The much criticized review showed much the same results as in November, with 99 more Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump ones.
After months of delays and blistering criticism, a review of the 2020 election in Arizona’s largest county, ordered up and financed by Republicans, has failed to show that former President Donald J. Trump was cheated of victory, according to draft versions of the report.
In fact, the draft report from the company Cyber Ninjas found just the opposite: It tallied 99 additional votes for President Biden and 261 fewer votes for Mr. Trump in Maricopa County, the fast-growing region that includes Phoenix.
The full review is set to be released on Friday, but draft versions circulating through Arizona political circles were obtained by The New York Times from a Republican and a Democrat. …
Late on Thursday night, Maricopa County, whose Republican leaders have derided the review, got a jump on the official release by tweeting out its conclusions.
“The county’s canvass of the 2020 General Election was accurate and the candidates certified as the winners did, in fact, win,” the county said on Twitter. It then criticized the review as “littered with errors and faulty conclusions.”
Mr. Biden won Arizona by roughly 10,500 votes, making his victory of about 45,000 votes in Maricopa County crucial to his win. Under intense pressure from Trump loyalists, the Republican majority in the State Senate had ordered an autopsy of the county’s votes for president. The review was financed largely by $5.7 million in donations from far-right groups and Mr. Trump’s defenders.
The draft reports implicitly acknowledged Mr. Biden’s victory, noting that there were “no substantial differences” between the new tally of votes and the official count by Maricopa County election officials. But they also claimed that other factors — most if not all contested by reputable election experts — left the results “very close to the margin of error for the election.” …
… On Thursday night, without acknowledging the findings of the draft reports that had been rippling across Arizona for half a day, the former president said in a statement, “Everybody will be watching Arizona tomorrow to see what the highly respected auditors and Arizona State Senate found out regarding the so-called Election!” …
… Maricopa County officials confirmed that the review established Biden’s victory over Trump, but they warned that the draft report was “also littered with errors & faulty conclusions about how Maricopa County conducted the 2020 General Election.” That material is likely to be seized upon by Trump die-hards seeking to bolster his false claims that he was cheated out of remaining in the White House.
The former President’s power to force elements of his Republican Party to reject democratic values was earlier in evidence yet again.
Hours after Trump published a public letter to Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott demanding an election audit, the office of Texas’ secretary of state announced Thursday that the process had already begun in the two largest Democratic counties and the two biggest Republican counties, Dallas, Harris, Tarrant and Collin. Trump wrote in his letter that “Texans know voting fraud occurred in some of their counties. Let’s get to the bottom of the 2020 presidential election scam!”
The audit will take place even though there is no evidence that the election in the Lone Star State was compromised or saw any significant voter fraud. And Trump won the state easily. The Texas Tribune reported in May that an official in the secretary of state’s office had earlier reported to state lawmakers that 2020 voting in Texas was “smooth and secure.” …
The Arizona Senate will receive the audit report on the Maricopa County election on Sept. 24 at 1 p.m. (MST) in a public presentation on the floor of the chamber, Senate President Karen Fann said. …
PHOENIX (AP) — Officials from Arizona are expected to hold a press conference announcing the results of the Maricopa County election audit born out of unfounded claims of widespread fraud. …
PHOENIX (AP) — Officials from Arizona are expected to hold a press conference announcing the results of the Maricopa County election audit born out of unfounded claims of widespread fraud. …
Having watched a small portion of the video, it seems to focus on various ‘sneaky’ things Maricopa election officials supposedly did to hide what ‘really happened. Those wily Cyber Ninjas found them all! Or did they?
The criticized review showed much the same results as in November, with 99 more Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump ones.
After months of delays and blistering criticism, a review of the 2020 election in Arizona’s largest county, ordered up and financed by Republicans, has failed to show that former President Donald J. Trump was cheated of victory.
Instead, the report from the company Cyber Ninjas said it found just the opposite: It tallied 99 additional votes for President Biden and 261 fewer votes for Mr. Trump in Maricopa County, the fast-growing region that includes Phoenix.
“Truth is truth and numbers are numbers,” Karen Fann, the Republican Senate president who commissioned the vote review, said as the findings were presented to the State Senate on Friday.
Mr. Biden won Arizona by roughly 10,500 votes, making his victory of about 45,000 votes in Maricopa County crucial to his win. …
Review officials implicitly acknowledged Mr. Biden’s victory, noting that there were no substantial differences between the new tally of votes and the official count by Maricopa County election officials. But they also claimed that other factors — most if not all contested by reputable election experts — left the results “very close to the margin of error for the election.”
