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The MoA Election Week In Review
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
> Public PBS and NPR provided extensive coverage to presidential candidates in their newscasts with President Trump receiving 48 per cent of all politics-related news coverage on both channels, largely critical. Former Vice President Biden and his campaign received 18 per cent of such coverage on PBS and 20 per cent on NPR, most of which was neutral. On the three national TV networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) President Trump received 63, 56 and 60 per cent of prime time politics-related news coverage, respectively, most of which was critical, while former Vice President Biden received 20, 25 and 22 per cent, respectively, mainly in a neutral tone. The cable networks were mostly relying on reporting opinions at the expense of balanced coverage. MSNBC, and, albeit to a lesser degree, CNN, portrayed the incumbent President very negatively, and Fox News showed open bias with demeaning vocabulary against former Vice President Biden in some of its evening shows. <
> Though the maths and maps suggests Biden will likely reach 270 Electoral votes, the old saying ‘It ain’t over ’till it’s over’, holds true. The electoral vote scenarios in the key ‘swing states’ would only apply if there is no litigation, fraud or theft. However all three are in play – If you are stuffing the ballot box, you first wait to see what the regular vote is, so that you know how many votes you ‘need’ (mathematical anomalies aside) to push your candidate over the top. Trump, somewhat rashly, gave out the GOP vote calculations at 02.30 on Wednesday, and hey-presto, loads of absentee ballots suddenly arrived at certain polling stations at around 04.00. That seems to have happened in Wisconsin, where over 100,000 Biden votes appeared seemingly out of nowhere on a flash drive delivered by hand from a Democratic district. That put Biden ahead in Wisconsin – but litigation is in process. Likewise, it appears that a huge “absentee ballot” dump appeared in Michigan that heavily favored Biden.
This is just the beginning of a new and more uncertain phase that could go on for weeks. <
> In sum, if the results we have hold, Joe Biden will win the election and preside over a divided Congress. A chastened and anxious Democratic caucus will continue to hold the House. A triumphant Senate Republican caucus will obviously destroy his major legislative agenda. Biden will assuredly turn to policy by executive action, just as Barack Obama did late in his legislatively stymied administration. When he does, Republicans will do all they can to send those actions to a 6–3 conservative Supreme Court Biden will be unable to pack or meaningfully reform. In defeating Trump, Democrats will have avoided their worst-case scenario. Instead, they will have won the worst possible Biden victory, a political situation that will be a nightmare all its own. <
> There is nothing done by the Trump administration that can be rationally characterized as a radical aberration, some dramatic break, from U.S. tradition. Quite the contrary: none of Trump’s actions and policies are in some new universe of savagery, lawlessness, or radicalism when compared to those who preceded him in power. <
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Joseph Dana @ibnezra – 10:06 UTC · Nov 8, 2020
Biden’s acceptance speech in front of a Chase logo pretty much says everything you need to know about the next four years. #USElectionResults2020
Please use the Open Thread 2020-88 for non-election issues.
@ 20. Piotr Berman
1. Hypersonic missiles will only ever be used in an all out war, de facto WW III. Which is overwhelmingly the least likely kind of war. Short of that no use of them is going to happen except perhaps China-Taiwan. They will certainly not be employed by Russia. Can anyone imagine Putin using hypersonic missiles in response to a trade blockade by Amerikastan on a par with the Amerikastani trade blockade of Iran?
2. I have already said exactly what Russia should have done, repeatedly and in great detail, but if you missed it you can see some of it here:
https://bill-purkayastha.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-sultan-and-grandmaster-nagorno.html
Except:
A few years ago I wrote an article in which I had compared Putin’s “restraint” against Amerikastani provocations not just failures in and of themselves, but direct encouragement to more provocations. Back in 2014, I had said, Putin was so single issue focussed on the Sochi Olympics that what even the Amerikastani imperialists STRATFOR called the “most blatant coup in history” played out in full public view in Kiev, without Russia lifting a finger. I had written that Putin could have sent in two battalions of Spetsnaz, overthrown Obama’s Ukranazi coup regime, reinstated Viktor Yanukovych, and withdrawn, with the clear statement that if there were any more coups Russia would return and this time to stay. I remember that when the militias of the Donbass were desperately raiding museums to secure WWII weapons to take on Ukranazi armoured columns, when Russian military blogs were demanding “Putin, dai prikaz!” (Putin, give the order!), Putin kept silent. When the defenders of Donbass had to withdraw from Slovyansk and were nearly cut into two, when the Ukranazis were at Donetsk airport, when defeat was only a matter of hours, it was then that Putin allegedly did something. What that something was I’m not clear about. It was certainly not the dispatch of Russian forces, or else Russian tanks would have been rolling down the Kiev streets in two days. It may have been finally sending weapons, allowing volunteers to go to the front to fight (including more than a few brave and laudable Americans; not all of them are brain-dead imperialists), and possibly limited artillery support. At any rate, when the defenders of the republics crushed the Ukranazis at Debaltsevo and were well on the way to liberating Mariupol on the Black Sea, Putin again withdrew support to them, leaving them without a port and stuck in a frozen war interrupted by sniping and shelling.
