Daily Digest |
- Accepting the Electoral College Vote, Or Not
- How Much Voter Fraud Was There?
- NYT: Covering the Elites, Or Covering *for* the Elites?
- New year’s predictions
- Thoughts from the ammo line
Accepting the Electoral College Vote, Or Not Posted: 01 Jan 2021 04:17 PM PST (John Hinderaker) Senator Josh Hawley has said that he will vote against accepting the reported Electoral College vote in the joint session of Congress next week, and a number of Republican House members will do the same. Some reports say that 140 or more GOP House members will vote to reject the Electoral College tally in one or more states. As I understand it, if there are objections in both houses, the House and Senate are required to retire separately to debate the grounds for the objections, which will give Republicans an opportunity to air their voter fraud grievances. Democrats have gone ballistic over this news, with “sedition” being one of their milder characterizations of Republican skepticism of official election results. Of course, it was not always so. In the past, Democrats have objected to Electoral College results on the flimsiest possible grounds. RedState has a good summary. In 2001, 2005 and 2017, Democratic Representatives and, in 2005, Senators voted against accepting the Electoral College tally. Thus, every Republican president since George H. W. Bush has seen Democrats vote against accepting the legitimacy of his election. 2005 is the best analogy. In that year, George W. Bush was re-elected rather easily over John Kerry, but the Democrats focused their rage on Ohio. They alleged that Bush’s re-election was illegitimate, mostly because the actual election results were different from certain exit polls, and also because of a ridiculous conspiracy theory involving Diebold voting machines. The vote in Ohio wasn’t even close; nevertheless, Democrats in both the House and Senate voted against accepting it. This is what Nancy Pelosi had to say about the Democrats’ “sedition,” as they now call it, in 2005:
Needless to say, she is singing a different tune today. Questioning the 2020 Electoral College vote in various states is justified, but won’t do much good in the short term. Joe Biden will be inaugurated on January 20. But the issue of ballot integrity needs to be highlighted. Lack of confidence in our elections–a justified lack of confidence–is, right now, the biggest threat to our democracy. Reforms are necessary, or confidence will erode further. It is hard to push back against cynicism when the cynics turn out to be right. So, while it won’t do anything to prevent a Biden/Harris administration from taking office, objecting to electoral results in the joint House/Senate session, which is usually just a formality, can play a useful part in advancing the cause of election integrity. And the Democrats, having done the same thing repeatedly, only on frivolous grounds, are in no position to complain. |
How Much Voter Fraud Was There? Posted: 01 Jan 2021 09:41 AM PST (John Hinderaker) Voter fraud is a large and growing problem in the United States, and there is good reason to think that it exploded in 2020 on account of (among other things) unprecedented numbers of mail-in ballots and deliberately lax controls in many states. John Lott has now produced a statistical analysis that suggests substantial voter fraud in Fulton County, Georgia and Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. Lott’s conclusion is that his analysis suggests a total of more than 55,000 fraudulent votes in those two counties. You can read Lott’s paper here. His statistical calculations are laid out in detail, and you can evaluate them for yourself. Lott’s method is simple and rather elegant: he compares absentee votes in precincts in Fulton County, for example, with adjacent precincts in neighboring counties. He also controls for demographics. Since voting is done at the precinct level, while counting was done at the county level, and since there is no evident reason why precincts across the street from one another should show significantly different results, the approach makes sense. But the evidence is still circumstantial. One factor in this year’s election in Georgia is that unattended ballot boxes were set up, but only in heavily Democratic areas. I don’t know whether all of them were in Fulton County, but I believe a lot of them were. Anyone could drop any number of ballots into these boxes. Why the state’s Secretary of State, a Republican, agreed to such an arrangement, which virtually cries out for fraud to be committed, is anyone’s guess. But he did. The Democrats will argue, of course, that turnout was extraordinarily high in last year’s election because their voters were motivated and they did a good job of driving turnout. Mail-in voting also predictably increased turnout, fraud aside. Analyses like Lott’s can cast doubt on whether such benign explanations can account for Joe Biden’s “win,” but there is no way they will result in the election being overturned. At this point, even if Republicans were able to show how, and by whom, fraud was perpetrated in various states, which likely would require confessions from Democratic operatives, it is too late to prevent Biden’s inauguration. What will happen, however, is that Joe Biden will take office under a cloud of uncertainty. According to the polls, close to half of the country doubts that he actually won the election. His ill health and mental decline would make him a lame duck in any event, but the additional cloud over the legitimacy of his election will erode his authority still further. Over the next two years, the election will be investigated and books will be written. Some will argue that Donald Trump actually won the election, while others will try to show that Biden’s victory was legitimate. In all likelihood, the question will never be definitively resolved, but the questions about Biden’s legitimacy probably will grow. Will that scenario bring about demands for electoral reform so that future elections do not end in a cloud of doubt? I hope so, but I doubt it, at least in states where Democrats have substantial power. The Democrats like voter fraud. That has been true for a long time. In 2020, they saw how helpful to their cause lax voting procedures, that both enable fraud and make it hard if not impossible to prove, can be. They will fight tooth and nail to preserve their fraud advantage in future elections. All of which could make the bitterness over last year’s election a mild preview of things to come. |
