Month: October 2021

There are a surprising number of people who still don't know that a proper check of the 2000 presidential vote in Florida was conducted and concluded that Al Gore won. Here is CNN's summary:

A national media consortium — composed of CNN, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Tribune Company, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The St. Petersburg Times, and The Palm Beach Post — paid for the National Opinion Research Center, or NORC, at the University of Chicago to review 175,010 disputed Florida ballots — 61,190 undervotes and 113,820 overvotes.

How it worked: NORC, a highly respected data and research organization, conducted the counting of ballots....Full statewide review

• Standard for acceptable marks set by each county in their recount: Gore wins by 171
• Fully punched chads and limited marks on optical scan ballots: Gore wins by 115
• Any dimple or optical mark: Gore wins by 107
• One corner of chad detached or any optical mark: Gore wins by 60

None of this means that Gore would ever have won the actual count in Florida. He never asked for a statewide recount, and those 113,820 overvotes never would have been tallied. George Bush legitimately won by the standard in use at the time.

Nevertheless, it's still a fact that a full count of all the votes shows that more Floridians voted for Gore than Bush. Just because Donald Trump is delusional doesn't mean that everyone else is too.

Hey look! It's Hopper with no cone. She is delighted with this state of affairs, and so far she's been very good about not licking her wound. All that's left now is for her shaved tail to regrow all its fur.

As you may recall from the dim recesses of your memory, a couple of years ago Donald Trump's attorney general appointed a US attorney to investigate ties between Trump and Russia. That is to say, he appointed someone to investigate Democratic lies about ties between Trump and Russia and the FBI's collusion in said lies, something that Trump has always been sort of maniacal about.

Anyway, the chosen investigator was John Durham, US Attorney for Connecticut, who has been diligently beavering away on this task. But what was Durham up to? Was he a serious investigator? Or a right-wing nutball determined to dig up dirt on Democrats?

This has come into sharper focus recently with Durham's indictment of Michael Sussmann, a lawyer who passed on leads to an FBI official in 2016. Bizarrely, the indictment accuses Sussmann of lying about his ties to Hillary Clinton's campaign even though (a) the FBI official in question repeatedly testified that he had no recollection of whether Sussmann mentioned his ties to Clinton, (b) it doesn't really matter if Sussmann was doing work for the Clinton campaign, and (c) this obviously has no bearing on whether the FBI itself did anything wrong.

So why did Durham even bother with this? The answer appears to be that he had some things he wanted to get off his chest, and he needed an indictment to do it. Here is Jon Chait:

The perjury charge is merely the window dressing in the indictment. The meat of it — the part that has Trump defenders excited — is a narrative laid out by Durham attempting to paint Sussmann and the experts he worked with as liars who smeared Trump. That narrative part does not describe actual crimes, of course. Prosecutors can write whatever they want in their indictment. This one is like a Sean Hannity monologue wrapped around a parking ticket.

But wait. There's more. Here is Ankush Khardori in Politico:

All of this has had the distinct appearance of an effort on the part of Durham’s team to scapegoat Sussmann for potentially unseemly conduct on the part of the Clinton campaign that they are not prepared to criminally charge....It remains to be seen whether the latest subpoena to Sussmann’s firm will actually turn anything up, but at least from the outside, the effort looks suspiciously like a proverbial fishing expedition. These concerns were further compounded on Thursday, when both CNN and the New York Times published stories that suggested that allegations in the Sussmann indictment were based on a highly selective — and arguably disingenuous — characterization of relevant emails.

....In the two-and-a-half years and millions of dollars spent since his investigation began, Durham has yet to identify any misconduct of real consequence within the FBI. We find ourselves in the surreal position of having an ongoing criminal investigation concerning the 2016 election, while, at the same time, the DOJ under Garland appears to be sitting idly by as information continues to accumulate that provides further reason to investigate the conduct of Trump himself in the wake of the 2020 election.

It's pretty obvious what we have here: Ken Starr 2.0. There's obviously nothing of significance going on, but Durham, like Starr, figures that if he just keeps digging and digging maybe something will come up.

President Biden is obviously in a difficult situation. If he tells Durham to wrap things up then it looks like he's protecting his fellow Democrats. But if he does nothing, Durham will just go on and on and on—probably leaking juicy tidbits to Republican hacks along the way. What to do?

I dunno. But it's pretty obvious that Durham is bound and determined to find something—anything—that will make Fox News happy. The endless investigation has become a Republican specialty, and now we have their latest version. Welcome to hell.

Needless to say, many people disagree with me about whether the Democratic Party is blowing it by moving too far to the left. And maybe they're right! Personally, I'd be thrilled to see the country become more of a European-style social democracy.

But I don't represent the median voter or anything close to it. The median voter, for better or worse, worries about the deficit, is troubled about wokeness, and doesn't like the idea of just giving money away to everyone.

And speaking of giving money away, that's what Joe Biden's expanded child tax credit does: it gives families $3,600 per year for every child under the age of 6 and $3,000 per year for older children. It comes in the form of a monthly check, and it doesn't matter if you're working or even looking for a job. If you have kids, you get it.

This has been billed as the "largest anti-poverty measure ever," and perhaps it is. But consider for a minute how this comes across to many people. Here's the attack ad Republicans are likely to run:

OPEN ON SCENE OF WORKERS AT A FOOD BANK:

VO: Americans have always been generous to folks who are down on their luck.

RAPID MONTAGE OF ASSISTANCE TO THE LESS FORTUNATE:

Healthcare for kids.

Housing for the homeless.

Food and money for those out of work.

CUT TO BW FOOTAGE OF WHITE MOTHER IN FRONT OF MOBILE HOME AND HER FOUR SCROUNGY KIDS RUNNING AROUND:

But that's not enough for the militant "progressives" who run the Democratic Party these days. Nothing is ever enough for them. Last year they passed the biggest handout in American history.

They call it a "child tax credit," but not a single penny of it goes to kids. It goes to their parents, who get it whether they feel like working or not.

DOLLY IN ON MOTHER:

For her it means $13,000 a year in cash, no strings attached.

CUT TO MOTHER OPENING ENVELOPE WITH CHECK INSIDE:

They already get Medicaid. And food stamps. And welfare. Now Democrats are handing them even more. In cash. What do you think they'll spend it on?

CUT TO WHITE MAN IN HARD HAT WIPING BROW AT END OF DAY:

You work hard for your money. Is this how you want your tax dollars spent?

Paid for by Citizens for Common Sense.

Now, this is mostly just a standard anti-welfare ad. Republicans have been running stuff like this forever. So maybe it doesn't matter much what Democrats do.

Still, the Biden CTC is different. The very things that progressives like about it—it's cash, and everyone gets it, no questions asked—are precisely the things that moderates are most afraid of: It costs hundred of billions of dollars; it goes to the "undeserving" poor; and they figure it probably gets spent on booze and partying.

Again: I get that anti-welfare rhetoric is SOP for Republicans. But the Biden CTC really is designed like a cruise missile to hit all the things that moderates and conservatives hate the most about welfare programs. It will not help Democrats make inroads among swing voters who would otherwise be receptive to ditching the party of Donald Trump.