Spambot of the day
Deep thoughts:
In an absence of desire, why lie or steal?
Election fraud allegations: here, there, and everywhere
So many stories to cover.
(1) In Pennsylvania:
Lancaster County officials announced in a news conference Friday that they are investigating two large batches of voter registration forms that are suspected of being fraudulent.
During the news conference, Lancaster County District Attorney Heather Adams (R) said many of the 2,500 suspect forms appeared to have the same handwriting and were filled out on the same day with unknown signatures. Adams said she was aware of two other counties investigating application irregularities.
(2) In Michigan, there were reports of many duplicate ballots, but “Lara Trump said on X that the RNC’s election integrity team investigated the matter and determined that a ‘glitch’ was to blame. The duplicates will not be counted.”
This “glitch” was caught. But the existence of the glitch is troubling, and I don’t see why some glitches wouldn’t pass undetected despite attempts to catch them.
(3) And this ruling on overseas ballot verification underlines how difficult it can be to get the courts to cooperate in enhancing vote security:
A federal judge has dismissed Pennsylvania Republicans’ lawsuit regarding overseas ballot verification, stating that granting their request for an injunction could affect thousands of voters before the 2024 elections, which is a week away.
“An injunction at this late hour would upend the Commonwealth’s carefully laid election administration procedures to the detriment of untold thousands of voters, to say nothing of the state and county administrators who would be expected to implement these new procedures on top of their current duties,” Judge Christopher Conner of the Middle District of Pennsylvania said in his ruling on Oct. 29.
(4) Dominion again only this time it’s about passwords:
The news that the Colorado Secretary of State’s office inadvertently included BIOS passwords for the state’s voting machines in a hidden tab on a spreadsheet on the department’s website has election officials scrambling days ahead of the election.
In an interview with CPR News, Secretary of State Jena Griswold said the employee responsible for the passwords ending up online no longer works for the state and a personnel investigation is ongoing.
“We have people in the field working to reset passwords and review access logs for affected counties,” Griswold said. “This is out of an abundance of caution; we do not believe there is a security threat to Colorado’s elections.”
I’m sure everyone is extremely reassured.
(5) And is this a thing, or just nonsense? I haven’t a clue, plus it’s way too technical for me to understand. That’s actually the case for a number of accusations of fraud.
(6) In Georgia:
After a bit of a ping-pong match in Georgia over new election rules enacted by the State Election Board in recent months, the state’s Supreme Court has declined to allow the rules to go into effect pending an appeal on the merits. That means the rules will not impact the upcoming November election.
They said it was too close to the election.
(7) Nevada appeals court says postmarks, schmostmarks. Then again, it supposedly will only affect a small number of ballots. But now that it’s a known loophole, that number could easily increase.
(8) Fires were purposely set in some Washington ballot boxes:
Investigators responding to arson fires at two ballot boxes in the Pacific Northwest this week found devices at both scenes marked with the words “Free Gaza,” according to two law enforcement officials.
Investigators are trying to determine if the perpetrator was actually a pro-Palestinian activist or someone using that prominent cause to sow discord …
(9) Some good news in Virginia, though:
Virginia asked SCOTUS for an emergency stay after the Fourth Circuit sided with the DOJ, forcing the state to stop removing non-citizens from the voter rolls.
(10) Here’s another win for Republicans, this time in Pennsylvania:
A Pennsylvania judge extended the in-person voting options in Bucks County due to long lines and complaints that selection officials were turning people away.
Some of these suits contain allegations that are similar to ones made in 2020, but back then they usually weren’t subjected to a trial on the merits of the evidence itself. For the most part, either plaintiffs were considered to not have standing, and/or the suits were mooted because they came in after the election. This time the Republicans are more aware, and are trying to be more pro-active, but it doesn’t always work.
It’s in the nature of such voting fraud offenses that much of the evidence will either come in only after the election or immediately before it, and that any lawsuits even before the election must be rushed. Successful lawsuits ordinarily take time, and this is time that the complainants don’t have. And in large blue municipalities such problems probably wouldn’t even be reported in the first place.
The only effective remedy is to change the voting system back to a more traditional one using paper ballots, same day voting, equal numbers of observers from both parties, voter ID, and very limited mail-in voting with signature verification plus witness signatures. But the left will fight that tooth and nail.
