"The Trump administration’s $1.776 billion 'anti-weaponization' fund could be a boon for GOP senators targeted by a Biden-era investigation..."

"... but some say they still do not want the taxpayer payout. Settlements for those the Justice Department deems were victims of 'lawfare and weaponization' under past administrations is the latest attempt to provide financial compensation to Republican senators whose phone records were tapped in the 'Arctic Frost' investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election...."

The Washington Examiner reports.

Were dull sheep cowed?

I'm reading  in "A Federalist Society co-chair promotes a stolen-election theory/Cherry-picking vote numbers and ignoring history make it easier to elevate baseless claims of election theft" by Philip Bump (in WaPo).

He's talking about "The Left's Attack on the Secret Ballot and on Same Day Voting/Mail in voting over a period of weeks with drop boxes eliminates the secret ballot, and the need for everyone to vote on the same day, with the same headlines in mind, and not over the period of a month" by Steven Calabresi (at Reason).

Bump carps:

"How much is abortion still motivating votes?/How much of a drag is President JOE BIDEN?/Do Democrats have a Black and suburban turnout problem?/Does any of it matter for 2024?"

It's Election Day, and those are — according to Politico — "Four big Election Day questions."

"Former president Donald Trump and some of his legal advisers see an upside to the latest criminal case against him: He can use his upcoming trial to further argue his false claims of a stolen 2020 election...."

I'm reading "Trump plans to use charges to revisit 2020 election, a fraught topic for GOP/Strategists in both parties agree that having Trump talking about election fraud and Jan. 6 hurts Republicans" (WaPo).

Isn't it a "fraught topic" for Democrats too?! This is the sharpest example of concern trolling I've ever seen. It's going to "hurt Republicans" if Trump uses the opportunity of the criminal trial to break open the question of the legitimacy of the 2020 election?

Let's keep reading:

"What the Trump Documents Might Tell the Jan. 6 Committee/Following last week’s Supreme Court ruling, the House panel has received material that it hopes could flesh out how the attack on the Capitol came about."

This is an article in the NYT, which I'm reading because what I hope is that the material will show that Trump wasn't involved in planning or promoting breaking into the Capitol or committing any illegal acts. And isn't that what everyone should hope? 

So I'm reading this article and setting to the side everything that is about Trump's belief that he really did win the election, his search for a legal path to victory, and his desire for a big, exciting rally showing strong support for this cause. 

So, what does the NYT list? I've copied and pasted the whole text into my compose window, and I will now cut out everything I just said I was setting to the side:

 

 

 

Okay. Now that I've done that... feel free to check my work. Maybe you'll say that the talk of seizing voting machines indicated a willingness to pursue a path that wasn't clearly legal, but it was only considered and then not done. Wasn't it part of brainstorming about what could be done if an election actually were being stolen? 

Let's consider the question hypothetically: What if an American presidential election were stolen? What could be done? What if it looked about like the 2020 election, but it really was a fraud? 

One answer might be: In the event of such a calamity, it would be best to go forward and treat the ostensible winner as the winner in order to maintain confidence in the system and to avoid the trauma of revealing and delving into the chaos beneath the surface. The true winner of the election should see the profound national interest in moving forward with a new President in office and fully in power — free of any cloud of uncertainty. The true winner should do nothing more than to offer strong support to his erstwhile opponent and to celebrate the beauty of democracy.

"No, this was not a conspiracy in the strictest, most intentional sense (it didn’t need to be!), but it did kill thousands of people and manipulate our politics. . . . C’mon, people, let’s not be afraid to admit this one."

Said Tyler Cowen, quoted at Instapundit.

"Bring on the audits. Really. As a Republican election lawyer who has participated in more than 30 post-election recounts, contests and audits..."

"... I am extremely confident: They won’t find anything. The massive fraud that former president Donald Trump claims tarnished the 2020 election has been and will remain illusory — because it didn’t exist. But audits, I believe, can be the friend of sanity, helping everyone in the political process, especially the Republicans who understand that convincing their voters that elections are hopelessly rigged is no way to win elections.... If the audits that Trump himself has demanded keep coming up empty, maybe, just maybe, some true believers in Trump’s falsehood will recognize he’s been feeding them snake oil.... Something has to change, and the key to that change is to convince some portion of the 30 percent that Trump has failed to deliver on his bombast. Trump is hoisting himself on his petard. Let him."

"Don’t be afraid of the election audits — they may be our only ticket out of this mess" by Benjamin L. Ginsberg (WaPo).

