The Pursuit of Happiness

In these dark, threatening times we should, more than ever, be reaching out to others, sharing hope and joy; pursuing happiness. Instead, the chilling shadow of constantly predicted doom, sprayed over us by high pressure firehose, can easily darken our waking hours.

We are living through a vast war on so many fronts it’s hard to remember, through the lens of this endless multimedia blitzkrieg, how beautiful the ocean is, the sky, trees, the natural curiosity and playfulness of kids and other young animals, the faces of people we love. Happiness, it often seems now, will have to wait on a few major world factors changing for the better.

Meaning that to pursue happiness, we need to become part of the change we want to see in the world. It is on each of us now to figure out how to do our part carrying a mercilessly heavy burden to get us all to a better day. And figuring out how to remain as happy and decently human as possible while we do it.

As I was reading NY Times headlines on my phone late last night (while Sekhnet battled a little insomnia) I saw a reference to “doom scrolling”– an excellent description of exactly what I was doing, reading the newspaper at this perilous moment in human history.

It’s very scary not only here in the United States, life everywhere on the planet is imperiled, at war, trying to make sense of massive global chaos, violence and destruction — in the face of vigorous, constant, brazen propaganda, much of it insisting there’s no problem at all — except for irrationally enraged cranks intent on deception and violence. The whole problem, everyone seems to agree, is inchoately angry, vicious assholes on the other side of every damned issue!

I then, to my chagrin (since I was by then aware I was “doom scrolling”), clicked on an Op Ed that was one of the worst evocations of possible doom here in America that I’ve ever seen. Entitled Whose America is It? it makes the point that in these radically polarized times both sides see the opposing party as not only 100% wrong and despicably deluded, not only as enemies but as less than human.

We have learned over and over that dehumanization is the precondition for mass violence, you have to see an enemy as a disgusting piece of garbage before you can kick him in the face and then shoot him. It’s much harder to brutalize and kill a fellow human being, it seems.

I’ve been urged by my few good friends to disconnect from this soul-crushing cycle of violence that is the news, get out into nature, immerse myself in the preciousness of our world, refresh my spirit. I understand their point– unless I can figure out how to join with others to take effective action I am just marinating in a horror movie and spouting random opinions to nobody in particular. I vow to take a day off, enjoy the beautiful weather we’re having in NYC lately, be thankful that the air here is not toxic like on the west coast, that the pandemic is not ripping through here at the moment, that constant ambulance sirens are not shrieking by all night as they were a few months back.

I decide to start the day doing something I love. I will go downstairs to play the guitar, finish learning a musically ingenious song I’ve been working on, a beauty Louis Armstrong made popular a few years back. But, first, I’ll quickly catch up on the headlines, just for a second. In that second I see, no surprise, that this evil blowhard is pursuing his own perverse notion of happiness, making sure the world is ruled by his master’s irrefutable will, presumably a reflection of the divine will of this guy’s fervently beloved deity. Stops me in my tracks, it does.

No details really needed, here’s a picture of this dogged pursuer of happiness, from today’s news.

Presumably animated by his deep faith in the compassion and wisdom of the Christ he venerates, he gives a speech urging federal prosecution of protesters arguably exercising their First Amendment rights. He wants federal prosecutions of angry protesters under a draconian federal sedition law that allows imprisonment for twenty years for “sedition” which is, in common parlance, a synonym of “treason” [1].

Rings a bell. Weren’t the unconstitutional Alien and Sedition Acts, designed to muzzle political opponents, the downfall of the John Adams administration? [2]

Damn this mind of mine, and its endless interest in the idiocies of our most powerful humans that are recorded as history!

As soon as I finish editing this (won’t take long) I’m going to force myself to make that unpleasant call to try to resolve a large, surprise tax bill, make an appointment to have my clogged ears cleaned, and go finish mastering “Do You Know What It Means (To Miss New Orleans)” on the piano as well as guitar. Playing it in time on the piano (mainly that Bbm7-9 Eb7-9 Eb7 Ab7 sequence) is a musical challenge so far that feels very much like the pursuit of happiness.

Happiness, happiness, and justice shall you pursue.

[1]

While seditious conspiracy is generally defined as conduct or language inciting rebellion against the authority of a state, treason is the more-serious offense of actively levying war against the United States or giving aid to its enemies.
Sedition – FindLaw

Sedition is defined as words or speech that incite people to rebel against the government or governing authority. Words that inspire a revolution that overthrows the government are an example of sedition.
Sedition dictionary definition | sedition defined – YourDictionary

[2]

The Alien and Sedition Acts were a series of four laws passed by the U.S. Congress in 1798 amid widespread fear that war with France was imminent. The four laws –which remain controversial to this day– restricted the activities of foreign residents in the country and limited freedom of speech and of the press. Mar 5, 2020
Alien and Sedition Acts – Definition, Significance & Purpose …

Follow the link above and we see that these partisan, free speech limiting laws were brought to you by our original Federalist party (talk about yer small world!) — under the headline:

Dueling Political Parties 

The Federalist Party, which supported a strong central government, had largely dominated politics in the new nation before 1796, when John Adams won election as the second U.S. president.

In opposition to the Federalists stood the Democratic-Republican Party, commonly known as Republicans or Jeffersonians for their ideological leader, Thomas Jefferson. Republicans wanted to reserve more power to state governments and accused the Federalists of leaning more towards a monarchical style of government.

Prevalence of Voting Fraud using Heritage Foundation numbers

I know that facts matter in politics far less than slogans, catchwords and emotionally resonant advertising, we see that everyday here in America and worldwide. Still, this constantly repeated complete lie about massive voter fraud in US elections has gotten under my skin — it will be the vehicle for Trump claiming victory in an election he is expected to lose by millions of votes. The “rigged election” cry could also be the opening salvo in a bloodbath, armed white supremacists are not expected to take this election rigging lying down. So, for the peace and prosperity of our great nation, let’s take a moment to look at the facts about voter fraud.

