Friday 29th of March 2024

US presidential elections: russia vs china?...

china's help

At least Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, and their surrogates in the Mainstream Media got one point right regarding foreign interference in U.S. politics: that it is totally bogus to compare the records of Russia and China in election meddling and in other aspects of American public life, and their abilities to do so.

Trouble is, the House Speaker, the Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, and other Never Trumpers are wildly off-base about who the main culprit has been and will be for years to come. It’s not Russia, it’s China— and by orders of magnitude.

In fact, on top of efforts to shape voters’ opinions during election campaigns, Beijing for decades has been influencing American politics in ways Moscow can barely dream of.

Commenting on the spotlight that U.S. intelligence officials have placed on both countries’ interference efforts (along with Iran’s), Pelosi and Schiff declared that the analysis “provided a false sense of equivalence to the actions of foreign adversaries by listing three countries of unequal operational intent, actions, and capabilities together.” 

In particular, they charged, the actions of Kremlin-linked actors seeking to undermine Vice President Biden, and seeking to help President Trump” were glossed over.

Pelosi stated subsequently, “The Chinese, they said, prefer (presumptive Democratic nominee Joe) Biden—we don’t know that, but that’s what they’re saying, but they’re not really getting involved in the presidential election.” 

The liberal media, as is so often the case, echoed this Democratic talking point. According to The New York Times‘ Robert Draper, author of a long piece in the paper’s magazine section on Trump’s supposed refusal to approve anti-Russia interference measures or take seriously such findings by the intelligence community, China “is really not able to affect the integrity of our electoral system the way Russia can.”

What these Trump opponents have completely overlooked is that the Chinese are unquestionably meddling—though with some distinctive Chinese characteristics. And much more importantly, China has long been interfering in American political activities by capitalizing on the degree to which so many major American institutions have become beholden to the Chinese government through pre-Trump “bilateral ties.”

As for the narrower, more direct kind of election corrupting, you don’t need to take the word of President Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien that “China, like Russia and Iran, have engaged in cyberattacks and fishing and that sort of thing with respect to our election infrastructure and with respect to websites.”

You don’t have to take the word of Vice President Mike Pence, who in 2018 cited a national intelligence assessment that found that China “is targeting U.S. state and local governments and officials to exploit any divisions between federal and local levels on policy. It’s using wedge issues, like trade tariffs, to advance Beijing’s political influence.”

You can ignore Pence’s contention that that same year, a document circulated by Beijing stated that China must [quoting directly] “strike accurately and carefully, splitting apart different domestic groups” in the United States.

Nor do you need to take seriously the intelligence community judgement dismissed by Pelosi and Schiff that:


“China has been expanding its influence efforts ahead of November 2020 to shape the policy environment in the United States, pressure political figures it views as opposed to China’s interests, and deflect and counter criticism of China….Beijing recognizes that all of these efforts might affect the presidential race.”

 

Much harder to ignore: China’s decision at the height of the 2018 Congressional election campaigns to take out a four-page supplement in the Sunday Des Moines[Iowa] Register that clearly was “intended to undermine farm-country support for President Donald Trump’s escalating trade war.”

The New York Times itself reported that this past spring that U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that as the coronavirus pandemic was peaking in the nation, Chinese operatives were responsible for sending throughout social media scary sounding warnings that President Trump was about to lock down the entire country—complete with prepositioning  troops “to help prevent looters and rioters.”

At least as worrisome: A new report from the information analysis firm Graphika documenting how, “Social media accounts from the pro-Chinese political spam network Spamouflage Dragonstarted posting English-language videos that attacked American policy and the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump in June, as the rhetorical confrontation between the United States and China escalated.”

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/china-leaves-russian-meddling-in-the-dust/


who's going to loose, will do it gracefully...

 

From Sara Carter


Former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden should not concede the 2020 election under “any circumstances.” She theorized that the November presidential election ” is going to drag out.”

Over the past year, Clinton, whose campaign in 2016 paid a foreign spy to compile a fake dossier on President Donald Trump’s campaign, has been struggling publicly with her loss. She at one point reiterated a false theory that she won the election and that the Russian’s will not have an opportunity to put Trump in office again.

This time she is calling on her Democratic troops to pull together a “massive legal operation.” 

I personally think the former Secretary of State has lost connection with reality due to her failure to win the presidency twice. 

