nothing in your entire posting history would indicate you actually care about what happened to the parents or the children.
The refusal to engage in fake, performative outrage for political reasons should not be mistaken for a lack of empathy. Not everyone likes to milk what they see as a politically opportune moment for as many Virtue Points as they can muster.
Giving my own opinion on the subject (I agree with Munoz* that the vast majority of cases are of being reunited without talking to the government because people have cell phones and internet nowadays, offered the same argument years ago because it makes perfect sense, and it was widely criticized despite being accepted now) would take away from my real point here. Namely, that every substantial criticism of the process, from the facilities to the lackluster way we handle these children under our care are true of the past administration as well as this one. This desperately wants to be ignored now, because it would imply some semblance of self criticism is in order, and instead all focus is on Trump.
* but still think it is criminally negligent on the part of the government to settle the fate of a child with a mere phone call and not even attempt further investigation. Just because we think that is what is happening doesn't mean that is what is happening. That includes Trump.
I think the most moral thing I can do is refuse to give the moral high ground to people who want to change the laws by inches and act like they are redeeming all mankind. The issues with our system go far beyond Trump's changes and into the system itself.
About election fraud accusations > I found it on the internet. A compilation of many, picked from codex.
>Woman arrested in Vanderburgh county for pre checking boxes on 400+ ballots https://archive.is/4dfIs
>Butler county Pennsylvania loses untold number of mail in ballots https://archive.is/aYcUd
>Ballots stolen from mail boxes and discarded on roadsides in Washington town https://archive.is/J7zXE
>Group claims 400,000 ballots sent to residents who moved out of state or died in California https://archive.is/IrbaU
>Texas officer & poll watcher testifies on 2020 Houston Voting Fraud Using stacks of drivers licenses , (has photos) https://archive.is/YgPcn
>West Palm Beach residents receive duplicate ballots and ballots for dead relatives https://archive.is/eGO3T
>Pennsylvania postal employee on leave and now fired after bags of mail discovered outside of home put out for trash pickup https://archive.is/nU32I
>25,263 ballots rejected in Colorado primary https://archive.is/hdlXg
>Double absentee ballots sent to residents in Henrico county https://archive.is/5ubBL
>Pa rejects 336,000 duplicate ballot requests 34,000 rejected for other reasons . Many voters request ballots up to 11 times https://archive.is/S2WSS
>Mecklenburg residents receiving double ballots due to labelling glitch https://archive.is/nEDFx
>San Mateo residents receive multiple ballots https://archive.is/PvLTU
>Multiple absentee ballot applications showing up at Flint Michigan homes https://archive.is/ieaho
>Florida man arrested for obtaining dead wife's ballot and forging signature to "test the system" https://archive.is/0nASP
>Election officials ask voters to not disinfect their mail in ballots as handfulls have already arrived destroyed and unable to be tabulated https://archive.is/GzEIp
>400 duplicate ballots sent to local voters in Richmond https://archive.is/dmU3I
>Duplicate ballots sent to "some" in North Carolina. How many? Who knows. https://archive.is/cJHrU
>Placer county residents receiving duplicate ballots https://archive.is/49s9J
>Bay area voters receive multiple ballots https://archive.is/MVH4l
>USPS confirms missing ballots, never made it to residents of Seminole county. How many? Who knows https://archive.is/w7xDd
>Board of elections resends 99,000+ ballots in Brooklyn . Officials worry numerous originals already filled out and sent off https://archive.is/2pnX1
>50,000 ballots in Ohio sent to wrong addresses https://archive.is/3zQti
>500,000 ballots in Virginia labelled with wrong return address https://archive.is/qdAge
>Glitch sends duplicate ballots in pittsburg Allegheny county https://archive.is/aiPzw
>Glitch sends duplicate ballots to Needham town residents https://archive.is/H7QpL
>Detroit elections, where 72% of absentee votes do not match registered voters https://archive.is/1SSGK
>80,000 ballots dissappeared in baltimore https://archive.is/dZnqb
>New York voting official warns people will use dead people to vote, and a few have https://archive.is/ZwA36
>Michigan secretary misprinted military absentee ballots . 400 already issued https://archive.is/aG87n
>Mail in ballots found in road ditch in Wisconsin https://archive.is/nCQLH
>4 officials arrested in ballot harvesting scheme https://archive.is/DWFlj
>9 military mail in ballots thrown in dumpster in PA https://archive.is/EDBm8
>134 felony voter fraud charges announced in Dem primary https://archive.is/7eJkz
>New Yorkers receiving ballots with wrong names and adresses https://archive.is/jd65P
>Queens voters receiving military ballots https://archive.is/YLIoB
>Sun sentinel detailing Florida voting fraud https://archive.is/YRUQ1
>Ballot harvesting scam exposed in minneapolis https://archive.is/flFsD
Total number of fraudulent votes = not enough to overturn the election. Period...
First was "allegations with no evidence" and "there was no fraud"
Now that people are finding fraudulent votes, is "not enough to overturn the election"
What is the next step?
Well - I dont have the time to go through these necessarily. First - just citing an online article doesnt constitute evidence.
Second - I clicked on the bottom one since I recognized the story: It's the Project Veritas attempt to smear Ilhan Omar. Project Veritas is known for manipulating facts and creating false stories with them. IIRC, the Ilhan Omar ballot harvesting thing has since been proven totally false (I believe the guy in the video has since admitted he was paid of Project Veritas to lie).
So consider that of the group of links you posted, many (or all) of them are either flase or at least unsubstantiated.
Mistakes do happen in elections. The whole glitch thing in Michigan is an example of a mistake. It was discovered and corrected. No one has been able to prove (or even meaningfully argue, to my knowledge) that the votes were glitched out intentionally.
It's *(hard* to steal an election without leaving a paper trail. If election fraud was widespread enough to flip the election, it would be very hard to keep that a secret. The fact that almost no stories are being reported upon by investigative journalists with a history of ethical investigation should say something.
I didn't click through all either, but his first link wasn't even about the November election, but rather about a summer primary in Indiana (not exactly a disputed state). Again, it's becoming clear that people raising these allegations are not taking the time to vet them. And thus don't actually take the issue seriously. We shouldn't have to either.
(...)
It's *(hard* to steal an election without leaving a paper trail. If election fraud was widespread enough to flip the election, it would be very hard to keep that a secret. The fact that almost no stories are being reported upon by investigative journalists with a history of ethical investigation should say something.
All, I repeat ALL of the media is pro democrats on USA and in the western hemisphere. Of course mainstream journalists would't investigate something that is against their interests. Is like expecting cigar companies to investigate the negative effects of cigar...
Note that Trump won in 2016 with a tiny fraction of Hilary's election money and that the media wasted 4 years spreading lies about him.
I am an election fraud skeptic. Intentional election fraud seems implausible alone to me, but possible, but doing so on a mass scale seems impossible.
However, I want one thing explained to me.
