Even Peggy pegged this one:
Biden’s Georgia Speech Is a Break Point
He thought he was merely appealing to his base. He might have united the rest of the country against him.
By Peggy Noonan
And: According to Kim, Biden continues to plagerize:
Biden Follows the Trump Playbook
His Georgia speech’s demagoguery echoes his predecessor’s from just over a year ago.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Potomac Watch: One year after his inaugural address calling for ‘unity,’ Joe Biden has stirred up division with a voting rights speech Mitch McConnell called ‘incoherent, incorrect and beneath his office.' So why has the President’s rhetoric become so harsh? Images: AFP/Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Joe Biden is an admirer of his immediate predecessor. The president’s Georgia speech was as close as they come to a Donald Trump special.
Mr. Trump went to Georgia just over a year ago to rally voters for the Senate runoff elections. In a rant of a speech, he made false claims about the electoral system, accused Democrats of undemocratic aims, and attacked the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Mr. Biden this week went to Atlanta to rally support for two federal voting bills. In a rant of a speech, he made false claims about the electoral system, accused Republicans of undemocratic aims, and pre-emptively attacked the legitimacy of the 2022 election. Now who’s the wrecking ball?
Where are those Washington Post “fact checkers” when you need them? They were on the hop for the Trump speech, documenting some 90 “untruths” in the course of that campaign rally. Mr. Trump rolled out his claims that Georgia’s vote-counting system was rigged, beset by disappearing drop boxes and floods of absentee ballots cast by dead people, felons, nonresidents and teens. Georgia election officials disproved all this.
Mr. Biden’s speech was every bit as divorced from facts. He baldly claimed Georgia Republicans enacted an election law designed purely to put up “obstacles” to voting. He said the law made it “harder for you to vote by mail” and limited “the number of drop boxes and the hours you can use them.” These changes, he asserted, were designed to create “longer lines at the polls,” causing hungry voters to give up. He promised the state GOP would “subvert” future elections with a provision allowing it willy-nilly to “remove local election officials” it doesn’t like. The law overall, he claimed, enables Republicans to get “the result they want—no matter what the voters have said, no matter what the count.”
These claims are as wild as any Mr. Trump made—even if the fact checkers have gone conveniently deaf. The Georgia law leaves in place no-excuse absentee voting—and actually makes it stronger, by getting rid of signature matching. It expands weekend early voting and sets minimum Election Day voting hours. It enshrines in law the use of absentee-ballot drop boxes—which didn’t exist in Georgia before their temporary pandemic use. Yes, the state Legislature can remove officials, but only after proving “malfeasance” or “gross negligence” over at least two elections. And Georgia’s broader electoral safeguards remain in place—the exact checks and balances in place when Mr. Biden carried the state last year. The president’s claims are straight-up fiction.
The broader Biden-Democratic claim that election-integrity measures make it “harder to vote” is one big untruth. California has among the loosest election laws in the country, New Hampshire the toughest. California routinely ranks at the bottom for presidential election-year turnout, New Hampshire at the top. As Hans Von Spakovsky and John Fund document in their recent book, “Our Broken Elections: How the Left Changed the Way You Vote,” Georgia’s decision in 2008 to impose a statewide voter ID law (suppression!) has actually produced record-high registration and turnout, especially among minorities.
Just as Mr. Trump in Georgia accused “left-wing, socialist, communist Marxists” of “stealing” an election so as to impose “unchecked, unrestrained, absolute power” over Americans, Mr. Biden branded Republicans segregationists, traitors, and domestic “enemies” while predicting national collapse if he doesn’t get his way. The coming vote on his federal election takeover would mark no less than a “turning point in this nation’s history,” the choice between “democracy” or “autocracy,” and whether the GOP obtained the “kind of power you see in totalitarian states.” Really? He failed to mention the other, likely possibility: that his bills fail, and the states carry on with their highly successful 246-year tradition of holding fair and free elections.
Most astonishing—and most cynical—was Mr. Biden’s decision to match Mr. Trump in sowing doubt on electoral outcomes. Presidents ought to reassure Americans their votes count, that they have a duty to get to the ballot box. Mr. Biden instead bluntly told his followers that if his bills failed, “your vote won’t matter,” because Republicans will simply “disenfranchise” you.
