Conservative publication fact checks election fraud stories
“All of these claims, with the exception of the absentee Georgia ballots (which seemed like honest confusion and could actually have hurt Joe Biden if true, given his general advantage in mailed-in ballots), were shared to bolster the claim that the election was stolen from Donald Trump. And all of them, with the exception of the claim that Pennsylvania reported a batch of ballots all for Biden, were false. (Even that one was missing some context.)” - The Dispatch
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[G. N. Barkman]You’ve gotta be kidding! Have you been to San Marino? (I have.) It’s a little city-state landlocked by Italy. It makes my city of Burlington, NC (population around 40,000) seem huge. I’m glad they’ve had only 100 cases of COVID, but talking about cases per 1M in San Marino is way too funny.
I agree that President Trump has not exercised great leadership in regard to COVID. It’s also evident that most European countries, whose leadership is generally praised by the Left, have not done well either, and are now experiencing a new wave. Truth is, nobody has been able to control COVID. Biden won’t either, but you can count on the media to laud his performance, even if it turns out to have no better results than Trump’s.
Yep, I know San Marino. I wanted to show how ridiculous it was to say that the US is pretty much where many other countries are at. There are only two ways to measure the spread of COVID. An absolute number (i.e. 10M cases and 250K dead), or in relation to population size to normalize the data. The problem with absolute numbers is that the larger the country the higher the potential cases. We have more cases than some countries entire population. So the # of cases in relation to population size is a more accurate way to look at it. And when you do that, yes you have places like San Marino and Vatican city being higher than the US. Practically all countries in the world have lower cases and deaths as a percentage of their population and as an absolute (as we are the only ones).
Don, said that I was drinking the Koolaid. My wife is an infectious disease biologist and I was a pharmaceutical chemist, so we are not way outside of our comfort zone in this space. With that said, I do agree with Trump pushing back against all of the infectious disease experts. A right plan, needs to be a balanced plan. The infectious disease experts, rightly so, would argue for complete lockdown. From a disease perspective that makes sense. But a plan isn’t just lopsided as the consequences could be worse. What Trump lacked, was some sort of cohesive plan that balanced protecting the vulnerable and the spread of the disease with an opening of business safely plan. Many leaders of other countries took varying degrees of approach to this. The federal government should have laid out the plan, tried to drive support (maybe legally) and help coordinate efforts. There were wisps of this from Trump, but unfortunately much was overshadowing with his consipratorial ideas, ignorance of the disease, wrong leadership on his teams and just a general abandonment of any assemblence of response by June. Trump could have easily led through this, in my opinion, and if he would have, the presidency would have been given to him. Instead his utter lack of leadership and increasing paranoia let the entire deck of cards fall. If you watched his press conferences, it became clear he was in way over his head, his ability to communicate was hampered by his poor and in some cases infantile vocabulary, and he hung to things just to hang on and push back. I had always viewed Trump as someone who probably had some level of diminished intelligence, but I always balanced that out with some of the actions he was taking that was pointed in the right direction. What finally sealed the deal for me was when he was standing up in a press conference and suggested that the medical teams should look at putting UV lights into people’s lungs. That was the turning point for me. No clue whey anyone that was 10 years or older would say something like this, especially in a press conference in front of the entire world. He wasn’t acting as the President of the entire United States, he was acting out for his own interests first and his rabid base second.
BTW, some countries did control it well. New Zealand and South Korea are two quick examples, as are a whole slew of others. I am not naive to think that we can just eliminate it, but I am 100% confident we could have done better and we could have saved some lives. Why conservatives were flippant about people lives in comparison to their freedom, but are adamant about anything that looks like an abortion, leaves me scratching my head. I know young children who no longer have their dad because of COVID. It is really, really sad. We didn’t need to be crazy and lock down everything, but we could have definitely been smarter.
[Bert Perry]Here you go. Contrary to David’s claims—this is getting to be a pattern here, ahem—the United States is actually #13 in the death rate per 100k, not fifth.
The data set that you used is not very accurate outside of the US and is slightly delayed. You can see when looking at even yours there is a tightness of data right after #5, right after Spain. John Hopkins is fairly accurate for US, delayed about a day, but is worse for outside of the US. I know the guy who created the John Hopkins data site (which is what wikipedia is using), but that is fine, we can argue all we want about differences in data as there are various challenges, regardless of who you use. I use worldometers.info. I have used them on a number of projects before. It is slightly better and more accurate in some regards.
And no the blame isn’t solely Trumps. But the buck does stop with him. And the fact is, that he had no plan of any sort. We can blame a whole slew of things, but the discussion was around Trump and whether a more cohesive tight plan that was lead by the federal government would result in less deaths and more control over the spread. I think you would be hard pressed to say that Trump led a great effort. Here we are today in a mess in terms of exploding cases and hospitalizations, and have we heard anything from Trump? Nope. He is focused on the news outlets, his twitter feed proclaiming that he won, and sitting in the WH or playing golf. Like I said in my previous response there was some glimmer of a few things he did, including helping to speed up the vaccine. But I would say most of that is overshadowed with his focus on other things. If we want to pass blame around for the other elements of COVID we can, but I didn’t want to go off topic.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/11/the_real_story_behind_ag_b…
If what is talked about in this article about why AG Barr recently did what he did is so (I do not know of any reason to think that it is not), it seems that there must be something of importance that is being investigated. Only time will tell.
[RajeshG]https://www.newsweek.com/rnc-chair-says-11000-people-have-come-forward-v…
The keyword here is claims. This is not a surprising number in a year when an incumbent President began spreading a voter fraud narrative even before the election occurred… and a President with a large number of followers who are personally loyal to him, not to mention a President whose entire political life has been defined by fighting. So he is going to go down fighting.
But the justice system is, so far, focused on evidence, as it should be. So, fighting or not, the probability that he is going down is near 100%.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/donald-trump-is-acting-like-…
To win, Trump would have to overcome Biden’s leads in at least three of the five states mentioned below. I have listed them with the electoral votes in parentheses, followed Trump’s current deficit.
Wisconsin (10) Trump down by around 20,000 votes.
Arizona (11) Trump down by about 13,000 votes.
Georgia (16) Trump down about 14,000 votes.
Michigan (16) Trump down about 146,000 votes.
Pennsylvania (20) Trump down about 48,000 votes.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
[Aaron Blumer]The keyword here is claims. This is not a surprising number in a year when an incumbent President began spreading a voter fraud narrative even before the election occurred… and a President with a large number of followers who are personally loyal to him, not to mention a President whose entire political life has been defined by fighting. So he is going to go down fighting.
But the justice system is, so far, focused on evidence, as it should be. So, fighting or not, the probability that he is going down is near 100%.
Claims is key. A number of suits have been thrown out that hard large number of affidavit’s as evidence of voter fraud. Each time they came down to 1) hearsay, 2) lack of knowledge of the poll counting process, 3)identified an error that other checks and balances caught. I haven’t seen any get through the initial hearing so far. Mistakes were made, 100% agree with that. But if you understand the poll counting process there are typical 3 or more layers of checks. Yes someone can write a number down wrong, but those numbers are then checked and reverified multiple times. You are taking a sprawled out process taking place across thousands of counties with 10’s of thousands of workers, doing much of the activities by hand, and people are looking for mistakes. What I have been impressed with, just at least talking with my local precincts, is the importance that the people put on their job and the structure, checks and processes that they have to ensure counts are accurate.
Recounts will often swing no more than a few hundred counts one way or the other. Trump would have to show extensive voter fraud, and not just throw out 10’s of thousands of votes, but throw out 10’s of thousands of Biden votes only while maintaining all of his votes. And he would have to prove that across multiple states. I think when all is said and done, very few legitimate errors will be found. Trump is good at sowing discord. It is his MO all the way back to his younger days. His object is to throw a ton of confusion at something, throw a bunch of lawsuits at it, bully people…. No doubt when this is all said and done, he will have created enough doubt in his core supporter’s minds that it will carry on for decades. It is always about how unfair he has been treated.
I am all for them checking and doing reverifications. That is their right. What I don’t like is all of the conspiracy and fraud language thrown out, when there is no proof.
[RajeshG]https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/11/the_real_story_behind_ag_ba…
If what is talked about in this article about why AG Barr recently did what he did is so (I do not know of any reason to think that it is not), it seems that there must be something of importance that is being investigated. Only time will tell.
Everyone is scratching there head at what Barr did. What he essentially did was send a note to tell people to do their job. Which for the most part everyone was already doing. I like this quote in this article, “odds look pretty good for President Trump” Pretty much everyone, including conservative legal scholars don’t agree that the election will be overturned and there is significant doubt if anything at any level will change, as at this point there is a lot of antecdotal evidence, but not much proof.
[dgszweda] What finally sealed the deal for me was when he was standing up in a press conference and suggested that the medical teams should look at putting UV lights into people’s lungs. That was the turning point for me. No clue whey anyone that was 10 years or older would say something like this, especially in a press conference in front of the entire world. He wasn’t acting as the President of the entire United States, he was acting out for his own interests first and his rabid base second.
I’ve mentioned this to you before, but I think you overreacted to this event. It may not have been one of his finer moments, but to say he was just looking out for his own interests is off base. It seems to me he worked very hard on the coronavirus, setting up a task force, briefing the public daily, doing his best to ramp up testing, getting PPE and ventilators to cities and states that needed them, leveraging private industry, fast tracking production capabilities of potential remedies and vaccines, blocking air travel from China and Europe, setting up lock downs to slow the spread, but then opening back up so the economy would not completely tank. I can’t fault him for being an optimist or trying to weight both health and economic needs of the nation. He was in a tough spot, as any president would be, and it’s hard to say that any change in policy would have made things turn out better. Some of the ancillary effects of the lockdowns are true. A man in our church had a son who committed suicide because his business was failing due to Covid restrictions. The reality is that this was an extremely complex issue that we were all learning about as we went along. I cannot imagine Biden doing any better. He has already added a man to his task force that questions the usefulness of living past 75, and another who wants us to send the vaccine overseas before we make it available to all Americans.
