The effort being made to discredit the validity of US elections is pretty disturbing. There have always been dead people on the voting rolls. That's because people die all the time and county clerks don't instantly change the voting lists to reflect that. Same is true for people who move from one jurisdiction to another. This is not new. None of that means that illegal aliens or other ineligible voters routinely misrepresent themselves to vote in the name of a dead person or somebody who has recently moved. In fact, evidence shows that such instances are exceedingly rare. Don't fall for the spin. The elections here are at least as free and fair as any others in the world.

“Everyone has been asking what we’re gonna do with the wood,” says park spokesperson Tony Clark. “We’re taking it down. We’re not gonna really give it to anybody. We’re not going to sell it. We’re not gonna auction it. It’s gotta go. If that changes and we want to build some special chairs or furniture and sell it in the park, we’ll let people know, but I don’t think there’s big plans for that wood.”

By Andra Gillespie

Hillary Clinton has selected Virginia Senator Tim Kaine as her running mate.

While this news was not surprising – Kaine had long been suspected to be a top choice and made President Obama’s short list in 2008 – it does raise questions about Secretary Clinton’s choices. In an extremely polarized election contest where her own liberal bona fides were questioned, why would she pick a centrist Democrat as her running mate?

Those who study the vice presidency usually concede that the veep pick has a negligible impact on the ticket’s eventual vote totals. John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin in 2008 may be an exception. Researchers estimate she may have cost the campaign as much as 1.6 percentage points. However, the choice of a running mate still reflects a nominee’s judgment and sends signals about which groups campaigns they feel they need to target in a general election.

Both Clinton and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump had to balance the demands of base constituencies with their own need to find complementary partners for the campaign.

MORE HERE: http://yonside.com/kaine-was-the-logical-choice-as-hillary-clintons-vice-president/

“Today, the danger of some sort of a nuclear catastrophe is greater than it was during the Cold War,” warns William Perry, “and most people are blissfully unaware of this danger.”

A former U.S. defense secretary from 1994 to 1997, Perry has been an inside player in the business of nuclear weapons for over 60 years. And his book, My Journey at the Nuclear Brink, is a sober read. It’s also a powerful counterpoint to NATO’s current European strategy, which envisions nuclear weapons as a deterrent to war: The purpose of nukes “is to prevent major war, not to wage wars,” argues the Alliance’s magazine, NATO Review.

But as Perry points out, it’s only by chance that the world has avoided a nuclear war — sometimes by nothing more than dumb luck — and, rather than enhancing our security, nukes “now endanger it.”

The 1962 Cuban missile crisis is generally represented as a dangerous standoff resolved by sober diplomacy. In fact, it was a single man — Russian submarine commander Vasili Arkhipov — who countermanded orders to launch a nuclear torpedo at an American destroyer that could have set off a full-scale nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States.

MORE HERE: http://yonside.com/risk-nuclear-catastrophe-might-greater-now-cold-war/

Donald Trump delivered a dark vision of an America under siege Thursday, branding himself the law-and-order candidate in a lengthy speech laden with references to terror and violence in the streets.

Speaking on the last night of a convention unlike any in decades, Trump described a country on the brink of anarchy, one beset by ISIL and immigrant hordes, with an economy crumbling under the weight of crooked free-trade deals.

"Our convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation," Trump said early in the speech. "The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life. Any politician who does not grasp this danger is not fit to lead our country."

MORE HERE: http://yonside.com/donald-trump-delivers-dark-vision-america-branding-law-order-candidate/