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November 2020

A Bit More ‘Divisiveness’ If You Please Peter O’Brien

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/11/a-bit-more-divisiveness-if-you-please/

“The presidential election is being put to bed with the usual lullaby of stock phrases enjoining voters to set aside their election day differences and reunite in amity and good fellowship. That Democrats didn’t do that after 2016 isn’t mentioned, which further illustrates why Trump is such a despised oddity — a Republican who declined to play by the Left’s rules and gave as good as he got.”

I wonder how many supposedly conservative or right-wing commentators really understand what’s been going on in the US.  Even after four years! At the time of writing it looks as though Biden will snatch, possibly steal, the Presidency. I have no doubt that fraud and cheating took place. As a general rule, we already know that political machines cheat and lie. We already know the Democrats have done this countless times during the past five years. Why would we think that party apparatchiks in swing states would suddenly recoil at the thought of doing something — anything! — underhand?

To say this, of course, marks you as a conspiracy theorist in the eyes of some, so, in order to defuse that criticism, some commentators take the line that ‘yes, probably some cheating went on but not on the scale to affect the overall outcome’.  Well, if the perpetrators didn’t think they could affect the outcome, why would they bother?  It would only take a few thousand votes in one swing state to turn the election.  Do we think that is beyond the people who gave us the Russiagate hoax? That said, I doubt that the courts will overturn a Biden victory.  So where to from here?

The suggestion from most commentators is that Trump should graciously concede, giving ‘loser’s consent’ to an administration fronted by a senile, arguably corrupt, time-server on the basis that this will heal divisions within the country.  Those people clearly do not get the Trump phenomenon.  They acknowledge– some of them, anyway — Trump’s impressive list of achievements but wonder why he can’t be more collegial, more empathetic, more  ‘presidential’. Perhaps they are thinking of former Republican leaders who were attacked, ridiculed, maligned and misrepresented without uttering a peep of protest. George W. Bush springs immediately to mind.

It’s Not Who Votes, It’s Who Counts Them James Allen

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/11/its-not-who-votes-its-who-counts-them/
“Joe Biden’s handlers would have you believe — and this is but one example of the line they expect Americans to swallow — that ghetto districts in Milwaukee voted in numbers greater than 90% of the electoral roll. Some would accept such wonders in the name of good manners and observed convention. Donald Trump isn’t cut from such cloth.”

A conservative friend who dislikes Trump asked about his 2am speech branding the election as a fraud. Here’s my reply:

I guess my immediate response to any criticisms of Trump’s performance last night is to tease out some of the underlying assumptions. There are three basic possible premises.

1/ The Democrats did not cheat.

2/ The Democrats did cheat.

3/ We can’t know for sure, but the Democrats may have cheated.

In regard to #1, if this is true then Trump’s claims about stealing an election are despicable. Thus far I haven’t been overwhelmed with any evidence on this front. But it may come.

Re #2. On this premise I don’t think there was anything at all wrong with Trump’s 2am performance. I would have done the same.

Re #3. I assume most people fall here. We don’t know. We do know that Wisconsin now has, what, an 86 per cent turnout. That is nearing NZ levels, the highest in the world for any non-compulsory voting jurisdiction.

And we know that all three Midwest Democrat-run states stopped their counting at the same time. I’ve not heard of stopping the counting in Canada and Britain. And the fact they all stopped at the same time – not even on the hour – is very odd, very odd indeed. The odds of it not being co-ordinated are rather small. Of course, there are non-cheating explanations for co-ordinating a ‘stop counting’ decision across three states, it’s just that we’re not hearing what they might be.  If honest and above board, then it was dumb because it licensed people to think cheating was taking place.

‘Software Glitch’ Switched 6,000 Votes in One County From Trump to Biden; 47 More Counties Used Same Software, Mich. GOP Says By Carmine Sabia Jr.,

https://pjmedia.com/election/carminesabia/2020/11/06/michigan-gop-says-6000-votes-in-one-county-switched-by-software-glitch-from-trump-to-biden-47-more-counties-used-same-software-n1130630

It may very well be that after all the smoke clears former Vice President Joe Biden has defeated President Donald Trump to become the 46th President of the United States.

But the counting is not over, and neither is the need for serious scrutiny as irregularities are being discovered.

