January 17, 2024

Wednesday, January 17, 2024. Annette’s News Roundup.

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Joe is always busy.

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Just because it is good to hear the truth.

Virginia officials find misreported 2020 election votes added to Trump’s total.

As Donald Trump continues to pursue the lie that his 2020 presidential election defeat was the result of electoral fraud, elections officials in Virginia have admitted some results there were improperly reported – resulting in an artificially inflated total for Trump while votes were actually taken away from Joe Biden.

Eric Olsen, director of elections for Prince William county, said: “Election results were improperly reported by the previous administration during the 2020 election.

“… The reporting errors were presumably a consequence of the results tapes not being programmed to a format that was compatible with state reporting requirements. Attempts to correct this issue appear to have created errors. The reporting errors did not consistently favor one party or candidate but were likely due to a lack of proper planning, a difficult election environment, and human error.”

The result, Olsen said, was that Biden received 1,648 fewer votes than he should have received and Trump received 2,327 too many.

The error did not affect the result in Prince William county or in Virginiaoverall.

In the county, Biden beat Trump by more than 61,000 votes. In the state, on his way to victory in the national popular vote by more than 7m ballots and in the electoral college by 306-232, Biden won by more than 450,000.

Errors affected other 2020 races in Prince William county, which sits south-west of Washington DC and includes Manassas, the site of two major American civil war battles and Barack Obama’s final pre-election rally in 2008.

For US Senate, the sitting Democratic senator Mark Warner received 1,589 votes fewer than he should have and his Republican challenger, Daniel Gade, was short by 107. Statewide, Warner won by more than 500,000 votes.

In the US House, the Republican Rob Wittman was short by 293 votes in Prince William county but won Virginia’s first district by more than 80,000.

Olsen said the errors did not meet the threshold which would trigger a recount.

“Over the past three years,” Olsen said, “the 2020 election has been the subject of audits, recounts and investigations. Election officials have continued to work diligently in the face of extreme stress and threats to our health and safety.

“Mistakes are unfortunate but require diligence and innovation to correct. They do not reflect a purposeful attempt to undermine the integrity of the electoral process and the investigation into this matter ended with that conclusion.

“We have worked to bring transparency to the reporting of an election that happened three years ago. This dedication remains and applies to all current and future elections. The public should have faith in the thousands of tireless public servants and volunteers who preserve and protect our democracy.”

In 2022, Michele White, the former registrar in Prince William county, was indicted on charges of corrupt conduct, making a false statement and willful neglect of duty, in connection with the 2020 election.

White said the charges were politically motivated. Jason Miyares, Virginia’s Republican attorney general, denied that – but the charges were recently dropped. (The Guardian).

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Take-aways from the Iowa Caucuses.

From Biden surrogate in Iowa, Governor Pritzker of Illinois.

What does this mean? 👇

Iowa Caucus Turnout Was Lowest in Years.

Blame the sub-zero temperatures, the lack of drama in a race that Donald Trump was widely expected to win, or any number of other possible factors. But by historical standards, Iowa’s much-watched [2024] caucuses didn't draw much participation.

In the last contested GOP caucuses, in 2016, some 187,000 people cast ballots, a record high equating to 29% of registered Republicans.

In 2012, almost 122,000 participated, and almost the same number turned out in 2008, the Associated Press reported. (Wall Street Journal).

Some of my thoughts on the decline in GOP participation this year.

Maybe it was the weather? Or maybe even Iowa Republicans had Trump fatigue, and found the other GOP candidates weak too?

There were just over 108,000 participants in 2024 with Trump winning slightly over 50% support…just under 15% of the state's 752,000 registered Republicans, down 40% from the total number of Caucus Participants in 2016.

As NPR’s Domenico Montanaro concluded, “It's pretty amazing for so few voters to play such a prominent role in the presidential nominating process.”

The 51% of GOP caucus goers who voted for Trump on Tuesday represented just over 2% of all of Iowa’s registered voters.

As Governor Pritzker reminded us, 49% of the GOP participants in the Caucus chose not to vote for Trump.

Here is more food for thought too.

The GOP Caucus participants were asked - Do you believe Biden legitimately won the presidency in 2020?

Yes:

Haley voters: 79%

DeSantis voters: 40%

Trump voters: 6%

How will the Haley and DeSantis people who don’t believe the Big Lie vote?

As the Washington Post reported,”entrance polls showed 3 in 10 voters said he wouldn’t be fit to serve as president if he’s convicted of crimes, and a Fox News analysis showed more than 6 in 10 Haley voters said they wouldn’t support Trump in the general election.”

This sounds to me as if Trump and the GOP have fewer committed voters than he or they would like us to believe.

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A thoughtful and thorough analysis of how to end the Israeli-Hamas War.

How Israel and the Palestinians go from war to peace. By Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post.

Israeli American Milty Levinson, a reservist in the Israeli military, with his family in Tel Aviv on Dec. 30

Talk to any Israeli today and you can get a glimpse of the torrent of pain, disorientation and anxiety that has washed over the country since Oct. 7. It seems like not a soul in a country of about 9 million can be found who does not know someone killed, kidnapped, injured, widowed, orphaned or fighting for the Israel Defense Forces. Hamas’s terrorist attack was, in a real sense, a personal trauma for 9 million people, aggravated by the subsequent outpouring of denial and antisemitism around the world. Israelis’ anguish is understandably all-consuming.


And meanwhile, Gaza civilians — living where thousands of Palestinians have been killed, injured, widowed, orphaned or made homeless — have had their entire world psychologically and physically devastated. Whether they grasp that Hamas is ultimately responsible for their fate, they too are drowning in sorrow.


Two people, two oceans of despair. How can they possibly move from that to “two countries for two peoples?” It is one thing for diplomats to insist, correctly, that ultimately the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be resolved only with two states living side-by-side, but it is quite another to conceive of how the parties can possibly get from where they are to where they must be.

The war will end at some point. But three main elements of a postwar transition — Gaza administration, Israeli political and psychological evolution — are each daunting.

As to Gaza’s administration, Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a U.S. citizen from Gaza and a Middle East analyst, writes online: “Public sentiment in Israel supports the war effort, and most Israelis will initially tolerate high casualties as their military attempts to entirely destroy Hamas in Gaza. However, an indefinite operation or occupation is unlikely to be politically popular, especially without transitional steps and policies or a clear Israeli plan of what a post-war future might look like.”

Reoccupation of Gaza by Israel is untenable for the residents and for the Israelis (who do not want to be responsible for 2.4 million hostile Palestinians). As currently constituted, the Palestinian Authority is too corrupt and feeble to take over. Arab states want no part of overseeing Gaza, especially given the expectation that Israel’s military will need to intervene periodically to defuse security threats.

An interim entity to administer massive aid (which the United States, Saudi Arabia and UAE are willing to provide) is needed. “Issues such as societal chaos, criminal mobs, the rise of warlords or dominance of powerful clans, poverty, famine, diseases, the radicalization of a resentful and beaten population, and low-intensity insurgency would present enormous security, geopolitical, humanitarian, and international challenges and consequences,” Alkhatib observes. As such, rebuilding an administrative infrastructure for Gaza will be the first and most critical challenge.

Diplomat and scholar Dennis Ross, with deep Middle East experience, has suggested a trio of entities — Palestinian business leaders, an international humanitarian administrator (akin to that set up in Bosniaafter the fighting ended in 1995 and in Cambodia in the early 1990s) and the contingent of civil servants already in Gaza who have remained on the PA’s payroll even during Hamas’s rule. (“The Hamas-run government in Gaza employs some 50,000 workers in various classifications and functions,” Alkhatib explains. “The group’s governance of the coastal enclave also entails a hybrid structure of its members in key posts, professional technocratic elements, PA employees who enjoy international recognition and legitimacy, and a diverse web of local charities and international NGOs.”)

