Please use this blog as the portal for your Amazon holiday gift purchases if you prefer – as they used to say of the yellow pages long ago, before the internet took over – to let your fingers do the walking. Click on the Amazon widget in the right sidebar on desktops/laptops or down at the bottom of the page for phones (or go here if for some reason the widget isn’t showing), and everything you buy during that visit will send a bit of money my way, and it won’t cost you one extra cent.
Today is CyberMonday at Amazon, and there are lots of things on sale. I’m thinking of getting a new computer – something I think about quite regularly but so far have done zero about except read product descriptions. Maybe I’ll really do it this time. This one kind of catches my fancy.
(2) A tale of college propaganda convincing a student to turn hard left, and of her mother’s successful attempts to deprogram her. This probably happens a lot, minus the second part. I’m often surprised that so many people are susceptible to being indoctrinated like that – one attendance at an SDS rally in college made it clear to me that this was not the way to go, for example – but many certainly are, and there’s no dearth of college professors and administrators dedicated to the task these days.
(4) RIP Irene Cara. She had a couple of really big songs and a lot of positive energy when she performed. Here’s a very 1980s video of one of those songs.
(5) In Arizona, Maricopa county has certified its results despite all the sketchy things that happened. This is no surprise; they’re the ones responsible for allowing the sketchy things to happen in the first place. Lake is suing. Meanwhile, some smaller Republican counties are still delaying their certification of results, due today.
You’ve almost certainly read about the protests in China. On the one hand, it’s encouraging that people so tightly controlled want to be more free and are willing to go public with it in significant numbers. On the other hand, the fact that they are so tightly controlled – and modern technology makes it more and more possible for any high-tech centralized government to do something of the sort – makes it hard to think that the protesters will somehow be successful.
When regimes topple, it’s often because of one of these things: (1) those at the top become unwilling to use violence and coercion to maintain control; or (2) those at the next-down level – police or military, for example – stop doing their bidding.
Are there any signs of either thing happening in China? I don’t really see it. For example:
Rallies against China’s unusually strict anti-virus measures spread to several cities over the weekend, and authorities eased some regulations, apparently to try to quell that public anger. But the government showed no sign of backing down on its larger coronavirus strategy, and analysts expect authorities to quickly silence the dissent.
With police out in force Monday, there was no word of protests in Beijing or Shanghai. But about 50 students sang at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and some lit candles in a show of support for those in mainland cities who demonstrated against restrictions that have confined millions to their homes. Hiding their faces to avoid official retaliation, the students chanted, “No PCR tests but freedom!” and “Oppose dictatorship, don’t be slaves!”
Many governments have learned how to calibrate their responses so that things are kept at a simmer, cracking down where needed and relenting a little bit when needed just to allow a bit of pressure to release. And then they go on as before.
Do I sound cynical? I suppose so. But until a significant portion of the police and/or military decide not to enforce the government’s will, or many more people go on a general strike, I just don’t see things changing.
Act of shameless self-promotion coming up: please use this blog as the portal for your Amazon holiday gift purchases if you prefer – as they used to say of the yellow pages long ago, before the internet took over – to let your fingers do the walking. Click on the Amazon widget in the right sidebar on desktops/laptops or down at the bottom of the page for phones (or go here if for some reason the widget isn’t showing), and everything you buy during that visit will send a bit of money my way, and it won’t cost you one extra cent.
Newborn twins, born in Oregon three weeks ago, were produced from what are believed to be the longest-frozen embryos ever.
The embryos, which produced twins Lydia and Timothy Ridgeway on Halloween, were frozen 30 years ago on April 22, 1992.
The embryos were donated but had been unused all those years. The couple who decided to have them implanted have four biological children but “‘specifically requested the embryos that have been waiting for the longest. They actually felt called to specifically say we want the embryos that everyone else has taken a pass on,’ Dr. John David Gordon, medical director at NEDC, told WATE.”
Does anyone think that the rape lawsuit against, by Ms. E. Jean Carroll, will succeed?…
…[S]he’s starting a lawsuit against Donald Trump, accusing him of- convincing her to go into a store, a store that just had him in it, and she also accuses him of raping her in that store.
I’m really puzzled as to why this case can go to court since:
1] she seems to be a VERY pro-feminist writer, who has a serious dislike of most men, 2] she doesn’t sound like someone who would be around men she doesn’t know at all, like Trump, because of the violence done to her in the past, and 3] She doesn’t sound like someone who would say to herself: I think it is OK to go into a store or building…,with nobody and no clerks in it…, and go into a dressing room with a man I don’t know…, AND this man is called by many reporters: a rich, powerful, greedy, bullying, white man. Would she really go into a building with someone, or into a room with someone, in these situations? Would she really trust a person + go with him, with all of these red flags on this event?
Do you think that the courts will find him guilty…?
This is only one of many many attempts to destroy Trump through lawfare, and if it fails it will not be the last. Without knowing more details of the case it’s impossible to answer, but even with details it would be impossible to answer. The outcome rests on judge and/or jury (if it’s a jury case), as well as on elements of the law in the state of New York with which I’m almost certainly unfamiliar.
However, I can’t even imagine finding a jury in New York (or perhaps even elsewhere) that is objective.
I have written briefly here about Ms. Carroll’s claims back in June of 2019, around the time they were first aired. The incident is alleged to have occurred in the fall of 1995 or the spring of 1996, so that’s one problem right there: lack of specificity can cast doubt on credibility. Of course, there is also the age of the charges and the fact that they were brought up almost 25 years later, and when the accused was president of the US.
Carroll is a long-time advice columnist for Elle magazine who first made the accusations in a memoir featured in New York magazine. That only solidifies the suspicion that this was done for political reasons and for personal publicity to help sell her book. I don’t know enough about the law in New York to know whether that sort of evidence would be allowed, however. She is also suing Trump for defamation because after the accusations were made public he said she was a liar and also not his type. This type of defamation charge for saying that accusers are liars has become a not-uncommon tactic of women making such accusations against public figures these days.
There are people, and probably even judges, who believe Trump is evil incarnate or at least politically dangerous and who would convict him of raping aliens on the moon if it would serve the cause of stopping him from ever holding a position of power again, and/or of bankrupting him and his family. So even though these charges would probably not even be brought if they weren’t against a public figure like Trump, it is certainly possible he would be found guilty. They are not criminal charges, however – which in a way is an advantage to his accuser because the standard of proof is much lower than in a criminal case.
How is Carroll able to bring charges for such an act that is alleged to have occurred so long ago? Simple. The law in New York was amended recently and she filed as soon as the new law became operative:
The New York Adult Survivors Act gives women a one-year window starting Thursday to file a complaint against an alleged attacker and other responsible parties for incidents of sexual assault perpetrated at any point in their adult lives, starting at 18, within the state of New York.
One notable lawsuit already filed under the new law is against former President Donald Trump.
If you’ve followed my writing on the subject of sexual assault allegations, you’ll see that I believe the standard of proof should be high in order to protect from the very real problem of false allegations. It is just too easy to make them, and in the case of public figures much too rewarding. In the past, some sort of shame might have attached to victims’ coming forward that might have discouraged such false allegations at least somewhat, but that’s long gone. Was this law designed to allow this particular lawsuit against Trump? Let’s just say that Carroll had already made the accusations and had been barred by the statute of limitations from bringing suit prior to the law’s passage, and so it’s certainly possible that getting Trump was one of the goals of the law, although probably unstated.
NOTE: See this. It will give you a glimpse into the mind and motives of Carroll, a rather chilling sight.
A little while ago I wrote a post entitled “Magical thinking on the right about fixing the voting rules.” In it I wrote:
What do I see, though, around the blogosphere? Statement after statement to the effect of: the GOP could have changed these [lax voting security] rules and they didn’t even try because they don’t want to win. This is said by bloggers, opinion writers in publications on the right, and commenters galore. But I believe it’s a case of magical thinking, for the most part.
Compared to the volume of comments like that, I see very little realism about just how that should be done in states that are either blue or purple. I’m not even sure most people understand the formidable obstacles in the way, and I see very little acknowledgement of the many efforts the GOP actually has made to change things.
