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Major Election Fraud Alert – Is This How They Are Going To Steal The Election From Donald Trump?

Election FraudEvery ounce of effort that ordinary Americans have put into getting Donald Trump elected could be completely wasted if we allow them to steal the election.  If you have confidence in the integrity of our elections, that confidence will be shaken by the time you are done reading this article, because I am about to share some information with you that is absolutely astounding.  Yesterday, I showed you that dead people are being registered to vote right now and that they have been voting in elections across the country for years.  I also showed you that illegal immigrants have been voting in important swing states such as Virginia and Pennsylvania.  But all of that pales in comparison to the evidence of systematic election fraud that we witnessed on election day in 2012.

Because Mitt Romney threw in the towel very early on election night in 2012, very little scrutiny was given to the actual voting results.  But if Romney had been willing to fight, there was actually quite a bit of evidence that the election was potentially stolen from him.

According to the Election Protection Coalition, voters all across America reported over 70,000 voting problems by five o’clock Eastern time on election day in 2012.  In many instances, voters that were attempting to vote for Mitt Romney were having their votes switched to Barack Obama by the voting machines.  We are going to look at some examples of this phenomenon below.

In particular, we want to focus on the swing states, because that is where most of the voting irregularities seem to have popped up.  If you are going to steal an election, you don’t really care too much about the really “red states” or the really “blue states”.  Rather, the key would be to shift enough votes in the tightly contested swing states to ensure a victory for your candidate.  And so let’s take a look at what happened in some of the most important swing states during the last election.

Ohio

During election night in 2012, the pundits breathlessly proclaimed that it was all going to come down to Ohio.  They told us that if Mitt Romney was going to have any chance of winning the election that he had to win Ohio, and so that was the state to watch more than any other.

One of the counties where Barack Obama really needed to run up votes was in Cuyahoga County.  But Barack Obama didn’t just solidly win in Cuyahoga County.  In fact, there were 16 precincts were Mitt Romney did not receive a single vote.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Earlier today I went to the official Cuyahoga County website, and the results from the last election are still up.  The following are the vote totals for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in the precincts where Mitt Romney did not get any votes…

0154 CLEVELAND -02-Q: 542 – 0

0192 CLEVELAND -04-L: 388 – 0

0204 CLEVELAND -05-E: 597 – 0

0205 CLEVELAND -05-F: 483 – 0

0206 CLEVELAND -05-G: 257 – 0

0219 CLEVELAND -05-T: 386 – 0

0228 CLEVELAND -06-H: 405 – 0

0232 CLEVELAND -06-L: 70 – 0

0233 CLEVELAND -06-M: 419 – 0

0241 CLEVELAND -06-U: 118 – 0

0248 CLEVELAND -07-F: 361 – 0

0273 CLEVELAND -08-J: 472 – 0

0280 CLEVELAND -08-Q: 49 – 0

0285 CLEVELAND -09-B: 414 – 0

0288 CLEVELAND -09-E: 478 – 0

0523 EAST CLEVELAND -04-C: 486 – 0

There were also a whole host of precincts in Cuyahoga County where Mitt Romney received just one or two votes.  Overall, Barack Obama won more than 99 percent of the vote in more than 100 precincts in just this one county.

How in the world does that happen?

Well, I think that what ordinary voters were telling reporters on election day in Ohio gives us a big clue.  According to Fox News, there were voters in Ohio that said that they tried to vote for Romney but the voting machines kept switching their votes to Obama…

“I don’t know if it happened to anybody else or not, but this is the first time in all the years that we voted that this has ever happened to me,” said Marion, Ohio, voter Joan Stevens. 

Stevens said that when she voted, it took her three tries before the machine accepted her choice to vote for Romney.

“I went to vote and I got right in the middle of Romney’s name,” Stevens told Fox News, saying that she was certain to put her finger directly on her choice for the White House.

She said that the first time she pushed “Romney,” the machine marked “Obama.”

