Every MSM Outlet: Postal Voting Fraud Whistleblower Recants! Whistleblower: No I Didn’t!

November 12th, 2020

We’ve reached the point in the post-election cycle where the mainstream media is so desperate to make Democrats’ election fraud for Joe Biden stick that they’re not just ignore election fraud stories, they’re outright lying about them.

Take for example the recent news story of a U.S. postal worker whistleblower Richard Hopkins recanting his accusations of being instructed to backdate ballots.

Just one tiny little flaw in the story: he did no such thing.

Here’s an excerpt of a USPS official Russell Strasser trying to browbeat Hopkins into recanting.

And here’s the full two-hour interrogation audio, which I haven’t listened to all of yet.

The media will do anything to see trump defeated, even if it means outright lying in an attempt to cover up massive election fraud.

Updated to add: The plot thickens:

Veterans Day: Celebrating Hiroshi H. Miyamura

November 11th, 2020

This Veterans Day we celebrate the life of Korean War Medal of Honor winner Hiroshi H. Miyamura:

Cpl. Miyamura, a member of Company H, distinguished himself by conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty in action against the enemy. On the night of 24 April, Company H was occupying a defensive position when the enemy fanatically attacked threatening to overrun the position. Cpl. Miyamura, a machine gun squad leader, aware of the imminent danger to his men unhesitatingly jumped from his shelter wielding his bayonet in close hand-to-hand combat killing approximately 10 of the enemy. Returning to his position, he administered first aid to the wounded and directed their evacuation. As another savage assault hit the line, he manned his machine gun and delivered withering fire until his ammunition was expended. He ordered the squad to withdraw while he stayed behind to render the gun inoperative. He then bayoneted his way through infiltrated enemy soldiers to a second gun emplacement and assisted in its operation. When the intensity of the attack necessitated the withdrawal of the company Cpl. Miyamura ordered his men to fall back while he remained to cover their movement. He killed more than 50 of the enemy before his ammunition was depleted and he was severely wounded. He maintained his magnificent stand despite his painful wounds, continuing to repel the attack until his position was overrun. When last seen he was fighting ferociously against an overwhelming number of enemy soldiers. Cpl. Miyamura’s indomitable heroism and consummate devotion to duty reflect the utmost glory on himself and uphold the illustrious traditions on the military service.

Miyamura actually signed up to fight in World War II.

Miyamura joined the US Army in January 1945.

Miyamura volunteered to be part of the all-Nisei 100th Infantry Battalion. This army unit was mostly made up of Japanese Americans from Hawaii and the mainland.

He was discharged from the active army shortly after Japan surrendered. Following the war, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve, and was recalled to active duty following the start of the Korean War. He endured as a prisoner of war for 28 months.

Because he was captured by the North Koreans, his Medal of Honor was originally awarded in secret.

As Brigadier General Ralph Osborne explained to Miyamura and a group of reporters upon notifying them of his medal, “If the Reds knew what he had done to a good number of their soldiers just before he was taken prisoner, they might have taken revenge on this young man. He might not have come back.” Following his release on August 20, 1953, he was repatriated to the United States and honorably discharged from the military shortly thereafter. His medal was presented to him by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in October 1953 at the White House.

Here he is talking about his service:

Miyamura still lives in his hometown of Gallup, New Mexico. Last year he was one of the Grand Marshals for the 2019 New York City Veterans Day Parade.

Note: The two living World War II Medal of Honor recipients we celebrated last Veterans Day, Hershel “Woody” Williams and Charles H. Coolidge, are evidently both still alive. Williams is 97 and Coolidge is 99. And the ship named after Williams, Expeditionary Sea Base USS Hershel “Woody” Williams (ESB 4), recently visited Naples and Greece.

Three Cheers for Drug Legalization

November 10th, 2020

Let’s take a break from election results to look at an election result: Oregon decriminalized hard drugs:

Oregon became the first state to decriminalize small amounts of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and other drugs on Election Day, according to New York Times’ Thomas Fuller. In South Dakota, Montana, Arizona and New Jersey, voters chose to legalize recreational marijuana. Mississippi also adopted an initiative to create a medical marijuana program for patients with debilitating conditions.

These Election Day results effectively mean cannabis is now legal across a broad swatch of western states, from Arizona to Montana.

Due to Oregon measure 110, the possession of small amounts of harder drugs like heroin and cocaine will now amount to a violation, similar to a traffic ticket. It is no longer punishable by jail time. The Oregon measure passed by 60 percent of the vote and serves to help treat people with addictions rather than giving them jail time.

“This is the most significant reform in our nation’s failed drug policies in a generation,” The Executive Director of Drug Policy Alliance Kassandra Frederique told Washington Post’s Jaclyn Peiser. “It’s particularly significant because most people don’t realize that drug possession is the number one arrest in the country.”