I got the vote totals for national elections 2000-2018 from this website http://www.electproject.org/home. My arithmetic gave a total of 1,089,090,347 votes cast in the ten most recent national elections (I show my work below). I divided this number of votes by the Heritage Foundation’s claimed 1,296 incidents of proven voter fraud in recent elections (their Election Fraud database goes back to 1982, there was one in 1983, none in 1984, 1985, 1987, 1989 or 1990 and a few other years, oddly enough). In 2016 they list 62 cases of fraud, out of 138.846,571 votes cast — I used the total of every fraudulent vote they claim for the last 20 national elections.

The Brennan Center’s investigation that resulted in its report The Truth About Voter Fraud gave incident rates of between 0.00003% and 0.0025% (3 hundred thousandths of 1% to 25 ten thousandths of 1% — a pretty wide range in the statistically insignificant– unless somebody mistyped some zeros) for the prevalence of voter fraud [1].

For purposes of extreme New York Times-style fairness, I’m treating the Heritage Foundation’s numbers as accurate and condensing them into the 18 year period 2000-2018 for which I’ve tallied national votes. Doing this drives the fraud prevalence number twice as high (since their fraud claim includes twice as many years) but let’s give this repeatedly debunked right-wing talking point about massive voter fraud every benefit of every doubt.

My calculator, dividing the total votes 2000-2018 by the Heritage Foundation’s proven 1,296 cases of fraud since 1982, tells us that voter fraud, 2000-2018, using this worst case scenario that goes beyond the claims of the conservative think thank, occurs in 1 of every 840,347 cases. (Dividing the 2016 votes by the 62 listed by the Heritage Foundation for 2016 gives us 1 case of voter fraud for every 2,239,461 votes, but let’s go with the much higher incidence calculated above).

My math skills are a bit rusty, so please bear with me. Out of 1,089,090,418 votes cast (2000-2018) 10,890,904 would be a one percent fraud rate. 1,089,090 would be a tenth of one percent, 0.1%. 544,545 fake votes (half of that 0.1% number) would be five hundredths of one percent 0.05%. 840,347 per 1 billion plus would appear to be between a tenth and five hundredths of a percent.

Even that tiny fractional of one percent seems too high somehow. The fraction 1/840,347 as a percentage is… shoot, beyond my feeble skills. Counting the places it seems it should be in the 0.000% range. Any help out there?

As far as I can work it out, using the percentage key of my phone, the prevalence of voter fraud seems to be 0.000118984% or 12/ten thousandths of one percent. Wow — a couple of orders of magnitude smaller than that give or take 0.075%, which was my common sense estimate.

But, yo, as Mr. Trump and his lawyers would be quick to point out– WAY, WAY MORE, hundreds of times more, thousands, than that crazy 44/millionths of one percent figure people determined to end the so-called myth of widespread voter fraud once and for all keep trotting out at virtual cocktail parties!

Doing the math, the number of voters in 2016, 138,846,571 divided by 840,347 gives us a stunning 165 fraudulent votes! (Checking this against the percentage I derived makes the percentage 0.00000118984% or 12/millionths of one percent…)

Bear in mind that this highly theoretical 165 (more than twice the number Heritage has for 2016 voter fraud cases) could be considered a significant number of fake votes. Trump became president in 2016 on the strength of a combined 78,000 votes in three swing states, votes which gave him the election-deciding Electors of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan [2].

Though, to be candid, that projected number falls far short of the claimed millions of fraudulent votes investigated and never found by Mike Pence and Chris Koback’s short-lived Presidential Advisory Commission on Electoral Integrity [3].

Why is this constantly cited lie about massive voter fraud still allowed to march forward, still allowed to support numerous federal and state lawsuits brought by Trump and his myrmidons [4]?

It is like other muscular zombie beliefs we keep being forced to confront: there is no catastrophic climate change — record heat, record wild fires and record numbers of devastating tropical storms are just… things, nature, science has no idea; there is no systemic racism in the United States, unarmed blacks are scary and need to be dealt with harshly and sometimes too much force is used by patriots doing a very dangerous job; Jared has made peace in the Middle East, defeated the opioid crisis and was splendid in curbing the spread of Covid-19, no country did it better; forcing people to wear disease prevention masks is a form of hysterical left-wing fascist nanny state tyranny, private industry is always superior to government efforts, health care in the US is fine… Go down the infernal list, here you go:

In 2016 Trump won the Electoral College by 78,000 votes spread across Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, so 16,520 votes (under this slow-cooked, bloated number based on a study of almost 40 years of voting fraud by an extreme right “think tank”) could well decide 2020 [3]. If you believe the Heritage Foundation, and why wouldn’t you? It’s a THINK TANK, dummy!

Trump handily took the Electoral College in 2016 — 304 to 227.   He won Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan by a total of 78,000 votes, combined  [1].   This number is 0.000312% of the estimated 250,000,000 American voters.  Of  course, I intensely dislike Mr. Trump, so I have jiggered the numbers to make him look less popular than he actually is. Only about 138,000,000 Americans voted in 2016, in an historic contest between the two most hated political figures in America.   That means Trump’s robust Electoral College margin was actually closer to a convincing 0.000609375%.   A mandate, a historic mandate, really.

[1]

  • The Brennan Center’s seminal report on this issue, The Truth About Voter Fraud, found that most reported incidents of voter fraud are actually traceable to other sources, such as clerical errors or bad data matching practices. The report reviewed elections that had been meticulously studied for voter fraud, and found incident rates between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent. Given this tiny incident rate for voter impersonation fraud, it is more likely, the report noted, that an American “will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.”
  • A study published by a Columbia University political scientist tracked incidence rates for voter fraud for two years, and found that the rare fraud that was reported generally could be traced to “false claims by the loser of a close race, mischief and administrative or voter error.”
  • A 2017 analysis published in The Washington Post concluded that there is no evidence to support Trump’s claim that Massachusetts residents were bused into New Hampshire to vote.

  source

[2]

According to the final tallies, Trump won Pennsylvania by 0.7 percentage points (44,292 votes), Wisconsin by 0.7 points (22,748 votes), Michigan by 0.2 points (10,704 votes). If Clinton had won all three states, she would have won the Electoral College 278 to 260.     source

[3] Wikipedia

The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity (PEIC or PACEI), also called the Voter Fraud Commission, was a Presidential Commission established by Donald Trump that ran from May 11, 2017 to January 3, 2018.[1][2] The Trump administration said the commission would review claims of voter fraud, improper registration, and voter suppression.[3] The establishment of the commission followed through on previous discredited claims by Trump that millions of illegal immigrants had voted in the 2016 United States presidential election, costing him the popular vote.[4]Vice PresidentMike Pence served as chair of the commission, while Kansas Secretary of StateKris Kobach served as vice chair and day-to-day administrator.