So she pushed Romney again. Obama came up again. Then it happened a third time.

“Maybe you make a mistake once, but not three times,” she told Fox News.

At the time, Fox News also reported that similar things were happening in Nevada, North Carolina and Texas, but once election day faded from memory nobody really seemed to care about these incidents anymore.

Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania is another very important swing state, and as the 2012 election approached the Romney campaign was actually somewhat optimistic that they may have a shot of winning the state.

And it turned out that Mitt Romney did win 55 out of the 67 counties in Pennsylvania, but he still managed to lose the entire state by a significant margin because of the crazy vote totals that Obama ran up in the urban areas.

If you can believe it, there were 59 voting divisions in the city of Philadelphia where Mitt Romney did not get one single vote.

The combined vote total for those 59 voting divisions was 19,605 for Barack Obama and 0 for Mitt Romney.

The odds of that happening by random chance are so low that they are not even worth mentioning.

So how does something like that happen?

Well, the overall voter turnout rate in the city of Philadelphia was approximately 60 percent on election day in 2012.  But in the areas of the city where Republican poll watchers were illegally removed, the voter turnout rate was over 90 percent and Barack Obama received more than 99 percent of the vote.

You would think that the Republican Party should have screamed bloody murder about this, but instead they did absolutely nothing.

And once again, voting machines were switching votes from Mitt Romney to Barack Obama in Pennsylvania.  The following was reported by WND at the time…

It was in Upper Macungie Township, near Allentown, Pa., where an auditor, Robert Ashcroft, was dispatched by Republicans to monitor the vote on Election Day. He said the software he observed would “change the selection back to default – to Obama.”

He said that happened in about 5 percent to 10 percent of the votes.

He said the changes appeared to have been made by a software program.

Ashcroft said the format for computer programming has a default status, and in this case it appeared to be designating a vote for Obama each time it went to default.

So would Mitt Romney have won the state of Pennsylvania if the voting had been fair?

We may never know the answer to that question.

Florida

In the critical swing state of Florida, there were also a number of key precincts where Barack Obama received 99 percent of the vote.  The following was reported by Pundit Press…

How exactly did he accomplish this? Well, in part thanks to Broward County Precincts L024 to L029 (though I’m sure it’s all a coincidence that this happened to precincts all in order).

In those precincts combined, all in order, Mr. Obama won over 99% of the vote, defeating Mitt Romney 5,392 to… 54. Golly, how lucky! This especially impressive because in precincts L019-L022 (L023 doesn’t exist) Mr. Romney did over 14 times better than in L024-L029, and the precinct after, did 30 times better.

Most Americans have never even heard any of this information.  And remember, in this article we are looking at just a few examples from the most critical swing states.  The truth is that these kinds of “statistical anomalies” were happening all over the nation.

Virginia

In the important swing state of Virginia, a poll watcher named Dara Fox tried to sound the alarm about rampant voting fraud, and it should have made front page news all over the country.  The following is what Fox told WMAL radio about what went down…

-That it appeared that voters for Obama were being bussed in.

-That many of them could not speak English at all.

-That many of them could not even tell poll workers the correct address on their identification cards.

-That many people were voting more than once at that same polling station throughout the day.

Colorado

It appears that funny business was happening in swing states out west as well.  Somehow, 10 counties in the key swing state of Colorado had a voter registration rate of more than 100 percent on election day in 2012.

Theoretically this is impossible.  If all of the voting age people in your county registered to vote you could have a voter registration rate of 100 percent, but to go beyond that means that something is seriously wrong.

And yesterday I did show that authorities in Colorado have discovered that there is a “very serious” pattern of dead people casting votes in the state that goes back for many years.

This is why states should be allowed to require photo identification at voting locations.  The integrity of our voting process has been compromised over and over again, and anyone that tries to steal an election is committing a crime against all of us.

It is a fact that Barack Obama did not win in a single state that required a photo I.D. to vote in 2012.

So what would the election results have looked like if all 50 states had required a photo I.D. to vote?

