With all the fake news about “fake news”, what about dealing with some real news. Why is this just a sidelight, hardly discussed anywhere in the media.

MORE ELECTOR THREATS: ‘PUT BULLET IN MOUTH’…
LONG-SHOT BID TO BLOCK MONDAY…
Angry Celebs Call For Coup…
Two war rooms, plus ‘weaponization’ against Trump…

We are down to an almost zero chance that the Electoral College will overturn the vote, but we are not down to zero attempts to influence the outcome, in no small part because of how well the election result has been received. This, too, is from Drudge.

AMERICA GREAT AGAIN: Dollar Climbs to Strongest Since 2003…
Homebuilder sentiment spikes 7 points, Trump has them feeling fantastic!
WIRE: Measures of Economic Optimism Shooting Up All Over…

This is partly why it won’t happen, but also a large part of the desperation on the left. Trump might really make America great again. This sideshow is not just repulsive but fantastically dangerous for civic peace. The first of the articles listed by Drudge is actually titled, Electors are being harassed, threatened in bid to stop Trump, which begins:

Electors around the country are being harassed with a barrage of emails, phone calls and letters — and even death threats — in an effort to block Donald Trump from being voted in as president by the Electoral College on Monday.

The bullying is overwhelming Sharon Geise’s tech devices, but not her resolve to support Trump.

The Mesa, Arizona, grandmother woke up Wednesday morning to more than 1,500 emails demanding she not carry out her legal duty to vote for the president-elect.

“They just keep coming and coming,” Geise told The Post, estimating she’s received more than 50,000 emails since the election. “They’re overpowering my iPad.”

Her answer: mass delete.

Despite the avalanche, she said, her decision to back Trump is stronger than ever.

Well, there are crazies everywhere, and you have to expect that in a country of 300 million adults, 50,000 is not necessarily a lot. But there is this to make you wonder:

The effort to deny the electoral vote to Trump was launched shortly after the Nov. 8 election.

The Clinton campaign came out in support of the effort Monday, backing an open letter from 10 Democratic electors to National Intelligence Director James Clapper calling for an intelligence briefing on what role Russian hackers may have played in the election.

To have given any air at all to this effort is for the Democrat candidate for president to be found among the crazies of the farthest left. To genuinely hope to succeed is to tempt a similar effect on the future of the American Republic as the assassination of Julius Caesar had on the Roman Republic in 44 BC.

This is Conrad Black, in the #NeverTrump National Review of all places, discussing the Lights Out for the Old Order. What he describes is what most of us hope will be a reality we can look back on in four years’ time. It was a close run thing but all such changes are like that in the first instance. Once Trump is president and the game plan unfolds, there will be massive shift in sentiment. This is a revolution that will become irresistible since it will be nothing other than governance in keeping with the sentiment and wishes of the governed.

In place of the scrimping Mother Hubbard Pentagon of Robert Gates, Leon Panetta, Chuck Hagel, and Ashton Carter, we will have combat military officers rebuilding a military capability adequate to all reasonable needs, accompanied by a prudent foreign policy that rejects George W. Bush’s hip-shooting nation-building and Barack Obama’s phantasmagorical conjuration of a friendly Iran and Hamas — a vastly increased strategic capacity to achieve much more realistic objectives.

This is a revolution: There has not been such a transition since Roosevelt in 1932. Each major domestic-policy department of government is being entrusted to people dedicated to radical change, to the uprooting of a whole generation of error. Education will go to a great champion of chartered schools (Betsy DeVos), in the hope of wrenching the country’s failed public-education system from the palsied hands of the Democratic party’s decayed allies in the teachers’ unions.

Labor itself will be in the hands of someone (Andrew Puzder) who supports the workers by guaranteeing their rights and liberating them from the corrupt enemies of workplace efficiency and cooperation in organized labor – a barely living group reduced now to the infestation of public-sector unions (only 6.7 percent of the country’s shrinking work force is now unionized).

The Environmental Protection Agency will be in the hands of someone (Scott Pruitt) who does not believe the unsubstantiated ecoterrorism about global warming and will protect the environment without throwing millions of people in carbon-related energy into unemployment in the fatuous professed expectation that they will be reemployed building windmills and solar panels.

Health care will be in the hands of the greatest expert in the Congress (Tom Price) on how to introduce a dual-payer (where affordable to the insured family) universal-health-care system that does not lie to the taxpayer, separate the patients from their doctors, or preserve statewide insurance fiefdoms.

Taxation, campaign-finance reform, and the budget will be in the hands of people (Steven Mnuchin at Treasury) who will raise revenue from elective transactions and reduce taxes for small personal and business income earners.

In the meantime, in the words of our most recent Nobel Prize winner for literature, get out of the way if you can’t lend a hand. The notion on the left that a re-run of the election would see Hillary win is so ludicrous that it is almost impossible to imagine how people can say they have an interest in politics and get things so completely wrong.

The left in general, but the American Democrats in particular, are doing about as good a job at discrediting their brand as I could hope. This Russian hacking business is an example of such insanity that you really do have to wonder why they have any credibility at all. The point is not that the Russians hacked into the voting machines and manipulated the results. Voting machines are stand-alone and cannot be influenced from the outside (we can talk about their programming some other time). The way in which the election was supposedly affected by the Russians is that they fed all of the WikiLeaks material from the Democrat National Committee to Julian Assange who then made this material public. And the outrage is that the Russians supposedly also had similar material from the Republican National Committee which they did not leak. Therefore, according to some unknown and unnamed source inside the CIA, the Russians are the reason for Donald Trump having won. So if I say to you that anyone who believes this sort of thing is crazy, you will see what I mean. Here, for example, is Paul Krugman in an article titled, The tainted election: How Donald Trump won is horrifying.

The CIA, according to The Washington Post, has now determined that hackers working for the Russian government worked to tilt the 2016 election to Donald Trump. This has actually been obvious for months, but the agency was reluctant to state that conclusion before the election out of fear that it would be seen as taking a political role.

Meanwhile, the FBI went public 10 days before the election, dominating headlines and TV coverage across the country with a letter strongly implying that it might be about to find damning new evidence against Hillary Clinton — when it turned out, literally, to have found nothing at all.

Did the combination of Russian and FBI intervention swing the election? Yes. Clinton lost three states – Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania – by less than a percentage point, and Florida by only slightly more. If she had won any three of those states, she would be president-elect. Is there any reasonable doubt that Putin/Comey made the difference?

You really have to read it all to see just how demented the argument is. That Hillary was everything you would not want to see become president, that she would have continued Obama policies as far into the future as she could, that there is a renewed optimism in the US following Trump’s win is perfectly clear, only emphasises how bizarre all of this is. The aim is somehow to discredit the election result, to perhaps influence enough “electors” to abandon Trump at the electoral college, and even, as some have asked, to run the election again. Here is Krugman again, spelling out the strategy:

We ought to be able to look both forward and back, to criticise both the way Trump gained power and the way he uses it. Personally, I’m still figuring out how to keep my anger simmering – letting it boil over won’t do any good, but it shouldn’t be allowed to cool. This election was an outrage, and we should never forget it.

There is no doubting it. These people are not just bad losers. They are totalitarians at heart who support the democratic processes only up to the point it actually delivers them the results they want. They are a danger to us all, and to themselves. The only reason the US does not turn into Venezuela is that they represent only about 47% of the voting population. They are saved from financial oblivion by the Republicans whom they hate. Here’s Newt Gingrich.

All the panic on the left about Russia is a ruse. The same media which was freaking out about ‘fake news’ last week is now engaging in just that. They’re promoting the idea that Russia influenced the election to create doubt about Trump’s victory and de-legitimize him. It’s a completely dishonest political move.

It’s a try-on by the left and their allies in the media. This one didn’t quite get the traction, but you may be sure they will be back with something else as soon as they can find something else to beat up. Meanwhile, this is a drumbeat that will continue for the next four years, and hopefully for the next eight.

In fact, according to the latest forms of Democrat hysteria, they have already been. I’m not even sure I know what the Russians have been accused of doing. Here’s a version of the story that mirrors my own scepticism: Trump on Russia meddling in US election: ‘I don’t believe it’.

US intelligence has previously linked Russia to leaks of damaging email from Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign but saw it as a broad bid to undermine confidence in the US political process.

On Friday, however, the Washington Post reported that the CIA has since concluded that the aim of the cyber intrusions was to help Trump win the election.

The New York Times quoted a senior administration officials as saying there was “high confidence” that the Russians hacked both the Democratic and Republican National Committees, but leaked only documents damaging to Clinton through WikiLeaks.

There is no doubting that WikiLeaks made a difference, and it would be interesting if it turned out that the Russians thought of Hillary as the less reliable partner. There is, of course, Obama with his ‘the 1980s Are Calling, They Want Their Foreign Policy Back’ which he said after Romney had stated that Russia was the largest geopolitical threat during the debates in 2012. But more amusing was when Donald Trump Called on Russia to Find Hillary Clinton’s Missing Emails. This is from The NYT on July 27.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Mr. Trump said during a news conference here in an apparent reference to Mrs. Clinton’s deleted emails. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Since they have no sense of humour on the left, and specially no appreciation of irony, I will point out that it was meant as a joke. As the story concludes:

Mr. Trump’s apparent willingness to avoid condemning Mr. Putin’s government is a remarkable departure from United States policy and Republican Party orthodoxy, and has fueled the questions about Russian meddling in the campaign. Mr. Trump has denied that, saying at the news conference that he has never met Mr. Putin, and has no investments in Russia.

“I would treat Vladimir Putin firmly, but there’s nothing I can think of that I’d rather do than have Russia friendly as opposed to the way they are right now,” he said, “so that we can go and knock out ISIS together.”

I would like to have Russia friendly as well. We are no longer in the middle of the cold war, and there is this business about ISIS.

I am reprinting this article from February 2013 since the opposition to Romney as Secretary of State is quite absurd. He would have been a great president and saved us and much of the world a great deal of anguish that four extra years of Obama have caused. It is another example of Donald Trump’s good judgement that he has still not ruled Romney out. My overlap with Trump, interestingly, was 94%. And as you can see, I even noted Romney’s good sense on foreign policy. This is what I wrote then.
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As the survey result showed, I had a 91% overlap with the political views of Mitt Romney, and truth to tell, I have still not recovered from the American election and the disappearance of Romney from the public stage. As discussed in my Quadrant article on Lessons for the Australian election, he would have been the perfect president for our times.

Romney was far and away the best candidate available to the Republicans. In an environment of the politics of personal destruction, there was virtually no element of his life history that could be used against him. He was conservative to an exceptional degree. He was personally warm and humane. He had a professional background that made him almost ideal in trying to find a way through the fiscal mess previous administrations had created. He would have rid the USA of Obama’s impending health care disaster while being able to work with the states to make a system of health care universally available. And on foreign policy he would have supported our Western way of life against a rising tide of totalitarian regimes of various denominations. In each of these aspects he presented a fundamental difference from Obama.

Whether the pieces can be put together again after this loss is something I very much doubt but time does heal at least some of the wounds some of the time. But a tragic outcome all the same.