Joe’s best friend was – and is – the MSM. But it’s not America’s.

The New Neo Posted on by

The media has treated Joe Biden in a manner so gentle that it far eclipses even the fawning obeisance they paid to Barack Obama. And although the MSM may have low ratings and Americans may not trust the press, at least half of them are highly highly influenced by it – something I’ve observed time and again in my friends and family, who regularly don’t even know of certain news stories and/or events I might bring up.

If the MSM hasn’t covered them, they don’t exist. And of course the media’s slant on the stories they do deign to cover tends to affect people more than most people realize, too.

So the infuriating findings of this study should come as no surprise:

According to an explosive new study the Media Research Center (MRC) released on Tuesday, the legacy media’s suppression of eight key election-related news stories effectively handed the presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden. According to a poll conducted by The Polling Company on behalf of MRC, a whopping 17 percent of Americans who voted for Joe Biden would not have done so had they been aware of just one of these stories…

The Polling Company surveyed 1,750 Biden voters in seven swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Six of these states (all except North Carolina) have been called for Biden. The poll found that a whopping 82 percent of Biden voters were unaware of at least one of the news stories, while only five percent said they did not know about all eight…

The poll raised these eight news stories: Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegations against Joe Biden; Joe Biden’s involvement in the Hunter Biden corruption scandal; Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) getting rated the most leftist senator; 33 percent GDP growth in the third quarter of 2020; 11.1 million jobs created from June 5 to October 2; the Middle East peace deals with Israel that led to three Nobel Peace Prize nominations for Trump; U.S. energy independence; and Trump’s successes with Operation Warp Speed in fighting the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.

These were not obscure stories, either. They were big. And I wonder how much the respondents read of any news, actually. Perhaps a lot of people simply are generally uninformed. After all, they may be busy living their lives.

Note, however, that only 17% would have changed their minds had they known of these things. My own experience with talking to friends is that literally nothing would have changed their minds this year. Trump was evil and had to be gotten rid of, and replacing him with anyone would have been just fine. So Joe Biden would do, and it didn’t really seem to matter much who Joe was and what he stood for, as long as he was a Democrat.

And no, my friends are not stupid, certainly not in the conventional sense. Nor are they evil. Their worldview is mostly shaped by the MSM and by their friends and family who believe the same things they do. I’m a weird outlier, and although most of them tolerate me and even think I’m intelligent, I believe they think I’ve been taken over by something strange and inexplicable, even though many have heard my explanations.

I truly feel that the MSM is responsible for a great deal of what has happened to America, and that they have a lot to answer for. Not that they’ll ever be tasked with answering it, any more than Joe Biden will be subject to their grilling.

Another infuriating story of Pennsylvania voting fraud

The New Neo Posted on by

Not that we need another one of these tales. But this makes one particular method of accomplishing fraud clear. It also makes it clear that the liberal PA Supreme Court seems demented. But a demented decision in the cause of furthering the election of Joe Biden is no vice, right?

You be the judge (would that you were). Here’s more on the PA court decision I’m referring to:

The Trump campaign argued that observers were stationed too far away to actually see the process of counting votes, and a lower court initially agreed with them, ordering that they be allowed closer to the process. The state Supreme Court, which had previously rejected other Republican arguments, vacated that lower court order on Tuesday.

“We conclude the Board did not act contrary to law in fashioning its regulations governing the positioning of candidate representatives during the precanvassing and canvassing process, as the Election Code does not specify minimum distance parameters for the location of such representatives,” the court wrote in its majority order. “Critically, we find the Board’s regulations as applied herein were reasonable in that they allowed candidate representatives to observe the Board conducting its activities as prescribed under the Election Code.”

The Trump campaign called the ruling “inexplicable” and signaled the legal battle wasn’t over.