[4] myrmidon:

a follower or subordinate of a powerful person, typically one who is unscrupulous or carries out orders unquestioningly.

“one of Hitler’s myrmidons” (Google’s example, not mine)

Plausible Worst Case Scenario — sorry to mention it

Chief Justice/swing vote John Roberts decides who is president after Trump contests results of the 2020 election.

With lawsuit after lawsuit in state after state, claiming potential for massive fraud in expanded voting due to the pandemic (without evidence), Mr. Trump and his janissaries [1] are attempting to suppress the vote and once again win the Electoral College.

Absence of evidence for Trump’s debunked voter-fraud claims doesn’t seem to matter in the lawsuits the president is pursuing to restrict voting in states trying to expand it safely during a pandemic. The suits are all moving forward, ready to be appealed if lost. 

I suppose I must leave aside the following questions for the moment:

If the actual prevalence of fraud is a microscopic fraction of one percent, how are these voter-fraud based cases allowed to go forward as though they’re credible claims? 

Why is that statistically insignificant nano-percentage of voter fraud not a major, constant talking point and a decisive legal rebuttal of Trump’s baseless claims?

This chilling piece by Fareed Zakaria lays out a plausible scenario for John Roberts, the corporatist swing vote on the Supreme Court, deciding, in the face of numerous Trump federal lawsuits and appeals that reach our highest court, who will be the 46th president of the United States.

Here is the article Zakaria cites: How Trump Could Refuse to Go. From that article:

Nominally, Trump and his political sycophants are trying to stop state and local officials from making voting-by-mail more accessible during a pandemic. But, in fact, the real aim is simply to push into the public sphere the false claims that mail-in ballots are prone to fraud. Each court battle or legislative fight gives them the opportunity to keep sowing those doubts, ready to be harvested later.

[1] janissary:

a member of the Turkish infantry forming the Sultan’s guard between the 14th and 19th centuries.

a devoted follower or supporter.

Keep Your Eye on the Ball, Fellow Citizens

The distractor-in-chief, gleeful chaos agent, lights multiple stinking dumpster fires every day — it’s his particular gift. That antifa guy who allegedly shot the religious right-wing counter-protester in Portland? According to Trump he got exactly what he deserved (death in a hail of bullets from U.S. marshals) in what has to happen in such cases. Trump told a host on FOX: “Now we sent in the U.S. marshals for the killer, the man that killed the young man in the street. Two and a half says went by and I put out “when are you going to get him.” And the U.S. marshals went in to get him. There was a shootout. This guy was a violent criminal, and the US Marshals killed him. And I’ll tell you something — that’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution.”

You can be as outraged as you like that the U.S. president advocates the summary extra-judicial execution of an unarmed American suspect (according to witnesses of the shooting) by federal police. The only alternative, and not to Trump’s liking, would have been holding a “politically correct” criminal trial with witnesses, evidence, all kinds of delay and inconvenience. Be outraged or keep your eye on the ball:

The number of votes that will be counted in the upcoming presidential election is the only crucial number right now.

The president used this identical tactic, repeating lies about widespread voter fraud, the last time he ran for the world’s most powerful office. He did this for the same reason he’s doing it now: to create fear and uncertainty ahead of an election he expects to lose if all the votes are fairly counted. And to set the table for going to court to contest an election rigged against the real winner– him.

A flashback, to show Trump used this exact ploy last time, from the Washington Post, October 18, 2016:

An unshackled Donald Trump is barreling down the final stretch of the campaign, making bold and unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud and rigged elections the centerpiece of his closing arguments to American voters.

While Trump is light on the specifics of how this alleged election-rigging works, it seems to involve some combination of media bias and official complicity running all the way from precinct ballot boxes to the director of the FBI.

The truth of the matter is that lawmakers already have numerous legal options at their disposal for tipping the scales of democracy in one direction or another. Changing the composition of the electorate — by enacting restrictions on who can vote, or at what times, or on the ID required to fill out a ballot — are one way to do this.

source

Voter fraud is not a statistically significant thing in the USA. The incidence of documented voter fraud is a microscopic fraction of one percent. The stubborn myth of voter fraud has been debunked time after time, yet it will not go away — like the wild bot-fueled rumor of that Democrat-run child sex trafficking operation in the basement of a Washington DC pizza place (a place that had no basement) — there’s a large, growing movement based around that groundless conspiracy theory right now, applauded by the president himself [1].

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative “think tank” funded by Charles Koch and friends, published a study that found almost 1,100 cases of voter fraud between 2000 and 2018. For the state of Florida alone, Heritage lists one case in 2018 AND another one in 2017 (as well as THREE from 2015 and a whopping FIVE from 2013). Here’s the entry from 2017:

Gladys Coego, a temporary worker in the Miami-Dade County elections department during the November 2016 election, pleaded guilty to filling out the mail-in ballots of other voters in favor of Republican mayoral candidate Raquel Regalado. While she admitted to altering the ballots of at least two individuals, detectives believe that Coego likely fraudulently marked numerous other absentee ballots. She was sentenced to two years of house arrest. Source: bit.ly/2hmygEr, bit.ly/2w9hoax

source

The Heritage Foundation claims “at least 1,296” proven cases of voter fraud and 1,120 convictions (see their full report at the link above).

You can read a detailed critique of the Heritage Foundation’s Electoral Fraud study at the Brennan Center website. The lede: Claims that the Heritage Foundation document contains almost 1,100 proven instances of voter fraud are grossly exaggerated and devoid of context, Brennan Center researchers found — but that is not the point.

Even taking the study by Charles Koch and friends at its word — nationwide 1,296 instances of “recent, proven election fraud” in recent years, out of perhaps a billion votes cast — well, you don’t need a calculator to see that this is a nano-fraction of one percent of all the votes cast. Hardly grounds for a dozen or more federal lawsuits by Trump and the RNC claiming, with microscopic evidence, that mail-in voting is an ongoing invitation to massive voter fraud.

Let us fight this transparent lie about extensive voter fraud head-on — there are no guarantees about the future of our democracy.

I’m researching a reliable number of the total votes cast in every election between 2000 and 2018. Taking the Heritage Foundation’s 1,296 fraud cases and dividing it into the number of votes cast will give us a fraud prevalence perhaps much higher than the 44/millionths of one percent fraud number I have been going on [2]. The Heritage Foundation-derived percentage may be many, many times that, perhaps as high as 44/ten thousandths of one percent fraud. In which case…

Keep your eye on the ball, ladies and gentlemen — making the votes count and allowing people to vote safely.

I’m going to do my best in the coming days to figure out how to get this number and this idea out there, find a way to organize with others and do everything to ensure maximum votes are cast and counted. Keeping our eye on the immediate goal: voting these corrupt autocratic rascals out of power — which will happen 100% if all votes are counted, or even 90%.

Stay tuned.

[1] The word “Satanic” was removed from the description of this cabal of powerful pedophile cannibal Democrats, to make the QAnon theory more mainstream, to attract non-religious Christian Americans and even non-Christians (this conspiracy is a gigantic tent, like Trumpism itself). Every decent American can get behind a movement that stands for the protection of children from organized, predatory, sex-pervert cannibals. Fair is fair, evidence or no, you can’t argue with the idea that children must be protected from evil. If you can argue against it, what the Devil is wrong with you, pervert? God bless the children!

[2]

Number of states with active voter ID laws: 32

Number of laws passed to tighten voting laws since 2001: Over 1,000

2012 voter turnout: 129,085,403

Approximate number of 2012 voter fraud cases: 4

Projected number of 2016 voter fraud cases based on 2012 turnout: 4

Your odds of getting struck by lightning (twice!) are more likely than election fraud at: 1 in 9 million

source

44/millionths of one percent

Documented prevalence of voting fraud by individuals 2000-2016 is 0.0000044%.

Say it loud.

Put it on fucking shirts and baseball caps.

It’s not that voting fraud by individual voters is extremely rare in the USA, it’s not that the RNC’s many ongoing lawsuits to restrict voting are based on zero actual evidence.

Voter fraud’s documented prevalence is:

44/millionths of one percent

And even if was a thousand times more than that, 44/thousandths of one percent– how would that change the story?

Why is this fraudulent insistence on widespread voter fraud not front page news in every major newspaper as our divided nation argues about “rigged” vs. “fair” elections?

Evidence vs. No Evidence (and the 44/millionths of one percent odds of winning on the merits, after exhausting all appeals)

We live in a bizarre and dangerous time when arguments presented without evidence can prevail — particularly in the algorithm-driven Court of Public Opinion. This court is not presided over by particularly sophisticated judicial minds. Any assertion that sounds legally plausible will do to support a claim already endorsed by partisans. Doctrines like Presidential Privilege, or Sovereign Immunity sound pretty impressive, and pretty darned absolute and unassailable. Case closed!

Blanket Unlimited Protective Presidential Immunity (for the president and anyone who has ever talked to him): BINGO! Sounds like a winner, unless you look at every previous Supreme Court ruling on less audacious claims of presidential immunity.

Fortunately for our democracy, laws and legal precedents govern when legal doctrines may be applied – and when they may not be applied. The final word on what is lawful is given to the courts of our country. These cases are won or lost based on who has the superior evidence for their claim. If powerful sounding legal doctrines are misused by the government, as Bill Barr routinely does, simply as stumbling blocks to delay the court’s final determination of a claim the AG (and every other legal scholar) knows will fall — that’s fatal for our democracy and the delicate system of checks and balances that upholds it.

Trump’s only hope for an outright, or at least arguable, electoral victory is chaos, confusion, fear, rage, violence and the suppression of millions of votes from people he’s alienated by his divisiveness and incompetence.

He’s favored in this hope by the winds of the highly infectious pandemic he decried and denied for months, a rampaging, deadly, airborne disease that creates chaos, fear, confusion. 39% of Americans couldn’t care less that he deliberately lied to the nation about the severity of the virus, as he revealed for posterity during his many recorded talks with Bob Woodward.

He’s favored by the discord he sows every day, the fear, rage and violence he inspires as he publicly strives to keep everyone calm. Those who follow him will insist he is the Law and Order candidate striving to keep everyone calm. They will faithfully repeat what the president himself has said, defending his decision to lie about the deadliness of the novel coronavirus.

He is NOT favored by the evidence for virtually any of his claims.

He’s not the brilliant dealmaker and great businessman he boasts about being; he’s a fraud and a snake-oil salesman, a serial failure saved from bankruptcy by vast family wealth over and over. Just before his election he settled a case to shut down his fraudulent university, as president his charitable family foundation has been shuttered for illegal activity.

Trump is well-known to be a compulsive liar. It is a compulsion, he literally has to lie. He is in jeopardy of prosecution for multiple crimes once he is no longer president. He’s been kept in office so far, in the face of massive evidence of his obstruction, abuse of office and other wrongdoing, only by fervent true believer AG Barr and soul-dead Senate leader McConnell. Trump is wounded and dangerous.

