Domestic Violence or a Bleak Future?

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On the other side of town a woman is being beaten. It’s been going on for over a month.The whole town knows about it, in fact it’s all over the news with pictures of her injuries, videos of her assaults and tales of her heroic fight to stay alive. The townspeople send her meals, praise her resistance, and supply Raine—that’s her name—with helmets and gloves for defense. 

The man committing the assault, Russ, became fabulously wealthy through corruption. He owns a host of businesses that provide the town with essentials such as heating oil and gasoline. Plus, he has an enormous supply of TNT and plastic explosives. He says he’ll blown up anyone who intervenes, but then he and his fathers before him fine-tuned intimidation and mendacity to an art. He claims Raine is his wife and that she is bound to him by God, history and nature—not that he cares about God; he simply uses the manipulation.

Some of my neighbors claim that the woman has low morals. She is of little value to the town and perhaps, because of her manner of dress and history of doing anything for a price, she is getting what she deserves. If she had joined the Westside Enterprise and Social Team, they would feel compelled to come to her assistance as an alliance with far greater power and resources than Russ possesses. She had wanted to join, but her tarnished virtue made the board of directors resist. Raine had been married to Russ in the past and finally, years after the divorce, was courting other men in the WEST. It was only when some of the board expressed willingness to accept her that Russ decided to take her back. He cuts and shoots her, trying to force her to submit. She pleads for a knife and a gun for defense. She asks for a lock, a roof, a wall. The committee refuses, thinking these steps will provoke Russ into attacking them. Cowards.

I live in the richest part of our village. Our councilman, Joe, is an old character (whose intemperate son, by the way, had dalliances with Raine, which simply amuses me but is of no consequence in this matter.) He talks about standing up to bullies when he’s on camera, but he is more frightened by Russ than almost anyone else. He and other townsfolk have ceased doing business with Russ for the most part, but not completely. Russ has them over a barrel, so to speak, since homes would grow cold and trucks would stand idle if they stopped buying his fuel. Old Joe and many other leaders of WEST sound like they simply want Raine to surrender, allow Russ to possess her and have his way. Then they can go back to fretting about the weather a hundred years in the future over champagne and caviar.

Fear is a losing strategy, as is any emotion. For me, it’s not the heart-breaking images of destruction and woe but the knowledge that history teaches us that tyrants must be stopped with the tool they use, force. Otherwise, their appetites are never sated. They continue their rampage until they conquer all or die or are stopped. 

In my prime I was a physician. I saw that the patients sho showed up with an emergency got the doctor on duty at that moment. If they were very bad off and were lucky to get one that was excellent, they might survive. If they were unlucky and the doctor was sub-par, they didn’t. Life, as we all know, is not fair, despite our human compassion to make it so. Raine has the council in the WEST that exists: risk averse, indecisive and pusillanimous. Perhaps Russ knew this when he attacked or maybe he didn’t care. Their wishful thinking that a surgeon can fix her up afterwards and that a good attorney can enforce the divorce later, when the devastation ends will lead to her death. It’s not like we haven’t read this tale in history books over and over again.k

Of Motives and Treason

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Could supplying the Taliban with a vast stockpile of armaments and ammunition as occurred over the last two months be construed as treason? I have no training in law but it seems it cannot, unless the act was deliberate. Intent is a key element in any act of treason. If the transfer of potentially well over a billion dollars of materiel was lost in defeat, the victor has earned the spoils. The same question could be asked about the capture or death of soldiers and civilians and the same answer should apply.

An undetermined amount of supplies and armaments, including aircraft, bombs and other explosives, ended up in the possession of the Taliban when the Afghan soldiers surrendered. When the US closed the Bagram air field, the Taliban began an aggressive campaign to conquer provinces. They fell rapidly. The sudden closure of the one military complex that provided dramatic military superiority was seen as an act of betrayal, according to news reports. It left the Afghan military both vulnerable and hopeless. (The psychological impact may have been made worse by the US giving the enemy a date-certain for withdrawal from the country but no warning to allies about abandoning Bagram.)

As the provinces fell, US leaders made a willful and conscious decision to value the departure date more than the security of the military equipment that was falling into the hands of the enemy.

Later, when Kabul fell sooner than anticipated, President Biden valued the departure date and troop levels higher than the lives and freedom of the hundreds of thousands who found themselves suddenly surrounded by Taliban. He did not delay the date or change the plan despite the dramatic tactical changes. Good generals make decisions based on active circumstances.. Politicians do not share the same propensity.

