Is 'wokeness' responsible for US and European heat waves? Absolutely.

 With record temperatures steam-pressing the United States and much of Europe, Africa and Asia, many in my Science-Is-A-Hoax Facebook group have posed a sensible question: Is "wokeness" to blame for these heat waves?

As a white man with access to the internet and an unwillingness to care about anyone besides myself, I can tell you the answer is, indisputably, yes. Liberal wokeness is causing temperatures to rise and forcing me to leave my Hummer idling in the driveway with the AC on and the doors open in an attempt to cool the air around my house.

President Joe Biden and his windmill-hugging liberal minions will tell you the soaring temperatures have something to do with “climate change” or “global warming” or “humanity’s unwillingness to stop destroying the planet, thereby guaranteeing its own extinction.”  Well, if you believe that, I have a coastal bridge to sell you! (FULL DISCLOSURE: Bridge is currently underwater and will require minor heightening and repairs.)

On Tuesday, the National Weather Service, which notoriously attempts to influence conservatives with left-wing concepts like “facts” and “data,” forecast “dangerous heat” across the country, ranging from the high 90s to triple digits. 

In a heat advisory, the Weather Service wrote: “Take extra precautions if you work or spend time outside. When possible reschedule strenuous activities to early morning or evening. Know the signs and symptoms of heat exhaustion and heat stroke.”

You don’t get to tell me what to do, you Marxist meteorologists. I’m an American, and if I want to go out in the backyard and dump used motor oil in the pond while breathing in the welcoming smoke of my neighbor’s tire fire, I will do so without knowing the signs and symptoms of heat exhaustion, thank you very much. Commies.

Now back to why wokeness is to blame for the heat, and for everything I don’t want to be forced to care about.  Wokeness is an effort to get a person like me to treat people who aren’t exactly like me with some level of basic human decency, usually through onerous requests like respecting their identity or faith, not making offensive jokes at their expense or having to make almost immeasurably small adjustments to the way I speak or live my life.

It could involve a person saying, "I use he/him pronouns and would appreciate you using them when you refer to me," and me saying, "That would require me to be considerate, and I can't do that because my brain is busy figuring out new ways to 'own the libs' on Twitter."

Or it could involve a teacher giving my child the historical context of racism in America so he can grow up with a full understanding of our nation's complicated past, when I would prefer that teacher stick to the teachings of Sean Hannity, who once said: "The U.S. is the greatest, best country God has ever given man on the face of the earth.“

When confronted with wokeness, I have two options: Listen, understand and do my best to make another person’s life better (HAH!); or get extremely angry and vent about it online.

Obviously, I always choose the second option, which is bad for global temperatures because getting angry online causes my brain to start functioning, and the friction involved in firing dormant synapses generates SERIOUS heat.

Now imagine how many of me there are in this country and around the world and how much heat our brains are cranking out when we get angered by woke-ism. Is that enough to explain why the United Kingdom shattered its previous high-temperature records on Tuesday, with one village in eastern England hitting 104.5 degrees Fahrenheit?

No, not quite. The other woke-induced issue contributing to these heat waves is the voluminous hot air released by Republican politicians and right-wing pundits when they are angry about wokeness, which is all the time.

Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin recently released a weather-changing blast of hot air when he blamed school shootings like the one in Uvalde, Texas, on wokeness: “We stopped teaching values in so many of our schools. Now we’re teaching wokeness, we’re indoctrinating our children with things like CRT, telling some children they’re not equal to others, and they’re the cause of other people’s problems.”

Nikki Haley, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and possible GOP presidential candidate, spiked the room temperature in Fox News’ studio Tuesday, saying America needs to "get rid of all this woke stuff” and start fighting for “normal people.” 

Do you see the harm you’re doing to the environment, you woke warriors? You’re causing people like Haley to warm the earth’s atmosphere with fired-up comments suggesting you’re not normal. Should she have kept that thought to herself and never admitted she had it to anyone, anywhere, ever? Yes. But you folks in the “let’s all take the infinitesimally small measures necessary so everyone can be their true selves” crowd forced Haley to say it out loud in a billowing puff of hot air and now WE HAVE FLIGHTS GETTING CANCELED BECAUSE AIRPORT RUNWAYS ARE MELTING!!

Shame on all of you for trying to force us normals to think about someone other than ourselves. You woke-ists have nobody but yourselves to blame for these heat waves.  Either that or I typed this column outdoors by the tire fire without knowing the signs and symptoms of heat exhaustion.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/is-wokeness-responsible-for-us-and-european-heat-waves-absolutely/ar-AAZMHNs?ocid=entnewsntp&cvid=c99e491693c84d17b89a2463959b05a6 

School Shootings: One Of My Students Asked If I’d Stand Between Them And A Gunman. Here’s What I Said.

 (By Amanda Mayes, Huff Post, 30 May 2022)

 “Ms. Mayes? If a gunman came in here, would you protect us? Would you stand between us and the gunman?”  It was about two months into my third long-term substitute teaching position at my high school alma mater. I returned when my high school mentor was diagnosed with cancer. When he came back in remission, I stayed to continue to build and shape the community that had given me a sense of self in my formative years.

This group of students was still new to me, but I adored them. Sure, they had their moments when they would rather be sucked into a phone screen than discuss the ramifications of gerrymandering, the intricacies of supply and demand, or the Gilded Age.

But teenagers deserve more credit than we ever give them.

They are kind, intelligent, insightful and bold. I was supposed to be their teacher, but I learned so much about myself and the world from them. When they are of age to vote, they will ignite this world with compassion. We do not deserve them, especially when we continuously fail to protect them.

That day, I was running my first active shooter drill.

When I sat in these same desks and walked down these same halls six years earlier, the only scenarios we rehearsed were for tornadoes, fires, and asking a special someone to prom.

But this is the new normal. My students were restless. It was a planned drill ― not always a given, as some drills are enacted without warning. But the notice did little to calm nerves and suppress the reality that we must rehearse for the possibility of our own deaths.

I reviewed my lesson plan, glared at the finicky overhead projector, took a sip of coffee, and waited. No one knew when the principal’s voice would come over the intercom, triggering the drill.

The drill came and went, and melted into the new normalcy of a modern school day, with full knowledge that our paper-thin classroom walls were no match for automatic weapons fire.

But this is not normal. This should not be normal.

We ask our teachers to do so much — to be educators, caregivers, counselors, nurses, peacekeepers, custodians, disciplinarians. And now we ask them to be human shields.

When I stumbled into teaching, it had not crossed my mind that I would have to grapple with my own mortality and weigh the worth of my life against those of my students, despite growing up in this era. I was in third grade when Columbine stunned the world of education. I was in 11th grade when the Virginia Tech shooting happened.

“Yes. Yes, of course I would,” I told the teenager who had asked if I would protect my students.

I made the decision to sacrifice myself to save my students should an active shooter enter my classroom. Part of teaching is believing in the future and believing in a better future. My students must survive to make that future a possibility.

But it is not a decision I should have to make.

With each new mass shooting, the arguments against common-sense gun restrictions appear like clockwork:

“If we armed the teachers, this wouldn’t happen.”

I am an educator. A mentor. A helper. A guide. A light. I will not be relegated to a role of perpetuating this American culture of violence. I will not be complicit in the weaponization of myself and my fellow teachers.

“This is the price we pay for our Second Amendment freedoms.”

Why have many in this country decided that owning weapons outweighs the safety and lives of our children and teachers? How many dead students and dead teachers is your “freedom” worth to you? How high are you willing to set the price to defend an amendment that has been outpaced by technology? How is worrying about being shot at school or a movie theater or a grocery store freedom? Your paranoia and misguided belief that “courage is a man with a gun in his hand” has corrupted the original intent of an antiquated amendment.

We accept reasonable limitations to our other rights. Why is this such a struggle with the right to bear arms?

“Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.”

It is beyond time to limit access to tools used to kill more efficiently. Why are you so terrified of your neighbor that you need an assault rifle? Or feel the need to conceal and carry when you do your weekly grocery shopping? This is a reflection of you — of your need for false power, of your suspicions, of your cowardice — not a reflection of the society you purportedly fear. An AR-15 or other military-grade weapon serves no purpose other than that of destruction.

“This is an act of a mentally ill person.”

Stop equating mental illness as a requisite for murder. Start supporting mental health care. Start normalizing discussion about mental health. Start considering the mental health of those affected by gun violence.

“Now is not the time for politics. Now is the time to send thoughts and prayers.”

Thoughts and prayers comfort those left behind. They also assuage the consciences of those who plan to do nothing, who will continue to support the status quo because it is comfortable, familiar, and politically expedient.

These days I occasionally teach political science as an adjunct at a college. Every classroom I enter triggers the same process: Check the door. Take note of how it locks. Plan how to cover the windows. Find potential barricades. Make a plan. Rehearse.

This process is more difficult at a college because the classroom is not mine. It is used by several faculty members throughout the day. Desks arrangements may be reconfigured. The blinds may be opened or closed. Keys may be misplaced. A first aid kit may have vanished to another room.

Each time the classroom could be different, which necessitates quickly generating a new plan. I have lost sleep running different scenarios in my mind to be prepared for the next day.

Creating a plan in case of an active shooter is second nature now. It is part of the process. Along with preparing my lecture notes and stashing my best dry erase markers, I think of ways to save the lives of my students.

This should not be normal.

Instead of asking teachers to take on the impossible, to accept the reality that they could die doing their job, ask yourself: Who would have to be gunned down in your life for you to act?

Yes. I will sacrifice my life for the lives of my students. But do not let this become my reality the next time I teach.  Do not let my life and the lives of my students fade into statistics.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/teachers-school-shootings-uvalde-texas_n_6293d1c7e4b05cfc269bee94?ncid=APPLENEWS00001

School Shootings: The GOP’s Only Answer To School Shootings Didn’t Help In Uvalde, Texas

(By Alex Yablon, Slate, 25 May 2022)

 In the recent annals of American political rhetoric, there have been few more consequential statements of ideology than NRA chief Wayne LaPierre’s post–Sandy Hook truism that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”  The line has gone from crisis PR spin to Republican Party dogma. But while the “good guy with a gun” mantra has the ring of tough guy common sense, the empirical evidence suggests armed cops and civilians do less than nothing to deter mass shooters.

Look no further than Texas Republicans’ responses to this week’s mass shooting in the small town of Uvalde, the deadliest at an elementary school since Sandy Hook. Speaking to Newsmax, Attorney General Ken Paxton, the top law enforcement and public safety officer in the state, said: “We can’t stop bad people from doing bad things. … We can potentially arm and prepare and train teachers and other administrators to respond quickly. That, in my opinion, is the best answer.”

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Of course, this is Texas. It’s not like potential good guys with guns were thin on the ground in Uvalde. Law enforcement actually engaged the shooter before he got into the elementary school. Indeed, as the Austin American-Statesman reported, it was actually a school guard—a good guy with a gun—who confronted and failed to prevent the shooter’s entry. For years, though, Texas has encouraged teachers to pack heat. In the wake of a 2018 shooting at a high school in Santa Fe, Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott signed legislation that encouraged schools to do exactly what Ken Paxton now demands. It mattered little back then that Abbott was responding to killings at a school that already had two armed guards and a plan to put guns in the hands of teachers.

