Dems Have Become Stars AT CORRUPTING ELECTIONS! NEVER FORGET BIDEN’S 2020!

Dems Who Cry ‘Voter Suppression’ Should At Least Pretend To Care About Election Integrity

BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE at the Federalist:

DECEMBER 09, 2022

Despite her supposed quest to restore access to the ballot box, Stacey Abrams remains silent on the problems in Arizona.

TRISTAN JUSTICE

In 2018, failed Democrat Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams refused to concede a fair statewide defeat citing unfounded claims of voter suppression.

“I acknowledge that former of Secretary of State Brian Kemp will be certified the victor in the 2018 gubernatorial election,” Abrams said when she finally ended her first effort to take over the governor’s mansion. “But to watch an elected official, who claims to represent the people in the state, baldly pin his hopes for election on the suppression of the people’s democratic right to vote has been truly appalling.”

“So let’s be clear,” she added, “this is not a speech of concession because concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true or proper. As a woman of conscience and faith, I cannot concede that.”

Abrams went on to start a national organization against “voter suppression” in 2019 and never conceded that she fairly lost the Georgia governor’s race. Weeks after the loss, Abrams went on MSNBC to complain about “long lines” and “under-resourced” polling stations that suppressed the vote.

“It was not a free and fair election,” Abrams said, carving out her legacy as the OG election denier. “It was not fair to the thousands who were forced to wait in long lines because they were in polling places that were under-resourced, or worse, they had no polling places to go to because more than 300 had been closed.”

If Abrams and her group, “Fair Fight,” actually cared about voter suppression, however, they would be filing lawsuits in Arizona.

Federalist Staff Writer Shawn Fleetwood has been chronicling the issues that plagued the November election run by Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who also happened to be at the top of the ballot this cycle as the Democrats’ candidate for governor. In Maricopa County, home to nearly 62 percent of the state population, hours-long lines and broken machines turned away many same-day voters, who typically favor Republicans.

“After its close and contentious 2020 election, Maricopa County officials refused to cooperate with an audit of the election by state senators and dismissed concerns about how it conducts elections,” Fleetwood reported. This year, it took poll workers nearly two weeks to finish counting ballots, with election workers reporting issues with the equipment. “Printers with misconfigured settings in at least 70 of Maricopa’s 223 voting locations printed ballots that were rejected by many of the center’s vote tabulator machines.”

According to the Arizona attorney general’s office nearly two weeks after Election Day, voters who were having issues at their original vote center were told at their second destination that the state system showed they had already cast ballots.

Hobbs ultimately won the governor’s contest over Republican Kari Lake, an ex-television anchor, by just more than 17,000 votes out of more than 2.5 million cast. The results were certified on Monday over Republican objections. Lake plans to file a lawsuit challenging the election on Friday.

“We’re ready to go with what we believe to be an exceptional lawsuit. And we believe we will be victorious in that lawsuit,” Lake told Steve Bannon on his “War Room” podcast. “We’ll take it all the way to the Supreme Court if we have to. We will not stop fighting. Because the people of Arizona were disenfranchised.”

Despite her supposed quest to restore access to the ballot box, Abrams remains silent on the problems in Arizona.

Meanwhile in Georgia, where Abrams and the entire Democrat Party went all in last year against Republican reforms to the state’s elections system, calling it “Jim Crow on steroids,” this year’s midterms featured record-level early-voting turnout weeks before Election Day. According to the Georgia secretary of state’s office, Tuesday’s runoff broke more records for all-time turnout in the midterms, “with more votes cast than any other midterm,” totaling more than 3.5 million residents who cast a ballot. Democrat Sen. Raphael Warnock carried the runoff race by nearly 3 points, earning his first full six-year term to the upper chamber, despite amplifying his party’s hysteria over statehouse Republicans’ 2021 election law that actually expanded early voting.

“What the state Legislature did yesterday is to try to arrest the voices and the votes of the people,” Warnock said in Atlanta last year. “The issue of voting rights is about the democracy itself.”

Despite the law’s passage, Warnock achieved six years in the Senate by an even wider margin than his first special-election runoff in January 2021. So much for all the GOP “voter suppression” in the Peach State. Will the Democrats who claim to care about voter suppression begin to turn their heads to Arizona? Will there be a reckoning over the party’s own hysteria concerning a law that did nothing to hinder their victories? Don’t count on it.

The party’s corporate allies in Georgia, including Major League Baseball and Coca-Cola, which participated in the Democrats’ efforts to kill the election-integrity bill, have so far refused to offer any moment of self-reflection. Warnock himself already told supporters in his victory speech that he won despite “voter suppression.”

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Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.

“Our public health establishment has now abandoned the claim that vaccination will prevent a person from catching covid…..”

 DECEMBER 9, 2022 BY JOHN HINDERAKER at Power Line:

DO THE VACCINES WORK?

Everyone knows that covid is dangerous mostly to old people who are already sick. Thus, there has been a particular emphasis on vaccinating and boosting the elderly. Our public health establishment has now abandoned the claim that vaccination will prevent a person from catching covid, but says that it will greatly reduce the risk of hospitalization or death.