Mr. Trump’s rhetoric helped the Republican incumbents lose the Georgia runoffs by depressing GOP turnout, and it’s an odd strategy for a Democratic Party facing a midterm. That is, unless the White House is expecting a blowout loss and is already engineering an excuse. If the Democrats who have mismanaged Covid, inflation and foreign policy can’t win on the merits, they will pre-emptively delegitimize the coming election by accusing Republicans of stealing it. Never mind the damage this will have on American trust in institutions.
Mr. Biden ran on a promise to lower the temperature, and what a joke that has been. It turns out Democrats and the media have no real problem after all with a hyperbolic, name-calling, factually challenged president. Just so long as that president is their guy
By Salena Zito
BEDFORD, Pa. — State Rep. Jesse Topper’s legislative office hugs the sidewalk along Richard Street in this Bedford County seat. A big picture window offers a view into the cheery office. Many constituents of the 78th District come here for help from the one elected official most like themselves.
You are more likely to run into a state representative like Mr. Topper in your local grocery store, sitting in your church pew on Sunday or coaching your kids’ little league team than any lawmaker you vote for in your lifetime.
It’s a connection to government that is vitally important.
Mr. Topper says he knows his district because — with the exception of his college years — he’s spent his whole life within its boundaries. And he said “constituent services” — fixing problems for his fellow citizens — is his most important role.
Every 10 years that relationship alters when the census numbers reveal how populations in the state have shifted — and new lines are drawn to accommodate the shift, a process that is not supposed to be designed to easily escort a new party into power.
When the latter happens — when the lines are drawn for political gain — the process is called “gerrymandering.”
Mr. Topper says that’s exactly what’s happening with the new lines drawn by the Pennsylvania Legislative Redistricting Commission: “The proposed new district lines divide rural Pennsylvania and severs smaller counties from each other and merge them into districts that don’t share the same interests in the state legislature.”
The new preliminary House map — drawn by a five-person panel of the top legislative leaders from both parties in the state assembly and a chairperson selected by the Democratic-majority state Supreme Court — forces 12 incumbent Republicans into running against each other; conversely, only two Democrats share that fate.
The process is far from over — Pennsylvanians can submit feedback online or at meetings this month to voice their concerns or support — and the panel then has 30 days to consider the comments.
Mr. Topper says he is not speaking out of turn when he says the Democrats have drawn the commission’s map for political gain, “I’m not saying anything that the Democrat minority leader Joanna McClinton didn’t say in front of the (Pennsylvania) Press Club, when she said to a bunch of reporters, when the question was, ‘How do you plan to win back the majority in the house?’ And she said, ‘Redistricting.’”
Mr. Topper said it is not as though it’s some secret playbook that no one is supposed to know about: “I just find it hard to understand why more media didn’t cover that particular quote.
Part of what has contributed to the realignment of our political parties in this country is the sense among voters — in particular among voters in the less populated places, no matter their political affiliation — that they have fewer and fewer shared values with those who represent them, a sentiment that has spread to almost every institution they interact with and which has upended the political threads that were designed to bind us together.
When you take away a community’s state lawmaker seat, which for generations has been held by someone local, it not only diminishes the influence and clout of the people who have little to begin with, it also widens the gap between representative and those represented, and resentment simmers toward those who drew the new lines.
It’s a problem few people consider, especially the three members of the commission who gave preliminary approval to the lines, all of whom live in highly populated urban districts and who likely never once experienced the distance from power that people in rural districts endure.
Keystone College political science professor Jeff Brauer says gerrymandering is the most raw exercise of political power in the United States, one that allows legislators to pick their voters rather than voters picking the legislators: “It is a monumental event and a complex process, which always involves many competing considerations, such as political party power, minority representation and making sense for localities, among others.”
Mr. Brauer said no redistricting process is more complex than that for the Pennsylvania General Assembly, “which is the largest, most expensive professional state legislature in the nation.”
He added that while Democrats and “fair districting” groups are lauding this new map, “what seems to be put aside with this round of mapping is the consideration, perhaps the most important consideration, of representation that makes sense to local communities, especially local communities in the more rural parts of the state.”
State legislators are already the most important “local” public servants, as they are the link between all levels of governments in the country. “Obviously they know state government, but they also work closely with both federal and local officials to solve problems for their constituents,” said Mr. Brauer. “None of this is more true than for their rural constituents. For them, state legislators are often the lifeline to government services and aid.”
Mr. Brauer said the proposed maps for Pennsylvania adversely impact rural people and their vital connections to their state legislators: “With the proposed maps, many rural constituents will be very long distances from legislative offices and the services they provide. Many rural constituents will lose long-standing representatives and the relationships they have developed with them.”
It will create a situation that will further isolate rural people from the political, cultural and economic elites who make decisions on their behalf.
“It will also further increase their distrust of such elites,” said Mr. Brauer, adding that “rural constituents — often conservative to moderate Republicans, Democrats and independents — make up a large percentage of the current populist movement which is challenging such elites. These proposed maps show a fundamental misunderstanding of this major political divide and will only serve to exacerbate it.”
Drive through this state and most of the scenery that captures your imagination is in the least populated areas — they have either always been rural, or they have become so after industries that once fueled an economy that supported more people left for greener pastures, cheaper labor or became obsolete because of automation and technology.
Nevertheless, these rural areas are also some of the most important contributors to our prosperity — through agriculture, energy and recreation. Yet their contributions are often overlooked because they don’t have the population muscle larger cities possess.
Mr. Topper says his district is one of the few that won’t change much, but his concerns are not about him: “This is about the whole state; you make decisions like this, and there will be long-term consequences down the road that none of the people who drew this map are thinking about. They are not thinking about it because they don’t know how something like this feels,” he said.
“You can’t keep cutting communities and localities up and isolating people and not expect them to react in the voting booth. You’d think someone would have learned that lesson by now.”
Click here for the full story.
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Fits right in with book now reading on how "woke media" helped undermine democracy:
The war to save democracy could kill democracy
The notion that Americans should emulate Israel’s coalition is based on a fallacy about both countries. And the more liberals talk about democracy dying, the more danger it’s in.
By JONATHAN S. TOBIN
(January 13, 2022 / JNS) Are Israelis happy with their government? A poll published a few weeks ago by the country’s Channel 12 showed that a plurality preferred the current coalition comprising parties of the right, center, left and one Arab faction over the previous right-wing/religious government led by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Yet when asked who they wanted to lead the country, the answer remains what it’s been for years: Netanyahu maintains a wide lead over all possible alternatives, including current Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and his partner, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid. And when also asked which party they would vote for in a theoretical new election, the answer also remains the same as it was throughout a stalemate that lasted over two years and four elections: Netanyahu’s Likud would win the most votes, though would have no chance of forming a governing coalition with its allies.
The government led by Bennett divided against itself on all important issues. But since the only alternative remains an endless round of inconclusive elections, it’s likely that the current arrangement will remain in place at least until Lapid is scheduled to switch jobs with Bennett in 2023 since all those concerned remain united by their belief that Netanyahu must be kept out of office.
That doesn’t sound like a good formula for leading a country that faces enormous problems on many fronts, even if it has brought Israelis a respite from unnecessary elections.
Yet to one of the leading pundits in the mainstream media, that sounds like an example for Americans to emulate.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman may have gone beyond his expiration date sometime in the distant past, but has somehow retained his perch on the opinion pages of the flagship of liberal journalism, even if his columns appear less frequently than they once did. If nothing else, Friedman remains a reliable indicator of conventional wisdom among the chattering classes, and his columns do tell us what the foreign-policy and journalism establishments are thinking.
So when he wrote this week urging that the Democratic Party follow Bennett and Lapid’s example if it wants to hold onto power in Washington, it’s an indicator both of the columnist’s inveterate foolishness as well as of the moral panic that has seized hold of many people about the future of American democracy.
Friedman is just one of many to sound the alarm about the impending doom of American democracy. The defeat of former President Donald Trump and the Democrat’s narrow hold on Congress haven’t been enough to calm their ruffled nerves. They are angry about the unwillingness of Republicans to completely repudiate Trump in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot. They’re just as infuriated about the refusal of approximately half the country to acquiesce to claims by President Joe Biden and other Democrats that if a series of sweeping laws federalizing elections and throwing any notion of ensuring the integrity of the vote out the window isn’t passed, then democracy will be destroyed. And they’re astonished that conservatives don’t agree that those who oppose the voting bills are the moral equivalent of advocates of “Jim Crow” racism or that this means that the GOP is now a party of “insurrectionist” traitors.
