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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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PCR usually runs 40 cycles (I run at work). Where you set Ct for a positive matters. For COVID it’s often set at 35-40 Ct, which sets sensitivity too high.
“The cut off for positive and negative Ct for SARS CoV-2 remains unclear. However, a good number of authors recommend a cut off of 40. [2,6,8] It means a test is considered positive if the Ct is < 40 and vice-versa. On the other hand, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) considers the Ct cut off of 35 and a Ct value > 35 considers that it could be the result from a contaminant.“
”Bullard et al. examined the relationship between SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR Ct values from respiratory samples, symptom onset to test (STT) and infectivity in Vero cell lines culture. [16] Viral growth was seen in only 28.9% of samples. Inter- estingly, there was no growth in samples with a Ct > 24 or STT > 8 days. They concluded that infectivity may be low in patients with Ct >24 and duration of symptoms longer than 8 days. Similarly, Wolfel et al. reported no SARS-CoV-2 grows in specimens collected after 8 days of the onset of symptoms. [11].”
https://ir.library.louisville.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1160&context=jri
There is election fraud. Period. The only question is how much…I have one other point. We need to address our voting systems. Every election there is vote stealing, vote loosing, vote finding, vote manufacturing, vote under counting, double voting, voting in multiple jurisdictions and so on all over the country. We have a worse than 3rd world voting system that in some locations looks to have been set up to enhance cheating. I am tired of it and want something that is a bet closer to reflecting a true vote than systems that makes Venezuela and Zimbabwe wish they had something that was half as crooked.
What we are really seeing right now is the return of Sore Loserman in Trumpian clothing.
Every election produces a winner and a loser. The loser usually looks for rationalizations for the loss and evil software voting machine trickery is a rationalization that satisfies the loser.
Back in 2004 many on the Left could not stomach George W Bush’s reelection and, thus, decided that it had to be Diebold voting machines subtly shifting votes from John Kerry toward George W Bush.
In 2020 we have Trump offering up an updated version of the Diebold voting machine conspiracy.
It’s the same old same old excuse for losing.
One, kedavis was blaming the media for running stories about Trump’s bad behavior — as if Trump himself has no control over that. Of course he does — he could have stopped making inflammatory statements intended for no other reason than to be inflammatory both on Twitter and in live situations. Here’s a revolutionary thought: If he doesn’t create those moments then the media can’t run them. One would think that would be obvious, but apparently not for Trump, who provided the media with a never ending stream of often outrageous patter.
P.S. Please don’t come at me with “but the media would make Trump look foolish no matter what he did!” They absolutely would. But what they came up with would have far less effect than the real ones Trump supplies them with on an almost daily basis.
The first Presidential debate is a prime example of what I’m talking about. Trump was a bull in a china shop and it played terribly. Was the media obliged to ignore it? How differently would the election have played out had Trump not behaved like a total boor in that debate and had actually shown up for the second one instead of skipping it because his feelings were apparently hurt (no, it had nothing to do with COVID)? We don’t know of course, but does anyone want to argue that Trump wouldn’t have done better had he behaved better in the first debate and shown up (and as well behaved) in the 2nd debate?
Two, the topic here is Trump and how his actions turned off a lot of voters. What Obama did or didn’t do is irrelevant in this context and using him is (at this point) a tired and shopworn obfuscation — an attempt to deflect Trump’s culpability for his own behavior. I don’t buy it.
Donald Trump is the President of The United States. He is responsible for his actions, his words and the way they are distilled to the public. He never made any serious attempt to change that dynamic that lasted longer than a few weeks. And it likely cost him re-election.
It was interesting over the summer after The New York Times newsroom staff was successful in a partial purge of the paper’s op-ed department over having the nerve to run an opinion piece by Tom Cotton, the newsroom staff at the Wall Street Journal attempted the same thing with their paper’s conservative editorial department, but were slapped down by News Corp. execs, who know they’d hemorrhage readers if the op-ed section lurched left. The question with Fox is more post-election, if the channel’s already hemorrhaged viewers who the conservative prime-time show hosts can’t bring back.