She said the “Biden campaign is working on” amassing an operation to monitor the upcoming the election. 

“We have to have poll workers, and I urge people who are able to be a poll worker,” she warned Democrats. “We have to have our own teams of people to counter the forces of intimidation.” 

I have a message for Clinton: this is a Democracy and the peaceful transition of power is basically the Hallmark of America’s exceptionalism. So let it go, stop trying to instigate violence and come to terms with your losses.

 

Read more:

https://saraacarter.com/clinton-says-biden-should-not-concede-election-u...

 

Read above... Hillary was never graceful...

russia didn’t defeat her...

As the United States sinks deeper into a multi-faceted global crisis that no politician seems able or even willing to address, one hears more and more often demands for radical change in who runs the country and to what end. Of course, Donald J. Trump offered such a dramatic shift in priorities four years ago, but he has been unable to deliver due to his own inability to execute and the ill-conceived machinations of those whom he has chosen as advisers. The Democrats for their part are offering little beyond a repeat of their 2016 pander to grievance groups in an effort to cobble together an unassailable majority based on buying off the party’s various constituencies.

But there is one area where change could come dramatically if either party were actually motivated to do something that would truly benefit the American people, and that is in the area of foreign and national security policy where the president has considerable power to set priorities and redirect both the State and Defense Departments. Unfortunately, foreign and national security policy is almost never discussed during the presidential campaigns and this time would already appear to be no exception. That means that the one thing that is a constant amidst all the smoke and mirrors is the continued bellicosity of both parties on the world stage.

The Republicans are apparently eager to “democratize” Latin America while the Democrats in particular are wedded to the “foreign interference” angle to explain their loss in 2016, with Hillary Clinton predictably advising in her Democratic National Convention speech that the public should “Vote to make sure we — not a foreign adversary — choose our president.” Indeed, the tendency to create and then demonize “foreign conspiracies” is generally supported by the establishment and its parasitical media, since it enables the billionaire oligarchs who really run the country to grow fatter while also avoiding any blame for the declining fortunes of most of the American people.

The Democrats are currently taking pains to recall the so-called “Russian interference” in 2016, and are expecting or possibly even hoping for more of the same this year. Tying Trump to Russian President Vladimir Putin is obviously perceived as a game winner, even though the just-completed investigations into the events of 2016 are at best ambiguous. Early prognostications by journalist-pundits in the foreign interference sweepstakes indicate that both China and Iran will be supporting Joe Biden while Russia wants to continue with Trump. No one bothers to explain how those countries will express their preferences or what kind of impact they could possibly have.

One thing that is certain is that both parties will continue their deference to Israel which in turn means hostility towards Iran and its few friends worldwide. The U.S. media has not reported the almost daily bombings of Syria and Gaza by Israel and even largely failed to cover how two weeks ago the United States Navy seized four Greek flagged oil tankers transporting more than a million gallons of fuel to economic basket case Venezuela, a country which is in its sad condition due to sanctions and other “maximum pressure” at the hands of Washington. The fuel was seized based on unilaterally imposed U.S. sanctions on Iranian sale or export of its own petroleum products, a move intended to strangle the Iranian economy and bring about an uprising of the Iranian people. Such a move used to be called piracy.

To be sure, the Democrats have indicated that they will rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which Trump withdrew from under orders from top donor Sheldon Adelson in 2017, one of his first acts in office. The JCPOA is intended to monitor and restrain any possible efforts by Iran to enrich uranium to develop a nuclear weapon, which one might assume is in the U.S. interest, but one should make no mistake in thinking that re-entering the agreement signifies any softening towards Iran. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are owned lock, stock and barrel by the Israel Lobby, which is pretty much true of most politicians from both major parties in Washington. Iran is Israel’s target and even lacking any threat to the U.S. so it will remain the American enemy of choice.

America’s efforts to demonize and punish Iran, ineptly stage managed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, frequently lead into the Twilight Zone. On August 17th, the United States suffered what has to be described as a humiliating defeat in the United Nations Security Council. As the Washington Post reported it, “The United States asked the council to approve an extension of the 13-year-old embargo on arms trade with Iran — something that matters greatly to Israel and U.S. Arab allies, and which most of the democratic world favors. Yet only one member of the 15-member council, the Dominican Republic, sided with Washington. Russia and China opposed the motion, while 11 countries — including Britain, France and Germany — abstained. The vote could open the way for Iran to obtain Chinese and Russian arms — for example, missiles it could employ against Israel, the UAE or U.S. ships in the Persian Gulf.”

Note particularly the reliably Zionist Post’s “newspeak” version in describing both the issue and the vote. It states that “most of the democratic world favors” an embargo on selling arms to Iran but then describes how “11 countries – including Britain, France and Germany – abstained.” And, of course, the potential threat to Israel is front and center as the reason for the embargo, an apartheid state that has nuclear weapons developed in secret after stealing both the uranium and triggers from the United States. One might also note that Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which Israel is not, and its nuclear related research facilities are fully open to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

After the rebuff, Trump subsequently moved on to phase two in its attack on Iran by invoking a so-called “snap-back” provision of the JCPOA that empowers any of the signatories to the agreement to unilaterally call for renewal of the international sanctions that isolated Iran prior to 2015, when the plan of action was signed by the U.S., Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia, along with the European Union. The U.S. claimed that Iran has been cheating on its enrichment program and also that the accord’s authority is rooted in an accompanying Security Council resolution, which means that Washington can at will address the issue before that body.

Bear in mind that the U.S., though an original signatory, withdrew from the agreement, and any attempt to restore U.N. sanctions through an admittedly sleazy maneuver would be resisted by nearly all the other members of the Security Council, which is precisely what did take place last Thursday, with the Europeans producing a joint letter emphasizing that Washington has no standing on the issue as it is no longer party to the arrangement. Pompeo responded by saying that the Europeans “chose to side with the ayatollahs.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, presumably supported by the president, has been angered by the Security Council’s failure to support him on either extending the arms embargo or re-imposing general sanctions, though he is probably eternally grateful for the fortitude demonstrated by the plucky little Dominican Republic. On both meetings with the Security Council Pompeo complained, using his standard line, saying that “We can’t allow the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism to buy and sell weapons. I mean, that’s just nuts.”

The next step by the White House was a unilateral proposal submitted in writing by the U.S. to reimpose a full range of economic sanctions on Iran in thirty days. That can only be blocked by a Security Council resolution which Washington can veto, meaning that America will again be going it alone in its not-so-secret war against Iran, further isolating the U.S. in world fora and again demonstrating that the Trump Administration has few friends anywhere in this fight but Israel and its newfound Arab associates in the Gulf. It also means that the re-imposed sanctions are unlikely to be actively enforced by anyone that matters, further suggesting that the U.S. might resort to secondary sanctions, as it has done in the past, on those who do not comply, a formula for chaos.

Well, it should seem obvious that we Americans can’t afford a foreign and national security policy that pits the United States against the rest of the world in situations where the U.S. is not actually directly threatened and does not even have a vital interest. Over the next two months, perhaps we will see some serious discussion of America’s place in the world or perhaps not. If 2016 is anything to go by, we are more likely to see a number of bromides tossed out without any real meaning behind them. We are still waiting for troops reductions and the ending of useless wars promised by Trump. We are still waiting for Hillary to concede that Russia didn’t defeat her. She did it all by herself.

 

Read more:

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/08/27/lets-talk-us-foreign-policy-it-is-root-cause-many-evils/

a scenario for troubles....

Imagine that Biden gets less college voters than Trump, after a bruising voting which sees Trump also getting more of the popular vote. Could the Democrats try to entice the college voters to vote for Biden rather than for Trump — going against the long agreed convention that super-voters have to vote for the majority in their own state and not vote according to their conscience?

 

Would this be a scenario for trouble? We know that in 2016, Hillary intimated to this possibility... This would really spoil the fiesta. wouldn't it?

 

 

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tough on beijing...

How is the issue of China playing out in the American election cycle? Both Trump and Biden portray themselves as being tough on Beijing. Maybe they are – at least rhetorically. But reality tells a very different story – and it’s bipartisan. The commanding heights of industry and finance have courted China for decades and have the riches to show for it. Is this China’s fault?

 

See/hear more:

https://www.rt.com/shows/crosstalk/495652-china-us-election-cycle/

counting the votes...


This Is Democrats’ Doomsday Scenario for Election Night


What if early results in swing states on Nov. 3 show President Trump ahead, and he declares victory before heavily Democratic mail-in votes, which he has falsely linked with fraud, are fully counted?


“There has been (rightly) a lot of concern about this,” J.J. Balaban, a Democratic consultant in Pennsylvania, said in an email.


In Michigan, Ms. Benson predicted that three million votes would be cast by mail this year, 60 percent of the total. She has called for changes to let election clerks process absentee ballots early — opening envelopes, contacting voters if ballot signatures don’t match registrations, and beginning the counting. If the changes don’t pass in the Republican-led Legislature, full results may not be known until the Friday or Saturday after Nov. 3, Ms. Benson said. “Time is running out.”


Currently, 12 states do not allow mail-in ballots to be processed before Election Day, including the battlegrounds of Michigan, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.


A Democratic data group backed by Michael R. Bloomberg said this week that it was likely that Mr. Trump would appear to have won on election night by a landslide, a scenario it called “a red mirage.”

“We are sounding an alarm and saying that this is a very real possibility, that the data is going to show on election night an incredible victory for Donald Trump,” Josh Mendelsohn, the chief executive of the group, Hawkfish, told “Axios on HBO.” The company’s survey of registered voters concluded that twice as many planned to cast a ballot by mail as ever before, and that they were mostly Biden supporters.


A spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, Thea McDonald, called Democrats’ concerns about the president prematurely declaring victory “an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory,” adding, “President Trump and his campaign are fighting for a free, fair, transparent election in which every valid ballot counts — once.”


The president has raged against mail voting all year, tweeting in May that “there is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent.”


As Mr. Trump demonizes mail ballots, many of his supporters do not plan to use them.


An NBC/Wall Street Journal national poll last month found that nearly half — 47 percent — of supporters of Mr. Biden planned to mail in their votes, compared with two-thirds of Trump supporters — 66 percent — who planned to vote in person on Election Day.


In some states, the discrepancy is even more stark. A recent Marquette Law School poll of Wisconsin, another swing state, found that among voters planning to cast a mail ballot, Mr. Biden was favored by 67 percentage points. Among those who planned to vote on Election Day, Mr. Trump led by 41 points.

 

 

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/02/us/politics/voting-election-day.html

 

 

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In Australia, Mail-in votes tend to favour the neo-con rightwing extremist CONservative governments... The mail-in system is mostly used by sick oldies or "grey nomads" — old folks going camping on the trip of which dreams are made of, in areas where there are only moquitoes, snakes and crocodiles, after a lifetime spent collecting a small bourgeois loot.

 

After three to six month touring the outback of Australia, where there is only red dirt to see and red dust to breathe — and be blinded by dry salt lakes — the caravan is then parked, unwashed on the front lawn like a trophy, for about ten years, till the plywood becomes rotten to the core under the aluminium cladding... The tyres are flat, the wheels are seized up and the only way to keep the frame horizontal is to prop it up with bricks... 

 

By then the zimmer frames are the only way to travel from the bedroom to the sacred caravan site, and the electric cart is used t go to the shop — and to the post office for the Mail-in voting...

 

 

In America:

stadium

 


joe biden isn't senile, he just needs a teleprompter...

US 2020 Vote: Why Russia "Denigrating Biden’s Health" Story Unlikely to Scare Off Trump’s SupportersThe Democratic Party and left-leaning media are continuing their attempts to shift the blame for their failures on Donald Trump and Russia, notes Wall Street analyst Charles Ortel, who explains why American voters are unlikely to swallow the bait.

On 2 September, ABC News revealed that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had withheld publication of an intelligence report warning of a supposed Russian scheme to influence the US elections by promoting “allegations about the poor mental health” of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

According to the media outlet, the bulletin titled “Russia Likely to Denigrate Health of US Candidates to Influence 2020 Election”, was submitted to the agency on July 7 but has never been distributed to the DHS's federal, state and local law enforcement partners. The document also touched upon China and Iran's alleged efforts to hurt Trump's re-election.

Americans Need No Foreign Scheme to See What's Going On

Reacting to the media revelation, a DHS spokesperson later explained that the intel report was delayed as it did not meet the agency's standards, adding that the department usually does not comment on any leaked documents.

"The report that you referenced was, at the end of the day, a very poorly written report", Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf toldFox News last Wednesday. "I had questions about it when I talked to career officials in I&A [Intelligence and Analysis] in the office that produced the report."

Nevertheless, the story was widely disseminated in the US mainstream media, which insisted that the authors of the aforementioned bulletin said with "high confidence" that "Russian malign influence actors are likely to continue denigrating presidential candidates through allegations of poor mental or physical health to influence the outcome of the 2020 election". Besides this, the bulletin argued that four years ago Moscow supposedly tried to sow "serious doubts about [then-candidate Hillary Clinton’s] physical capability".

"On a sad and serious note, for years one might question the sanity of anyone who might seek the US presidency," says Charles Ortel, a Wall Street analyst and investigative journalist. "Without help from outsiders, thoughtful Americans, interested in facts certainly see Biden today as a much diminished version of his hapless self from 1988 while listening to his incoherent babbling, and watching his poor choices and prescriptions for the future."

As for rumours concerning Hillary Clinton's physical capabilities, everyone saw that on 11 September 2016 she collapsed after leaving a memorial ceremony in New York City, the analyst recollects. He adds that no foreign actor was needed to spread the rumour since the video of the incident quickly went viral on social media.

'US Voters Face a Clear Choice'

Following the ABC News leak, the Biden campaign jumped at the opportunity to accuse the incumbent president's team of throwing into question the Democratic nominee's health and claimed that Russia and the Trump campaign "are speaking from the same script of smears and lies".

"We now know far more about the lengths to which Donald Trump will go to manipulate and conceal intelligence for partisan political purposes, and to strip our country of its defenses against foreign attacks on our democracy," the Biden campaign's spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement to ABC News, also referring to the decision by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to suspend in-person congressional briefings on election security over previous leaks of sensitive information.

For its part, Wired connected the delayed report to Ratcliffe's recent move, and Attorney General William Barr's decision to replace the head of the Justice Department’s national security Office of Law and Policy, alleging that Trump is "eroding election security" ahead of the 2020 vote.

"Each move would be concerning on its own, but the combination is uniquely troubling and should raise fresh questions with Capitol Hill, state and local election officials, and voters about how seriously the Trump administration is committed to combating election interference," the media outlet claimed.

Commenting on the media speculations, Ortel notes that the Democratic establishment and its allies have long been promoting "a criminally false narrative against Team Trump that the corrupt MSM, academia, and crony capitalists willingly embraced starting the day Trump and his wife announced his candidacy in 2015".

Drawing parallels between today's attempts to shift the blame to Russia and Trump for flaws and setbacks of the Democratic campaign in 2016 and 2020, the analyst recalls that it was Hillary Clinton who "cockil,y then foolishly, failed to show up seeking vital support in key swing states" as the election day neared and apparently therefore lost. Nevertheless, the former Democratic hopeful pinned the blame on Russia for her defeat and reiterated it in her book "What Happened" (2017). Moscow has repeatedly and resolutely denied the accusations of its alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election in the US as groundless.

Trump-Russia Hoax No Longer Works

Meanwhile, it appears that American conservatives have been left unimpressed by the worn-out Russian bogey exploited by the left-leaning US media and Democratic politicians over and over again.

The Federalist, a conservative American online magazine, subjected ABC News' report to ridicule and cast doubt on the much-discussed intelligence bulletin last Thursday:

"If talking about Biden’s mental fitness is a Russian scheme, for example, what other seemingly legitimate concerns might the Kremlin be planting in our minds? Preferring lower taxes? Opposing partial-birth abortion? National mask mandates and lockdowns seem an obvious target," Christopher Bedford, the magazine's senior editor, wrote in an op-ed titled "ABC: Joe Biden Isn’t Senile, You Guys, That’s Just What The Russians Want You To Think".

According to Ortel, "Joe Biden and his team are failing spectacularly themselves" without any foreign interference.

"Blaming others is like saying your dog ate your homework after you failed to turn anything in," he notes, adding that this scenario as well as the "Russia-Trump hoax" are thinly veiled and could hardly produce any effect on Trump's base or thoughtful voters.

The timing of the new accusations against the Trump campaign is remarkable given the upcoming revelations by US Attorney John Durham, who has been investigating the FBI and DOJ's handling of the Trump-Russia probe for quite a while, according to Ortel. On 30 August, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe told Fox News that he is coordinating efforts with Durham and plans to declassify "additional documents" soon.

Voters in America can weigh up the pros and cons themselves and they need no perspectives from abroad to make their choice on 3 November, the analyst concludes.


Read more:
https://sputniknews.com/analysis/202009081080393784-us-2020-vote-why-russia-denigrating-bidens-health-story-unlikely-to-scare-off-trumps-supporters/

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