We can’t go back and change what happened in 2012, but we sure can do something about 2016.

If you see something strange when you go to vote in November, do not just keep it to yourself.  If nobody in the mainstream media will listen to you, then contact me or someone else in the alternative media.

Collectively we need to scream bloody murder if they try to steal this election.  And if there is one thing that we know about Donald Trump, it is that he is not afraid to file lawsuits.  But the Trump campaign cannot be everywhere, and it is up to ordinary men and women to report any signs of trouble that they see or hear on election day.

If we will not fight election fraud, we might as well not even have any elections.  Because what is the point of spending so much time and effort trying to get someone elected if we are just going to let them steal the elections from us?

Is The Mainstream Media Dying?

CNN News Studio - Photo by DougRatings at CNN, MSNBC and Fox News have all been plummeting in recent years, and newspaper ad revenues are about a third of what they were back in the year 2000.  So is the mainstream media dying?  Despite what you may have heard, the mainstream media is certainly not completely dead just yet.  The average American watches approximately 153 hours of television a month, and as I pointed out in a previous article, about 90 percent of the “information” that is endlessly pumped into our heads through our televisions is controlled by just six gigantic media corporations.  However, there are a whole host of signs that things are changing – especially when it comes to news.  More Americans than ever are losing faith in the establishment-controlled media and are seeking out alternative sources of information.  Is this a trend that the big media companies are going to be able to reverse at some point?

For years, the “news business” has been dominated by CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.  But now all three channels are rapidly losing viewers.  According to a recently released Pew Research study, the number of prime time viewers for all three networks combined fell by 11 percent last year…

In 2013, the cable news audience, by nearly all measures, declined. The combined median prime-time viewership of the three major news channels—CNN, Fox News and MSNBC—dropped 11% to about 3 million, the smallest it has been since 2007. The Nielsen Media Research data show that the biggest decline came at MSNBC, which lost nearly a quarter (24%) of its prime-time audience. CNN, under new management, ended its fourth year in third place, with a 13% decline in prime time. Fox, while down 6%, still drew more viewers (1.75 million) than its two competitors combined (619,500 at MSNBC and 543,000 at CNN).

And the decline is far more dramatic when you look at just the key 25 to 54-year-old demographic.

From November 2012 to November 2013, CNN’s ratings for that demographic dropped by a staggering 59 percent, and MSNBC’s ratings for that demographic dropped by a staggering 52 percent.

Is this a sign that Americans are finally getting fed up with the endless propaganda being spewed by those establishment mouthpieces?

A recent survey conducted by a liberal polling firm would indeed seem to indicate that this is the case.  That survey found that only 6 percent of Americans consider MSNBC to be their most trusted source for news…

NBC News and sister cable network MSNBC rank at the bottom of media outlets Americans trust most for news, with Fox News leading the way, according to a new poll from the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling.

In its fifth trust poll, 35 percent said they trusted Fox news more than any other outlet, followed by PBS at 14 percent, ABC at 11 percent, CNN at 10 percent, CBS at 9 percent, 6 percent for MSNBC and Comedy Central, and just 3 percent for NBC.

And of course it is not just the big mainstream news networks that are in decline.

A recently released Pew Research study discovered that the decline of America’s newspapers continued in 2013 as well…

The Newspaper Association of America has stopped compiling quarterly reports on advertising revenue. According to its annual numbers, which were released in April 2014, overall revenue for newspapers in 2013 was $37.6 billion, a decrease of 2.6% from 2012. Within that total, combined print and digital ad revenue decreased by 7%—to $20.7 billion.

Seven percent may not sound like much, but you have to realize that these declines have been happening year after year.  When you look back over a longer time frame, it really puts the massive decline that we have witnessed in advertising revenues in perspective…

It took a half century for annual newspaper print ad revenue to gradually increase from $20 billion in 1950 (adjusted for inflation in 2013 dollars) to $65.8 billion in 2000, and then it took only 12 years to go from $65.8 billion in ad revenues back to less than $20 billion in 2012, before falling further to $17.3 billion last year.