It’s lies all the way down, and you can fool some of the people much of the time
It seems to me that lies are not incidental to the leftist campaign; they are foundational. The lies are constant and pervasive, and without them the left would have almost no selling points. The key to lying effectively is to be as united as possible in the lie, to repeat it and not back down in the face of corrections, and to enlist the cooperation of the MSM and social media heads in the endeavor.
The left has accomplished that for the most part, although now and then there’s a defection from someone who just can’t wallow in the lies anymore. That’s also why those who do defect must be ostracized and if possible destroyed financially and socially, maybe even imprisoned and certainly broken financially. And that’s why Elon Musk is considered such a dangerous traitor by buying Twitter and instituting (or re-instituting?) a measure of free speech there, as well as community notes.
But the left and the MSM still have great power, for the simple reason that a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its boots on. News junkies like us follow the details, but a great many people only get the headlines and then go about their lives, and social media and email are still great conduits for spreading the lies. What’s more, the newer lies are placed on top of a large edifice constructed of the older lies, and the new ones are integrated seamlessly and seem extremely plausible because they fit into the previous worldview of the person receiving the information.
That’s how perceptions based on lies persist and even grow stronger. It’s a rare person who – like a friend of mine did recently – tries to determine whether a new story is a lie or not. This friend likes neither Trump nor Harris, and had gotten some sort of communication from friends, either through email or Facebook, that Trump said he wanted Liz Cheney put up in front of a firing squad. My friend found this very disturbing, if true, and because she knew I research these things she asked me what I thought and I was able to explain about the “chickenhawk” charge.
But what of her friends who believed it and I’m pretty certain continue to believe it? It fit in perfectly with their idea of Trump, formed by thousands of other such incidents and lies: that he’s a violent threat to women and should never, never ever, be given power. What’s to be done to set them straight? You might say it’s not worth bothering and/or impossible, but they are the voters who might elect Kamala Harris as president, without even knowing how they’ve been duped.
I think the key is the MSM. If the media did its job properly, the politicians might tell their lies but the lies wouldn’t get halfway round the world.
Open thread 11/2/2024
Roundup
(1) I haven’t watched it yet, but here’s Joe Rogan’s interview with J. D. Vance:
(2) I’m extremely nervous about this election. I’ll probably write more about that before Tuesday. But at the moment I’ll just mention that reports of women leading in the early voting increase my worry.
(3) Here’s how the Harris campaign manipulates social media to skew the message. Of course they do.
(4) And speaking of Harris, don’t think she wasn’t very much an agent in getting herself anointed by the party as the candidate [hat tip: commenter “huxley”]. From The New Yorker:
By the time Biden announced his withdrawal, that Sunday afternoon, a scramble was already under way, largely out of public view. Bakari Sellers, a former South Carolina state representative who helped Harris secure the nomination, told me that her team saw value in moving swiftly. “We weren’t going to do this bullshit that other people were asking for,” he said. In his view, an open convention was a way to “skip over Kamala.”….
David Axelrod, who was the chief strategist for both of Obama’s Presidential campaigns, told me, “There was an argument that she would be strengthened by a competition, but she showed a mastery of the internal politics, which is one test of a potential candidate. People respond to competence, and that was a very competent operation.” He compared it to a rapid military strike. “She didn’t get handed this nomination,” he said. “She took it.”
(5) A bad jobs report has come out. Will that even matter to people voting next week? The MSM excuses the low number of jobs as being a result of hurricanes and a Boeing strike, but this is a national report and I doubt those reasons accounted for all but a little bit of the shortfall.
(6) More lies about what Trump said about Liz Cheney being a chickenhawk.
Ordinarily mild-mannered Hugh Hewitt quits the WaPo on air
I don’t know how any conservative can stand to work for an organization like the WaPo and listen to their slanted coverage. But Hewitt couldn’t take it any more, a bit like Howard Beale in Network.
Here’s the video. Capehart’s incredibly off-putting attempt to convey the pretense not only that nothing much had occurred but that he didn’t have to answer Hewitt’s accusations is unintentionally revealing of how deeply biased and truly obnoxious he is. Ruth Marcus, another long-time shill for the left, was – to her temporary credit – at least more flummoxed by the whole thing. I’m not sure if she was also subject to a simultaneous technical problem, but the timing of it makes me think it was not an accident:
Hewitt actually quit the paper rather than just walking out of the interview:
“I have in fact quit the Post but I was only writing a column for them every six weeks or so,” Hewitt later told Fox News Digital.
