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Huda Fakhreddine has repeatedly voiced praise for the Jew-hating terrorist group Hamas and has specifically lauded their barbaric attack on innocent Israeli civilians on October 7th during which over 1200 were slaughtered and many more raped, mutilated, and taken hostage.
On October 7, 2023, just hours after the massacre, Fakhreddine tweeted in Arabic, “While we were asleep, Palestine invented a new way of life,” clearly celebrating the brutal slaughter of Israeli innocents.
A few days later, on October 12, Fakhreddine doubled down on her warped view of the conflict, posting a “Statement of Solidarity with Palestine” which charged Israel with “sole responsibility” for Hamas’s October 7th massacre. The statement claimed that “The Palestinian resistance efforts”—note the whitewashing of mass rape and baby-killing as acts of “resistance”—“are a response to 75 years of occupation, colonization, and apartheid by the Israeli settler colonial regime.”
In a Facebook post a week later, Fakhreddine added: “When we chant, 'From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," we are calling for a one state, one person=one vote, where everyone living between the river and the sea is free and treated as a human being with rights and dignity." If some see freedom and equal rights for all as an existential threat, then they are the problem. No country should require oppression and apartheid to exist.”
As the anti-Semitism watchdog site Canary Mission notes, “‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free’ is a chant calling to dismantle the state of Israel. It has also been employed by Hamas leader Khaled Mashal to call for the replacement of Israel with an Islamic state.” It is a genocidal call for the annihilation of Israel and the destruction of its entire Jewish population.
So extreme are Fakhreddine’s views that she rejects even the common pro-Palestine descriptor of Gaza as an “open-air prison,” tweeting that, “Gaza is not an open-air prison. Prisoners receive visitors and aid is allowed to be passed to them. Gaza is a Nazi-style concentration camp, a concentration camp under bombardment.” Fakhreddine’s comparison of Israel’s conduct to Hitler’s Nazi regime is a common and widely-used form of Jew hatred.
The professor has repeatedly made clear that she supports Hamas’s attack on innocent Israeli civilians. In a civil rights case filed in U.S. District Court, Jewish students at Penn allege that at a pro-Palestine rally in October 16, 2023, one speaker declared that “all settlers and all settlements are legitimate military targets and will be targeted.” The same speaker also told Jewish students to “go back to Moscow, Brooklyn . . . fucking Berlin where you came from.” According to the case filing, “Professors, including Huda Fakhreddine, cheered the speaker on and clapped in approval.”
Last May, when students created an illegal pro-Hamas encampment on Penn’s campus, Professor Fakhreddine was on hand to support them. When university officials finally allowed city police to clear the encampment, Fakhreddine sided with the students who illegally occupied university land and claimed that the students were “brutalized” by law enforcement. She further drew a parallel to the actions of Philadelphia and campus police and an instance from her childhood when Israeli military forces “invaded” her village in Lebanon.
Fakhreddine was one of the faculty organizers of the notoriously anti-Semitic Palestine Writes Literature Festival, held on campus in the fall of 2023. At the event, which brought many well-known Jew haters to Penn’s campus, Fakhreddine used the genocidal phrase “From the river to the sea,” promoting the destruction of Israel and its Jewish population.
The professor also denied the well-established fact that the Jewish people have deep ancestral ties to the land of Israel, stating “And now, as Zionists continue to forcibly remove us from our homes, destroy and build over our ancestral villages, cemeteries and archaeological heritage. They have invented a stunning new tale of indigeneity [that is] propagated in popular culture throughout the West in particular.”
She also invoked anti-Semitic tropes that Jews control the media, stating “An open collaboration with Israeli media continues to remove or shadow ban Palestinian content on social media, a phenomenon that was verified by an independent investigation commissioned by Facebook itself that revealed unequivocal anti Palestinian bias. Financial platforms like PayPal have been pressured by Zionists to disallow Palestinians from even the most mundane of transactions.”
Fakhreddine mocked concerns about the potential for anti-Semitism at the festival as “Hysterical and racist accusations that our presence here poses a threat to Jewish students on campus, making them feel unsafe and fearful of wearing their kippas” adding, “Again, this is an old, well worn colonial script of the violent, dark, irrational and savage native." Which I will not dignify with a response.”
In perhaps her most direct statement of Jew hatred, Fakhreddine alleged that “So many of us in this room have had to watch our elders die in refugee camps that aren’t fit for rodents, all so they [Jews] can have an extra country if they want, the violence of which is on full display on this campus every year when Zionists set up their so-called Birthright Trips propaganda tours to recruit young American Jews to become our colonizers, tormentors and Lords.”
For her outright and enthusiastic support for Hamas’s October 7 massacre targeting Jewish civilians in Israel and her well-documented record of anti-Semitism, Penn Professor Huda Fakhreddine deserves her place on the list of Hamas-loyalist professors.
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Delaware County election board member John McBlain has resigned, accusing the panel of rushing to add three “voter service centers” in deeply Democratic parts of the suburban Philadelphia county, something he said adds a "blatant element of unfairness to the county’s election process."