Even when revenues from digital advertising and other categories described by the NAA as “niche publications, direct marketing and non-daily publication advertising” are added to print ad revenue (see red line in chart), the combined total revenues for print, digital and other advertising last year was still only $23.56 billion in 2013 dollars, which was the lowest amount of annual ad revenue since 1954, when $23.3 billion was spent on print advertising alone.

Yes, you read those numbers correctly.  As you can see from this chart, newspaper ad revenues are now about a third of what they were back in the year 2000.

That is not just a “shift” – that is a massive tsunami.

Needless to say, the big newspapers are quite distressed by all of this.

For example, “the Grey Lady” herself is essentially in a state of panic at this point.  Just recently, a 96 page internal New York Times report was obtained by BuzzFeed that basically skewers the company’s current strategy when it comes to the Internet…

A 96-page internal New York Times report, sent to top executives last month by a committee led by the publisher’s son and obtained by BuzzFeed, paints a dark picture of a newsroom struggling more dramatically than is immediately visible to adjust to the digital world, a newsroom that is hampered primarily by its own storied culture.

But they still don’t understand the true cause of their decline.

It isn’t the fact that they haven’t adapted to the Internet very well that is the primary reason for their decline.

Rather, it is the fact that the American people are losing faith in the New York Times and other similar establishment mouthpieces.

News magazines are also experiencing a dramatic multi-year decline.  Ad revenues are way down across the entire industry, and any publication that can keep their yearly losses to the single digits is applauded for it…

For a third year in a row, news magazines faced a difficult print advertising environment. Combined ad pages (considered a better measure than ad revenue) for the five magazines studied in this report were down 13% in 2013, following a decline of 12.5% in 2012, and about three times the rate of decline in 2011, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. Again, hardest hit was The Week, which suffered a 20% drop in ad pages. The Atlantic fell 17%, The Economist 16%, and Time about 11%, while The New Yorker managed to keep its ad pages losses in single digits (7%).

Mainstream media executives appear to be optimistic that they can reverse these declines at some point, but they simply don’t realize that there has been a fundamental paradigm shift when it comes to the news media in the United States.

The general population has lost a tremendous amount of faith in the mainstream media.  They are increasingly becoming aware that it is deeply controlled by the establishment.

At this point, the charade is so out in the open that even reporters are talking about it.  For example, former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson says that the “influence on the media” by political and corporate interests is “unprecedented”…

“There is unprecedented, I believe, influence on the media, not just the news, but the images you see everywhere. By well-orchestrated and financed campaign of special interests, political interests and corporations. I think all of that comes into play.“

Wow.

Remember, this is not just some outsider that is saying these things.  Attkisson worked in the industry for more than 30 years.

And the American people know that they are getting very little truth from the establishment media these days.  A recent Gallup survey found that only 23 percent of Americans have a great deal of confidence in the mainstream media at this point.  Increasingly, Americans are turning to other sources for news and information.

This is fueling an unprecedented alternative news boom, and more Americans than ever are relying on the Internet as their main source of news.  If you doubt this, just check out this chart.

30 years ago, you would have never been able to read this article.  It never would have gotten past the gatekeepers that had almost total control over what Americans read, watched and listened to.

But now things have changed.  The Internet has allowed ordinary Americans to communicate with each other on a scale that has never been possible before.  As we share information with each other, we are increasingly becoming aware that we don’t need the mainstream media to define what reality is for us after all.

If the mainstream media really wants to keep from dying, they should at least try to start telling us the truth.

Unfortunately, that simply is not going to happen.  The political and corporate interests that control the big media corporations have way too much to lose.

So we will have to continue to learn to think for ourselves and to share news and information with each other over the Internet.

In the end, we will all be much better off being unplugged from “the matrix” anyway.

