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This week, John Yoo, the Ricochet Podcast Senior Election Fraud Analyst and the Joan and Ray Kroc McRib Scholar at Hamburger University sits in for Peter Robinson and kicks the show off with a deep dive on where we stand with all of the current court cases and challenges around the election. Then, Avik Roy (listen to his American Wonk/COVID in 19 podcast right here on Ricochet) stops by to science us on the recent resurgence of COVID cases cropping up across the country. Then, National Review’s Jim Geraghty (do yourself a favor and subscribe to his must read Daily Jolt newsletter) visits for a bit to talk about Georgia, polling, and to drop a few impressions. Finally, mad props to Ricochet member @markcamp for winning the coveted Lileks Post of The Week badge for his tome, Was Perry Mason a Great TV Series? We’ll let you decide. Thanks to all who joined us for the live video version of the show. We apologize for Rob’s sweater.
Music from this week’s show: Don’t Look Back In Anger by Oasis
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There is zero mention of this on Twitter right now. She is scheduled to be on tonight.
Ooo. Maybe don’t take that to the bank.
James Murdoch quit the board of NewsCorp last summer. This interview (trigger warning: it’s by Maureen Dowd) is very interesting and I recommend it if you have an interest in the media business. Traditionally, the NewsCorp board has been a rubber stamp for Rupert’s wishes, but maybe that has changed now that Lachlan (the other son) is running things day to day.
Fox News has owned the Conservative media space for 20+ years. Nothing is forever, of course, and in the conversation about media consolidation, I don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing that they have been so completely dominant. We may indeed see a shift in the landscape. The rise of streaming and the move away from the cable bundle certainly makes them vulnerable.
But Fox News isn’t going to go down without a fight. A bloody one. You can count on that.
I’m going to say some thing that is going to be a little bit unpopular. I like watching Fox News. I get Newsmax and I like that if I can fish through it on a DVR or if I can watch it on my phone so I know when to switch over. The best things on Newsmax are Howie Carr and the guy that follows him in the afternoon. They are way better than Fox on weekends. The problem is talk radio destroys all of it. The conservative channel on Sirius XM is absolutely excellent.
The word “if” is doing a lot of work in that Tweet, but I’ll ask John for this thoughts on this. Pretty sure John knows more about PA courts than Dersh and Levin combined.
She tweeted out yesterday: “Newsmax here I come” but Fox may have told her to delete the tweet since her contract prohibits her from even appearing on other networks like Newsmax or OANN to hawk her book. Her relationship with Fox has been rocky in the last couple of years and I don’t think it’s inconceivable that she may be in discussions to get out of her contract if Fox doesn’t fire her first.
I found the interview I posted on #52 pretty compelling.
The GOP needs to get ahead of all of these shenanigans and ballot harvesting. That is the only way to do it. California proved it.
I find it incredibly amusing that they are promoting their nighttime shows and Janine Pirro all of the time now. It’s ridiculous.
That’s where they get the most eyeballs and their ratings consistently outperform their competitors. I guess will see how long Tucker, Hannity, and Ingraham can continue to carry them. They certainly have their work cut out for them during the day. They may want to kill Cavuto’s hour on FoxNews and just let him prattle on on FoxBusiness.
One wonders what Melissa Francis is thinking these days.
What is always someone else’s fault? Your original response to Kedavis was a nonsequitur because he wasn’t blaming anyone for anything. Brian posted a meme, you said similar tactics could be used against Trump, and Kedavis said that they already do and already have as a matter of course in one way or another. No fault was ever at issue in this exchange.
Now GG jumped in to say that Obama actually did tend to deflect blame to everyone else, and you jump back in to say that Trump and his supporters always blame everyone else. No one is blaming anyone in this exchange. Your fixation is bizarre, and telling.
What’s its channel number? I’ll have to give it a listen.
The single biggest possible correction is a manual recount. That should eliminate at least the electronically-induced fraud, not resulting from fraudulent physical ballots.
But it’s been happening to some degree for a long time. I live in Chicago and the assumption seems to be that people like Rush and others solid conservatives are ratings losers. The result has been various attempts to get less conservative on these stations (including moving Rush from his regular time slot a while back). The news divisions are already simply reading the mainstream lines including all of the standard methods of the last few years that they can fit into their on the quarter hour reports between traffic and weather. However, it’s not true. As many slots have gone milquetoast I’ve tolerated it (barely) only because I have nowhere else to go, and apparently there is no burgeoning lefty audience just waiting to take my place no matter how many “moderate” or “center” type shows they push out. Aside from NPR the attempts as liberal talk radio just haven’t worked out. They don’t want me as an audience, but they don’t have a replacement. Yet the stations keep trying. Of course it’s stupid, yet they keep trying.
Channel 125
It’s absolutely exceptional. Breitbart and Wilkow are the best. They aren’t forced to deal with a terrestrial radio clock, and for up to five days it’s effectively a podcast. Rebecca isn’t on at night anymore, but she is just insanely smart. Maybe she will come back.
Minneapolis has three channels going very strong.
If you are unhappy get the Talk Stream Live app.
I think there is some fraud, but I agree that it’s not enough to overturn the election. I think it’s essential to go through the recounts to help people see that the election was just close. I think even though he lost, Trump won per the narrative that was against him and the fact that he got more voters for a second term. I also think it’s important to not call the people who want recounts kooks because it’s easy to understand why they feel like they’ve been mistreated for… four years.
I also think the president probably lost the election per the razor thin margin in the first debate per early voting, but that’s just my thought. I have no evidence beyond a feeling that if he’d performed as calmly as he did in the last debate, he could have kept some more Biden skeptics. Perhaps enough to tip the thing back to him. This is because I know there were a lot of people who love Donald Trump. Fair enough. There were also a lot of people who liked his policies but didn’t like him at all. They held their noses. He made it harder to do that in debate one, and I suspect some people just threw up their hands. (So, again, I may be completely wrong.) If someone yells at me style over substance, my answer to that is yes. That’s… uh… part of an election with democratic elements.
It’s my hope that Trump’s push to examine the votes helps make systems better, even though I don’t think it will change anything at all for 2020.
Fox features Donna Brazile regularly on its more serious newsy side, like for election nights, debates, and state of the union. As if she is some honest broker of anything aside from propaganda. That is definitely a canary in the coal mine. You can find plenty of decent lefty voices to throw into the mix without going into that muck. Yet they do go into that muck.
Cavuto cutting off McEnany. Roberts pressing the Trump-as-bigot theme so hard that he refused to notice when his demand for denunciation was given literal just seconds before. These are recent examples. Similarly to my experience with local talk radio, there’s not much I can do about it. At least there wasn’t. Now I can go elsewhere much easier and I don’t need Fox. As long as the media establishment is unsuccessful at censoring and regulating those alternative media, anyway.
The number of app based conservative outlets is incredible. I would never turn any of them on over talk radio though.
Also… on Avik and masks… I flew on several planes in April. The crews did not care one iota about masks. They started caring when they felt that would get people back on planes, so I was glad that he mentioned there are other factors associated with filters because I just don’t think he made a great case with why masks have stopped spread in that particular place.
Of course I don’t know, but a big reason I feel this way can be found in the fact that if you have a longer flight, there’s food service. You can take off your mask while you’re drinking your water and eating your cookies.
You aren’t allowed to have alcohol or coffee, for some reason. And everything is given to you in a plastic bag, for some reason. But people have their masks off for as long as they can nibble their biscotti, and that’s just fine.
This makes no sense if masks are the things that are stopping the spread.
There is no more magic associated with not spreading viruses when eating cookies than there is when going to riots.
And I promise. I eat my cookies suuuuuuuuuuupppppper slow. It takes most people 15+ minutes to eat their cookies.
He had a better point in medical offices, though I also think that the masks worn by dentists are probably changed a bit more than your average plane passenger’s mask. I am absolutely certain that 100% of the passengers on the plane are not wearing a sterile mask when they sit down. I am often fishing one out of the bottom of my purse where it has accumulated purse fuzz and an occasional old breath mint before putting it on to protect the world.
At the very least, I absolutely understand how @fullsizetabby feels about masks. I can even concede they have some utility in some circumstances, but I see no logical limit to them. If they stop me from giving Karen Covid… that’s nice. Why shouldn’t I have to protect the world from every virus I might be carrying? There have always been people with compromised immune systems around me. And people are often sick with other things.
Anyway, those are just my thoughts. Maybe I’m just crazy.
Mr Roy failed to address the most pressing question of all, represented by Elon Musk’s testing for COVID: 2 positive tests and 2 negative tests. What that suggests is that the false positive rate may be as high as 50% (yes a very small sample). (Alternatively, the false negative rate may be as high as 50%–but given the extreme sensitivity of 40 cycles of PCR, the former is far more likely). If it is that high, it makes the rt-PCR test about as good as flipping a coin. The reason why the false positive rate may be that high is the (insane) requirement that 40 cycles of DNA replication be done for the test. That creates over a trillion (2 to the 40th power) copies of viral DNA. Typical PCR tests use 25-30 replications. Using more cycles than that has the potential of detecting virus particles that are present in such minute numbers that they are not causing disease. This may have something to do with the high number of cases that appear to be asymptomatic, or minimally symptomatic. PCR testing has not been correlated with viral load, to my awareness. Nor has the point at which the test becomes positive been correlated with severity of disease.
This makes a complete mess of the statistics on mortality rate, transmission rate, contact tracing, and herd immunity. If the false positive rate is high, we have been sold the greatest bill of goods, and been subjected to the greatest “scientific” fraud in history.
Anyone know of any good data on viral load correlation with PCR testing, and clinical symptoms and disease course?
The point of masks is to lower the coefficient of spread. If it isn’t for that, they need to be more explicit about it. No level of government has ever put on a dog and pony show about why masks lower the coefficient of spread. Well, why is that? They just want to shove them down everybody’s throats. They want all the Democrat sheep-collectivists to shame everybody about it. Well, I freaking hate that because it’s not based on anything, at least so far.
I’m not sure the examples Avik provided actually relate to the coefficient of spread very well.
If it actually changed the coefficient of spread like we know the other things we do, I would be more open minded.
Short answer: Don’t people in China wear masks a lot? In large part because they’re easily controlled? So there you go. They want us to become like China, and be easily controlled. Wearing masks is just one outward sign.
I don’t think the plane example was a good one for this, though I’m not even going to pretend I’m a scientist. (I don’t think Avik is either, though, right? He’s just a policy wonk reading the data and trying to interpret it?)
I’m absolutely fine with social distancing, washing my hands, and not hanging out with coughing people in enclosed spaces. :)
We are forcing millions of people to wear a masks to slow the spread of people that are contagious and spreading. It is not about protecting the person that wears the mask.
That is the point.
I think the idea that is contributing anything to all of the other things we are doing is preposterous. Every single month the data for masks gets worse.
They are obviously hiding the Danish study because it’s bad for mask policy. They have to be good little statists at gun point.
Why would the Senate, even GOP-controlled, stop anything a President Biden wants to do? He served there for decades. It’s full of his friends.
What I learned about TV in this episode is that Rob Long loves discussing the effect of entertainment on popular culture and politics…unless it’s Star Trek.
I’m not ready to agree to that yet.
The first step seems obvious: well-monitored manual recounts in any area of dispute. That should get rid of any electronic manipulation to start with.