I wonder what Bezos will say, or whether he’ll address it at all.
“Journalism” ceased to be journalism long ago, which is one of the main reasons we face the possibility that the execrable duo of Harris/Walz could well be elected next Tuesday.
[ADDENDUM: Found at Ace’s, this sarcastic comment:
Not knowing details of election fraud and just insisting that there was none at all is the way to go.
Well, okay, there was some, but it didn’t affect any outcomes.
How do I know it didn’t affect any outcomes? Because that’s impossible. People commit fraud in elections in order to have no effect on the outcome. It’s really more of a hobby.
Yes, that’s the way it’s spun by 98% of the press and every Democrat. As I’ve said so many times, once the voting rules are relaxed it becomes impossible to prove fraud and to prove it affected the outcome, except in a very few extremely local elections with only maybe a hundred votes or less cast, total, and minuscule vote differences between candidates. Other than that, it would be nearly impossible to prove and in any event courts are reluctant to hear the evidence in a timely fashion and to apply a remedy.
And what would a court-ordered remedy be, anyway? It can’t be to automatically award the win to the other candidate. It could be a do-over, but in a federal election that’s not going to happen. A fine wouldn’t matter, because the fraudsters often would consider it well-worth it to pay the price if the election is for national office. Criminal convictions? Maybe, but the proof would have to be ironclad and as I’ve already said, it’s very hard to prove.
No, it must be an ounce of prevention, because there really is no cure. Trust in elections is earned, not automatic. The stakes are way too high, the temptation too great, and the opportunities too available.
[Please SCROLL DOWN FOR NEW POSTS: this one has been bumped up] The Gerard Vanderleun book website is open and the book is ready for purchase
Well, here goes – it’s book launch time for Gerard Vanderleun’s book of essays! The title is The Name In the Stone.
Please go to the book website VanderleunBooks, take a look around, and order a book or books. It’s published in a very handsome-looking paperback edition, if I do say so myself, and there are a couple of hardcovers available as well [NOTE: The hardcovers, which were a very limited edition, are already sold out, but I’m going to order another print run of hardcovers, and so you can order them now although there will be an estimated delay of about ten days in mailing the hardcovers out to customers]. Here’s a link to the description of the book.
You can communicate with me about the book either at my usual email address of jaybean33@yahoo.com or at the booksite’s email address, which is info@vanderleunbooks.com . I plan to add a page of reader testimonials at the website, and you can send a review that way if you’d like.
Open thread 11/1/2024
What happened to October?
Thirty-six years later, and twenty-one years ago:
Can’t we all just get along?
From the one and only Babylon Bee:
“Listen up, you Nazis. Here’s the deal,” Biden said. “Dangerous, inflammatory rhetoric has no place in our political discourse. That’s why I’m calling on all of Donald Trump’s nasty, disgusting, disease-infested, Hitler-loving, supporters to knock it off. Got it?”
The president stressed the need to leave insults behind and for the nation to return to civility. “The idea… that these sewer-dwelling, racist, woman-hating, fascists would try to infect our democracy with such vile, and by the way!” Biden continued. “They’re the worst. The absolute scum of the earth. Walking pieces of human scat. But this is a time for unity. When we can come together… as one people… all of us… along with the hideous, festering, buckets of slime who support Donald Trump… to unite this country. And that’s… that’s the… that’s it. End speech.”
Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign agreed with Biden, issuing a press release calling for the arrest and imprisonment of all Trump supporters in an effort to heal division in the country.
The sad thing is that it’s not too much of a stretch from their actual utterances.
As for the question of whether Biden’s “garbage” speech was a deliberate sabotage – I don’t think so. I think he genuinely wanted to capitalize on what he saw as a grave error by the Trump campaign in having a comic at their Madison Square Garden rally who told what seemed to be an anti-Puerto Rican joke (I doubt Biden or most of the audience realized it was actually about a very real problem concerning actual garbage in Puerto Rico). Biden wanted to do some sort of clever little play on the word “garbage,” but wordplay is not his forte (hey, that rhymes!).