Reasons this is a good thing:

  • The purpose of government is not to protect people from themselves. Ending the war on drugs should theoretically free up resources for police to go after more important crime. (That is, if lunatic leftists don’t defund the police.)
  • Clearly previous drug war policies have not ended the problem. It’s time to try something else.
  • The states are intended to be laboratories of democracy. Let Oregon legalize hard drugs and let the other states observe results. Maybe things will get better (it’s possible crime may be lowered if there’s more jail space and resources to fight more serious crimes), and maybe they’ll get worse (Portland can become the junkie capital of the world).
  • Speaking of which, in a totally self-interested view, I think Austin residents should let every homeless adler know that Oregon has now decriminalized drugs…and provide them with bus schedules from Austin to Portland.
  • However, decriminalization is only a halfway measure that doesn’t break up illegal drug cartels, doesn’t prevent minors from getting hooked, and does nothing to prevent junkies from continuing to commit property crimes to continue feeding their habit. Legalization and regulation of the drug trade are the far more promising avenues to reducing crime and drug abuse that simple decriminalization. There are myriad possible ways to test different carrot-and-stick measures (like legalized drug use licenses…but only for the employed; welfare recipients need not apply) to see which works best.

    I fully believe that drug prohibition should be ended at the federal level because it’s not an enumerated power of the federal government. Let each state decide its own approach to narcotics and look at the resulting data to see what policy mixture works best.

    Election Fraud Update for November 9, 2020

    November 9th, 2020

    I trust you saw my Benford’s Law post from yesterday. Here’s a roundup of current election fraud news:

  • A state of play thread.

    Read the whole thread.

  • In Detroit, Republican poll watchers were prevented from carrying out their duties.
  • Evidence:

  • Undeniable mathematical evidence of voting fraud:

    In both Michigan and Wisconsin, several vote dumps occurred at approximately 4am on Wednesday morning, which showed that Joe Biden received almost 100 percent of the votes. President Trump was leading by hundreds of thousands of votes in both states as America went to sleep, and turnout in the state of Wisconsin seems to be particularly impossible.

    With absentee ballots, former vice-president Joe Biden was also up 60 points in Pennsylvania and almost 40 points in Michigan According to the New York Times. Comparably, Biden was only up single digits in absentee voting in most other battleground states. Wisconsin has not yet been reported.

    Elections officials in Michigan and Wisconsin could not explain Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s sudden and dramatic vote tally increase that occurred in both states Wednesday morning.

    When asked at a Wednesday press conference how this occurred, Michigan Department of State spokesperson Aneta Kiersnowski told reporters “We cannot speculate as to why the results lean one way or another.”

    This is particularly concerning considering republicans led in mail-in ballots requested and mail-in and in-person ballots returned leading up to and at the start of election day.

    According to NBC News on election day before the polls opened, In Michigan, Republicans led 41% to 39% in Mail-in Ballots requested. Republicans also led 42% to 39% with Mail-in and in-person ballots returned.

    In Wisconsin on election day before the polls opened, Republicans led Mail-in Ballots requested 43% to 35%, and Mail-in and early in-person ballots returned 43% to 35%. Almost ALL of the ballots found, while most in the country were sleeping, after they officials stated they would stop counting, were for Joe Biden.

    
    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Detroit Democrats evidently pulled out all the stops in the fraud machine:

  • Thread on the security deficiencies in the “Dominion” voting software used in so many states:

    Read the whole thread, as there are a lot of attack surfaces there….

  • Rudy Giuliani claims there’s enough evidence to change the outcome, and it will all come out in court. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • A list of the lawsuits the Trump team has filed over election fraud.
  • Even if Democrats make their presidential fraud stick, it came at a high price:

    But even if Trump does lose, it may be a blessing in disguise for Republicans.

    The result has crushed Democratic expectations of a clean sweep. It wasn’t a landslide win against an unpopular president, as we had been told so confidently for months.

    If Biden wins, it will be by the narrowest margin.

    And all the hundreds of millions spent on retaking the Senate came to nothing, with the Republicans looking to hold onto their lead. The top targets, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Lindsey ­Graham, survived easily.

    The fatal miscalculations of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in cynically refusing to negotiate on the latest stimulus bill have cost the Democrats dearly in the House, where they have gone backward by at least six seats. They did not manage to get rid of a single Republican. So much for the blue wave.

    The failure means that in 2022, the House is more likely to revert to Republican control, setting up a lame-duck presidency.

    The Democrats won’t be able to pack the Supreme Court, abolish the Electoral College or make DC and Puerto Rico states. They will struggle to impose the Green New Deal.

    Unfortunately, nothing can be done to stop a President Biden-Harris repeat of the geopolitical errors of the Obama presidency, such as appeasing China and Iran’s mullahs and signing onto the Paris climate accord.