NYT: Covering the Elites, Or Covering *for* the Elites? Posted: 01 Jan 2021 09:23 AM PST (Steven Hayward) Whatever else might have once been said about liberal bias at the New York Times, at least you could say that they covered the elites. What else can you say about their wedding announcements section, which, as I think David Brooks once joked, reads more like a mergers and acquisitions page, since the couples spotlighted are invariably ivy league uber-overclass climbers. But now it seems the Times mission is to provide cover for the elites. Their long story about the Hilaria Baldwin scandal a couple days ago reads like a Babylon Bee parody designed to ward off any criticism of lying about one’s identity on a grand scale. All these puff pieces about her in Spanish language publications? Hilarious Baldwin now says she didn’t see or read any of them. It’s all someone else’s mistake:
Hunch: ¡Hola! and CAA declined to comment because they know these claims are outright lies. But to continue:
There follows a series of self-serving bobs, weaves, and ducks worthy of a bantamweight boxer all designed to keep the fundamental lie alive. This is fake news squared. Read the whole thing if you want maximum amusement. But this example raises a deeper question: why do so many liberals feel compelled to embellish or make up stories about themselves? In addition to racial fakery like Rachel Dolezal, which connects to the diversity ideology of the moment at least, you have the fake war heroism of Richard Blumenthal, Brian Williams, and, most spectacularly of all, John Kerry. (And leave aside Hillary Clinton “landing under fire” in Bosnia, and supposedly being named for British explorer Edmund Hillary, even though his fame as a mountaineer didn’t arrive until well after Hillary Rodham was born.) I suggest there is something about the fundamental nihilism at the heart of modern liberalism—the view that there is no truth, that the “narrative” is the only important thing, that creating your own “reality” is perfectly fine—that compels liberals to lie about themselves. And a newspaper that has employed fabulists as “reporters” (e.g., Jayson Blair, or the recent 12-part podcast series about the ISIS caliphate that turned out to be completely phony) is more than willing to fall into line to defend liberal fakery, when they are not faking it themselves (Janet Cooke, anybody?). Just as liberalism as a political ideology depends on lies (“gender is a social construct” “raising taxes won’t affect the economy”), individual liberals apparently can’t live contented lives without lying about themselves. |
Posted: 01 Jan 2021 06:46 AM PST (Scott Johnson) If the reality principle dictates preparation for a so-called Harris-Biden administration this January 20, I think it likely that the evils of 2021 may well exceed those of 2020. I would like modestly to offer my new year’s predictions. • Political betting markets will set the over-under on Biden’s tenure in the Harris-Biden administration at two years. I take the under. • Some prominent Democrat — it might even be Biden — will urge an Operation Warp Speed approach to the conquest of Alzheimer’s disease. • Whoever formulates this proposal, however, will make no mention of Operation Warp Speed. The proposal will be framed in terms of JFK’s Moonshot. • Biden will hold no unscripted press conferences in 2021, yet the mainstream media will salute the transparency of his administration. • Speaking of transparency — we will be discouraged from noting Biden’s resemblance to an escapee from Madame Tussauds, from inquiring or speculating about the number of plastic surgical procedures he has undergone, or to recall the brain surgeries performed to repair his aneurysms. • Biden’s fans — is there such a thing as a Biden fan? Strike that. Biden’s supporters in the media, in politics, and among talking heads may allude in public to Biden’s medical history in coded language by saying Joe Biden is a survivor! • The media will express profound respect for the limits of public discourse in the name of decorum. They will do their best to enforce the limits they seek to impose by stigmatizing those who transgress them. • The number of subjects that can be freely discussed and the range of opinions that can be publicly expressed will continue to contract. • It will not be acceptable to allude to Biden’s “issues” by reference to the last years of Woodrow Wilson. Edith Wilson is she who must not be mentioned. We may refer vaguely to “Dr. Edith” in an offhand kind of way if we can do so without cracking a smile. The audacious among us may express an interest in Regency history. • James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and their co-conspirators will remain at large. |
