Monthly Archives: January 2021

Professor Richardson provides the information that suggests, at least to me, that the GOP is in the final stages of fragmenting. This is motivated by the revelation that President Trump has attempted to interfere, quite possibly illegally, in the Georgia Presidential election, as revealed over the weekend.

Some prominent Republicans are waving flags indicating they will not cross the line. Here’s former Speaker Ryan (R-WI):

Unexpected statement from Paul Ryan: "It is difficult to conceive of a more anti-democratic and anti-conservative act than a federal intervention to overturn the results of state-certified elections and disenfranchise millions of Americans." pic.twitter.com/RRvoYiMv9n

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) January 3, 2021

High ranking member of the GOP House caucus Rep Liz Cheney (R-WY), and, yes, incidentally daughter of former VP Dick Cheney (R-WY):

Memo runs through relevant constitutional & statutory provisions & includes a summary of Team Trump's myriad failed legal challenges in (supposedly) contested states. Her conclusion: "There is no appropriate basis to object to the electors from any of the six states at issue." pic.twitter.com/8NLLWSg5df

— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) January 3, 2021

Trump ally Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), which I find surprising:

Cotton: “…I will not oppose the counting of certified electoral votes on January 6. I’m grateful for what the president accomplished … which is why I campaigned vigorously for his reelection. But objecting to certified electoral votes won’t give him a second term…” https://t.co/oqsOI35xNp pic.twitter.com/8q8cSDEwCO

— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) January 4, 2021

And then there will be the Trump supporters, who will be substantially those who’ve come to power due to Trump. Georgia GOP chair David Shafer appears to be in the President’s camp, judging from his reaction to the weekend’s revelations:

President @realDonaldTrump has filed two lawsuits – federal and state – against @GaSecofState. The telephone conference call @GaSecofState secretly recorded was a “confidential settlement discussion” of that litigation, which is still pending.

— David Shafer (@DavidShafer) January 3, 2021

Incidentally, this was rejected by a Biden lawyer.

As has long been foreseen by many pundits, the Republican Party is ripping itself into pieces. In my view, the tenet of team politics, in which Republicans are expected to vote the ticket, no matter how repugnant, has led to leaders who, so long as they are willing to swear allegiance to a collection of positions, such as absolutist positions on gun control, abortion, taxes, private sector regulations, immigration, and smaller government, are then automatically considered to be qualified for elective office.

But Republicans were at a loss as to what to do when Senator Barack Obama defeated Senator McCain in 2008. Republican Party tenets had lead the country to wrack and ruin in the form of the 9/11 attack, two wars which revealed a Republican Administration willing to indulge in torture, and the Great Recession; worse yet, the lion of the old order, McCain, had lost to a Black Democratic, who then proved to be exceptionally competent and, at the end, if not during, quite popular.

But McCain had brought into national prominence his running mate, Sarah Palin (R-AK), a religious freak who happened to have some charisma, enough that her incompetence and incoherence was not a factor for those who were naturally aligned with her.

And that was the evangelical movement. Already socially conservative, Palin spoke an apocalyptic language familiar to those who detested social change such as gay marriage, and preferred their ideal of justice to be pre-ordained, rather than reasoned.

Minnesota contributed its own Evangelical rambling incoherent political leader, Rep Michelle Bachmann (R-MN), who became the subject of much excitement on both sides of the spectrum. (A conservative relative of mine from Illinois once asked me why Bachmann was being elected, using language that was less than complimentary towards her – not profane, something along the lines of “loon”, which here in Minnesota is not a compliment.)

But the dropping of the importance of the requirement that candidates demonstrate competency, or even sanity, has led to the elevation of the ill-defined term charisma as the differentiating factor in selecting candidates.

And many folks found Trump to be charismatic, much like Palin and Bachmann.