Please look at and memorize this number to trot out at your next virtual cocktail party: 44/millionths of one percent:

44/millionths of one percent

Rate of voter fraud in the United States 2000-2016: 0.0000044%

The president’s repeated claims about massive vote-by-mail fraud are not supported by any evidence. Voter fraud is a brazen lie told to help suppress the numbers who will be allowed to vote. You can read about the lack of evidence of voter fraud he and the RNC submitted in a federal suit they recently brought to limit mail-in voting during a pandemic [1].

Trump’s presidential commission on Election Fraud, created soon after his razor thin 78,000 vote Electoral College victory in 2016, tasked with finding the three million fraudulent Hillary voters that gave her a wide margin in the popular vote (many of these voters were dead Mexicans, as I recall Trump saying) found zero evidence. Headed by voting rights zealots Mike Pence and Chris Kobach, the commission shut down after two meetings, having turned up no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

By now, everyone should know Trump’s election rigging voter-fraud claim is false, a lie, 100% bullshit. The rate of demonstrated voter fraud is, let’s repeat it, to help remember the nano-percentage of cases of actual voter fraud, to drop into conversation:

44/millionths of one percent

Rate of voter fraud in the United States. 2000-2016: 0.0000044%

Yet the media continues to report on claims of widespread voter fraud like it is a real issue.

I read one in the NY Times the other day, grotesquely contorted to appear fair and balanced, that made me hate them anew. All they needed to do in that article was somewhere provide the number of actual, documented voting fraud cases from 2000-2016: 0.0000044% (or use the equally descriptive “statistically insignificant”). They dared not cite that damning fact, for whatever accursed reason, in assessing the truth or falsity of Trump’s claims of massive voter fraud and a rigged election.

You read the NY Times article and emerge with the idea that some very smart lawyers believe that mail-in fraud is much more widespread than in-person fraud. Perhaps as much as 200% more prevalent: 97/millionths of one percent, one imagines. Even if it is 1000% more prevalent, that’s 44/100,000ths of one percent. Come on, Grey Skank… sheesh, what is in it for you?

Trump has been pushing this load of crap since he announced that he was running for president in 2016. Check out this report from the Public Broadcasting System, October 2016, completely debunking this ignorant blowhard talking point.

As for American votes actively suppressed, recently, votes already legally cast and yet actually not counted, keep reading. This exchange is from the latest interview by national treasure Bill Moyers, about a federal lawsuit this Republican election lawyer is bringing to trump the multiple frivolous Trump lawsuits arguing for the need to curb unsubstantiated, widespread voter fraud [and also to throw a wrench into Trump’s ongoing conspiracy with mega-donor Postmaster General DeJoy to slow the delivery of mail]:

DAVID BERG: We have to prove imminent harm. In order to get any kind of injunctive relief from any court in the country, you have to prove that you are in imminent danger of losing, in this case, a valuable right, for which no money can compensate you. This is at the heart of this democracy: a free, unfettered right to vote. In this case, we were able to show, this is what we think is the harm. This is what we think we can say to the court. “Look, your Honor– ” I wouldn’t say, “Look, your Honor.” But I would say, “Your Honor– we have four people here. Their experience, from all published reports, is no different from millions of Americans. Their right to vote was unconstitutionally burdened, as the test goes.”

BILL MOYERS: In their primaries.

DAVID BERG: In their primaries. Yes, exactly. And in the runoffs. So, we say to the court, “That’s not something that a voter should have to confront.” And we can’t be certain, given everything that’s happened with the United States Postal Service, that this is not going to happen again. “This” being the failure to deliver the ballots in response to applications. And then, and this is also critical, because this is unknown to the voter. There were tens of thousands of votes that arrived too late at election officials’ offices during the primary season, and in the runoffs, Bill. And they weren’t counted. Used to be that, you know, you postmarked your mail-in ballot on the last day before the election, and it’ll get counted. We don’t have that assurance anymore.

BILL MOYERS: So what are you asking the court to do?

DAVID BERG: The court can look to the causes. There are four causes of the slowdown, probably more that we don’t know about. But there are four that widely publicize. The most serious of the causes, you’ve probably heard DeJoy and other of his cohorts at USPS–

BILL MOYERS: Postmaster DeJoy, President Trump’s appointment to be postmaster general.

DAVID BERG: Yes, exactly. He’s bragged about the fact in an email to all of the 600,000 employees of the United States Postal Service that the rate of delivery has really improved. On-time delivery has gone from 83% to 94% in just a month. That’s just about as trustworthy as when he, DeJoy, said he would suspend all the changes. Which was just a head fake, was just three card Monty with our election. When he said he’d suspend the changes that he was making at the post office claiming it just to be for cost-cutting, what he really meant to say was, I’m not going to reverse the changes I’ve already made, which has created slowdowns in mail delivery, failure to deliver mail all over the country. Especially more pronounced in some parts than others. So what we’re asking the court to do is lift the hiring freeze. Thousands of postal workers have been sidelined by the Coronavirus. And the fallacy of this business about delivering on time, Bill, if your trucks all leave on time, that’s one thing. But they leave on time without the mail. They are no longer allowed to do late deliveries or special deliveries to customers. So the mail stacks up, and that makes the delay even worse. So yes, he’s telling us the trains are running on time. But they’re empty.

[1] Trump’s claim in the case — that mail-in voting:

… denies any procedural visibility to candidates, political parties, and the public in general, thereby jeopardizing the free and fair public elections guaranteed by the United States and Pennsylvania Constitutions. The most recent election conducted in this Commonwealth and the public reaction to it demonstrate the harm caused by Defendants’ unconstitutional infringements of Plaintiffs’ rights. The continued enforcement of arbitrary and disparate policies and procedures regarding poll watcher access and ballot return and counting poses a severe threat to the credibility and integrity of, and public confidence in, Pennsylvania’s elections.

full amended complaint here

is not only unsupported by evidence (in apparent contempt of a judge’s order) but these claims are identical to Kremlin talking points about the upcoming US election. How a federal lawsuit is allowed to go forward, unsupported by evidence of any kind, in spite of the unambiguous order of the federal judge that Plaintiff’s submit evidence or STATE THAT THEY HAVE NO EVIDENCE, is a modern American judicial mystery.  The failure of the news media to report on it is a modern American media mystery. 

self-dealing source 

History Lesson for September 11th

featuring an excerpt from Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back.