Then I went on to list just a few of those efforts and what became of them. So why am I writing another post on this today? Because I keep seeing those same statements all around the right side of the internet, and the ignorance is overwhelming. The result, of course, is people on the right dropping out of the entire voting process, which only helps the left.
One of the most frustrating states is Arizona. See this for an angry description of how that state, which has had a legislature and a governorship controlled by Republicans, failed to pass measures to tighten up security. One of the main factors blamed by the author is the GOP leadership in that state, held by GOP “moderates” who don’t like the populist wing of the GOP and who are accused of having squelched quite a few efforts by some of the legislature rank-and-file to make things better. However, although I didn’t see it mentioned in the article, the GOP control of the Arizona House and the Arizona Senate post-2020 has been very thin: 16 to 14 in the Senate and 31 to 29 in the House. That means that unless nearly all the Republican members are onboard, including the RINOesque ones, voting security measures will not pass.
Another fact the article does not see fit to mention is that Katie Hobbs, the Democrat who ended up winning the governorship in 2022, has been Secretary of State in Arizona, tasked with the following:
The highest profile duty of the office is oversight and administration of secure and accurate elections. The Secretary of State serves as Chief Election Officer for the State. One of the goals of the office is to register more voters and encourage their active participation in elections. As part of elections administration, the office certifies: voting devices, election results, candidates and measures to the ballot, as well as the results of statewide elections.
Please let that sink in: the person running on the Democratic ticket for governor in the state of Arizona is the very same person assigned to oversee the security and accuracy of the election. This is unconscionable, and prior to the election there were plenty of calls for her to recuse herself (some of them even from Democrats), but Hobbs simply refused.
But even apart from that, secretaries of state have a lot of power to block voting reform bills by engineering collusive lawsuits in court. If you don’t know how collusive lawsuits work, here’s a description of how the process worked in Minnesota:
The League of Women Voters, a solidly Democratic organization, is “suing” Minnesota’s Secretary of State, left-wing activist Steve Simon. The lawsuit seeks to suspend Minnesota’s election laws, ostensibly on account of COVID-19, so that persons mailing in absentee ballots won’t need to satisfy the statutory requirement of a witness to verify their identity. Without that requirement, voter fraud will be even easier than it is at present. If a Democrat finds a ballot lying around, as will happen many thousands of times in Minnesota, where the voter rolls include hundreds of thousands of names that are dead or otherwise not eligible voters, he can fill it out and send it in, no questions asked.
Democratic Secretary of State Steve Simon, who consistently abuses his office to facilitate voter fraud, quickly agreed to the “settlement” that his party wanted…
…[A]collusive “settlement” is the easiest path to voter fraud.
Or certainly to blocking Republican efforts to stop it. And I have little doubt Hobbs would have done this, had the Republican reforms passed. However, they did not, but not due to lack of trying by the conservative wing of Arizona’s GOP. The problem was that there weren’t enough of them to pass the legislation in such a narrowly divided legislature, and the legislative leadership of the Arizona GOP didn’t seem strongly invested in pushing it nevertheless.
Here’s a different look at the same set of circumstances, written in March of 2022 when the process was ongoing. It is from NPR, and so of course there’s a leftward skew to it. But it mentions a lot of efforts by the GOP in Arizona, and how the opposition framed them:
By last count at the Arizona State Capitol, close to a hundred voting bills have been introduced, part of a nationwide push by far-right Republican-controlled legislatures to pass restrictive voting laws.
The swing state of Arizona is front and center — home to 10% of all the proposed legislation…
So there were many efforts. Some details:
Fillmore represents one of Arizona’s most conservative districts around Apache Junction, in the suburban desert east of Phoenix. The businessman often seen in a bolo tie says many of the proposed bills, which range from measures to require all ballots be hand counted to restrictions on ballot drop off boxes, are a response to concerns by his constituents.
