Some selections from the impeachment trial – plus, now we’ll have witnesses

The New Neo Posted on by

[UPDATE 1:26 PM:

Well, that was quick. I’d no sooner published this post than it was announced that the Democrats have done an Emily Litella and said “never mind.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced Saturday that a deal has been reached to skip witnesses in the impeachment trial of former President Trump, not long after a vote to call witnesses threw the Senate into chaos.

What follows is the original post I wrote.]

We’ve had double standards and hypocrisy from the Democrats for a long time, and these videos illustrate the Trump lawyers’ exposure of that fact. Democrats in Congress won’t be shamed by this, however. I think they have become incapable of shame.

Now the Democrats have decided to call witnesses even though they originally agreed not to do so. Perhaps they felt a bit damaged by yesterday’s presentation by the Trump lawyers. The five Republicans who voted with the Democrats to do so included Lindsey Graham, who had this reason for agreeing:

But the reason he went along with it was because once it became clear that they had the votes to do it, he joined because he said that if they do that, he’s going to call the FBI agents who will testify it was all preplanned and every other witness that will prove the defense. He also said he was going to make it take a very long time, if they wanted to play that game and it would most definitely interfere with anything else on the agenda that the Democrats or Biden wanted to do….

Graham noted how it was strange that Democrats always pull these moves right before a vote when they know they’re about to lose. Democrats had previously agreed to no witnesses.

If the Democrats want to waste more of their own time for substantive legislation, and wish to open up their sham trial to more witnesses brought by the GOP side, it’s just fine with Graham.

On Beethoven’s deafness

The New Neo Posted on by

ADDENDUM:

Here’s a description of the premiere of Beethoven’s 9th:

…[T]he Ninth Symphony was premiered on 7 May 1824 in the Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna…This was the composer’s first onstage appearance in 12 years; the hall was packed with an eager audience and a number of musicians.

The premiere of Symphony No. 9 involved the largest orchestra ever assembled by Beethoven…many of Vienna’s most elite performers are known to have participated.

…Caroline Unger, who sang the contralto part at the first performance and is credited with turning Beethoven to face the applauding audience.

Although the performance was officially directed by Michael Umlauf, the theatre’s Kapellmeister, Beethoven shared the stage with him. However, two years earlier, Umlauf had watched as the composer’s attempt to conduct a dress rehearsal of his opera Fidelio ended in disaster. So this time, he instructed the singers and musicians to ignore the almost completely deaf Beethoven. At the beginning of every part, Beethoven, who sat by the stage, gave the tempos. He was turning the pages of his score and beating time for an orchestra he could not hear…

When the audience applauded—testimonies differ over whether at the end of the scherzo or symphony—Beethoven was several bars off and still conducting. Because of that, the contralto Caroline Unger walked over and turned Beethoven around to accept the audience’s cheers and applause. According to the critic for the Theater-Zeitung, “the public received the musical hero with the utmost respect and sympathy, listened to his wonderful, gigantic creations with the most absorbed attention and broke out in jubilant applause, often during sections, and repeatedly at the end of them.” The audience acclaimed him through standing ovations five times; there were handkerchiefs in the air, hats, and raised hands, so that Beethoven, who could not hear the applause, could at least see the ovations.

Perhaps New Yorkers wish they could recall Governor Cuomo

The New Neo Posted on by

Or perhaps this sort of thing is just peachy keen with them:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s top aide privately apologized to Democratic lawmakers for withholding the state’s nursing home death toll from COVID-19 — telling them “we froze” out of fear that the true numbers would “be used against us” by federal prosecutors, The Post has learned.

The stunning admission of a coverup was made by secretary to the governor Melissa DeRosa during a video conference call with state Democratic leaders in which she said the Cuomo administration had rebuffed a legislative request for the tally in August because “right around the same time, [then-President Donald Trump] turns this into a giant political football,” according to an audio recording of the two-hour-plus meeting.

“He starts tweeting that we killed everyone in nursing homes,” DeRosa said. “He starts going after [New Jersey Gov. Phil] Murphy, starts going after [California Gov. Gavin] Newsom, starts going after [Michigan Gov.] Gretchen Whitmer.”

Why yes, yes he did. And it turns out that the situation was even worse than he knew. So they had to keep covering it up, because paying the consequences for their actions certainly isn’t allowed.

And my guess is that they no longer have to fear prosecution by the DOJ, because it’s the Biden administration in charge now.

More:

In addition to stonewalling lawmakers on the total number of nursing home residents killed by COVID-19, Cuomo’s administration refused requests from the news media — including The Post — and fought a Freedom of Information lawsuit filed by the Empire Center on Public Policy.

Instead, it only disclosed data on the numbers of residents who died in their nursing homes.

But after state Attorney General Letitia James last month released a damning report that estimated the deaths of nursing home residents in hospitals would boost the grim tally by more than 50 percent, Health Commissioner Howard Zucker finally released figures showing the combined total was 12,743 as of Jan. 19.

Just a day earlier, the DOH was only publicly acknowledging 8,711 deaths in nursing homes.