…
But let’s ignore the people of the two Donbass republics for the moment and look at the result of this “restraint”. Today, Amerikastani B52 bombers and RC135 reconnaissance planes fly freely through Ukranazi airspace right up to the Russian border, compelling Russian air defence systems to turn on their electronic defences, exposing their signatures for analysis and jamming by said Amerikastanis. Ukranazistan, not being a NATO member officially, is even more valuable to Amerikastan than it would have been as a NATO member, since it can be used for staging actions that could not involve NATO without risk of a world war. How’s that for “restraint”, Putinoids?
In fact, with the one shining exception of the war against Georgia in defence of South Ossetia in 2008, when Medvedev – not Putin – was president, Russian foreign policy has always been criminally defensive and reactive, never proactive. In 2011 Russia permitted Libya to be destroyed, turning an ally into a jihadi hellhole where a slave trading human trafficking regime and a CIA asset fight for control. In 2015 Syria was on the verge of collapse when Putin belatedly and reluctantly sent just enough planes and troops to save Damascus and help the legitimate government of Dr Assad liberate Aleppo, but failed to do a thing to stop the north and east turn into, respectively, an Ottoman colony and a Kurd Quisling puppet state under Amerikastani protection. In 2020 in Belarus it was only the personal courage and genuine popularity of President Aleksandr Lukashenko that prevented a colour revolution that would have turned the country into another NATO stooge. The same 2020 saw the Putin regime allow the racist right wing “liberal” Alexei Navalny to be sent to Germany, and predictably a fake “Novichok poisoning” was immediately manufactured to wreck EU-Russian relations, which were just about beginning to mend, beyond repair.
To quote Shakespeare, “art thou answer’d yet”?
Posted by: Biswapriya Purkayast | Nov 8 2020 16:01 utc | 23
From FactCheck.org. November 6:
Trump’s Wild, Baseless Claims of Illegal Voting
Trump then proceeded to mischaracterize litigation pertaining to observers watching the vote counting process, saying that Democrats “have gone to the state Supreme Court to try and ban our election observers and very strongly.”
The dispute has been over how close observers can get to the canvassing proceedings, not whether observers are allowed to be present. Initially, a trial court denied the Trump campaign’s request for closer observation in Philadelphia, finding on Nov. 3 that by the campaign’s own admission, it had been given the opportunity to observe “the opening and sorting of ballots.”
The next day, a state court reversed that ruling, allowing observers within 6 feet, “while adhering to all COVID-19 protocols, including, wearing masks and maintaining social distancing.” Philadelphia’s election board then appealed the ruling to the state Supreme Court, saying that it had complied with the law and that closer inspection “jeopardizes both the safety of the City Defendants’ canvass, plus the privacy of voters.”
Separately, but on the same issue, the Trump campaign filed suit in federal court on Nov. 5 to stop the vote count in Philadelphia. That request was dismissed by a judge — who was appointed by President George W. Bush — after both sides agreed that each would be allowed 60 observers. The Trump lawyer admitted during the hearing that the campaign did have some canvassing observers present, stating, “There’s a non-zero number of people in the room.”
Philadelphia, notably, has been livestreaming its vote canvassing, which is available online for anyone to watch.
There’s much more in that piece – worth reading to see how Trump lies about *everything*.
Elections expert Q&A: No evidence of fraud and fail-safes everywhere in US voting system
Q. What kind of specific safeguards are in place to make sure elections aren’t rigged?
A. There are multiple safeguards. With mail balloting, ballots have individual identifiable codes on them that match the voters that request them or that they’re sent to. They’re checked when they come back. There’s a signature check, or a scan check. If there’s a question because the ballot in some way got messed up or can’t be read, they’re opened and they’re looked at carefully.
If there’s a question at all, there’s a Republican and a Democratic or opposing candidate’s representatives who are part of the counting system. These are not the observers that stand aside and look around. These are the people that actually decide, … if there’s a questionable ballot, what did the voter intend. And if they agree, then it goes forward.
The other is when people vote in person, they’re on a voter roll because they’ve registered and they’ve supplied evidence of their residence. In some states, first time voters have to supply additional ID… When you’re there, your signature is there and there’s just no evidence that anybody has tried to impersonate somebody else at any level that makes a difference.