“This ruling is contrary to the clear purpose of the law,” Jenna Ellis, a campaign senior legal adviser, said in a statement. “The lower court rightly recognized that the intent and purpose of the Pennsylvania law is to allow election watchers from both parties to actually see the ballots close enough to inspect them, and thus prevent partisan ballot counting in secret.“

“It’s inexplicable that five justices on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court would conclude that watchers observing from distances up to 100 feet away is reasonable,” Ellis added. “We are keeping all legal options open to fight for election integrity and the rule of law.”

I wouldn’t call it “inexplicable.” There’s an explanation: they’re Democrats. And the law, as Mr. Bumble said, can be “a ass – a idiot.” It’s certainly an ass when partisans and sophistry rule.

The Old Guard GOP is trying to take the party back

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve noticed this effort, too:

The radical Never-Trump people have been making noise for several weeks about wanting to return the party to the way it used to be, whatever that means. They are operating under the delusion that a lot of Republicans are waiting around to welcome them back with open arms.

Good luck with that.

Republicans who love Trump’s transformation need to be very vigilant right now. The Never-Trumpers may not be well-liked by mainstream American members of the GOP, but they are still well connected to some old money. If we drop our guard amid all of the pandemic and election chaos, these back-stabbers could make a successful grab at some more power.

The Democrats and the media will be giving these malcontents a lot of publicity and support too.

I think that going back in that direction would be an enormous mistake, because most people on the right have turned their backs on that wing of the party. Fortunately, the other wing – the fighting wing – has been growing, and there are increasing numbers of choices there.

This may have been one of the reasons the Trump team has disconnected with Sidney Powell

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “Kate.”]

Powell made this allegation against Georgia’s Republican Governor Kemp:

Mr. Kemp and the secretary of state [Raffensperger]…[are] in on the Dominion scam with their last-minute purchase or award of a contract to Dominion of $100 million. The state bureau of investigation for Georgia ought to be looking into financial benefits received by Mr. Kemp and the secretary of state’s family about that time.”

Powell is not even asserting she has any evidence on that score, only that she suspects corruption and collusion in voting fraud (to hurt Trump) on their part. That’s the sort of reckless public statement Powell shouldn’t be making without strong evidence, if she wants to retain credibility in other matters. It’s also a side issue, to say the least.

This sort of shooting from the hip on Powell’s part seems to me to be a change in behavior for her; to the best of my knowledge she’s usually been careful not to make public claims without being able to back them up.

That said, the purchase of the Dominion equipment in Georgia was a step in a process that was already being criticized as suspicious in January of 2019. I didn’t follow the story at the time, but the state had been contemplating setting up a new system of voting, and the discussion pitted paper ballots against machine voting, with Kemp opting for the latter:

…Kemp proposed spending $150 million on a new statewide voting system, an amount that matches estimates for the cost of the system promoted by ES&S, called ballot-marking devices, which use a combination of touchscreens and ballot printers.

The latest moves fueled suspicions that cozy connections between lobbyists, Kemp and other elected officials will lead to ES&S winning a rich contract to sell its computerized voting products to the state government, even though 55 percent of Georgia voters said in a poll by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution this month that they prefer a cheaper system where paper ballots are filled in by voters.

After Kemp faced allegations from his opponent, Democrat Stacey Abrams, that he used his position as Georgia’s secretary of state to run an unfair election for governor last year, he’s now being accused of tilting the procurement of voting machines toward ES&S, which is the state’s current election company.

In Georgia, the paper ballots were going to be counted by machine also, so my guess is that voting machines would have entered into it no matter what decision was made. However, paper ballots were less expensive than the decision that was ultimately made to purchase the machines from Dominion. Maybe Kemp made that decision in order to avoid the criticism about his close connections to ES&S, which would be ironic if true.

I discuss the matter only to point out that Powell isn’t making the controversy up; it seems to be based on an older argument regarding ES&S and Kemp. But that would have involved ordinary corruption, even if true – not collaborating in voting fraud to throw a national election.

