Errata: Was e mailed John's Hopkins data in previous being questioned.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++The (M)ass media responds to Biden as dogs licking their master's boots. When they covered Trump they acted like attack mongrels.
Media Treat Trump’s Team Like Dogs, Biden’s Like Puppies
The largely celebratory coverage unwittingly emphasizes the triumph of the press’s own class.
When Joe Biden gets to the White House, he will, it seems, be bringing with him a menagerie of domesticated animals, eager to roll over and have their tummies tickled by a solicitous first couple.
There will be Champ and Major, the two German shepherds, one of whom, like his master, is a veteran of the Obama administration. There will be the as-yet-unnamed cat who, we learned last week, will prowl the echoing halls of the executive mansion, no doubt mischievous and imperious by turns, like all felines.
Above all there will be a whole pack of cuddly, playful, yelping puppies, eager for attention and desperate to please, gently nuzzling their master and members of his administration whenever they stoop to stroke them or issue a kind word or a stern command.
These fully house-trained pets will sport White House press passes and carry laptops and microphones. They will project a vulpine self-regard and profess a houndlike commitment to hunting down the truth. But it’s clear already that when brought to heel they will have all the independence of mind of one of those nodding toy dogs that used to adorn the dashboards of motorcars.The level of critical scrutiny on display so far from the national press corps since Mr. Biden began announcing the members of his administration and its plans makes Toto look like the Hound of the Baskervilles.
There was the giggling excitement from reporters last week when the president-elect announced the latest recruit into his expanding animal kingdom. As I read the coverage from supposedly serious news sources, I tried to imagine for a moment what it would have been like if President Trump had announced at any point in the last year that he was acquiring a cat.
“President Trump to Forcibly Incarcerate Helpless Animal on Federal Property,” The New York Times would doubtless have thundered, in a multiple-byline, six-column front-page blockbuster. CNN would have featured interviews all day with scientists about how cats are Covid superspreaders and how this was the latest act of irresponsibility on the part of a president who had already murdered a quarter-million Americans.
To be fair, we are all suckers for new pets, and excitable reporters, like small children, can be forgiven for falling hopelessly for cute animals. But how does this apply to John Kerry?
The former secretary of state’s anointing as special envoy on climate change has elicited mostly affectionate coverage from most of our media watchdogs. So too the rest of the foreign-policy team. We have been treated to lengthy profiles of Antony Blinken, the designated secretary of state; Jake Sullivan, national security adviser; Avril Haines, director of national intelligence; Linda Thomas-Greenfield, ambassador to the United Nations. All highlight their impeccable credentials, their experience in previous Democratic administrations, and the contrast they represent with the dilettantes and extremists of the Trump administration. There’s the occasional dissenting voice but the overall message is carefully consistent with Mr. Biden’s own gloss: “America is back.”
You’d think at minimum that an inquisitive press corps would want to examine all this experience, that the reader might have questions about what these giants of American security strategy contributed to an Obama administration that, as even its friends overseas acknowledge, produced a desultory and confusing foreign policy that did nothing to arrest the decline of American prestige in its eight years.
On economic policy, we are told in awed tones that Janet Yellen’s expertise and experience in what will be the three top domestic roles—at the White House, Federal Reserve and now Treasury—makes her uniquely qualified. But there’s almost no critical assessment of the role she played, especially at the Fed, in the accelerating financialization of the U.S. economy, with all the baleful consequences that has had for most American workers and their living standards.
There’s a larger point here about the rot in America’s institutional leadership that, in part at least, the Trump administration was elected to undo. In its largely celebratory coverage, the press is unwittingly emphasizing what this restoration represents: the triumph of its own class. It is highlighting how completely in lockstep the various elements of the new and old establishments now are: the media and tech platforms, the global corporate bossocracy, the vast, overfed Washington policy crowd, whose different characters pop in and out of government with a change of president without leaving a footprint on the receding sands of American leadership.
Harry Truman famously reminded us that canine friendship is the only enduring loyalty when things go wrong in Washington. Joe Biden and his administration will at least have plenty of other friends to provide comfort as they set out on yet another familiar journey.
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Meanwhile:
The President and CEO of Dominion Voting Systems defends his company against the various accusations.
Fake Claims About Dominion Voting Systems Do Real Damage
Our machines have no secret ‘vote flipping’ algorithm. We have no ties to dictator Hugo Chávez.