On Thursday the Michigan Republican Party held a press conference and said that a glitch in the tabulating software in one county gave 6,000 Republican votes, including those for President Trump, to Democrats.

“In Antrim County, ballots were counted for Democrats that were meant for Republicans, causing a 6000-vote swing against our candidates,” Michigan GOP Chairwoman Laura Cox said.

“The county clerk came forward and said, ‘tabulating software glitched and caused a miscalculation of the votes.’ Since then, we have now discovered that 47 counties used this same software in the same capacity,” she added. “Antrim County had to hand count all of the ballots and these counties that used this software need to closely examine their result for similar discrepancies.”

Now think about this. We are talking about 6,000 votes in just one county out of the 47 counties that used this tabulating software.

U.S. Labor Market Extends Gains, Jobless Rate Declines to 6.9% Katia Dmitrieva

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-labor-market-extends-gains-134130082.html

The U.S. labor market strengthened in October, defying expectations for more subdued gains amid an intensifying pandemic and lack of additional fiscal relief.

Nonfarm payrolls increased by 638,000 after an upwardly revised 672,000 gain the prior month, according to a Labor Department report Friday. That compared with the 580,000 median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg, and reflected a decline of 147,000 in temporary Census workers.

The unemployment rate fell by 1 percentage point to 6.9% — a bigger drop than economists projected and double the prior month’s decline — though the number of long-term jobless Americans surged and now makes up a third of those out of work.

Progress in the U.S. labor market is holding up as household savings help fuel spending and business investment rebounds, putting the economy in better shape than many analysts expected just six months ago. The improvement, though, may have come too late to help President Donald Trump, who’s on the verge of losing to Democrat Joe Biden in this week’s election.

Job growth stronger than expected in October, unemployment rate slides to 6.9%

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/06/jobs-report-october-2020.html

Nonfarm payrolls increased by 638,000 in October and the unemployment rate fell to 6.9%.
Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had forecast 530,000 and 7.7%, respectively.
Hospitality and professional and business services showed the biggest gains. Government job losses subtracted from the total.

The Kafka Election: Finding a Way Out of the Maze . By Frank Miele

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/11/06/the_kafka_election_finding_a_way_out_of_the_maze__144618.html

The 2020 election is a nightmare from which I — along with millions of others — am trying to awake.

Like many dark dreams, it is uncertain exactly what is happening. Phantasmic ballots come and go. Seemingly insurmountable Republican victories disappear into the mouth of a vote-munching machine and come out the other side as excremental — oops, I mean incremental — Democratic leads just beyond the reach of a recount. And as in any nightmare worth its salt, just when you think it’s about to end, a new trap door opens and you fall into yet one more level of confusion and chaos in a maze with no exit in sight.

But this is America. It’s not supposed to be a Kafka novel.

So how did we get to a place where, days after the election was held, despite many proclamations by news organizations to the contrary, we still don’t know who won, we don’t know who voted, and we don’t know for sure whether the rules were followed in either voting or counting?

Various irregularities have been reported in five big cities, all in strategic states, and particularly in Detroit, Mich.; Philadelphia, Pa.; Atlanta, Ga.; Milwaukee, Wis.; and Las Vegas, Nev. The allegations range from mysterious ballot drops that seem to show tens of thousands of votes for Joe Biden and zero votes for President Trump, inexplicable record turnouts in late-counting counties (all Democrat-dominated) that far surpass turnouts in counties in other states where the votes were counted on a timely basis; and of course the illegal banning of election observers in those very counties where the most outrageous anomalies are reported.

Pennsylvania is Soros Country by: Diana West

https://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/4068/Pennsylvania-is-Soros-Count

Top officials in Pennsylvania charged with ensuring that the state’s presidential election was free and fair are protoges of George Soros. 

1. State Attorney General Kathy Boockvar

Boockvar spent three years , according to Bucks County Courier Times, as the senior voting rights attorney for the Advancement Project, a Soros funded non-profit, whose mission is to see “structural racism” “dismantled” through the “practice of community-centered racial justice lawyering.”

Boockvar also became executive director of “birthing center” Lifecycle WomanCare in Bryn Athyn, Montgomery County (which immediately made me think of 1960s radical/Columbia Nursing School honcho Jennifer Dohrn.)

We know of Boockvar’s public bias against President Trump

Boockvar is also a defendant in this lawsuit seeking to halt the flow of Mark Zuckerberg’s millions around the legislature and into Pennsylvania election system.