The election fraud cases: the already-thick plot thickens over Sidney Powell’s role

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m going to start out by repeating something I wrote on November 18 about the election fraud cases [emphasis added]:

…I hear amazing allegations [about election fraud] and we just don’t know what’s true and what isn’t. So I’ll just put some of it here for your perusal and you can judge for yourself.

I will add that, for the most part, with election fraud an ounce of prevention is worth a million tons of cure.

Fraud can be prevented if the will is there and more rigorous rules for voting are in place. But it takes two parties to want it, and that is definitely not the case in the US today and especially not this year. Once that prevention horse is out of the barn, proving that fraud actually occurred and finding a remedy for what happened is nearly impossible. Fraudsters know that. The motivation to commit fraud is sky-high, and if there’s an opportunity they will try to do it and may indeed succeed. Even if fraud hasn’t happened, vulnerability of the system will encourage the strong suspicion on the part of a great deal of the public that fraud has occurred, which is a very bad thing as well.

The answer is to offer little or no opportunity for fraud. Much much too late for that.

That’s what I have thought from the beginning, although it’s not a happy thought. In fact, it was my fear for many months prior to the election, once I learned how much the rules and ordinary safeguards against election fraud had been relaxed. I stand by it now that this story has come out:

Sources close to the president told the Washington Examiner neither the White House nor the Trump campaign have seen any of the evidence [Powell] claims to have related to assertions about voting machines switching millions of votes from President Trump to President-elect Joe Biden. They argued that her claims overshadowed what they see as legitimate concerns about the mail-in ballot process.

Even national security officials within the Trump administration said they have seen no evidence of Powell’s claims.

“Sidney has made these claims, but she has not shown, to my knowledge, evidence to support them — not to the campaign and not to the White House. … I don’t know anyone who has seen the evidence,” one senior administration official told the Washington Examiner. “Where is that evidence? The more she goes out there, the more it overshadows the legitimate problems. … The problem with this stuff is that you got so over-the-top, and you overshadow the illegitimate improper things that were done.”

My perception is that there were always three different types of cases to bring. First we have cases connected to the rule changes that were set up with COVID as a reason or an excuse, prior to the election – that is, things that include (just to take one example) whether it was legal to have a state supreme court change the rules passed by a state legislature that is solely tasked with drawing them up.

The second group includes the type of case that alleges that all sorts of voting irregularities occurred during the counting of the votes in the large Democratic cities (such as Philadelphia and Detroit) in certain swing states. These anomalies include, for example, throwing out Republican observers or making them stand so far away they could see nothing meaningful, shutting down counting for many hours (or just pretending to as an excuse for sending observers home), changing the dates on ballots that arrived after the deadline, allowing voters in Democratic districts to “cure” errors on mail-in ballots while denying the opportunity to those in Republican districts, and bringing in huge truckloads of ballots for Biden in the wee morning hours. These claims rest on affidavits submitted under penalty of perjury, and presumably many of these witnesses would be willing to testify in a trial.

The third group involves the claims by attorney Sidney Powell that the Dominion voting machines were programmed to tally votes in a way that favored Biden. This was the strangest and in some ways the most disturbing of the charges if it were true, but it depends either on statistical and/or software analysis or insider whistleblowing and seems even more difficult to prove or to even understand if one is not conversant with software development. I had and still have no idea whether Powell can back up these charges, and I can’t imagine that many of the people opining about it one way or the other actually know.

So, because of this difference among the types of fraud cases, it makes sense to me that they would be separated. Which brings us to what happened yesterday:

…[T]he Trump campaign released a statement saying [Powell] is not a member of their team.

“Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own,” Giuliani and Ellis said. “She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity.”

Powell released a statement to CBS News later in the day.

“I understand today’s press release. I will continue to represent #WeThePeople who had their votes for Trump and other Republicans stolen by massive fraud through Dominion and Smartmatic, and we will be filing suit soon.

Perhaps she was misled by lying witnesses, perhaps she has gone off the deep end (the Flynn case could do it), or perhaps she has tons of convincing evidence we have yet to see.