Multiple Government Agencies Are Keeping Records Of Your Credit Card Transactions

Credit CardsWere you under the impression that your credit card transactions are private?  If so, I am sorry to burst your bubble.  As you will see below, there are actually multiple government agencies that are gathering and storing records of your credit card transactions.  And in turn, those government agencies share that information with other government agencies that want it.  So if you are making a purchase that you don’t want anyone to know about, don’t use a credit card.  This is one of the reasons why the government hates cash so much.  It is just so hard to track.  In this day and age, the federal government seems to be absolutely obsessed with gathering as much information about all of us as it possibly can.  But there is one big problem.  What they are doing directly violates the U.S. Constitution.  For those that are not familiar with it, the following is what the Fourth Amendment actually says: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”  Unfortunately, the Fourth Amendment is essentially dead at this point.  The federal government is investigating all of us and gathering information on all of us all day, every day without end.

Many Americans have never even heard of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but Judicial Watch has discovered that they are spending millions of dollars to collect and analyze our financial transactions…

Judicial Watch announced today that it has obtained records from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) revealing that the agency has spent millions of dollars for the warrantless collection and analysis of Americans’ financial transactions. The documents also reveal that CFPB contractors may be required to share the information with “additional government entities.”

Judicial Watch was able to obtain some absolutely shocking documents thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request that it filed in April.  The following is a summary of some of the things those documents show…

  • Overlapping contracts with multiple credit reporting agencies and accounting firms to gather, store, and share credit card data as shown in the task list of a contract with Argus Information & Advisory Services LLC worth $2.9 million
  • A provision stipulating that “The contractor recognizes that, in performing this requirement, the Contractor may obtain access to non-public, confidential information, Personally Identifiable Information (PII), or proprietary information.”
  • A stipulation that “The Contractor may be required to share credit card data collected from the Banks with additional government entities as directed by the Contracting Officer’s Representative (COR).”

How do you feel about the fact that the government has contracts with “multiple credit reporting agencies and accounting firms to gather, store, and share credit card data”?

How do you feel about the fact that your credit card data and other “non-public, confidential information” may be shared with “additional government entities”?

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton put it very well when he said that this “warrantless collection of the private financial information of millions of Americans is mind-blowing.  Is there anything that this administration thinks it can’t do?”

But of course the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is not the only one keeping records of your credit card transactions.

We have also recently learned that the NSA is doing it too.  The following is from a recent Time Magazine article…

Networks are most likely giving the government “metadata.” That is, the credit card issuers could provide the NSA details such as an account or card number, where and when a purchase was made, and for how much. Even though the exact items purchased aren’t revealed, Brian Krebs, who blogs at KrebsOnSecurity.com, says “merchant category codes” in such data give clues about what was bought.

If the NSA is collecting data at the processor level, “at that point the transaction gets cleared and posts to an account, so, yes, you can track it down to a person,” Aufsesser says.

The NSA conceivably could — and probably would — be able get the names of individual account holders from banks issuing credit cards. ”I don’t see how you would anonymize it,” says Al Pascual, senior analyst for security, risk and fraud for Javelin Strategy & Research.

We are rapidly becoming a “Big Brother society” where the government tracks virtually every move that we make.

And don’t think that you can escape this by not using credit cards or by staying off of the Internet.  The truth is that we are being tracked in hundreds of different ways.

For example, have you heard of automated license plate readers?

They are being installed on police vehicles all over the nation, and the amount of information that they are gathering on all of us is frightening.

A computer security consultant named Michael Katz-Lacabe asked the city of San Leandro, California for a record of every time that these license plate readers had scanned his vehicle, and what he discovered absolutely stunned him…

The paperback-size device, installed on the outside of police cars, can log thousands of license plates in an eight-hour patrol shift. Katz-Lacabe said it had photographed his two cars on 112 occasions, including one image from 2009 that shows him and his daughters stepping out of his Toyota Prius in their driveway.