The handful of times when people try to do something, they’re caught and they’re indicted. … It’s only a handful of individuals and that’s not going to change an election.
The Next 2020 Election Fight? Convincing Trump’s Supporters That He Lost
And now Trump has seized on those doubts. He and his campaign have shared conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory about why votes were still being counted after Election Day, even though the tallying process was going roughly according to plan.
“I am disturbed that this is being intentionally mischaracterized to undermine the election process,” Tina Barton, the Republican city clerk of Rochester Hills, Mich., said Friday in a video debunking one of the Trump campaign’s many claims.
While these sorts of assertions largely have not found a receptive home in the courts, they have found one online. Social media groups have quickly sprung up in the days since voting stopped to spread disinformation about supposed cheating on the part of election officials, and in some cases organize in-person protests.
“This is the most intense online disinformation event in U.S. history and the pace of what we have found has only accelerated since [Election Day],” said Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and Facebook’s former chief security officer.
The social media groups are reusing channels that have previously been aimed at sharing other conspiracy theories that cater mostly to Republicans, says Melissa Ryan, who runs the firm Card Strategies, which researches disinformation.
“These ‘Stop The Steal’ protests are clearly building off the infrastructure from the reopen protests that we saw earlier in the year during the pandemic,” Ryan said. “And frankly, they’re using the same strategy and infrastructure as the Tea Party back in 2009, 2010.”
Morons gotta moron…
Why These New Election Lawsuits Will Fail
The president’s lawyers may try to tie up the election in courts, but the courts aren’t cooperating.
One group of lawsuits takes aim at the deadlines for receiving mail ballots. Many states have specifically provided that ballots will be accepted as long as they are mailed or postmarked on or before Election Day (as required by state law) and received within a certain number of days thereafter.
In Pennsylvania and North Carolina, a state court order and the state elections board respectively clarified that ballots arriving by a specific date after November 3 would be accepted as long as they were mailed in time (such clarifications are appropriate under state and federal law). Lawyers for the Trump campaign and other GOP operatives have tried to roll back the deadline in these states, and their efforts have been rejected thus far by courts up to and including the U.S. Supreme Court.
Other states require that ballots be received before polls close on Election Day. In a now dismissed challenge in Georgia, lawyers for the Trump campaign alleged that all of 53 possibly late arriving ballots were placed on the same table with timely arriving ballots by the Chatham County Board of Elections. The judge concluded that there was “no evidence” of fraud or commingling of late and on-time arriving ballots.
Another set of lawsuits from the Trump campaign alleges that their poll watchers were not given proper access to view the ballots. These lawsuits want counting to stop. There’s no basis to ask that ballots be thrown out, because there is no suggestion that any voter did anything wrong. On Wednesday, the campaign filed one such lawsuit in Michigan on behalf of an observer who claims to have not had appropriate access, but the lawsuit was so short on details that the judge said she planned to deny the request to stop the counting.
And then there are the lawsuits in Pennsylvania. As of Thursday evening, the Trump campaign’s lawyers had filed no fewer than four and were trying to intervene in a Pennsylvania case already before the U.S. Supreme Court.
All four of these new Pennsylvania suits challenge various ballot counting procedures. Two concern poll watcher access, and a third challenges guidance issued by the Pennsylvania secretary of state allowing voters to provide required identification information for an additional three days beyond what is required by statute. The fourth alleges that ballots with incomplete outer envelopes are being counted. None of these lawsuits allege that the voters who cast these ballots are ineligible people who are are voting. Two of the four Pennsylvania suits specifically target Philadelphia.
More lawsuits are threatened. After two lawsuits in Nevada petered out, a third complaint was filed on Thursday night.
Our judiciary is supposed to protect the right to vote, but we’re not seeing a lot respect for the role of the judiciary. Federal and state courts are getting tied up in disputes that other courts have spoken on or that grown-ups should be able to work out (or both). In an example in Pennsylvania, a request was filed one day in federal court, then effectively withdrawn when it did not look like the plaintiffs were going to get what they wanted, and the same issue was already being litigated in a state court case. This is not about process or fraud prevention — it is a distraction and a waste of judicial resources.
And finally, a short read on how hard it is to do mass mail-in voting fraud:
How Security Features Prevent Vote-by-Mail Misconduct
Voter fraud related to mail ballots is virtually nonexistent thanks to numerous safeguards.
Of course, none of this will stop morons from posting assertions that this or that “suspicious event” – or even outright clear local fraud – means mass voting fraud across all the swing states which proves the 4.4 million votes Biden received over Trump are all “fraudulent.”
Bullshit.
Posted by: Richard Steven Hack | Nov 9 2020 1:27 utc | 76
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