    But a President Biden in cognitive decline will sooner or later be replaced by his unpopular, untested vice president, Kamala Harris.

    Saddled with a recession and policies that will only exacerbate economic decline, the next four years will hobble Democrats.

  • Sarah Hoyt says not to panic:

    They’re scared.

    Oh, not the sheep on the streets. They fell for it, just like they fell for “two million dead from covid.” But the higher-ups, they’re scared.

    Years ago, during the ’04 election, a friend told me the Democrats always get louder and more triumphalist when they’re losing. I’ve observed this is true, since then.

    So, step down from the ledge. Go take a shower. Have some real food. Eat a vegetable. Ease up on the coffee. Go for a walk.

    And don’t fall for the blue smokescreen

  • “In Apparent Glitch, Voting Machines Hunt Down And Murder Trump Supporters.” “This is just a small, routine error, and we are looking into it,” said one official. “There’s nothing to be concerned about. These kinds of small mistakes happen from time to time, and it will be corrected soon.”
  • Benford’s Law Shows Biden Vote Fraud

    November 8th, 2020

    I was just going to include this in Monday’s state-of-play voting fraud roundup, but since I found out that Facebook is blocking access to one of the source articles, literally preventing you from posting a link to it (I tested), saying that it “this link goes against our community standards.” So I decided to do this post to let you have something you can share on Facebook.

    The first link I saw on the topic was this GitHub piece forwarded to me by reader Brandon Byers, who noted “the Wikipedia entry for Benford’s Law was edited 11/5 in order to downplay its usefulness in detecting election fraud.” It appears that a lengthy edit war is still going on there. The author is one “cjph8914”; no idea who it is; GtHub is a code repository system that anyone can sign up for and use.

    Benford’s Law, also called the Newcomb–Benford law, the law of anomalous numbers, or the first-digit law, is an observation about the frequency distribution of leading digits in many real-life sets of numerical data. The law states that in many naturally occurring collections of numbers, the leading digit is likely to be small. For example, in sets that obey the law, the number 1 appears as the leading significant digit about 30% of the time, while 9 appears as the leading significant digit less than 5% of the time. If the digits were distributed uniformly, they would each occur about 11.1% of the time. Benford’s law also makes predictions about the distribution of second digits, third digits, digit combinations, and so on.

    This GNews piece by “Himalaya Australia” makes much the same argument, and is the one that Facebook is blocking: “As the vote counting for the 2020 Presidential Election continues, various facts suggest rampant frauds in Joe Biden’s votes. So does mathematics in terms of the votes from precincts.”

    Wikipedia description snipped.

    However, in the Milwaukee County of Wisconsin, which is in one of the key swing states, Joe Biden’s votes violate Benford’s Law while other candidates’ don’t. (Joe Biden 69.4%, Donald Trump 29.4%, Jo Jorgensen 0.9%. Source: theguardian.com)

    Here’s a YouTube video that explains the basic concepts of Benford’s Law:

    Here’s a YouTube video that basically covers the GitHub piece, which covers other urban areas where it appears Biden’s vote total violates Benford’s Law:

    I am not a statistician or a mathematician, but this does seem to make a good case for pro-Biden vote fraud in some urban areas.

    Try posting this to Facebook. I wonder how many hits I’ll have to get before someone there tries to block it…

    Texas Charges Social Worker With 134 Felony Voter Fraud Counts

    November 7th, 2020

    Voting fraud right here in River City Texas:

    “Attorney General Ken Paxton today announced that his Election Fraud Unit assisted the Limestone County Sheriff and District Attorney in charging Kelly Reagan Brunner, a social worker in the Mexia State Supported Living Center (SSLC), with 134 felony counts of purportedly acting as an agent and of election fraud,” the state said in a statement. “State Supported Living Centers serve people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Brunner submitted voter registration applications for 67 residents without their signature or effective consent, while purporting to act as their agent.”

    Mexia is east of Waco and south of Corsicana.

    “Under Texas law, only a parent, spouse or child who is a qualified voter of the county may act as an agent in registering a person to vote, after being appointed to do so by that person,” the statement continued. “None of the SSLC patients gave effective consent to be registered, and a number of them have been declared totally mentally incapacitated by a court, thereby making them ineligible to vote in Texas.”

    The statement added that if she is convicted, Brunner faces up to 10 years in prison for these offenses.

    You have to be pretty low to take advantage of the retarded. There’s no word which party or candidate Brunner was (allegedly) trying to steal votes for.

    (Hat tip: rbrt987.)

    LinkSwarm for November 6, 2020

    November 6th, 2020

    All that calm wore off and now I’m just pissed about a variety of things: The stolen election, Amazon being irrational (“No, we can’t split orders just because one item won’t be in stock until February 2021, we don’t have that power. No, there’s nobody you can escalate to.”), and BlueHost refuses to say anything but “You’re not optimized enough” when the blog craters during and Istalanche. And other things I can’t talk about

    So enjoy a (shorter than usual) Friday LinkSwarm dominated by news of Democratic election fraud.