But this characteristic’s elevation does not encourage rational approaches to politics, whether it’s selection or performance evaluation. Charisma evaluation becomes a chute down which the voter falls, and it takes courage to climb back up the hill and admit to making a mistake. Thus, so many cries of Fake election and Stop the steal. They’re not willing, because their evaluation is based on an intuition of charisma, bolstered by a lack of accurate information, to change their allegiance. After all, a chronic liar like Trump doesn’t suffer charisma changes just because everything he does is a failure; he just lies some more. In concert with frantic cries of Fake news! from allies benefiting from his pliability in office, and several decades of determined creation of “alternative” realities, Trump finds a putrid bedrock for his popularity.

Combine this with Trump’s desperation to win, whether it’s a pathological feature of his personality, or a reality-based fear of future events if he is ejected from office in seventeen days, and it’s not surprising to see the Republican Party beginning to fragment. To a certain, small extent this has been happening in the form of Biden endorsements by modern Republicans, and the formation of The Lincoln Project.

Those who’ve achieved prominence by clinging to Trump’s gonads face two hard questions: Do the actions of Trump constitute a challenge to the very bedrock of the American Experiment, and, if they agree that it does and that Trump is either a criminal, or close to one, then are they willing to imperil their own political position in order to do right?

Most won’t. They are so far gone in irrationality or their hypocritical allegiance that there’s no backing out now. I look forward to the rational and irrational sides of the party throwing charges of RINO (Republican in Name Only) at each other, desperate to retain the stained name of a formerly great party.

But the truth of the matter is that the conservatives are fragmenting, and in first past the post electoral systems, which are in general use in the United States, that’s death. Ironically, we may see the Republicans taking up the call for ranked choice voting, as a last gasp chance at grasping and holding power.

But it won’t work. The bitterness will be too strong. The Trumpists, bitter that the more moderate Republicans didn’t cheat and destroy the Constitution so that their deeply incompetent leader could remain in power, will not vote for moderate Republicans while they are in the thrall of the Trump cult. And the moderate Republicans will not trust the Trumpists for betraying the Constitution.

The next few months should be deeply entertaining.

Today a pastor in Texas died in a shooting. But it’s not so straightforward:

On Sunday morning, the pastor of [Starrville Methodist Church] discovered a man in the bathroom holding a red bank bag that belonged to the church.

The pastor drew his firearm and ordered the suspect to stop, [Starrville Methodist Church] said. The suspect moved toward the front door, then lunged, disarmed, and fatally shot the pastor. [CNN]

So the fellow didn’t bring his own firearm to the party. Never mind that the encouragement of everyone carrying a firearm by conservatives led to this tragedy – this is what really bothers me:

The case will be investigated as a capital murder and presented to the Smith County District Attorney’s Office, Smith said.

The pastor clearly menaced the man with a gun, and while it may stretch credulity to suggest the guy was clearly engaged in self-defense, it obviously was not planned in advance; indeed, in the struggle over the gun it may have been accidental, even self-inflicted.

But this isn’t just over the death of a pastor. It’s also vengeance over the revelation of the flaws in a religious tenet of the conservatives. Everyone needs a gun for self-protection! they proclaim. This was common to read back when I was still subscribing to REASON Magazine, and just six months ago, when a MAGA-friend sent me mail that sounded like a right-wing website regurgitation, the same assertion was part of that mail.

But it does little to assure self-protection to own a gun, as I noted here.

But this is not acceptable to the doctrinaire far-right conservative; this very occurrence is a kick in the teeth of said doctrinaire conservative, and therefore, rather than accept that this may be nothing more than manslaughter, they proclaim they’ll be investigating it as capital murder.

Rather than considering this may have been a foolish pastor who should never have had a gun in the first place.

Continued reading yields a useful appendix to this post from Michal Zapendowski on The Daily Kos:

U.S. Code Title 52 (Voting and Elections), Section 20511 (relevant portions in bold):

A person, including an election official, who in any election for Federal office-

(1) knowingly and willfully intimidates, threatens, or coerces, or attempts to intimidate, threaten, or coerce, any person for-

(A) registering to vote, or voting, or attempting to register or vote;

(B) urging or aiding any person to register to vote, to vote, or to attempt to register or vote; or

(C) exercising any right under this chapter; or

(2) knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds, or attempts to deprive or defraud the residents of a State of a fair and impartially conducted election process, by-

(A) the procurement or submission of voter registration applications that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held; or

(B) the procurement, casting, or tabulation of ballots that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held,

shall be fined in accordance with title 18 (which fines shall be paid into the general fund of the Treasury, miscellaneous receipts (pursuant to section 3302 of title 31), notwithstanding any other law), or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.