As Republicans like Abbott and Paxton double down on the same pro-gun proliferation response to every mass shooting, evidence accumulates that weapons are rarely effective means of deterring or stopping mass shootings.  Last year, a group of public health scholars published a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association examining 133 school shootings from 1980 to 2019. An armed guard was present in about a quarter of the incidents in the study. Those schools actually suffered death rates nearly three times higher than schools without armed guards. Similarly, a 2020 review of gun policy research by the RAND Corporation think tank found no evidence that the presence of more guns had any effect on gun violence. Criminologists at Texas State University found that unarmed staff or the shooters themselves are far more likely to bring a school shooting to an end than someone with a gun returning fire.

So-called good guys with guns fail to effectively deter or end mass shootings for a variety of tactical and psychological reasons.  For one thing, it’s actually very hard to shoot straight in a situation like a mass shooting. RAND analysts have found that even highly trained NYPD officers only hit their intended target in 19 percent of gunfire exchanges. Winning a gunfight with a shooter only becomes more difficult when the perpetrator carries a semi-automatic rifle like an AR-15, as the Uvalde suspect and many others have done. These weapons have a much longer range and are far more accurate than the kinds of pistols typically used by police and civilian concealed carriers, allowing shooters to keep responders far enough away that their own weapons will be of little use. The Uvalde gunman, for instance, managed to overpower two officers whom he encountered on his way to the elementary school.

In the most extreme cases, a single gunman with a semi-automatic rifle can stymie an entire SWAT team for hours: Back in 2015, a single gunman assaulting a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood with an AK-style rifle held off police for the better part of a day before surrendering.  The idea that armed guards and teachers could deter shootings in the first place presumes mass shooters behave rationally, weighing risks, when in fact the opposite is true. As the JAMA authors noted, “many school shooters are actively suicidal, intending to die in the act, so an armed officer may be an incentive rather than a deterrent.”  Considering the long odds of taking down a determined shooter equipped with an assault rifle, armed police and bystanders sometimes have difficulty motivating themselves to actually engage at all, as happened so infamously in the Parkland shooting when two sheriff’s deputies apparently hid from the gunman.

So Republicans’ preferred response to mass shootings operates in the realm of fantasy. The standard-issue liberal response—to ban guns in a country where they outnumber people—is at this point not much more realistic. That’s not to say there is no way to prevent a lot of mass shootings, however.  Civil gun seizure orders, known as “red flag” laws, are a promising but underutilized means of preemptively intervening when gun owners show signs they will hurt themselves or others. If a gun owner makes a threat or behaves dangerously—committing violent misdemeanors or torturing animals, for example—“red flag” laws allow family, school workers, medical professionals, and law enforcement to petition a judge for an emergency temporary order confiscating the dangerous person’s weapons.

The laws function like more commonplace personal restraining orders. Many states created civil gun seizure procedures in the wake of the 2018 Parkland shooting (though not Texas), and the NRA even offered limited support for the measures. A 2019 case study of California’s law, passed in the wake of the 2014 Isla Vista shooting, found the orders were used in 21 cases where gun owners had made credible threats of mass shootings. It’s at least conceivable that this law prevented other possible atrocities.

Good guys with guns fail to stop bad guys with guns in the moment because mass shootings are rare, surprising, and unpredictable events. Red flag laws are effective because mass shooters are, by contrast, pretty predictable: They almost always display clear warning signs that they are a danger to society and themselves. The Uvalde shooter was no exception: According to friends, he engaged in self-harm, shot a BB gun at strangers, and expressed a desire to kill. He also posted frequently on social media about his desire for guns. If Texas had the appropriate legal machinery in place, the people in the shooter’s life who had been so alarmed by his behavior might have had an opportunity to act before it was too late.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/05/gop-school-uvalde-shooting-response-guys-with-guns.html

The 2020 Election Wasn't 'Stolen.' Here Are All The Facts That Prove It.

 (By Andrew Romano and Jon Ward, Yahoo News, 12 November 2020)

 The United States has been conducting presidential elections for 232 years. No modern candidate has ever refused to accept the results and recognize the winner’s legitimacy.  In this sense, 2020 could be different from any contest since the Civil War — if President Trump continues to claim that President-elect Joe Biden “stole” the election from him.

But every indication is that the 2020 election, conducted in the midst of a pandemic, with by far the most votes ever cast, was run honestly and the results tabulated accurately — a tribute to the professionalism and integrity of officials across the country.

Before Election Day, the Trump administration invited a delegation of 28 international experts from the Organization of American States, which has reported on elections around the world, to observe the vote. Its preliminary report found zero evidence of significant fraud.

The New York Times recently spoke to top election officials in 49 of 50 states. Not one, Democrat or Republican, reported “that fraud or other irregularities played a role in the outcome of the presidential race.”

On Nov. 12, the coordinating council overseeing the voting systems used around the country said in an unprecedented statement distributed by Trump’s own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) that “the November 3rd election was the most secure in American history” and that “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”  “While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections,” the statement continued, “we can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too.”

And the head of CISA has spent the last week explaining on Twitter and on the agency’s “Rumor Control” website why none of the stories of so-called fraud that Americans may be encountering on social media or alternative news sites represent anything out of the ordinary.

Yet these ominous-but-ultimately-overblown stories continue to circulate online — stories of pollsters falsifying their surveys to hurt Trump, of dead people voting, of observers being blocked from watching the count, of mysterious batches of Biden votes suddenly materializing in Democratic cities, of computer glitches changing the results, and so on.As a result, millions of people continue to worry that maybe something happened in 2020 that’s never happened before. They wonder if maybe the election was stolen. 