I've read some of the comments over there, and the most common notion seems to be that it's no use producing evidence because Republicans won't believe it or will just interpret it to mean what they want it to mean.

"Public opinion polls in the 2020 presidential election suffered from errors of 'unusual magnitude,' the highest in 40 years for surveys estimating the national popular vote..."

"... and in at least 20 years for state-level polls, according to a study conducted by the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). The AAPOR task force examined 2,858 polls, including 529 national presidential race polls and 1,572 state-level presidential polls. They found that the surveys overstated the margin between President Biden and former president Donald Trump by 3.9 points in the national popular vote and 4.3 percentage points in state polls. Polls understated the support for Trump in nearly every state and by an average of 3.3 percentage points overall. Polls in Senate and gubernatorial races suffered from the same problem.... 'Identifying conclusively why polls overstated the Democratic-Republican margin relative to the certified vote appears to be impossible with the available data,' the report states."

From "2020 presidential polls suffered worst performance in decades, report says" by Dan Balz at WaPo.

I didn't watch Biden's speech last night.

I see — reading the NYT this morning — that he made "costly proposals" that "amount to a risky gamble that a country polarized along ideological and cultural lines is ready for a more activist government." Was that something America voted for last autumn? Obviously, not. It doesn't seem fair to spring this on us now.

Invoking the legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mr. Biden unveiled a $1.8 trillion social spending plan to accompany previous proposals to build roads and bridges, expand other social programs and combat climate change, representing a fundamental reorientation of the role of government not seen since the days of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and Roosevelt’s New Deal.

He should have had to run on that plan. Why did he beat Bernie? If this was to be the plan, we deserved a chance to vote for Bernie — or not. But the moderate, Biden, was pushed to the fore, pushed out in front of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who forthrightly represented this kind of government. Maybe one of them would have beaten Trump, but the Democratic Party edged them aside and gave us the seemingly innocuous Biden. It was an offer to get us back into balance, back to normal. It was a con. 

Oh, but perhaps, everyone knew it was a con, so America really did vote for this.

“We have to prove democracy still works, that our government still works and we can deliver for our people,” Mr. Biden said in his first nationally televised address to a joint session of Congress.

Prove democracy still works by only doing what you told us you'd do, back when we voted.  

Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, one of the more moderate Republicans that Mr. Biden needs if he has any hope of forging bipartisan support, used another metaphor. “Maybe if he were younger, I’d say his dad needs to take away the credit card,” Mr. Romney told reporters.

(To comment, you can email me here.)

"A group of top Democratic Party pollsters are set to release a public statement Tuesday acknowledging 'major errors' in their 2020 polling — errors that left party officials stunned..."

"... by election results that failed to come close to expectations in November.... 'Twenty-twenty was an "Oh, s---" moment for all of us,' said one pollster involved in the effort, who was granted anonymity to discuss the process candidly. 'And I think that we all kinda quickly came to the point that we need to set our egos aside. We need to get this right.'...  [S]ky-high turnout for Trump among irregular voters only explains a small slice of the problem, the pollsters concluded. Even if the polls conducted last year were properly adjusted for future turnout, they still would have been biased toward Democrats. The memo floats at least three possible causes: late movement toward Trump and Republican candidates... the Covid pandemic causing people who stayed home to answer the phone at a greater rate... and the decline of social trust and faith in institutions."

Politico reports. 

FROM THE EMAIL: lawlizard writes:

They nailed it when they noted “decline of social trust and faith in institutions.” I took a phone poll in 2002. I was a conservative living in a liberal city. The pollster actively tried to get me to say what he wanted to hear. I assume pollsters continue to do the same. My husband told a pollster in 2020 he was going to vote for Joe Biden, and then laughed about it for 3 days. The purpose of a poll should be to find out what I do think, and inform the politician what he should do based on its popularity, not to tell me what I ought to think. Polling instead says we want to spend a lot of money on social programs, you are telling us you do not want to pay more in taxes for these programs, but you do like spending on “infrastructure.” If we call social programs “infrastructure,” can we spend the money the way we want? You want voter id and secure elections, if we tell you that this is “racist,” does it change your mind. Polling like many other institutions has been corrupted. It’s not about listening, it’s about manipulating. They have lost sight of their institutional role and so it can no longer be effective. If you are going to manipulate me, then I’m going to manipulate you first.