But we don’t know.

I would like to know more about all three types of cases. I would especially like some clear information about the relevant rules for voting in each state in which irregularities have been alleged, and exactly how those rules are alleged to have been violated in each case, as well as how many fraudulent votes for Biden are alleged to have occurred as a result, and how those figures were arrived at with what evidence. I’ve tried to cull that information from newspaper articles, and I’ve not been able to do it so far (not that I’ve spent hundreds of hours on the task).

Mail-in voting is widely shunned and/or strictly limited around the world because it is known to be inherently vulnerable to fraud. I think its expanded US use is the big problem here – a problem that kept me up nights prior to the election, even though there obviously wasn’t a thing I could do about it. What’s more, I thought fraud allegations would rear their ugly head no matter which candidate won.

But Trump’s legal challenges to the election results are being treated right now as though they are an unconscionable affront to democracy. However, I think that by far the greater affront involves trying to stop or discredit a challenge before it goes through the court system, and/or saying fraud doesn’t exist here before we’ve even seen the evidence. After all, if significant fraud occurs and it remains unchallenged, it means not only that the wrong person is in office and the will of the voters has been thwarted, but it ensures that more fraud will happen next time and will probably grow in magnitude unless measures are taken to prevent it.

Democrats called Trump an illegitimate president from the start and repeatedly tried to discredit and remove him from office based on lies and illegal leaks. The last four years of these activities have constituted the single most destabilizing political element in my lifetime. And yet now the same people are crying foul because some fraud cases are being brought to court resulting from a messy and chaotic system that they allowed to occur and in many cases even advocated.

I would very much like to see measures put in place to make fraud difficult if not impossible. I’d like to see an end to automatic mail-in ballots and automatic mail-in ballot requests being mailed to everyone on the voter rolls in certain states. I’d like to see voter rolls cleaned up. I’d like to see many more limitations placed on absentee ballots as well, and very stringent requirements for signature verification and the like. I’d like to see mostly in-person voting on a single day or at the most two days – perhaps with expanded hours and voting places, and IDs required. I’d like to see some sort of meaningful enforcement of the rules on observers, because once they’re kicked out it’s too late. I’d like to see a requirement that the envelopes from absentee ballots be saved and available to be looked at and matched with the absentee ballot requests if there is a challenge. And I’d like to see safe and non-hackable counting and tabulating systems in place.

And we need not just to stop voting fraud, but to stop or greatly reduce even the perception of voting fraud as a real possibility. And that can only be accomplished by tightening up the rules.

But as the song says, you can’t always get what you want. And so I don’t see any of these things ever coming to be, except perhaps in red states, because that list runs counter to the desires of the left.

[NOTE: And of course the MSM is worse than worthless, treating issues quite differently depending on which side is making the allegations. Just one little example for today is to contrast what the MSM is writing now about voting machines and fraud with this NBC story from last December, which states:

A new level of scrutiny of the election system, spurred by Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, has put ES&S in the political spotlight. The source of the nation’s voting machines has become an urgent issue because of real fears that hackers, whether foreign or domestic, might tamper with the mechanics of the voting system.

That has led to calls for ES&S and its competitors, Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems and Austin, Texas-based Hart Intercivic, to reveal details about their ownership and the origins of the parts, some of which come from China, that make up their machines…

The secrecy of ES&S and its competitors has pushed politicians to seek information on security, oversight, finances and ownership. This month, a group of Democratic politicians sent the private equity firms that own the major election vendors a letter asking them to disclose a range of such information, including ownership, finances and research investments.

“The voting machine lobby, led by the biggest company, ES&S, believes they are above the law,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a member of the Intelligence Committee who co-signed the letter. “They have not had anybody hold them accountable even on the most basic matters.”

Hearings before Congress seem to have been held, but it doesn’t seem like much was revealed or resolved. Bills to supposedly improve things stalled amidst disagreements between the parties on how best to go about it. I haven’t been able to find out much about what those disagreements were. But I know we’re paying now for that lack of agreement.]