Accurate, transparent and accessible elections—this is the objective that motivated me to create Dominion Voting Systems 18 years ago in Canada. From the start, the company was focused on improving paper-based voting, and it continues to pursue vote-tabulation solutions that enhance accuracy and transparency through audits and reviews, as well as by allowing voters to create, verify and privately cast a marked paper ballot. But if you’ve heard about our role in the U.S. election on Twitter, it’s likely you’ve heard something different.
The allegations against Dominion are bizarre, but I’ll set the record straight. Dominion is an American company, now headquartered in Denver. Dominion is not and has never been a front for communists. It has no ties to Hugo Chávez, the late dictator of Venezuela. It has never been involved in Venezuelan elections. None of Dominion’s systems use the Smartmatic software that has come under attack, as any state certification lab could verify.
There is no secret “vote flipping” algorithm. Third-party test labs, chosen by the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission and accredited by a program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, perform complete source-code reviews on every federally certified tabulation system. States replicate this process for their own certifications. Postelection canvassing and auditing also exist to provide additional assurance of the vote totals’ accuracy.
The part of the election process on which Dominion focuses is highly regulated and certified. The company doesn’t work in noncertified areas such as voter-registration systems, poll books or signature-verification software, and it doesn’t provide vote-by-mail printing. Dominion voting machines do one thing: accurately tabulate votes from county-verified voters using a durable paper ballot controlled and secured by local elections officials.Some of the main counties where results have been contested, like Philadelphia and Allegheny (Pittsburgh), don’t even use Dominion voting systems. In fact, across the 14 Pennsylvania counties that use Dominion systems, President Trump received 52.2% of the vote.
Despite the company’s limited role in elections, it has been the target of a stream of outrageous statements since Election Day—increasingly reckless and defamatory allegations that don’t stand up to scrutiny. Dominion is never able to affect the outcome of an election. The entire certification process makes sure of that. Regardless, the company’s focus has always been to be nonpartisan and respectful of all views. Dominion’s customers are election officials from both parties in the 28 states where it operates.The President and CEO of Dominion Voting Systems refutes the stories about his company's products.
Unlike its critics, Dominion has had to attest to every part of its business ownership and operations to governmental agencies and in courts—under oath and penalty of perjury. We believe it is important to welcome the highest degree of scrutiny and transparency in the election process. This builds trust and leads to more resilient and robust elections. The widespread disinformation campaign America currently faces, however, does the opposite. Baseless and ludicrous smears are presented without evidence and amplified across social media.
These attacks undermine the tens of thousands of state and local officials who run our elections. When it comes to counting ballots, officials have established a distributed, multilayered system with checks and balances, in which robust safeguards ensure that no one needs to trust blindly any person, company or technology. Here are some of the safeguards in place in Georgia, where the Trump campaign has contested the result:
• Tabulation machines are tested publicly, before bipartisan witnesses, before and right after Election Day.
• On Election Day, poll workers—not Dominion systems—verify voters’ identities, including a signature check.
• Voters mark a paper ballot to vote. Absentee voters use pens, while in-person voters use “ballot marking devices,” which display a digital ballot for voters to make a selection and then print a paper record. In both cases, voters verify the marked paper ballot before casting it in a secure ballot box through an air-gapped scanning tabulator.
• After polls close, results are tallied by local officials. Paper ballots are safeguarded by thousands of poll workers distributed across 2,656 precincts.
• The Georgia Secretary of State’s Office certified election results after hand-auditing five million ballots, which showed that the paper-ballot voting system counted and reported results accurately. The small change to the final tally was due entirely to the addition of ballots that had been uncounted due to human process errors.
• The state also enlisted Pro V&V, a certified third-party testing laboratory, to audit a random sample of Dominion machines. No tampering was found.
The wild allegations of recent weeks have fueled the harassment of election officials and Dominion employees across the country—including stalking and death threats. The lies and smears have no basis in fact, but they do real damage to our democracy by casting doubt on the legitimacy of the electoral process. The false allegations should be retracted immediately.
Citizens should know that America’s rigorous, layered and transparent electoral process—in which Dominion is proud to participate—ensures its elections are secure, accurate and credible.
Mr. Poulos is president and CEO of Dominion Voting Systems.