That photograph, Katz-Lacabe said, made him “frightened and concerned about the magnitude of police surveillance and data collection.” The single patrol car in San Leandro equipped with a plate reader had logged his car once a week on average, photographing his license plate and documenting the time and location.

At a rapid pace, and mostly hidden from the public, police agencies throughout California have been collecting millions of records on drivers and feeding them to intelligence fusion centers operated by local, state and federal law enforcement.

Most Americans do not even know that these devices exist, but they have been “collecting millions of records” and feeding them into law enforcement databases all over the nation.

In San Diego alone, more than 36 million license plate scans have been fed into a regional database just since 2010…

In San Diego, 13 federal and local law enforcement agencies have compiled more than 36 million license-plate scans in a regional database since 2010 with the help of federal homeland security grants. The San Diego Association of Governments maintains the database. Like the Northern California database, the San Diego system retains the data for between one and two years.

“License-plate data is clearly identifiable to specific individuals,” said Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “This is like having your barcode tracked.”

Is this the kind of society that we want to become?

Do we really want the police to be taking millions of photographs of us?

Do we really want all of our financial transactions to be fed directly into federal databases?

Do we really want the government to track every phone call we make and every email we send?

As I wrote about recently, it has been documented that literally thousands of companies have been handing over customer data to the NSA.

Is this the kind of legacy that we want to leave for our children and our grandchildren?

Fortunately, it appears that at least some Americans are waking up to all of this.

According to a brand new Rasmussen survey, 56 percent of likely voters in the United States now believe that the federal government is a threat to individual rights…

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 56% of Likely U.S. Voters now consider the federal government a threat to individual rights rather than a protector of those rights. That’s up 10 points from 46% in December.

While 54% of liberal voters consider the feds to be a protector of individual rights, 78% of conservatives and 49% of moderates see the government as a threat.

Overall, only 30% believe the feds today are a protector of individual rights. Fourteen percent (14%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

If the American people do not stand up and demand change, the people that are constantly violating our privacy are going to continue to do so.

Sadly, the vast majority of the politicians in both major political parties seem to think that there is nothing wrong with the status quo.  So I wouldn’t expect any major changes in the short-term.  But hopefully government surveillance will start to become such a major issue with the American people that the politicians will be forced to start addressing it.

The All-Seeing Eye Is Watching You

18 Startling Quotes About The Incredible Destruction Caused By Hurricane Sandy

It is hard to put into words the absolute devastation that we are seeing along many areas of the east coast right now.  Boats have been washed ashore, homes have been razed, some coastal roads have been essentially destroyed, and large numbers of people are still trapped in their homes by flood waters.  It is being reported that more than 50 people are dead and more than 8 million people along the east coast have lost power.  Those without power might not get it back for a week or more.  In New York City, an all-time record storm surge of almost 14 feet caused incredible destruction.  It is going to take months for New York City to recover, and along the Jersey coast things are even worse.  Hurricane Sandy really did turn out to be “the worst case scenario” for much of the eastern seaboard.  At this point more than 15,000 flights have been cancelled, and nobody knows when subway service in New York City is going to be restored.  More than 4 million people a day use that subway system, and right now many of the most important tunnels are absolutely flooded with water. Sadly, this crisis is far from over.  The storm formerly known as Hurricane Sandy has moved inland over Pennsylvania where it continues to do a tremendous amount of damage.  The full extent of the destruction caused by this storm will probably not be known for weeks.

We have truly seen some unprecedented things during this storm.  For example, a 168 foot long tanker was driven ashore on Staten Island.  Right now the tanker is sitting on Front Street.

In the beachfront Queens neighborhood of Breezy Point, a massive fire broke out and burned just about everything that was not already flooded.  The blaze destroyed close to 100 homes, and by the end of the fire more than 190 firefighters were battling it.

Some areas in the West Virginia mountains have already had up to 3 feet of snow, and yet it just continues to fall.  When all of that snow starts to melt in a few days, tremendous flooding is anticipated.