It wasn’t.

What follow are the facts, and just the facts, on each of the major “fraud” rumors flooding your inbox and your newsfeed.

Even if all of these rumors were true, which they aren’t, they wouldn’t add up to enough votes to overturn the outcome: Biden is on track to beat Trump by 5 million votes nationwide and by tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of votes in key states.  And while some allegations could end up exposing real fraud — because real fraud happens in every election — history shows that such incidents will be few, far between and ultimately inconsequential.

In 2014, Loyola Law School professor and voting expert Justin Levitt investigated every general, primary, special and municipal election held since the year 2000. Of more than 1 billion ballots cast, he found just 31 credible instances of potential voter impersonation, which is one of a few ways that cheating can actually occur.

RUMOR: Democrats and Dominion Voting Systems tampered with computers to change the results

REALITY: Officials quickly fixed isolated glitches and accidents, only two of which involved Dominion and none of which affected the final vote count

No election goes off without a hitch, and in the internet era, technology can compound some of the usual mistakes. But there’s a big difference between Democrats conspiring with Dominion Voting Systems to “hack” election and delete Republican votes and the kind of minor, easily detectable and correctible data-entry accidents and software glitches that complicate any computer-based enterprise.

The first is what Trump & Co. darkly speculate, without evidence, to have taken place in close-run states.  The second is what actually happened.

Consider the example of Antrim County, Mich., a Republican stronghold where unofficial results initially showed Biden beating Trump by roughly 3,000 votes — a sharp reversal from Trump's performance there in 2016. Trump supporters flagged the discrepancy. Tweets about it went viral. Soon conservatives such as Ted Cruz were calling for investigations and alleging that maybe the same election-management software used in Antrim County (Dominion Voting Systems) had screwed up the statewide count.

Experts eventually figured out what went wrong: An election worker had “configured ballot scanners and reporting systems with slightly different versions of the ballot, which meant some results did not line up with the right candidate when officials loaded them into the system,” according to the New York Times. By then local officials had already caught and corrected the error — even before another round of review conducted by Republican and Democratic “canvassers” that is designed to catch such mistakes. In the revised count, Trump beat Biden by roughly 2,500 votes.

But these facts haven’t deterred Trump allies from seizing on other, unrelated examples of routine tech-related errors to falsely insinuate some sort of nefarious conspiracy involving Dominion. In Oakland County, Mich., election workers mistakenly counted votes from the city of Rochester Hills twice, according to the Michigan Department of State — then spotted and fixed their error. An incumbent Republican county commissioner kept his seat as a result.

“As a Republican, I am disturbed that this is intentionally being mischaracterized to undermine the election process,” Tina Barton, the clerk in Rochester Hills, said in a video she posted online. “This was an isolated mistake that was quickly rectified.”

Oakland County used software from a company called Hart InterCivic, not Dominion.

Meanwhile in Georgia, glitchy software updates affected how poll workers checked in voters in Spalding and Morgan counties, which both halted voting for a few hours. In another Georgia county, Gwinnett, a different glitch delayed the reporting of results.  Gwinnett County used Dominion; the other counties did not. In any case, the issues did not affect the counts. Trump won Spalding County by 21 points and Morgan County by 42; Biden won Gwinnett by 18.

Elsewhere, fringier far-right activists have vaguely theorized that secret CIA computer systems called “Hammer” and “Scorecard” hacked the election on Biden’s behalf, pointing to momentary inconsistencies in CNN’s unofficial, on-air vote tallies for the 2019 Kentucky gubernatorial race as evidence. There is no proof that Hammer and Scorecard exist, and even if they did, experts say they would not be able to intercept the digital transmission of vote results and change them without being detected; officials always compare the transmitted results to paper receipts from the original machines before certifying the outcome.  “The Hammer and Scorecard nonsense [is] just that — nonsense,” tweeted Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency director Chris Krebs. “This is not a real thing, don’t fall for it and think 2x before you share.”

Yet Twitter and Facebook posts from Trump and White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany falsely implied that the isolated issues in Michigan and Georgia were signs of widespread problems with the election. On Thursday, the president even went so far as to tweet that Dominion itself had deleted millions of his votes — a claim with no basis in reality. He followed up Sunday and Monday by echoing baseless conspiracy theories alleging Democratic control of Dominion, which have been debunked as well. The president has not provided a shred of proof that software switched or deleted a single one of his votes — let alone the tens or even hundreds of thousands he would need to overturn his losses in Michigan, Georgia and elsewhere.

Not to be deterred, however, Georgia’s two Republican senators, who are jockeying for advantage in their Jan. 5 runoff elections, called on Brad Raffensperger, the state’s Republican secretary of state, to resign because he had “failed the people of Georgia.”

“That is not going to happen,” Raffensperger said in a statement. “My job is to follow Georgia law and see to it that all legal votes, and no illegal votes, are counted properly and accurately. … As a Republican, I am concerned about Republicans keeping the U.S. Senate. I recommend that Senators Loeffler and Perdue start focusing on that.”

RUMOR: Biden won only because of ‘illegal’ votes

REALITY: Actual illegal votes are rare, and the courts are considering all credible charges

In every election, some people cast ballots that end up not counting because they run afoul of state election law for one reason or another. It’s critical to the integrity of the election — and public trust in America’s democratic process — that officials identify and disqualify such votes. Every state has numerous safeguards in place to ensure that’s exactly what happens.