September 11 is probably a good time to transcribe this evocative passage from the opening chapter of the 2006 book by Amy Goodman and David Goodman that I have long been meaning to transcribe and post here.

Journalism is often called the first draft of history. These investigative reports from the first term of the Bush/Cheney administration detail the real-time actions of people struggling against a new regime in which torture was legally (if secretly, at first) redefined as “enhanced interrogation” and dark practices that were previously hidden were now flaunted as part of the US’s tough new zero-tolerance policy towards “Terror”. How did this official U.S. embrace of torture change history? Our current president, when he was a candidate, boasted that the tortures of Bush and Cheney were nothing compared to what he was prepared to do. In that sense, at least, Mr. Trump has kept his word.

Americans are famously prone to amnesia when it comes to history. The name Maher Arar will not ring any bells for most Americans. He was a Canadian citizen, born in Syria, who was detained at JFK airport on September 26, 2002, separated from his family (they were en route to Canada after a vacation) interrogated for days, drugged, diapered, shackled and “rendered” to Syria, where he was kept in a hole in the ground and tortured daily for a year before Canadian efforts finally got him released.

As Amy and David Goodman record: “Three hundred and seventy-four days after he landed at JFK, Maher Arar was released from the Syrian prison. Charges were never filed against him.”

Canada eventually issued a public apology to this innocent Canadian architect, a man with a name similar to someone the US suspected of being a terrorist, and paid him millions in damages. The U.S., in the name of “national security,” (and on several other grounds as well) dismissed the lawsuit Arar brought in U.S. federal court. Nothing to see here, dipshit, we’re fighting evil!

Years later President Obama would admit “we, uh, tortured some folks,” explaining that good people had done it with the best of intentions during very fearful times, but that it was still, you know, kind of wrong. So our first multi-racial president, whose election wiped the slate clean of racism once and for all, made a clean breast of our descent into barbarity, under cover of law. He said it was wrong. I will let the Goodmans take it from the beginning of their 2006 book, a work of journalism that is now a straight up history book (and one I highly recommend):

The United States is an outlaw nation.

The laws that used to govern the behavior of American leaders evolved from basic codes of conduct for civilized nations. In 1215 the Magna Carta asserted that no one, not even the king, was above the rule of law, and it established the concept of habeus corpus — a prisoner’s right to challenge his or her detention in a public court of law. Kidnapping, murder and rape, all nations agree, are crimes. The four Geneva Conventions, the first of which was adopted in 1864, established that even in wars, civilians and combatants have rights. The conventions prohibit murder, torture, hostage-taking and extrajudicial sentencing and executions.

These have long been the publicly proclaimed ideals of Western nations. In private, they have been routinely violated. From the Native American conquest, to slavery, to Vietnam, where torture and extrajudicial killing were staples of the CIA’s Phoenix program, to Latin America, where US-backed death squads rained terror on civilians throughout the 1970s and ’80s, to the US Army School of the Americas, which counts among its graduates a who’s who of Latin American dictators and humans rights abusers, the United States has been secretly involved in the torture business for years.

Yet even by these sordid standards, the United States is now probing new lows.

For this, we must credit President George W. Bush. A failed oil-man, he lost the 2000 election but was selected as president of the United States by the Supreme Court. Having lost the popular vote nationally that year — including, as recounts proved, losing in Florida– Bush proceeded to declare after the attacks of 9/11 that he had a God-given mandate not just to rule America, but to wage war across the globe. He reportedly told Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, “God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam.” Bush decreed that neither international law nor U.S. law applied to him or his administration.

Bush was not able to achieve all this on his own. A compliant Congress, lubricated by contributions from self-dealing lobbyists and multinational corporations, together with a deferential American media have been essential parts of his arsenal.

In the Outlaw Nation that has risen up where the United States once stood, holding humans in offshore cages and denying them fair trials is fine. Kidnapping has become an essential tool of foreign policy. The vice president personally lobbies the Senate to legalize torture, while the secretary of defense decides which medieval torments are acceptable (drowning and freezing are in, disemboweling is out). The secretary of state trots around the globe to forcefully and unequivocally reassure squeamish allies — on whose soil the kidnappings and torture occur — that what they know is happening (and secretly assisted) is not really happening. The U.S. media speaks politely about possible “abuse” and refers delicately to things like “stress positions”.

Torturing enemies in secret is not new for the United States. But the open — even proud– embrace of it is unprecedented. Let us take a look into the dark alleys, behind the iron bars, and into the dungeons to shed some light on the secret actions of the Outlaw Nation.

Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back. pp. 17-19 (c) 2006 Amy Goodman and David Goodman

A Defense of the President

On a US government website you can read this timeline of Republican talking points of how the Deep State put “Operation Crossfire” into motion, that baseless attempt to illegally set up Mr. Trump, his campaign, his donors, every patriotic citizen actively trying its best to make America great again, before it’s too late (2045 — the year US whites are expected to be a minority).

I don’t know what to make of those talking points being posted on a government website, except that the government itself has been weaponized by Mr. Trump in ways previously impossible to imagine. This is nothing new, certainly but conspiracy theories and random incendiary talking points have never been as commonly endorsed by government officials (Barr- massive voter fraud, for which there is no evidence, is “obvious”) as under “the most transparent president in history” as the president’s latest press secretary called him the other day. I’ve been meaning to transcribe the intro to Amy and David Goodman’s great Static, a pre-Obama work of journalism that is now a history book. I’ll do that soon (here you go, well-worth a read).