The Presidential Screeching may be felonious.

Picking the right title for this post is so difficult that I decided to punt to my readers.

WaPo is reporting that it has a recording of a phone conversation between President Trump, along with his chief of staff and lawyers, and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R-GA) and his office’s general counsel, in which Trump attempted to pressure Raffensperger into “finding” votes for Trump:

President Trump urged fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to “find” enough votes to overturn his defeat in an extraordinary one-hour phone call Saturday that election experts said raised legal questions.

The Washington Post obtained a recording of the conversation in which Trump alternately berated Raffensperger, tried to flatter him, begged him to act and threatened him with vague criminal consequences if the secretary of state refused to pursue his false claims, at one point warning that Raffensperger was taking “a big risk.”

Throughout the call, Raffensperger and his office’s general counsel rejected Trump’s assertions, explaining that the president is relying on debunked conspiracy theories and that President-elect Joe Biden’s 11,779-vote victory in Georgia was fair and accurate. …

At another point, Trump said: “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”

The fact that he wants to “find” a specific number of votes pushes this from a request for a recount into a push for corruption. I have no patience for anyone who argues otherwise.

It’s not surprising that such a conversation took place. President Obama and his Administration were well known for their scrupulous adherence to law; President Trump and his Administration will be known to history for its flouting of law.

But this conversation is definitely, in my mind, against Georgia law, as interference in an election has previously been reported to be a felony.

The question becomes what to do about it? I don’t know if it’s legal or practical for the newly sworn in Congress to pursue impeachment charges, but that’s how I’d be inclined to proceed. Remember, conviction on such charges not only immediately would remove Trump from office, but it would bar him from future election to all political offices.

It wouldn’t have a chance to succeed, but those GOP members of Congress who voted against the charges in the House, and against conviction in the Senate, would have their names remembered to history as backing one of the most incompetent, foulest, and power-hungry men to ever pollute the Oval Office. That can then be used against them in future elections, and in many districts might provide the needed boost to eliminate politicos who do not have even a basic understanding of how the United States functions.

And that’s how appalling Trump’s frantic grasping for power has become.

If you’re interested in data visualizations of racial prejudice, at least in the Hennepin County (Minneapolis) area, the University of Minnesota’s Mapping Prejudice project may be of interest to you. For example, here is a map from 1952.

The blue areas are locations of properties which have racial covenants which prevented members of the Black community from buying or renting the property. They have data from 1910 to 1955.

A relative ran down some useful information earlier this year:

Those of us in South & Southwest Mpls and in the Southern ‘burbs may well have racial convenants on our home titles. While they can’t be enforced, they can be legally discharged from our properties. Please consider taking this action now. Is it symbolic at this stage of the game? Yes. Are symbols important? Yes. See more about how to check your title and what to do if it has a racial covenant.

[click here]

From the Irish equivalent of The Onion, the Waterford Whisper News:

SEVERAL enterprising single women have begun to revolutionise the face of dating with the help of a simple, solitary tattoo.

Long since fed up with the tall tales men tell regarding penis length, we meet the women who got a to scale ruler inked onto their forearms.

“If lads had an inch for every time they claimed its ‘like a baby’s arm holding an apple’ their dicks could serve as a ladder to Mars. Once I got the tattoo everything changed,” remarked single-and-fucking-done-with-mingling Anna Pollock told WWN.

“When we’re in the bedroom and I reveal the tattoo you’d want to see some of them, they turn white as a sheet, some faint, some jump out the window, but the bullshit ends there and then,” added Pollock.

A bit of Irish humor for you.