Me, I just don't answer the phone if Siri doesn't announce who's calling. You'll have to leave voice mail to get through by phone, and I don't think pollsters ever do that. So I am never polled. I didn't vote, but I stood in waiting, prepared to vote, if motivated — a raging "undecided" in a swing state.

AND: Ray So CA emails:

"Across the United States, many areas with large populations of Latinos and residents of Asian descent, including ones with the highest numbers of immigrants, had... a surge in turnout and a shift to the right, often a sizable one."

"The pattern was evident in big cities like Chicago and New York, in California and Florida, and along the Texas border with Mexico, according to a New York Times analysis of voting in 28,000 precincts in more than 20 cities..... [T]he red shifts, along with a wave of blue shifts in Republican and white areas, have scrambled the conventional wisdom of American politics and could presage a new electoral calculus for the parties.... And over all, Mr. Trump, whose policies and remarks were widely expected to alienate immigrants and voters of color, won the lion’s share of the additional turnout....  ... Mr. Trump lost ground in white and Republican areas in and around cities — ultimately leading to his election loss — he gained new votes in immigrant neighborhoods.... 'The Latino conservatives feel a lot of momentum,' said Geraldo L. Cadava, a professor at Northwestern University and author of a book on Latino Republicans. They had argued that Mr. Trump could win Latino voters, not with the Bushesque strategy of moderation on immigration, but with a Reaganesque message of personal responsibility and hard work, he said.... Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, said he worried before the election that Democrats’ focus on racial justice issues came at the expense of outreach about easing the lives of hard-pressed workers. 'In general, it suggests that Democrats’ theory of the case — that their electoral problems were all about race rather than class — was incorrect.'"

From "Immigrant Neighborhoods Shifted Red as the Country Chose Blue" (NYT).

"'Defund the police' is the second stupidest campaign slogan any Democrat has uttered in the twenty first century."

"It is second in stupidity only to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 comment that half of Trump’s supporters belong in a 'basket of deplorables.'" 

Said University of California-Irvine polysci prof Bernard Grofman, quoted in "'The Far Left Is the Republicans’ Finest Asset’/An intense battle between moderates and progressives has already spilled into public view" by Thomas Edsall (NYT). 

Edsall also quotes from a report by 4 progressive groups — New Deal Strategies, Justice Democrats, Sunrise Movement and Data for Progress — "What went wrong for Congressional Democrats in 2020":

The latest choice for Democrats to locate our fear and blame is the slogan from many Black and young activists who marched the streets this summer: “Defund The Police.” Conservative Democrats may change the terms and people we blame and fear year-by-year, but Democrats must take on the Republican Party’s divide-and-conquer racism head-on and not demobilize our own base.... This election, the Black youth leading the Black Lives Matter movement have turned their power in the streets into votes.... When Democratic leaders make unforced errors like showing off two subzero freezers full of ice cream on national television or cozy up with Wall Street executives and corporate lobbyists while Trump tells voters we are the party of the swamp, it is not surprising that we lose.

Edsall links to this especially good Trump ad, which magnificently exploited Pelosi's posing with her refrigerators: 

Anyway, which side does Edsall take? (Do you care?) I'll just quote his last line:

Liberal advocacy groups have become more in-your-face, more intense, partly in reaction to the intransigence of the Trump regime, a development that is in turn irrevocably linked to the intensity of the conflicts across the country and within the Democratic Party itself.

Trump only gets credit when it seems like blame. Oh, he's intransigent! But what Edsall is admitting is that Trump suckered the Democratic Party into fighting itself. How did he do that? It was quite a bit more sophisticated than just being "intransigent" and thus causing other people to become "more intense." 

"One more lame defense you hear from Republicans: Democrats did this to Mr. Trump. But that’s false, too."

"Democrats did indeed focus on Russia’s assistance to Mr. Trump’s election campaign. But they did not claim that he wasn’t president. Hillary Clinton immediately conceded. President Barack Obama invited Mr. Trump to the White House and attended the inauguration." 

From "One more lame defense you hear from Republicans: Democrats did this to Mr. Trump. But that’s false, too" by the Editorial Board of The Washington Post.

The "lame defense" is put into words — "Democrats did this to Mr. Trump" — that seem easy to refute. The word "this" carries a silly amount of weight. What is "this"? What are these Republicans actually saying the Democrats did to Trump and how does it compare to what Trump and his supporters are doing to Biden now? Which is worse?!