Exactly how those three elements operated together would need to be negotiated. But there are international precedents. The arrangement would not be a permanent one, but rather, an interim step before a reformed PA can prepare to assume governmental authority.

But this technocratic evolution would need to be accompanied by political change in Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition have lost the support of the country (only 15 percent of Israelis want Netanyahu to keep his job after the Gaza war). Indeed, Netanyahu is the focus of outrage and anger for the failure to prevent the Hamas massacre, the government’s delinquency in responding, the failure to address the humanitarian crisis in Israel (including the dislocation of roughly 130,000 people evacuated from southern Israel) and the apparent prioritization of hunting down the last Hamas fighters over the negotiated return of hostages held in Gaza.

What replaces the Netanyahu government — and what the public attitude toward separation from the Palestinians would look like — must be part of a robust national debate. The massive pro-democracy movement that took to the streets to protest Netanyahu’s attack on the judiciary (and which has taken up the cause of the hostages) might scramble the status quo, forming a new political force better able to navigate the future choices Israel faces.

Finally, over time two peoples immersed in their own suffering will need to come to terms with a simple reality: Neither is going anywhere. Contrary to Hamas’s genocidal fantasy, Israel is not going to disappear. Likewise, Israelis must acknowledge that the bigoted view held by Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich that Palestinians can be ignored and denied self-determination defies reality.

If that realization can emerge from the ashes of Oct. 7 and following the Hamas war, perhaps — with considerable effort from civil society groups — each side can find empathy for the other. At the very least, the horror of recent events might impress upon each side that denying the other side’s humanity results in interminable suffering.

No one imagines any of this will be easy. Administering and rebuilding Gaza will be challenging, to say the least. The Israeli political debate yet to unfold will be chaotic, difficult and divisive. And the psychological journey each side must undertake is hard to even comprehend. Still, there is no choice, because the alternative is one Oct. 7 after another, for eternity.

And equally true, none of this can proceed unless Hamas is defanged and its ability to project force eliminated. That need not require killing every single Hamas terrorist. The reported Qatari-backed plan for Israel to allow “the exile of Hamas leaders outside of Gaza in exchange for the gradual release of all of the remaining hostages as well as the IDF withdrawing entirely from the Strip” might be a feasible off-ramp for Israel.

Make no mistake, however: Unless and until Hamas is eliminated as a military force in Gaza, none of this is possible. Rid Gaza of the cancer of a genocidal terrorist group and maybe, just maybe, the two sides can begin traverse the ocean of agony, pain and suffering that threatens to drown them both.

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The out-of-control hedge-fund billionaire, Bill Ackman, has now taken his indiscriminate sledge hammer to Joe Biden.

Ackman is throwing some financial resources ($1 million this week) at Dean Phillips, the unknown Democratic Congressman, who recently decided to challenge The President.

Could this be the back story? More when I know more.

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Well, this is interesting.

Supreme Court declines to step into the fight over bathrooms for transgender students.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Tuesday passed up a chance to intervene in the debate over bathrooms for transgender students, rejecting an appeal from an Indiana public school district.

Federal appeals courts are divided over whether school policies enforcing restrictions on which bathrooms transgender students can use violate federal law or the Constitution.

In the case the court rejected without comment, the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an order granting transgender boys access to the boys’ bathroom. The appeal came from the Metropolitan School District of Martinsville, about 30 miles (48 kilometers) southwest of Indianapolis.

The federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, also has ruled in favor of transgender students, while the appeals court based in Atlanta came out the other way.

Legal battles over transgender rights are ongoing across the country, and at least nine states are restricting transgender students to bathrooms that match the sex they were assigned at birth.

In her opinion for the 7th Circuit, Judge Diane Wood wrote that the high court’s involvement seems inevitable.

“Litigation over transgender rights is occurring all over the country, and we assume that at some point the Supreme Court will step in with more guidance than it has furnished so far,” Wood wrote. (Associated Press).

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