In a Wednesday letter to lawmakers, Zucker said the total number of nursing home residents killed by COVID-19 had increased to 13,297. That number jumps to 15,049 when assisted living/adult care facilities are factored in.

By the way, according to this site there were 89,775 people in New York living in nursing homes in 2019. That means that if 13,297 died of COVID, that would be approximately 15% of all nursing home residents in the state. I don’t know how that compares to how many usually die in a one-year period (approximately the time we’ve had the COVID pandemic), but it seems really really high to me.

How’s the Gavin Newsom recall doing?

The New Neo Posted on by

It looks like the vote will probably happen:

Petitions to force a vote on whether to recall Newsom look likely to succeed — despite the obstacles to collecting signatures during a pandemic. Instead of relying on paid canvassers outside supermarkets, campaigners have to convince supporters to circulate and mail petitions individually…

The recall has until March 17 to submit signatures. If it qualifies, the special election would include two items: a yes-no vote on whether to recall Newsom and a gubernatorial ballot to pick his replacement if the recall passes. So voters would have some idea of the possible alternatives.

Potential candidates include former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, a Republican who has said he’ll challenge Newsom in next year’s regular election if the recall fails, and venture capitalist and former Facebook Inc. executive Chamath Palihapitiya, a Democrat with 1.3 million Twitter followers.

Democratic officials are trying to stigmatize the recall movement as a collection of dangerous kooks.

I wonder whether they’ll try to harass and cancel people who sign it.

Does a recall have a chance of succeeding? I doubt it, but there’s this:

The discontent isn’t just coming from Republicans or Trump supporters. Newsom’s numbers are on the skids among people who used to like him. Two recent polls show a significant decline. Among likely voters, the Public Policy Institute of California found a slight majority of 52% giving the governor a favorable rating — a drop from over 60% in the early days of the pandemic.

Finally the questions about the death of Officer Sicknick are getting a wider audience

The New Neo Posted on by

Not wide enough, of course. But wider.

I already wrote about my questions concerning Officer Sicknick’s cause of death, in posts appearing on January 11, January 26, January 30, and February 5. The ambiguities and contradictions in the articles, plus the missing autopsy report, were clear signs that something was not right with the version we had been getting so far. But now a site called Revolver has picked up the story (I doubt from me) with this February 9 article entitled, “MAGA Blood Libel: Why Are They Hiding The Medical Report?”

And now Tucker Carlson has taken up the question as well, and the intrepid Glenn Greenwald has been tweeting up a storm about it (to read the Greenwald thread please scroll up as well as down).

One tweet of Greenwald’s also mentions that the initial reporting about the rioter with the zip ties is false, too. I hadn’t heard that before, but I had heard about the zip-tie guy. In the first few days after January 6th, an upset relative had sent me a photo of “zip-tie guy,” and asserted that this picture proved that people came into the Capitol prepared with equipment and the intent to take members of Congress hostage.

I certainly thought that was possible – after all, I have no trouble assuming there would be some opportunistic people in the crowd bent on worse than a protest. But later I recall reading a story – I don’t recall where – that the zip-tie guy said that he had actually picked up the zip ties while in the Capitol, and that he had found them lying around. This seemed improbable to me at the time, but doing a search just now I see that the prosecutor in his case agrees with that description [emphasis and additions in brackets mine]. The misleading headline is “The Capitol riot’s ‘zip-tie guy’ appeared to take the plastic handcuffs from Capitol police, prosecutors say,” which for me conjures up an image of him taking them from the hands or pockets of police. But if you read the article it says instead that prosecutors claim that the zip-ties were on “a table” when zip-tie guy picked them up:

Munchel, who broke into the building with his mom, was labeled “zip-tie guy” after he was photographed barreling down the Senate chamber holding the restraints. His appearance raised questions about whether the insurrectionists who sought to stop Congress from counting Electoral College votes on January 6 also intended to take lawmakers hostage.

But according to the new filing [by the prosecutor], Munchel and his mother took the handcuffs from within the Capitol building — apparently to ensure the Capitol Police couldn’t use them on the insurrectionists — rather than bring them in when they initially breached the building.

“At one point, MUNCHEL spots plastic handcuffs on a table inside a hallway in the Capitol. MUNCHEL exclaims, ‘zipties. I need to get me some of them motherf—ers,” and grabs several white plastic handcuffs from on top of a cabinet,” the filing says, adding: “As MUNCHEL and [his mother, Lisa Eisenhart,] are attempting to leave, Eisenhart says words to the effect of, ‘Don’t carry the zip ties, just get ’em out of their hand.'”

Prosecutors submitted the filing in an effort to keep Munchel, who was arrested on January 10, detained until his trial.

He and Eisenhart each face several charges in relation to their actions at the Capitol building and are among at least 169 people currently charged.

Much of the evidence included in the filing was taken from videos recorded by Munchel himself: He kept an iPhone mounted to his chest…

Video footage reviewed by prosecutors also suggests Munchel and his mother carried weapons while in Washington, DC — despite the district’s strict gun laws — and abandoned them only before they got into the building.

“We’re going straight to federal prison if we go in there with weapons,” Eisenhart told Munchel before they entered the Capitol building, according to prosecutors.