McBlain, the lone Republican on Delaware County’s election board, has been the minority party appointee on the three-member election board since 2021. All members of the election board are appointed by the county council, which has been majority-Democratic since early 2020. A provision in the county’s charter ensures a check on the majority party, however, requiring that at least one member of the election board be a representative of the minority party.
At a special meeting of the election board on Friday, McBlain announced his intention to quit effective at the end of November, saying his decision was due to the board’s approval of three voter service centers in Upper Darby, Chester, and Chester Heights — all three Democratic strongholds.
“I thought I could serve on this board as long as I believed that we were making sure the elections were both secure and fair,” McBlain began at the end of the meeting on Friday, October 11. “I think the board has put their finger on the scale, so I don’t think that that fairness aspect is there anymore. Therefore, I — as much as I’m tempted to do so, as of effective immediately — I tender my resignation as of November 30th, 2024, so that I can complete my duties during the election certification process. But then I hereby resign from the board after that date.”
Voter service centers (VSCs) are essentially no different than “satellite election offices,” which were controversial as far back as the 2020 general election. Whichever name is used, the creation is meant to be a literal extension of the county’s primary election office — the one place where a voter can register to vote, request a mail-in ballot, and return that ballot, all at the same time and same place. Philadelphia’s satellite election offices drew the ire of Republicans that year because Philadelphia refused to allow poll watchers anywhere inside, arguing that the locations were county election offices, so they could not be polling places. A Commonwealth Court ruling later upheld that argument to exclude poll watchers.
Like Philadelphia, Delaware County also used satellite election offices in 2020, the rationale largely being the pandemic. But according to McBlain, since 2020 “the only voter service center that we’ve maintained has been [the original and main election office] at the Media courthouse, and we’ve done that for every election, and that has been adequate.”
Now, McBlain says, the three VSCs seem to be created spur of the moment, and they’re in some of the deepest blue parts of the county.
“I don’t understand what has changed. We are down — I want to say by more than a third, if not two-thirds — the number of applications for mail-in votes as we were in 2020,” McBlain said.
“There’s no more pandemic where we need to sort of spread things out. There’s no need for it. The Media [county seat] office is more than adequately handling all requests for registration for applications to handle receipt of mail-in or absentee ballots,” McBlain told Broad + Liberty after his resignation. “No one has been calling publicly for [VSCs]. I don’t recall one member of the public attending a previous meeting this year [prior to Oct. 11] and advocating that we ought to have voter service centers to provide better service to the residents.”
At a September 24 meeting of the election board, county election director Jim Allen distinctly raised the possibility of adding VSCs, and listed only the sites in Upper Darby, Chester, and Chester Heights as possibilities.
But it’s what happened next that troubled McBlain the most.
McBlain says just after that meeting, he was talking to Allen. Then Donna Cantor, who McBlain says is a lawyer for the county Democratic party, approached them both.
“She [Cantor] came up to Mr. Allen and told him that Colleen Guiney, the chairwoman of the [county] Democratic Party, had a list of volunteers to staff the voter services center. I expressed shock,” McBlain said.
“I said, ‘I didn’t realize that we had decided that we were going to have voter services centers.’ And to Jim Allen’s credit, I mean, he immediately said ‘Well, listen at any voter services centers, we’re not going to have partisan volunteers staffing.’ But the Democratic Party was already prepared to staff these voter services centers at the September meeting where again, it was discussed almost in passing,” McBlain explained.
Election Director Allen did not directly refute that a conversation with Cantor happened, but he did offer his own context.
“[S]omeone approached me about the possible use of volunteers in front of Mr. McBlain, and I turned away the suggestion. There were no specifics or a ‘list,’” he said.
Cantor did not respond to a request for comment asking if she disputed McBlain’s version of the conversation.
Guiney responded to a request for comment, but did not answer specific questions about whether the county Democrats were somehow prepared to staff VSCs before the VSCs were even discussed publicly and approved. Guiney mostly filibustered.
“It is a matter of public record that voter services centers are located in areas convenient to public transit, and in facilities already wired into the secure Delaware County communications system,” Guiney said. “We have had Voter Service Centers in previous elections, and surrounding counties have already opened Voter Service Centers this cycle. This matter has already been discussed at the publicly streamed Board of Elections meeting leading up to the most recent meeting.
“The Democratic party has robust volunteer engagement, but the County is not using volunteers at the Voter Service Centers. Any Delaware County resident, of any political party, is welcome to apply for a temporary position with the Board of Elections by contacting the Bureau of Elections for more information,” Guiney concluded.
During the public comment portion of the Oct. 11 special meeting, 21 total people rose to address the election board. The Broad + Liberty analysis showed that five of them spoke about regular polling locations, one spoke about poll worker safety, thirteen spoke in favor of adding VSCs, and two expressed concerns about VSCs.
“So at the time of the [Oct. 11] meeting, it was clear that there was a partisan [effort] to pack the room in favor of this. There were dozens of Democratic committee people and volunteers,” McBlain said. “There were a dozen or more members of the League of Women Voters who were nothing more than the provisional wing of the Delaware County Democratic Party who were present to speak in favor of it.”