The question then arises, what was President Biden’s motivation to value that date above the lives and freedom of American soldiers, civilians and at-risk Afghans; to value that date above the harm of arming a force opposed to western values wherever they exist? Since that date had nothing to do with ending US presence in Afghanistan, it cannot be anything other than either personal credit and aggrandizement or gaining strategic partisan political power, unless I’m missing something.

Intent is a key element in treason. The experts in law can argue over whether the motives of the President and his advisors who do most of the thinking were pure or corrupt.

An innocent Friend in Prison

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The #MeToo movement was on television, the papers and throughout social media. Every week, it seemed, several famous men found their careers decimated by lurid tales from their victims. A man at the dawning of his career lived in constant fear of public exposure, a term laden with irony, since he had privately exposed himself as an adult to his nanny.

A year and a half later, he was in court. The prosecutor was a woman, tall and trim, professional from her Chandlers to her Anne Taylor outfit to her neat coif. He was dressed in his best plain black suit. A Tongan woman in a colorful patterned dress, sat behind a table. He smiled.

By pure chance, he had seen a lurid TV crime show depicting an au pair sexually abusing a boy. After some planning and research, he filed a claim of sex abuse against his former nanny, Vina, that began when he was eight. Drew—his pseudonym—went on the circuit, detailing his victimhood for a half hour special on television, arranging photo ops and statements of support from politicians and sex-crimes activists, and a host of newspaper interviews. He managed to get himself on the right side of the courtroom.

Vina is our former employee and now a family friend. Our children loved her then and still do. When we read in the paper that she was charged with well over one hundred counts of forcible sex abuse of a minor, we were stunned. That was simply impossible, we all agreed. We asked hard questions of the kids, now adults. Absolutely not, all three independently agreed.

Vina had immigrated to the US to marry an American Lutheran missionary. She had education to teach in Tonga but not in public schools in the states. She taught preschool and raised a family of three children. Late in career and shortly after her years with us, she found work as a nanny with a family new to Utah. Drew was the oldest child, a precocious eight-year-old boy. Vina spent years helping this family of seven in their home right before she retired and moved out of state to help with her grandchildren. Years later, after mentioning she was moving back, she found a message on her Facebook page. Drew wanted to talk to her. Vina was pleased and excited that he had reached out. She replied with her cell number without an inkling that he had filed a complaint against her. 

Drew reported the crimes late, he claimed, because he never realized he had been abused until he saw the fictional TV episode. The last act occurred when he was eighteen, barely inside the statute of limitations for sex crimes against children but past the statute for adult sex crimes. Good enough, the prosecutor concluded. Police suggested he get her to admit to at least one sex act on a recorded phone as corroboration and they file charges.

She received his call on her cell phone in a child-noisy house. She gushed questions about Drew’s siblings and his new career. She had trouble understanding him as he quickly changed topics. Ever the teacher, she was initially pleased he felt he could ask her questions, but she quickly grew confused at the odd interchange, seemingly having something to do with intimacy problems with his young wife. Her answers led to a formal interview by a sex crimes detective a few days later. 

The investigator did not go to the expense and long delay of having a certified translator present. He used obscene slang terms that Vina, a church lady right out of an old Saturday Night Live skit, didn’t understand. In his sex-crimes world, everyone understood the smutty lingo he used. Indeed, he later testified at trial that he was certain she was lying about not understanding. We have numerous and sometimes humorous anecdotes that showed, between her English and hearing loss, she had trouble understanding.

The trial lasted four days, including jury selection and bickering over motions. The investigator didn’t interview the siblings present in the house during all of the alleged acts. He failed to follow the law or protocol to get a translator. At some point while the gaggle of attorneys argued about some technicality with the judge at a sidebar, Vina’s daughter-in-law told me she watched as Drew got Vina’s attention and then make an obscene sexual gesture while licking his lips and laughing silently. No one else reported seeing this. Vina thought little of it; he had been inappropriate with her as a teen, something she failed to address or report to his parents out of fear of losing her position. 

The defense, other than the opening and closing statements, lasted less than an hour, time enough for one witness, my wife, to take the stand and testify to Vina’s character. They declined to call another witness that would have testified to Drew’s malicious attack on her disabled son. The woman was still livid and had potty mouth. They didn’t want to offend the jurors, they explained They provided no defense against the specific assertions. She was quickly found guilty late on a Friday afternoon. She is now on her second year of a twenty-five-year sentence. She will soon “celebrate” her fifty-year anniversary alone in a cell. She will die in prison.

My research yielded an array of studies of convictions of innocent people, showing a frequency that ranged between 0.04 percent to twenty-seven percent. When governments conduct the research, the percentage is low. When academics or defense networks conduct the studies, the error rate averages around eight percent. Truth and fact on this topic are elusive. Studies also showed that the majority of wrongful convictions are of minorities, the poor, and those who speak English as a second language. Vina hit the jackpot. She is all three.

If we assume that two percent of convictions are in error and we consider that 2.2 million convicts are in prison, we could calculate that forty-four thousand Americans are deprived of freedom and rights through wrongful conviction at any given time. The number of those abused by the system gets bigger if we expand to include those convicted but now out of jail.

Humans err. We witness mistakes by highly qualified leaders in the monumental historical events such as war, pandemics and recessions. In medicine, an industry run by brilliant physicians, publications report tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans are killed by medical error every year. That statistic might make the rate of inappropriate incarceration look minor.

How do innocent people get wrongly convicted? It typically begins when an investigator forms an opinion and ceases to consider other possibilities. Language difficulties contribute to this. Innocent people frequently assume their innocence is apparent to the police. Many believe lawmen are walking, talking lie detectors. The reality is that, when they are studied, they are not much better than flipping a coin, detecting deception 50-60% of the time. Failure to get an attorney early is another common mistake and often a consequence of economic deficiency or penury.

An accusation of any sex crime against a minor carries with it a great deal of momentum as the crime is heinous and we trust the police would not pursue this unless they were certain it happened. In the book, Guilt by Accusation, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz relates his experience of being accused of such a crime. He explains that creating reasonable doubt is inadequate, that a strong affirmative defense is required. It took hundreds of thousands of dollars to establish his innocence. Other prominent defense attorneys agree that it takes evidence and experts to prevail. These things cost money that Vina didn’t have.

The absence of experts left Vina’s jury deprived of the following information:

  1. Female child sex offenders (FCSOs) are typically arrested at an average age of twenty-seven. Older women are rarely offenders and arrests over age sixty virtually never happen. Vina was well into her fifties when the alleged behaviors took place and almost seventy when arrested.

2.   Eighty percent of FCSO’s use an accomplice, typically male. No accomplice was mentioned.

3.   Eighty percent are single, and the remainder have unstable relationships. Vina has had a stable marriage for almost fifty years.

4.   Risk factors for being a FCSO including mental health disorders, substance abuse, personality disorders, abusive relationships or absent intimate relationships. Vina had none of these risk factors.

5.  FCSOs who abuse male children usually stick to one of two categories, prepubescent or pubescent and overlap is infrequent. The alleged abuse lasted until Drew was a fully adult male, something extremely rare if not unprecedented.

6.   In the small minority of cases involving serial sex abuse, the median number of assaults is eight and these are almost always by men. Where higher numbers of serial abuse are found, the setting is typically in captivity. Well over a hundred episodes without captivity is, again, unprecedented.

7.   The longest reported duration of non-captive sex abuse of a minor I could find was eighteen months. A ten-year period of non-captive abuse?  Unprecedented again.

8.   Victims of repeated abuse invariably have psychological sequelae such as substance abuse, self-injury, poor performance in school or work. Drew reported none of these.

9.   Male victims of abuse often have risk factors such as parental absence, disability, low socioeconomic status, rural living and others. Drew hits none of the above.

The jury didn’t even hear a common sense look at the allegations. Looking at the one event that both people agree happened, who is more likely to be the sexual aggressor, an eighteen-year-old boy from a highly repressive sexual culture—her story—or a sixty-something grandmother—his claim—in a stable, long marriage? Who is more believable to law enforcement, an unsure, nervous old woman or a man trained in persuasion and dressed in ecclesiastical garb? Finally, would one guilty of repeated, criminal abuse want to speak to the person abused when contacted out of the blue?

Depriving the jury of this exculpatory information and alternative views means this was not justice. The trial was a sham and a pretense but served successfully to promote Drew’s career.

Aldous Huxley said, “There are things known and things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.” To be honest, I must explain something. The first paragraphs reflect my opinion of the events that brought my friend into prison. The police heard a different version first, one in which a lecherous Islander—an evil mastermind, he said—led an innocent boy into sexual experimentation by trickery and deception. She mesmerized him into having sexual urges and manipulated him into hiding their secret alliances from his parents, under whose noses this all occurred. The man is a rabbi, the son of a rabbi, prominent people about whom nothing ill can be said without risking charges of antisemitism.

The first version of a story is the one that sticks in our minds, the later retraction or correction less so. Opinions often do not change when the truth or an alternate view is revealed.

My charitable wife sees yet a third version. Science tells us memories change with time. She believes that Drew may not remember the past accurately, that his chosen status as firstborn coupled with the repressive nature of orthodox Judaism made him create an alternate reality, one in which he is not to blame for his urges and actions, but that the devil—er, Vina with her German surname and all that historically goes with it—made him do it. She became his excuse.

The past recedes. We see it through our lenses of bias under the dust of subsequent events. The truth this long afterward is not knowable. 

“There is no truth. There is only perception.” —Gustave Flaubert

The yin and yang of Donald Trump

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I’ve worked with more egocentric, puffed-up personalities than I ever wanted—I’m a cardiologist—and the 2016 version of Donald Trump was just one more. I find all of them unlikable. Yet, I voted for him twice, and even donated a few bucks to his campaign because I thought he was better than the alternatives. 

I see yin and yang (dark-bright; cold-warm) in people and actions in every aspect of life. President Trump’s personality yins that I see include his management style, his mental-emotional incontinence, and his pettiness. His obsequiousness toward brutal dictators stands in stark contrast to his harshness toward his allies. He was a poor loser and left office badly with a giant exclamation point on January 6. My metaphor is that he prepared the menu, bought the food, and cooked the dinner but he didn’t start the food fight.

In terms of legislative accomplishments his were few, maybe only one: tax reform. That’s pretty meager when in his first two years both the Senate and the House were in Republican control. His absence of political experience and his insulting manner were problematic.

His performance had a host of yangs. Through appointments and executive orders, he enhanced the federalist nature of our government and was, in that regard, a very conservative president.  Judicial appointments are durable but executive orders are easily undone and Mr. Biden’s writers have been working overtime to reverse the meaningful ones. By being an ardent disestablishmentarian, President Trump gathered a great and loyal following of common people who love the country and distrust the career politicians that run it. The ideas he supported such as enforcing laws, rebuilding the military, supporting the law abiding and law enforcers resonate with many Americans, notably in rural regions; eighty-four percent of counties voted for him. The yin there was that his approval rating never exceeded fifty percent and that detractors became more stridently opposed to him.

He disdained the elitist policies and theories. In reducing taxes for the lower income brackets, minorities and middle class Americans saw more income and higher standards of living. The political opposition frothed and tried to destroy him. (Was it because they feared the result of conservative taxation was the empowering of the demographics that kept them in power?) In his usual self-promoting style Trump referred to his first three years as “my great economy.” Funding his economy came at a cost. In his first three years we averaged close to $1 trillion in annual deficit and the federal debt increased around $3.5 trillion. In 2020, there was blowout spending that increased the national debt by nearly $4.5. In Trump’s four years the national debt increased from $19.6 trillion to $27.7 trillion. This makes him the least conservative president in history in a fiscal sense. He increased the debt more in his four years than his predecessor did in eight.

Perhaps the country cannot fiscally afford another term of Donald Trump. But whom can we afford? The current occupant of the White House is headed toward one more year of more than $4 trillion of deficit spending. National debt has increased 320% in fifteen years and has doubled every nine years. Debt-to-GDP has increased 220% in the same period. When the crash comes, blame will fall on many, Democrat and Republican alike. Mr. Trump will deserve a lion’s share.

Facts and Thoughts About Income Tax in 2021

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The sixteenth amendment, ratified in 1913, created the first direct relationship between individual citizens and the federal government. It was the first great erosion of the federalist nature of the country.

I’m not against income tax. We need reliable ways of funding government at all levels. Yet, this amendment weakened the original idea of a union of states formed to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide common defense, and promote general welfare among them. 

Article I, section 2 of the constitution declares that taxes shall be apportioned among the states according to population. Since there are significant differences in prosperity between states, this means of raising money was problematic. Having a tax based on income seems more just and tolerable. 

Money yields power. In the creation of the direct citizen-federal relationship, the central government gradually, over decades, accreted more power over the states. States now petition Washington DC for funds, the direct opposite of what was created at our founding.

It is possible to restore state power and still retain the ability to tax income by placing the collection mechanisms in the states, abolishing or greatly downsizing the Internal Revenue Service.  States could combine their income tax burden with the federal and have some leeway with deductions, incentives and other market manipulations without affecting the rest of the country. The handful of states without income tax create a bit of hurdle that would need to be cleared. Those that favor federalism and states’ rights would rejoice. The expanding statist populace would oppose this.

Power is a zero sum notion. The more power an individual, county, or state cedes, the less is retained. The founders disagreed on a lot of things but on one idea they agreed, that a unitary government with vast sums of wealth and power was an anathema to individual freedom. The founders and politicians ever since have differed in opinion about how much power to give to the central government. With the sixteenth amendment, enormous power has been achieved.

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After breaking the barrier against direct citizen-federal relationships and a drift toward incrementally more social benefits, other connections were established over time. A national retirement plan was established during the Great Depression. A national healthcare funding plan for the elderly began thirty years after that. We have disaster insurance, and a growing array of federally funded health plans today. (Note that the preamble said promote the general welfare. The verb chosen was not provide.)

Historically in the US, progressives have managed to increase federal size and power by appealing to the emotions of the voters, citing desperate need for one group after another. Regardless of why or how it is done, by placing more money in one system, its power grows. I, for one, would like to see a balance restored by getting all social programs away from the federal government and let individual states run them, with a set of simple, unifying principles throughout the country.

The polarization that grips our nation in this era seems to be between the citizens who object to power being removed from states and individuals and concentrated in Washington DC and the citizens who want a strong central government, as long as it is run by people who agree with their position. The number and extent of federal social programs makes our country in the category of social democracy now. Progressives want more while conservatives was less. Without reaching a durable compromise about federal, state and individual power, we will fracture and fail.

Utah’s unfaithful Senator

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My family likes Mitt Romney, in particular the ones that are Democrats and don’t live in Utah. To me, Mitt is the prime example of why the seventeenth amendment was a mistake. In Utah, Mitt is well liked by Democrats, as is Jon Huntsman, liked so well, in fact, that hundreds changed party in order to vote in the primary election to get them on the Republican ballot. Mitt, for those that don’t know, is a Republican Senator who was elected to represent the state government of Utah. That is his singular objective. 

In the constitution before amended, Utah would have appointed a person to represent the legislature and governor by some mechanism that the state, not the federal government, had chosen. To be clear, the US senator was to represent the needs of the state government in a union of state governments (y’know, just like the name says.) In the current version, he represents himself. It is almost certain that a supermajority of the state legislature disapproves of many of his high profile votes. This means that he frequently votes against the institution he was elected to represent. Mr. Romney fails to represent his state. That’s his only job and he can’t do it.

This is what happens when senators are elected by a popular vote. They do not differ from representatives, except they have a longer term. There were problems with the Senate before the seventeenth amendment. We’ve only acquired different problems, ones that erode the basic structure set out in 1786. Arguably, it has added to the strain on our Union currently. Given diversities in many dimensions and planes and given that humans are not angels, there is no perfect system of government. It is also possible that the best form of governance varies according to the culture of those governed. For the people that loved liberty and freedom so much that they or their predecessors fled monarchies in Europe, the best structure seemed to be ours in its original basic structure as it balanced the needs of the people and the needs of state governments with the needs of the union of state governments, aka the federal government. (This explains in part why the states, not the people, elect the president.)

Mr. Romney is a good man, a popular guy, handsome, clean-cut, erudite, successful, wealthy and talented. However, he is unfaithful. He, not a Utahn, philandered to a state with a populace that would elect him, but, it turns out, not a state to which he could be true. He has long focused on the lengthy list of sins of Mr. Trump but cannot see his own political promiscuity. He repeatedly argued and voted to rid the country and the republican party of a man who, despite his flagrant flaws, did a hundred times more to advance conservative ideals than Mr. Romney ever could, ideals that Mr. Romney claims to support during his campaigns, and aspirations that dominate the state government. A man with no flaws has very few virtues, Lincoln said about his choice of generals, but he could have been speaking about Romney and Trump as well.

Lack of fidelity to party is, at most, a peccadillo. Making the state government you were elected to represent a cuckold is unforgivable. 

My Dog is a Democrat

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When I say he’s a Democrat, I refer not to a Blue-Dog Democrat, neither to a Democrat like his human mom. Gus is a progressive. He’s multi-breed and non-white. He’s young and seems to have considerable gender fluidity for reasons I omit for decency purposes, but he reminds me a bit of a certain randy, well-loved ex-president. I  might add that Gus does not wear flannel pants. Wrong generation.

How I determined for certain his political preference was through a PhD animal psychologist who examined the pup last week. She said that resource-guarding explained his violent disposition. If he has played with a toy or even chewed on a broken icicle or a chunk of bark—worthless stuff—and abandons it, my other dog, who is a pacifist and claims to be apolitical, sometimes chews on it himself. When that happens, Gus attacks and bites his jugulars in fit of snarling, clawing profanity.

I see resource guarding constantly by Democrats. “Well, I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”  Joe Biden said this to a black dude in one of his rare appearances in the campaign. (Is that different from saying I own you?) Obvious resource guarding was in operation in that exchange and in many others. Democrats claim all people of color as their own, including Latinos, plus LGBTQs, university faculty, staff and students, journalists, women, and probably other demographic groups that I don’t recall as their property. If any party messes with the groups that they, like border collies, have split off from the herd, then there will be hell to pay.

When the Dems are out of power, their possessiveness continues. Likewise, when had Gus castrated, it did no good. When Gus launches an assault, my wife pulls them apart while I stare in wonderment and think, what the hell? Nigel, that’s my other dog’s name, is a purebred setter, English and regal. When he gets old enough—if he gets old enough—he might react by becoming a Republican, which I’m fairly certain, plays a roll in the ongoing abuse. Gus laid claim to a small orange quilt. Nigel learned to avoid it. Democrats lay claim to states and regions. If the California Republicans away from the coast try to claim the state, they are attacked. Mr. Trump tried to claim the whole country. He spent a painful four years as the chew-toy president, managing to win 84% of counties in his failed reelection bid. Perhaps his acolytes should form the Chew-toy Party, given how they are treated. Gus claims newspapers as his exclusive toy. But, with progressives, it’s not clear who owns whom with it comes to all media including social and tech. The Hunter Biden debacle confirmed that the media resource-guard Democrats. In turn for the protection and counter-assaults, progressives work to boycott and shut down Fox News, conservative influencers and talk radio, the competition. Gus, with his experience, may have opportunity to serve on boards of high tech. He now attacks for no apparent reason, a useful, oppressive tactic.

I missed Gus’s political inclination last November. Three of our six mail-in ballots went missing. (To explain, three of us live here and three deceased souls also get ballots.) When I went on line, I found that the ballots had been submitted, not eaten. It took a seance to learn that the dead people—Democrats all—were saddened at not getting to vote, but pleased with how the dog had punched the ballots.

The Domestic Intel-Op, 2016 – 2020

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One of my personal aphorisms is that we see the world from where we stand. For example, an educated elitist may believe that most people need a college education. A young urban dweller may think that automobile ownership is a luxury.  A person who is left of center politically typically sees a person at the center as being on the right and sees those on the far left as moderates.  Every person is biased. Failure to recognize this constant of human nature leads either to gullibility or dogmatism. Many studies looking at various metrics over the years have shown that most media people dwell on the political left. A group of people that have a similar political worldview is likely to make decisions often without intent ranging from content to vocabulary that demonstrates this leftward bias. That’s rational and also reflects what I had perceived before Mr. Trump came to Washington. My belief that media bias was largely unintentional was shattered by the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.

First, I should point out that a large chunk of Americans believe that the scandal is misinformation, a fiction created by Russian intelligence, the GRU, to disrupt our democratic process. My summary follows. A laptop was left at a repair shop. Many months later, the shop owner sold the old device as abandoned material, which act was legal. The buyer found that it contains material indicating the previous owner was a grifter of sorts, a man who sold access to his father, a former US senator and the current Democratic Party nominee for president, to several questionable or even frankly hostile governments through business ventures. New York Post reporters gained access to this trove of information and spend weeks vetting it before it was published two weeks before the presidential election. The material supported a former business associate who provided documentary support and testimony that the son and his father reaped millions of dollars of profit from a company tied to the communist leadership of China.

A normal news outlet would cover this astonishing breaking news story. Instead, the vast majority of media buried it, just as they had largely suppressed the video of Vice President Joe Biden threatening to withhold $1 billion of foreign aid from Ukraine if they failed to fire the prosecutor investigating his son and the company that hired him. Social media and search engines hid the NY Post laptop story. The reason given for keeping this information away from the public was that it was not only false but an intelligence operation of the Russian GRU. Former CIA director John Brennan said, “It has all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.” What media people heard Brennan say, however, was that the story was Russian disinformation. 

The CIA is a great place for clever liars and we appreciate them there, when they are working to keep us safe but not when they are misleading the country, using intel-ops in support of a personal political agenda. The entire Russia Hoax of 2016 – 2020, has all the hallmarks of a John Brennan operation, since it began with his CIA assets as soon as Trump became a nominee. By leveraging Trump’s ill-advised sycophantic approach to Vladimir Putin, Democrat leaders were able to give the Russia  hoax credibility. To be clear, there are still millions of Americans, including Hillary Clinton and Adam Schiff, who still cling to the precept that Donald Trump is a Russian agent and that Russian oligarchs control him, possibly through blackmail or perhaps through some secret club. This notion provided the platform to claim the laptop was a Russian plant. Brennan and others only needed to keep the story out of public view until the election was past or, failing that, make the story another Russian ploy to keep Trump in office.

However, the laptop did not mysteriously appear; that it belonged to Hunter Biden was confirmed in several ways. Much of the laptop material was verified by secondary sources. A former business partner of Hunter Biden’s, who provided a great deal of the hard evidence confirming Biden’s ownership of the laptop, produced additional hard evidence and testimony of questionable dealings by the Biden clan. The partner, as I understand, was not a Republican and not a fan of Donald Trump. 

A pathetic tale of a profligate son grifting on his famous and powerful father’s coattails would normally sell a lot of copy. What was the compelling motivation to suppress this titillating tale of corruption at the height of the father’s campaign? Patriotism or partisanship? Was it elitist patronizing, or the media puppet masters deciding what string to pull? Regardless of reason, suppressing the story was intentional interference with our basic democratic process, honestly informed voting. The left got the electoral result they wanted.

To be or not to be…an autocrat.

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A man with a reputation as an early riser can sleep until noon. That was one of Mark Twain’s observations pertaining to expectation bias.

Let that sink in for a moment.

To paraphrase Shakespeare with a current event twist, the evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones. So let it be with Trump. The noble Biden hath told you Trump was authoritarian; if it were so, it was a grievous fault and grievously hath Trump answered for it. 

Mr. Trump was fond of saying, “Sleepy Joe,” in reference to the man who now has succeeded him as our president. Mr. Biden is not sleeping, at least with respect to extending power. He signed scores of executive orders and actions in a few days and continues at a rapid pace. It took (Mr. Authoritarian) Trump, several months to sign as many. Mr. Biden ran as one who reaches across the aisle, one who achieves compromise, and a man who will reduce partisan fighting. This was the reputation he, and the media, cultivated. But, now in the light of scores of actions, will the real authoritarian please stand up?

Perhaps half the country cannot see President Biden as authoritarian. The power of expectation bias is that even compelling facts can be rendered invisible. At least, for a while.

***

Sea turtles and insects lay many eggs. This is a trick of nature to ensure that enough of them survive to propagate the species. We have witnessed a flurry of orders that overwhelm the balance-of-powers mechanisms of our constitution, smothering the legislative and judicial branches. President Biden is counting on the legislative branch to support him and likely surmises that the judicial branch is loath to challenge him. Not only has Chief Justice Roberts been remarkably reticent, each order must be challenged and a lower court must review and support the challenger’s position in order for each order to reach the Supreme court. This avalanche of executive power is a clever trick and is likely to succeed on its own. The fourth rail of political balance (and the fifth column?), the media, will do its job of promoting, not challenging, this power play as well as the bipartisan, cooperative stereotype they stamped on the current president. Newlyweds and freshly minted politicians get away with excesses during the honeymoon.

One more thing. When President Biden had an opportunity to act with bipartisanship, he continued his autocratic style by rejecting a generous $600 billion bipartisan Covid relief bill and pushing his partisan $1.9 trillion bill.

Losing faith in electoral security.

2 Replies

In the 2016 presidential election, Russians created pro-Trump advertisements on Facebook and other locations. C202andidate Trump joked about Russians turning over Hillary Clinton’s lost emails. For the next four years, federal investigations ran and congressional hearings were held on a wide range of Russian issues. Other than getting president Trump out of office, one laudable goal was making our elections more secure. President Trump has been called an illegitimate president under the premise that he would not have won without Russian interference. 

In all presidential elections, fraudulent voting has been reported.  People cheat. The amount of cheating is like shoplifting or employee theft; it happens on a small enough scale that it rarely makes a significant difference. There are notable exceptions, perhaps such as the election of Senator Al Franken.

In the recent 2020 presidential election, the reports of highly questionable activity were widespread and far in excess of any prior election in well over one hundred years. Improper vote counting was recorded on video and other cheating was substantiated with hard, factual evidence, supplemented by thousands of sworn affidavits. Most of the claims were that votes cast were not legal, but the remedy the states chose to deal with the complaint came from the school of Scrooge McDuck, where possession is nine-tenths of the law. They recounted all the votes that had been cast, without reviewing the legality of the votes in the first place. Unsurprisingly, the outcome did not change. In the NFL, this would be like reviewing one second of footage where a pass was incomplete and failing to review the seconds before when the receiver was held.

According to a recent piece by Mollie Hemingway of the Federalist, a rapid analysis of voting records in Georgia showed the following: 

  • 2,560 felons,
  • 66,247 underage registrants,
  • 2,423 people who were not on the state’s voter rolls,
  • 4,926 voters who had registered in another state after they registered in Georgia, making them ineligible,
  • 395 people who cast votes in another state for the same election,
  • 15,700 voters who had filed national change of address forms without re-registering,
  • 40,279 people who had moved counties without re-registering,
  • 1,043 people who claimed the physical impossibility of a P.O. Box as their address,
  • 98 people who registered after the deadline, and, among others,
  • 10,315 people who were deceased on election day (8,718 of whom had been registered as dead before their votes were accepted).

Such a litany of findings demands an in depth review, but, unlike football, where the evidence is footage from a few high speed cameras, the amount of data is voluminous and an adequate review of such claims would take months to years. There were only six weeks between election and the electoral college vote to collect probative evidence. The list of other problematic issues in several other states is longer and more complicated. Statistical anomalies abound.

Courts rejected the claims by the Trump campaign, citing lack of evidence, which is understandable. Courts as well as William Barr opined that number of ballots provably in question were insufficient to reverse the outcome. The major caveat is that the absence of evidence cannot be construed as evidence of absence, particularly apropos when the collection of evidence was just starting. Unspoken is the expectation bias, the unwillingness to consider that hundreds of thousands of votes could be fraudulent. We want—no, we need—to have confidence that our democratic process works.

Cynically, I note that strict Democrat partisans claim that looking into suspicious activity in the 2020 election is unpatriotic and harmful to our republic. It seems that whoever wins an election does not want any review while those that lose, demand that no stone should remain unturned. I tire of the whole party first mentality that seems to exist on all sides. I would think that with complaints by Democrats of interference in 2016 and the claims by Republicans of mischief in the 2020 election, that there would be some bipartisan support for a review and reformation of our electoral processes. I am, as usual, disappointed with politicians.

As in football, the Trump team is forced this year to accept the call made and the loss that came with it, regardless of their accusations of cheating. However, in the off-season, a great deal of work is needed.

  1. Purge and clean voter rolls in every district and state.  This is mandatory as there are millions of errors.
  2. Investigate the voting irregularities and claims of cheating in the 2020 election with a goal of preventing mischief in future elections.
  3. Return to in-person voting as the default. 
  4. For other methods of voting, increase security measures to equal those of in-person voting. (If we can safely conduct banking and commerce on a smart phone, we should be able to vote with it securely.)
  5. Ensure that state laws and regulations that affect elections for federal officers, such as president, senate and house, meet federal standards for fairness, security and voter eligibility.

The National Commission on Election Reform was formed after the problems with the 2000 presidential election. The report, datedAugust 2001, is anemic and vague. For example, it provides tables and data about signature verification in the various states but no data regarding the reliability of methods used to verify that a signature, or data that sheds any light on fraudulent voting by mail or ballot box versus in-person voting. The long report is what I have come to expect from the process followed and the people involved, dealing more with expanded access and not at all with security. We need data that deals directly with electoral veracity.

The goals should be to enable reasonable access for all eligible voters, to count all legal votes and not count any votes that are illegal by making fraud impossible. I’m not sure what road blocks Washington Republicans might erect but Washington Democrats typically contend that access is restricted, that some demographics are disenfranchised, that the voting age should be even lower, that anyone living inside our borders should vote, etc. However, we cannot afford to have another debacle of this magnitude where tens of millions of voters are fairly certain that the election was stolen and tens of millions of others have much less faith in the system. Lost faith is very difficult to restore. Ask a cheated-on spouse…and the cheater.

Millions of Democrats across the country maintained for four years that Mr. Trump was unfairly elected, stole the election with foreign interference, and was illegitimate. Here we are again, same chorus but a different verse, claiming that widespread cheating led to the election of Joe Biden. Failing to restore confidence in the democratic process could lead to catastrophic consequences for our nation. Washington, fix this!