  • Yes, Democrats are trying to steal the election. Mostly what I’ve covered here before.
  • Documented evidence of fraud: “Wagons, Suitcases, and Coolers Roll Into Detroit Voting Center at 4 AM.”
  • “23,277 Ballots ‘Found’ In Pennsylvania, All Mysteriously For Biden.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Brazen:

  • Another lawsuit:

    Pennsylvania’s Democratic election leaders violated state code on Monday when they authorized county election officials to provide information about rejected mail ballots to political party operatives, according to a Republican lawsuit filed in state court and obtained by National Review.

    The lawsuit cites an email sent to county election directors at 8:38 p.m. on Monday by Jonathan Marks, Pennsylvania’s deputy elections secretary.

    In the email, Marks wrote that “county boards of elections should provide information to party and candidate representatives during the pre-canvass that identifies the voters whose ballots have been rejected” so they could be offered a provisional ballot.

    Democrats have been winning mail-in voting handily in Pennsylvania and mail votes are key to Joe Biden’s chances of overtaking President Donald Trump’s dwindling lead in the state.

    Republicans argue the direction from Marks violates the state’s election code, which states “no person observing, attending or participating in a pre-canvass meeting may disclose the results of any portion of any pre-canvass meeting prior to the close of polls.”

  • Larry Correia has thoughts:

    I am more offended by how ham fisted, clumsy, and audacious the fraud to elect him is than the idea of Joe Biden being president. I think Joe Biden is a corrupt idiot, however, I think America would survive him like we’ve survived previous idiot administrations. However, what is potentially fatal for America is half the populace believing that their elections are hopelessly rigged and they’re eternally fucked. And now, however this shakes out in court, that’s exactly what half the country is going to think.

    People are pissed off, and rightfully so.

    Before I became a novelist I was an accountant. In auditing you look for red flags. That’s weird bits in the data that suggest something shifty is going on. You flag those weird things so you can delve into them further. One flag doesn’t necessarily mean there’s fraud. Weird things happen. A few flags mean stupidity or dishonesty. But a giant pile of red flags means that there’s bad shit going on and people should be in jail.

    Except for in politics, where apparently all you have to do to dismiss a bunch of red flag is be a democrat and mumble something about “fascist voter suppression” then you can do all sorts of blatant crime and get off.

    I’ve been trying to keep up with the firehose of information about what’s going on during this clusterfuck of an election. Last night I was on Facebook talking about the crazy high, 3rd world dictatorship level voter turnout levels in the deep blue areas of these swing states was very suspicious. Somebody gas lighted me about how “I’d have to do better than that”, so this was my quick reply, listing off the questionable bullshit I could think of off the top of my head:

    The massive turn out alone is a red flag.

    But as for doing better…

    The late night spikes that were enough to close all the Trump leads are a red flag.

    The statistically impossible breakdown of the ratios of these vote dumps is a red flag.

    The ratios of these dumps being far better than the percentages in the bluest of blue cities, even though the historical data does not match, red flag.

    The ratios of these vote dumps favoring Biden more in these few battlegrounds than the ratio for the rest of the country (even the bluest of the blue) red flag.

    Biden outperforming Obama among these few urban vote dumps, even though Trump picked up points in every demographic group in the rest of the country, red flag.

    The poll observers being removed. Red flag.

    The counters cheering as GOP observers are removed, red flag.

    The fact that the dem observers outnumber the GOP observers 3 to 1, red flag (and basis of the first lawsuit filed)

    The electioneering at the polls (on video), red flag.

    The willful violation of the court order requiring the separation of ballots by type, red flag.

    USPS whistleblower reporting to the Inspector General that today they were ordered to backdate ballots to yesterday, red flag.

    The video of 2 AM deliveries of what appear to be boxes of ballots with no chain of custody or other observers right before the late night miracle spikes, red flag.

    Any of those things would be enough to trigger an audit in the normal world. This many flags and I’d be giggling in anticipation of catching some thieves.

    (Hat tip: Crossover Queen’s Creative Chaos.)

  • “How Senate Republicans averted catastrophe. With a late cash infusion and misses in the polls, the GOP looks likely to hold its majority.” Unfortunately, this was written two days ago, before Democratic Party election fraud manufactured enough votes to steal John James victory in Michigan and force both Georgia senate races into runoffs that Democrats could again try to steal.
  • Pollsters learned nothing from 2016. Or didn’t want to learn anything:

    A CNN poll had Trump down 12 percentage points nationally entering the final week before the election. An ABC News/Washington Post poll in late October claimed Biden was leading in Wisconsin by 17 points. That state’s voting ended up nearly even. YouGov’s election model showed Biden prevailing with a landslide win in the Electoral College. Progressive statistics guru Nate Silver had for weeks issued pseudo-scientific analyses of a Trump wipeout.