Who’s happy about the results of this presidential election?

The New Neo Posted on by

We already know the left is, although their joy is tempered by the vote fraud challenges as well as their less-than-stellar performance in the Congressional races. But no matter; if Biden is president, he (or whoever tells him what to do) can get much of the job done without Congress. And there’s always the Senate runoffs in Georgia, a state where opportunities for voting fraud are many and various.

But who else is very happy? Why, those who would like to enter this country illegally and have been restraining themselves till recently. Call it the Biden Surge.

And then there are the international players: Iran, Palestine, China, much of the EU, and UN functionaries – and that’s not meant to be an exhaustive list.

More locally, we have the critical race theory hate/guilt hucksters. Cancel culture. The MSM. Judge Sullivan. The NeverTrumpers and the Lincoln Project. Academia. Brennan, Comey, Strzok, and other federal agency players too numerous to mention.

[ADDENDUM: And although this isn’t really all that related, I think Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge asks an important question: if Biden ends up becoming president, “How much of the modern GOP will continue to follow the forty-fifth president, and how many will end up being perfectly content with being partners with Joe Biden?” In other words, has the majority of the party developed some fighting spirit, or is it eager to go back to business-as-usual?]

Do Giuliani, Powell, and Ellis have the goods?

The New Neo Posted on by

This seems to be a big argument at present on the right (see this): have Giuliani and Powell and Ellis presented enough “evidence” of fraud?

Here’s a transcript of the text of their press conference, if you haven’t watched the video.

But I find the criticism of Giuliani et al to be rather odd, because I don’t see how they can possibly present the actual evidence to the press right now. It’s complex and voluminous and belongs in a courtroom. In many cases, witnesses don’t want their identities publicly revealed on cable news. This was stated at the press conference, and the three lawyers certainly described the evidence in some detail. I don’t think the press ordinarily demands that lawyers show them the actual evidence in a press conference – perhaps they do privately, but I’m certainly not aware of it.

I have no idea whether the Trump lawyers actually have the goods, and I certainly have no idea whether they have enough of the goods to prevail in court (which is a somewhat different matter). And I don’t see how anyone else other than the legal team itself can know that at the moment – nor would any evidence convince most of their critics, certainly not the ones on the left. After all, the press was shown a great deal of the evidence in the Hunter Biden laptop situation and they either refused to cover it or said (with no evidence at all) that it was Russian disinformation, their go-to claim for anything to which they want the public to pay no attention.

It’s not really about evidence for the press. Evidence is for the court – if the court is unbiased. But the amount of evidence required to prove a case to that court (ultimately SCOTUS, most likely) is not the same as the amount of evidence that would convince the public, and is also different from whether any court will be able and willing to give sufficient relief even if that court judges the evidence convincing. Short of having a new election – which I doubt a court would order – or throwing the election to the House (which I also doubt) I just can’t see what a sufficient remedy would be.

I also find it difficult to figure out what would constitute more evidence than hundreds of sworn witnesses willing to testify. If and when audits are done that include the mail-in envelopes (often unavailable in many states, if I’m correct), then that will be more evidence, but that hasn’t occurred yet. Trump’s lawyers even say they have Dominion employees willing to testify to fraud – that seems like good evidence to me. But again, short of trotting them out to speak at a press conference – which they understandably don’t want to do – we need to wait and see. We’re most likely not going to find a series of emails where the plotters discuss exactly how they’re going to do it, but sometimes I think even that would not be enough evidence for those who don’t want to believe that such a fraud took place.

I repeat, just to make it clear: I don’t know whether it did. But I know that I’m interested in hearing what the evidence will be in court, and until then I don’t expect to see more than I’ve already seen.

There’s no mystery as to why the left dismisses all of this. The more interesting case is why some on the right do. I think that some of them are backpedaling out of fear. The fear has several possible causes. For those in the media, they may think that if they go too far with this they’ll risk being Glenn Becked and labeled as kooks forever. Of course, they risk that label and worse, whatever they do, if they’re on the right. The second is that what Giuliani and the rest are claiming is so terrifying, so serious and widespread (like something out of a James Bond movie), that it’s easy to hope that it isn’t true because it’s far more frightening if it is.

Talking about politics

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Rufus T. Firefly” writes:

I also find Politics a fairly boring topic most of the time, especially in polite company. When getting together with family why wouldn’t want have sincere conversations about how each other are doing, what is going on their lives, do they need help with anything?, etc… To stand around and rant about Nancy Pelosi or Mitch McConnell seems crass. Upper class people used to always avoid the topic and even in the lower middle class environment I was raised in people would not bring such things up at social events.

I seem to recall that the two topics supposedly banned in polite conversation were politics and religion, because they always caused strife and dissension.

In my family, politics was almost never discussed except for one exception: my father and his brother. I don’t recall who would bring it up, but it was almost inevitable that one of them would, and then they’d have at it. My uncle was a hard leftist and a Sovietphile, and he didn’t miss a beat even when Stalin’s crimes were revealed. My father was a regular liberal Democrat of the era – which makes him almost conservative by today’s standards. Those discussions were extremely unpleasant to listen to, but now I wish I could have recordings of them because I’d love to hear how it went and what the content actually was.

Today it’s different. It seems that many social events involve almost obligatory political talk. I have a theory about this, which is that it occurs mostly in groups in which there is little political diversity or at least little perceived political diversity. Since I “pass” as a Democrat among those who don’t know me well, I am often automatically assumed to be one of the group, and so I’m privy to a lot of these discussions. My strong impression is that they are not really meant to hash out the issues, but are what you might call joining and inclusion exercises for the group, ways to express solidarity and fellowship, almost like a secret greeting or handshake.

I ruin the feeling of oneness if I express myself, which I tend not to do if the group is one in which I’m unlikely to see these people again. With family and friends, I sense that my presence acts as a downer, a way to remind them that my puzzling point of view persists, or a check on what would otherwise be a fun group conversation.

It’s been my experience that very few people bring up politics in order to have an actual conversation between the sides, a sober pro and con back-and-forth in which each side listens to the other. There are groups such as this one which try to foster such discussions, and good luck to them. But it’s not what I think most people are looking for, even though they might say they are. And it’s only gotten more extreme over time – although I must say it’s hard to imagine any mere discussions more extreme than those I witnessed as a child between my father and his brother.

I propose a deprogramming challenge for the left

The New Neo Posted on by

Leftists would like to deprogram the right and get us out of our bubble of misinformation and into the light and the fresh air of leftist truth:

As usual, however, the left exposes the fact that it doesn’t really know much about the right at all. I’ve looked at politics from both sides now, and I believe I can safely say that it is the left that is far more inclined to live in an enclosed bubble.

The reason is that a person on the right would have to go to enormous lengths to block out the voices of the left. For starters, the MSM is almost entirely on the left, as are academia and entertainment. On the other hand, for a leftist to hear much from the right (except for the left’s conception of the right) he or she would have to actively seek out conservative viewpoints by watching the very few news stations and commentators (internet and otherwise) that are on the right, or reading a small select group of conservative periodicals and blogs that a Google search will not lead them to without their scrolling down considerably on the offered list.

So, here’s my proposal to the left (a proposal they won’t accept): let’s take an equal number of people on right and left. Expose the ones on the right to a bunch of news stories from CNN an MSNBC as well as NPR, and have them read a series of articles in the
NY Times and The New Yorker and The Nation. Then have some leftists and liberals watch Tucker Carlson or listen to Larry Elder or watch some John Anderson interviews on YouTube of figures on the right, read some pieces from The Federalist or City Journal, and throw in some Victor Davis Hanson and Thomas Sowell along the way.

I predict that you’d have a lot more Democrats leaving the fold than Republicans.