Yet in the hours-long presentation before the State Senate the review officials did not focus on the numbers showing Mr. Biden’s victory but instead presented a blizzard of hypotheticals, none verified, most hinting darkly at a tainted election. They came prepared with slides, ballot scans and discussions of arcane election rules. …
Ron (RC) Weakley (A.K.A., Darryl For A While At EV) says:
Now some basic math. A 50 pound sack of coastal ryegrass seed that I have recently seeded in a pasture costs $37 per 50 pounds. Now that grass seed is germination for forage in the late fall, early winter, and is cheaper than buying hay off the rancher next door. A cover crop implies I plant it and I guess let it die in the first freeze? Who knows what constitutes actually croppage with the crafters of this bill. We will probably learn more after it is pared down and passed.
Anywho, back to the math. Rye seed per pound covers approximately 325 square feet, but you can get away with closer to 400 if you stretch it, so one 50 pound sack will cover just shy of 20,000 square feet. An acre is 45,560 square feet. So now I need two bags of seed per acre at a cost of $74 per acre. And they want to pay me $25?
Here are three options to shrink down the Democrats’ climate change and social welfare bill as moderates demand less spending and smaller tax hikes to pay for it.
As Democratic leaders struggle to unite their caucus behind a sprawling domestic policy package, it is increasingly clear the $3.5 trillion in spending and tax increases will have to be pared back, possibly by a lot, to make it to President Biden’s desk.
That will involve difficult choices for a party fractured by mistrust and competing priorities. But in a package that is intended to shape every facet of American life, including public education, health care and the environment, there is room for agreement, even in a thinly divided Congress.
Here are three possible scenarios for how to structure a final deal. …
A slightly scaled-back plan that uses budget tricks to hold down the cost. …
A lowest-common-denominator $900 billion package that extends existing health and child care benefits. …
A middle-ground $1.5 trillion bill that invests huge resources in programs to combat climate change.
…
Democrats could include the social welfare components of the lowest-common-denominator option — extending the temporary benefits of the American Rescue Plan — while going big on climate change. Those climate provisions would cost $585 billion over 10 years, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
They would push utilities away from coal and natural gas-fired power plants with a $150 billion Clean Electricity Performance Program, fund renewable energy deployment with tax credits worth more than $100 billion and offer $42 billion worth of tax credits for the purchase of electric cars, trucks and buses, while also pumping billions into home and commercial energy efficiency.
Those efforts, with a full, 10-year extension of the child credit, would push the total to $2.1 trillion.
Adding the remainder of the international corporate and business tax changes drafted by the House Ways and Means Committee to the higher corporate tax rate and increased taxes on the rich would just about pay for this option.
you all might have missed it, but this one didn’t miss us by much:
Asteroid 2021 SP flew past Earth at just 0.03 LD – closest flyby in 2021, 10th closest on record – A newly-discovered asteroid designated 2021 SP flew past Earth at a distance of 0.03 LD or 0.0000943 AU (14 107 km / 8 765 miles) from the center of our planet or about 7 700 km (4 780 miles) from the surface on September 17, 2021. This is now the closest asteroid flyby of the year and the 10th closest on record. … The close approach took place at 11:50 UTC at a speed (relative to the Earth) of 14.37 km/s.
A newly-discovered asteroid designated 2021 SP flew past Earth at a distance of 0.03 LD or 0.0000943 AU (14 107 km / 8 765 miles) from the center of our planet or about 7 700 km (4 780 miles) from the surface on September 17, 2021.
This is now the closest asteroid flyby of the year and the 10th closest on record. The previous closest in 2021 was 2021 RS2 on September 8 at 0.00015 AU.1
Since the start of the year, our sky surveys have discovered 90 asteroids to fly past Earth within 1 lunar distance.
2021 SP was first observed at Palomar Mountain (ZTF), California on September 17.2 …
The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QSD, also known as the Quad or QUAD) is a strategic dialogue between the United States, India, Japan and Australia that is maintained by talks between member countries. The dialogue was initiated in 2007 by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe … (Wikipedia)
President Biden gathered the leaders of Japan, Australia, and India at the White House on Friday to cement an emerging partnership of four Indo-Pacific countries, known as the Quad, united in their misgivings about China.
But before the main event, Biden sought to reassure one crucial member of the bloc — India — which also has lingering concerns about the United States. Biden greeted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the Oval Office, where the friendly banter before cameras gave no sign of tension. …
… the meeting comes a month after US forces departed Afghanistan and the Taliban swept into power, putting the United States’ commitment to allies into question from London to Brussels to Beijing. One quiet critic has been India, which argued against a hasty US withdrawal and considers the rise of a hard-line Taliban government, backed by its archrival Pakistan, to be a disastrous outcome.
Now, as the Biden administration shifts US attention and resources to countering Beijing, it needs to assuage concerns in India, a geopolitically isolated partner that is juggling a tense rivalry with China to its east, but also threats from its west in the form of Islamist militant groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan that see India as a mortal enemy. …
Failure of moderates and progressives to reach a deal would fuel Republican attacks on their competence — with consequences as soon as November in Virginia, and in the midterms next year. …
(If the electorate swallows this, then the GOP strategy of stalemating Dems
will prove effective next year, if not 2024. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Should Dems just give up and allow the GOP to put them out of their misery?)
… You’d think that between Covid-19, climate change and U.S. democracy under siege, we would already have enough crises on our plate. A potential Chinese financial meltdown is the last thing we need. Yet here we are.
The story of the moment is Evergrande, a huge, heavily indebted real estate company that appears on the edge of default. The echoes of the global financial crisis 13 years ago are obvious.
… Some of us still remember the Japanese bubble economy — or as the Japanese themselves called it, the “babaru economy” — of the late 1980s, when prices of many assets, above all commercial real estate, went completely crazy. At one point it was widely claimed that the land under the Imperial Palace was worth more than the whole state of California. Then everything crashed.
By the way, I am not making fun of the Japanese for using an English-derived term. English speakers — among whom everyone from policy mandarins to business gurus finds it de rigueur to borrow foreign terminology — have no right to feel schadenfreude when someone else borrows from us. …
GOP Review of Arizona Vote Fails to Show Stolen Election
CNN: Not even Arizona’s sham audit can dispel reality of Trump’s election loss
… Maricopa County officials confirmed that the review established Biden’s victory over Trump, but they warned that the draft report was “also littered with errors & faulty conclusions about how Maricopa County conducted the 2020 General Election.” That material is likely to be seized upon by Trump die-hards seeking to bolster his false claims that he was cheated out of remaining in the White House.
The former President’s power to force elements of his Republican Party to reject democratic values was earlier in evidence yet again.
Hours after Trump published a public letter to Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott demanding an election audit, the office of Texas’ secretary of state announced Thursday that the process had already begun in the two largest Democratic counties and the two biggest Republican counties, Dallas, Harris, Tarrant and Collin. Trump wrote in his letter that “Texans know voting fraud occurred in some of their counties. Let’s get to the bottom of the 2020 presidential election scam!”
The audit will take place even though there is no evidence that the election in the Lone Star State was compromised or saw any significant voter fraud. And Trump won the state easily. The Texas Tribune reported in May that an official in the secretary of state’s office had earlier reported to state lawmakers that 2020 voting in Texas was “smooth and secure.” …
The Arizona Senate will receive the audit report on the Maricopa County election on Sept. 24 at 1 p.m. (MST) in a public presentation on the floor of the chamber, Senate President Karen Fann said. …
Official release of audit report: 4pm (EDT) Sep 24
Arizona officials hold press conference on elections audit results
PHOENIX (AP) — Officials from Arizona are expected to hold a press conference announcing the results of the Maricopa County election audit born out of unfounded claims of widespread fraud. …
(There is video at the link above.)
PHOENIX (AP) — Officials from Arizona are expected to hold a press conference announcing the results of the Maricopa County election audit born out of unfounded claims of widespread fraud. …
PBS News Hour: Arizona officials hold press conference on elections audit results
Having watched a small portion of the video, it seems to focus on various ‘sneaky’ things Maricopa election officials supposedly did to hide what ‘really happened. Those wily Cyber Ninjas found them all! Or did they?
Republican Review of Arizona Vote Fails to Show Stolen Election
Corrupt people acquire power and then power corrupts. Vicious circle much?
I am a little baffled by our governments assessment of agriculture. Just today they released a few details about paying farmers to plant cover crop, as per this article here https://www.dtnpf.com/agriculture/web/ag/news/business-inputs/article/2021/09/23/house-budget-plan-offers-big-funds
Now some basic math. A 50 pound sack of coastal ryegrass seed that I have recently seeded in a pasture costs $37 per 50 pounds. Now that grass seed is germination for forage in the late fall, early winter, and is cheaper than buying hay off the rancher next door. A cover crop implies I plant it and I guess let it die in the first freeze? Who knows what constitutes actually croppage with the crafters of this bill. We will probably learn more after it is pared down and passed.