What happened?:
“The fact that our elected officials in this country could even be introducing bills that so thoroughly undermine our democracy sends a really bad message,” says Sean Morales-Doyle, acting director of the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights and Elections Program, which has analyzed every voting rights bill introduced in state legislatures since 2011…
…[A]nalysts are worried that their very mention and news coverage of them could lead to further distrust in the electoral system among the general public.
So mere discussions of bills to enhance voter security – designed to encourage trust in the minds of the enormous number of Americans who already believe our elections are now fraudulent – are described as causing more voter distrust, in one of those Orwellian twists of which the left is so very fond.
And then there’s – you guessed it – charges of racism:
During a recent debate on his bill to require all voting to be done on election day in a voter’s precinct only, Rep. Fillmore said he wanted to bring voting back to how it was in 1958.
That didn’t land well.
Arizona has a fraught history of Jim Crow laws. Today, Republicans hold just a slim majority in the legislature and Arizona’s population is getting more diverse thanks to in-migration from states like California.
For his part, Fillmore says Democrats are trying to misconstrue what he said, when he really just wants voting to get back to its basics.
“What I was referring to was back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, you had voting in the precinct, with government identification,” he says. “You had counting done in the precinct reported that day and that night.”…
“You can say that you didn’t mean it, but you said it,” [a black newspaper owner and former member of the Arizona legislature named Campbell] told NPR, in reference to the 1958 comment. “I think that to a certain extent a lot of people feel that they want to go back to the quote un-quote good old days for them, that wasn’t good ole days for everyone.”
The main guy who blocked the legislation was named Boyer:
Last year when Boyer refused to join Republicans who were trying to seize voting records from Maricopa County, party activists tried to recall him. He was also threatened and briefly had police security at his home. Today, Boyer says he’s disturbed by the GOP’s move toward populism, deficit spending and a cult of personality with Donald Trump.
So this guy is essentially the Liz Cheney or Mitt Romney of Arizona, and he has a lot of power in such a close legislature. Boyer declined to run again in 2022, by the way. The narrowly-divided party breakdown in the Arizona Senate has not changed as a result of the 2022 election, and same for the House, although now Hobbs will be governor and able to veto anything they might want to pass.
But from that history, you can see that, even in Arizona – the swing state the failed to tighten voter security after 2020 and yet had at least a chance of doing so – there were many bona fide efforts that were able to be stopped by one or two people. This is the problem with narrow majorities and a party that is divided against itself.
I could go into the history of state after state – in particular, Pennsylvania. But it would be a very long post. Suffice to say that in Pennsylvania, the Democrat governor was able to veto all efforts, and if that had failed the leftist appeals court would always be willing to fill in to the same effect. You can see some of this history here and here.
I fail to see how the GOP can get election security reform bills passed without a strong enough legislative majority, the governorship of the state involved, an appeals court that is not skewed to the left, and a secretary of state who is also Republican. However, states that have all of that in place probably don’t have voting security problems in the first place, or have already fixed them – such as, for example, Florida.
This continuing belief on the part of so many voters on the right that the GOP could wave a magic wand and fix it if only they wanted to do so, and that their failure to accomplish this task means that they didn’t try and don’t want to, is both ignorant and destructive – destructive because it causes some voters on the right to compound the problem by giving up and not voting at all.
It’s instructive to do some basic research and discover what actually was tried, and what failed, and why, and what the obstacles are that need to somehow be overcome. But the left feeds on ignorance – not only of its own voters, but of some GOP voters as well.
It’s the day after Thanksgiving, otherwise known as Black Friday. If you’re curious to know the origin of the term, see this.
I don’t know if the stores are still so crowded on this day, post-lockdown when everyone got even more used to shopping online. (Act of shameless self-promotion coming up): just use this blog as the portal for your Amazon holiday gift purchases if you prefer – as they used to say of the yellow pages long ago, before the internet took over – to let your fingers do the walking. Click on the Amazon widget in the right sidebar on desktops/laptops or down at the bottom of the page for phones (or go here if for some reason the widget isn’t showing), and everything you buy during that visit will send a bit of money my way, and it won’t cost you one extra cent. Or here’s a link to Black Friday specials.
Then you can relax and enjoy eating those leftovers, watching TV, taking a walk, or writing the great American novel.
