A design change Pennsylvania officials made to prevent voters from making a disqualifying error on their mail ballots appears to have backfired. The issue — voters failing to write the final two digits of the year on the return envelope — is leading some counties to reject ballots in the primary, despite the state’s new advice to count them.

Last fall, the Pennsylvania Department of State announced it was redesigning the state’s mail ballot return envelope, in part to reduce the number of ballots rejected for lacking a proper date, which is required by law. This year’s envelope has “20” prefilled in the year line and leaves spaces for the voters to fill in the last two digits.

One election director said a “significant” number of voters who returned flawed ballots had not filled in the last two digits of the year, and other election officials around the state echoed that observation. On the Friday before the election, Deputy Secretary for Elections Jonathan Marks sent an email to counties advising them to count ballots even if the envelope lacks the last two digits of the year....

But the department’s emailed advice does not carry the force of law, and counties are making different decisions about whether to count the ballots. Votebeat and Spotlight PA contacted eight counties and found that Philadelphia, Allegheny, and Delaware Counties are counting the ballots, while York, Lycoming, Lancaster, and Snyder Counties are rejecting them. Montgomery County said it would make a decision next week.

Allegheny County Democrat Erin McClelland topped state Rep. Ryan Bizzarro in Tuesday's Democratic primary for state treasurer. She will now face Stacy Garrity, the Republican incumbent, this fall. Treasurer is one of three of Pennsylvania's executive level offices that will appear on the November ballot; the other two are state attorney general and state auditor general.

Along with attorney general candidate Eugene DePasquale, McClelland is Allegheny County’s other contender in the statewide ballot this spring — but her rival lives just a couple of hours up Interstate 79.

State Rep. Ryan Bizzarro has represented Erie in the state House for more than a decade and has garnered the endorsement of the state Democratic Party. McClelland is a mental health and substance abuse counselor who worked as a contractor for Allegheny County. She has previously run unsuccessful campaigns for Allegheny County executive and Congress, twice winning the party’s nomination but losing to the Republican incumbent.

Both have criticized incumbent Garrity for factors that include her close ties to Donald Trump. But their own primary battle was contentious, involving questions about McClelland’s campaign finance reports and Bizzarro’s decade-old support for a bill that would prevent state insurance exchanges from covering most abortions.

sssh! don’t wake up Donny during his trial. he’s in the middle of a dream. it’s a big, beautiful dream. in fact, it may be the greatest dream of all time. it goes something like this:

the real heroes of January 6th — the brave freedom fighters now beings unfairly held as hostages — bust out of prison and come to New York, where they stream into the courthouse where that crabby old fuckface Judge Merchan is forcing Donny to listen to mean tweets....

there’s just one problem with this dream: yesterday, outside the courthouse, only three or four protesters showed up.



they were outnumbered by the comedy duo The Good Liars, who came to interview them — by which I mean they were there to mock MAGA to their faces. also, there’s this little thing called security. welcome to New York, where they don’t fuck around, or take chances. lower Manhattan is now crawling with cops.

What is going on with this new The Office thing? The possible reboot/possible revival/possible spin-off has been all smoke and mirrors and Greg Daniels schemes. But it’s real enough to have apparently bagged two pretty big names as the first actors cast. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Domhnall Gleeson (of the Star Wars sequel trilogy) and Sabrina Impacciatore (of the second season of The White Lotus) have signed on to join this amorphous mystery version of the beloved sitcom.

As we’ve been following, Daniels (who created the American version of the workplace comedy) has been developing some new version of the show that’s set in the same universe as the one that’s home to Michael Scott (Steve Carrell), Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson), and Pam Beesly (Jenna Fischer). Last month, it was reported that Daniels had brought on Nathan For You co-creator Michael Koman to be his partner on this new project, which as of yet has no studio attached. Now, THR says the duo “have been casting a wide net to find talent availabilities for the latter half of this year.”

Basically, we don’t know anything about what the show will be like or what the actors will be doing yet. But you couldn’t really ask for better stars than Gleeson and Impacciatore. Impacciatore was a standout in the darkly comedic White Lotus. And Gleeson has proven his range, from sniveling and unpleasant in Star Wars to warm, funny, and charming in About Time. Beyond their many talents, the casting also suggests an interestingly international bent to this new Office (Impacciatore is Italian and Gleeson is Irish). That’s a departure from the sort of homogenous middle America of Scranton, Pennsylvania in Daniels’ original. We’ll have to wait and see what Daniels and co. have in store.

Two hundred days remain until the presidential election that will shape America’s destiny for the balance of the 21st century. The time will pass quickly. The magnitude of the decision cannot be overstated, nor can the threat to the American way of life that is imperiled by MAGA/fascism. A great test is at hand.

What is the nature of the test? What must be overcome? We live in an era of obnoxious, transcendent and ubiquitous cynicism.

American politics and media are the white hot molten epicenter of our cynicism meltdown. We are besotted with some of the most unprincipled, craven and morally corrupt Americans in our history, who roam the MAGA range spitting venom, sputtering idiocies, and immolating previously stated unshakable principles for THE DONALD. They do it all for power and fame.

Whether it be Tucker Carlson, the 2020s version of Father Coughlin, a thousand religious hustlers like Pastor Paula, a million Covid grifters, slews of access journalists whoring for clicks, gaggles of media c-suite executives looking for a buck, insiders turned Saudi agents, Bitcoin hustlers and social media monarchs who poison society and target children with algorithms, we live in an age of taking. The ethos of the locust is immoral and self-defeating, but there are no practitioners of the philosophy who measure up against the Aristotles of our age, who are the MAGA politicians like Elise Stefanik, Bill Barr, Lindsey Graham, and hundreds more who have abdicated decency, Americanism and their oaths for a low man and lower cause.