Post by the Scribe on May 28, 2021 19:27:47 GMT
CNN finally catches up with the Senator behind the Arizona "#Fraudit"
Frank Vyan Walton
Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)
Thursday May 27, 2021 · 9:05 AM PDT
CNN's Kyung Lah catches up with AZ State Senate Leader Karen Fann and asks her questions about why she supported and implemented a private third audit of the Maricopa County ballots from 2020.
if somebody says the moon is made of green cheese, you really don’t have to create a space program just to verify whether it's bree or gouda. If somebody suggests that somebody sent 40,000 ballots from “South Asia” that somehow managed to match on signatures, ID and SSN# you really don’t have to test every ballot for the presence of bamboo. If there were secret “watermarks” on all the legitimate ballots you don’t need to expose them all to UV light, you could ask your own Secretary of State if that’s true.
And yet, somehow, each and every crazed suggestion is being given rational consideration by this Arizona “Audit.” Sadly, Senator Fann seems to think that she going to successfully “resolve” these issues for those who believe nutbag conspiracies. But here’s the thing, people who’ve lost their faith in the system and their ability to perform critical analysis — will never be convinced that their darkest, dankest fever dream isn’t reality.
Eventually, Fann tries to turn the tables on Lah by asking this crazed hypothetical question..
Just for the record, some voters who were accused of being dead were still alive. One man who voted for his dead mother, voted for Trump and was caught. Another man murdered his wife, then voted for her… again for Trump. Generally speaking, the existinutg system of signature, ID and SSN# checks tends to catch these people already. The previous two audits of Maricopa county ballots would have already caught this.
The FBI, DOJ, Homeland Security and every Federal Agency — under Trump — confirmed that there was not enough fraud to have changed to the outcome of this election.
I’ve heard arguments that the DOJ can’t be trusted because Bill Barr “has links to Dominion” as if this guy who was perpetually in the tank for Trump so badly he would lie to a Federal Judge would turn around and give all that up for a Dominion paycheck. According to Snopes Bill Barr is not connected to Dominion Voting Systems, he uesd to be on the board of Dominion Energy before he resigned as he became AG. Dominion Energy is a completely different company from Dominion Voting Systems — there is no link between them.
So Bill Barr didn’t proclaim that the election was secure merely to please his Dominion overlords.
The burden here is entirely reversed, it's not CNN’s job to prove every single vote was secure — the burden should be on this Senator and her allies to prove that there was anywhere near enough fraud with bogus ballots to show that the election results may have been changed. You don’t have to prove that there weren't any invalid ballots at all, someone needs to show that there were anywhere near enough to make a difference, and it looks like this audit can not prove this unless it's results are falsified.
Later in the interview, Fann tries to proclaim that the audit is “entirely transparent.”
Honestly, everyone says that OAN isn’t credible. In fact, OAN is mostly known as a primary outlet for Paid Russian Propaganda.
OAN argued that their reporter was only a “freelancer” for Sputnik and not actually a paid reporter. So I guess they are “Unpaid Russia Propaganda.”
Rouz has definitely provided “disinformation and unverified information.”
So, yeah, not credible.
This is a difference between fact and fantasy. There are some legitimate election concerns that should be considered, but widespread strategic election fraud isn’t one of them. Fann seems to believe that her little phony audit will alleviate the fears of the unreasonable.
That is unlikely.
The Kraken, once fed with tiny morsels of legitimacy, will never be satisfied.
Frank Vyan Walton
Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)
Thursday May 27, 2021 · 9:05 AM PDT
CNN's Kyung Lah catches up with AZ State Senate Leader Karen Fann and asks her questions about why she supported and implemented a private third audit of the Maricopa County ballots from 2020.
Fann: I don’t know what’s legit, what isn’t legit, but why wouldn’t we want to answer those questions?
Lah: You’re questioning Democracy.
Fann: No. I’m questioning the integrity of the election system.
Lah: Which is th backbone of Democracy.
Fann: Which is right. Which means we should have full 100% confidence in our democracy and our election system.
Lah: You’re talking about trying to disprove conspiracies.
Fann: If I had to, yes, why wouldn’t we? If somebody say something is out there, I would love to be able to say “That’s not true guys.”
Lah: Aren’t you raising more questions by giving rise to these conpiracy theories?
Fann: No. I’m answering questions.
Lah: You’re questioning Democracy.
Fann: No. I’m questioning the integrity of the election system.
Lah: Which is th backbone of Democracy.
Fann: Which is right. Which means we should have full 100% confidence in our democracy and our election system.
Lah: You’re talking about trying to disprove conspiracies.
Fann: If I had to, yes, why wouldn’t we? If somebody say something is out there, I would love to be able to say “That’s not true guys.”
Lah: Aren’t you raising more questions by giving rise to these conpiracy theories?
Fann: No. I’m answering questions.
if somebody says the moon is made of green cheese, you really don’t have to create a space program just to verify whether it's bree or gouda. If somebody suggests that somebody sent 40,000 ballots from “South Asia” that somehow managed to match on signatures, ID and SSN# you really don’t have to test every ballot for the presence of bamboo. If there were secret “watermarks” on all the legitimate ballots you don’t need to expose them all to UV light, you could ask your own Secretary of State if that’s true.
And yet, somehow, each and every crazed suggestion is being given rational consideration by this Arizona “Audit.” Sadly, Senator Fann seems to think that she going to successfully “resolve” these issues for those who believe nutbag conspiracies. But here’s the thing, people who’ve lost their faith in the system and their ability to perform critical analysis — will never be convinced that their darkest, dankest fever dream isn’t reality.
Eventually, Fann tries to turn the tables on Lah by asking this crazed hypothetical question..
Fann: So let me ask you a question. Are you 100% confident that every vote that came in, in Arizona or any other state, can you say emphatically 100%, that no dead people voted, that ballots weren’t filled out by other people, that the chain of custody from the minute people voted, that the chain of custody the entire time, can you tell me that?
Just for the record, some voters who were accused of being dead were still alive. One man who voted for his dead mother, voted for Trump and was caught. Another man murdered his wife, then voted for her… again for Trump. Generally speaking, the existinutg system of signature, ID and SSN# checks tends to catch these people already. The previous two audits of Maricopa county ballots would have already caught this.
Lah: I can say that what the data shows us…
Fann: No, no, no.
Lah:.. there was no widespread fraud.
Fann: I didn’t say there was fraud.
Lah: But you just said chain of custody…dead people.. these things are all fraud.
Fann: Right. [...] Well, I asked you a question Can you tell me that, in all the states, no ballots from people that are already deceased were not filled out and sent in?
Lah: I can tell you that what the data has shown is, overwhelmingly, this was the most secure election in American history.
Fann: So, you can’t answer that question either.
Fann: No, no, no.
Lah:.. there was no widespread fraud.
Fann: I didn’t say there was fraud.
Lah: But you just said chain of custody…dead people.. these things are all fraud.
Fann: Right. [...] Well, I asked you a question Can you tell me that, in all the states, no ballots from people that are already deceased were not filled out and sent in?
Lah: I can tell you that what the data has shown is, overwhelmingly, this was the most secure election in American history.
Fann: So, you can’t answer that question either.
The FBI, DOJ, Homeland Security and every Federal Agency — under Trump — confirmed that there was not enough fraud to have changed to the outcome of this election.
I’ve heard arguments that the DOJ can’t be trusted because Bill Barr “has links to Dominion” as if this guy who was perpetually in the tank for Trump so badly he would lie to a Federal Judge would turn around and give all that up for a Dominion paycheck. According to Snopes Bill Barr is not connected to Dominion Voting Systems, he uesd to be on the board of Dominion Energy before he resigned as he became AG. Dominion Energy is a completely different company from Dominion Voting Systems — there is no link between them.
The allegation is that Barr was appointed to serve on, and currently is a member of, the board of directors for Dominion. This is flawed for several reasons, but a fairly central problem is that a news release that accompanied the above tweet refers to the Virginia-based Energy behemoth Dominion Energy Services, Inc., which has nothing whatsoever to do with the company Dominion Voting Services.
It is true that Barr was elected to serve on the board of directors of Dominion Energy. This occurred over a decade ago, in December 2009. In February 2019, when Barr was confirmed as Trump’s attorney general, he resigned that position, as noted in a company news release:
It is true that Barr was elected to serve on the board of directors of Dominion Energy. This occurred over a decade ago, in December 2009. In February 2019, when Barr was confirmed as Trump’s attorney general, he resigned that position, as noted in a company news release:
So Bill Barr didn’t proclaim that the election was secure merely to please his Dominion overlords.
The burden here is entirely reversed, it's not CNN’s job to prove every single vote was secure — the burden should be on this Senator and her allies to prove that there was anywhere near enough fraud with bogus ballots to show that the election results may have been changed. You don’t have to prove that there weren't any invalid ballots at all, someone needs to show that there were anywhere near enough to make a difference, and it looks like this audit can not prove this unless it's results are falsified.
Later in the interview, Fann tries to proclaim that the audit is “entirely transparent.”
Fann: It’s being livestreamed. .
Lah: By OAN. With Cameras controlled by OAN.
Fann: Are you saying OAN is not a credible news source?!
Lah: Yes.
Fann: Oh, I’ll remember that CNN says that OAN isn’t credible.
Lah: By OAN. With Cameras controlled by OAN.
Fann: Are you saying OAN is not a credible news source?!
Lah: Yes.
Fann: Oh, I’ll remember that CNN says that OAN isn’t credible.
Honestly, everyone says that OAN isn’t credible. In fact, OAN is mostly known as a primary outlet for Paid Russian Propaganda.
Conservative television network One America News is suing Rachel Maddow for more than $10 million for saying it “really literally is paid Russian propaganda.”
[...]
A week after Herring sent an email to a Comcast executive, Maddow opened her MSNBC show by referring to a report in the Daily Beast that said an OAN employee also worked for Sputnik News, which is linked to the Russian government.
“In this case, the most obsequiously pro-Trump right-wing news outlet in America really literally is paid Russian propaganda,” Maddow said on “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
“Their on-air U.S. politics reporter is paid by the Russian government to produce propaganda for that government,” Maddow said.
[...]
A week after Herring sent an email to a Comcast executive, Maddow opened her MSNBC show by referring to a report in the Daily Beast that said an OAN employee also worked for Sputnik News, which is linked to the Russian government.
“In this case, the most obsequiously pro-Trump right-wing news outlet in America really literally is paid Russian propaganda,” Maddow said on “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
“Their on-air U.S. politics reporter is paid by the Russian government to produce propaganda for that government,” Maddow said.
OAN argued that their reporter was only a “freelancer” for Sputnik and not actually a paid reporter. So I guess they are “Unpaid Russia Propaganda.”
The lawsuit includes a statement from Rouz that said he wrote about 1,300 articles over the past four and a half years for Sputnik but “I have never written propaganda, disinformation, or unverified information.”
Rouz has definitely provided “disinformation and unverified information.”
Rouz went viral last month in the midst of the coronavirus crisis after Media Matters’ Matt Gertz happened to see a segment he created claiming “mounting evidence of a globalist conspiracy” by the Clintons, Soros, Bill Gates, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and the Chinese government, citing a comically high amount of unnamed “reports.” (To be 100 percent clear, no reports indicate this.)
In 2017, also on an entirely false OAN segment, Rouz made up a claim about how Clinton was secretly funding antifa through her political action committee. In another, he repeated the debunked claim that Soros collaborated with Nazis during World War II, when he would have been in his early teens. He also claimed on-air that Soros was funding the Central American migrant caravan that captured the attention of conspiracy theorists in the fall of 2018.
[...]
Despite its small viewership, Trump has helped OAN gain outsize reach and reputation by endorsing its outrageous reporting and by his multiple assertions that he might prefer the network to Fox News. The channel’s willingness to do stories without a factual basis seems to know no bounds, as long as they make the left look bad and the right, particularly Trumpism, look great. The channel amplifies hoaxes that, before, were usually sitting on the margins of the internet. For example, theories about the global ambitions of liberal megadonor George Soros, Bill Gates, and other wealthy people that the channel has run haven’t appeared anywhere else but on message boards and fringe-right Twitter and Instagram accounts. It’s unclear if the channel has a fact-checking process. If it does, it appears to have no problem citing such sources.
In 2017, also on an entirely false OAN segment, Rouz made up a claim about how Clinton was secretly funding antifa through her political action committee. In another, he repeated the debunked claim that Soros collaborated with Nazis during World War II, when he would have been in his early teens. He also claimed on-air that Soros was funding the Central American migrant caravan that captured the attention of conspiracy theorists in the fall of 2018.
[...]
Despite its small viewership, Trump has helped OAN gain outsize reach and reputation by endorsing its outrageous reporting and by his multiple assertions that he might prefer the network to Fox News. The channel’s willingness to do stories without a factual basis seems to know no bounds, as long as they make the left look bad and the right, particularly Trumpism, look great. The channel amplifies hoaxes that, before, were usually sitting on the margins of the internet. For example, theories about the global ambitions of liberal megadonor George Soros, Bill Gates, and other wealthy people that the channel has run haven’t appeared anywhere else but on message boards and fringe-right Twitter and Instagram accounts. It’s unclear if the channel has a fact-checking process. If it does, it appears to have no problem citing such sources.
So, yeah, not credible.
This is a difference between fact and fantasy. There are some legitimate election concerns that should be considered, but widespread strategic election fraud isn’t one of them. Fann seems to believe that her little phony audit will alleviate the fears of the unreasonable.
That is unlikely.
The Kraken, once fed with tiny morsels of legitimacy, will never be satisfied.