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Finally:
Will Trump help or hurt when he comes to Atlanta this Saturday and does he truly understand how this trip relates to his legacy? A Northern General named Sherman once torched Atlanta. Will Trump be the second to do so?
Trump’s March to Atlanta
No one has a bigger stake in keeping the Senate Republican than the president.
By William McGurn
Donald Trump’s name isn’t on the Jan. 5 runoff ballot for Georgia’s two Senate races. But no one has a greater interest than the president in seeing Republicans take at least one of these seats—and keep their majority in the U.S. Senate.
Because the first thing Democrats plan to do come January is start erasing Mr. Trump’s legacy. Absent a Republican Senate, there will be little to stop whatever appointments Mr. Biden may make or whatever legislative agenda he pushes through.
The two Georgia Republicans running are Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. They are being challenged, respectively, by Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. Given that the last Peach State Democrat elected to the Senate was Zell Miller in 2000, Republicans might in a normal year be expected to win fairly handily.
Then again, 2020 is not a normal year.With the president’s lawyers still contesting the Georgia election results, a split has opened in Republican ranks. On Thanksgiving the president called the Georgia Republican who certifies those results, Secretary of State Brian Raffensperger, an “enemy of the people.” On Sunday he followed up by saying he was “ashamed” he’d ever endorsed Republican Gov. Brian Kemp.
Attacks on fellow Republicans are nothing new for President Trump. The danger this time, however, is that they will sour the nearly 2.5 million Georgians who voted for him on the Republican Party, discouraging them from coming out in January to vote for its two candidates. Unfortunately, this is precisely what one of the president’s lawyers, Lin Wood, has urged Georgia’s Trump supporters to do. “Threaten to withhold your votes & money,” he wrote on Twitter, unless Ms. Loeffler and Mr. Perdue do more to fix the “steal of the 11/3 GA election.”
Mr. Trump, by contrast, seems to appreciate that a defeat for these two Republicans would be a defeat for himself. Two weeks ago he tweeted, “I strongly stand with Kelly & David. They are both great and MUST WIN!” The day after Thanksgiving, he reiterated his claim that Joe Biden’s victory is a “total scam” but added that “we must get out and help David and Kelly, two GREAT people. Otherwise we are playing right into the hands of some very sick people. I will be in Georgia on Saturday!”
Donald Trump Jr. clearly intends to make himself felt in Georgia as well. A week ago he tweeted that it was “NONSENSE” for “people that are supposed to be on our side” to be “telling GOP voters not to go out and vote for @KLoeffler and @PerdueSenate.” On Monday Mr. Trump Jr. backed up his words with the launch of the Save the U.S. Senate super PAC, which will run ads in Georgia encouraging Trump voters to back the Republicans on Jan. 5.
In the meantime, Mr. Trump will be in Georgia Saturday because he knows the outcomes of these runoff races will help determine the fate of the Biden presidency. A Republican Senate wouldn’t only nix Mr. Biden’s more ambitious spending plans—e.g., a big fat climate package—but also create an incentive for Mr. Biden to reach deals by nominating more moderate judges and executive branch officials. Some even speculate Mr. Biden would prefer a Republican Senate as a card he could play against the party’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing when it pushes him too far.
Mr. Trump’s interest in a Republican Senate is more fundamental. Over the past four years he has built a solid legacy of achievement—cutting taxes, deregulating the economy, appointing good judges to the federal bench, getting three of his nominees seated on the Supreme Court and so on. These are all things Democrats have vowed to reverse, and many have said that if they’re unable to do it by ordinary legislation, they’ll resort to radical measures such as abolishing the filibuster, packing the Supreme Court, and admitting new (Democratic) states to the union.
These also happen to be things that would be hard to get through a Senate run by Mitch McConnell. He wouldn’t be able to block everything. But he would be in a position to stop the worst, and in so doing, preserve many of Mr. Trump’s most significant achievements.
As Mr. Trump admitted to reporters on Thanksgiving, it’s going to be “a very hard thing” for him to concede. But Georgia’s Senate runoffs offer him a twofer. Not only would Republican victories in Georgia help prevent the Biden administration from reversing his achievements; they also offer him the opportunity to go out on a winning note.
Mr. Biden and the Democrats campaigned on a clear theme: We’re the anti-Trump party, and when we get power our goal will be to undo everything he did. Right now Mitch McConnell is their most formidable obstacle. And keeping him Senate majority leader is President Trump’s best bet for preserving his own legacy.