A request for comment to the two other members of the election board, sent to them via the county’s spokesperson, was not returned.
Democratic state Representative and chair of the Upper Darby Democratic committee Heather Boyd was among the thirteen who spoke in favor of the measure. Others included a county Democratic committee member, someone who ran for delegate to the Democratic National Convention last May, as well as a donor to a local Democratic candidate and the founder of a progressive group in Delco. Two people from the League of Women Voters also spoke.
One Drexel Hill resident questioned the rationale for the satellite site locations. “I’m also concerned about the equity of these polling places, these satellite polling places. Where is the equity for the communities that have a heavy Republican presence? Where is their pop-up satellite location [in] communities such as Parkside, Trainer, and Upland — communities that are also considered perhaps low income communities, where is their pop-up voting site?”
McBlain also said VSCs came up very briefly but somewhat unseriously months ago, he suggested the county survey all municipalities to see which ones might be interested, but that the county never acted on that suggestion.
To anyone thinking McBlain has a hair trigger for an election conspiracy need only listen to his Democrat counterparts to understand that’s not the case.
“I think you served on the board with great distinction,” Election Board Chairwoman Ashley Lunkenheimer said upon hearing McBlain’s intention to resign. “I think there are very few in the county or in the commonwealth who have a better knowledge of election law and I think that your viewpoint has always been well served on this board, but I appreciate that you’re continuing your duties through the election because we need — you have a really good perspective on elections.”
“John McBlain is someone who I’m gonna disagree with on a great many policy issues, but we both have the same factual understanding of how elections are conducted,” Democratic Councilwoman Christine Reuther told the Inquirer in November, when Reuther was about to renominate him to the election board. “He doesn’t see conspiracy theories every time you turn around.”
Reuther’s November comments to the Inquirer came just as a long-simmering partisan power struggle over the election board was about to come to a close. Earlier in the year, the county council passed an ordinance that would allow it to reject the minority party’s nomination for the election board. The resolution went further, saying that the county had the “unfettered discretion” to reject as many candidates from the minority party as it liked until it found a suitable candidate.
Council Democrats passed the ordinance in January 2023. Republicans quickly denounced the move as a power grab. When Republicans sued in June, a spokesperson for the council accused Delco Republicans of playing politics.
“Interestingly, the Delco GOP's public statements on this case suggest [sic] a ‘blatant power grab,’” the county said in a statement to the Daily Times. “However, the change in the law which is being challenged was passed in January 17, 2023. Now, more than five months later, has the lawsuit [sic] been filed. It appears less an effort to secure a fair election, and more a weak effort to develop a talking point for an upcoming county election.”
However, a judge ruled in December that the ordinance was illegal and struck it down.
“The Ordinance was an arrogant attempt by the County Council to create a veto power for themselves to block the right of the Delaware County Republican Party Chairman to nominate his preferred member to the Delaware County Board of Elections,” said Wally Zimolong, one of the attorneys who fought the suit on behalf of the county GOP.
Reuther, a member of council who oversees the county’s elections, has also danced on the partisan tightrope in a presidential election before.
In 2020, Reuther was clearly in the lead in the county’s pursuit of and eventual acceptance of election grants from the Chicago-based Center for Tech and Civic Life, or CTCL. Those grants would later become famous for receiving a $350 million infusion from Mark Zuckerberg
As Delaware County got nearer to accepting the grant, the county solicitor flagged to Reuther some of the left-leaning tendencies of the grant agency.
“Not at all surprising,” Reuther said in response. “I am seeking funds to fairly and safely administer the election so everyone legally registered to vote can do so and have their votes count. If a left-leaning public charity wants to further my objective, I am fine with that. I will deal with the blow back.”
The Pennsylvania General Assembly later banned local election offices from accepting grants from outside, private agencies, in part because of concerns that the grants resulted in improper and unbalanced political influence.
McBlain was not a part of the election board at the time.
But this time, he says it’s not election security he’s worried about.
“I think this is the Delaware County Democratic Party putting their hand on the scale with these voter services centers to literally get out the vote in highly partisan areas of the county without any consideration of [if] there’s a reason that they didn’t come in and offer it in Marple or Springfield. I just wasn’t going to be a part of it anymore. I’m disgusted that this partisanship is showing its head at the 11th hour.”
Todd Shepherd is Broad + Liberty’s chief investigative reporter.
Who would have thought the Amish would ever vote for ANYONE? I hear they are voting for Donald Trump (not Kamala Harris) in the 2024 election. So I went to their world headquarters to find out why. And what an insight!
President Donald Trump speaks to supporters at a campaign rally at the Bayfront Convention Center in Erie, Pennsylvania. Watch the full rally on NEWSMAX and NEWSMAX2.
DELAYED FOR A FEW MINUTES TO START; WAITING FOR THE SECRET SERVICE TO GET READY!
You're not going to believe what's happening in ANOTHER small town in America. Another migrant surge has overtaken a small town. This time, it's Charleroi, Pennsylvania.