    Pollsters were widely wrong in 2016. Yet they learned nothing about their flawed methodologies. So how do they remain credible after 2020, when most were wildly off again?

    A cynic might answer that polling no longer aims to offer scientific assessments of voter intentions.

    Pollsters, the vast majority of them progressives, have become political operatives. They see their task as ginning up political support for their candidates and demoralizing the opposition. Some are profiteering as internal pollsters for political campaigns and special interests.

    Never again will Americans believe these “mainstream” pollsters’ predictions because they have been exposed as rank propagandists.

    That bleak assessment won’t make much difference to pollsters. They privately understand what their real mission has become and why they are no longer scientific prognosticators.

    Big liberal donors sent cash infusions totaling some $500 million into Senate races across the country to destroy Republican incumbents and take back the Senate. In the end, they may have failed to change many of the outcomes.

    But did they really fail?

    Democrats dispelled the fossilized notion that “dark money” is dangerous to politics. They are now the party of the ultra-rich, at war with the middle classes, whom they write off as clingers, deplorables, dregs, and chumps.

    In that context, the staggering amounts of money were a valuable marker. The liberal mega-rich are warning politicians that from now on, they will try to bury populist conservatives with so much oppositional cash that they would be wise to keep a low profile.

    Winning is not the only aim of lavish liberal campaign funding. Deterring future opponents by warning them to be moderate or go bankrupt is another motivation.

    Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey seemed unapologetic that his company was systematically censoring and de-platforming conservative users. In a recent hearing he talked to members of the Senate as if he were a 19th-century railroad baron.

    Google has been accused of massaging its search results to favor progressive agendas. During the final weeks of the campaign, social-media platforms shut down accounts and censored ads and messages, providing an enormously valuable gift to Joe Biden.

    Silicon Valley, like the 19th-century oil, rail, and sugar trusts, sees no reason to hide its partisanship and clout.

    The media coverage of the election was unsavory. Journalists confirmed the findings of Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center, which in an assessment of news coverage of Trump’s first 100 days in office found that 80 percent of the coverage was negative.

    As in the fashion of the Russian collusion hoax, the media for weeks on end revved up their engines for a seemingly certain Biden landslide victory. They rarely cross-examined Biden on the issues. And they certainly stayed clear of the Biden family influence-peddling scandal.

    What do all these power players — big polling, big money, big tech, and big media — have in common other than their partisanship and their powerful reach?

    One, they stereotypically represent a virtue-signaling coastal elite that feels its own moral superiority allows it to destroy its own professional standards.

    Two, they worry little about popular pushback because they assume that their money, loaded surveys, and Internet and media cartels create, rather than reflect, public opinion.

    Three, while these elite cadres have enormous resources, they still are relatively unpopular. Despite being outspent 2 to 1, pronounced doomed by pollsters, often censored on social media, and demonized in print and on television, Trump was neck and neck with Biden — a fact that a few days ago was deemed impossible.

  • “Election night showed why Trump voters don’t trust the media“:

    The wall-to-wall promises of a blue wave were delivered with all the certainty of prophecy. Joe Biden and Democrats would sweep the White House and all of Congress from sea to shining sea. Even a large voter survey that Fox News did with the Associated Press suggested as much.

    Some 24 hours after the polls closed, President Trump still has a fighting chance to get 270 electoral votes, the GOP is holding on to a slim majority in the Senate and actually gained five House seats, narrowing the Dems’ majority to 12 seats.

    We all make mistakes, and most of us try to avoid them. The problem with the unholy news-polling-social media-industrial complex is that the mistakes are so numerous and predictable that they begin to feel intentional.

    He’s wrong on that: They’ve felt intentional for a long time now.

  • Facebook Shuts Down Massive ‘Stop the Steal’ Group. The pro-Trump group attracted 300,000 members in just two days.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.”
  • Kurt Schlichter on the other election winners and losers:

    LOSER: The Pollsters

    You know, in the world we normal people dwell in, when you consistently fail, you get fired. But, as in so many of our garbage establishment institutions, when you’re a pollster there is no accountability. You keep failing and failing and failing and your dumb clients and the dumb media keep citing your garbage surveys. It’s really remarkable. You would think they would have a little pride in themselves and not want to look like idiots, but no. Instead, it’s, “Our weighting gives us Biden +15 in Texas. Gee, that sounds right. Let’s go with that!” Except for a few outlets, always the ones that take conservatives seriously enough to reach out to them, it’s been a disaster. But next time, we’ll hear once again about how, “Ackshuuuuuallly, the polls were very accurate in 2020” as if we have the same memory issues as the guy they were trying to help. The nice thing is that even the least woke Republican is woke to the poll scam now.

    WINNER: The Republican Party’s Populist Wing

    The battle for the soul of the Republican Party is over and we won. This is now the party of people who work for a living, people who have little companies, people who want their kids to grow up in a world of regular pronouns and where going to church isn’t a hate crime. It is also a party that cares nothing about where your grandfather came from – we are winning black and Hispanic voters to our cause not by condescending “outreach” but by offering an agenda of good jobs and their kids not being sent off to fight idiotic wars. It is not the party of the Chamber of Commerce – hey geniuses, how’s that pivot to the Dems working out for ya? It is not the party of the bow tie dorks who snicker with their lib buddies over pumpkin-infused IPAs in Georgetown restaurant about those Walmart-shopping, Jesus-liking hicks who make up the base. It is not the party of Wall Street. We are a party that happily includes both the Amish and Lil’ Pump. And the Democrats are the party of hedge funders, college professors, Antifa bums, and people who think “The Handmaid’s Tale” is nonfiction.

  • Tucker Carlson blasts the media for its racist assumptions:

    Elections tell you what the parties actually look like, not what you imagine they look like … so the coalitions become really clear. And in Florida, the population center, of course, Miami-Dade County, the biggest county in the state, Hillary Clinton [got] 334,000 votes there. An hour ago, with 84 percent reporting, Donald Trump had already outstripped that by more than 100,000 votes,” Carlson said on Tuesday evening.

    Miami-Dade is 70 percent Hispanic,” he continued. “That’s not what you would have expected if you’ve been watching for the past six months this attempt to racialize everything to make Trump the greatest racist in the world’s history. Whether you buy that or not, you would expect that to depress the votes for Trump in Miami-Dade County but the opposite happened. He’s doing better there with non-White voters than he did four years ago.”

    Clearly, the media was completely wrong.

  • Why the left is enraged at Amy Coney Barret’s confirmation:

    The fundamental source of this agitation is that the Left was convinced the Court would always be on its side, becoming its personal tool for achieving desired outcomes outside the electoral process.

    A fuller understanding requires looking back at recent history. And it requires looking at it more honestly than do the recent laments that, for example, Republican presidents over the past several decades have disproportionately appointed more justices to the Supreme Court than they deserve. For conservatives of a few decades’ past — and still, even, to some extent now — this is not a sign of success but of a particularly cruel kind of failure, if not even their preferred appointees could be trusted once on the Court. The modern conservative legal movement, animated primarily by a renewed commitment to understanding the Constitution as it was understood by those who drafted it (known as originalism), didn’t just come out of nowhere with the 1982 birth of the Federalist Society or the 1985 originalist stirrings of Reagan attorney general Edwin Meese. These and other stirrings came in response to a recognition on the right that the Left had either welcomed or been actively complicit in the transformation of the Supreme Court into a super-legislature, a way for liberals to achieve judicially what they could not electorally.

    To conservatives, this fact alone comported ill with the Constitution, never mind that many of the decisions achieved by the Court — most notoriously Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationwide in 1973 — proceeded to do further violence to the constitutional order. Their response was not merely to capitulate to this state of affairs, but to work, slowly yet surely, to change it. The Federalist Society helped these efforts greatly, bringing originalist-inclined law students together, connecting them to like-minded professors, helping to seed law schools and courts nationwide with trustworthy exponents of its philosophy, broadly speaking, and more. And this was done despite significant resistance from the left, which treasured the Court and wished to keep it under its control. Liberals aghast at McConnell’s hardball today shouldn’t just look back at the 2018 treatment of Brett Kavanaugh, but also to the infamous Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas hearings, the treatment of lower-court nominee Miguel Estrada, and more.

    And yet, for all of the Right’s successes on the Court, it must still witness what it views as fairly spectacular failures. The first Court with majority Republican appointees essentially affirmed Roe; in 2012 a Republican-appointed chief justice rewrote the Affordable Care Act to uphold it as constitutional; in 2015 the Court found a right to same-sex marriage in the 14th Amendment; and just this past summer, Neil Gorsuch, an apparent textualist, divined protection from transgender discrimination in legislation penned within living memory that originally contained no such protections. To be sure, the Right has had its triumphs — often though not always corresponding to defeats for the Left, only inasmuch as the Left was defying or hoping to defy the Constitution — such that it remains interested in the game. And so it is likely to remain, while still wary of the Court’s ability to uphold the Constitution, even with an ostensible 6–3 majority.