In addition, there is little question that many Democrats have contempt for Trump voters and people on the right. It comes out in myriad ways. I’ve experienced it many times in my own life, both directed at me personally and in my role as listener to conversations. Because I appear to others to be a typical well-educated woman possessing the demographics that would ordinarily point to my being a Trump-hater, people often assume I’m sympatico to their contemptuous point of view about the right. They are always surprised to learn otherwise.
NOTE: This post’s title is a well-known quote attributed to Rodney King in 1992. But King actually said something a bit different:
And uh, I mean, please, we can, we can get along here. We all can get along. We just gotta. We gotta. I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s, you know, let’s try to work it out. Let’s try to beat it, you know. Let’s try to work it out.
Make America Fun Again – with garbage
If you follow the news you can’t help but have heard about Biden’s remarks in which he called Trump supporters “garbage,” and then about the MSM’s concerted attempts to explain his remarks away. You can read about it here
as well as here, if you were fortunate enough to have missed it previously.
I also want to briefly point out is something else: the terrible and yet typical quality of the rest of Biden’s statement. Here it is, with my comments:
Trump was a successful businessman and TV personality, and he’s not been unfriendly to latinos or Puerto Ricans specifically, although he certainly isn’t keen on illegal aliens of any ethnic origin. He cares about the middle class and not just billionaires, as the middle class is well aware. His comments about poisoning the “blood of the country” referred to criminal illegal immigrants who, among other things, have been helping fentanyl to addict many Americans. An end to birthright citizenship – or at least limitations on it – has been proposed by people on the right prior to Trump; I wrote about some earlier efforts here.
Now, back to garbage.
Trump responded with an epic troll. He is much much better than most standup comics:
Trump is an echo of political pranksters such as Andrew Breitbart, as well as the Yippies of an earlier generation. But I don’t recall any prankster political candidates before, at least not in my lifetime. Kamala and Walz have tried to do lighthearted stuff but it simply doesn’t work. They’re not funny and they’re not lighthearted. Kamala laughs at her own very unfunny jokes that wouldn’t even register as jokes if she didn’t laugh uproariously and embarrassingly at them.
Trump is genuinely funny. It occurs to me that, if the left hadn’t been out to destroy him from day one, America might have had a lot of fun in a Trump presidency. He and Vance – who also has a good sense of humor – would like to Make America Fun Again. Will they get a chance?
By the way, here’s Vance’s interview with Joe Rogan. I haven’t watched it yet, but I hear it’s funny:
Bill and Hillary and Kamala Harris: do they want her to win?
So Bill Clinton goes to Michigan and speaks to an Arab-American group and essentially tells them that HAMAS F’d up on Oct 7 when they butchered Israelis and he goes on to say that because HAMAS hides behind civilians, it is Hamas’ fault that civilians in Gaza are getting killed.
Don’t know – and don’t care – if his comments will help/hurt the CACKLER, but it’s not that often a demonkrat tells the truth and calls it like it is.
Of course, conservative outlets are claiming (in their stupidity) , that Clinton is just trying to sand bag the CACKLER’S campaign and it’s part of an Obama vs Clinton “war.”
The Clinton’s may not like Obama, but there is no way on earth that they would prefer to see Trump in office.
I can’t say I have the inside track on Clinton mindreading, but I can easily see a way on earth that they would prefer a Trump victory. It’s really rather simple: Hillary was supposed to have been the first woman president. She has nursed a nearly decades-long grievance at having lost to the likes of Trump. In addition, she’s so far the only person that has. Even the cognitively-challenged Biden won, whether by hook or crook or fair and square. So at the moment Hillary bears the distinction of being the first female presidential nominee but failing to win, and being the only person who lost to Trump.
I think you can see where I’m going: if Kamala were to win it would add insult to injury, because Kamala would be the first woman president. And Hillary would remain the only person who ever lost to Trump.
Plus, maybe – just maybe – Bill found anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment a bridge too far. So there’s that, too. I never got the impression that either Bill or Hillary were onboard with Obama’s anti-Israel actions and enabling of Iran, and I recall that Hillary quit her SOS job in the beginning of Obama’s second term. Why? Whether she was forced out or whether it was voluntary, I thought she had some disagreements with Obama’s foreign policy and the main one involved Iran. She was replaced with John Kerry, who was fully onboard.
The Clintons also have a Jewish son-in-law, much like Trump. Trump’s daughter Ivanka converted to Judaism and Chelsea has not – but still, it may be a factor as well.