Anywho, back to the math. Rye seed per pound covers approximately 325 square feet, but you can get away with closer to 400 if you stretch it, so one 50 pound sack will cover just shy of 20,000 square feet. An acre is 45,560 square feet. So now I need two bags of seed per acre at a cost of $74 per acre. And they want to pay me $25?
How Democrats Could Shrink Their $3.5 Trillion Budget Bill
you all might have missed it, but this one didn’t miss us by much:
Asteroid 2021 SP flew past Earth at just 0.03 LD – closest flyby in 2021, 10th closest on record – A newly-discovered asteroid designated 2021 SP flew past Earth at a distance of 0.03 LD or 0.0000943 AU (14 107 km / 8 765 miles) from the center of our planet or about 7 700 km (4 780 miles) from the surface on September 17, 2021. This is now the closest asteroid flyby of the year and the 10th closest on record. … The close approach took place at 11:50 UTC at a speed (relative to the Earth) of 14.37 km/s.
*LD = lunar distance
Small asteroid misses Earth just hours after its discovery
(About 336 hours, actually.)
A small asteroid barely missed Earth just hours after the car-size rock was discovered flying through space.
The asteroid, dubbed 2021 RS2, came within 9,532 miles of the Earth’s surface Tuesday. …
,,. RS2 was first observed by researchers at Mount Lemmon Survey in Arizona on Sept. 7 as it barreled Earthward at 39,366 miles per hour.
If the asteroid had come any closer, it would have mostly disintegrated while burning up in the atmosphere and posed no real threat to the planet.
It is the closest flyby of the year and the 21st-closest on record …
According to The Watchers website, RS2 is the 81st known asteroid to fly within 1 lunar distance (239,228.3 miles) of Earth since the start of 2021.
In case an asteroid one day threatens Earth’s existence, NASA has developed a contingency plan to launch a spaceship right at the rock. …
Asteroid 2021 SP was a closer call, however
And discovered more recently.
A newly-discovered asteroid designated 2021 SP flew past Earth at a distance of 0.03 LD or 0.0000943 AU (14 107 km / 8 765 miles) from the center of our planet or about 7 700 km (4 780 miles) from the surface on September 17, 2021.
This is now the closest asteroid flyby of the year and the 10th closest on record. The previous closest in 2021 was 2021 RS2 on September 8 at 0.00015 AU.1
Since the start of the year, our sky surveys have discovered 90 asteroids to fly past Earth within 1 lunar distance.
2021 SP was first observed at Palomar Mountain (ZTF), California on September 17.2 …
The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QSD, also known as the Quad or QUAD) is a strategic dialogue between the United States, India, Japan and Australia that is maintained by talks between member countries. The dialogue was initiated in 2007 by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe … (Wikipedia)
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/09/24/world/biden-hosts-first-quad-summit-white-house-india-brings-enthusiasm-questions/
Biden hosts first Quad summit at the White House
President Biden gathered the leaders of Japan, Australia, and India at the White House on Friday to cement an emerging partnership of four Indo-Pacific countries, known as the Quad, united in their misgivings about China.
But before the main event, Biden sought to reassure one crucial member of the bloc — India — which also has lingering concerns about the United States. Biden greeted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the Oval Office, where the friendly banter before cameras gave no sign of tension. …
… the meeting comes a month after US forces departed Afghanistan and the Taliban swept into power, putting the United States’ commitment to allies into question from London to Brussels to Beijing. One quiet critic has been India, which argued against a hasty US withdrawal and considers the rise of a hard-line Taliban government, backed by its archrival Pakistan, to be a disastrous outcome.
Now, as the Biden administration shifts US attention and resources to countering Beijing, it needs to assuage concerns in India, a geopolitically isolated partner that is juggling a tense rivalry with China to its east, but also threats from its west in the form of Islamist militant groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan that see India as a mortal enemy. …
Democrats Fear Failure to Deliver in Congress Could Be Fatal in Midterms
(If the electorate swallows this, then the GOP strategy of stalemating Dems
will prove effective next year, if not 2024. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Should Dems just give up and allow the GOP to put them out of their misery?)
This Might Be China’s ‘Babaru’ Moment
NYT – Paul Krugman – Sep 25
The Japanese babaru keizai, or “bubble economy”, of the 1980s