Technical note amidst the sad preview of the next…12…years: Perry Mason got his clients off during preliminary hearings every week. California does have grand juries but doesn’t normally use them for criminal procedures when you’ve already been charged with a serious crime. They answer the basic questions: did it happen here and is it not entirely impossible that you did it, dude/chick? And they are brief.
My favorite personal memory of the show is being 8 and sitting with my grandfather watching an episode (original airing). At some point in the first 1/2 hour. Him: I know who did it! Me: Who? Him: The ice-man! [laughs uproariously] Me: ????? It was many years later and long after the ice-man, the milk-man, the bread-man, the occasional vacuum cleaner, brush, or encyclopedia salesman, or Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity could have done it that the inflation-adjusted penny finally dropped. But here, let Big Maybelle explain it to the younger set in verse 3:
The one thing that always gets me about the conspiracy denial crowd. They keep claiming that conspirators have to be in contact in order to conspire. Legally they dont. People whom have never met or spoken can be in cooperation in a conspiracy. This is a strategy to avoid detection. I believe that there is not wide spread election fraud but concentrated and directed.
There are maybe 10 – 15 counties that have regular election fraud on a large scale. All the places that gave Biden this election.
Rockford Files!! I loved that show! I want to live in a cheesy trailer in Malibu!
Zuckerberg Drops an Additional $100 Million into ‘Safe Elections’ Project that Looks Like a Democrat GOTV Effort
https://www.breitbart.com/2020-election/2020/10/18/zuckerberg-drops-additional-100-million-safe-elections-project-looks-like-democrat-gotv-effort/
I would agree with this. I really think this is where he lost the election. But I also am sympathetic to how abused and bruised many Trump supporters feel when it comes to how Trump and Trump voters are almost always portrayed in the media, whether the president is saying something foolish or not.
I mean, I am absolutely certain @blueyeti has followed politics long enough to know that Joe Biden makes weird statements, exaggerates (if I’m being nice with my word choice) in self-aggrandizing ways, can act like a bullying buffoon, is thin-skinned, makes very inappropriate statements, and doesn’t really seem all that bright. Yet he’s lifted up as a statesman… a nice guy… that good ol’ “Uncle Joe.”
These obvious discrepancies in treatment of different party candidates over what has been decades are bound to make a group of people a wee bit defensive, even when Trump deserves some of the disdain others have for his antics.
Personally, I am less invested in the president himself. I did not vote for him in 2016. I voted for him in 2020, but it was as much a vote against the Democrats as anything else. (I do like some of his policies, too.)
I think Trump lost his office, but he won the election in that he managed to keep himself very relevant per the margins. He turned out enough voters to deny Joe Biden any sort of mandate, though again we see that Biden’s win in 2020 is trumpeted as historically significant while Trump’s win in 2016 was constantly being pointed out as razor thin and suspect.
No one will be able to call Donald Trump “Jimmy Carter” after he leaves the White House. (Carter, btw, was calling Trump an “illegitimate president” who had stolen the 2016 election with the help of the Russians halfway through Trump’s term!) This was not a humiliating result.
So I don’t want President Trump to stir passions in people by making them feel as if they need to go buy “resistance” t-shirts and have marches, but I would love it if some of the concerns about voter fraud that has always existed at least on the margins were actually taken seriously in this moment so that they can be exposed, and people can have more confidence in future elections… so that local governments are less influenced by political machines that really do seem to cheat in areas that have been controlled by one political party or the other for generations.
This isn’t an opportunity for Trump to flip the vote. It’s an opportunity to apply a “no broken windows” philosophy to petty corruption in elections, which discourages bigger crimes. It also helps Trump voters heal a bit and accept the results.
Yes, every election will feature some votes by otherwise ineligible voters. But if you honestly think that our system as a whole is no better than some of the most corrupt nations on earth, then provide some hard evidence. Because that’s just insane. I have multiple family members who work as poll workers and vote counters and here in Wisconsin we have a pretty darn good system. There is no one stuffing ballots or hacking the machines. Did you believe the count was accurate 4 years ago? If so, what changed this time?
Back in 2004, when George W Bush was running for reelection against John Kerry, I volunteered to be a poll watcher for the Republican party in Denver, Colorado. There were some minor issues. But nothing truly significant. And I was part of a large team of Republican poll watchers. Our goal was to have at least 1 Republican poll watcher at every polling place and I think we succeeded. George W Bush won reelection, by the way. And the media wasn’t exactly going easy on George W Bush. In fact the media accused Bush of being a war criminal for the war in Iraq.
His actions also gained more. Among every demographic except white men.
What’s the problem with white men these days?
Not with everyone. Maybe with a bunch of white men.
You know who else played terribly at that first debate? Joe Biden. Why does nobody talk about that? Everyone expected the President to be brash and blunt. So that’s not even news. But that good ol’ Joe Biden that the press was selling all year? He wasn’t there either. That might be news. But it wasn’t.
It’s pretty much a given that if Trump does not run again in 2024, whoever gets the GOP nomination will be the next Hitler in the eyes of the media, especially if that candidate says anything nice at all about Trump and his agenda. The main question — since Trump is not going away anytime in the near future and the media will still continue to throw their same accusations at him thinking he might run in ’24 — is whether or not the swing voters will finally get Hitler Fatigue, and the ability to turn on a dime and declare someone else New Hitler that America has to freak out over, after spending 7-8 years calling Trump Hitler, will be effective if the Biden/Harris (or Harris/Biden) Administration is screwing things up for a majority of those voters.
I’m a national media basher from way back. But at least 70 million people watched the first debate. If Trump’s bad behavior overshadowed Biden’s bad behavior, it’s through the eyes of those people, not because the media finessed it.
What I’m saying is that all anyone talks about is how awful Trump was. Nobody seems to talk about Biden’s awfulness. (An awfulness that increased since his awful debate with Paul Ryan.)
This is the first election where the incumbent ran against a ghost. A man who stayed in his basement for most of the campaign, called “lid” by 10:00 am most days. Couldn’t get even a dozen people to his rallies. He barely spoke with the press, for most of the fall he campaigned maybe one out of three days, in only 10 states. When he did open his mouth he could barely stay coherent and yelled at people a lot. He refused to answer a whole lot of questions about his plans for his administration.
That this ghost was able to miraculously win an election is, itself, a red flag.
The Biden campaign held to a strategy that allowed Trump to do all the talking, figuring that the more Trump talked, the more people would be motivated to vote for Biden in order to rid themselves of Trump. It worked. Biden received well over 78 million votes.
Go spam another forum. I think in the last week you’re responsible for half the comments on the entire site. We already know your point of view. Repeating it another hundred thousand times won’t make us suddenly agree with you.
This is a fair point. Biden also had a poor debate. The problem is that Trump refused to shut up and in effect rescued Biden every time Trump interrupted him. 🤷♂️
Nailed it.
Why is it so difficult for you to accept the idea that while a lot of voters liked Trump’s policies, they found the man exhausting and petulant? This is the question I asked at the beginning of this thread — why do you expect voters to look past who the guy is and only vote for what he is? When has that ever worked in politics?
I suppose the question now is what kind of ‘mandate’ does a ghost have, and will swing voters who ousted Trump for his temperament suddenly find themselves taken aback by the policies of the man they voted for, based simply on him being Not Trump?
(Biden, in turn has his own COVID-related dangers since he can’t go back to the Obama 2009 playbook, which was to jam all the recovery dollars into the deep Blue urban centers and let the rural areas fend for themselves. In trying to take Trump down, they’ve built up so much fear in their own voters about those deep Blue areas being incubation centers for viral death, trying to suddenly flip on a dime and bribe their voters in those areas to act like it’s Oct. 2019 again is going to be a tough sell, vaccine or not.)
Or, far more likely his campaign figured the less Biden talked, the less opportunity for him to reveal himself as an addled old man who will happily sell us out to the far left (and China). Which is another reason they kept him in the basement — less of a chance for him to make a fatal gaffe.
The President took the risk.
I get that you hate the President, but it’s strange that you think Joe Biden was playing some kind of 4-D chess here.
Biden couldn’t play tic tac toe against a chicken and win.
Who’s being exhausting here? C’mon man!
I’m about 100% sure I’ll regret wading in here, but…
Count me among those who find (found?) Trump exhausting and petulant. (I voted for him this year, and it was a pretty easy decision.)
And yet. The dude received at least seventy-two million votes. He and Biden are the only two presidential candidates ever to exceed 70 million. There are clearly a ton of Americans who are on board with Trump, foibles and all. They weren’t all holding their noses or voting against Biden either–they love Trump and what he’s done in office. So I’m not entirely convinced that a less-Trumpy Trump would have automatically resulted in more votes. Who’s to say that a less-Trumpy Trump wouldn’t have attracted more votes from demographic A while at the same time decreasing the total from demographic B?
Perfect.
It’s so interesting how The Squad and Bernie knew they could hijack him, but on the other hand the broad election results were a total repudiation.
When Harris takes over, I don’t see her having any principles except getting reelected.
I guess I’ll never understand the people who say “Yeah, the President had great policies, but I didn’t particularly care for his manners, so I’ll happy vote for totalitarianism.” These are not serious people. They’re trivial people fixated on trivia.
But yeah, let’s just give Iran another kajillion dollars, send more of our soldiers into the meat grinder and bend over for China. Because we don’t like the President’s manners.
I stand by my thought that there is election fraud. And specifically there is and has been election fraud every single election. Good for you if you think the elections in Wisconsin are ok, bit can you honestly say the same for Philadelphia or Chicago? I am pretty sure some election shenanigans hae and are occurring here in GA. I am not talking about massive conspiracies but a fair number of small actions that add up to election fraud. There have been over the years a number of cases documented (just to show that it is non partisan – in the 2018 election there was election fraud in a race for House Rep in NC by the Republican side – the candidate – the Republican – called for a revote and did not stand as a candidate). There is much that can and should be done to protect the vote as every vote falsified or stole negates a true vote.
I do not think Biden was playing 4-D chess — not at all. I think he was simply observing the oldest rule in politics (sometimes credited to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, although that may not actually be the case): “When your enemy is in the process of destroying himself, stay out of his way.”
That’s all Biden did. And it was successful. Because Trump did all of the hard work for him.
For the record. I do not hate the President. I am not a Never Trumper. I’m Trump Neutral: willing –eager even– to support him if he shows me he has the temperament for the job. I have made clear that my issues with him were largely confined to the way he conducted himself in office. Many here think I and other voters should ignore that. But we can’t separate the man from his policies. Nor should we have to. The President isn’t just a policy machine. He’s the leader and public face of the country to the world and personally, I don’t think it’s asking too much for him to behave like it. Or at the very least, shut up so you are not in our heads every day. I would have gladly taken that approach to the office (h/t: Calvin Coolidge).
No question he’s accomplished much: he was the steward of a very strong economy and given us a Supreme Court that will serve the country well for decades to come. His Middle East peace initiatives are truly remarkable and he succeeded where every U.S. President for the last 70 years have failed. His China policy has that country on its heels. He got dealt a bad hand with COVID, and dealt with it as best he could, but he was probably not the best leader for this type of crisis. Nonetheless, he has gotten the country most of the way through it in his own inimitable way.
For all of those reasons, Trump should have been re-elected and indeed, he almost was. I can’t help but think about what might have been: A little less Tweeting (OK, a lot less Tweeting — in fact, how about no Tweeting?), a bit more humility, 10% less stirring up the media, and he almost certainly would be looking at another 4 years in the White House.
Maybe they really are the racists the media tells us they are and decided to vote for the genuine article instead of the guy who doesn’t deliver on his supposed racism.