But the mere existence of irregularities doesn’t invalidate an election. If it did, no election would be valid. Scale is important here, too. Illegal votes can affect the outcome only if enough of them benefit the winner to potentially account for his or her entire margin of victory.  “One would have to show, at minimum, more illegal votes than the margin between the candidates,” Richard Hasen, a law and political science professor at the University of California, Irvine, and a nationally recognized election law expert, recently explained. “That would be quite an extreme scale of fraud. Let’s see what the evidence is.”

The evidence of illegal votes in the 2020 election has been exceedingly thin.

One of the most detailed complaints about the possibility that ineligible voters cast ballots, or that votes were manufactured, came in a lawsuit filed in Michigan on Nov. 9. A pro-Trump lawsuit against the city of Detroit, filed by the Great Lakes Justice Center, claimed that election workers were told not to check signatures on mail ballots, that extra mail ballots were brought in and all counted for Biden, that election workers backdated mail ballots so they could be counted, and that they “used false information to process ballots.”

The lawsuit also claimed election observers were blocked from watching vote counting at key moments, that votes from ineligible voters were counted and that a handful of city workers “coached” voters to cast ballots for Biden.  But the city filed a detailed response, knocking down the allegations and saying they reflected “an extraordinary failure to understand how elections function.”

Election workers at the TCF Center, a Detroit convention center where much of the county’s vote tabulation took place, were instructed not to check mail-ballot signatures during the count, the city said, because signature matching had already been done before the ballots arrived at the facility.

Complaints made in the Great Lakes lawsuit about mail ballots — known in Michigan as absent voter ballots — being backdated, with the implication that they had arrived after Election Day, were also plainly false, the city said. “No ballots received by the Detroit City Clerk after 8:00 p.m. on November 3, 2020 were even brought to the TCF Center,” the city’s attorneys wrote. “No ballot could have been ‘backdated,’ because no ballot received after 8:00 p.m. on November 3, 2020 was ever at the TCF Center.”

As for the notion that ineligible votes were counted, or that votes were concocted out of thin air and assigned to names of people who didn’t vote, the city said that what Republican observers inside TCF really saw was election workers correcting an error by some election workers at satellite locations, who failed to complete a process that allowed some mail ballots to be counted. It was necessary to enter the date for these ballots to allow them to count, the city said.  “Every single ballot delivered to the TCF Center had already been verified as having been completed by an eligible voter,” the city said.

The charge of extra ballots being brought in was related to the arrival of blank ballots that were sent to TCF for use by election workers. These ballots were given to election workers so they could function as duplicate ballots in case legitimate ballots were damaged and could not be read by voting machines, the filing said.  “Michigan election law does not call for partisan challengers to be present when a ballot is duplicated; instead, when a ballot is duplicated as a result of a ‘false read,’ the duplication is overseen by one Republican and one Democratic inspector coordinating together,” Detroit’s lawyers wrote. “That process was followed, and Plaintiffs do not — and cannot — present any evidence to the contrary.”

The Trump campaign, in a lawsuit of its own filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan, claimed there were cases in which “ballot duplication was performed only by Democratic election workers, not bipartisan teams.” This claim has already been dismissed in one lawsuit filed last week by the Trump campaign in Michigan’s Court of Claims.

The accusation of “false information” was based on records that list some voters as having been born in the year 1900. The city said some mail ballots that arrived between Sunday night and Tuesday — all before the close of polls on Tuesday night — needed to have the birth date manually entered due to a software “quirk.”

Election workers entering the birth date for those ballots used Jan. 1, 1900, as a “placeholder date” until the ballot entry could be matched to the voter’s entry in the state voter file. “That birthday will appear in several places in the electronic poll book record for a limited period,” the city said.  That leaves the allegation of city workers “coaching” voters to cast ballots for Biden, a claim made by a city worker named Jessy Jacob in the lawsuit.

The city said that if this were true it would be “contrary to the instructions given to workers at the satellite locations,” but also said it was “curious that Ms. Jacob waited until after the election to raise these allegations.”  The city noted that Jacob had been furloughed prior to the election, was brought back to work during election season in September and was furloughed again immediately after the election.  The filing also pointed to evidence on social media that two of the individuals who signed affidavits in the Great Lakes lawsuit were adherents of the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory.

The Detroit lawyers also pointed out that Trump received almost three times as many votes in Detroit in the 2020 election as he did four years ago: 12,654, up from 4,972 in 2016. (The vote for Biden in Detroit this year was just under 234,000, which was about 1,000 votes less than Hillary Clinton’s total in 2016. But Biden won the state by almost 150,000 votes.)

“Nothing about those numbers supports the theory of fraud being advanced. Nothing about those numbers supports the completely unsubstantiated claims of tens of thousands of improperly processed ballots,” the city said.

RUMOR: ‘Dead people’ voted for Biden

REALITY: The Trump campaign hasn’t been able to produce more than one or two potential examples of ‘dead people’ casting ballots (and no one knows who they voted for)

It’s a perennial claim in American politics: The only reason my candidate lost is because a bunch of dead people voted for your candidate. And Trump ally Lindsey Graham, the recently reelected Republican senator from South Carolina, is its latest proponent.

“The Trump team has canvassed all early voters and absentee mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania, and they have found over 100 people they think were dead [and] 15 people that we verified that have been dead who voted,” Graham said during a Fox News interview. “Six people registered after they died and voted. In Pennsylvania, I guess you’re never out of it.”

Graham isn’t alone in accusing the deceased of meddling in the election; members of Trump's family and supporters like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell have repeated similar charges. Meanwhile, a series of viral tweets and videos shared by Trump fans have also accused various Michigan residents — some with birth dates from the turn of the 20th century — of casting absentee ballots from beyond the grave.  The implication is that somehow Democrats filled out and fraudulently submitted ballots in the names of dead people in order to lift Biden to victory.

But that just doesn’t compute.

In reality, 13 states actually count absentee ballots submitted by living voters who then die before Election Day, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. So some of these so-called illegal votes are, in fact, perfectly legal.  Elsewhere, states prohibit counting the votes of people who are no longer alive. They do this in two ways: by disqualifying the early votes or mail ballots of residents who wind up dying before Election Day and/or by promptly flagging voters who have recently died so officials can cross-reference the voter rolls and discount any ballots cast in their name.

It’s a complicated, fast-moving process, and sometimes the human beings in charge of it make mistakes. One viral video, for instance, purports to show that “118-year-old ‘William Bradley’ voted via absentee ballot in Wayne County, Mich.” But what actually happened, according to Politifact, is that Bradley’s son — also named William Bradley and residing at the same address, but not born in March 1902 and definitely not deceased — voted with his own ballot, which officials then incorrectly attributed to his father.  “No ballot was cast for the now deceased Bradley,” Politifact explained. “This was a clerical error, not voter fraud.”

Another Michigan voter, named Donna Brydges, was also cited in viral pro-Trump videos because her birth date was listed as 1901 in the state’s qualified voter database. Turns out that Brydges is 75 and voted legally; her DOB was merely a placeholder.

“It is important to note that some state registration systems indicate a missing date of birth by adopting filler dates, such as 01/01/1900, 01/01/1850, or 01/01/1800,” a 2017 report about duplicate voting from the Government Accountability Institute noted. “The vast majority of votes cast by individuals appearing to be over 115 years old had these three erroneous birthdates.”

Likewise, CNN recently checked 50 of the more than 14,000 names on a list of allegedly dead-but-registered Michigan voters making the rounds on Twitter and found that only five of them voted in 2020 — and all five are, in fact, alive.  None of the 37 actually dead people in CNN’s sample cast a ballot.

Whatever the exact figures, we’re talking about a small handful of ballots here — nowhere near the number Trump would need to catch up in Michigan, where he trails by about 147,000 votes, or Pennsylvania, where he trails by 45,000. A suit filed by a conservative foundation in Pennsylvania alleged that the state included 21,000 dead people on its voter rolls. But “the court found no deficiency in how Pennsylvania maintains its voter rolls,” according to a spokeswoman for the state attorney general’s office, and “there is currently no proof provided that any deceased person has voted in the 2020 election.”

And even then there’s no reason to think the dead favor Democrats over Republicans. In October, a man in Luzerne County, Pa. — a registered Republican — was charged with felonies after trying to apply for a mail ballot in his dead mother’s name. On Nov. 7, meanwhile, Trump campaign adviser Corey Lewandowski provided what he said was “one concrete example” of dead-voter fraud, pointing to an obituary for Denise Ondick of West Homestead in Allegheny County, Pa., who died on Oct. 22 — one day before election officials received her application for a mail-in ballot, according to online records from the Pennsylvania Department of State, and 11 days before the county received and recorded her vote. The Trump campaign has cited a single, similar incident in Nevada.

In an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, Ondick’s daughter said she helped her mother fill out an application for a mail ballot in early October, before the elder Ondick died of cancer, but that she could not explain why the ballot had been sent in after her mother’s death. Ondick’s husband said he couldn’t recall doing anything with the ballot.  Ondick’s daughter also said her mother had planned to vote for Trump.

Lewandowski said Ondick was “one of many” examples of dead-voter fraud the Trump campaign would be asking the courts to review. So far, the campaign has not revealed any additional details or mentioned any other specific cases.

RUMOR: Democrats blocked Republican observers from watching the count

REALITY: Republican lawyers for the Trump campaign have admitted in court that this is false

Republicans have focused these complaints on Detroit and Philadelphia.  “We’re seeing this pattern in Democratic city after Democratic city, but the worst of the country right now is Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, were they’re not allowing election observers in, despite clear state law that requires election observers being there, despite an order from a state judge saying election observers have to be within 6 feet of the ballot counting,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said on Nov. 5, on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show.  “I am angry and I think the American people are angry because by throwing the observers out, by clouding the vote counting in a shroud of darkness, they are setting the stage to potentially steal the election,” Cruz said.  These allegations were repeated by Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. 

But the Trump campaign’s own lawyers acknowledged in a hearing that there have been Republican observers in the room at all times since mail ballots began to be opened and counted at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.  “Their counsel admitted at the hearing, after questions from the court, that they had several representatives in the room,” said the Philadelphia City Commissioners in a statement.

The commissioners, two Democrats and one Republican who oversee voting in the city, said there were between 15 and 19 Republican observers present all day on Nov. 5.  Hawley also said that “some states [were] going to court to try to stop poll watchers, people just observing the ballot counts.”  “I mean, that is deeply, deeply disturbing,” he said.

That was another false claim. The city of Philadelphia appealed a ruling that partisan observers should be allowed to oversee the work of election officials from as close as 6 feet away. There was never an allegation in the suit that poll watchers were being barred from the room.  The Trump campaign’s lawsuit had alleged that its observers, who were in the room with unobstructed views, wanted to get closer so they could challenge individual mail ballots if there was no signature on the outer envelope, or if the voter had written the wrong date on the envelope.

The city’s appeal argued that state law does not permit those kinds of challenges, a decision the state legislature made in recognition that allowing challenges to individual ballots would slow down the processing of a historic number of mail ballots during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Challenging the eligibility of voters to cast mail ballots had to be done when the ballots were requested, Tammy Bruce, a former Arizona elections official, told Yahoo News.

Observers in the room are entitled to see that mail ballots are being examined for signatures and that they were properly placed inside a privacy envelope, and to monitor for anything else of concern, such as the destruction or discarding of ballots.  Gingrich, also on Fox, claimed poll watchers had been “physically excluded” from overseeing vote counting.

He pointed specifically to Detroit, where there were complaints about election officials covering the windows of a counting room at the TCF Center.  “You have a precinct where you don’t let anyone in. They’re boarded up,” Gingrich claimed. “I would take every precinct that blocked poll watchers and not count their votes.”  But a Detroit city attorney said the windows were blocked because ballots were being counted closely enough to them that members of the public could take photos that might disclose the privacy of voters’ ballots.  There were “hundreds of challengers from both parties … inside the Central Counting Board all afternoon and all evening,” said Detroit attorney Lawrence Garcia.

The city of Detroit noted in a court filing that “more than 200 Republican challengers were present at the TCF center, and at no time were they limited to fewer than one challenger for every Absent Voter Counting Board. While six feet of separation was necessary for health reasons, the Department of Elections provided large computer monitors at every counting board, so that challengers could view all information as it was inputted into the computer.”  “When it became clear that the number of challengers had reached or exceeded the lawful quota and the room had become over-crowded, additional challengers were not admitted until challengers from their respective parties voluntarily departed.”

When Yahoo News asked Gingrich what proof he had of observers being “physically excluded” from vote-counting centers, a Gingrich spokesman essentially admitted there was none. “With regard to the people being kept from watching ballots being counted, we now have a better understanding of the situations in Philadelphia and Detroit,” said Louie Brogdon, editorial director of Gingrich 360, a consulting and media production firm.  “When Speaker Gingrich made his earlier comment, he was speaking on the best information he had at the time,” Brogdon said.

RUMOR: Democrats suddenly ‘found’ new, fraudulent Biden votes to beat Trump

REALITY: Counting mail ballots took a long time in some states, like Pennsylvania, because the Republican Party blocked reforms that would have avoided this problem

In the days after Election Day, Trump said several times that Democrats were trying to cheat him by “finding” votes for Biden.  “They are finding Biden votes all over the place — in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. So bad for our Country!” the president tweeted just before noon on Wednesday, Nov. 4.  His mention of those three states is telling. They are the same ones that Yahoo News was writing about for three months leading up to the election, raising awareness about what one Pennsylvania Republican warned in September was a “man-made disaster … that easily could be avoided.”

The disaster happened. It didn’t have to. And it created space for the president to falsely claim that votes were being “found” when in fact they were simply being counted in a delayed fashion. The delay was caused — seemingly intentionally — by the Republican Party itself. 

Here’s what happened. After the outbreak of COVID-19 in the late winter and early spring, most states allowed all voters to cast ballots by mail in the spring and early summer, during primary elections. Over the summer, some states moved back to a focus on in-person voting. But most stuck with expanded access to voting by mail.  For many states this was new. But five states have conducted their elections by mail for years now: Colorado, Utah, Washington, Oregon and Hawaii. Two more, Arizona and California, have done their elections mostly by mail for a few years.

As states moved to voting by mail, most had rules that allowed election clerks to process those ballots as they arrived. As Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, told Yahoo News in August, “We can start processing those right away, meaning: Cut the envelope, open, verify the information on it, put it through the scanner, but not hit ‘tabulate.’ That can’t happen until 7:30 on election night.”  As a result, Ohio had most of its mail ballots counted early on election night. Most states did.  But Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — the same three states mentioned by Trump in his tweet — refused to make a change allowing clerks to process mail ballots like the rest of the country.

Action was needed from the state legislature, and in all three states the Republican Party held majorities in both the state Senate and the state House.  LaRose himself warned of a “really terrible situation” if these legislatures didn’t make a simple change, giving clerks time to process mail ballots before Election Day.

In other words, the GOP knew its lack of action was going to delay the counting of mail ballots by several days, and either did nothing or — as in the case of Michigan — gave clerks one day ahead of Election Day to process mail ballots, rather than the week or two that experts and election officials recommended.

In Pennsylvania, Republicans at first allowed clerks to start processing mail ballots 21 days before Election Day, but then cut that down to three and included a number of “poison pill” ideas in its bill that guaranteed Democrats would oppose it.

There has been no evidence of ballots being added. That has happened before in Philadelphia, but on a very small scale. In May, an election judge there pleaded guilty to adding a total of 113 votes over three elections from 2014 to 2016 to help judicial candidates running for a local court.  The point made by LaRose and other Republican experts is that even isolated examples of cheating, which do happen, do not add up to a conspiracy. To manipulate tens of thousands of votes without detection is not possible given the multiple layers of security and accountability involved in running elections, experts say.  One of those layers is the postelection audit that each state conducts itself to ensure that the result was accurate.

RUMOR: Pollsters falsified their results to suppress the GOP vote

REALITY: Republicans turned out in record numbers even though pollsters mistakenly underestimated Trump again

Last Thursday, Trump told reporters that pollsters had deliberately produced false surveys showing Biden with a big lead in order to suppress Trump votes and help Biden win the election.  He followed up Monday night with a series of tweets repeating the same claim.  “.@FoxNews, @QuinnipiacPoll, ABC/WaPo, NBC/WSJ were so inaccurate with their polls on me, that it really is tampering with an Election,” Trump wrote. “They were so far off in their polling, and in their attempt to suppress - that they should be called out for Election Interference … ABC/WaPo had me down 17 points in Wisconsin, the day before the election, and I WON! In Iowa, the polls had us 4 points down, and I won by 8.2%! Fox News and Quinnipiac were wrong on everything… The worst polling ever, and then they’ll be back in four years to do it again. This is much more then [sic] voter and campaign finance suppression!”

