So why did tRump send ANY classified documents at all back to the National Archives in January 2022?

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Sunday September 04, 2022 · 12:31 PM PDT

2022/09/04 · 12:31

NOTE: First off, I want to thank everyone who read my previous diary on this topic and especially those who participated in the discussion in the comments. I learned a lot, and was impressed by the level of discourse.

By the end of 2021, the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) had been asking tfg to send back all the stuff covered by the Presidential Records Act — papers, pictures, souvenirs, gifts, etc. — that he had shipped from the White House down to Mar A Lago.

When tfg finally decided to send some of the documents back to NARA, we are told he sorted through the boxes himself and decided what to keep and what to send back. From Maggie Haberman at NYT:

Mr. Trump went through the boxes himself in late 2021, according to multiple people briefed on his efforts, before turning them over.

So either Orange Julius went down to the storage room in the basement himself, or he had all the boxes and bins carried up to his ornate ‘45 office’ — doesn’t matter which — and he rooted through ‘his’ stuff and decided what to send back in order to get NARA off his back…. those archivists don’t sound very aggressive, but they seem to be pretty persistent, eh?

There is no indication that NARA had asked about classified documents. In fact, when NARA got the 15 boxes — which NARA agreed that he could ship by commercial carrier, but would have been a BIG no-no if classified docs were included — they opened the boxes, saw some of the 184 colorful coversheets and probably said ‘Oh, shit!’, then immediately called the FBI. The poor NARA folks probably even had to wash their eyes out with soap because they weren’t cleared for TS, LOL!

OK, that’s the path that leads us to the title question:

What in the hell was going through the few remaining addled neurons in the pea-brain hiding under the rat’s nest on top of Little Donnie when he decided to mix ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY FOUR classified documents in with the rest of the useless junk he sent back?

Nobody had asked for them.

There had been no sign of any interest in them — see my previous diary.

WTF?

As we’ve seen, Donnie Boy sorted through the boxes and decided what he wanted to keep. I get that he kept the classified docs that he wanted to keep, but why send the rest back?

When nobody was asking for them?

When sending them back was the trigger for the current mess he (thankfully) finds himself in.

The mess that is (hopefully, hard to type with my fingers crossed) going to send him to prison for the rest of his miserable life.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m glad he did… ecstatic!

But why didn’t he just stick those 184 classified documents in a box and put it in a corner?

Or stash them in Melania’s drawers?

It just doesn’t make any sense.

In a lifetime of making really stupid decisions, this one really stands out.

Can anyone help me out here?

Enquiring minds (well, one of them, at least) want to know.

Why wasn't a massive alarm raised in the White House about missing TS/SCI docs on 1/20/21?

databob

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Friday September 02, 2022 · 1:08 PM PDT

2022/09/02 · 13:08

We know a lot about how the classified documents made their way to Mar A Lago:

tRump is an obsessive collector — if he didn’t have people cleaning up after him, I imagine he’d show up on one of those hoarder shows on TV
For visual proof of this, go look at pics of his office in tRump tOwer.
As per John Bolton, if tRump fancied a classified doc in an Oval Office meeting, he would just keep it, perhaps saying ‘I want to read it some more later’, and nobody had the gumption/temerity/horsepower to tell him no.
He would take the docs, pics, clippings, etc. up to his bedroom and stash them away.
Lots of people knew about this, but as president he had the legal right to do it.
Until 1/6/21, the tRumpies had no plans to vacate the WH — ever.
After 1/6/21, the tRumpies were… um… rather disorganized. The coup failed. They had 2 weeks to get out.
Mark Meadows told people (Cippilone?) that he would take care of recovering the classified docs.
Mark Meadows didn’t do that — duh!
Moving day happened.

Here is a picture, from 1/14/21, of what seems to be some of the 50 or more boxes and bins of documents and other stuff that was shipped to Mar A Lago in a moving truck.

People wait for a moving van after boxes were moved out of the Eisenhower Executive Office building inside the White House complex, Thursday, Jan. 14, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) — This is NOT a SCIF

So we have a pretty good idea how those documents ended up in the storage room at Mar A Lago, and we’re learning more and more about what has happened to them since they got there. My question has to do with what happened — or didn’t — at the White House — and CIA, and DOD, and DOJ, etc. — starting on 1/20/21 at 12:01pm, the moment we all heaved a huge sigh of relief.

I’m focusing on the documents classified as TS/SCI, of which dozens have been recovered. These are special documents, so sensitive that they are ‘compartmentalized’ to further restrict access to a sub-set of even people with Top Secret clearances. These are our nation’s most important secrets, and they are tightly controlled. They are stored in a ‘Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF), logged in and out, hand-carried from place to place, and only viewed by those who not only have a Top Secret clearance AND access to that specific ‘compartment’, but also have a legitimate need to know the information contained in that document.

Every time tRump walked off with a TS/SCI document — which, again, he had the legal right to do — the government employee, for instance a CIA briefer, would have to go back to the SCIF it came from and log the location of the document as something like ‘POTUS has it’. It was known to the inner circle that tRump took them up to his bedroom and stashed them — like a hoarder — with all the pictures of him and newspaper clippings of him, etc.

Back to that huge sigh of relief moment on 1/20/21. Every custodian of every SCIF with at least 1 TS/SCI document logged out a ‘POTUS has it’ now had a big problem: POTUS didn’t have it anymore.

FPOTUS had it — FORMER POTUS… and FPOTUS had no legal right to those documents.

Many of those TS/SCI documents would probably have been signed out from the SCIF in the basement of the White House. That’s why when I visualize the moment President Joe Biden (I still love typing that) and his new WH staff entered the West Wing, I see some poor document custodian from the basement SCIF jumping up and down, waving their TS/SCI document log and screaming at the top of their lungs something like:

‘HELP! CALL THE FBI! THERE’S 53 TS/SCI DOCUMENTS MISSING!!!’

(followed by a dramatic dissolution into a puddle of goo as the gnome from the basement SCIF contemplated spending the rest of his life at Leavenworth)

That’s what should have happened…. but it didn’t, obviously. Nothing happened.

Well, not nothing — the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) got wind that tRump shipped a bunch of Presidential Records — which don’t belong to an FPOTUS — to Mar A Lago, and spent a year asking politely and coaxing him to return them. At no time during that year was there any mention of classified documents, let alone TS/SCI docs.

Then, when tRump sent back 15 boxes of stuff in January 2022 — by commercial carrier — and NARA officials opened them, they were shocked to find classified documents, including TS/SCI docs, in 14 of the boxes. That’s when the ‘OH, SHIT’ moment and the panicked call to the FBI happened.

NARA had no clue there might be classified documents in those boxes, because otherwise they would never have let tRump ship them up to DC via UPS or a moving company.

What happened? Or, more importantly, what didn’t happen? And why not?

Can anybody explain why nothing happened? Or what I missed?

The closest I can come is that the SCIF custodians assumed that all the TS/SCI documents in tRump’s possession had been turned over to NARA along with the rest of the presidential records, as normally happens during a change of administration. So they just changed the logging from ‘POTUS has it’ to ‘NARA has it’. And never confirmed that with NARA, who never knew there were TS/SCI documents missing.

OK, that’s pretty weak — I admit it. It assumes multiple SCIF custodians pencil-whipping away a problem with accounting for some of the most sensitive and highly-classified documents our nation possesses. It’s scary to even contemplate.

But something like that happened. We know that because over a year passed before there was any interest in missing classified documents.

So I can’t figure it out, and it needs an explanation. Anybody?

Cheers.

Theory: Nuke Docs at MAL were unknown copies until the 'rat' spoke to FBI

databob

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Friday August 12, 2022 · 10:34 AM PDT

2022/08/12 · 10:34

If in fact there were highly-sensitive ‘nuclear documents’ sought and/or recovered from Mar-A-Lago in the FBI search, there is a sticky question remaining:

Why would the National Archives, DOJ and FBI spend 18 months asking ‘pretty please’ for these super-secret (and not subject to POTUS declassification*) documents to be returned?

I believe — but have no proof — that the answer is that until the ‘MAL Mole’ spoke to the FBI and dished on the identity and locations of the documents, they were unknown to the government. That would explain several things:

Why was there a sudden massive escalation in the intensity of the effort from NARA being given 15 boxes (and not being able to search for others at MAL) to the subpoena which netted another few documents (and not being able to search for others at MAL) to ‘everybody out in the parking lot! Blow the safe! Rummage in Melania’s drawers!.
How could the classified document custodians not have known these documents were missing?
What was it that prompted the ‘rat’ to come forward? Although perhaps it was an observant Secret Service agent, it was most likely someone very trusted by tRump. That means someone close to him — ‘under his spell’ — who saw something so massively horrible and heinous that they were able and willing to break the spell and dish to the FBI. tRump casually pulling nuclear documents out of his safe and bragging about them would do it.
Remember that the FBI had to have specific knowledge that the documents they were searching for were in that safe in order to get it included in the search warrant, and the only way that happens is from the ‘rat’
Apropos of nothing at all…. has anyone heard from Mark Meadows lately? Tucker Carlson?

So I could be completely wrong, but that’s my theory until it gets proven wrong.

On another note, a quick reading of 18 USC 793 shows that the word ‘classified’ (or anything like it) does not appear at all. The law specifies ‘defense information’, and what cannot be done with it without committing a federal crime, but it does not distinguish between classified and unclassified status of military documents.

So that appears to shoot down any defense of ‘but I declassified everything before I left the White House.’ Doesn’t matter, turd-ball.

And aside from that, POTUS waving his hands over a document merely starts the process of its declassification. There’s a lot of work that goes into that process — for instance, the document has to be re-marked as ‘unclassified’, and all other copies of that document have to be re-marked as well. If something like a classified project name is declassified as part of that process, then all mentions of that should be tracked down and declassified as well….. it’s a complicated process.

Finally, it seems that we as a country need to take some measures to protect ourselves in case another malignant narcissistic sociopath stumbles into the White House…. Such as not letting a president unilaterally declassify stuff — a good president won’t mind if there is a committee to approve something like that, and a bad president is what we need to protect ourselves from.

Cheers.

*Documents pertaining to atomic/nuclear energy and weapons are classified separately under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, and not subject to presidential declassification.

DeathSantis takes YET ANOTHER victory lap over his Covid-19 response. Compares Florida to Vermont!?!

databob

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Friday November 26, 2021 · 4:36 PM PST

2021/11/26 · 16:36

It’s become routine. Every time there is a dip in Florida’s Covid-19 cases, our self-absorbed governor and hopeful 2024 ‘daddy’s best boy’ Ron DeSantis can’t resist patting himself on the back.

In an interview last Sunday, he gave us his latest take:

"Freedom works," he said. "People vote with their feet. If the media was right and those other states, New York did the right way and Florida did the wrong way, you would see people leaving Florida to flock to those states."
"There was a lot of pressure on the media from some of these scientific elites. They didn’t want a control group because they were advocating policies that were going to have a hugely detrimental effect to the social fabric," DeSantis said. "If you could show a Sweden or a Florida or some of these other places that didn’t pay those terrible costs and still had similar outcomes in terms of COVID, then it would show that what they were advocating was not only misguided but it was actually harmful."

"It would be one thing if we could all just go in a cave for two weeks and the virus would disappear, but that is not true. So, you’re going to have to deal with it. And I think we’re finding that out now because you look, some of these very highly vaccinated countries in Europe are having massive spikes; Vermont in the United States hitting records," he added. "So, that’s just the reality, and I think that living with it and not destroying your society was something that made sense. And, quite frankly, was what the literature up until COVID for pandemic preparedness had said, they always said, don’t let the fear overcome society. You have to keep things going."

(Emphasis added)

There’s plenty in there to chew on — like the bit about the ‘scientific elites’ not wanting ‘a control group’, as if the public health response to a global pandemic should be ‘you billion folks wear masks and you billion don’t, and we’ll see who dies faster’ — but I’m going to focus on the parts I highlighted.

Desantis singled out Sweden and Florida as not paying ‘those terrible costs’. Let’s see if that’s valid.

Sweden got publicity early in the pandemic for adopting a sort of ‘live with it’ policy. How well did that work? I’m going to focus mostly on deaths in this diary, because the number of cases has become less important due to the vaccines and therapies available.

Fig. 1 — Sweden Covid-19 deaths since start of pandemic

OK, Sweden got hit hard early, and again in the Delta surge over the winter last year. Since then they’ve done rather well. Now Florida:

Fig. 2 — Florida Covid-19 deaths since start of pandemic

Florida actually did pretty well during the first Covid-19 surge, when nobody really knew what was happening or had any idea how to treat the people who fell sick, much less even that masks were useful. That had nothing to do with anything DeSantis did — the whole country basically shut down while we waited to see what happened in the first set of hot-spots like New York city, Italy, New Orleans, etc.

Then, on May 20, 2020, DeSantis took his first victory lap. Read and watch the video here. He had already forced the state to re-open starting May 4, 2020, and 6 weeks later there were over 10,000 cases per day in Florida. A month after that, over 200 people were dying daily. Great leadership, eh?

Here’s a look at the overall statistics for Sweden and Florida:

Fig. 3 — Florida overall Covid-19 statistics

Fig. 4 — Sweden overall Covid-19 statistics

Sorry for the lousy graphics — I’m unable to figure out how to make them bigger or clearer.

Sweden has reported 1,484 deaths per million population since the beginning of the pandemic. Florida has reported 2,847.

Almost exactly TWICE as many people per capita have died from Covid-19 in Florida compared to Sweden, and DeSantis dares to claim some sort of equivalency. That’s 30,000 extra deaths.

So where would Florida actually rank world-wide in Covid-19 deaths if it was a country?

Fig. 5 — Brazil overall Covid-19 statistics

Yeah, right behind Brazil, in 12th place in deaths per capita… in the world! Ahead of the USA as a whole, and every other developed country in the world. Take a bow, DeathSantis!

Actually it’s not that surprising, as DeathSantis’s pro-Covid policies are quite similar to those of Brazilian strong-man Bolsonaro’s.

Alright, this is getting long, and I’m tired. I’m not going to go through the same exercise with his dig at the ‘highly vaccinated countries in Europe’, except to note that Germany’s death rate is 1,202 per million, well under half of Florida’s. Yes, cases are surging in western Europe, but deaths aren’t.

I am, however, going to take exception with DeSantis’s dumping on Vermont. Look at Vermont’s daily deaths:

Look at the scale of this graph. I know Vermont is far smaller in population than Florida, but most days it’s either zero, 1 or 2 deaths.

Yeah, Vermont ranks 51st out of 51 states+DC in deaths per million — less than 25% of Florida’s lofty 2,847 per million, which ranks 9th.

This is part of what makes Ron DeSantis so incredibly terrifying to me: he can lie with a straight face better than TFG, he has absolutely no moral compass, and he doesn’t have the baggage of TFG.

The thought of him as president is mortifying.

Cheers.

Florida reported 901 new Covid-19 deaths today.... or maybe it was 8

databob

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Thursday August 26, 2021 · 3:05 PM PDT

2021/08/26 · 15:05

As has been explained in other diaries, Florida has been engaging in a horribly ~~duplicative~~ duplicitous practice of reporting Covid-19 deaths based on date of death, not date of report. This has led to the kind of totally misleading chart such as the one today on the CDC Covid tracking site:

Fig. 1 — Florida Daily Deaths for 8/25/21 as reported to CDC

Hey look! Everything’s good, nothing to see here. Deaths are dropping, right off the cliff. Why, there were only EIGHT Covid-19 fatalities in Florida yesterday. WOW!

On the other hand, as of yesterday, Florida had reported to the CDC a total of 42,731 Covid-19 fatalities:

Fig. 2 — Florida total deaths as reported to CDC on 8/25/21

And here’s today’s report:

43,632 — 42,731 = 901. So how does 901 = 8?

It’s easy. Here’s the daily totals as reported on 8/24/21 matched up to the daily totals reported on 8/26/21:

So the 6 deaths reported on 8/23 morphed into 53, and even the 126 deaths reported on 8/1 is STILL going up more than 3 weeks later, from 126 to 130.

It’s impossible to get a good estimate of how many people are actually dying from Covid-19 because of the way deaths are being reported, but the (current) total for the week beginning 8/5 is really scary: 1,400 Floridians died of Covid-19 during that week which is 200 per day.

And that total of 1,400 is going to go up even more, for several more weeks, as the DeathSantis administration here in Florida continues its deadly game of misdirection by pretending that death totals are going down precipitously, when in fact, they are nearly as high as they were a year ago, and trending higher.

Not a happy time down here in Florida.

Edit 8/26/21: changed duplicative to duplicitous.

Who here thinks Weisselberg was the only beneficiary of the Trump Org tax fraud scheme?

databob

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Thursday July 01, 2021 · 6:06 PM PDT

2021/07/01 · 18:06

I’m reading the text of the indictment, and this scheme was blatant and brazen…. but it was also petty and paltry. It would probably still be going on, except for the inconvenience of the Former Guy getting elected as president….. and most, if not all of the larceny and tax fraud ended in 2017 — gee, I wonder why?

It occurred to me, as my headline brings up, that it’s pretty hard to believe Alan Weisselberg just cooked up this scheme to ‘enrich’ himself. If he did, he was pretty stupid about it. Here’s one amazing detail from the indictment itself:

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that ol’ Alan got $500,000 in salary, and an additional $100,000 in ‘off the books’ benefits, like rent, car lease payments, school tuition, etc. in a given year. According to the indictment, the Trump Organization kept a SPREADSHEET that totaled up those off the books payments, and then DEDUCTED that amount from Alan’s paycheck. Now think about that for a moment…… if you were stealing from your company as well as defrauding the IRS, would you dock your pay by the amount of your theft? And keep a spreadsheet with the details? And get other people working for you to do the dirty work of keeping track of your theft? And get your boss (Orange Julius) to sign some of the checks?

Nahhhhh, no way — you can’t convince me that they didn’t use this same scheme for Junior, Ewic, Ivankaaaaah…. probably put Tiffany through college the same way.

It’s also impossible to conceive that Orange Julius didn’t know about this scheme, approve of it, participate in it, and benefit from it as well. I suspect we’ll be hearing more about this in the near future.

This was just the opening salvo — Weisselberg gets to feel the handcuffs, do the perp walk into the courtroom (a bit over the top, if you ask me — he’s 74 and not in good shape, he needs handcuffs for what purpose?), and stare a couple years in the slammer in the face (maybe he’ll call Cosby for advice). I suspect they don’t really NEED him or his testimony, but it would be helpful, so why not fire this barrel first?

This is the gift that will just keep on giving. Keep the popcorn coming.

Cheers.

Go ahead and cry. I sure did.

databob

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Wednesday January 20, 2021 · 3:55 PM PST

2021/01/20 · 15:55

No words.

Story

What the HELL is up with this 'maybe extra doses in the Pfizer vaccine vials'?

databob

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Thursday December 17, 2020 · 6:38 AM PST

2020/12/17 · 06:38

I must be missing something here…. from HuffPost:

The Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday vials of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine may contain up to 40% more doses than originally thought, meaning medical officials could potentially use the limited supplies on hand to inoculate many more people against the coronavirus. (emphasis added)

These Covid-19 vaccines are supposed to be science rushing to the rescue of humanity, but ‘may contain’ just does not seem to me to be a scientific term.

So I went to the official Pfizer instructions for handling, thawing, diluting and administering the vaccine. It is interesting to read — and a bit scary to realize all of the steps that have to be done perfectly to avoid injecting someone with ruined (and useless) solution.

Here are the bits that are pertinent to the issue of ‘extra doses’:

The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine Multiple Dose Vial contains a frozen suspension that does not contain preservative and must be thawed and diluted prior to administration.

…..

Dilute the vial contents using 1.8 mL of 0.9% Sodium Chloride Injection, USP (not provided) to form the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine.

…..

Using aseptic technique, cleanse the vial stopper with a single-use antiseptic swab, and withdraw 0.3 mL of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine.

So there is some unspecified quantity of ‘frozen suspension’ in the vial, you add 1.8ml of saline and withdraw .3ml to give each injection. Since we don’t know how much of the now-thawed suspension we started with, we don’t know the final volume of the prepared vial, but it is something more than 1.8ml.

I found it VERY curious that the Pfizer data sheet does not say anywhere (that I could find) how many doses are in each vial. We have all heard and read in the news that there are 5 doses per vial and 975 in each ‘pizza box’, etc. but there is NOTHING in the official instructions about how many doses are in a vial.

I also don’t know if you are supposed to use ALL of the liquid in a vial when loading syringes — I know you don’t want air in the syringe, which is hard to keep out when sucking the last bit of liquid out, but here is another issue:

Gently invert the vial containing the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine 10 times to mix.
• Do not shake.
• Inspect the vaccine in the vial.
• The vaccine will be an off-white suspension. Do not use if vaccine is discolored or contains particulate matter.

(emphasis added)

We are accustomed to shaking stuff to mix it, but this vaccine is apparently VERY fragile, to the point where just SHAKING that vial a few times will DESTROY it…… how often have you seen a nurse flick a syringe to get that pesky air bubble out of it? Seems likely that would ruin the fragile vaccine, and trying to suck the last bit of liquid out of a little vial to squeeze out that one extra dose would likely get some air in the syringe, wouldn’t it?

So that brings me to my complaint:

How could Pfizer and the FDA — after all of this rigorous development and testing — not KNOW how many doses of the vaccine are in a vial?

There either IS enough mRNA material in the vial for FIVE, SIX of SEVEN doses or there IS NOT. There is no MAYBE here.

Either you CAN safely get SEVEN doses out of a properly diluted vial or you CANNOT.

I think it’s pretty likely that when they did the clinical trials, they diluted the vials, got a maximum of 5 doses out of each vial (consistent with the short defrosted shelf life of this vaccine) and didn’t fiddle around with squeezing out extra doses. So if you didn’t test the effectiveness of the vaccine when you got 6 or 7 doses out of a vial, how can you claim the same results?

It also seems to me that it wouldn’t be very difficult for Pfizer and the FDA to very quickly announce that they pulled some vials out of the shipping process, analyzed them carefully, and verified that there is enough actual mRNA material in EVERY vial to DEFINITELY be able to get SEVEN doses….. OR THERE ISN’T.

Look, I’m a very strong vaccine proponent. I’ve consistently told everyone that I’ll be first in line to take this vaccine as soon as Dr. Anthony Fauci tells me it’s safe and effective…. which he’s done.

But this episode isn’t doing anything to bolster my faith and enthusiasm for this vaccine.

They have GOT to do better than ‘may contain’.

Cheers.

Poll

331 votes Show Results

When are you going to get the Covid-19 vaccine?

331 votes Vote Now!

When are you going to get the Covid-19 vaccine?

Already got it

6 votes

As soon as I can

235 votes

When they make me

2 votes

Over my dead body... or in it!

4 votes

When I think it is safe

77 votes

Don't need it

0 votes

Don't believe in vaccines

0 votes

7 votes

Ultimate narcissism: tRump thinks Dems only stole HIS votes, let other GOPers win!

databob

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Monday November 30, 2020 · 8:55 AM PST

2020/11/30 · 08:55

Even for Diaper Don, this tweet was notable:

It is true that Republicans did better than predicted in a lot of the down-ballot races nationwide, and that’s a problem that Democrats are going to have to do some soul-searching about before the next elections in 2022.

When looking at how badly Orange Julius did compared to other GOP candidates, 2 general explanations present themselves:

Sneaky Dems rigged the election, stole millions of votes from Dear Leader to give to Sleepy Joe, did a fantastic job of hiding ALL of the actual evidence of their crimes, but stupidly neglected to tamper with any of the other races on the same ballots that they cheated on to steal the election for President-Elect Joe Biden
OR
The election was fair, and millions of people voted for GOP candidates up and down the ballot, but specifically not for tRump

It is pretty obvious, to me at least, that the second theory is correct. Just take a look at Georgia, where Orange Julius couldn’t even muster as many votes as Perdue did in his senate primary. Or Maine, where tRump fell 25,000 votes short of Susan Collins’ total… and Collins very clearly ran AWAY from tRump. Even in Alaska he didn’t reach the vote total of Dan Sullivan, the Republican candidate.

Heck, in Colorado, tRump was 65,000 votes short of Cory Gardner’s LOSING total. And in Texas he was well short of John Cornyn’s total.

I think pretty much everyone can see the truth here….. except Dear Leader, perhaps.

Cheers.

Was there voter fraud in Oakland County Michigan? Let's take a look! (corrected)

databob

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Wednesday November 25, 2020 · 3:00 PM PST

2020/11/25 · 15:00

I saw this in a story sent me by my wife from a friend of hers on Facebook. Click the link for all the gory details, and feel free to watch the entire video if you like, but here’s the gist:

CORRECTION: As pointed out in the comments, Michigan is NOT the only state still using straight-party voting.

Alabama, Indiana*, Michigan, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and South Carolina.

*Senate bill 61 in 2016 abolished straight ticket voting for at-large races only.

BTW, Michigan is the only state in the USA that still has the option of ‘straight-party’ voting, in which a voter pushes a single button or lever or whatever, causing his vote to be cast for ALL candidates from a single party. The voter still needs to make selections in non-partisan races and measures if they choose. So this comparison can only be made in Michigan.

So this chart purports to show how well Dear Leader did with voters who voted for him specifically against voters who voted the straight Republican ticket. There is a clear trend line that the higher the percentage of Republican straight-ticket votes in a particular precinct, the worse tRump did.

Waitaminit! How can that be? It sure seems that the more rabidly conservative a neighborhood (precinct) is, the more rabidly pro-tRump it will also be. Anything else seems counter-intuitive, right?

At this point I was intrigued enough to download the raw precinct data from Oakland County and set up the graph myself:

Fig. 2: My plot of Oakland County voting data

I didn’t spend much time on it, but it is good enough for me to agree that this pattern exists.

That, to Dr Shiva Ayyadurai, a self-proclaimed really smart and highly educated guy, is conclusive proof that some enterprising Democratic operatives had written an ‘algorithm’ and injected it into a bunch of voting machines, causing them to ‘steal’ votes from Orange Julius and giving them to…… wait for it……. PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN!!!!! (not sorry, it just gives me a chill to type that — every time!). BTW, Dr. Shiva is an interesting fellow: he claims to have invented e-mail, believes Covid-19 can be prevented/cured with vitamins (i forgot which ones and refuse to go look) and was the unsuccessful Republican candidate for the US senate in Massachusetts this election, losing by about a zillion votes. Google him at your own risk.

OK, back to the topic…. so the data sleuths ran the data from another county — Macomb — and found the same pattern (see the linked story for that graph), and then, as their slam-dunk proof that this was some vast left-wing conspiracy, they plotted the data for Wayne county (90% Dem):

Unfortunately, there isn’t enough data in Wayne County to draw any conclusion, because almost all of the precincts voted over 90% for PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN!!! (still not sorry). Of note is some of the precincts down by the red arrow, where according to their data tRump got NEGATIVE votes, because when you subtract his vote delta from the total GOP votes, you get less than zero… a neat trick, eh?

At any rate, there is definitely something going on here, but does it actually point to vote fraud and/or stealing votes? I was stumped. I thought maybe it was an effect of third-party candidates — if most of the votes for the libertarian candidate were Republicans, and if a higher percentage of Republicans in a neighborhood made them feel more comfortable to vote for the libertarian……. I corrected for that and it didn’t change the problem.

I started losing sleep over this, and then I had a brain-fart: what happened in 2016? I went and found the Oakland County data and plotted it the same way:

Fig. 5: My plot of Oakland County 2016 voting data

Woah! Same pattern! What the HELL is going on here? Well, for one thing, the whole ‘vast left-wing conspiracy’ pretty well goes up in smoke, because it is VERY far-fetched to think that even if they did develop and inject this so-called ‘algorithm’ (which is a stupid thing to call it) back in 2016, one would think they would have made it work well enough so that Hilary would have at least won Michigan.

I quit losing sleep even though I still couldn’t explain this pattern — at least it is demonstrably NOT vote fraud or theft.

Then I remembered from my research that, while Michigan is the only state that still does straight-ticket voting, Texas only got rid of it in 2017, so I went looking for some useful 2016 data. Here’s what I found in Denton County, a solid (57%) tRump county in north-east Texas:

Fig. 6: My plot of Denton County Texas vote data 2016

OK, same pattern. That totally kills the conspiracy theories, because even if Denton County Texas uses the same voting machines as Oakland County and Macomb County and Wayne County in Michigan (which I have no idea about), and even if there WAS a vast left-wing conspiracy that was willing to spend a long time in prison for trying to fix a presidential election, why would you take that risk in TEXAS in 2016?

So it’s pretty obviously not vote fraud or theft, but what is going on? It seems there has to be some logical explanation for this phenomenon, but I can’t figure it out. Any ideas?

PS: at the last minute, I came upon this debunking from a data scientist. It seems compelling, but I’m not yet willing to accept it as gospel. Something doesn’t seem 100% right with it, so I’m still picking at this issue.

Poll

117 votes Show Results

Will Dear Leader attend PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN'S inauguration?

117 votes Vote Now!

Will Dear Leader attend PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN'S inauguration?

HAHAHAHAHA

57 votes

Not bloody likely

26 votes

No, because no direct flights from Moscow

18 votes

Not if PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN lets him keep AF1

0 votes

No, because Deathsantis will give him political asylum

3 votes

0 votes

Yes, because he will think it is HIS inauguration because OF COURSE he won in a landslide

13 votes

tRump's Wisconsin partial recount is as stupid as he is!

databob

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Wednesday November 18, 2020 · 4:53 PM PST

2020/11/18 · 16:53

So our soon-to-be-unemployed (and indicted) Dear Leader saw that he ‘only’ lost Wisconsin by 20,608 votes and decided to demand a recount. Since Joe Biden’s margin of victory (oh, I LOVE to type that phrase) of .7% is within the legal limit in Wisconsin, he is entitled to one. But there’s a catch: you gotta pay for your recount…. upfront! And the cost isn’t cheap: $7.9 million.

Obviously not wanting to spend that much of his cult members’ money on a useless effort (while he’s working out ways to put it in his own pocket), cheapskate donnie picked some counties and ponied up $3 million for a partial recount.

Maybe that’s not such a bad idea….. after all, in the Georgia recount that is finishing up and several counties found missing votes. In Fayette county, there were 2,577 votes found, with a net of +449 for tRump. In Floyd county, 2508 uncounted ballots surfaced, with a net gain for tRump of +778.

Not surprisingly, both counties have Republican majorities. tRump carried Floyd with 70% and Fayette with 53%.

Armed with this data, certainly provided by his crack campaign legal team led by……. Ruuuuuddddyyyyyy!…. which counties did Dear Leader choose to spend his $3 million fishing for votes in??????

Forest County — 65% for tRump

Rusk County — 67% for tRump

Taylor County — 71% for tRump

Monroe County — 61% for tRump

As we saw above, it stands to reason that the more people who voted for tRump in a county, the more likely that any ‘lost’ or ‘misplaced’ votes would also favor him.

Which counties did tRump decide to pay $3 million to recount? (thanks for asking again)

Milwaukee County — 69% for BIDEN

Dane County — 76% for BIDEN

Seriously?

Cheers.

THE most important question: When was tRump's last negative Covid-19 test?

databob

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday October 03, 2020 · 4:58 PM PDT

2020/10/03 · 16:58

We only know 1 incontrovertible fact about Dear Leader’s Covid-19 case: At about 6:30pm EST yesterday he was admitted to the hospital.

There are a lot of other bits of data that we think we know, but, given the vagueness, errors and opaqueness of the people who should be keeping us updated, just about everything else is open to question — not least because many of the people who are giving us information have a history of lying, prevarication, quibbling and obfuscation.

I’ve never heard of anyone progressing from tested negative to tested positive to hospitalized with symptoms in 48 hours, but we are supposed to believe this is what has happened to Orange Julius…. but also that he is ‘doing fine’ and is rarin’ to go.

We can see that the Saturday Supreme Court nominee introduction was a ‘super-spreader event’, but can’t tell if tRump got infected or was the super-spreader himself at that event.

We have been told that Kellyanne Conway, Hope Hicks and Chris Christie were all deeply involved in doing what passed for debate practice in the White House Map Room with tRump for hours and hours in the past couple of weeks… and they have all tested positive in the past few days. Mark Meadows and Rudy Guliani were also in that practice in that closed room for hours and hours…. how soon will they test positive?

We know Melania was mysteriously sitting in the middle of the tRump family Tuesday night WITH A MASK ON — the only mask on that side of the room amongst the family. Explain that to me, please. She only took off the mask when she went up on stage after the debate. They all flew back to DC after the debate in Cleveland that night… I wonder if she wore her mask on the plane as well, while she was around the family.

We know that Hope Hicks’ positive test result was known — at least to Mark Meadows, because he publicly confirmed it — before the Marine One helicopter with tRump left the White House on Thursday morning enroute to Joint Base Andrews to take them to New Jersey for the fundraiser.

Going to that fund-raiser after knowing he had definitely been exposed — in close contact for hours a day — to a known contagious person, without getting even an instant Covid-19 test first, was a monstrously evil act all by itself.

We have been told — by Dear Leader himself, multiple times — that he is tested ‘every day’. Obviously, given the source, this is not a credible data point. I strongly suspect that tRump doesn’t like the nasal swab any more than I did when I got my test, so his testing frequency has probably dropped off over time.

So that brings me to THE most important question: When did tRump get infected, and when did he first test positive?

We may never know the answer to these questions, but a whole lot of people who were in close contact with tRump during the past week would certainly like to know. And the rest of us would like to better understand the true magnitude of the monstrous evil that is being perpetrated on our country by tRump.

Cheers.

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