August 14, 2021: Dominion Voting Systems, Nazis and COVID-19

 

8/14/21: Right-wingers continue to fall victim to a virus they discounted from the start. And let’s not forget. Donald J. Trump, at the time the most powerful leader in the world, blew off the threat in the fall of 2020, got his fat ass infected, and ended up being rushed to the hospital. 

Come to think of it, if you pay taxes, you got stuck with the bill for all his state-of-the-art healthcare. 

In recent days, we learn that longtime right-wing Florida radio host Marc Bernier is hospitalized with COVID-19. 

Just last week, he suggested the U.S. government was acting “like Nazis,” insisting that people get shots.

Real Nazis place warning sign on Jewish business, 1933.

 

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“This delta variant is burning through the population.” 

FLORIDA is experiencing a crippling wave of new coronavirus infections. But there’s a dearth of Nazis. 

On August 11, it could be reported that the state had broken its record for hospitalized COVID patients eleven days in a row. “This delta variant is burning through the population,” Jason Salemi, an epidemiologist at the University of South Florida, told the Miami Herald. “It’s infecting a lot of people very, very rapidly.” 

“The degree of contagiousness and rate of transmission for the delta variant is completely off the charts compared to all the previous variants,” Dr. David Andrews, a pathologist and professor at the University of Miami agreed. “It is absolutely unprecedented.” 

The dying, the mask-denying, and the I-don’t-want-to-be-turned-into-a-chimpanzee refusing-to-be-vaccinated continue. On August 10, another 664 Americans fell victim to COVID-19.

 

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IT TURNS OUT claims that the 2020 election was stolen are selling at a steep discount. Dominion Voting Systems, accused by all kinds of crazed voices on the right, has sued Newsmax and One America for continuing to tout the unproven claim. In one case, Dominion says, One America trotted out an “expert mathematician” to explain how the voting was rigged. 

In a January 27 interview, Ed Solomon told his One America host and the channel’s clueless audience, that he had performed a mathematical analysis. He said the votes in Fulton County, Georgia had to be rigged. Results, he said, could “only have been done by an algorithm.” He said the probability of Biden’s victory in the county was “1 over 10 to an exponent so large there’s not enough stars in the universe, there aren’t enough atoms in the universe, to explain the number.”

 

Lawyers for Dominion have spoiled the soup, pointing out that Solomon was, at the time of his report, already a convicted felon, with no college degree. His day job at the time was installing swing sets for children. Dominion also noted in a recent court filing that OAN “had effectively acknowledged” that the claims made by Solomon and others like him were false “by secretly removing several articles and broadcasts from its own website that made similar claims.” 

Among other assertions, the right-leaning media outlets insisted that Dominion machines in 28 states had been used to shift millions of votes from Donald J. Loser to Joseph R. Biden Jr., which no court has ever found to be true. 

As NPR notes, the Dominion lawsuit also names, 

OAN CEO Robert Herring as well as his son, OAN President Charles Herring; the chief White House correspondent for OAN, Chanel Rion; and a network personality, Christina Bobb. Dominion has also sued Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock; he appeared often on OAN and was interviewed as an “expert,” but similarly spread misinformation about Dominion and the 2020 election, the suits allege.

 

Dominion is suing Newsmax, OAN and Byrne for a minimum of $1.6 billion each.

 

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YOUR HUMBLE BLOGGER does not pretend to be an “expert mathematician,” but he will venture to say, “One, point six billion is a large pile of cash.” 

So let’s check out Fulton County. In 2016, Hillary Clinton carried the county with 281,875 votes (69.2%). Trump had 110,372 votes (27.1%). Gary Johnson gathered in another 14,926 (3.7%), enough, had he run four years later, to possibly save Loser Don’s fat and stupid ass. 

In 2020, Joe Biden simply did better, polling 381,144 votes (72.65%). Trump performed worse, probably because a majority of Americans, through four years of his term, had always told pollsters they disapproved of the job he was doing. This time, his total vote rose to 137,240 (but his percentage dropped to 26.16%) 

A Libertarian candidate pulled down 6,275 votes, (1.2%) 

Voter turnout was 65.57% in 2020, with 806,451 individuals in Fulton County eligible to vote. 

Or, to put it another way, in just one critical county, in just one critical state, 277,674 voters stayed firmly planted at home.

 

As for the “rigged” part of the whole, you had to wonder, with that many potential votes left on the table, why Dominion didn’t come up with a way to steal…say, 50,000 more votes, so that the cliff-hanger election wasn’t so close. Turnout was always going to be the key in the election. Both sides turned out supporters in force. Trump increased his totals in Fulton County, in 2020, by 24.3%. Biden increased his total, compared to Clinton’s in 2016, by 35.2%. 

We can also check the numbers for 2012, when Obama carried Fulton County with 64.2% of the vote, and 2008, when 67% of Fulton voters chose Barack Obama over the war hero John McCann. 

As for all the stars in the universe not explaining how Biden could have piled up so many more votes, it might be worth noting that from 2010 to 2020, Fulton County population grew by more than 150,000. Voters in the county tend to be more highly educated, with 53% having earned at least a bachelor’s degree, as opposed to 31% across the state, and 32% in the United States. We know, in both elections involving Trump, that the more educated populations went for other candidates. 

That’s because they’re educated, of course. 

As for this blogger, I hereby volunteer to appear on OAN and set their dumb hosts and poor viewers straight.

 

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IN TODAY’S EPISODE of “Scum Bags on Parade,” we learn that New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is stepping down in fourteen days. Investigations revealed that he had sexually abused or harassed eleven women. 

We also learn that Maryland prosperity-preaching Pastor Rudolph E. Brooks Jr. has been arrested and charged with bilking the federal government to the tune of $1.5 million. He stands accused of using the money from a Paycheck Protection Program loan to purchase thirty-nine cars! His new fleet included one Tesla, one Bentley and one Mercedes, and the good Reverend used what cash remained to put a down payment on a new house and cover personal expenses.