Assessing the relative risks of the vaccinated and unvaccinated requires accurate knowledge of the numbers in each category. We have records of the people who have been vaccinated, so the “unvaccinated” in government figures merely represents the difference between the total population cohort and the number known to have been vaccinated or boosted. So the size of the total population cohort is obviously critical.

Kevin Roche, proprietor of Healthy Skeptic, realized that in Minnesota, the Department of Health was basing its vaxed/unvaxed comparisons on different time periods: it looked, for example, at case etc. rates for people who were vaccinated in 2021, but in order to determine the rates for the unvaccinated, it used population numbers averaged between 2015 and 2019. The over-65 population in Minnesota grew significantly between 2015 and 2021. In a cohort where vaccination rates are high, that turns out to make a huge difference.

This chart tells the story:

Kevin explains:

Here is what the relative event rates would look like if the 2021 one-year Census population estimates were used for Minnesota instead of the five-year 2019 estimate that DOH uses. As we anticipated, the change for the 65 and over group is dramatic. In the October event data week, for example, (and which should be using 2022 data, which we will extrapolate to in a future post) the move from what is really a 2017 age 65 and over population estimate to a 2021 one takes the number of unvaccinated persons from about 62,000 to over 162,000. It takes the cases per 100,000 people from 396 to 151, the hospitalizations from 71 to 27 and the deaths from 4.9 to 1.8. The case rate is now lower than that for vaxed population and equal to that for the boosted. The hospitalization rate is far lower than that for the vaxed and almost equal to that of the boosted population. And the death rate goes from 4.9 to 1.8, equal to that for the vaxed group and below that of the boosted population.

So the alleged benefit of vaccination in people over 65 turns out to be the artifact of a statistical blunder. Or, perhaps, a statistical trick.

There is much more at the link, including charts that show the impact of vaccination and boosters in younger age groups, using the correct years. They indicate that in those age groups, there is a positive impact from vaccination and boosters, although in some cases the numbers are so low as to be of doubtful significance.

Do national figures, and data from other states, incorporate similar errors? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

It is easy to manipulate statistics, either intentionally or accidentally, by committing errors that are really rather simple but that never will be revealed by the government media. It is left to smart observers like Kevin Roche to do the work that neither our public health establishment nor our journalists have the ability, or perhaps the desire, to do.

“Sometimes it is entire states that have “some of the worst air pollution”.

 DECEMBER 9, 2022 BY STEVEN HAYWARD at Power Line:

“SOME OF THE WORST” NEWS MEDIA

Who or what publication deserves to be regarded as the worst news media outlet in the country (or the world)? Chances are it is the one in your nearest metro area. Wait—how can that possibly be? I dunno, but if we ask the media, this is likely the answer they’d come up with.

About 15 years ago I co-authored a book about air pollution and the Clean Air Act. I know—you’ll just have to contain your excitement. One of the things we found was an example of what might be called the reverse Lake Woebegone Effect, i.e., according to local media every local area had “some of the worst” air pollution in the whole country! Every metro area was below average! Of course, if every place has “some of the worst” of anything, then no place really does (as the government’s air quality data bear out*).

Some samples from the book:

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago has “some of the worst air pollution in the nation.” The Dallas-Fort Worth area has “some of the country’s worst air,” claims the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The Baltimore Sun says Baltimore has “some of the worst air pollution in the country,” as well. The New York metropolitan area? “Some of the country’s dirtiest air,” according to the Westchester Journal News. Atlanta, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has “some of the worst air pollution in the country.” The Washington Post puts not only the Washington-Baltimore metropolitan area but also Phoenix in the “some of the worst air pollution” fraternity.

Sometimes it is entire states that have “some of the worst air pollution.” New Jersey, the Bergen Record says, has “some of the worst air pollution in the country.” But just across the Hudson River the New York Times claims not only that the state of New York “has some of the nation’s dirtiest air,” but that “the smog in Connecticut is among the worst in the nation.” Tennessee experiences “some of the worst air pollution in America,” according to the Chattanooga Times Free Press. Maryland is “faced with some of the worst air pollution in the country,” according to the Baltimore Sun.

Did all these news outlets arrive at these claims through original reporting and consulting the EPA data? Yes, I jest, so you can stop laughing. Actual EPA data shreds these claims, but environmental advocacy groups (especially the American Lung Association’s annual “state of the air” report) produce cookie-cutter press releases claiming that each local area suffers “some of the worst” pollution in America, and the media dutifully repeats these claims. This is why most environmental “reporters” are really just stenographers for environmentalists. This ought to be embarrassing for any serious editor or publisher, but there aren’t many serious editors or publishers any more.

Now we have a sequel to pass along, courtesy of WattsUpWithThat. Local media are reporting that their local area is warming faster than the world! And if every local area is warming faster than the world, then the world is warming faster than itself, as the summary headline shows:

* As an example, this 20-year old chart from our book shows that the claim that “LA and San Francisco have “the same smog problems” is nonsense: