By Foreign Standards

The NYT sends out a morning email, which this morning is trying to browbeat Trump into conceding the election. (Gore, of course, didn't concede in 2000 until mid-December, which they fail to mention.) "A president is trying to undo an election result: How would you describe that situation in another country?"

Well, if a President in a foreign country were asking for recounts and audits of suspicious votes, I don't think I'd call it anything except the election process playing out. Those are ordinary enough things in close races or races with questions about their conduct.

Fair enough, though: what would we say about an election like this if it happened in a foreign country? It happens that the State Department had a report on an election in Ukraine that it called "rigged." Streiff at RedState, a fellow I've met once and know to be a veteran of unimpeachable taste in Scotch, reports.

You can read the State Department report in their official archives here. Among the reasons they thought the vote was rigged were "Illegal Use of Absentee Ballots (massive electoral fraud was committed through the illegal use of absentee voter certificates).... Opposition Observers Ejected.... North Korean-Style Turnout in the East: (Turnout in the pro-Yanukovych eastern oblasts was unnaturally high)... Mobile Ballot Box Fraud.... Computer Data Allegedly Altered To Favor Yanukovych..."

So basically everything that Trump's lawyers have sworn affidavits for in their appeals to the courts, in other words.

Apparently we call that "rigged."  Well, G. W. Bush's State Department did, anyway.

A Small Matter of Formalities

What's the difference anyway? It's all rhetoric, these days, a few old-fashioned folks aside. 

Happy Veteran’s Day

I salute those of honorable service. Thank you all. 

Happy Birthday Marines

 245 years, if my math is right. 

Gatlinburg

Rode to Gatlinburg this weekend through the Newfound Gap. 

I think this haunted house has been there since I was a boy. If it’s the same one, it has a balcony that is hinged to “fall” an inch or so when you walk out on it. Gives kids quite a jump. 

These ridgeline houses were all destroyed in a recent fire. I have a cousin who is doing well for himself rebuilding, as he is one of the few civil engineers who understands how to build here.  

It’s a tourist town. Lots of fake moonshine and fake everything. The best pizza in town really is, though: it’s the Mellow Mushroom, since 1974 makers of the Southern style of American pizza. 

The great thing about Gatlinburg is that it presses right up to the border of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. You can ride down into town, eat at the Mellow Mushroom, get back on your bike, and be in the woods again in less than two minutes. 

There’s more traffic in the park than elsewhere in the mountains, but the views are pretty. 

Mean tweets

Stacey Lennox on the Lincoln Project:

The most puzzling thing about the Lincoln Project crowd is that they have never succinctly articulated exactly which of President Trump’s policies they disagreed with. Was it the judges with fidelity to the Constitution? The tax reform that favored investment? We’ve been pursuing peace in the Middle East my entire life, and the first real gains have been in the last few months. Energy independence and deregulation unleashed the economy and gave us leverage globally.

Freedom is still worth pursuing

I'm taking a break from putting up "Celebrate! Unite!" signs in my front yard to read Jay Valentine's hope for success in various legal challenges to widespread vote fraud.  May some of it be true, and may we all support the legal challenges with money, attention, and refusal to be silenced.

Replicating failure

From a comment to the Manhattan Contrarian's discourse on blue basket-case cities whose people-helping warm fuzzy charitable organizations function primarily as vote factories ("a/k/a Tammany Hall poverty pimps"):

Ok, Trump has an unlikeable personality, but his actual record in accomplishing conservative objectives is easily the best since Reagan and arguably superior since he did it in 4 years with the threat of impeachment hanging over his administration from day 1. And your take is that Mr. and Mrs. Middle of the Road or Mr. and Mrs. Traditional Republican would rather vote for a senile, corrupt, and Leftist Joe Biden for the big job because they prefer higher energy prices, higher taxes, Constitution ignoring judges, open borders, bending over to please China, and the threat of Supreme Court packing and two new Democrat states rather than put up with 4 more years of ugly Tweets? Yea that makes a lot more sense than massive vote fraud coming exclusively out of inner city Democrat run districts.

Also, cheerful thoughts from another commenter on why the fraud exploded this year while 2016 kept it down to the usual dull roar:

2016 might well have been the result of Democrats thinking it would be such a landslide, that it wasn't worth the risk of fully engaging 'the apparatus.'

2020 may well be payback along with a YOLO risk mentality, which will hopefully make it possible to nail them this time.

We're waiting

 

Go back to sleep

 The press is incurious when it gets the result it wanted.  Otherwise, it's insatiable, even if that means poring over your high school yearbook.

Cracking the code

It's all a question of making the words mean what you want them to mean:

When liberal journalists say something is racist or white supremacist, they don’t use the words the way normal people use them. We see now that they detach concepts of whiteness, blackness, etc., from skin color, family, or ancestry and attach it instead to ideology and party.

You’re white if you’re a Hispanic who votes Republican. You’re white supremacist if you’re a black voter who votes Republican. This shows us that racist and white supremacist, coming from these quarters, might just mean Republican or conservative.

Still not a good look

 Kyle Mann edits the Bee.

A Few Red Flags

 An analysis by a former auditor. 

Curious Senate Results

It's odd that the President would out-perform his 2016 numbers and then be beaten by Joe Biden even though the President doubled his cut of the black vote, on which the Democratic Party often relies. It's even stranger, though, that Joe Biden's titanic landslide didn't come with coat-tails:  the Republican Party kept the Senate, and added to the House. 

One explanation for why that might happen is if Republican voters turned on Trump, but otherwise continued to vote for Republicans down ballot. If that were true, you'd expect to see lots of races with Republican Senate numbers well in advance of the President's numbers. But the results don't show that.

What the results appear to show is that Trump and the Republican Senators running alongside him mostly posted similar numbers, as you'd expect if Trump voters were also likely to be Republican voters down-ballot. Biden's numbers are the ones that look weird. In swing states Biden votes are not tethered to the Senate numbers.

Michigan
Trump: 2,637,173
GOP Sen: 2,630,042
Dif: 7,131

Biden: 2,787,544
Dem Sen: 2,718,451
Dif: 69,093

Georgia

Trump: 2,432,799
GOP Sen: 2,433,617
Dif: 818

Biden: 2,414,651
Dem Sen: 2,318,850
Dif: 95,801

So one possibility is that somebody's inventing Biden votes on a tight schedule. In Georgia, they knew after Tuesday night counting got halted that they needed around 100,000 votes. Since each one takes time to process, time is limited, and you can't expand your personnel much without running risks of being discovered, they're turning out the Biden votes without bothering to fill out the rest of the ballot. 

In Georgia that will be particularly hard to prove, ironically, because of the voting machines being so terrible. I've been complaining about that for years. It will be ironic if Brian Kemp is now unable to prove a fairly large degree of fraud because of his own failure to upgrade to more secure machinery. 

Another possibility that occurs to me:  at least some of the swamp-creature Congressional Republican leadership is in on the scheme. They've agreed to let the Biden race be stolen in order to get rid of Trump, who is a problem for crony DC types of all parties. However, a condition is that the fraud can't be used to unseat any Republican Congressmen. Those races have to be run straight, or else they'll blow up the game. 

The first possibility is one of a party engaged in fraud, in a hurry, while their party machinery buys them time with delays. The second possibility is of a self-appointed ruling class attempting to purge itself of an unwanted democratic element, and to reassert its control over the Federal government. 

Are there non-fraud explanations that might be plausible? Lots of voters who know only about American politics that they hate Trump, so they showed up to vote in just one race on the ballot? But only in swing states? One possibility is that these numbers are wrong, and that we'll see in the final analysis that there wasn't such a discrepancy; but if that's true, then why didn't the Biden landslide also carry the Senate?

Darn populace

 The Bee.

Oopsie

You can watch the Wisconsin vote tally flip on live TV. Language warning, and if you don't want to sit through the whole thing, start at about 4:30.

 

"Dude, where's my landslide?"

Steve Hayward at Powerline:

With the GOP keeping the Senate and improving in the House, we have four years of gridlock ahead, and as I always point out, gridlock is the next best thing to constitutional government. Kiss goodbye court packing, ending the filibuster, the Green New Deal, big income tax hikes, a massive blue state bail out (though I suspect McConnell will give them something), and statehood for DC and Puerto Rico. Then look ahead to the midterms in 2022, when the GOP can realistically hope to retake the House.

Tennessee River

The Tennessee is not that interesting, but the Little Tennessee and its feeder rivers really are. The French Broad River runs east and then north, wrapping around the mountains to turn west. It is also joined by the Pigeon river, whose headwaters are in the Graveyard Fields atop the Pisgah ridge. Both join with the Little Tennessee into the Tennessee itself. That goes on to join the Mississippi. 

Not over yet

 Lots to unpack in this Powerline summary.  Also, interesting demographics from the New York Times, though I haven't tried to go behind the paywall to figure out whether this is national or regional:

Bingo

This Dennis Prager summary of what Democrats hate about Trump personally and what Republicans hate about the left as an ideology is eerily precise in summing up what I heard from my troubled Democratic niece several days ago--almost to the point to using the same words.  He nailed quite a few of my responses, too.