I’ve been paying dutiful attention to the political world for years now – directly since 2014, indirectly since probably 2000, and somewhat since 1984 – but having any clue as to what’s going on in GOP land these days is getting beyond me. Consider this Daily Beast article on Trumpist lawyer Lin Wood:

Pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood ramped up the crazy on Wednesday night by suggesting Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts was somehow involved in Justice Antonin Scalia’s death and part of a child-sex cult.

Wood, alongside on-again-off-again Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell, has been at the forefront of President Donald Trump’s hopeless attempt to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s decisive victory in the Nov. 3 election. Besides filing a slew of conspiratorial lawsuits alleging election fraud that have been laughed out of court, Wood has urged Georgian Republicans not to vote in next week’s pivotal Senate runoffs because of his belief that the election will be “rigged” and has filed an emergency petition with the Supreme Court to halt the Jan. 5 election.

The QAnon-peddling attorney took things to a whole new level on Wednesday night, however, when he decided to take to Twitter and toss out a series of dangerously unhinged accusations.

Here’s one of the tweets:

A couple of more questions for Chief Justice John Roberts:

(1) You are recorded discussing Justice Scalia’s successor before date of his sudden death. How did you know Scalia was going to die?

(2) Are you a member of any club or cabal requiring minor children as initiation fee? pic.twitter.com/jGxfgLCk4D

— Lin Wood (@LLinWood) December 31, 2020

Maybe Wood’s account was hacked?

Wood has certainly encouraged the belief that the Georgia Presidential vote was corrupted, despite three different verifications conducted by Republican state officials, and that therefore Republicans shouldn’t vote in the runoff for the two Senate Georgia seats. Which is all a bit nonsensical.

But far-right commentator Erick Erickson remarked back on December 3rd that Wood is hardly trustworthy, in his opinion:

The man who donated to Barack Obama and Michelle Nunn and now wants Republican voters to let the Democrats take the Senate is also subject to a lawsuit filed by the lawyers who worked with him.

Lin Wood seems to have some issues, based on this lawsuit by his legal partners.

From the lawsuit:

During the 3.5-hour teleconference, Defendant Wood referred to himself as Almighty; offered to fight the individual Plaintiffs to the death; demanded the Plaintiffs’ undying loyalty; threatened to “hurt” the Plaintiffs; offered to have the Plaintiffs stay in the firm; and called Plaintiff Grunberg a “Chilean Jew” and demanded that he admit he does not look like the other lawyers in the firm.

Well. Is Wood (1) a Trumpian lawyer with a sordid past, (2) a lefty plant, or (3) an escapee from a dementia ward?

I’ll vote for (3).

But if he’s not, then the swirl of filth in the GOP cauldron is really getting to be an incoherent, indecipherable mess. Even trying to characterize it as religious mania is a stretch. The best I can do is suggest that multiple national adversaries are quietly stirring the broth, fighting over the spatula, and taking advantage of the credulous to a spectacular degree.

Perhaps democracy is a doomed mess. That, or the Web.

But, if we do survive the madness, there’s gonna be a whole lot of Ph.D.s awarded for those who study this mass psychosis.

As expected, the suit brought by Rep and Head Clown Louie Gohmert (R-TX) to give Pence the authority to, well, reject any Elector’s Vote that he sees fit was tossed out on its ear today:

A federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit from Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas and several Arizona Republicans seeking to force Vice President Mike Pence to help throw the election to President Donald Trump next week when Congress meets to count the Electoral College votes.

Judge Jeremy Kernodle of the Eastern District of Texas said on Friday that Gohmert and the others lacked standing to sue.

Gohmert’s suit was part of the desperate and extraordinary GOP attempt to overturn the presidential election using baseless and unproven allegations of mass voter fraud and charging that multiple states that President-elect Joe Biden won illegally changed their voting rules due to the pandemic. Those arguments have failed dozens of times in state and federal courts over the past two months. [CNN/Politics]

Too bad Judge Kernodle ruled against them on the grounds they had no standing to sue. It would have been far more impressive if he’d told them that Pence’s duties are administrative, and do not involve free authority.

In other words, batting Gohmert on the nose and telling him to go lay down by his dish until released from his punishment.

Of course, the grandstanding Representative is trying to attract attention as a Trump supporter. For him, the stability and the Republic is not of importance; only his sense of self-importance, and of being a Trump supporter, is served here. Whether, in two years at the next reelection run, this is a positive is up in the air. If, under the management of Biden and the Democrat-controlled House, the United States is back to prospering, Gohmert may find himself being primaried – by a moderate Republican. And losing. And even being RINOed – from the (relative) left, rather than the frenetic far-right.

Here’s hoping.

“I only fondle women with my pistol,” he whispered tensely. “When I go off, so will you.” She looked at him innocently.

Prisoners of the Lost Universe (1983) is definitely an eek-squeak-ugh level story about a scientist who devises a doorway between dimensions, and the TV reporter and the jack of all trades that accidentally follow the scientist through the doorway. On the other side, there are various goofy little monsters, a rather more literal take on gratitude than we’re accustomed to, toothmarks in the scenery, sundry levels of undress, and a general lack of any compelling theme or anything else to keep one’s interest. Although I admit I laughed at the TV reporter remarking on the beings that appear to be committing suicide on the installment plan. But that’s about it for memorability.

Don’t bother with this stinker. Even a salvage mission wouldn’t be worth it.

In this thread I made the argument, from a problem-solving perspective, that ignoring the possibility of out and out corruption of voting machines was, at the very least, a poor intellectual practice. On RawStory Alison Greene makes a similar case, but for Kentucky’s Senatorial race:

In 2017, a Public Policy Polling Survey asked Kentuckians, “Do you approve or disapprove of Senator Mitch McConnell’s job performance?” Only 18% approved. He clawed his rating back up to 39% on the eve of the election. …

So, what exactly drove these angry Kentuckians to reelect Mitch McConnell with a 19-point advantage over opponent Amy McGrath—57.8% to 38.2%?

Even as Republicans across the country still insist that the election was rife with fraudulent Democratic votes, no one’s asking how McConnell managed one of the most lopsided landslides of the Nov. 3 election. They should. An investigation of Kentucky voting results by DCReport raises significant questions about the vote tallies in McConnell’s state.

McConnell racked up huge vote leads in traditionally Democratic strongholds, including counties that he had never before carried.

So how seriously should we take this story? That is, how should we analyze this as a citizen with little to no expertise in voting, polling, and electronic voting systems?

First, let’s figure out which factors seem to be important: the candidates, the opportunities for cheating, the polling, the general atmosphere of Kentucky, and the activities that took place prior to the election that may have swayed the election.

Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is the incumbent candidate and long-time holder of the seat. Senate Majority Leader and one of the most prominent conservative leaders, love him or hate him, he has considerable prestige.

Lt. Colonel Amy McGrath (USMC-Ret), the Democratic challenger, grew up in Kentucky after being born in Ohio, and can be fairly considered to be a Kentucky native. However, a 20 year career in the Marines, in both combat and administrative roles, meant she was not present nor prominent in the state during her service. Military careers are an honored option in American life, but combat roles for women are new and, in some states, controversial or disapproved. That may have tarnished her military career in the eyes of some Kentuckians. She won the Democratic primary by only a few points over State Senator Charles Booker, and as McGrath is White and Booker is Black, this may have discouraged the Black community from voting for her. She has not held an elective seat outside of academic settings, but she has training in the political field in her professional background. That still leaves open the question of why McGrath is qualified for the position of Senator, especially as a junior-level replacement for the most prominent member of the Senate. More information from prior to her primary victory is here. It’s mostly about problems her campaign faced if she won.

In terms of polling, this report on a Mason-Dixon poll, published October 21st (the election is roughly two weeks later), suggests McGrath was in trouble:

A new Mason-Dixon poll shows a significant lead for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in his race for reelection.

According to the poll, the Republican incumbent has support from 51 percent of likely voters. His Democratic challenger, retired Lt. Colonel Amy Mcgrath, has 42 percent support from likely voters. Four percent of likely voters support Libertarian candidate Brad Barron, and three percent said they are undecided. [WSAZ]

Mason-Dixon gets a B+ from FiveThirtyEight. The final result of the general election:

McGrath was down by 9 points two-three weeks prior to the election. The final margin is nearly 20 points. On its own, this margin may merit investigation.

But that leads to context: the atmosphere in Kentucky, those amorphous details, so hard to diagnose from afar (my term for Minnesota) as an independent. In particular, how many McConnell fans chose to lie to pollsters? Enough to shift the margin from 20 to 9?

Another factor is Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, wife of McConnell, who was well-known to be steering excessive amounts of money to Kentucky. To what extent did this influence voters in Kentucky?

Finally, Greene notes that the vote counting machines, in most cases in Kentucky, were from Election Systems & Software. As a citizen with limited time to spend on issues such as this, I chose to look at the Wikipedia page on ES&S, and, as a software engineer, I was troubled by what I saw: remote access software, and presumably hardware, installed on some of their offerings without notice to customers, throughout their history. While these may have been eliminated by the time of the 2020 elections, two questions come to mind – how do I know that’s true for all of their machines, and, more importantly, what other poor and/or malicious design decisions were made by ES&S that may turn out to be security holes?

I also noted that ES&S is owned by McCarthy Group, LLC, which has no Wikipedia entry. Their corporate page is here. Would they be inclined to take the risk of corrupting voting machines? Beats me.

But it’s worth noting that Greene reports ES&S machines were also used in Maine, where incumbent Senator Collins (R-ME) scored an unexpected, and even large, victory over challenger Sara Gideon. On my own, I see that Iowa also uses ES&S, and Senator Ernst (R-IA) scored a 6 point victory over Theresa Greenfield (D-IA) in what was considered to be a toss up race. I suspect 6 points is beyond the margin of error.

What do these observations prove? Nothing of relevance.

But correlation, for a problem-solver, is always of interest. Quite often, it leads nowhere, to coincidence, bad data, bad judgment: nothing actionable.

And, occasionally, it leads to a smoking gun.

It’s all very interesting, and as a software engineer, I’d sure like to have a peek at the code resident in these ES&S products. But it’s also possible to attribute Democratic losses to bad polling, including MAGA and single-issue voters unethically lying to pollsters, mistakes in the last days of the campaigns, Republican campaign propaganda, and a few other factors.

Pragmatically, there’s little chance that any Republican Senator will be deprived of their seat due to Greene’s investigation. Nothing may come of it at all. But keeping an eye out for the opportunity to examine an ES&S machine in situ would be a wise thing to do by Democrats and Republicans alike. An electorate distrustful of the process really serves no one but malevolent forces.

Or we could, like, outlaw voting machines and return to paper-only methods, as has been done in the past. It’d be far more wise.

Typically, the aim of scientists is to generalize, so this NewScientist (28 November 2020) report on a dwarf titanosaur is a little different:

[Aline Ghilardi at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil] and her team analysed a sample of the leg bone, cutting thin sections of the fossil and analysing them using a medical CT scanner.

The researchers found that the dinosaur was old and infirm. They analysed strange, spongy bumps on its bones, and found that they were probably due to an aggressive form of osteomyelitis, a type of bone infection often spread by fungi, bacteria or protozoa.

Based on the way the infection typically works in animals or humans today, they deduced that the state of the disease was so advanced that this dwarf titanosaur would have been covered in open wounds. The team gave it another nickname: Dino Zombie.

Further analysis also revealed microorganisms that were present in the dwarf titanosaur’s blood when it died. Ghilardi says these might be large protozoans or nematode worms, and could have even been the cause of the bone infection, although it is difficult to say for sure.

It’s interesting to see how the plagues have been around for millions of years.

Or will the creationists try to claim that Dino Zombie was actually just not turned enough by its attendants in its final days in a nursing home?