We can put ’em in the backpacks,” Eisenhart then said, before stashing “tactical bags” outside the building, according to prosecutors.

They sound really intent on murder or kidnapping, don’t they? The complaint against Munchel alleges that he dressed in tactical gear, had weapons that were not brought into the Capitol, shouted “treason,” picked up the zip ties “gleefully”, ” and may have been guilty of violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, conspiracy, and civil disorders.

Oh, and that shaman? Was he going to assassinate someone? Apparently not:

In a filing seeking the detention of “QAnon Shaman” Jacob Chansley, for example, prosecutors said he planned to “capture and assassinate elected officials” before walking back on that claim.

NOTE: By the way, in the impeachment trial, the Democrats have asserted that Trump’s words are responsible for “murder”:

In its article of impeachment, the Democrat-controlled House alleged that former president Donald Trump, by his “incitement of insurrection,” was responsible for murder. That is an essential rationale for impeaching Trump. It is the most serious accusation that has been leveled. The impeachment article states that, incited by Trump to storm the Capitol and “fight like hell,” Trump supporters “injured and killed law enforcement personnel,” among other heinous acts.

The accusation about killing law-enforcement personnel refers, of course, to Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick, who was pronounced dead on the night of January 7, more than 24 hours after the siege on the Capitol had ended.

Adding to the serious but vague accusation in the impeachment article, the Democratic House impeachment managers, who are the prosecutors in the Senate trial, elaborated in their publicly filed pretrial memo (at p. 28): “The insurrectionists killed a Capitol Police officer by striking him in the head with a fire extinguisher.”

Now there’s a move to abandon the seemingly unprovable fire extinguisher claim, and they’re trying to say that Officer Sicknick was killed by bear spray wielded by some rioters. I’ve looked up whether bear spray can cause death, and there’s no mention of it in the many articles I read, although it definitely can cause temporary nasal and eye problems if sprayed up close and in the face. But Officer Sicknick took ill many many hours after his pepper spray encounter. And again, we have had no mention of any autopsy reports even though it’s been about five weeks since his death.

And then there’s the whole “Calvary/cavalry” thing.

The voting “reform” bill: it gives me no pleasure to say I was right…

The New Neo Posted on by

…when I wrote in December that a “voting reform” bill would probably be the very first bill the Democrats would try to pass in their new session – and that it could very well destroy valid voting in this country if it passed both legislative bodies. This prospect was one of the biggest things that haunted me for months prior to the election:

If the Democrats end up controlling the Senate as well as the House and eliminating the filibuster, and if Biden or Harris becomes the president, I predict that the Democrats will revive their intent to effect an extremely radical remaking of election law in order to favor their party. You may or may not recall that one of the first acts of the new Democrat House when it was installed in January of 2019 was to pass (by strict party-line vote) the Orwellian-entitled “For the People Act”. It died in the Republican-controlled Senate, and so not all that much attention has been paid to it. But we need to take another look, because if the Democrats do get the Senate this time, I believe that passing it will be one of their first orders of business.

And here we are:

Democrats introduce their first bill in the House: H.R.1…Nationwide mail-in voting, banning restrictions on ballot harvesting, banning voter ID, criminal voters,DC Statehood roadwork, it’s all in here.

At the moment states set their own rules on voting and have a lot of leeway, but there’s nothing I can find so far that would prohibit Congress from setting national rules that supersede individual states’ desires, as long as the new rules don’t violate the 14th Amendment or something considered basic like that.

This is what Mitch McConnell said about the bill’s similar predecessor back in January of 2019:

“I think it’s more accurately described another way: The ‘Democrat Politician Protection Act.’

“This sprawling, comprehensive proposal is basically the far left’s entire Christmas wish list where our nation’s political process is concerned. What would it do? It would pile new Washington D.C.-focused regulations onto virtually every aspect of how politicians are elected and what Americans can say about them. So my Democratic friends have already tried to market this unprecedented intrusion with all the predictable clichés. Quote – ‘restoring democracy.’ Quote – ‘for the people.’ Really? The only common motivation running through the whole proposal seems to be this: Democrats searching for ways to give Washington politicians more control over what Americans can say about them and how they get elected…

“To begin with, Democrats want to make the Federal Elections Commission a partisan institution…

“…[T]he legislation that Democrats are moving through committee would throw away that bipartisan split. It would reduce the FEC to a five-member body and — listen to this — let sitting presidents hand-pick their majority. Obviously this is a recipe for turning the FEC into a partisan weapon.

“Democrats also empower that newly-partisan FEC to regulate more of what Americans say. That 3-to-2 FEC would get to determine what they subjectively see as ‘campaign-related’ — a new, vague category of regulated speech. There’d also be new latitude to decide when a nonprofit’s speech has crossed that same fuzzy line and subsequently force the publication of the group’s private supporters. All this appears custom-built to chill the exercise of the First Amendment and give federal bureaucrats — and the waiting left-wing mob — a clearer idea of just who to intimidate…

“Perhaps most worrisome of all is the unprecedented proposal to federalize our nation’s elections, giving Washington D.C. politicians even more control over who gets to come here in the first place. Hundreds of pages are dedicated to telling states how to run their elections, from when and where they must take place, to the procedures they have to follow, to the machines they have to use.

“Democrats want to import the inefficiencies of state and federal bureaucracy to ballot boxes and voter rolls while making it harder for states and localities to clean inaccurate data off their voter rolls, harder to remove duplicate registrations, ineligible voters, and other errors, harder to check every box Washington Democrats demand before allowing you to pick your representatives. Provision after provision would make it easier for campaign lawyers to take advantage of disorganization, chaos, and confusion…

“This sprawling power grab clocks in at around 570 pages. Seemingly every one of those pages is filled with some effort to rewrite the rules to favor Democrats and their friends.”

I can’t cover all the bill’s provisions in this post, but suffice to say that this bill (you can read the whole lengthy thing here if you wish; I’ve only read some sections) would take away the rights of red states to avoid the pitfalls of early voting or mail-in voting or many other regulations that would help to ensure valid elections (for example, as I read it, it does away with witness requirements for signatures on mail-in ballots).

Would SCOTUS let it stand? The tradition is to allow Congress broad discretion to set rules for voting in federal elections (House and Senate, and probably president), although not in local or state-only ones. SCOTUS precedent seems to be that Congress can pass laws superseding state rules in federal elections, and so I don’t see that SCOTUS will be willing or able to stop this sort of bill.

In order to pass it, however, the Senate would have to jettison the filibuster. We know that might indeed happen.

Make no mistake, though. If by some miracle we dodge this bullet this time, the Democrats will be intent on accomplishing it if and when they can do so. If they do, I predict that many states will refuse to comply.

If you continue to wonder about the legality of national control of election rules, please see this:

Although the Elections Clause makes states primarily responsible for regulating congressional elections, it vests ultimate power in Congress. Congress may pass federal laws regulating congressional elections that automatically displace (“preempt”) any contrary state statutes, or enact its own regulations concerning those aspects of elections that states may not have addressed. The Framers of the Constitution were concerned that states might establish unfair election procedures or attempt to undermine the national government by refusing to hold elections for Congress. They empowered Congress to step in and regulate such elections as a self-defense mechanism….

On occasion, Congress has exercised its power to “make or alter” rules concerning congressional elections, and some of its laws lie at the very heart of the modern electoral process. It has established a single national Election Day for congressional elections, and mandated that states with multiple Representatives in the U.S. House divide themselves into congressional districts, rather than electing all of their Representatives at-large. Congress also has enacted statutes limiting the amount of money that people may contribute to candidates for Congress, requiring that people publicly disclose most election-related spending, mandating that voter registration forms be made available at various public offices, and requiring states to ensure the accuracy of their voter registration rolls.

Hey, but what if Congress passes a law trying to ensure the inaccuracy of the voter registration rolls? Did the Founders ever contemplate that?

What if Congress were to declare that all states must allow anyone to vote who came to the polls or who submitted a ballot, without any checking at all? Would that be constitutional? In other words, is there no limit to the fraud that Congress is allowed to enable by overriding states’ efforts to make fraud more difficult?

Someone please tell Andrea Mitchell that ignorant AND arrogant is no way to go through life

The New Neo Posted on by

And yet apparently NBC’s Andrea Mitchell has managed to do just that.

As someone or other used to say: sad.

Here’s the error Mitchell made in an attempt to put Ted Cruz in his place:

Mitchell graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in English literature. Granted, for the 74-year-old Mitchell it was a long time ago. But the “Tomorrow” speech in “Macbeth” is one of the most well-known (and brilliant although depressing, I might add) passages in all of Shakespeare. I’m not quite as old as Mitchell but I remember the speech, which I had to memorize in high school or maybe junior high. Here it is, for those of you who’ve never had the pleasure:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Yes, Faulkner did indeed write a book titled The Sound and the Fury (I never could plow through Faulkner although I tried, but that’s another story). But surely Mitchell knows that Faulkner came a bit after Shakespeare.

The most impressive (and not impressive in a good way) thing to me about Mitchell’s behavior here is not that she made an error. We all make errors. It’s that she apparently didn’t doubt herself for the moment it might have taken her to look it up, so intent was she on having a “gotcha!” moment with Cruz. Not only that, but she made this very lame excuse when people pointed out her embarrassing error:

Oh, really? Does the brain only hold so much information, and when a person studies Faulkner it necessarily displaces all knowledge of Shakespeare to make room? What’s more, as John Hinderaker helpfully points out:

Here’s the thing, though. No one who studied Faulkner even superficially could fail to understand that the title of The Sound and the Fury was a Shakespearean reference. This was explained in every freshman English class where Faulkner’s book has been taught.

Here’s why: The full Shakespeare quote, from MacBeth, says that life “is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Why did Faulkner choose that Shakespeare quote for the title of his book? Because the first section of The Sound and the Fury is, in fact, a “tale told by an idiot.” It is a narrative by a character named Benji who lacks normal mental capacity. He describes many things that he does not understand–other people playing golf, for example–and the art of that section of the book is for Faulkner to write it so that Benji doesn’t understand what he is seeing, but we do.

This is all undergraduate English stuff, and no one could study Faulkner in college without the origin and significance of The Sound and the Fury being explained.