What’s more, they lack the self-awareness to realize that these wild claims are as much of a “big lie” as Trump’s are about the 2020 election, or for that matter, the Democrats’ floating of the Russian collusion conspiracy theory to undermine the legitimacy of the 2016 election results.
But what’s really troubling them is the way Biden’s approval ratings are sinking, coupled with the prospect that the Democrats are likely to receive an even worse thumping in the midterm elections this fall than is usual for parties in power, which means that they will lose control of Congress in 10 months.
Rather than acknowledge mistakes, they are doubling down on the hyperbole. Having convinced themselves that their gaslighting the country about a disgraceful riot being the moral equivalent of the 9/11 attacks is actually true, many on the left now sound as if they believe that the only way to save American democracy is to prevent the GOP from winning back Congress and the presidency in 2024 by any means possible, even if it means changing the rules or overturning constitutional norms.
This is yet another troubling symptom of the bitter tribal culture war into which U.S. politics has descended. Americans on both sides of the party divide no longer credit each other with good intentions. The notion that the other side’s aim is not merely to enact mistaken policies but to destroy democracy is also commonplace on both ends of the political spectrum.
So when Friedman writes to analogize the political situation in Israel to the current political dilemma facing America, he’s echoing what many liberals in both countries believe.
Netanyahu’s critics thought he was destroying democracy. Even if you agree that a change at the top was inevitable, Israeli democracy wasn’t in danger. The problem was that democracy (as expressed by the country’s system of proportional representation) was working all too well with the narrow split among the voters about Netanyahu being accurately reflected in the composition of each new Knesset. The result was that something had to give—and that meant a group of parties with nothing in common except for their loathing of one person. That formed the basis of a coalition government to end the stalemate.
As is currently the case now in the United States, at no point was democracy in danger. Those who claimed that right-wingers pointing out the flaws in the system, especially with respect to the selection of Supreme Court justices, or the bias of most of the Israeli media against Netanyahu were signs of proto-authoritarianism were at best being disingenuous and at worst simply lying for political advantage.
Friedman’s advice to Democrats is that they should discard the leftist agenda Biden has embraced in order to secure Republican votes in the midterms. He then jumps the shark by advocating that they nominate renegade Republican Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.)—who is using her role as wingman to Democrats on the House’s Jan. 6 Committee in order to demonize not just Trump but all Republicans—to replace Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024.
That’s not going to happen for a number of reasons. Unlike the right-wingers who make up a considerable portion of Bennett’s coalition, Cheney represents no one but herself and a tiny remnant of what is left of Never Trump Republicans. No matter what they think of Trump, almost everyone in the GOP believes that the Democrats’ talk of “insurrection” is aimed at destroying them and not just the former president. Nor will the Democrats’ left-wing activist base, which appears to have captured Biden on most matters of substance, acquiesce to any such dubious alliance.
However, the main problem is that by hyping a non-existent threat to democracy in order to try and delegitimize their opponents, liberals in the chattering classes are creating a real crisis of confidence in the system. Indeed, with both parties starting to believe that there is no way they can be defeated by fair means, it’s easy to see that no matter who wins in 2022 and 2024, each side will be prepared to make their own claims about their defeat being the result of foul play or a “plot against America.”
For the moment, Israel is living with an unsatisfactory compromise. Absurd talk about democracy being doomed will resume the next time voters are given a chance to put Netanyahu back in office by democratic means. In the United States, the war to save democracy is not only equally disingenuous but doing far more damage than Trump’s penchant for flouting convention ever did. Not only is Israel’s example a poor one for Americans to follow; it’s imperative that sensible people on both sides of the aisle start denouncing the apocalyptic rhetoric lest the predictions of disaster become self-fulfilling.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.
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Instead of missiles this time it might be troops?
Russia Indicates Impending Military Deployment to Cuba and Venezuela
Russia’s deputy foreign minister is not excluding deploying military infrastructure to Cuba and Venezuela if tension with the United States remains high.
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