It’s always possible to defend anything, literally. Here is the defense of a well-spoken pro-Trump caller to yesterday’s Brian Lehrer show on WNYC (NY Public Radio) during a segment about the release of some exchanges from Bob Woodward’s recorded interviews with Mr. Trump showing that although Trump knew the pandemic was serious, deadly and airborne, he kept downplaying the severity of the virus:

David in Paramus (at 16:10 at “Trump Called COVID ‘Deadly’ Despite Publicly Downplaying It”)

…I’m a little bit taken aback by your guest today, he seems to think that you have Trump painted into a corner, that he said things to famous Watergate author Bob Woodward that maybe he thought wouldn’t go out into the public air, which we all know, obviously he knew it would all be played at some point, but why play it today and what’ll be played tomorrow and what’ll be played over the next two months prior to the election? He did the thing that he thought was best, that’s why we elected him president, and that was to set a tone to keep the country at ease [1].

He wasn’t a fact finder, he’s not a scientist, he’s going on the best information that he had at the time, that you had, that I had, that we all had, which is what is the coronavirus and where is it going? And for him to err on the side of not causing panic is a much better option than telling the whole country “oh, this is really, really bad!” [2].

And I’d like to bring up the point with regard to 9/11, I remember nineteen years ago tomorrow, George Bush sitting in that classroom with that look on his face when his aide whispered in his ear that the towers had been attacked. George Bush didn’t turn around and jump up and tell America “run for the covers!” It was a moment when he made the best decision with the facts he had at hand and he did keep the public from going into a panic [3].

And the comment with regard to panic on the street, Wall Street, I feel it’s also not appropriate.

Lehrer: …if he knew that it was more deadly than the flu and he turned around and told everybody it’s not so bad, you can go about your normal lives, why isn’t that like a doctor (who fails to give sound medical advice after detecting a potentially deadly heart condition in a patient)?

David: That’s an excellent point, I won’t say I’m not 100% fantastically appreciative of what he did on that day, I’m saying that I take it with a grain of salt, I don’t wake up in the morning and say “well, President Trump said this today so I’m going to conduct my life the way he said to.” I feel strongly about not inciting panic, I think that’s a tremendous responsibility, and to the young lady that lost her father, who I send my my condolences to, that spoke at the Democratic National Convention, for Trump to say it’s OK to go out to karaoke tonight and don’t wear a mask, it just falls flat for me, on its face [4].

I’ve seen Facebook responses from people that I went to high school with that feel strongly that this is the most momentous thing that they found that Trump did that was so egregious and his responsibility for the 190,000 deaths that have occurred. I don’t blame the Trump administration, I wouldn’t blame Biden, or Roosevelt or anybody else for an insidious pandemic that struck the world like we’ve never seen in our lifetime, any more than I would blame you or anybody else.

Very fair-minded, David.

some caviling, tell-tale notes:

[1] It is a key part of the job of the president to keep us calm during a national crisis. “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” was famously uttered by FDR during a very frightening time in world history. Mr. Trump often fans fear, of things real and imagined (a cabal powerful cannibal pedophiles; evil, black uniformed men flying in to cause riots) because it leads to other strong emotions, like anger and violence, that he and his political base feed on. There is some irony in this defense of the president as the man who keeps the country calm.

[2] This is the precise reason that the weather service NEVER broadcasts terrifying predictions about incoming killer storms. It only causes panic, and keeping people calm before a raging climate event is a small price to pay for a few theoretical extra deaths.

[3] OK, I’ll leave off with this beating of a straw man, y’all get the point. If you select a single talking point, in this case “keep everyone calm,” you can beat it like a drum, over and over, no matter what other points are raised. This is called “making an argument” in Trump’s America.

[4] One last note: the “resistance” the “tyranny” of mandatory face masks and social distancing is a regular feature of every Trump news conference and campaign rally. The president refuses to wear a mask and has weaponized the wearing of protective gear, one of the few proven ways we have to minimize risk of infection. So that last bit, about “don’t just blindly do what the Leader says” and making his dead follower responsible for blindly following his calming advice about no need to fear the “pandemic”, well, for Trump’s base, that claim falls a bit flat, for me, on its face.

Irreconcilable Storylines — not a problem

The thing about contradictory storylines that can never be made to meet, in any detail, is that Americans today will believe one or the other depending on the color of the hat on their head. There is no convincing anybody who is undyingly loyal and determined in their true beliefs, no set of facts that will change anybody’s mind about these irreconcilable narratives. It’s sad as hell, but there we are.

Every “fact” you can produce to make a persuasive argument is now instantly met with a “counter-fact” from the equally compelling world of “alternative truth.”

It makes people feel good to be right, and, say what you want about him, it’s never been easier to be right than in Donald J. Trump’s America.

There’s been a lot of buzz about Bob Woodward’s new book, Rage, based on hours of recorded interviews with the president and his indispensable minister with many portfolios Jared Kushner. Apparently many inside the White House urged them not to speak to the dogged journalist whose reporting brought Nixon down, but they felt they had nothing to hide and had confidence that they could easily out-maneuver the liberal hack.

On recordings most of us have heard snippets of by now, Mr. Trump candidly tells Woodward, on February 7, more than a month before he ordered the limited national pandemic emergency in mid-March, that he knows how much deadlier than the flu Covid-19 is, five times deadlier, and highly contagious through the air. “But I don’t want to create a panic” says Mr. Trump to Mr. Woodward. This conversation about how deadly this infectious airborne disease was happened in early February, then the president continued to tell the American public that the China Virus, no more serious than the common seasonal flu, was a Democrat HOAX, a made up story to bring him down, and crash the greatest economy America has ever known, to damage him in the upcoming election.

The shocking revelations in Woodward’s book (and shame on him for not reporting these months ago when they happened, another John Bolton… preserving maximum books sales trumps trumping Trump…) will cause no ripples among the die-hard 39% who love Mr. Trump no matter what. The president speaks their language, he’s crude, he’s spicy, sometimes nasty, he honestly tells it like it is, like he believes it is, he’s not afraid to be “politically incorrect,” he’s not a pussy, he may lie, as do we all, but always in the name of a higher Truth.

Let’s take a quick look at a few facts and counter-facts.