Jennifer Rubin seems every bit as ignorant and arrogant as Mitchell. But why would that be any surprise? She quickly jumped on the very rickety bandwagon:

Oh dear.

Why do I even bother with this? It’s not important – except for what it tells about the mindset and knowledge base of so many of those who profess to be qualified to tell us what’s going on and what it might mean. I can’t stand Twitter, but one function it has often served is to display and highlight the feet of clay of our very own chattering classes. It is all too often a tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing except the propaganda that helps shape our lives and the future of this country and the world.

Bonus track: the very first time I ever heard a reference – an oblique one, to be sure – to this Shakespearean speech I was about eight years old and didn’t understand the allusion. It was on a Tom Lehrer record my family had. In this song he is doing a number of satiric riffs on the old song “Oh My Darling, Clementine,” rewriting it in several different styles. Here’s the portion where he introduces a segment in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan. I didn’t understand why the audience laughed at “full of words and music, and signifying nothing.” Later, when I studied “Macbeth” and had to learn that “tomorrow” speech, I had an “Aha!” moment:

[NOTE: I’ve learned that whenever writing a piece like this, pointing out someone else’s stupid mistake, there’s some sort of rule that one must be very very careful to avoid the karmic trap of making a mistake oneself, a trap that always beckons. I hope I’ve avoided that pitfall.]

[NOTE II: There’s also a Robert Frost poem that I encountered in junior high or high school that makes a reference to the “tomorrow” speech. The reference is in the title as well as the theme: see “Out, out–“, one of Frost’s darkest and most heartbreaking poems. He may have assumed that most people reading the poem knew the literary reference, but that was in 1916. Apparently the poem was based on a true incident that happened to a friend of his son.]

[NOTE III: I noticed that a lot of the replies to Mitchell’s tweet criticized her for apologizing to Cruz at all, saying that there never would be any reason to apologize to such a vile person.]

We’ve had the Reichstag fire – what’s next?

The New Neo Posted on by

Now that Washington DC is an armed camp after the January 6 Reichstag fire, and the Senate is busy trying the previous president and pretending they have the authority to do so, what’s next?

Let’s see. Let’s not forget that we currently also have the purge of the armed forces to root out those defined as extremists on the right. It’s not the same as a personal loyalty oath to the leader that was required of the German military under Hitler, but it’s a way to make sure our military is composed of people unlikely to turn on the left no matter what.

The Enabling Act was the method by which the Reischstag effectively dissolved itself and placed all power in the executive. Even though by then the Nazis pretty much controlled the legislative body and the various other parties that still remained, the Reichstag’s mere existence was apparently felt to be enough of a threat and/or impediment to speedy efficiency that it was better to be rid of it except for ceremonial purposes.

But in the US there’s no need to go that far. Instead we have the mechanism of the executive order, which Biden (or whoever is in charge in his administration) can employ to expedite the implementation of orders that once would have been effected only through legislation. But since our Congress is presently so evenly split that unless nearly all the Democrats hang firm and also eliminate the filibuster (which might happen), very little far-left legislation will be passed and the EO is the way to go instead.

Which brings us to the last hope of stopping this – the judiciary. It’s a faint hope to be sure, but it seems to be the only mechanism by which at least some of the EOs could be invalidated (except, I suppose, by state-by-state defiance). Of course, that’s where court-packing comes in, but that also requires the end of the filibuster.

Are these comparisons hyperbole on my part? Perhaps; perhaps not. The left in this country are not Nazis, although they’d have people think that people on the right are exactly that. But the left in this country are totalitarians and/or totalitarian wannabees.

These developments are just another reminder that, brilliant as the Constitution is and brilliant as the men who devised it were, a constitution cannot rein in a people who have lost their virtue and who support a party that believes the ends justify the means. And the Founders knew that they could not protect us indefinitely from that.

A few more points about that Time report

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve already written two posts (this and this) on the topic of that recent report in Time on the 2020 pre-election machinations, as well as posting several podcast videos on the same subject. But somehow it seems there’s more to say.

The basic premise of the Time article was “we had to do all of this to protect America from the false accusations Trump was sure to make about voting fraud.” This presupposes a lot. It presupposes he would be making such accusations. It presupposes they would of course be false.

But these things – especially the latter – were unknowable prior to the election. The first – Trump’s accusations – was not a farfetched prediction. But the idea that a fraudulent election would not and could not occur at the hands of Democrats? That could never have been known. And certainly the last people one should trust to reassure us on that score would be those Democrats themselves or their “bipartisan” NeverTrump GOPe allies.

And yet that’s what the people who ran the conspiracy to “fortify” the election say we should do – trust them. And that’s what Molly Ball of Time is saying, too.

What’s more, if that was in fact their big pre-election concern – that Trump would falsely accuse the Democrats of cheating, and throw the post-election transition into an uproar – what would be the best way to prevent that and reassure the American people that all was actually on the up-and-up with the vote? Why, make sure the voting process was hyper-secure and hyper-protected against fraud or even the suspicion of fraud. What did the Democrats do instead? They mounted a full-court press to relax the voting rules in ways that were bound to cause suspicion. Here’s how the article tells it:

They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears…

In the end, nearly half the electorate cast ballots by mail in 2020, practically a revolution in how people vote. About a quarter voted early in person. Only a quarter of voters cast their ballots the traditional way: in person on Election Day.

They instituted a nationwide, state-by-state lawfare push for the relaxation of these rules and the implementation of an avalanche of mail-in votes, a voting method known world-round to be inherently less secure than in-person ballots, some of it in states woefully unprepared to institute such a system in time. They relaxed other rules connected with signature verification, postmarks, and the like. All objections to this were to be labeled “voter-suppression.” And funny thing, although COVID was used as an excuse (successfully, in most cases) for these changes, the changes actually matched a Democrat wish-list for voting that long predated COVID and many had been part of the first bill the House had passed after the 2018 election. So no, this was not a reaction to COVID, although its legal success was enabled by COVID.

So, while they claim to have been motivated in this huge conspiratorial enterprise by the idea of protecting the public from believing in Trump’s obviously-bogus fraud claims of the future, they simultaneously made those claims far more credible. They also made it far more possible to actually accomplish voting fraud.

Doesn’t that seem just a bit paradoxical?

As for the suppression of information they deem false, who made them the judge of that? Once upon a time it was thought that getting to the truth dictated the free expression of ideas – that the answer to a bad argument was a better one, and the response to false facts was to prove them false and counter with the truth. Saying “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” was unacceptable, especially for news outlets. Now the MSM has become Orwell’s Minitrue, dedicating to suppressing information the proles aren’t allowed to hear.

10,000 National Guard troops

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a report that, in advance of January 6, Trump suggested the deployment of 10,000 National Guard troops:

Former President Donald Trump offered to deploy “as many as 10,000 National Guard troops,” ahead of Jan. 6 to support law enforcement, according to his one-time White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

Meadows, during an interview on Fox’s “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo,” said that in January and “throughout the summer … the president was very vocal in making sure that we had plenty of National Guard, plenty of additional support because he supports our rule of law and supports our law enforcement and offered additional help.”

He added, “Even in January, that was a given, as many as 10,000 National Guard troops were told to be on the ready by the Secretary of Defense. That was a direct order from President Trump and yet here is what we see, all kinds of blame going around but yet not a whole lot of accountability. That accountability needs to rest with where it ultimately should be and that’s on Capitol Hill.”…

…I can tell you [the Capitol Police] do a tremendous job, but they need to be empowered to do that job, and there were plenty of assets there to assist them in their efforts. And some of those decisions weren’t made appropriately, in my opinion, and those decisions did not come from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, it came from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.”

You might think, “Wow, that’s an important story.” But this statement by Meadows seems to only be reported by sources on the right such as this one. Whether or not it’s a true account, what he said is certainly newsworthy. But apparently the left doesn’t think America should even hear it – at least, I could find nothing about it there.

Funny thing; those troops – and more – somehow managed to appear for Biden’s inauguration.

More about that Time article: the Arizona call by Fox and many other incidents of interest

The New Neo Posted on by

That recent Time article I’ve already discussed (in this post) is the gift that keeps on giving. The more you think about the article, the more it seems to reveal and/or suggest.

For example, take this excerpt [emphasis added mine; additions in brackets mine]:

Election night began with many Democrats despairing. Trump was running ahead of pre-election polling, winning Florida, Ohio and Texas easily and keeping Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania too close to call. But Podhorzer [head of the anti-Trump “cabal”] was unperturbed when I [author of the Time piece Molly Ball] spoke to him that night: the returns were exactly in line with his modeling. He had been warning for weeks that Trump voters’ turnout was surging. As the numbers dribbled out, he could tell that as long as all the votes were counted, Trump would lose.

Before and after the election, the mantra of the anti-Trump forces was “count all the votes” whereas that of the pro-Trump forces was “count all the legal votes.” It seems that Podhorzer was very confident despite the initial returns that frightened so many people on his side and elated the other side. Why was he so sanguine? Why was he so sure that once all the votes (absence of qualifier “legal”) were counted, Biden would win? Perhaps it was just statistics, or perhaps it was all those poll workers the left had recruited over the previous year (as the Time article said), and perhaps it was the nationwide coordination he put in place that could communicate with them instantaneously.

The article continues [emphasis mine]:

The liberal alliance gathered for an 11 p.m. Zoom call. Hundreds joined; many were freaking out. “It was really important for me and the team in that moment to help ground people in what we had already known was true,” says Angela Peoples, director for the Democracy Defense Coalition. Podhorzer presented data to show the group that victory was in hand.

Note that there were hundreds of people all over the country in on the call. And note that the coordinators already knew the outcome of the election. Now, it’s one thing to talk statistics and what you think will be happening. But these people are using language of predetermined certainty.

More:

While [Podhorzer] was talking, Fox News surprised everyone by calling Arizona for Biden. The public-awareness campaign had worked: TV anchors were bending over backward to counsel caution and frame the vote count accurately. The question then became what to do next.

Was this really a surprise? After all, as the second sentence indicates, the anti-Trump coalition had been in communication with the TV people about how to call the election. And why was calling Arizona way too early (and supposedly surprisingly so) equated to “framing the vote count accurately“? There seems to be a contradiction there.

Next [emphasis mine]:

The conversation that followed was a difficult one, led by the activists charged with the protest strategy. “We wanted to be mindful of when was the right time to call for moving masses of people into the street,” Peoples says. As much as they were eager to mount a show of strength, mobilizing immediately could backfire and put people at risk. Protests that devolved into violent clashes would give Trump a pretext to send in federal agents or troops as he had over the summer. And rather than elevate Trump’s complaints by continuing to fight him, the alliance wanted to send the message that the people had spoken.

So the word went out: stand down. Protect the Results announced that it would “not be activating the entire national mobilization network today, but remains ready to activate if necessary.” On Twitter, outraged progressives wondered what was going on. Why wasn’t anyone trying to stop Trump’s coup? Where were all the protests?

Note that they label Trump’s winning the vote in a normal fashion to be a “coup” by definition. There are no allegations at that point that he had cheated in any way, so the coup seems to simply have consisted of him being ahead. This is very indicative of their partisan mindset despite disclaimers.

Note also there were “hundreds” on the call being coordinated. And I don’t think any of them were the rank-and-file workers; these were the leaders in many walks of life and of many organizations that were involved.

Note also that the rioters who had been destroying cities all summer and most of the fall stopped rioting on a dime when they were told to do so by these “we’re just interested in a fair election” leaders. In fact, they apparently always had had the power to stop the riots the whole time, because it seems those riots were not spontaneous uprisings (although they also attracted some people who would fit that description) but strategic ones orchestrated by many groups under a central leadership, and their aim seems to have been to influence the 2020 election rather than anything having to do with saving black lives.

The right suspected that all along, but the Time article is a frank and unashamed admission of it. The final aim of such riots, also connected with the election, was the enlistment of fearful merchants’ organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce as well as larger corporations, through using the threats of further riots if these entities didn’t cooperate with and aid their election efforts in the ways that were suggested. This approach was very very successful in getting people onboard out of fear.

Now let’s get back to that pivotal moment mentioned earlier, Fox News calling Arizona for Biden. On election night, it puzzled and infuriated a lot of people on the right when that happened, because at the time Trump was way ahead and at the very least the outcome still seemed in doubt. Although it was possible that he would lose, there didn’t seem to be any basis to say he absolutely would lose, and yet that’s exactly what Fox was saying by calling the state.

The Epoch Times has some further background on that:

The description [concerning the Arizona call in the Time article] surrounding election night, while short, is telling and raises further questions. Despite the overall tone of the article, it seems clear that Democrats thought they had lost the election in the later hours of Nov. 3th, 2020.

That’s the rank-and-file Democrats; the people in charge of this Zoom call didn’t seem to think so. In fact, they seemed quite sure the election had been won.

This is what the Epoch Times adds:

One analyst, described as a “member of a major network’s political unit who spoke with Podhorzer before Election Day” told Time that having access to Pordhorzor’s data and being able to “document how big the absentee wave would be and the variance by state was essential.”

Arnon Mishkin, an outside contractor and a Democrat, was the individual at Fox who reportedly made the call on Arizona at 11:20 p.m. New York time. According to one report, “No announcement was made until anchor Bill Hemmer, reviewing the latest status of an electoral map that was looking positive for Trump, glanced at the southwest, where the decision desk had left its yellow check mark on Arizona awarding the state to Biden.”

After making his call on Arizona, Mishkin stated that Trump was “likely to only get about 44% of the outstanding votes that are there.” Mishkin was wrong. Trump got a significantly higher percentage of the remaining votes, and although the Arizona call ultimately stood, it was far closer than Mishkin had forecast. Indeed, there’s currently a parallel audit underway in Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous county.

How wrong was Mishkin? Very wrong indeed. Here’s the Arizona vote as it stands now: Biden 49.36% to Trump’s 49.06%, or a difference of 10,457 votes. The Fox News call for Arizona at that time was preposterous, and the Republican-voting viewers who were outraged were right to feel that way.

Why was Mishkin so confident? Was he just crunching the numbers, or did he have the knowledge that the numbers would be found no matter what?

In addition, the Time article makes it clear that those organizing this enormous effort to “fortify” the vote also had recruited “armies of poll workers.” I wonder where these poll workers were recruited and who they were, but I suspect I know. It would be fascinating to learn. But I suspect they were in those all-important blue cities, and there is no reason to believe they were non-partisan or on the right. The article also describes huge numbers of partisan observers that were sent to places where there were deemed to be too many Republican observers, in order to challenge them.

Note also the time this Zoom call happened: 11 PM on election night. When was it that a number of swing states supposedly closed for the evening and sent most observers home, and yet continued to count? Didn’t it start around then, or at least between 11 PM and 1 AM? The right immediately noticed the oddness and the seeming coordination of the shutdown/count, something that seems to have never happened before and certainly not in this multi-state manner. It was during these “closed” hours that all the swing states in which Trump had been strongly ahead suddenly switched and found Biden ahead. These were the disputed ballots in true-blue cities, mostly mail-in and often separated forever from their envelopes without Republicans able to watch and verify the process.