    Yet this complicated history, full of the kind of back-and-forth one would expect from the political process, helps to explain the depth of the Left’s anger about the Court’s current status. They are mad that conservatives discovered their thinly veiled attempts at transforming the judiciary and decided to try to recapture it with the help of a philosophy that emphasized a renewed commitment to the Constitution. Now that, after decades of patience and persistence, conservatives have established a beachhead on a Court liberals thought would always be theirs, they are infuriated. Some, such as Sheldon Whitehouse, see evidence of a nefarious conspiracy in what has been accomplished openly yet at great difficulty. But the true root of this remains a frustration that, in at least one area, the Right has refused to go along with the Left’s capture of an institution, that it has not consented to the triumphalist narrative the Left imagines culminates with it forever in charge of everything, never dealing with anything more than token opposition.

  • More on that theme:

    There is also one particular aspect of conservative success in filling the federal courts that contributes to the tone of hysteria that creeps into these reactions. The federal appellate courts, and the Supreme Court in particular, are elite institutions — indeed, the most elite institutions in all of American government and the legal profession. They are populated by highly educated professionals. They work with ideas. They are one of the few institutions of government that actually consumes the work of academics and sometimes translates it into policy. Their output is expected to be scholarly in character and taught in law schools. To see such institutions in the hands of conservatives, particularly social and religious conservatives, is intolerable to people whose worldview depends so heavily on sneering at the inferior intellect of anyone who holds to socially conservative views. That sneering is especially apparent any time a conservative is described as intelligent; the gag reflex you see in response is visceral.

    Elite or wannabe-elite institutions in our culture these days tend to be dominated by social liberals and progressives, who in turn seek to drive out all dissenters. To be a conservative on a university faculty is to be, at a minimum, badly outnumbered. Often there are more-or-less open efforts to stamp out any remaining vestiges of disagreement. We see the same thing with big newspapers, magazines, and other journalistic institutions; with the arts and entertainment; increasingly in large corporations as well. The tribunes of the legal profession itself — the bar associations, the journals covering the legal industry, the people who hand out awards — are dominated by the same groups, and rarely even engage with the possibility that their values might not be the only good ones. But no amount of desire for social ostracism can change the fact that the Supreme Court and the federal appellate courts sit atop the legal food chain, where the bar’s disapproval must remain comparatively muted, if through clenched teeth. To a certain sort of progressive, this itself serves as a kind of standing rebuke, a nagging reminder that gets in the way of simply scorning the idea that conservatives could be capable of doing such a job.

  • “My kid has cancer and ObamaCare is making everything worse.”
  • Governor Abbott welcomes a new resident:

  • Under other circumstances this might be amusing:

  • “Miracle: Ballot Counter Turns 5 Biden Votes Into 5,000.”
  • “Florida Recount Finally Wraps Up, Al Gore Declared President.”
  • Mike the Musicologist sends an emergency puppy:

  • What Can You Do About A Stolen Election?

    November 5th, 2020

    “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?”

    – Matthew 6:27

    It’s Thursday morning and the Presidential race is still up in the air. I would probably worry more about it if I hadn’t been suffering from such sleep deprivation last night. So instead, I achieved the sort of zen calm that comes over you after you’ve depleted all those neurotransmitters and neuroeptides necessary for you to worry. And I have other worries ahead of national elections right now.

    Are Democrats in the process of stealing the 2020 Presidential race by carrying out massive voter fraud in a few key battleground states?

    Some evidence:

    Then there’s the county where Biden and Trump numbers were briefly transposed. It’s entirely possible that was just an error.

    Obviously, this is going to end up in courts. In fact, legal action is already underway:

  • Supreme Court orders Pennsylvania Democrats to respond in ballot dispute.” “President Trump has moved to intervene in a lawsuit brought by Pennsylvania Republicans, arguing the state’s Democratic Party and Secretary of State violated the law by extending the time for counting mail-in ballots to Nov. 6 at 5 p.m., despite the state legislature setting the deadline as Election Day.”
  • Rudy Giuliani filed another lawsuit over voter fraud in Pennsylvania.
  • There’s a Michigan lawsuit over denial of GOP poll watchers access.
  • In addition to that, the campaign has filed a lawsuit in Georgia, and is demanding a recount in Wisconsin.
  • This post was going to have some insightful commentary on possible paths for various Trump/Biden win/lose scenarios, but I don’t have time to get to it right now. And after 9 hours of sleep, I still feel tired…

    Morning Election Aftermath

    November 4th, 2020

    Last night’s declaration that Trump was winning beyond the margin of fraud may have been optimistic.

    Somehow, in the middle of the night, election officials in the Democratic stronghold of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, managed to find over 100,000 absentee votes that flipped the state from Trump to Biden, where Biden is now some 20,000 votes ahead.

    Similarly, a large number of Michigan ballots have also narrowed Trump’s lead to a razor thin margin of just over 9,000 votes. It may all come down to Trump holding Michigan.

    This year’s polls seemed even more off than they were in 2016.

    Trump still has something like a 600,000 vote lead in Pennsylvania, a 70,000 vote lead in North Carolina (with 99%+ of the votes in there), and over a 100,000 vote lead in Georgia (also with 99%+ of the vote in there).