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Finally:
Cancelling student debt has financial as well as moral implications. I can accept changing the
program to allow sliding interest rate charges but forgiveness is outrageous and a dangerous path to establish and take.
Canceling Student Debt Would Be a ‘Brahmin Bailout’
The Democratic Party looks to build policy around the interests of its educated elite voters.
The economist Thomas Piketty used postelection surveys taken from France, the U.K. and the U.S. to track a remarkable evolution in left-wing political parties: “from the worker party to the high-education party.” He noted in a 2018 paper that leftist parties in the mid-20th century relied on less-educated and lower-income voters to form their electoral base. But more recently these parties have come to rely on college graduates. Mr. Piketty refers to this new base as the “Brahmin left,” as in the Indian upper caste.
The transformation of the Democratic Party has been summarized aptly by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who in 2016 boasted, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in Western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” The strategy didn’t work for his party that year, but in the 2020 presidential election it bore fruit. Strong performance in the educated suburbs allowed the Democrats to capture new territory, including Arizona and Georgia.
Political parties are coalitions of voters; as bases evolve, so do policies. It is hardly a surprise that Mr. Schumer, who has pushed the Democrats to embrace a suburban strategy, is now advising President-elect Joe Biden to forgive up to $50,000 in federal student-loan debt for every graduate.
Canceling student debt would play well with the Democrats’ growing base of educated elites. But how much would it help the workers who once formed the backbone of the Democratic Party? Sen. Elizabeth Warren claims forgiving student debt would be the “single biggest stimulus we could add to the economy.”
But Jason Furman, a chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama, writes that this debt forgiveness “likely has a multiplier close to zero,” because it would be taxable. Matt Bruenig, founder of the left-wing People’s Policy Project, writes that forgiving student debt is “possibly the least effective stimulus imaginable on a dollar-for-dollar basis,” because “normal stimulus measures try to put money in people’s pockets so that they can spend it. But student debt forgiveness does not do this. It’s like giving out $1+ trillion that is then immediately garnished by creditors, leaving households with no extra liquid cash to spend.”
Some would counter that forgiveness will help unburden Americans weighed down by student debt. But note which Americans will get most of the benefit. As the Brookings Institution’s Adam Looneyfound last year, Ms. Warren’s proposal to forgive up to $50,000 of debt for Americans whose households earn less than $250,000 a year is regressive. Under her plan, the bottom 60% of households would receive only 34% of the benefit. That’s because college graduates—even the ones who went into debt to pay for their degrees—tend to be relatively affluent. Were the government to forgive $50,000 for all Americans without Ms. Warren’s $250,000 cap, the result would be to transfer even more money to wealthier Americans.
A blanket forgiveness of student debt would be a Brahmin bailout, delivering economic benefits to the upper class while doing nothing for the trucker in Toledo, Ohio, or the Waffle House waitress in Atlanta. It would increase divisions between the college-educated and the rest of the country without reforming the student lending system or bloated universities that created the debt problem.
The federal government instead could let current borrowers refinance their loans at lower rates, allow student loans to be discharged through bankruptcy, or require colleges and universities to repay some of the loan balance of students who are unable to do so themselves. These ideas, offered by senators as ideologically diverse as Ms. Warren and Missouri Republican Josh Hawley, recognize that student debt is a real problem. But they don’t propose a large transfer of income to some of the wealthiest people with the best prospects in America.
Stopping the Brahmin bailout would draw a line in the sand for the Democratic Party. It can choose to spend up to $1.6 trillion in taxpayer dollars to cancel all student debt—as socialist standard-bearer Sen. Bernie Sanders proposed during his presidential campaign—or it could focus resources instead on the least among us. Brookings’s Melissa Kearney has estimated that we could eliminate most child poverty in the U.S. by enacting Social Security benefits for poor children at an annual cost of $179 billion.
Seeking votes and campaign money, Democratic politicians have correctly decided that America’s college-educated elite are a key to both. But should they build policy around the narrow interests of this elite, they risk further polarizing Americans along the class divide. That’s a recipe for igniting a populist movement that would make Democrats look back at the Trump years with affection.
Mr. Jilani is a freelance journalist in Arlington, Va.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Barr and The DOJ have yet to find systematic vote fraud.
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