It seems to me that it is likely that this was coordinated from the same central group that “knew” Trump would lose. The Time article doesn’t confess to that, but it’s hard to read the piece without coming to the conclusion that, if in fact widespread fraud occurred, this was the way it was centrally orchestrated.

Also from the Time article, this is one of many things that happened post-election, also orchestrated by the central group:

Activists called “attention to the racial implications of disenfranchising Black Detroiters. They flooded the Wayne County canvassing board’s Nov. 17 certification meeting with on-message testimony.” Detroit’s vote was certified by the Republican board members.

Finally, the pressure on state legislatures was intense. On Nov. 20, Trump invited the Republican leaders of the Michigan legislature to the White House. According to the article, a “full-court press” was launched by the left and “Protect Democracy’s local contacts researched the lawmakers’ personal and political motives.”

Reyes’s activists rallied at departure and arrival terminals for the Republican state lawmakers’ trip to D.C.

The final step in certifying the Michigan vote was a vote from the state canvassing board, which was comprised of two Republicans and two Democrats. “Reyes’s activists flooded the livestream and filled Twitter with their hashtag, #alleyesonmi. A board accustomed to attendance in the single digits suddenly faced an audience of thousands.”

The vote was certified 3-0, with one Republican abstaining.

The article doesn’t mention it, but do you remember the threats and intimidation involved? The link I just gave is dated November 18, 2020, and I’m going to quote liberally from it because I think it’s important to understand the nature of the pressure that was brought to bear, and how difficult it was for the less-than-hard-boiled panel members to resist it:

A Michigan mother who was one of two Republicans on a panel appointed to certify the Detroit-area election results said she faced “heartbreaking” attacks, including being called a racist, when she raised objections over potential irregularities.

She and the other Republican member of the board changed their votes against certifying election results Tuesday with little explanation after enduring nearly three hours of insults and intimidation, including mentions of their children.

In a statement late Wednesday, Wayne County canvassing board chairwoman Monica Palmer called it “heartbreaking” to sit and listen to people attack her…

Democrat Abraham Aiyash, who is representative-elect for Michigan’s State House District 4 after running unopposed, took aim at Palmer and brought up the school her children likely attend.

“You, Miss Monica Palmer from Grosse Pointe Woods, which has a history of racism, are deciding to enable and continue to perpetuate the racist history of this country. And I want you to think about what that means for your kids, who probably go to Grosse Pointe North,” Aiyash said, a reference to a public high school in Palmer’s neighborhood…

The four-person panel’s two Republicans, Palmer and William Hartmann, initially voted against certifying the results of the election due to discrepancies in many precinct results. The 2-2 board deadlock would have meant that election results from the state’s most populous county, which includes the city of Detroit, would have been sent to a state elections board…

…[T]he vote set off a furious, and ultimately successful, effort to get the GOP members to back down. Aiyash was not the only critic to bring up the Republican board members’ families during the public comment period.

“Your children will be disgusted, and I am sad that you have influence over them,” said Pastor Edward Pruitt.

“Monica, your daughter is gonna look at you in disgust because she’s going to know,” said Trische Duckworth. “And this is going to affect her because people will ask her, ‘Is your mother a racist?'”

“I’m sorry for your descendants, who will be so ashamed of you,” said poll worker Liza Bielby.

Palmer drew controversy when she said she would be open to certifying some of the results from the county’s jurisdictions but not Detroit and other mismatched areas. Some claimed it was an attempt at disenfranchisement, as Detroit is more than 78% black.

“You’re up there with George Wallace and Bull Connor and all those people. And your QAnon crap, that’s all gonna come out,” said Kim Hunter. “Get ready for the racism that you unleash.”

“I hope that your name lives in infamy of being — disenfranchising voters, and racist, and continuing Jim Crow laws, and the attitude of Jim Crow into 2020,” aid Detroit Charter Revision Commissioner Denzel McCampbell.

One speaker, Ashley Daniels, accused Hartmann of being racist by not calling on people with “ethnic names” to provide comments. “They’re not that hard,” she said. “You’re racist, and you do not like women,” she added.

…When the board returned, the members explained that they had unanimously voted to certify the election…

Wayne County has been the center of most of the lawsuits and allegations of election fraud that the Trump campaign and Republicans in the state have levied. The Trump team’s federal lawsuit includes dozens of sworn affidavits from GOP poll challengers who claim to have witnessed electoral malfeasance, in particular at the TCF Center in Detroit, where absentee ballots were tabulated. Some claim they endured harassment and “intimidation” from poll workers.

I don’t doubt they endured exactly that.

Another must-watch from Frei and Barnes

The New Neo Posted on by

Or a must-listen, actually – no need to actually watch. It’s very long, but I’ve cued it up for just the two shorter parts that I think are especially important. The first once again concerns that Time article on how the anti-Trump conspiracy (it really is the appropriate word) made sure the election went the way they wanted. It’s an article that takes on even more importance the more you think about it:

My original piece on the Time article can be found here, and I’m planning a further one that probably will be published later today.

Here I’ve cued up the Frei and Barnes video to their discussion of the impeachment and trial: