Not Surprising

There are still enough rumblings around about the 2020 presidential election to cause me to wonder if we will ever know the truth. Yesterday Breitbart posted an article about some new information that further indicates that there could have been massive cheating.

The article reports:

The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) said on Friday that 82,766 mail ballots sent to voters in Wisconsin’s November 2020 presidential election “went missing or undeliverable,” a number more than four times greater than Joe Biden’s 20,682 vote certified margin of victory in the state.

More than 1.6 million votes were cast in the November 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin, and Biden’s certified margin of victory was just 1.2 percent of all votes cast.

The article continues:

“83K mail ballots went missing or undeliverable amid 20k vote margin of victory in WI 2020 Presidential,” the headline read in a statement that accompanied the release of a report by PILF on Friday morning.

“We now know the cost of the rush to mail balloting – lost ballots. The federal data show the 2020 election had more mail ballots that were never counted than the margin of victory in the Presidential election in Wisconsin. This isn’t the way to run an election. Mail ballots invite error, disenfranchisement of voters, and puts the inept U.S. Post Office determining the outcome of elections,” PILF President J. Christian Adams said in the statement.

The report showed that, unlike the results of the 2012 and 2016, the number of “missing or undeliverable” mail ballots in 2020 exceeded the margin of victory in the election to determine which presidential candidate would be awarded the state’s ten electoral college votes.

In 2020, for instance, 1.4 million ballots were mailed to Wisconsin voters, which was 86 percent of the 1.6 million votes cast. (emphasis added)

In 2005 the bi-partisan Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform, led by Democrat President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, a Republican who served in the George H.W. Bush administration, analyzed the US election system and made recommendations to preserve election integrity.

The website pure integrity for Michigan elections notes the following:

The Carter Center, founded by the former president and first lady Rosalynn Carter, is affiliated with Emory University and promotes peace and democracy efforts globally and domestically. 

Carter Center press release in May said the commission report “noted among its many findings and recommendations that because it takes place outside the regulated environment of local polling locations, voting by mail creates increased logistical challenges and the potential for vote fraud, especially if safeguards are lacking or when candidates or political party activists are allowed to handle mail-in or absentee ballots.”

“However, the Carter-Baker Commission found that where safeguards for ballot integrity are in place—for example in Oregon, where the entire state has voted by mail since 1998—there was little evidence of voter fraud,” the Carter Center statement continued. 

The commission’s main recommendations on vote-by-mail and absentee voting were to increase research on vote-by-mail (and early voting) and to eliminate the practice of allowing candidates or party workers to pick up and deliver absentee ballots.  

We need to look at the reforms the Commission recommended and put them in place.

When The Fact Checkers Are Not Paying Attention

Generally speaking, The New York Times has been immune from the fact checkers. Somehow they are willing to overlook the misinformation and ‘leaked from anonymous sources’ misinformation that The New York Times routinely prints. The latest example of this is a claim by the times that “there had been a “longstanding American policy treating the settlements as illegal” prior to Secretary of State Pompeo’s 2019 reversal of that purported policy. (“Mixed Signals on Israeli Annexation Reflect Split Among Officials,” June 22, 2020, David Halbfinger and Michael Crowley.) That is simply not true.

CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis) notes the following:

• Note that although President Carter took the position that settlements are illegal, this was quickly reversed by the Reagan administration, which held that settlements are “not illegal.” Subsequent administrations either reiterated Reagan’s view or refrained from taking a position on legality.

• Note that the New York Times itself repeatedly reported on Reagan’s view that settlements aren’t illegal, and in the past several years has twice published corrections after wrongly suggesting the U.S. had consistently viewed settlements as illegal.

• Just as those corrections were appropriate, so too is it necessary to correct last week’s piece by Halbfinger and Crowley.

• Note that memos by past legal advisors in the State Department archive are advisory, and do not set policy or bind subsequent U.S. presidents. While Carter administration legal advisor Herbert Hansell believed settlements were illegal, the Reagan administration rejected that view.

CAMERA further notes:

To be fair, the Times isn’t the first to make this mistake. In October 2016, the Washington Post corrected its claim that the U.S. regarded settlements as illegal. A month later, the Associated Press corrected the same claim. The following month, The Times (UK) corrected, as did ABC News and the Times of Israel. In 2018, the Times of Israel corrected again. The Financial Times corrected this same error in November 2019. And two days later the Economist ran a correction of its own.

Even the New York Times itself has, in the past, corrected this false claim. After a March 2017 editorial asserted that the U.S. “has consistently held that settlement building in the occupied territories is illegal,” a correction clarified, “An earlier version of this editorial incorrectly stated the United States’ position on settlement building in the occupied territories. It has been highly critical of the activity, but has not consistent [sic] held it to be illegal.”

From the news side, an August 8, 2013 correction in the NY Times likewise acknowledged that “the United States has taken no formal position in the last several years on whether [settlements] are legal or illegal.”

Unless those corrections were themselves in error, last week’s claim about a “longstanding” policy that settlements are illegal (and a similar claim last November by the same reporter, David Halbfinger) can’t be true.

This sort of reporting by The New York Times might help explain why much of the Jewish vote (generally readers of The New York Times) is misinformed on America’s policy toward Israel and the value of Israel in the world community.

Some Odds And Ends Linked Together For Thought

The original links were found at Front Page Magazine.

This is from the Harvard Crimson on April 8, 1980:

President Carter announced yesterday that the United States is breaking diplomatic relations with Iran and that all Iranian diplomats and officials will be ordered to leave the country by midnight tonight.

Carter acted hours after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ruled that the 50 American hostages must remain in the hands of the militants occupying the U.S. Embassy in Tehran until the new Iranian Parliament decides their fate.

The hostages have been held 157 days.

Carter also cut off virtually all remaining trade between the two countries, prohibiting further exports to Iran, with the exception of food and drugs.

The U.S. will also invalidate all visas issued for future arrival to Iranians, issuing new ones or renewing old ones only in unusual circumstances.

Carter has instructed Treasury Secretary G. William Miller to prepare an inventory of outstanding claims of American citizens and corporations against the government of Iran, with the aim of seizing assets of the Iranian government in the United States to finance settlements of claims by the hostages and their families.

Front Page Magazine emphasizes:

Fourth, the Secretary of Treasury [State] and the Attorney General will invalidate all visas issued to Iranian citizens for future entry into the United States, effective today. We will not reissue visas, nor will we issue new visas, except for compelling and proven humanitarian reasons or where the national interest of our own country requires. This directive will be interpreted very strictly.

…Carter orders 50,000 Iranian students in US to report to immigration office with view to deporting those in violation of their visas. On 27 December 1979, US appeals court allows deportation of Iranian students found in violation.

The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 gave the President the power to do this. I am not a big fan of President Carter, but he was right on this one.

The article at Front Page Magazine concludes:

Now unlike Muslims, Iranians were not necessarily supportive of Islamic terrorism. Many were and are opponents of it. Khomeini didn’t represent Iran as a country, but his Islamist allies. So Trump’s proposal is far more legitimate than Carter’s action. Carter targeted people by nationality. Trump’s proposal does so by ideology.

Classifying Iranians as a group is closer to racism than classifying people by a racist supremacist ideology that calls for the mass murder and enslavement of non-Muslims, as ISIS is doing today.

One of the neater subsets of the 1952 Act barred the entry of, “(11) Aliens who are polygamists or who practice polygamy or advocate the practice of polygamy.”

I wonder which creed this might apply to.

Maybe we can all calm down now long enough to have a rational conversation on the subject.

Wisdom From One Of My Favorite Liberals

As a conservative, there are some liberals whom I truly respect and listen to when they speak. In the past that list included Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Zell Miller, and Bob Casey, Sr. Presently that list includes former Senator Joe Lieberman and Alan Dershowitz. All of these men had principles that they upheld regardless of the political shenanigans going on around them.

In a recent press conference, Jimmy Carter was asked about what he would like to see happen before he dies. This is what he said:

In international affairs I would say peace for Israel and its neighbors. That has been a top priority for my foreign policy projects for the last 30 years. Right now I think the prospects of are more dismal than anytime I remember in the last 50 years. Practically, whole process is practically dormant. The government of Israel has no desire for two-state solution, which is policy of all the other nations in the world. And the United States has practically no influence compared to past years in either Israel or Palestine. So I feel very discouraged about it but that would be my number one foreign policy hope.

With all due respect, President Carter, Israel is not the problem.

Alan Deshowitz recently made some comments about former President Jimmy Carter to NewsMax Magazine that I think are important.

These are excerpts for the article that included those comments:

“[Carter] recommended to Yasser Arafat that Yasser Arafat turn down the deal that … would have resulted in the Palestinian state,” Dershowitz said. “He has blood of thousands of Jews and Palestinians on his hands. He should just stop talking about the Middle East.

“The idea that the International Criminal Court should create moral equivalence between a democracy — which has the most moral army in the world and has fewer civilian casualties than any other army in history — facing comparable threats to a terrorist regime that includes Hamas, that commits multiple war crimes every time it sends a rocket, is so obnoxious and so hypocritical and so typical of Jimmy Carter that the world understands that he has made himself irrelevant and tossed himself into the trash pan of history.”

…”Jimmy Carter has always had a problem with Jews and it borders on anti-Semitism,” he said. “In the midst of this tragedy, in the midst of this serious debate, to again blame it on Israel. He said that the terrorism and the reason the Jews and this anti-Semitism problem (exist) is because of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

…Continuing to create a moral equivalency between Hamas and Israel, as Carter suggests, only encourages Hamas acts of terror, Dershowitz added, feeding right into their hands.

…”Jimmy Carter goes back to the time he was running for governor. He has a long, long history of theological anti-Semitism coupled with virulent anti-Israelism. He never met a terrorist he didn’t like. He loved Yasser Arafat and he hated every Israeli leader he ever met.”

President Carter has made many statements about Israel that show either a total lack of understanding of the Middle East or a rather wide streak of anti-Semitism. Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. Israel is not the country lobbing rockets into civilian populations, and Israel is not the one tunneling under the border in order to attack and kill kindergarten children. President Carter’s statement that Israel is the obstacle to peace in the Middle East is simply wrong.

I Think This Is The Bottom Of The Barrel

John Hinderaker at Power Line posted an article today about some recent comments by ex-President Jimmy Carter. Those of us who are old enough to remember the Carter Presidency remember it as a time when the country was failing economically and losing prestige around the world. Yesterday President Carter chose to criticize the Obama Administration for it’s foreign policy.

The article reports:

Former President Jimmy Carter is criticizing President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy, saying he has shifting policies and waited too long to take action against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

In an interview published Tuesday in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the 39th president said the Obama administration, by not acting sooner, allowed ISIL to build up its strength.

Carter said Obama’s air campaign against ISIL in Iraq has “a possibility of success,” provided that some troops are available on the ground. He did not specify whether he meant U.S. or other ground forces.

The former Democratic president and Georgia governor also said the president has shifted his Middle East policy on several occasions.

President Carter has done many charitable things since leaving the Presidency. He has worked with Habitat for humanity since 1984, building houses for people in need. Unfortunately, he has also made a number of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel statements since leaving office. His criticism of President Obama may be accurate, but after his performance as President, I think he should have kept his opinion to himself.