Showing posts with label Fulton County. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fulton County. Show all posts

Sunday, March 20, 2022

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.

Monday, February 28, 2022

January 21: A Stake in the Heart of the Federal Republic

1/21/22: Remember when your parents told you not to hang around with “that kid” because they’d be a bad influence? Or maybe the day you told your own kids something similar?

 

____________________ 

If “POTUS allows this to occur…we’re driving a stake in the heart of the federal republic.” 

Anonymous member of the Freedom Caucus

____________________

  

Based on growing evidence, Trump is the U.S. government’s “bad kid,” the one who pulled other bad kids into his orbit. No wonder he might want to be re-elected in 2024. He’s going to need that pardon power. 

Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani T. Willis is on his trail. She has concluded that the former president’s conduct related to a call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger may well have been criminal. In that infamous call, then-President Trump asked Raffensperger to “find” just enough votes to give him a win in the state – and gently hand over the state’s sixteen electoral votes.


Willis could bring Trump down.

 

Add in other calls and plots, and Trump may be open to multiple felony charges. Those could include racketeering, solicitation of election fraud, intentional interference with performance of election duties and conspiracy to commit election fraud. Other working parts to a solid case might include, but would not be limited to:

 

A.    Trump’s call to the chief investigator for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, asking her to find “dishonesty” in the election. 


B.     Sen. Lindsey Graham’s call to Raffensperger, asking if all mail-in ballots in counties with significant rates of ballot signature challenges could be thrown out.

 

C.    Rudolph Giuliani and other Trump lawyers pressing lawmakers in seven states to appoint second sets of electors (despite having proven no significant voter fraud). These electors would vote for Donald, recounts and dozens of court defeats be damned.

 

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IN RELATED NEWS, the House Select Panel has revealed evidence, indicating that if you witnessed events on January 6, 2021, you were not alone in despairing for our republican form of government. An unidentified member of the Freedom Caucus, an ally of Trump, warned White House Chief of Staff Meadows to tell him not to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the electoral vote. If “POTUS allows this to occur…we’re driving a stake in the heart of the federal republic.” 

Along with Ivanka Trump and others, Meadows has been subpoenaed. At first, he was cooperative. Now he says he’s not coming unless a judge drags him up to Capitol Hill by his ear. Meadows has been held in contempt by the U.S. House of Representatives – on a mostly partisan vote. 

Naturally, Rep. Jim Jordan, a rubber-stamp Trump apologist, defended Meadows, lashing out at Democrat colleagues in the House. “Mark Meadows is our former colleague,” Jordan yelped and yowled. “He is a good man and he is my friend. This is as wrong as it gets. You all know it. But your lust for power, your lust to get your opponents is so intense, you don’t care.” 

We would be remiss if we failed to mention that Jordan has also been subpoenaed. But the man who supported four investigations into Hillary Clinton’s role in the Benghazi affair, now has a different take. “Nah. Not feeling like testifying under oath,” he more or less says. 

Roger Stone? He was also called to testify – and having already been convicted of a felony for lying to Congress – he decided to show. Then he took the Fifth on every question he was asked. (See: 12/17/21.) 


For bonus fun, federal prosecutors now allege that members of the right-wing Oath Keepers brought plenty of weaponry to Washington D.C. on January 5, in preparation for the attack the following day. That included, at least “three luggage carts’ worth of gun boxes, rifle cases, and suitcases filled with ammunition” which they stashed at a Comfort Inn in Northern Virginia. A second group of four men “kept their rifles ready to go in a vehicle parked in the hotel lot.” 

Two Oath Keepers, James Dolan and Mark Grods, have already plead guilty in relation to these charges. 

One of the others charged, Edward Vallejo, allegedly posed in a podcast on the morning of Jan. 6. “The question is: Is there a shot heard round the world moment? The possibility definitely exists.” 

Vallejo and his pals were ready and willing to spill a little blood (of their fellow Americans) to water the tree of liberty. (See: 1/12/22.)

 

While Team Trump continues to flail away in an effort to find and prove massive voter fraud – or even medium-sized voter fraud – state and federal courts continue to hand individual members of the team stinging defeats. Today, Igor Fruman, associate of Rudy Giuliani in a supposed effort to “clean up corruption” in Ukraine (by digging up dirt on Hunter Biden) had his day in court. Fruman had already plead guilty to soliciting foreign campaign donations and at his sentencing learned he’ll be spending the rest of 2022 and the first weeks of 2023 in the slammer. 

One may assume that Mr. Fruman has been cooperative. Rudy’s other pal, Lev Parnas, also accused of soliciting campaign donations from foreigners, is staring down a sentence of 45 years in prison.

 

Part of Parnas’ problem may be that he actually did manage to donate $325,000 to Trump and other GOP campaign operations in 2018. One illegal donation, for $10,000, was made to Adam Laxalt, a Trump loyalist, who was running for governor of Nevada at the time. He didn’t win. But as Nevada Attorney General, Laxalt later filed several lawsuits in an attempt to overturn the 2020 vote and bestow Nevada’s six electoral votes on Donald J. Trump.