More On The Next Enrons

It looks like Fox's prime time hosts are under pressure. Overnight, it seems a kerfuffle has arisen over whether, by Tucker Carlson's account, Sidney Powell "got angry and refused to provide evidence for voting software flipping votes" when he requested it.

Maria Bartiromo, also of Fox, interviewed Powell on the phone this morning, and Powell replied

I sent an affidavit to Tucker that I had not even attached to a pleading yet to help him understand the situation and I offered him another witness who could explain the mathematics of the statistical evidence far better than I can. . . But he was very insulting, demanding and rude and I told him not to contact me again in those terms.

It looks like Maria Bartiromo is getting off the reservation, and she and Fox will almost certainly come to a parting of the ways. Bartiromo has a serious journalistic career behind her, and I assume she has fallbacks if this happens. Tucker, on the other hand, is a pretty boy, not much different in his way from Megyn Kelly, and if he leaves Fox, the multimillion-dollar money spigot will be turned off, likely without anything like the settlement Megyn got. UPDATE: Don Surber comments, "If Fox dumped O'Reilly who built that time slot, Fox will not hesitate to dump Carlson."

And at this point, I'm not sure how many Megyn style settlements they can pay. (Bartiromo, of course, won't get anything like that anyhow and will just have to go on working for a living.) Fox is making it plain that it wants to go from the market leader to a third-place CNN wannabe. Leaving the election entirely aside, I've got to question what's on their minds just as a business decision.

My guess is that the word has gone out to the prime time hosts -- Hannity may not be in the same boat here -- that there are going to be cuts, and they'd better be on their best behavior. Based on my last post, Laura Ingraham is clearly nervous.

But Fox's audience is already leaving for Newsmax and OAN, while CNN's won't go over to Fox.

But it also looks like Dominion Voting has writen off its chances as a continuing enterprise. It pulled out of testifying before a Pennsylvania House hearing this morning, which will do nothing but continue to destroy its business reputation in any conventional sense. It presumably has lost any chance of ever selling another Dominion machine, at least under that brand.

The Next Enrons

Regardless of the election's outcome, some corporations are going to be joining Enron in the industrial Great Beyond. Fox had been hurting its reputation for weeks prior to the election, especially with Chris Wallace's moderation of the first debate, but since calling the Arizona election on November 3, it's fallen behind CNN and MSNBC.

Here's a sign of the times:

I would guess that Ingraham is beginning to feel quite insecure in her position and is taking things out on whatever target she can find.

I noted the other day that both Dominion Voting and Smartmatic are likely to have their brands irreparably damaged in the current controversy and show signs that they're beginning to recognize that. Dominion's home page is now devoted entirely to denying allegations that have come up in recent days. It's dated most recentlyh November 17, which was Tuesday, and it contains, aomng other denials:

DOMINION VOTING SYSTEMS CATEGORICALLY DENIES FALSE ASSERTIONS ABOUT VOTE SWITCHING AND SOFTWARE ISSUES WITH OUR VOTING SYSTEMS.

The problem is that the Trump team has been making entirely credible assertions that someone, quite possibly Dominion, or using Dominion capabilities, did in fact switch votes in specific cases in Georgia and Michigan, and such instances have been multiplying.

Dominion's reply is to cite now-fired DHS cybersecurity director Chris Krebs, who said, the 2020 general election "was the most secure in American history." In light of the substantiated allegations now in the public record, this assertion seems at best highly exaggerated -- and it leaves out the allegation from Rudy Giuliani in today's press conference that a senior Dominion manager went to Detroit on election night to facilitate in person the task of manipulating totals.

Smartmatic has left up the earlier "fact checks" on its website with no alteration.

Both compnies are apparently in a pseudo "crisis mode", trynig somewhat lamely to evade bad publicity. The problem for them is that as the scandal moves forward, their assertions will be dscreditied -- as it appears now that they're false, and their brands will become the punch lines of jokes.

Based on remarks at the press conference, Dominion employees are already bailing out, and as I noted the other day, hundreds are deleting their employment histories there from Linkedin.

Laura Ingraham, by the way, went to Dartmouth and worked on the Dartmouth Review as a protegee of Jeffrey Hart. None of this surprises me.

"The Golden Mountain Does Not Exist"

Among the more recondite pieces of knowledge I picked up as an elite-school undergraduate was a course in logical positivism, which can probably be characterized as a view that most philosphical problems can be traced to linguistic or grammatical confusion. An example I was given at the time was based on a dispute between Bertrand Russell and the Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong over the meaning (or not) of the statement, "The golden mountain does not exist".

The basic problem is that you've mentioned something called "the golden mountain", which must exist in some form, because you're referring to it, and the listener can conceive of it, but then you're turning around and saying it doesn't exist. This is at best confusing, and how to resolve the problem, or not, is beyond the scope of this post.

But now corporate media has discovered a golden mountain that does not exist -- in this case a computer server connected in various accounts not with Scytl or Smartmatic, or maybe not the CIA, that was not seized in Frankfurt, not by the US Army, not just after the Nov 3 election, that most assuredly did not contain information that Trump was on a path to win, or had actually won, the Nov 3 election, not.

Informed sources in the intelligence community inform investigative reporter John Solomon that the non-existent golden mountain has maybe been confused with a different non-existent landfill in Saxony, which clears it all up.

Corporate media fact checks seem to lag behind the rumors. But here's an assertion by a Seattle TV station from a couple days ago on what doefinitely does not exist:

Did the U.S. Army raid Scytl servers in Frankfurt, Germany to find evidence that the election had been tampered with.

No. The former director of the government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said it was false. Both the U.S. Army and Scytl have denied this has happened.

One problem is that the conspiracy theorists who continue to insist the golden mountain exists keep expanding on what the golden mountain looks like. The link above says,

Rumors began flying today that President Trump not only won, but won big.

410 electoral votes big.

That is, according to a server that was allegedly seized in a raid this week from overseas.

I take no position on this pro or con. But I think back to my course in logical positivism and agree that there are problems with asserting that the golden mountain does not exist. Especially when people are so emphatic about how it doesn't.

UPDATE: Via Gateway Pundit, Sidney Powell responded to a question from the press:

Reporter Emerald Robinson: There were reports that a piece of hardware possibly a server was picked up in Germany. Is that true and is it related to this?

Attorney Sidney Powell: That is true. It is somehow related to this. But I do not know if good guys got it or bad guys got it.

So at minimum, the existence of a confiscated German server related to the election is confirmed as not not existing.

Attorneys Are Good At Keeping Secrets. Spies, Not So Much.

Since the start of the post-election controversy, I've noticed how little the Trump lawyers have had to say. By Nov 5, although Trump himself plainly said the election had been "stolen", the people on his team were unnaturally quiet, and they continue to be so. Let's consider their ranks include Rudy Giuliani, :L Lin Wood -- both with very high and gabby public profiles, but even they have cut back -- but also Joe DiGenova, Victoria Toensing, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, and Robrt Barnes. Barnes has appeared on YouTube, but he's restricted his remarks to general questions of election law, and he seems to imply he's working in a different area than Sidney Powell, which apparently excludes him from the kraken.

Only Giuliani and Powell have said anything about a kraken and what that may imply, but the implication of their public remarks seems to be that there are issues with a foreign server involved in the vote count. Last night, Giuliani repeated an allegation that votes were counted in Spain and Germany by Smartmatic and refers to efforts by the Trump team to investigate this in much greater detail. Over the weekend, Giuliani made remarks about Smartmatic (that Smartmatic owned Dominion) that have been contradicted by Smartmatic, but it's plain that in yesterday's interview he's continuing to focus on Smartmatic and a foreign connection to the vote count. L Lin Wood has tweeted in agreement with this narrative.

On November 17, Trump fired "the top cybersecurity official at the "the Department of Homeland Security, Chris Krebs, who oversaw efforts to safeguard the presidential election from foreign interference " It's easy to think Trump's firing of Krebs, and earlier Defense Secretary Esper, were acts of terminal pique, but other analysis I've linked here suggests, at least with some credibility, that the firing of Esper was to enable the Defense Department to assist in seizure of a Frankfurt server. By the same token, firing Krebs may have been to enable similar cooperation at DHS, not just to punish pre-election nonfeasance.

Meanwhile, cybersecurity "experts" have told investigative reporter John Soiomon that "Reports that the U.S. military recently seized computer servers in Germany for evidence of election fraud likely pertain to an earlier raid by German authorities over a different issue". They go on, "a group calling itself Distributed Denial of Secrets [DDoS] reportedly used a German computer server to share sensitive U.S. police material. . . . Prosecutors in the Saxony region of Germany seized the DDoS server in July."

Saxony isn't Frankfurt, of course, and July isn't a week ago. Remarks by Giuliani and Powell seem to refer to seizure of a Frankfurt server not long after Nov 3, so I'm wondering if someome is trying to fuzz things over. The implication I get from Giuliani and Powell, however cryptic some of their ramarks may be, is that there's a concentrated effort in the Trump team to develop a convincing body of evidence that very large blocks of data were manipulated on a foreign server over the night of November 3-4. It sounds as though people in government have tried to thwart this effort and perhaps misrepresent it to investigative reporters. It's certainly possible that the firings of Esper and Krebs were related to this.

The public efforts at challenging election certifications in Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, while in themselves insufficient to overcome a deficit in the 400,000 range, may be separate indications of a larger strategy to demonstrate the effects of a single-point effort, possibly involving counts on a foreign server, to manipulate the overall election.

We'll have to see. But the members of the Trump legal team include highly capable former US attorneys who are, like all good attorneys, keeping very quiet.

Let's Not Forget The Bigger Battle

The outcome of the November 3 election has little direct effect on an issue that's been simmering for much of the year, the arbitrary and inconsistent COVID restrictions imposed by the states, over which (so far) the president has little direct control. At my old blog, I covered the ongoing legal campaign to limit extra-legislative actions by state, county, and municipal authorities to override First Amendment rights of speech, assembly, and free exercise of religion using the largely manufactured COVID-19 "pandemic", for instance in this post from October 19.

The status of various cases moving through federal and state courts is very mixed. The most important cases are currently an opinion by Judge William S. Stickman IV in the federal Western District of Pennsylvania courts effectively declaring the Pennsylvania COVID restrictions unconstitutional. I covered this in my old blog, for instance here. HIs order is stayed pending appeal.

Another case is a ruling by a Sutter County, CA judge invalidating many California COVID restrictions based on the idea that the governor modified state laws in several areas without going to the legislature to change them. I covered this in the old blog here. This is also in limbo.

These issues have tended to fall off the radar during the election crisis. The COVID crisis, though, emerged under President Trump, but in his capacity as president, there was little he could do about it. The Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution reserves the rights not designated to the federal government in the Constitution to the states or the people. The ability to regulate local health rules seems to be generally subject to the Tenth Amendment and is delegated to state legislatures.

Thus as understood up to now, the president has no authority to impose national lockdowns or mask mandates, nor to override them in the states. The efforts to go to the US Supreme Court are an attempt to use that court's authority to declare various arbitrary or discriminatory state measures unconstitutional.

Among the most recent cases that are making their way to the Supreme Court are lawsuits by ultra-Orthodox synagogues in New York State, as well as the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, intending to overturn COVID orders by Gov Cuomo that severely restrict attendance at "houses of worship" in order to reduce the number of COVID cases in specific areas. So far, all these cases have been rejected by lower federal courts, but in recent days, both the Roman Cathlic Diocese and the synagogues have now asked the US Supreme Court for an injunction to overturn those limits.

In the Diocese of Brooklyn case, Justice Breyer has ordered the state to file a response by Wednesday, Nov 18.

It does appear that more governors and other local authorities are recognizing that COVID measures are unpopular. Ohio Gov DeWine has announced a curfew, but not a fuil lockdown, apparently on the theory that people spread positive test results by going to bars and getting drunk. Califonria Gov Newsom has announced he's considering a similar measure, but again, not a full lockdown.

On Tuesday morning, Dr Fauci said on CNN "he 'can’t understand why there’s pushback' against the health orders. He argued the measures are important because 'they save lives.'”

Whatever. At least something's sinkng in. But this is going to be a long struggle, in the end more important than a single election.

"The Kraken Was Released Several Days Ago"???

Via Gateway Pundit, I see that Sidney Powell has tweeted, in response to someone urging her actually to release it, "The Kraken was released several days ago," with a quote from scripture. But a number of intelligent commentators have already been giving her the benefit of the doubt, expecting the real kraken would appear as she could release more evidence. Now, apparently what we see now is what we get.

I'm starting to lose confidence.

The video below from Robert Gruler, while again giving Powell the benefit of the doubt, is also increasingly skeptical:

At about 25:00, he makes an important point: a certain part of the Powell-Giuliani argument is that key Deep State actors in the FBI and CIA worked against Trump throughout his administration. The difficulty with this, according to Gruler, is that Trump was their boss. If he didn't like what they were doing, he could fire and replace any of them, as in fact he did sporadically. But the Trump team's argument is hinging more and more on the idea that, according to Powell, hundreds of thousands, even millions, of votes were stolen via a widespread conspiracy involving the voting machines.

And as Gruler and other commentators have pointed out, just recounts and audits simply won't be enough to reverse the results. You've got to establish a massive conspiracy, someting close to Jason Bourne level, involving CIA and FBI complicity.

As Gruler says, this isn't totally beyond the realm of possibility -- but there's a very short time to make this more credible than it currently is, and I'm losing confidence in Powell's ability to bring this off.

Sidney Powell Continues To Tease

As I've said, one of the best commentators on the surrent cycle is Robert Barnes. He appeared on the Viva Frei YouTube channel Sunday night to discuss developments, and they had a segment on Sidney Powell and the kraken:

Although Barnes has tweeted that he's now on Trump's electoral team, the indication he gives is that he's working in Georgia and hasn't spoken with Powell, and he doesn't know what the kraken specifically is. He and David, the Viva Frei host, agree that Powell is a prominent and reputable attorney who appears confident in the knowledge of circumstances she hasn't yet explanied very fully, but they also agree that time is running out.

In two appearences yesterday, Powell left me concerned that whatever legal atrategy she's following, it doesn't appear to be fully coherent. She went on Lou Dobbs to discuss an affadavit from a founder of Smartmatic that outlined a system capability of recording votes by individual voters, but changing them without an audit trail:

She went on Mark Levin to say essentially the same thing. One thing that concerns me is that she's veered away from Dominion to go into Smartmatic without explaining why she's doing this, or even if she fully understands that these are two different, and competing, products. Clearly both Dominion and Smartmatic are in crisis mode due to their portrayal in the current controversies. Smartmatic issued the following statement on its website:

• Smartmatic has never owned any shares or had any financial stake in Dominion Voting Systems. Smartmatic has never provided Dominion Voting Systems with any software, hardware or other technology. The two companies are competitors in the marketplace.
• Smartmatic does not have any ties to any governments or political parties in any country. It has never been owned, funded or backed by any government.

As David of Viva Frei has pointed out, affadavits themselves don't do much, and they can simply be contradicted by affadavits from the other side. If Powell has an affadavit from someone saying this is what Hugo Chavez wanted the product to do, that's interesting. But the question still remains of whether the product actually does that, separate from any capability of the Dominion system, and whether this function, assuming it exists, was actually employed in specific circumstances that can be proven in the US on the night of November 3-4.

This isn't a kraken, at least not yet. Since Powell is a competent attorney, she must certainly understand this. And time is running out.

Smartmatic's statement can certainly have been weasel-worded. It doesn't deny, for instance, that it has the capability to switch a voter's vote without keeping a record. And if this capability is in the system, we must assume there's at least the possibility that any totals collected by a Smartmatic system can be invalidated. This would probably be the end of both Smartmatic and Dominion as brands, so it's reasonable to see that they'd both be in crisis management mode.

(At minimum, large numbers of Dominion employees have deleted their Linkedin profiles since November 4, which should give an indication of current circumstances' impact on both companies, whether or not it's deserved. These companies may becme the next Enrons if things keep on this way, regarless of the election's outcome.)

However, Powell and the Trump election team need more than what's been disclosed, whatever happens to Dominion and Smartmatic. They implicitly recognize that to overturn the election, they will need to invalidate hundreds of thousands of votes. The only serious way to do this will be effectively to throw out large numbers of votes collected in both Dominion and Smartmatic machines.

At about 14:50 in the YouTube at the top of this post, Barnes says that unlike historical recounts, where about 1/100th of 1% of votes are changed, in 2020 Michigan recounts, 5-6% have been changed. This is better than a few hanging chads, but it's probably not enough by itself to change the overall result.