Random Thoughts (Political Edition)

Is anyone following project Veritas here? Looks like ABC got caught with their pants down... This type of thing just reinforces the argument that media is highly partisan and cannot be trusted to do proper reporting.


https://www.npr.org/2019/11/05/7764...epstein-coverage-after-leaked-video-of-anchor

For what it is worth, I did read this and it does raise more than a few questions. I can see waiting for a few weeks, or even months to get the information nailed down, but not years.

This is why there is more than one source of news and why the dilution of the media into such a few large groups is so bad.
 
I remain unsurprised gestures at the Panama Papers
 
Today is the 81st anniversary of the "Reichspogromnacht" where many synagogues and jewish owned houses and businesses were destroyed. A german artist initiated the so-called "Stolpersteine" (stumbling stones) 25 years ago to remember people who were killed by the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945.

Today many people cleaned and polished Stolpersteine to set an example to never forget those times and to prevent something like that happening again. I participated by cleaning and polishing six of those in my vicinity.









But this date isn't all negative: today 30 years ago the Berlin wall was opened, afterwards it didn't even take one year to re-unite Germany and in turn end the cold war. :)
 
https://www.npr.org/2019/11/10/7773...-of-fraud-claims-warning-of-corrosive-effects

Skeptics Urge Bevin To Show Proof Of Fraud Claims, Warning Of Corrosive Effects
Trailing in the vote tally for Kentucky's governorship by about 5,000 votes, incumbent Gov. Matt Bevin decided last week to play what's becoming a familiar card: He questioned the election's legitimacy.


"What we know is that there really are a number of significant irregularities," Bevin said Wednesday in front of the governor's mansion, "the specifics of which we're in the process of getting affidavits [about] — and other information that will help us to get a better understanding of what did or did not happen."


Bevin declined to take questions from reporters or give more specifics, other than saying that "we know there have been thousands of absentee ballots that were illegally counted."

No Kentucky election official, including Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, has corroborated that claim in the days since Bevin made it.


Critics and elections specialists are calling for Bevin to provide evidence of the dramatic claim or retract it.


"Gov. Bevin really needs to put up or shut up. Give us the evidence, or stop making these claims of voter fraud that have no evidence behind them," said Josh Douglas, an election law professor at the University of Kentucky.


"I think it's a danger to the legitimacy of a democratic institution."


Next steps in Kentucky


Kentucky is set to recanvass the votes in the election, at Bevin's request, on Nov. 14.


That process is different from a recount; rather than recounting each of the ballots again, officials will reprint receipts from voting machines and check them over. It's more of a clerical process, and not an uncommon one. Douglas says it would be "extremely shocking" if it were to change the underlying result.

Unless the recanvass yields major evidence that Democratic state Attorney General Andy Beshear didn't win, Bevin's options are slim.


Under state law, Bevin has the option to contest the election, which would put the ball in the legislature's court. The Republican supermajority in the legislature could then set up a committee to look at evidence and decide an outcome.


Outside specialists say they hope that doesn't happen.


"That's a horrible idea," says Lonna Atkeson, the director of the University of New Mexico's Center for the Study of Voting, Elections, and Democracy.


"And I can't imagine that the legislature would actually move forward with such an enterprise without some sort of serious information that indicated there was fraud or some other kind of abuse or very serious election irregularities."


The window may be closing; Republican Senate President Robert Stivers said in an interview Friday that Bevin should concede if next week's recanvass doesn't radically change the election results.


"It's time to call it quits and go home, say he had a good four years and congratulate Gov.-elect Beshear," said Stivers, in an interview with Louisville's Courier-Journal.


Losers have doubts


Bevin isn't the first politician to question the results of a race after the fact, and occasionally, if infrequently, those concerns have been founded in reality.


After the 2018 midterms, then-Florida Gov. Rick Scott alluded to "rampant voter fraud" that was never borne out in his Senate race.


Democrats also have continued to blame the results of the Georgia gubernatorial election on election administration issues that they say suppressed turnout.


And in North Carolina, an election for a House seat did end up being nullified because of an absentee ballot scheme.


Even after winning the 2016 election, President Trump alleged that "millions and millions of people" voted illegally in the 2016 election, which he said was why he lost the national popular vote to Hillary Clinton.

Trump has never presented any evidence for that claim, and a group his administration assembled to investigate voter fraud disbanded less than a year after it was formed, with no major result.


Overall, there has seldom been any evidence of widespread fraud in elections.


All the same, Americans' confidence in elections has been slowly eroding over the past 20 years — and democracy-watchers put some of the blame on political rhetoric.


Douglas, from the University of Kentucky, says the state's response to Bevin's claims will say a lot about how the country may react to similar claims in the next election cycle.


"Say that Donald Trump is shown to have lost the 2020 election. Will he accept defeat, or is he going to also make claims of massive voter fraud?" Douglas asked. "And how are our democratic institutions going to respond to that? I think that the situation in Kentucky this year could tell us a lot about whether our institutions are able to beat back these kinds of claims."
 
Pretty much.

It is unfortunate that whenever the US intervenes in these situations all they get are pineboxes, people in the US complaining about intervening, and about 20 years of collaboration before the other country's opposition goes "The Imperialist US idiots interfere with our glorious political system" and then the people elect the next populist schmuck on the line.

Though it does make the present policy of "We're happy to help...as long as you sort things out yourselves before we go in" make sense. At the vast human cost within the country. :(
 
Apparently in the austrian town of Braunau the house where Adolf Hitler was born will be remodeled to accomodate a police station to deter neo-nazis from pilgering there... :)
 
A Former Fox News Executive Divides Americans Using Russian Tactics

Conservative Edition News is a repository of stories guaranteed to infuriate the American right. Its recent headlines include “Austin sex-ed curriculum teaches kids how to obtain an abortion” and “HuffPost writer considers Christianity ‘dangerous.’”

On Liberal Edition News, readers are fed a steady diet of content guaranteed to drive liberal voters further left or to wring a visceral response from moderates. One recent story singled out an Italian youth soccer coach who called Greta Thunberg, the teenage climate activist, a “whore.”
The sites are the work of Ken LaCorte, the former Fox News executive who was accused of killing a story about President Trump’s affair with Stormy Daniels,
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/21/technology/LaCorte-edition-news.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
 
Today many people cleaned and polished Stolpersteine to set an example to never forget those times and to prevent something like that happening again. I participated by cleaning and polishing six of those in my vicinity.
Can I ask what you used? I’ve just come across two somewhat dirty ones and the paper tissue I had on me didn’t help at all.
 
 
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