Democrats didn't just "focus on Russia’s assistance." I won't take the time to write out all that Democrats did over the entire Trump presidency. And "Hillary Clinton immediately conceded" because the outcome was obvious on the first day. How would she have behaved if it had been as close and open-ended as the 2020 election? 

"Why did the Democrats win the Presidential vote but do so poorly in everything further down on the ballot -- Senate, House, and state-level races?"

"There are a lot of theories: a) Republicans liked Republicanism, and conservatism, even Trumpism, but they didn't like Trump! b) Swing voters liked Biden but were turned off by left wing Democratic themes — "defund the police,” Medicare for All, cutting edge progressivism on gender dysphoria in 8-year olds, etc. c) Voters in general wanted Congress to be a check on a Democratic executive. All plausible. But what if the explanation is something simpler and less profound -- mechanical even? The essential idea was proposed by veteran campaign reporter Walter Shapiro. It’s based on the idea of 'roll off,' the tendency of some voters to vote for candidates at the top of the ticket while leaving the nether regions of the ballot blank.... If this is true, what more explanation do you need? Dems simply made a strategic mistake: They pushed early, mail-in and absentee voting, which may have won them the presidential election but which also brought them a bunch of voters who, in their rush to rid America of Trump, left the other parts of the ballot untouched...."

Writes Mickey Kaus.

With Veterans Day accomplished, Trump launches into a hot morning of tweeting.

From the last 14 hours (in reverse chronological order) on Trump's Twitter feed:

"OK, I’ve seen enough. What’s going to happen to these guys (McCabe, Comey & the gang of treasonous thugs)? @SenJohnKennedy @MariaBartiromo @TheJusticeDept They, and many others, got caught. DO SOMETHING!!!"

Who is he quoting?

From 200,000 votes to less than 10,000 votes. If we can audit the total votes cast, we will easily win Arizona also!

That's a comment on an azcentral politics story that says "Biden's lead in Arizona keeps shrinking, but not enough for Trump to overtake him."

Big Jim is the greatest!

That's a comment on the KDKA story, "West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice refused to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the presidential election."

It took long enough! What is taking North Carolina so long? Are they looking for more ballots to fix that one also? Now with a recount, we will win Georgia also. Pennsylvania & Michigan wouldn’t let our Poll Watchers & Observers into counting rooms. Illegal!

That's a comment on the AP story, "BREAKING: Donald Trump wins Alaska."

It attempted to alter our election and got caught?

That's a comment on a tweet that reads "What do we know about Dominion?" I don't know what that means! 

NOW 73,000,000 LEGAL VOTES!

That's a comment on his own post from the 7th: "THE OBSERVERS WERE NOT ALLOWED INTO THE COUNTING ROOMS. I WON THE ELECTION, GOT 71,000,000 LEGAL VOTES. BAD THINGS HAPPENED WHICH OUR OBSERVERS WERE NOT ALLOWED TO SEE. NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE. MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WERE SENT TO PEOPLE WHO NEVER ASKED FOR THEM!"

Nobody wants to report that Pennsylvania and Michigan didn’t allow our Poll Watchers and/or Vote Observers to Watch or Observe. This is responsible for hundreds of thousands of votes that should not be allowed to count. Therefore, I easily win both states. Report the News!

And:

I am pleased to announce that I have given my full support and endorsement to Ronna McDaniel to continue heading the Republican National Committee (RNC). With 72 MILLION votes, we received more votes than any sitting President in U.S. history - and we will win!

And:

Everyone is asking why the recent presidential polls were so inaccurate when it came to me. Because they are FAKE, just like much of the Lamestream Media!

That's not including the retweeting, of which there is much at the link. 

I looked for an answer to my question about Dominion and think it's a voting machine company. Gateway Pundit, commenting on Trump's tweet, says: "We’ve reported that there were numerous instances in this election where votes were switched from President Trump to Joe Biden in states predominantly using Dominion voting machines.... Tonight the President responded that the Dominion voting systems were involved in election fraud and they got caught." 

"As the weaknesses of President Trump's legal cases to overturn Joe Biden's win become clearer, Republicans are talking more about the Electoral College..."

"... hinting at an extreme last-chance way for Trump to cling to power.... In this long-shot scenario, Trump and his team could try to block secretaries of state in contested states from certifying results. That could allow legislatures in those states to try to appoint new electors who favor Trump over Biden.... Trump has not directly said he would pursue this strategy. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo each noted on Tuesday that the election results don't become official until electors cast their votes next month...." 

Axios reports.