Posted: 01 Jan 2021 05:43 AM PST (Scott Johnson) Ammo Grrrll has second thoughts about FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS – A Happy New Year Break From Politics. She writes: Like many of you, I am but one generation away from the lack of indoor plumbing. My experience with it was being dragged to visit my maternal Grandma Eva's twin sister who still lived on a farm with an outhouse. I flat-out HATED going there. It was close to a hostage situation. Sadly, in the ’50’s there was yet no Amber Alert. Great Auntie Iva was a wonderful woman, but a terrible housekeeper, which was surely made more difficult by the presence of live chickens on the kitchen table and feathers everywhere. It cured me forever from being a fan of "free range" chickens. No matter the weather, we kids tried to be outside. One time my cousins and I got into some little green crabapples off Great Auntie's tree and the subsequent time spent in the wretched outhouse put me off all apples colored green for life. Sorry, Granny Smith, for verdant racism. An outhouse would be the perfect COVID test to see if you've lost your sense of smell. Not bothered? Straight to an ICU ventilator! My father's family in South Dakota was relatively "rich." Grandma had been given a large two-story house as a wedding gift from her prosperous Dutch farmer father. I thought it was a castle when I was a kid. It had a yuge screened-in porch, orchards and gardens. Grandma taught me to make dancing dolls out of Hollyhocks and hats from rhubarb leaves. The house had five bedrooms and one bathroom downstairs with a clawfoot bathtub. There were six kids in the family. They got drinking water for the kitchen from a cistern through a pump that had a nylon stocking over it to filter out things like – AGGHH! — WORMS! I drank only milk when I visited Grandpa and Grandma. That's probably how Daddy got so immune to everything that he survived COVID at 95. Mother's family, on the other hand, was much poorer, sharecroppers who lost their farmhouse in the Depression from being unable to pay their rent for nine straight months. The rent was $8.00. They moved into a town of 237 souls, including John Hinderaker's kin. Though they still had an outhouse, at least they had running water. On the farm, Grandpa had to haul water by horse and wagon in cream cans from several miles away. They bathed in a tin washtub on Saturday night, all three of the little girls using the same water. One of the first Texas jokes I ever heard went like this: Relatives from "up North" were visiting a wealthy rancher in Texas and the wife of the couple went into the fancy bathroom and began to draw a full bath. The lady of the house knocked on the bathroom door and said, "Honey, that's enough. In Texas, we don't spend water like money." I loved that joke because Mama had the same attitude, except she didn't spend money, either. As small kids, my sister and I would bathe together and we were allowed a couple inches of water. (Luckily, with displacement, it would turn into three inches. Especially after our baby brother was thrown in as a kind of interactive bath toy. Yay, Archimedes!) We would try to sneak more water in. The kitchen shared a wall with the bathroom and we would always get busted. Mother would bang on the wall, "I HEAR you, girls!" The first FULL bathtub of my life was in the dorm the first day of college in 1964. The guilt ruined the ecstasy of it. Old habits die hard. But eventually we all take for granted the crazy level of luxury that is life in America for almost everyone who is trying at all. Now I mention all this deep background because a week ago Thursday I started a bath in what famous novelist Max Cossack calls my "Susan-shaped" tub. Max is still alive and writing novels because I take that as a compliment. True, the tub is short, but it is very deep. Haha. Anyway, it is so deep that it takes about 15 minutes to fill up, during which I can make coffee, make the bed, and putter around. I stepped in and IMMEDIATELY leapt back out with a yelp because it was ICE COLD. What the heck? Or words to that effect. Max did not hear me scream because he was writing in his office with the door closed and his "wife-cancelling" headphones on to boot. I could have been attacked by wolves and he would only discover it when he got hungry much later. "Oh my goodness, LOOK at this mess! NOW who is going to make my sandwich?" Anyway, first I did what we all do in a similar situation. I tried the hot water in every sink – yup, ice cold — and concluded correctly that, unlike "racism," it really was a "systemic" problem. And I figured out further that the water HEATER in the garage must be involved. Duh. I feared I would find the tank leaked all over the garage floor. But, thank God, it was all dry. Time to call my Water Heater Guy, one Harley Don, the Handyman. He came within a couple of hours and immediately diagnosed the problem as the thingy on the front that controls temperature was burned out. That's as much as I retained. Technical information goes in one ear and out the other without stopping even to approach the ever shrinking area of my brain which retains information. Harley Don made note of the Service phone number, plus the part and model numbers and told me that they usually have overnight delivery and he would come back to install the "thingy" when it arrived. And now came the real fun. I sat on Hold for exactly one hour trying to reach the humorously named Reliant Company located convenient to Arizona in Tennessee. Then they cut me off and said they had captured my phone number – please Press One if that is correct – and would call me back as soon as an agent was free. By golly, they did! At 9:00 p.m. when it was too late to have the part arrive on Friday and, of course, there was no delivery on the weekend. We hoped to have hot water again by Tuesday assuming that on Monday the part arrived before 9:00 p.m. and Harley Don was not off on a motorcycle trip. And so began an adventure in "Doin' It Old School," filling up the kitchen sink with boiled water to do dishes and putting about three inches of cold water into the tub and then adding two spaghetti pots-ful of boiling water for what turned out to be a brief, surprisingly tepid bath. Max opted to go to our complex's Village Center to use the showers off the weight room. Because of the miracle of capitalism – even under the duress of a pandemic – the part arrived in the early evening on Monday. Harley Don came early on Tuesday morning (sans mask – he had already had Commie Flu). It was installed in 10 minutes and by noon I was soaking in a deep, HOT tub. In truth, the Reliant people in Tennessee were very helpful. Max had looked them up on the Internet (another miracle). And was quickly routed to their Parts People. So we were mildly inconvenienced for five days. And THIS is the system that the leftist lunatics in America want to destroy. Over my dead yet clean body. |
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