I can see who voted on this government website. I can sort it by birth date, and see the oldest ones who did. The first page is full of dates of 01/01/1800. This implies a data error and that the date of birth was not filled for whatever reason. Fair enough.
But at the bottom of the first page and covering the second, third, fourth, and beyond I start to see dates of people 120-90 years old who requested and returned ballots. Lots and lots of them. They all have unique birth dates, meaning this wasn't a data error. A mistaken number for the third year digit (i.e 1999 rather than 1909) seems to be hard to believe for the mass numbers of them. What is going on? I'm sincerely curious, and will accept a mundane, non-criminal explanation. But I feel like it deserves one.
(...)
It's *(hard* to steal an election without leaving a paper trail. If election fraud was widespread enough to flip the election, it would be very hard to keep that a secret. The fact that almost no stories are being reported upon by investigative journalists with a history of ethical investigation should say something.
All, I repeat ALL of the media is pro democrats on USA and in the western hemisphere. Of course mainstream journalists would't investigate something that is against their interests. Is like expecting cigar companies to investigate the negative effects of cigar...
Note that Trump won in 2016 with a tiny fraction of Hilary's election money and that the media wasted 4 years spreading lies about him.
All media. Really? I mean, in your list of articles alone were media that were definitely with pro conservative biases.
Am I now supposed to believe there is some conspiracy to keep ALL reputable media outlets silent on the issue of election fraud? It's ridiculous on the face of it how implausible that seems, especially considering that the *largest* non national media news network is conservative. 90% of radio media is conservative.
It's ironic of course that you mentioned 2016. The NYTimes spent more time running articles on the mythical super corrupt Clinton emails than any other story in the entire election. Man. They're biased for Democrats that they continually reported on a story that damaged Clinton. That's some crazy 3d chess right there!
I am an election fraud skeptic. Intentional election fraud seems implausible alone to me, but possible, but doing so on a mass scale seems impossible.
However, I want one thing explained to me.
I can see who voted on this government website. I can sort it by birth date, and see the oldest ones who did. The first page is full of dates of 01/01/1800. This implies a data error and that the date of birth was not filled for whatever reason. Fair enough.
But at the bottom of the first page and covering the second, third, fourth, and beyond I start to see dates of people 120-90 years old who requested and returned ballots. Lots and lots of them. They all have unique birth dates, meaning this wasn't a data error. A mistaken number for the third year digit (i.e 1999 rather than 1909) seems to be hard to believe for the mass numbers of them. What is going on? I'm sincerely curious, and will accept a mundane, non-criminal explanation. But I feel like it deserves one.
Were those votes actually counted? The fact that you noticed seems to me to imply that somebody else did too. The Antrim County non-issue in Michigan is the same thing. It was noticed and dealt with. No fraud, just a mistake that was corrected by existing checks and balances.
I also have a question that I would like answered and I too am willing to settle for a non-nefarious answer.
The Trump campaign has claimed (on twitter and sometimes unsuccessfully in court) that there was widespread voter fraud in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia and elsewhere.
Why aren't Republicans who won House and Senate races in those states refusing to accept their election results? If there is widespread fraud, why are they claiming they won? Their races were tabulated on the exact same ballots that carried those states for Biden.
How can you claim your election was perfectly legal and valid and then turn around and say that the election was rigged when both results rely on the exact same ballots??
This is also why they will breathlessly report on left wing election fraud narratives like they are absolutely true and beyond doubt. For the record, I have always said I didn't believe both.
We have a media that is more ideologically controlled than the average tin pot dictatorship and if this wasn't true Julian Assange would be a free man and more than a fraction of people might actually trust the media.
I am an election fraud skeptic. Intentional election fraud seems implausible alone to me, but possible, but doing so on a mass scale seems impossible.
However, I want one thing explained to me.
I can see who voted on this government website. I can sort it by birth date, and see the oldest ones who did. The first page is full of dates of 01/01/1800. This implies a data error and that the date of birth was not filled for whatever reason. Fair enough.
But at the bottom of the first page and covering the second, third, fourth, and beyond I start to see dates of people 120-90 years old who requested and returned ballots. Lots and lots of them. They all have unique birth dates, meaning this wasn't a data error. A mistaken number for the third year digit (i.e 1999 rather than 1909) seems to be hard to believe for the mass numbers of them. What is going on? I'm sincerely curious, and will accept a mundane, non-criminal explanation. But I feel like it deserves one.
Were those votes actually counted? The fact that you noticed seems to me to imply that somebody else did too. The Antrim County non-issue in Michigan is the same thing. It was noticed and dealt with. No fraud, just a mistake that was corrected by existing checks and balances.
No idea. I would like to know. Our government has made no statement on it far as I know and government departments here are notoriously online and chatty. Our state Treasury page is half memes and half serious talk.
I am an election fraud skeptic. Intentional election fraud seems implausible alone to me, but possible, but doing so on a mass scale seems impossible.
However, I want one thing explained to me.
I can see who voted on this government website. I can sort it by birth date, and see the oldest ones who did. The first page is full of dates of 01/01/1800. This implies a data error and that the date of birth was not filled for whatever reason. Fair enough.
But at the bottom of the first page and covering the second, third, fourth, and beyond I start to see dates of people 120-90 years old who requested and returned ballots. Lots and lots of them. They all have unique birth dates, meaning this wasn't a data error. A mistaken number for the third year digit (i.e 1999 rather than 1909) seems to be hard to believe for the mass numbers of them. What is going on? I'm sincerely curious, and will accept a mundane, non-criminal explanation. But I feel like it deserves one.
Were those votes actually counted? The fact that you noticed seems to me to imply that somebody else did too. The Antrim County non-issue in Michigan is the same thing. It was noticed and dealt with. No fraud, just a mistake that was corrected by existing checks and balances.
No idea. I would like to know. Our government has made no statement on it far as I know and government departments here are notoriously online and chatty. Our state Treasury page is half memes and half serious talk.
Michigan was won by Biden. Period. There is absolutely no credible evidence to the contrary. Even the conservative radio station I listen to (WJR-Detroit) says so. They had a man on the inside in the Detroit polling station where the alleged fraud took place and he said there was nothing. No fraud, just chaos due to more people wanting in than were allowed due to Covid social-distancing requirements.
(...)
Am I now supposed to believe there is some conspiracy to keep ALL reputable media outlets silent on the issue of election fraud? (...)!
The media is not democrat leaning? Just look to for eg, the "Russia collusion", literally every journal except fox news was saying that Trump got elected by "russian bots", Trump was investigated for years and they found no proof. After he was proven innocent, no media wrote an single line apologizing and no fact checker agency "fact checked" that conspiracy. Apparently, conspiracy is only bad when the right does it... The media also accused Trump from separating illegal immigrant children from his family, a policy which Obama started.
And is a hard problem to solve. Many of this children has no documents. Is easy for someone who entered as a tourist and overstayed his visa to find the parents and send all home. But how to do that for people with no papers? What if two families says that they are the parents of a children?
The establishment HATES trump. Outside of "Western Europe", the news tends to be far more favorable for Trump by a reason.
I am an election fraud skeptic. Intentional election fraud seems implausible alone to me, but possible, but doing so on a mass scale seems impossible.
However, I want one thing explained to me.
I can see who voted on this government website. I can sort it by birth date, and see the oldest ones who did. The first page is full of dates of 01/01/1800. This implies a data error and that the date of birth was not filled for whatever reason. Fair enough.
But at the bottom of the first page and covering the second, third, fourth, and beyond I start to see dates of people 120-90 years old who requested and returned ballots. Lots and lots of them. They all have unique birth dates, meaning this wasn't a data error. A mistaken number for the third year digit (i.e 1999 rather than 1909) seems to be hard to believe for the mass numbers of them. What is going on? I'm sincerely curious, and will accept a mundane, non-criminal explanation. But I feel like it deserves one.
Were those votes actually counted? The fact that you noticed seems to me to imply that somebody else did too. The Antrim County non-issue in Michigan is the same thing. It was noticed and dealt with. No fraud, just a mistake that was corrected by existing checks and balances.
No idea. I would like to know. Our government has made no statement on it far as I know and government departments here are notoriously online and chatty. Our state Treasury page is half memes and half serious talk.
Michigan was won by Biden. Period. There is absolutely no credible evidence to the contrary. Even the conservative radio station I listen to (WJR-Detroit) says so. They had a man on the inside in the Detroit polling station where the alleged fraud took place and he said there was nothing. No fraud, just chaos due to more people wanting in than were allowed due to Covid social-distancing requirements.
The only evidence required to dismiss the claims is how narrowly tailored they are vis a vis where Trump needed slightly better results. Apparently, the fraud ONLY took place in MI, WI, PA, GA, AZ and NV, and ONLY in regards to the Presidental race, which is, at most, 1/20th of the actual ballot, which is also filled with Congressman, judges, Water Commissioners, and ballot initiatives etc etc etc. If the Presidential race is invalid, so is EVERY other race or ballot initiative in those states.
The response you get from those seriously invested in this theory when you bring this inconvenient truth up is that Democrats threw the other races ON PURPOSE so it wouldn't seem so obvious. So, willing to subvert a national election, but not to TOO great an extent.
(...)
It's *(hard* to steal an election without leaving a paper trail. If election fraud was widespread enough to flip the election, it would be very hard to keep that a secret. The fact that almost no stories are being reported upon by investigative journalists with a history of ethical investigation should say something.
All, I repeat ALL of the media is pro democrats on USA and in the western hemisphere. Of course mainstream journalists would't investigate something that is against their interests. Is like expecting cigar companies to investigate the negative effects of cigar...
Note that Trump won in 2016 with a tiny fraction of Hilary's election money and that the media wasted 4 years spreading lies about him.
Many of your links are to mainstream daily newspapers, belying the claim that the news is not investigating these claims. What we're instead seeing is a failure by people calling for investigating the election to acknowledge that many of the fraud claims *have been investigated* and have fallen apart.
(...)
It's *(hard* to steal an election without leaving a paper trail. If election fraud was widespread enough to flip the election, it would be very hard to keep that a secret. The fact that almost no stories are being reported upon by investigative journalists with a history of ethical investigation should say something.
All, I repeat ALL of the media is pro democrats on USA and in the western hemisphere. Of course mainstream journalists would't investigate something that is against their interests. Is like expecting cigar companies to investigate the negative effects of cigar...
Note that Trump won in 2016 with a tiny fraction of Hilary's election money and that the media wasted 4 years spreading lies about him.
Many of your links are to mainstream daily newspapers, belying the claim that the news is not investigating these claims. What we're instead seeing is a failure by people calling for investigating the election to acknowledge that many of the fraud claims *have been investigated* and have fallen apart.
It's hard to overstate just how throughly Trump's ACTUAL lawyers are getting their clock cleaned in court. It's the Globetrotters vs. the Generals. His TV lawyers (Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis) may be saying one thing. The actual attorneys are thinking about dropping the cases because they are worried even being associated with this is going to permanently damage their firms.
The media is not democrat leaning? Just look to for eg, the "Russia collusion", literally every journal except fox news was saying that Trump got elected by "russian bots", Trump was investigated for years and they found no proof. After he was proven innocent, no media wrote an single line apologizing and no fact checker agency "fact checked" that conspiracy. Apparently, conspiracy is only bad when the right does it...
It's not conspiracy when they do it because the mainstream press was on board. The veneer of legitimacy that comes from established institutions is real.
They hollowed out the once respected institution of journalism, they wear its carved out skin suit, and have abandoned all of the higher principles of neutrality and investigative integrity it once represented in favor of the dissemination of blatant propaganda. They can take that unearned respect and leverage it to spout outrageous lies that people are less likely to question. Now the institution as a whole is only trusted by the same democrats who ruined it.
Think about how much narrative power holding over 90% of the information class gives you. Realize that even with that, and with a President of cosmic levels of incompetence, they can still barely hold onto power. The entire thing is house of cards ready to fall apart under a light breeze. A not insignificant number of folks only go along with this garbage because it is pumped into them every day from every angle unless you are actively looking for alternatives. Living under a system of strict information control where dissenters are ruthlessly silenced and punished will do that to you.
Note that Trump won in 2016 with a tiny fraction of Hilary's election money
Same this time for GOP vs Democrat House and Senate races. Democrats of today are the party of corporate money and represent corporate interests but their voters are so invested in the false promises of free education and healthcare that they will never deliver that they will swallow anything and everything they are told from the mainstream disinformation machine, no matter how many times it repeatedly fails or how little it captures the trust of the public at large.
As long as the people losing children taken in by the system and manufacture the weapons we use to slaughter innocents have pronouns and #BLM in their bio, that is enough.
They hollowed out the once respected institution of journalism, they wear its carved out skin suit, and have abandoned all of the higher principles of neutrality and investigative integrity it once represented in favor of the dissemination of blatant propaganda. They can take that unearned respect and leverage it to spout outrageous lies that people are less likely to question. Now the institution as a whole is only trusted by the same democrats who ruined it.
When is the last time you actually read the front section of the New York Times or the Washington Post? Not the op-eds. But the actual front, news section.
They hollowed out the once respected institution of journalism, they wear its carved out skin suit, and have abandoned all of the higher principles of neutrality and investigative integrity it once represented in favor of the dissemination of blatant propaganda. They can take that unearned respect and leverage it to spout outrageous lies that people are less likely to question. Now the institution as a whole is only trusted by the same democrats who ruined it.
When is the last time you actually read the front section of the New York Times or the Washington Post? Not the op-eds. But the actual front, news section.
I consume a ton of political media, it's one of my biggest hobbies for some reason I will never understand, so I read it. The New York Times and The Washington Post are my go-to news media sites when I sincerely want to understand the Democrat position. But I also object to the question. How often do you or any others seriously look at or investigate right wing media before making judgements about it? I am supremely confident that besides the passing glance at Fox News the answer would be zero. Which is a shame, because there are some really good ones out there.
If I wanted left wing content, I would get good left wing content rather than watered down mainstream neoliberalism. Like Chris Hedges, who was fired from the New York Times for criticizing the Iraq War and remains one of my favorite left wing journalists to this day. I don't think he has any respect for the mainstream press either, though. He's not some token conservative democrat either, he's really left wing but really good.
Hedges was also not fired for criticizing the Iraq war. And in fact was the Middle East bureau chief in the run up to the war, running several stories that helped sell the Bush allegations.
"EIGHT WEEKS after September 11, a pair of Americans entered the gleaming marble lobby of Beirut’s Intercontinental Hotel La Vendome, where they were greeted by a group of Iraqi expatriates. The Americans were reporters—New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges, who’d just been put on the Al Qaeda beat, and Christopher Buchanan, an associate producer of PBS’s Frontline—there to meet a mysterious Iraqi defector with information about Saddam Hussein’s secret weapons program...
"Two days later the story that spun out on the front page of the New York Times was as shocking as it was convincing. Ghurairy claimed that as a senior intelligence official, he had witnessed foreign Arab fighters training to hijack airplanes at the Salman Pak military facility south of Baghdad...
"When Condoleezza Rice, then George W. Bush’s national security adviser, was asked about the story at a press briefing, she said, 'I think it surprises no one that Saddam Hussein is engaged in all kinds of activities that are destabilizing.' ...
"Unfortunately, the story was an elaborate scam..."
Hold on a second. That link that you posted doesn't say that 90% of reporters are liberals, or that they identify as such. It says that 7% of them identify as Republican, but that doesn't mean that the other 93% are liberals:
"The number of journalists identifying as independent is at 50.2 percent, the highest percentage since the survey began, and the number identifying as Democrat dropped to 28.1 percent. Of those polled, 14.6 percent identified as “other.” That means nearly 65 percent of journalists polled don't identify with either of the major parties. "
You can't lump all these people together and claim they're all liberals just because they don't feel represented by the Republican party.
"EIGHT WEEKS after September 11, a pair of Americans entered the gleaming marble lobby of Beirut’s Intercontinental Hotel La Vendome, where they were greeted by a group of Iraqi expatriates. The Americans were reporters—New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges, who’d just been put on the Al Qaeda beat, and Christopher Buchanan, an associate producer of PBS’s Frontline—there to meet a mysterious Iraqi defector with information about Saddam Hussein’s secret weapons program...
"Two days later the story that spun out on the front page of the New York Times was as shocking as it was convincing. Ghurairy claimed that as a senior intelligence official, he had witnessed foreign Arab fighters training to hijack airplanes at the Salman Pak military facility south of Baghdad...
"When Condoleezza Rice, then George W. Bush’s national security adviser, was asked about the story at a press briefing, she said, 'I think it surprises no one that Saddam Hussein is engaged in all kinds of activities that are destabilizing.' ...
"Unfortunately, the story was an elaborate scam..."
Oh wow, guess he was just lying about that. I never bothered to investigate it because I never found it politically important.
But I don't think it helps the case of the media that it was being scammed into reporting false stories years ago and still can't be accurate or truthful now. Especially when it says they placed over 100 inaccurate stories in media. Just lol'ing at this article, not gonna lie. This is a better case against em then I could ever make.
THE GHURAIRY TALE was one of 108 stories the INC placed in the American and British media between October 2001 and May 2002. We know this to be true because, in a particularly audacious boast, the INC submitted a list of these stories to Congress to convince lawmakers that it should continue to receive funding. The revelation of this memo provoked soul-searching within the media. The New York Times has since admitted faults with its prewar reporting. But though the Times’ rather tepid mea culpa alluded to the Ghurairy story, it stated only that the story had “never been independently verified.” In June 2004 Frontline’s website was amended to add a small footnote to the “Gunning for Saddam” transcripts, indicating that the general’s claims have “not been substantiated.” And since I started speaking to the principals in this story, the website has again been amended to acknowledge the gist of the allegations made in this story.
"EIGHT WEEKS after September 11, a pair of Americans entered the gleaming marble lobby of Beirut’s Intercontinental Hotel La Vendome, where they were greeted by a group of Iraqi expatriates. The Americans were reporters—New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges, who’d just been put on the Al Qaeda beat, and Christopher Buchanan, an associate producer of PBS’s Frontline—there to meet a mysterious Iraqi defector with information about Saddam Hussein’s secret weapons program...
"Two days later the story that spun out on the front page of the New York Times was as shocking as it was convincing. Ghurairy claimed that as a senior intelligence official, he had witnessed foreign Arab fighters training to hijack airplanes at the Salman Pak military facility south of Baghdad...
"When Condoleezza Rice, then George W. Bush’s national security adviser, was asked about the story at a press briefing, she said, 'I think it surprises no one that Saddam Hussein is engaged in all kinds of activities that are destabilizing.' ...
"Unfortunately, the story was an elaborate scam..."
Oh wow, guess he was just lying about that. I never bothered to investigate it because I never found it politically important.
But I don't think it helps the case of the media that it was being scammed into reporting false stories years ago and still can't be accurate or truthful now. Especially when it says they placed over 100 inaccurate stories in media. Just lol'ing at this article, not gonna lie. This is a better case against em then I could ever make.
I dunno, when you hold up Hedges as a paragon of journalism, but he's committed several times just about the worst professional ethics violation, it reveals that you're not actually putting good journalism on your radar. Again you didn't just drop Hedges as someone who was good but rather someone who was good *in contrast* to the mainstream. The opposite is the truth.
Hedges is the unethical, unscrupulous journalist. And the NYT is better for him not being there.
Sorry Zeke, but what does it tell you that such a large percentage of educated people are liberal? You see it all, you do it is obvious, but you hold on to something that doesn’t make sense. I was there once. Long ago it was religion, let me tell you that was a fight, more recently it has been politics. As a conservative I am telling you, it doesn’t add up, and the farce of the last four years just makes it more glaringly obvious. Nothing wrong with being conservative, but being a Republican has nothing to do with being conservative anymore.
I actually find it a bit humorous that you have seen the dark side of the force, and seemed to gain perspective, but now that the light seems to be gaining prominence you are slipping back into the shadowy side. Are you like my brother that likes arguing so much that he will switch sides in the middle of an argument just to continue the argument?
The king is dead, his henchmen are no less culpable than they were a month ago. Wrap your mind around that. That is the dawn we are waking up to.
The argument that goes "Journalists are more liberal than not, so they will lie/falsely report to advance liberal causes" is tremendously specious. Journalists may be individually biased, and will present bias both in what information they decide to run and how they seek to address it - but editorial boards exist in order to counterbalance those biases and keep the Journalistic profession as ethical as they can.
The size of leap you need to make to say "Journalists tend to be liberals" to "Journalists will violate every ethical standard that they have in order to promote fraud" is just ridiculous.
But I get it. American Conservatism 101: Thou shall hate all news media.
(...)
It's *(hard* to steal an election without leaving a paper trail. If election fraud was widespread enough to flip the election, it would be very hard to keep that a secret. The fact that almost no stories are being reported upon by investigative journalists with a history of ethical investigation should say something.
All, I repeat ALL of the media is pro democrats on USA and in the western hemisphere. Of course mainstream journalists would't investigate something that is against their interests. Is like expecting cigar companies to investigate the negative effects of cigar...
Note that Trump won in 2016 with a tiny fraction of Hilary's election money and that the media wasted 4 years spreading lies about him.
Many of your links are to mainstream daily newspapers, belying the claim that the news is not investigating these claims. What we're instead seeing is a failure by people calling for investigating the election to acknowledge that many of the fraud claims *have been investigated* and have fallen apart.
It's hard to overstate just how throughly Trump's ACTUAL lawyers are getting their clock cleaned in court. It's the Globetrotters vs. the Generals. His TV lawyers (Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis) may be saying one thing. The actual attorneys are thinking about dropping the cases because they are worried even being associated with this is going to permanently damage their firms.
Because trump lost all his court cases now he claims they are not his. They were filed by “other people”
lmao, trump is now giving his own court cases the “I hardly knew him” treatment.
I am just waiting for him to disown himself, and start calling himself Hunter Biden. Lol
Don't worry folks, he'll release the evidence soon. At the same time he will release Obama's *real* birth certificate, mexico's check paying for the wall, the long awaited GOP replacement for Obamacare, and Trump'll also finally release his tax returns.
Just you wait true believers it's coming! Send cash and checks to me personally!!
I am an election fraud skeptic. Intentional election fraud seems implausible alone to me, but possible, but doing so on a mass scale seems impossible.
However, I want one thing explained to me.
I can see who voted on this government website. I can sort it by birth date, and see the oldest ones who did. The first page is full of dates of 01/01/1800. This implies a data error and that the date of birth was not filled for whatever reason. Fair enough.
But at the bottom of the first page and covering the second, third, fourth, and beyond I start to see dates of people 120-90 years old who requested and returned ballots. Lots and lots of them. They all have unique birth dates, meaning this wasn't a data error. A mistaken number for the third year digit (i.e 1999 rather than 1909) seems to be hard to believe for the mass numbers of them. What is going on? I'm sincerely curious, and will accept a mundane, non-criminal explanation. But I feel like it deserves one.
This story may be helpful in understanding the issue. It's responding to social media claims that many thousands of voters in Michigan are dead. The claims are based on cross-referencing names and partial dates of birth from the voter database with a national death database.
The reporters checked 31 of the thousands listed as dead voters on the social media post:
- in 28 cases the voters were confirmed as alive. The dead person simply had the same name and approximate birth date (this is not directly relevant to your post, but I'm including the information for context).
- also not directly relevant is the 1 case where a voter had correctly sent in a ballot, but died after that and before the election date (Michigan's election rules say in those circumstances the vote should not count).
- what is relevant is that there was one case where two men with the same name had lived at the same address. The voting record mistakenly showed the dead father as having voted, although the original ballot returned correctly showed the son as having done so.
- also relevant is the last case where again there were two men with the same name. In this case though the son had incorrectly returned his father's ballot instead of his own.
Given that naming sons after fathers seems to be much more common in the US than the UK, there are bound to be a considerable number of instances nationally where there is confusion between a dead father (or more distant relative) and son. I imagine this explains the issue you noted.
(...)
Am I now supposed to believe there is some conspiracy to keep ALL reputable media outlets silent on the issue of election fraud? (...)!
The media is not democrat leaning? Just look to for eg, the "Russia collusion", literally every journal except fox news was saying that Trump got elected by "russian bots", Trump was investigated for years and they found no proof. After he was proven innocent, no media wrote an single line apologizing and no fact checker agency "fact checked" that conspiracy. Apparently, conspiracy is only bad when the right does it... The media also accused Trump from separating illegal immigrant children from his family, a policy which Obama started.
And is a hard problem to solve. Many of this children has no documents. Is easy for someone who entered as a tourist and overstayed his visa to find the parents and send all home. But how to do that for people with no papers? What if two families says that they are the parents of a children?
The establishment HATES trump. Outside of "Western Europe", the news tends to be far more favorable for Trump by a reason.
The point about separating children has been addressed many times in just the last few days, so I won't bother correcting that bit of misinformation again.
On the issue about Russia, what the media has regularly reported is that all of the US investigative agencies have concluded there was Russian interference in the 2016 election. It seems unlikely to me that an agency like the FBI is participating in a left-wing conspiracy given the political leaning of most of its members.
The irony of the entire argument is that the only difference in family separation policy between Trump, Obama, and now Biden spans the entirety of the few months in which Trump's new policy was in place before widespread public rejection of it caused him to change it back to what it was. It is those few months- could even be weeks, my memory on it isn't perfect but it was a very short time- which will be the whole of the defense for the existence of the existing policy which does all the exact same things they were condemning as pure evil, and delivered with all the moral fury and righteousness of the most devout believer.
Convinced that after this day of exchange that Greenwald was basically right. As kids continue to be imprisoned in these low quality facilities with questionable ability to meet their needs, the entirety of the moral rhetoric that once surrounded this issue will disappear and it will be entirely forgotten, because it was all bullshit in the first place. Once they have the power to change it, all interest suddenly vanishes and they find the existence of the system perfectly fine.
@WarChiefZeke my wife gets incredibly annoyed by me from time to time because of my habit of always trying to look at both sides of an argument. In this case though I really don't understand why you are maintaining there is no difference between the following:
- a policy that separates a tiny minority of families where parents have committed major crimes and/or are suspected of child abuse.
- a policy that separates 100% of families with the deliberate aim of scaring future potential asylum seekers into not attempting to enter the US (and doesn't even maintain records to allow future reunification).
I realize though that it's possible I have a blind spot here because of how strongly I feel about this policy. Can you help me out by explaining why you think there is no difference?
Or is it just that your view is that the policy of family separation was a temporary aberration (which should now simply be forgotten about) and it's everything else that's much the same? If that's the case I have a bit more sympathy with your view of the situation, though if you look at the information I posted earlier it seems pretty clear to me that there are other significant policy differences over immigration beyond the specific point about family separation.
I'm not going to argue the little things here because the gist of your post is okay and the details will just obfuscate. To put it simply, if you truthfully can't understand my argument, is that i'm not saying there is no difference, i'm saying the argument of a substantial moral difference between the policies based on these differences is bullshit. So is the argument that you can justify the moral flaws of the existing policy based on it being better than the previous one.
What I don't understand is how you can believe there is a serious moral difference if, in both cases, children are both imprisoned, and lost without investigation. Nobody is arguing that unaccompanied minors and some minors who did come with parents who were under suspicion were imprisoned. Are you against child imprisonment and government mismanagement leading to lost children? Or are you against only this particular group having to suffer through this? Because your every word leads to the latter and none of the former.
Thanks for responding.
I agree there are concerns about the Obama policy both in terms of accommodation provided and the challenges made to the Flores settlement. However, I think there is a clear moral difference with what Trump attempted. To take a few specific examples:
- I don't accept there is any element of 'both sides' between the Obama policy of child separation (which, on rare occasions, separated children in their own best interests) and the Trump policy of separating all families irrespective of whether that was in the interests of the child. As an aside you asked about the duration of that. The blanket policy lasted for about 3 months up to June 2018, when Trump withdrew it in the face of political and legal pressure. However, there had been several trials of the same policy at specific entry points for more than a year prior to the blanket policy.
- the Trump practice of removing most children from their sponsors and transferring them to adult jails as soon as they turned 18 was a major break from the Obama policy to seek the least restrictive environment.
- the Trump policy to use information obtained from children to find and deport their relatives was another major change from Obama and resulted in a huge drop in the numbers of relatives willing to act as sponsors for unaccompanied children (and an increase in the numbers of children that dropped off the official radar).
In response to what I believe in, I think the Flores settlement is a moral one that balances individual rights with the right of the state to control its borders (so no, I'm not arguing that children should never be detained). That settlement requires that families are not broken up without good reason and limits the length of time children can be detained (whether in family groups or not) to 20 days. I'm not happy that the settlement provisions were challenged at all under Obama, but the extent of that challenge was limited. Trump's policy aim (as with most areas of regulation he disliked) was to abolish the settlement entirely without proposing anything to take its place (other than the ability to permanently detain immigrants without any court process).
I accept it's always going to be the case that authorities will lose track of some children placed in the community. The points made above about use of prison for 18 year olds and deporting relatives discovered via children will have greatly increased that particular issue, but it's the nature of those affected that really concerns me. When a child does drop out of the system it seems to me reasonable to have:
- less concern about a 17 year old child, with a mobile phone and the knowledge of how to contact his parents; and
- more concern about a much younger child whose parents are unknown (but almost certainly have been deported) and not contactable by either the authorities or the child.
I think the US might have just lost the trade war to China.
I presume you're referring to the RCEP trade deal. That includes 15 countries, making up 29% of the world's GDP (the largest such agreement in the world). It's the first time China has signed a multi-lateral trade deal.
The deal is a bit less comprehensive than the TPP at the moment (though is likely to develop over time). The latter agreement was Obama's attempt to forestall Chinese extensions of trade influence in Asia, but Trump opted out of that at the start of his presidency. As there are a number of the same countries in the RCEP as the existing TPP it seems quite possible there could be a future mutual recognition agreement developed between the two blocs.
I agree with you this is a real threat to US trade dominance. I posted some time ago about the fact the EU had developed their own settlement arrangements in an attempt to avoid firms being coerced into accepting US sanctions on Iran. Those alternative arrangements have been little used to date, but point out that the current trade advantage the US has by virtue of controlling settlement arrangements is not guaranteed for the future. With commerce now being almost entirely electronic, the status of the dollar as the main international currency is similarly under threat and the US does not have the economic power to unilaterally impose its will on most other countries (and has withdrawn from its role in most multi-lateral arrangements).
While the likelihood is that Biden will attempt to reconstruct some of the damaged international relationships, I suspect that if we look back in 20 years time it will be clear that the US is already somewhat past its peak now in terms of dominating international trade and that slide will continue for years to come.
Comments
The refusal to engage in fake, performative outrage for political reasons should not be mistaken for a lack of empathy. Not everyone likes to milk what they see as a politically opportune moment for as many Virtue Points as they can muster.
Giving my own opinion on the subject (I agree with Munoz* that the vast majority of cases are of being reunited without talking to the government because people have cell phones and internet nowadays, offered the same argument years ago because it makes perfect sense, and it was widely criticized despite being accepted now) would take away from my real point here. Namely, that every substantial criticism of the process, from the facilities to the lackluster way we handle these children under our care are true of the past administration as well as this one. This desperately wants to be ignored now, because it would imply some semblance of self criticism is in order, and instead all focus is on Trump.
* but still think it is criminally negligent on the part of the government to settle the fate of a child with a mere phone call and not even attempt further investigation. Just because we think that is what is happening doesn't mean that is what is happening. That includes Trump.
I think the most moral thing I can do is refuse to give the moral high ground to people who want to change the laws by inches and act like they are redeeming all mankind. The issues with our system go far beyond Trump's changes and into the system itself.
I didn't click through all either, but his first link wasn't even about the November election, but rather about a summer primary in Indiana (not exactly a disputed state). Again, it's becoming clear that people raising these allegations are not taking the time to vet them. And thus don't actually take the issue seriously. We shouldn't have to either.
All, I repeat ALL of the media is pro democrats on USA and in the western hemisphere. Of course mainstream journalists would't investigate something that is against their interests. Is like expecting cigar companies to investigate the negative effects of cigar...
Note that Trump won in 2016 with a tiny fraction of Hilary's election money and that the media wasted 4 years spreading lies about him.
However, I want one thing explained to me.
I can see who voted on this government website. I can sort it by birth date, and see the oldest ones who did. The first page is full of dates of 01/01/1800. This implies a data error and that the date of birth was not filled for whatever reason. Fair enough.
But at the bottom of the first page and covering the second, third, fourth, and beyond I start to see dates of people 120-90 years old who requested and returned ballots. Lots and lots of them. They all have unique birth dates, meaning this wasn't a data error. A mistaken number for the third year digit (i.e 1999 rather than 1909) seems to be hard to believe for the mass numbers of them. What is going on? I'm sincerely curious, and will accept a mundane, non-criminal explanation. But I feel like it deserves one.
https://data.pa.gov/Government-Efficiency-Citizen-Engagement/2020-General-Election-Mail-Ballot-Requests-Departm/mcba-yywm/data
All media. Really? I mean, in your list of articles alone were media that were definitely with pro conservative biases.
Am I now supposed to believe there is some conspiracy to keep ALL reputable media outlets silent on the issue of election fraud? It's ridiculous on the face of it how implausible that seems, especially considering that the *largest* non national media news network is conservative. 90% of radio media is conservative.
It's ironic of course that you mentioned 2016. The NYTimes spent more time running articles on the mythical super corrupt Clinton emails than any other story in the entire election. Man. They're biased for Democrats that they continually reported on a story that damaged Clinton. That's some crazy 3d chess right there!
Were those votes actually counted? The fact that you noticed seems to me to imply that somebody else did too. The Antrim County non-issue in Michigan is the same thing. It was noticed and dealt with. No fraud, just a mistake that was corrected by existing checks and balances.
The Trump campaign has claimed (on twitter and sometimes unsuccessfully in court) that there was widespread voter fraud in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia and elsewhere.
Why aren't Republicans who won House and Senate races in those states refusing to accept their election results? If there is widespread fraud, why are they claiming they won? Their races were tabulated on the exact same ballots that carried those states for Biden.
How can you claim your election was perfectly legal and valid and then turn around and say that the election was rigged when both results rely on the exact same ballots??
It doesn't need to be a conspiracy, it is simple demographics that make this a given. Over 90% of reporters are liberals.
https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2014/05/survey-7-percent-of-reporters-identify-as-republican-188053
This is also why they will breathlessly report on left wing election fraud narratives like they are absolutely true and beyond doubt. For the record, I have always said I didn't believe both.
We have a media that is more ideologically controlled than the average tin pot dictatorship and if this wasn't true Julian Assange would be a free man and more than a fraction of people might actually trust the media.
No idea. I would like to know. Our government has made no statement on it far as I know and government departments here are notoriously online and chatty. Our state Treasury page is half memes and half serious talk.
Michigan was won by Biden. Period. There is absolutely no credible evidence to the contrary. Even the conservative radio station I listen to (WJR-Detroit) says so. They had a man on the inside in the Detroit polling station where the alleged fraud took place and he said there was nothing. No fraud, just chaos due to more people wanting in than were allowed due to Covid social-distancing requirements.
The media is not democrat leaning? Just look to for eg, the "Russia collusion", literally every journal except fox news was saying that Trump got elected by "russian bots", Trump was investigated for years and they found no proof. After he was proven innocent, no media wrote an single line apologizing and no fact checker agency "fact checked" that conspiracy. Apparently, conspiracy is only bad when the right does it... The media also accused Trump from separating illegal immigrant children from his family, a policy which Obama started.
And is a hard problem to solve. Many of this children has no documents. Is easy for someone who entered as a tourist and overstayed his visa to find the parents and send all home. But how to do that for people with no papers? What if two families says that they are the parents of a children?
The establishment HATES trump. Outside of "Western Europe", the news tends to be far more favorable for Trump by a reason.
The only evidence required to dismiss the claims is how narrowly tailored they are vis a vis where Trump needed slightly better results. Apparently, the fraud ONLY took place in MI, WI, PA, GA, AZ and NV, and ONLY in regards to the Presidental race, which is, at most, 1/20th of the actual ballot, which is also filled with Congressman, judges, Water Commissioners, and ballot initiatives etc etc etc. If the Presidential race is invalid, so is EVERY other race or ballot initiative in those states.
The response you get from those seriously invested in this theory when you bring this inconvenient truth up is that Democrats threw the other races ON PURPOSE so it wouldn't seem so obvious. So, willing to subvert a national election, but not to TOO great an extent.
Many of your links are to mainstream daily newspapers, belying the claim that the news is not investigating these claims. What we're instead seeing is a failure by people calling for investigating the election to acknowledge that many of the fraud claims *have been investigated* and have fallen apart.
It's hard to overstate just how throughly Trump's ACTUAL lawyers are getting their clock cleaned in court. It's the Globetrotters vs. the Generals. His TV lawyers (Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis) may be saying one thing. The actual attorneys are thinking about dropping the cases because they are worried even being associated with this is going to permanently damage their firms.
It's not conspiracy when they do it because the mainstream press was on board. The veneer of legitimacy that comes from established institutions is real.
They hollowed out the once respected institution of journalism, they wear its carved out skin suit, and have abandoned all of the higher principles of neutrality and investigative integrity it once represented in favor of the dissemination of blatant propaganda. They can take that unearned respect and leverage it to spout outrageous lies that people are less likely to question. Now the institution as a whole is only trusted by the same democrats who ruined it.
Think about how much narrative power holding over 90% of the information class gives you. Realize that even with that, and with a President of cosmic levels of incompetence, they can still barely hold onto power. The entire thing is house of cards ready to fall apart under a light breeze. A not insignificant number of folks only go along with this garbage because it is pumped into them every day from every angle unless you are actively looking for alternatives. Living under a system of strict information control where dissenters are ruthlessly silenced and punished will do that to you.
Same this time for GOP vs Democrat House and Senate races. Democrats of today are the party of corporate money and represent corporate interests but their voters are so invested in the false promises of free education and healthcare that they will never deliver that they will swallow anything and everything they are told from the mainstream disinformation machine, no matter how many times it repeatedly fails or how little it captures the trust of the public at large.
As long as the people losing children taken in by the system and manufacture the weapons we use to slaughter innocents have pronouns and #BLM in their bio, that is enough.
When is the last time you actually read the front section of the New York Times or the Washington Post? Not the op-eds. But the actual front, news section.
I consume a ton of political media, it's one of my biggest hobbies for some reason I will never understand, so I read it. The New York Times and The Washington Post are my go-to news media sites when I sincerely want to understand the Democrat position. But I also object to the question. How often do you or any others seriously look at or investigate right wing media before making judgements about it? I am supremely confident that besides the passing glance at Fox News the answer would be zero. Which is a shame, because there are some really good ones out there.
If I wanted left wing content, I would get good left wing content rather than watered down mainstream neoliberalism. Like Chris Hedges, who was fired from the New York Times for criticizing the Iraq War and remains one of my favorite left wing journalists to this day. I don't think he has any respect for the mainstream press either, though. He's not some token conservative democrat either, he's really left wing but really good.
If you actually want to check him out:
https://newrepublic.com/article/118114/chris-hedges-pulitzer-winner-lefty-hero-plagiarist
Hedges was also not fired for criticizing the Iraq war. And in fact was the Middle East bureau chief in the run up to the war, running several stories that helped sell the Bush allegations.
"EIGHT WEEKS after September 11, a pair of Americans entered the gleaming marble lobby of Beirut’s Intercontinental Hotel La Vendome, where they were greeted by a group of Iraqi expatriates. The Americans were reporters—New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges, who’d just been put on the Al Qaeda beat, and Christopher Buchanan, an associate producer of PBS’s Frontline—there to meet a mysterious Iraqi defector with information about Saddam Hussein’s secret weapons program...
"Two days later the story that spun out on the front page of the New York Times was as shocking as it was convincing. Ghurairy claimed that as a senior intelligence official, he had witnessed foreign Arab fighters training to hijack airplanes at the Salman Pak military facility south of Baghdad...
"When Condoleezza Rice, then George W. Bush’s national security adviser, was asked about the story at a press briefing, she said, 'I think it surprises no one that Saddam Hussein is engaged in all kinds of activities that are destabilizing.' ...
"Unfortunately, the story was an elaborate scam..."
Hold on a second. That link that you posted doesn't say that 90% of reporters are liberals, or that they identify as such. It says that 7% of them identify as Republican, but that doesn't mean that the other 93% are liberals:
"The number of journalists identifying as independent is at 50.2 percent, the highest percentage since the survey began, and the number identifying as Democrat dropped to 28.1 percent. Of those polled, 14.6 percent identified as “other.” That means nearly 65 percent of journalists polled don't identify with either of the major parties. "
You can't lump all these people together and claim they're all liberals just because they don't feel represented by the Republican party.
Oh wow, guess he was just lying about that. I never bothered to investigate it because I never found it politically important.
But I don't think it helps the case of the media that it was being scammed into reporting false stories years ago and still can't be accurate or truthful now. Especially when it says they placed over 100 inaccurate stories in media. Just lol'ing at this article, not gonna lie. This is a better case against em then I could ever make.
I dunno, when you hold up Hedges as a paragon of journalism, but he's committed several times just about the worst professional ethics violation, it reveals that you're not actually putting good journalism on your radar. Again you didn't just drop Hedges as someone who was good but rather someone who was good *in contrast* to the mainstream. The opposite is the truth.
Hedges is the unethical, unscrupulous journalist. And the NYT is better for him not being there.
I actually find it a bit humorous that you have seen the dark side of the force, and seemed to gain perspective, but now that the light seems to be gaining prominence you are slipping back into the shadowy side. Are you like my brother that likes arguing so much that he will switch sides in the middle of an argument just to continue the argument?
The king is dead, his henchmen are no less culpable than they were a month ago. Wrap your mind around that. That is the dawn we are waking up to.
The size of leap you need to make to say "Journalists tend to be liberals" to "Journalists will violate every ethical standard that they have in order to promote fraud" is just ridiculous.
But I get it. American Conservatism 101: Thou shall hate all news media.
Because trump lost all his court cases now he claims they are not his. They were filed by “other people”
lmao, trump is now giving his own court cases the “I hardly knew him” treatment.
I am just waiting for him to disown himself, and start calling himself Hunter Biden. Lol
Don't worry folks, he'll release the evidence soon. At the same time he will release Obama's *real* birth certificate, mexico's check paying for the wall, the long awaited GOP replacement for Obamacare, and Trump'll also finally release his tax returns.
Just you wait true believers it's coming! Send cash and checks to me personally!!
This story may be helpful in understanding the issue. It's responding to social media claims that many thousands of voters in Michigan are dead. The claims are based on cross-referencing names and partial dates of birth from the voter database with a national death database.
The reporters checked 31 of the thousands listed as dead voters on the social media post:
- in 28 cases the voters were confirmed as alive. The dead person simply had the same name and approximate birth date (this is not directly relevant to your post, but I'm including the information for context).
- also not directly relevant is the 1 case where a voter had correctly sent in a ballot, but died after that and before the election date (Michigan's election rules say in those circumstances the vote should not count).
- what is relevant is that there was one case where two men with the same name had lived at the same address. The voting record mistakenly showed the dead father as having voted, although the original ballot returned correctly showed the son as having done so.
- also relevant is the last case where again there were two men with the same name. In this case though the son had incorrectly returned his father's ballot instead of his own.
Given that naming sons after fathers seems to be much more common in the US than the UK, there are bound to be a considerable number of instances nationally where there is confusion between a dead father (or more distant relative) and son. I imagine this explains the issue you noted.
The point about separating children has been addressed many times in just the last few days, so I won't bother correcting that bit of misinformation again.
On the issue about Russia, what the media has regularly reported is that all of the US investigative agencies have concluded there was Russian interference in the 2016 election. It seems unlikely to me that an agency like the FBI is participating in a left-wing conspiracy given the political leaning of most of its members.
Thanks for responding.
I agree there are concerns about the Obama policy both in terms of accommodation provided and the challenges made to the Flores settlement. However, I think there is a clear moral difference with what Trump attempted. To take a few specific examples:
- I don't accept there is any element of 'both sides' between the Obama policy of child separation (which, on rare occasions, separated children in their own best interests) and the Trump policy of separating all families irrespective of whether that was in the interests of the child. As an aside you asked about the duration of that. The blanket policy lasted for about 3 months up to June 2018, when Trump withdrew it in the face of political and legal pressure. However, there had been several trials of the same policy at specific entry points for more than a year prior to the blanket policy.
- the Trump practice of removing most children from their sponsors and transferring them to adult jails as soon as they turned 18 was a major break from the Obama policy to seek the least restrictive environment.
- the Trump policy to use information obtained from children to find and deport their relatives was another major change from Obama and resulted in a huge drop in the numbers of relatives willing to act as sponsors for unaccompanied children (and an increase in the numbers of children that dropped off the official radar).
In response to what I believe in, I think the Flores settlement is a moral one that balances individual rights with the right of the state to control its borders (so no, I'm not arguing that children should never be detained). That settlement requires that families are not broken up without good reason and limits the length of time children can be detained (whether in family groups or not) to 20 days. I'm not happy that the settlement provisions were challenged at all under Obama, but the extent of that challenge was limited. Trump's policy aim (as with most areas of regulation he disliked) was to abolish the settlement entirely without proposing anything to take its place (other than the ability to permanently detain immigrants without any court process).
I accept it's always going to be the case that authorities will lose track of some children placed in the community. The points made above about use of prison for 18 year olds and deporting relatives discovered via children will have greatly increased that particular issue, but it's the nature of those affected that really concerns me. When a child does drop out of the system it seems to me reasonable to have:
- less concern about a 17 year old child, with a mobile phone and the knowledge of how to contact his parents; and
- more concern about a much younger child whose parents are unknown (but almost certainly have been deported) and not contactable by either the authorities or the child.
I presume you're referring to the RCEP trade deal. That includes 15 countries, making up 29% of the world's GDP (the largest such agreement in the world). It's the first time China has signed a multi-lateral trade deal.
The deal is a bit less comprehensive than the TPP at the moment (though is likely to develop over time). The latter agreement was Obama's attempt to forestall Chinese extensions of trade influence in Asia, but Trump opted out of that at the start of his presidency. As there are a number of the same countries in the RCEP as the existing TPP it seems quite possible there could be a future mutual recognition agreement developed between the two blocs.
I agree with you this is a real threat to US trade dominance. I posted some time ago about the fact the EU had developed their own settlement arrangements in an attempt to avoid firms being coerced into accepting US sanctions on Iran. Those alternative arrangements have been little used to date, but point out that the current trade advantage the US has by virtue of controlling settlement arrangements is not guaranteed for the future. With commerce now being almost entirely electronic, the status of the dollar as the main international currency is similarly under threat and the US does not have the economic power to unilaterally impose its will on most other countries (and has withdrawn from its role in most multi-lateral arrangements).
While the likelihood is that Biden will attempt to reconstruct some of the damaged international relationships, I suspect that if we look back in 20 years time it will be clear that the US is already somewhat past its peak now in terms of dominating international trade and that slide will continue for years to come.