Lies run circles around us, loudly exclaiming. “Look at me!” “Look at me!” But it takes time and effort to get at the truth. So, we have a problem. It looks like Democrat states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania have been scheming to rig the vote for months using mail-in ballots. To that end have extended the vote count so that they have time to insert enough fraudulent ballots into the system and skew the election towards Biden? Have they given Republicans any reason to believe otherwise?
Consider what was said about the nature of a compromise in A PIC FOR LIZ. An election is a compromise, sometimes a bitter compromise. Consider what Democrats have said about President Donald Trump, their unceasing efforts to remove him from office and the threats some of them have made to riot if he wins again. Consider the charges from Republicans that Vice President Joe Biden accepted bribes from Russian, Ukrainian, and Chinese sources. Republicans clearly don’t trust Biden.
Since both sides are almost completely unhappy with the other’s candidate, why are Republicans voters obligated to accept the election of the Democrat’s candidate? Because he was elected fair and square? If it looks like Democrats have rigged the election at the polling locations they run, then why are Republicans obligated to accept the election of the Democrat’s candidate? What kind of compromise is that?
If Democrats do not regard election integrity as important, then why are Republicans supposed to assume Democrats are honest? If their candidate is plainly corrupt, why are Republicans suppose to trust Democrats? Are Republicans obligated to be gullible idiots or at least wise enough to insist upon an honest election.
Did Trump win the election? Probably. It certainly looks like Democrats tried to steal it.
- Why were the news election polls so far off? That was not designed for voter suppression?
- Why is Big Tech suppressing free speech, even our president’s tweets? Big Tech is not trying to rig the outcome?
- Why did Democrats insist upon unconstitutionally changing the rules in the middle of the election? Don’t legislatures set the rules, not executive officials?
- Why are Democrats so indifferent to election integrity? Why the ridiculous insistence upon voting by mail? Why don’t Democrats think voter ID is important?
- Why don’t Democrats allow Republicans to monitor the ballot count?
- Why are Democrats counting mail-in ballots that were not post marked before Election Day?
- Why are Democrats still counting mail-in ballots — the ballots that were supposed to arrive first — after Election Day?
When the election results reek to high heaven, is now the time to accept the outcome Liberal Democrats demand?
- If we cannot trust the results of our elections, how can we remain a free people? We cannot.
- Are we suppose to accept their preposterous argument that election fraud doesn’t even exist? No. Of course not.
- Are we suppose to just pretend that cheating is okay? No.
Pretending the problem does not exist is just a recipe for disaster. Now is the time to go to court and demand a thorough investigation. Now is the time to get behind President Trump and encourage him and his team to bring out the truth. When crooked people hide their dirty deeds in the dark of night, in pretense of honesty and prideful expertise, and in phony outrage, those seeking to know and expose the truth need to work harder, not give up.
BOTTOM LINE
If they cheated, why don’t we insist they vote again and do it right this time?
Citizen Tom 
Tom
I linked your post to mine today titled: 2020 Vote Wisdom
https://rudymartinka.com/2020/12/10/2020-vote-wisdom-for-usa-king-solomon-blog/
Regards and goodwill blogging
Off-topic: The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is good and welcome news.
Yes. Also a huge surprise.
Just two weeks ago Trump said it would be ready very soon at the debate and media called him a liar. They cited that “experts” said it would be at least 18 months.
Weird.
I don’t know the news coverage on that.
We will still have to wait for the vaccine to be approved in the US and Europe and for production to commence and ramp up. Nonetheless, it’s good news. Hopefully we will get additional vaccines, too. 90% efficient is good, but there is always hope for more. 😉 It would also give doctors options to chose from. And we have to hope, that protection is longlived.
Yep! Kind of funny that when Trump talked about it we were told not to take it seriously.
You know that this vaccine wasn’t part of Trump’s Operation Warp Speed nor did they take that government money to produce it, but rather it was created and tested privately. And everything that is coming out basically aligns with what Dr. Fauci has been saying, so you are just making this supposed disagreement up. (Trump said the vaccine would be available before the election).
The prospective vaccine has a need to be kept ultra cold, so there are logistical problems. Even if it is approved, which it has not yet, it may not be available to everyone until late next year at best.
All that said, this is good news, and I am willing to give Trump some credit for it, and for appointing the Army General in charge if the distribution logistics work as planned . . . but by then Trump will be long gone and perhaps 300,000 Americans will be dead because Trump instigated and modeled selfish behavior.
@tsalmon
And you are serious?
@tsalmon
Part of Warp Speed was getting the production line for the vaccine up to speed. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-09/pfizer-vaccine-s-funding-came-from-berlin-not-washington
So Germany paid for the vaccine funding. We still have the vaccine ASAP, which was the point of WARP speed. You realize that not invented here is a stupid attitude? Free trade is about getting the best bang for the buck.
@tsalmon
Here is another reference.
https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/09/media-lies-about-pfizer-partnership-with-trump-administrations-operation-warp-speed/
Our government spends lots of money. The Establishment hates Trump. So Pfizer is just trying to distance themselves from Trump. The party of love, love, love doesn’t have any moral issues with punishing its enemies.
Airline stocks are up bigly with the mention of the vaccine.
@Liz,
I watched “The Social Dilemma”, as have it appears my son and many of my friends with kids and grandkids.
I don’t spend much time on FB, but my wife enjoys it occasionally. I also honestly don’t spend any time searching the web for confirming views. This is literally the only blog I visit regularly.
I do watch a good bit of cable news, but I try to watch a variety, including Faux News sometimes. Of the tv news shows, I think PBS’s The News Hour tries the hardest to present the most unbiased factual news, and I think this is why Conservative Republicans politicians go on the show as much as Democrats.
I think a result of news siloing has been the distrust of experts and what Catholic Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in “After Virtue” called “Emotivism”. Here is a quote from Wikipedia summarizing the basic nature of the problem that MacIntyre presents:
“Another reason MacIntyre gives for the doomed nature of the Enlightenment is the fact that it ascribed moral agency to the individual. He claims this made morality no more than one man’s opinion and, thus, philosophy became a forum of inexplicably subjective rules and principles. The failure of the Enlightenment Project, because of the abandonment of a teleological structure, is shown by the inadequacy of moral emotivism, which MacIntyre believes accurately reflects the state of modern morality.“
Everything has basically become subjective. Years of study and experience have become meaningless to those who think their opinion is as good as the experts on everything from the merits of vaccination, to COVID mitigation to now the laws and procedures regarding political elections.
Americans instead have become enthralled to like minded enflaming political punditry, few of whom have any expertise or credentials in the areas in which they pontificate.
The experts are not always right and on many topics they have strong disagreement, but in the areas where they have strong agreement and data to back up their opinions, they are right far more often than they are wrong. We have to remember that truth is a never ending teleological process that is also never determinative.
If I want to learn to play the violin, I don’t go to someone who only knows how to be a car mechanic to learn. I think that if we want the closest thing to the truth we will ever get, we go to the authorities, we read books and articles from them on the problem and then we make truly informed decisions based upon that best authority. To do that, I guess we need to plug in a bit less.
Even Fox News called it for Biden even giving Biden Nevada for over 300 electoral votes for Biden.
Correction 290.
Yes, this hasn’t been lost with a lot of people.
Fox news quickly called several states for Biden even before the other networks did, when they were very close and a large percentage had not been counted. On the other hand they’ve been very slow to announce even when Trump has been the clear leader. For example, they still haven’t called Alaska for Trump (last I saw).
Also, currently Fox is naming Biden the “president elect”, and they’re called president Trump just Trump.
What do you believe this indicates?
Are you fan of Fox as a reputable source now?
Liz,
Not really. I go there occasionally for the same reason that I come here – just trying to get the pulse of ALL of America.
Sometimes I think basic decency is the closest thing to love we get. Just a little more goodwill each day to everyone we meet.
I’m sure this is true for you as well but the weird thing is that these pickup Trump flag people are my people. Growing up, I worked on cars with them, ranged offshore through storms in boats with them and flew as fellow aircrew with them. I love them all, and I get the hole in the soul that they feel for an indescribable something lost that they feel our parents had.
What these good folks, these salt of the earth of my youth don’t get is that black and brown and gay and queer folks are not their enemy and a White Nationalist populist is not the answer to their heart felt grievances.
Maybe a basically decent man who learned and was shaped from living and from loss will show us all that. I hope so. I learn something everyday.
Maybe at some point we can agree on some news source that just tries to present the actual verifiable facts and nothing but the facts Mam, whether we like those facts or not.
Tom, is right when he says that perfectly unbiased reporting is impossible, but I think it is too cynical to assume therefore that they shouldn’t even try to be factually balanced, so we can then just tune in to whatever confirms our preconceptions.
You are more savvy than I am on this Liz. Honestly, what news sources do you trust and consume who you honestly think are honestly trying to make that honest effort?
Maybe at some point we can agree on some news source that just tries to present the actual verifiable facts and nothing but the facts Mam, whether we like those facts or not.