Navigating Past Disinformation by: Diana West

ttps://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/4067/Navigating-Past-Disinformation.a

The most lethal threat to our nation at this moment in the election crisis is what is deceptively known as the “news” media, now inundating Americans with non-stop propaganda. This threat is nothing new, but the potential lethality of the election crisis itself makes it exceptional. We, the People, are under all-out psychological attack, our perception of these momentous events the main target. The impact is, of course, compounded by the censorship agenda of such platforms as Twtitter and Facebook, now unabashedly expunging and hiding facts about the events that emerge indepedently of the propaganda media. Big Tech’s censorship agenda now regularly extends to statements to the American people made by the President of the United States.

All of which was predictable, all of which was predicted. Finding ourselves at war with our communications compromised and interupted, we need to navigate past the disinformation. To that end, I will be posting valuable information, comments, analysis as I find it throughout the crisis. 

Press round-up, November 6, 2020.

Betsy McCaughey’s “President Trump is simply suing to stop the counting of bogus votes”

…The post-election limbo is a deliberate creation of the Democratic Party. In the months leading up to the election, the Democratic National Committee and allied groups blanketed swing states with armies of lawyers filing suits to challenge voter-ID laws, signature-verification laws and, more than anything else, deadlines for mail-in ballots — as if elections should no longer have deadlines but instead be staged as a rolling, never-ending process.

…The pretext for all these changes was the pandemic. But the fact is, this nation has elected presidents in a timely way during world wars, polio epidemics and many other emergencies without doing away with Election Day finality.

Oslo and the Lack of Peace by Moshe Phillips

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/11/04/oslo-and-the-lack-of-peace/

Weeks ago, on September 28, it was the 25th anniversary of the Taba signing of the Oslo II Accord — and no one celebrated. Hardly anyone even seemed to notice. Recently, a former high level staffer for Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin penned an article where he claimed, “Oslo was derailed”; he otherwise supported the longtime claims of Israel’s harshest critics in the Arab world and beyond. His idea that Israeli families living in communities in Judea-Samaria are the true obstacle to peace is untrue. This academic and many like him strive to recall the Oslo agreements as something they never were, and still want to assign responsibility for the lack of peace between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) to Jews in Judea and Samaria instead of supporters of terrorism in Gaza and the PA itself.

Professor Meron Medzini, who taught modern Japanese history for over 20 years at Hebrew University, made several mistakes in his book review article for the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs. The journal is published by the Israel Council on Foreign Relations (ICFR), and Medzini’s piece appeared in issue 14:1. The ICFR is an official part of the World Jewish Congress.

Dr. Medzini claims that “Oslo was derailed because of continued Jewish settlement in the West Bank; heightened Palestinian terror; and the decision of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to effectively freeze the entire process after he gave up Hebron.”

But Medzini is mistaken on all three counts.

Pennsylvania’s mail ballot results don’t look right By Richard Baehr

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/11/pennsylvanias_mail_ballot_results_

All of the major networks started confidently predicting yesterday that Joe Biden would win Pennsylvania after all the mail-in ballots that had been received by the state had been counted. The numbers gurus at the networks reported that Biden was capturing 78% of the votes from mail in ballots, and Trump 21%. In other words, Biden was winning this vote group by 57%,

This margin seems too high, based on the party registration of those whose mail in ballots have been confirmed.  

The party registration data suggests that Democrats were 65.5% of those who returned mail ballots, Republicans 23.4% and independents 10.4%. If independents split their votes evenly, then one possibility was that Biden would win this voter pool by 42.1%, the difference between their 65.5% share of registered voters who returned mail ballots, and Republicans’ share of 23.4%. Let us then assume that independents broke heavily for the Democrats, say 80-20, Then Democrats would have about a 48.3 % lead, 73.8% to 25.5%. Let us further assume that more registered Republicans shifted to Biden than registered Democrats to Trump, so that the real margin was 50%.

How does the Biden victory margin change with different shares of the mail in vote?

At 42.1% (50/50 split of independents returning mail ballots),  Biden wins this pool of 2,506,507 by 1,055,260
At 48.3% (80/20 split of independents), Biden wins by 1,210,667
At 50%, Biden wins by 1,253,279
At 57%, the margin reflecting the state’s announced results, Biden wins by 1,428,737