    Nevada was also called for Biden, but Trump is less than 8,000 votes behind there.

    It looks like Republicans are going to hold the Senate, right now losing a net of one seat (Democrats pick up Colorado and Arizona, Republicans pick up Alabama), but if John James wins in Michigan, the mostly likely outcome is the exact same partisan split as today. Republican Susan Collins retained her senate seat in Maine.

    Republicans are currently netting small gains in the House, but it looks like Democrats will maintain control. In Texas, Republican incumbent John Cornyn easily defeated M. J. Hegar, marking the second election in a row Hegar has lost.

    Democrats did not pick up a single U.S. House seat in Texas. Republican Tony Gonzalez held Texas 23rd congressional district, defeating Gina Ortiz Jones. Republican incumbent Chip Roy beat Wendy Davis, despite national attention and fundraising for Davis. That’s two high profile races Davis has managed to lose.

    Republican’s retain control of both Texas House and Senate.

    Some tweets:

    More later.

    Update: Shit. While I was eating breakfast, Decision Desk flipped Michigan to Biden.

    Liveblogging the 2020 Election

    November 3rd, 2020

    OK, it’s almost 12:30 AM, and here’s the way I see it:

    Georgia and Montana are gimmes for Trump.

    Trump will win Pennsylvania; I think he’s up some 700,000 votes, too far beyond the margin of fraud
    Trump will win Michigan: he’s up 280,000 votes there
    Trump will win North Carolina; he’s up over 100,000 with over 99% of the vote in.

    That’s enough to put him over the top.

    Trump is up over 100,000 over Wisconsin. But he doesn’t even need that to win if the above are correct.

    I predict President Trump has been reelected.


    Trump is up some 675,000 votes in Pennsylvania.

    That may be a lead outside the range of fraud.


    Trump’s total in Pennsylvania just keeps going up.


    ABC finally admits that Trump won Florida.



    Trump still up in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.


    Jodi Ernst wins.


    John James (R) up 330,000 in MI SEN.



    Trump still up in Virginia.


    Hmmm:


    Trump still up in Michigan.



    Texas House not flipping.


    Trump back up in Iowa.

  • Trump still winning Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.


    Biden finally up in Maine, but Susan Collins looks headed to reelection.


    Counterpoint:


  • Decision Desk calls Ohio for Trump.


    They’re calling Arizona to Biden. That’s a pickup for him.


    Chip Roy takes the lead over Wendy Davis.


    M.J. Hegar concedes in TX-SEN.


    Biden up in Iowa, Trump up in Michigan and Virginia.

    Trump up HUGE in Pennsylvania,

    This is a weird election to figure out.



    Trump up by 40,000 votes in North Carolina.

    WAY up in Pennsylvania with 30+% of the vote in.


    ABC projecting Biden takes New Hampshire.


    Many, CBS Austin has some amazingly bad kerning on “2020.”


    Chip Roy back within 2000 votes of Wendy Davis.



    Biden up in Arizona.



    Trump up in Wisconsin with 30% of the vote in.

    Republican John James is up BIG in Michigan.


    Trump seems to be running ahead of where he was in 2016 in Florida and Michigan, and behind where he was in Texas and Ohio.


    Biden under-performing Beto in Hays and Williamson counties.


    Lindsey Graham up in South Carolina.

    Trump still up by 17 points in Michigan.


    CNN Promises Not To Call The Race Unless Biden Is Ahead


    Trump takes North Dakota, South Carolina.


    Crenshaw winning, Hunt behind by 7,000 votes.


    ABC Projects John Cornyn wins TX SEN.


    McCaul up by only 2% in TX10.



    Gonzalez (R) still ahead in TX-23.


    Chip Roy behind with 56% of the vote in for TX-21.


    John Carter winning in TX-31.


    Strike that. Trump finally up in Texas.


    Trump leading in Michigan, Biden up slightly in Texas, but way too early to call.


    Williamson County Sheriff Chody (R) going down to defeat.


    Some talk of Biden overperforming in Ohio with 50% of the vote in.


    Biden pulling in a whopping 28% in Arkansas. 9% in.


    Virginia in play?


    Trump up by 18% in Michigan, but only 8% of vote in,


    Perdue is slaughtering Ossoff.


    Bad bad boys, or more Philly vote fraud.


    Cocaine Mitch wins.

    Also Haggerty:


    Austin update:

    Crap. Prop A is leading and Prop B has passed.

    Casar winning, alas. But Flannigan is heading for a runoff.


    Fox calls Indiana for Trump.


    Florida news:

    That’s Florida at 54%, but NC at only 1% results, so they’re not exactly equal.


    6:08 PM CST: Some early calls:

    Vermont goes to Biden.


    Expect the newest updates up top.


    Just a placeholder now. I’ll get started in earnest after 7 PM or so.