[AndyE]I’ve mentioned this to you before, but I think you overreacted to this event. It may not have been one of his finer moments, but to say he was just looking out for his own interests is off base. It seems to me he worked very hard on the coronavirus, setting up a task force, briefing the public daily, doing his best to ramp up testing, getting PPE and ventilators to cities and states that needed them, leveraging private industry, fast tracking production capabilities of potential remedies and vaccines, blocking air travel from China and Europe, setting up lock downs to slow the spread, but then opening back up so the economy would not completely tank. I can’t fault him for being an optimist or trying to weight both health and economic needs of the nation. He was in a tough spot, as any president would be, and it’s hard to say that any change in policy would have made things turn out better. Some of the ancillary effects of the lockdowns are true. A man in our church had a son who committed suicide because his business was failing due to Covid restrictions. The reality is that this was an extremely complex issue that we were all learning about as we went along. I cannot imagine Biden doing any better. He has already added a man to his task force that questions the usefulness of living past 75, and another who wants us to send the vaccine overseas before we make it available to all Americans.
First, I am not defending Biden. Time will tell. I have also mentioned on this thread that some of the things he did were good. But at the end of the day, while he did certain things, in general it was disjointed and it lacked any cohesive plan. I have a good friend who works on Capital Hill as a policy advisor to both Senators as well as the White House on health initiatives. Not only did he give me feedback, but it was well reported in the media based on interviews with aides that his primary concern was how it was going to make him look. You can brush it over as not his finest moment, but he is the leader of the free world, trying to lead through a once in a century crisis, he flubbed up a lot. He spent more time criticizing people and peddling things like hydroxychloroquine, UV light, and many other things that were not tested. That is not what a leader does. I applaud him for trying to reopen, but he took it as an all or nothing proposition. Instead of looking for the right balance, he just wanted to open and brush everything else under the rug that might make it look like a bad idea
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-tells-allies-his-we…
And if you still think he did a great job, we are now more than a week past the election and he hasn’t said anything to anyone about anything. In the last two weeks we have doubled the cases and more hospitalizations than ever. He is spending a tremendous amount of time tweeting and focused on how he was cheated out of the election, but hasn’t put forward any kind of leadership around this escalating problem. We are projected to hit over 350,000 deaths by Christmas at this rate. I would expect some type of updatd plan, reaction or discussion to help lead through the increasing problem, but all you get is crickets.
I know that some people want to defend Trump. Conservatives are more concerned about being critical to someone who wants to ship vaccines worldwide, but praise Trump for leading during COVID. Besides Biden’s advisor against absolute priority of vaccines. Manufacture and hold onto vaccines to get to a level of herd immunity, once that is reached help developing nations. This is exactly what Alex Azar said, the current HHS head. Not sure why conservatives are bouncing on this. Biden’s advisor was against the proposal from the WHO that said that vaccines should be distributed in propotion to population, which would have really been bad for the US.
https://www.jpost.com/american-politics/biden-taps-ezekiel-emanuel-to-c…
He was talking about himself. I’ve heard many a Baptist say the same thing! (Though 75 now seems awfully young to me. Probably does to Emanuel now, too since he’s six years closer to it.)
Gnats and camels.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
David, it’s worth noting that government works best when it does NOT produce comprehensive plans, per Hayek and the trouble of economic calculation. From the infamous five year plans of the Soviet bloc and China to AFDC (Moynihan critique of Great Society) and Obamacare, those who do economic calculations for all of us in government have a well earned bad reputation for the poor side effects of their decisions. So in my view, not having a “comprehensive” plan is actually a feature, not a bug. In terms of project management, the COVID crisis is one that is “agile” with many things not known. If you shoehorn it with a classical project management model, you’re going to cause far more problems than you solve.
Case in point; the results of the actions of Governors Cuomo, Whitmer, and Walz. On the flip side, a more agile process (yes, with a fair number of errors) generated the first human vaccine for a coronavirus, a number of new entries into the ventilator market, and a huge increase in the number of available rooms set up for corona-capable ICU.
Regarding the critique of the President I have little doubt that you heard, well, yes, I’ve read that about weekly from various sources. You know what? If your source wants to be taken seriously, he can go public under the name his mama and daddy gave him.
Let’s be frank about this; some may see Trump’s braggodocio as narcissism. I personally see the same thing in Swamp gossips backstabbing each other anonymously. In fact, I think that’s central to how poisonous the whole scene is.
Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.
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