Fact: the president’s weeks-long delay in declaring a national emergency when Covid-19 hit, and his failure to use his powers to produce and distribute desperately needed protective gear, cost thousands of American lives.

Counter-fact, this is part of a lying hoax, fake news, a false narrative spread by traitors wildly determined to hurt Trump (and who also, by the way, did nothing to stop the spread of the virus). The US did a great job fighting the pandemic, better than almost any other country in the world. They have statistics to back this up, too, you can ask the Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, he went to Yale and Harvard and has all the granular numbers for you science worshipping pinheads.

If you’re following the president’s current story, we can all relax about this pandemic, because we’ll have a patented American Covid-19 vaccine in record time, an amazing achievement only possible because the president is the greatest man in history. Problem solved, by Election Day, even though it’s already not a problem, since the administration took such strong, decisive early action to defeat the China Virus — the same China which is illegally helping Joe Biden, by the way, along with Iran.

Or, as government epidemiologists repeatedly tell us, as well as several of our largest drug companies, in an unusual show of noncompetitive unity, it’s almost impossible that sufficient tests will be done to ensure the safety of any effective vaccine to have it ready for use before Election Day, as the president keeps promising. Also, Russian electoral interference on behalf of Trump in 2016 and 2020 is well documented by numerous investigations, including a Republican-chaired Senate investigation; China’s and Iran’s efforts to hurt Trump in 2020 are not nearly as well-established.

Counterfact: the president’s first national security advisor, Mike Flynn, fired by the president for lying to the Vice President, and then lying repeatedly to the FBI, who pleaded guilty for telling these lies, was actually innocent. Yes, he was framed by vicious partisan members of the Deep State who set him up, lured the innocent patriot into a “perjury trap” and then savagely “unmasked” him. Then, when the Department of Justice, under patriot Bill Barr, finally sought, in the interest of justice, to belatedly make the unfair case disappear, a judge, also from the Deep State, refused to follow the law. A coup d’etat by an overreaching judge who illegally insisted on usurping the power of the Executive Branch. The appellate judge who ordered the usurping judge to obey the law and immediately dismiss the case ruled that there was no reason for a hearing, since this is not the unusual case that merits special scrutiny before dismissing it.

Or, it is actually a highly unusual case, a defendant, fired by his boss for lying, who twice pleaded guilty to a felony count of “willfully and knowingly” making false statements to the FBI, having his case suddenly dismissed by the DOJ without reason or a hearing — (and yes, Barr made a call on the “materiality” of Flynn’s lies, so there is a rationale, if not a nonpolitical reason.) The appellate judge who ordered the trial judge to immediately dismiss the case without a hearing was rebuked by the full panel of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, who vacated her order and found her ruling legally incorrect by a vote of 8-2.

Similarly, when the president calls a woman who accused him of rape in a Bergdorf-Goodman changing room a liar and claims he never even met her (in spite of at least one photo showing them together), and she in turn brings a defamation suit against the president, the Department of Justice steps in ten months later to make that case go away.

If Barr hadn’t stepped up to take the case the other day, under a fanciful interpretation of a Federal Tort law (that will be litigated and appealed for months, if not years, like Barr’s novel, flimsy but effective ‘blanket protective immunity’ claim for everyone who ever worked for President Trump), the president was in danger, weeks before a hotly contested election, of having to submit DNA to prove it wasn’t traces of him on the woman’s clothes — along with possibly being deposed in that case in a certain “perjury trap”.

You remember Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress? That was case closed for Lyin’ Bill Clinton. Even Slick Willie couldn’t lie after his DNA matched dried spunk on that blue dress, yo. This would be worse, because the woman (like all the others who accuse the president of similar things) is a liar and, besides that, a dog someone of Mr. Trump’s famously good taste in the ladies wouldn’t molest with Mike Pence’s dick.

Fact: more than twenty women accused then-presidential candidate Trump, who bragged about being able to “grab women by the pussy” because he was a star, of various sexual trespasses. Trump threatened to sue all of them, dogs and skanks one and all — and attention seeking liars — he promised he’d drag them all into court right after the 2016 election (along with providing a great, much more affordable and comprehensive health plan once he abolished Obamacare). None of these gold-digging partisan liars were sued (and no health plan was ever offered).

Counterfact: this lying, homely woman is just looking for a big pay day, and is probably already on the payroll of George Soros and the rest of the cannibal pedophiles Q has been warning us all about.

But here’s the thing that bugs me in this perilous moment, the consolidated media, run by advertising dollars and owned by very wealthy, connected corporate men, continues to pretend that cutting the baby in half is the way King Solomon would do it– if he was beholden to advertisers and wanted to maintain his access to the president’s administration. They have absolutely no sense of irony about this baby cutting they reflexively do, or any recognition that Solomon did not actually cut the baby, he only used the threat to be fair and chop the baby in half to learn who was the real mother. Or, more to the point, they don’t care about cutting your baby in half if there’s profit in it.

Here’s the Grey Lady on Barr’s sudden decision to intervene to make sure Trump doesn’t have to give DNA or be deposed in a defamation suit he brought on himself by publicly insulting a private citizen and calling her a liar from the bully pulpit. The headline repeats Barr’s claim that this is it unprecedented for the DOJ to step in and defend an American president in a civil suit — anything whatsoever that the president says in the course of his presidency is protected absolutely by this doctrine — ask Alan Dershowitz, nothing the president honestly thinks is right can be wrong:

Sure, perfectly normal. Presidents are regularly defended by the Department of Justice in defamation suits. It happens all the time. It could have been phrased “Barr defends unprecedented DOJ intervention as Normal” but that would only piss the administration off– and for what? What reminded Barr to take the case after so many months had passed?

Normal, you know. Not the sort of unusual, never seen before kind of case that merits any kind of close scrutiny. Happens virtually every day. Obama, yeah, he used it, sure he did, why wouldn’t he?

Perfectly normal, in Trump’s America. And you chumps can take that to the ballot box. Right after you get your vaccine, which will be safe, effective and free to everyone the day it is released.