It's very hard to imagine such a thing happening, but the Biden side needs to be prepared as long as Trump keeps the uncertainty alive, tormenting them. 

Axios has quotes from "one lawyer familiar with the process" — the process, not the Trump insiders who are planning to do anything like this, just the existence of this strange, mind-bending path to victory. 

This lawyer observes that Trump may be trying to "scare the living bejeezus out of everyone." Good guess. 

What is the argument that Trump ought to be doing what he can to calm us? I hear Biden and his people telling us they want to bring calm to the country, but they're declining the opportunity to just be calm themselves until the state officials certify the results of the election.

Personally, I feel calm about waiting for that. Why isn't that okay? It seems to me that as long as they choose to pressure Trump to concede before the vote certification, they're forfeiting the high ground of calmness above all, and I'm not going to worry about Trump's pot stirring. 

To say "deviation from Benford’s Law does not prove election fraud took place" is not to say that it isn't relevant evidence.

Reuters does a fact check that begins by stating the proposition in an ultra-strong way:

Social media users have been sharing posts that say a mathematical rule called Benford’s Law provides clear proof of fraud in the U.S. presidential election. 

Here's how the proposition to be fact-checked could have been stated: Benford's Law is of some use in determining whether or not there there was fraud or error in the U.S. presidential election. Lawyers will recognize the test for whether evidence is relevant. 

Reuter's is asking whether this evidence, standing alone, will meet a burden of proof, which is a tricky shortcut through factchecking. In real life, we don't depend on one piece of evidence. We look at whatever might be useful as we make decisions about how much more to investigate. Does Benford's Law raise suspicions that would make a fair-minded person want to look more closely and to gather more evidence? 

But we don't really have fair-minded people! We have highly partisan people on one side who are eager to cast doubt on the election and on the other side who want to say Stop right now! Reuter's strikes me — the closest thing you're going to get to a fair-minded person — as falling in the second group. Why? Because of the way they stated the fact to be checked! 

Now, let's look at the experts consulted (and go to the article for a statement about what Benford's Law is):

"Remember, from the Democratic primary onward, party leaders warned against running on Medicare-for-all, a Green New Deal and other progressive ideas...."

"Instead, Democrats went small, focusing on saving the Affordable Care Act and providing a check on President Trump. But after the party lost House seats and failed to retake the Senate, the knives are out for the left anyway.... It’s understandable that congressional Democratic leaders want to blame something other than their own candidate recruitment process.... [I]t is simply false to claim that standing up proudly for policies such as Medicare-for-all and a Green New Deal hasn’t worked, when the truth is it hasn’t been tried. For decades, congressional Democrats have run every cycle with a moderate message engineered by moderate, high-priced consultants. When this plan succeeds, the party establishment trumpets their wisdom. Yet when it more frequently fails, the leadership and moderates blame the progressives they rejected the entire campaign."

From "Democratic leaders play a ridiculous blame game with progressives" by James Downie (WaPo).

"The call for Joe Biden isn’t… Who was it called by? All the, Oh my goodness. All the networks. Wow. All the networks."

"We have to forget about the law. Judges don’t count. All the networks, all the networks, all the networks... thought Biden was going to win by 10%. Gee, what happened? Come on. Don’t be ridiculous. Networks don’t get to decide elections. Courts do.... Of course courts set aside elections when they’re illegal. In this particular case, I don’t know if there’s enough evidence to set aside the entire election. Certainly not around the country, maybe in Pennsylvania...."

Giuliani struggles to inspire hope in a coming barrage of litigation. (Transcript.)

"Two armed Virginia men who were arrested Thursday outside the Philadelphia Convention Center may have believed fake ballots were being counted there..."

"'According to our information at this very early stage of investigation, it appears these individuals were operating under the belief that 'fake ballots' are being counted at the Convention Center — a completely unsupported claim -- and that belief may have been what drew their attention to Philadelphia.' [Philadelphia District Attorney's Office spokeswoman Jane Roh emailed CNN]. CNN affiliate KYW had earlier reported that the men were 'coming to deliver a truck full of fake ballots' to the city, citing prosecutors....Antonio LaMotta, 61, and Joshua Macias, 42, both of Chesapeake, Virginia, were arrested Thursday night outside the center on suspicion of carrying handguns in Pennsylvania without permits, authorities said. Philadelphia police said they found the men Thursday night after receiving a tip that people with firearms were heading to the Pennsylvania Convention Center in a silver Hummer truck."

CNN reports.