The Voter Fraud Myth #275
By Hank Silverberg
"If you tell a big lie enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."
The "big lie" theory, stated clearly in Hitler's Mein Kampf and practiced for almost ten brutal years in the last century by Joseph Goebbels and his Nazi collaborators unfortunately works.
And I am sorry to say, we see it invading the truth again today here in the United States, with the continuing promotion of the election fraud myth by Donald Trump and his MAGA minions.
Allegations of fraud, conspiracy and the like have been rejected time and time again, including 44 court cases after the 2020 election, and in some extensive studies done since then.
Though there have been some cases of voter fraud across the country in recent years, most of them involve small local elections and the perpetrators have been caught. It is just NOT widespread.
Thirty-seven states now have some form of Voter I-D requiring you to show proof of who you are at the polls or when requesting an absentee mail-in ballot. You have to show similar documents when you register to vote.
How rare is voter fraud? Example: there were 3.3 million votes cast in Arizona in 2020. It had the highest number of voter fraud cases-198. The AP reports that virtually every case was based on an individual acting alone to cast additional ballots. Between 2000 and 2014, more than a billion ballots were cast. There were 31 credible cases of voter impersonation.
Voter fraud is a big lie myth. The longer it persists, the more danger it presents to our democracy.
The "Right" Is On the Wrong Side
I am flabbergasted by something I read this week. The source is former CBS anchor and respected journalist, Dan Rather. Though he was fired from CBS after not catching a very preventable but big mistake in 2005, that does not define his long award-winning journalism career. Since then he has worked on various projects and has had a low profile. Today, among other things, he writes a column called "Steady," which you can find on substack.com.
Rather brought up something this week that may have gone under the radar of many reporters.
It seems right-wing "influencer" (I hate that word) Jack Posebiec, opened a meeting of CPAC this week with the words:
"Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely."
He may have been joking, but it was hard to tell. Rather says no one reacted. And no reporters apparently followed up to see if it was a joke or not. Rather thinks the question should have been asked to the folks in the room, and I agree. Do Republicans and Conservatives attending CPAC really want to end our democracy, or are they joking about it to divert attention to what they really want to do?
The only good news here is that the crowd at the convention seemed bored and the broadcast got low ratings on TV.
For me, it's just a further extension of the GOP's decades-old role as "the party of No". Lately they've added the MAGA twist, turning us backward toward the dark days of open-faced racism, rampant discrimination against minorities and misogyny.
Critical Water Shortage
One of the world's biggest cities is only three months away from running out of water, and that could create big trouble. Mexico City has 22 million people. It's geography, low rainfall, chaotic urban development and leaky infrastructure have combined to create restrictions on water use from reservoirs. Several neighborhoods have already suffered from no water for weeks, according to the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
The rainy season in Mexico is four months away. The city is densely populated and runs across a high altitude lake bed, 7,300 feet above sea level on clay soil which is now sinking. It is prone to earthquakes and very vulnerable to climate change.
The original city, called Tenochtitlan, was built in 1325 by the Aztecs on an island. The Spanish drained the lake bed in the 16th century, filled in the canals and ripped away the surrounding forest. The city has been expanding ever since.
About 60% of Mexico City's water comes from an underground aquifer that is overextended and not replenishing fast enough because of hard, impermeable surfaces. The rest of the city's water comes from vast distances through pipes that leak.
Last week Mexico's leaders assured residents there would be no "day zero" when water would run out completely, but local media is predicting "day zero" could arrive June 26th unless conditions change.
The city is working on some solutions to the water shortage, but some communities are already relying on water trucked in from long distances.
Should "day zero" eventually arrive, there could be a mass exodus from Mexico city in a region already stressed by mass migration.
Some people have predicted that "climate migration" created by water and crop shortages could be the biggest problem for the second half of the 21st century.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/25/climate/mexico-city-water-crisis-climate-intl/index.html
Leap Year!
February 29th is coming up this week. Yes, it is a leap year. We haven't seen that date since 2020.
If fun for most of us. And a big deal for anyone actually born on February 29th because they can celebrate their actual birthday. But why is it there?
It's a correction to factor in Earth's orbit, which is
If this practice continues, you can mark your calendar. There will be no leap year in 2100, 2200, 2300 or 2500. But there will be one in 2400.
The next leap years that might actually matter to you is 2028 and 2032. (They are also presidential election years.)
Black Hole
It can swallow a sun every day. That's how big Australian scientists say a recently discovered Black Hole is. New research published in the journal
 |
| (Quasar J059-4351, photo courtesy of the European Southern Observatory) |
Nature Astronomy says a distant quasar (J059-4351) is the fastest growing Black Hole ever discovered, even though it was hiding in plain sight.
The phenomenon was discovered at Australian National University's Siding Spring Observatory in New South Whales and later confirmed at the European Southern Observatory's very large telescope. A news release from the university says it's the brightest known object in the universe, shining 500 trillion times brighter than our Sun.
Black holes are surrounded by a swirling zone called an "accretion disk". All material nearby gets dragged there first before being consumed in temperatures of 10,000 degrees Celsius. This Black Hole has the mass of 17 billion stars, and it's seven light-years wide,
But don't worry, it's not that close yet. It's 12 billion light-years away from us.
https://www.npr.org/2024/02/20/1232653636/massive-black-hole-discovery-quasar
Dumbest Quote of The Week!
This week's dumb quote comers from recidivist Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who remarkedly has managed to stay out of this section for weeks.
But this time she really sounded stupid. She was reacting to the $454 million (with interest) settlement against Donald Trump in his New York fraud case.
Referring to the judge who oversaw the trial and the huge judgement against Trump, Greene said on X:
"Judge Engoron should be disrobed and thrown out, he's a disgrace!!"
She went on to talk about the current value of Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida as proof that Trump was not lying about his worth, even though the fraud dates back to years ago when the estate was worth a lot less.
Greene probably meant Engoron should be disbarred, but she used the word "disrobed," which means to take your clothes off . As usual, she butchered the English language and sounded ridiculous.
We have got to do something about the quality of people in Congress or we are all in trouble.
( Your comments and suggestions are welcome)
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There was "voter fraud" in Republican eyes in 2020: too many people voted. For shame.
ReplyDeleteBecause of the pandemic, rules about absentee voting were relaxed and Houston even introduced 24 hour, drive up voting, which allowed busy people who might be working two or three jobs to vote. The belief that there was serious, illegal fraud is based on the idea that what you believe, you see, whether it is there or not. The same principle applies to Republican views on the economy: by a huge majority, Republicans say things are bad and they were much better when that other guy was in the White House. Sinking inflation, high employment, wage increases for lower paid jobs and economic growth: none of this matters if you have convinced yourself before the fact that everything has to be bad because a Democrat is in the WH.
The fact that Trump and Republicans have made ridiculous, fabricated charges about fraud in 2020 does not mean that there have never been cases of stolen elections in our country. One of the most outstanding cases of probable fraud was 1960 when votes in Chicago and far south Texas appeared to be too good to be true, boosting the election of Kennedy over Nixon. Because we have good, honest election officials and careful procedures on voting throughout the nation, we are protected from rampant vote stealing (aside from gerrymandered House districts and state legislative bodies, which constitute an accepted means of fraud by cancelling out voters in one district with the votes from another. Vote stealing by a legal means).
In the distant past, some people were paid to vote a certain way. In other cases, political bosses knew how the vote "should go" in every precinct and when it didn't, they could crackdown on those they believed voted "wrong".
The very wealthy spend hundreds of millions of dollars to try to get things to go their way at election time. The rich and the mega-rich never make investments without expecting returns and that mainly applies to getting continued tax breaks for themselves. Remember, the tax cuts passed under Trump were temporary for ordinary return filers, permanent for the rich. The same with G.W. Bush: the tax cuts passed then were supposed to be temporary, they became permanent under Obama because we were inba deep recession, the wrong time to raises taxes.
Is this a great country or what?
I didn't mean to leave my name off the above. I am Doug Terry.
DeleteThanks for your comment. I am sorry it took so long to respond. I was not clear how to do so since I get very few comments. I hope you keep reading.
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