Tom, is right when he says that perfectly unbiased reporting is impossible, but I think it is too cynical to assume therefore that they shouldn’t even try to be factually balanced, so we can then just tune in to whatever confirms our preconceptions.
You are more savvy than I am on this Liz. Honestly, what news sources do you trust and consume who you honestly think are honestly trying to make that honest effort?
I think we’re all in the same boat. It’s really hard to find a news source that is trustworthy…anywhere. I don’t watch television in general. During the election I watched Fox for the first time (outside of visiting my mother in law) in maybe two years. I’ll watch clips of Tucker Carlson if someone brings it to my attention on Twitter.
The basic dilemma (which we probably already know) is they have to compete with social media platforms. So they do things in a similar fashion.
I watched the movie “The Social Dilemma” a few nights ago and it is quite disturbing how the AI is programmed to not only anticipate our desires/decisions but shape them.
That’s becoming the business model for all of our news sources.
It’s pretty grim, IMO.
I do not know the answer. I hope they figure this out in the future.
The only thing to do is try to get information from numerous sources and compare.
Most of the military blogs I used to view have shut down. Those were informative (the commentary particularly so). John Robb with Global Guerrillas is interesting (I subscribe to his news letter), but sometimes he reminds me of Dr House. It’s not a happy publication.
Thanks Liz for the recommendations. I will look into them.
I agree with all of that. I’m a dinosaur, but I still think that local newspapers are a dying but great source of relatively unbiased facts.
When I was a cub reporter on the Natchez Democrat a lifetime ago, I was assigned the local police beat. I got to know all the cops there at that time and often did ride-alongs with them.
As part of my job, I would check the police blotter each day to report on crimes, arrests and incidents the night before. One entry caught my eye. A policeman who I knew had been shot in the foot under fairly mysterious circumstances.
I call the cop to ask what happened and he was pretty forthright and humorous about the situation. He told me he had accidentally shot himself in the foot while loading his service revolver. He claimed it happened when he was in his boxer shorts and the family cat jumped on his lap and started doing that pulsing thing they do with their claws sometimes. We both laughed heartily.
When he was finished relating the story he said, “Your not printing any this are you?”
In a spit second I had to determine whether I wanted to lose a friend and a source or print the story. I didn’t hesitate. The story of a cop shooting himself in the foot in his boxer shorts because of a cat being a cat was just too good.
I told him that he knew I was a reporter and that we had never agreed to keep anything off the record. It appeared the next day on page 2.
Was I wrong to tell the truth to the public about a public servant’s embarrassing carelessness, or should I have kept the source and the friendship? A lot of my friends and family since then might think that my decision to print was a betrayal, but none of those people would be my reporter friends – for them it would be instinctive.
That’s a funny anecdote. 😆
Local stories might have more accuracy as they typically don’t influence enough people for “the powers that be” to take an interest.
It’s unusual for a news source to flat out fabricate. What they will do is leave out context which changes everything.
A direct example would be: “X number of former intelligence officers agree the laptop has a Russian signature”. This might be true but what does it mean? There is nothing in that statement that requires any of those former intelligence officers to have even seen the laptop in which to form an assessment. Also, the publication hires former intelligence officers who have a vested interest in saying what their employer wants them to say. Finally, “former” would indicate their intelligence assessment is of little value at present. i’m pretty sure you know all of this is true yet you (and many others) will cite it anyway as though it makes no difference and is a serious intelligence analysis.
I could go on a long while about this. We know for a fact (it was proudly touted) that McCrystal was involved in a pro-Biden AI campaign that actually employed very effective psychological warfare tactics. The didn’t call it that of course, they called it “Defeat disinformation”. But this “defeat disinformation” campaign only went one way and in Biden’s favor.
My spouse contacted a friend (retired two star) who had worked for McCrystal directly (in Afghanistan) and also in the Pentagon. He said McCrystal has always been a Democrat. Also, he indicated that Trump acting like a New Yorker turned a lot of people off. Furthermore he said “Trump made it very uncomfortable in the Pentagon” by getting rid of a lot of regulations and forcing them to rewrite them.
Well….that last might have been uncomfortable for the leadership at the Pentagon but it was very helpful for the soldiers out in the field who no longer had to deal with extensive, time wasting and counterproductive regulations.
-Liz out
@tsalmon
@Liz
Our system of government was designed — carefully and deliberately designed — to play various factors against each other. The problem we have now is that with so much wealth and power consolidated into a few hands it is difficult to make the system work. Because we are educated and informed by the people who want to control us, most people don’t even understand how to participate in politics.
Consider the possibility the election was stolen. Then Democrats hugely outspent Rrepublicans and still loss, but the news media has covered up any effort to investigate the fraud. To retain power, Democrats will work with the owners of the news media. Very wealthy corporations.
Will there be some infighting? Probably, but we may never hear much about it.
When the communists took over Russia, they fought amongst themselves. Didn’t stop them.
“I watched the movie ‘The Social Dilemma’ a few nights ago and it is quite disturbing how the AI is programmed to not only anticipate our desires/decisions but shape them.“
Last night, Bill Maher had on the Co-Founder of The Center for Humane Technology who is featured in “The Social Dilemma.” Sounds disturbing. It was late and I went to bed, but I will try to watch the documentary tonight.
As for White Nationalism, I am talking about a broad spectrum of white, patriarchal, Protestant (specifically political Evangelicals), heterosexual politics that seeks to promote that cultural identity as superior and therefore that it should be the exclusive cultural, and therefore political, identify of the country. This often presents as a kind of national identity grievance when that cultural and political hegemony is threatened by cultural diversity and plurality, for example when gays are allowed to legally marry or Muslims set up a mosque near evangelical churches. It is therefore revealing that when I bring us the fact that Trump and Trumpism at heart presents as a grievance based populism, you deny the accusation and then you immediately give me an anecdote that affirms a grievance against some person somewhere simply seeking the freedom to pursue there own gender diversity.
Is the reaction in your example over-the-top by one side or the other? Probably by both sides with one side more justifiably harmed than the other. However, this is almost always a conflict of rights, pardon the pun, not a black and white issue. On the one hand you have the freedom to religiously discriminate (and also a fabulous claim of artistic cake expression) and on the other hand, the right to ask a public business to simply do business with you if what you are asking is legal, safe and protected at law by the equal protection laws of the state and/or the federal government. This case may be an overreach but other cases not so much. It is not that we can’t find a case of overreach to feel outraged and aggrieved about; it’s whether we can accept and allow cultural diversity outside our historical White Nationalist comfort zone.
This really is a civil rights and a freedom issue, but it is also a national cultural identity issue. Will the White Nationalist patriarchy maintain hegemony culturally, and more importantly politically in the form of laws that protect diversity rights, or will we simply allow a much more diverse, even exotic, cultural spectrum?
One way or another Trump will not be your hero to stop the flood of cultural variety. Trump at heart is a city bread libertine who simply used White Nationalist grievance as the populist message to catapult him to political fame and fortune. If you only listened to Trump for five minutes on the Howard Stern show in the past, the idea that Trump gives a flying flip about whether someone is gay, straight or transgender, Evangelical or Atheist is laughable at best. Look at his Bible prop debacle for an example of his ham handed ridiculously obvious pandering.😄
What these good folks, these salt of the earth of my youth don’t get is that black and brown and gay and queer folks are not their enemy and a White Nationalist populist is not the answer to their heart felt grievances.
I do not know the people you’re speaking of, but I believe you underestimate them and misrepresent them. It’s a pretty big charge to call people “salt of the earth” and white nationalist bigots all at the same time. I’ve never met a white nationalist. If you find them all around you I have to wonder if you’re really seeing what you think you are seeing.
I’ll tell you (and the rest of the folks in this forum) something you won’t see on the news. We went to the Masterpiece cake shop a week or so ago and he was in court again. This time he was being sued for emotional damages for his refusal to make a gender transition celebration cake. The original case had lost in court, but he/she is suing again for emotional damages over losing that case. He cannot make wedding cakes anymore which was a large percentage of his business. And over the course of the USSC case, his wife had so much stress she had a stroke.
This is the nicest family. A really good Christian family.
I beg to differ that this all about live and let live.
For background:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/why-jack-phillips-matters/
@tsalmon
So?
All the major news organizations have called the election. As Jake Tapper said, “America’s long national nightmare is over.”
Yes, one long nightmare. Well, Biden did promise a long dark winter.
Eventually those of us with wrong think will be properly re-educated.
Looking forward to the removal of “Hitler” so we can have a new war.
Before “Hitler” that hadn’t happened in decades.
Also looking forward to renewed dependence on China.
Yuck! Conservative tears taste awful! 😉
BTW Liz,
Yo do know that the trade deficit with China went up under Trump, don’t you?
@tsalmon
The economy grows. We buy more. We tax the stuff we get from China and lower taxes and manufacturing relocates back here eventually, but not now.
@tsalmon
It is the job of the news networks to call the elections and the job of Big Tech to factcheck and censor us?