The northeast has never seen a storm quite like this, and the ripple effects are going to be felt for years to come.

The following are 18 startling quotes about the incredible destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy…

#1 New Jersey Governor Chris Christie

“The devastation on the Jersey Shore is some of the worst we’ve ever seen. The cost of the storm is incalculable at this point.”

#2 MTA Chairman Joseph Lhota

“The New York City subway system is 108 years old, but it has never faced a disaster as devastating as what we experienced last night. Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc on our entire transportation system, in every borough and county of the region. It has brought down trees, ripped out power and inundated tunnels, rail yards and bus depots. As of last night, seven subway tunnels under the East River flooded. Metro-North Railroad lost power from 59th Street to Croton-Harmon on the Hudson Line and to New Haven on the New Haven Line. The Long Island Rail Road evacuated its West Side Yards and suffered flooding in one East River tunnel. The Hugh L. Carey Tunnel is flooded from end to end and the Queens Midtown Tunnel also took on water and was closed. Six bus garages were disabled by high water. We are assessing the extent of the damage and beginning the process of recovery. Our employees have shown remarkable dedication over the past few days, and I thank them on behalf of every New Yorker. In 108 years, our employees have never faced a challenge like the one that confronts us now. All of us at the MTA are committed to restoring the system as quickly as we can to help bring New York back to normal.”

#3 Hoboken, New Jersey Mayor Dawn Zimmer

“The Hudson River came in and filled half of Hoboken like a bathtub”

#4 Little Ferry resident Leo Quigley

“I looked out and the next thing you know, the water just came up through the grates. It came up so quickly you couldn’t do anything about it. If you wanted to move your car to higher ground you didn’t have enough time”

#5 New Jersey resident Montgomery Dahm

“I mean, there’s cars that are just completely underwater in some of the places I would never believe that there would be water.”

#6 Mobile home park resident Juan Allen

“I watched a tree crush a guy’s house like a wet sponge.”

#7 Angela Valenta, mother of 9-year-old Angelo Valenta

“He kept saying, ‘Am I going to die?'”

#8 U.S. Representative Bob Turner

“I, along with many other Breezy Point residents, lost our homes last night and I am grateful that my family and I are safe after this destructive storm. I hope you will join me in lending a hand to those who were less fortunate and keep everyone impacted by this storm in your thoughts and prayers.”

#9 Long Branch, New Jersey resident David Arnold

“The ocean is in the road, there are trees down everywhere. I’ve never seen it this bad.”

#10 New York resident William Yaeck

“I am looking outside of my sixth-floor apartment, and I see that a new lake has formed in the parking lot adjacent (to) my building”

#11 Motel owner Peter Sandomeno

“There are boats in the street five blocks from the ocean”

#12 West Virginia meteorologist Reed Timmer

“It’s 3 feet of heavy snow. It’s like concrete”

#13 Maryland State Police dispatcher Bill Wiltson

“It’s like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs up here”

#14 Con Edison spokeswoman Sara Banda

“This is the largest storm-related outage in history”

#15 John Miksad, senior vice president for electric operations at Con Edison

“This will be one for the record books”

#16 New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg

“Clearly the challenges our city faces in the coming days are enormous”

#17 New York Governor Andrew Cuomo

“You want to talk about a situation that gets old very quickly. You are sitting in a house with no power and you can’t open the refrigerator”

#18 National Weather Service meteorologist Joe Pollina

“It was an extremely devastating and destructive storm, hopefully one that people will only see once in their lifetime”

So what will this storm ultimately cost the U.S. economy?  Well, Fox News is reporting that the total cost could reach 45 billion dollars.  Others estimate that the economic toll may be even higher than that.

But one thing is for certain – at a time when layoffs are already surging, this is definitely not going to help.  The U.S. economy is showing lots of signs of slowing down again, and this storm may have just nudged us even farther in that direction.

Hopefully we will have some time to recover before the next major crisis strikes, but with the election coming up early next week that does not seem too likely.