Trump is right about one thing: Pollsters again underestimated the president’s support in key (mostly Midwestern) states such as Iowa and Wisconsin, four years after he first beat his Rust Belt polling numbers to eke out a narrow Electoral College victory over Hillary Clinton.  Trump is wrong, however, that this polling miss was part of some sort of plot to propel Biden to the presidency.  There are two reasons for this. First, these errors are the opposite of deliberate — instead, they’re a source of embarrassment for pollsters nationwide. And second, even if they had been deliberate, they didn’t actually “work.” They didn’t stop Republicans from voting.

Polling is a business, and accuracy is the coin of the realm. As Fox News contributor Liberty Vittert, a data science professor at the Washington University in St. Louis, recently explained, “Pollsters poll on many more issues than political campaigns, and their businesses depend on their reputations for accurate polling.”

To believe that dozens of pollsters independently falsified their results to boost Biden, in other words, you’d also have to believe that somehow they were all independently willing to sabotage their reputations and hurt their businesses on the slim chance that Trump’s passionate base would see Biden’s inflated numbers and decide to stay home.  “The president’s accusation doesn’t make sense,” Vittert wrote. “Think about it: why would any business hire a pollster if it thought the polling was inaccurate?”

Instead, the truth is that pollsters labored mightily to improve their methodologies after missing a lot of non-college-educated white Trump voters in 2016 — and now, in 2020, they’ve missed again, perhaps because many of those voters simply aren’t as willing as highly engaged, COVID-era Democrats to pick up the phone and participate in a practice they’ve already rejected as “fake news.”

This phenomenon is called non-response bias. Pollsters are not proud of their failure to correct for it.  “The reason why the polls are wrong is because the people who were answering these surveys were the wrong people,” pollster David Shor recently explained. “The problem [is that] one group of people [is] really, really excited to share their opinions, while another group isn’t. As long as that bias exists, it’ll percolate down to whatever you do.”

The flip side of this phenomenon, as Shor put it, is that “these low-trust people still vote, even if they’re not answering these phone surveys.” The 2020 results bear this out. Not only did Trump receive more than 72 million votes — the second-most in U.S. history, after Biden’s 78 million — but Senate Republicans in Texas, Michigan, Colorado, North Carolina and Georgia actually beat the president’s share of the vote in their respective states.  Together, these stats suggest that far from being discouraged by Trump’s unpromising poll numbers, Republicans turned out in force on Nov. 3. It’s just that more people voted for Biden.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/the-2020-election-wasnt-stolen-here-are-all-the-facts-that-prove-it-184623754.html

Travel Tips

Travelers’ Most Common Mistakes And How To Avoid Them

(By Christopher Elliott, Washington Post, 15 May 2014)

 

The secrets to a hassle-free summer vacation seem simple enough: Keep a checklist. Read the rules, especially if you’re flying. Take photos of your rental car. Don’t make assumptions about your hotel. And remember your paperwork when you’re traveling overseas.  But simple as that sounds, in practice it’s not always that easy.  Let me say right from the outset that I hardly started out as the world’s smartest traveler. But over the past decade and more, I’ve learned, from my own wide-ranging travels and from the many problems I’ve helped resolve for readers, what not to do when you’re on the road.  So what are the most common mistakes that travelers make? And, more important, how do you avoid them? How, in other words, can you vacation like the world’s smartest traveler?

1. Be prepared

Bob McCullough, a sales representative for a cheese company in Hainesport, N.J., admits that he’s a serial procrastinator, so he decided to start packing for a recent trip a full week in advance. He even booked a flight leaving Philadelphia on a Sunday to avoid the Monday crush of business travelers.  “I got to the airport two hours before my flight, found the parking garage pleasantly unpacked, and parked in a spot I had never dreamed of finding on a weekday,” he says. “I opened the trunk and reached in to grab my suitcase — which wasn’t there. I realized then, in shock with a cold sweat building, that I had left my suitcase in its normal pre-staging area of my laundry room.” 

The smartest travelers plan ahead, like McCullough, but they also have a fondness for checklists. Did you pack the right clothes? Remember all the power cords? Is your luggage in the trunk of your car? Lists are your friends. Smart travelers know when to wing it and when not to. Sure, your friends and family might poke fun at you for keeping a list for everything, but they’ll thank you when you’re the only one with a power adapter in France. Travelers who keep lists are far less likely to get into trouble on the road.

2. Read those airline rules

Airline policies can be counterintuitive, even bizarre. For example, a one-way ticket can sometimes cost more than a round-trip ticket on the same plane. A change fee can exceed the actual value of a ticket. Also, “non-refundable” means non-refundable, except when it doesn’t.  Confused yet? If it’s any consolation, even airline employees sometimes get mixed up about their own rules. Don’t laugh, I’ve seen it.  Kelly Hayes-Raitt remembers seeing an unbeatable deal for a flight from Los Angeles to Tampa, Fla. But when she arrived at the airport, she noticed her itinerary. “The plane landed in Phoenix, Dallas, Houston and New Orleans before finally arriving in Tampa,” remembers the writer from Santa Monica, Calif. “I still groan when I think of how stupid I was.” 

Based on the cases I’ve mediated, my best advice is to familiarize yourself with the always-changing, often Byzantine rules developed by the airline industry — rules that are often created for the sole purpose of “protecting” an airline’s revenue or, to put it in terms that everyone else can understand, to separate you from your money.  They may make about as much sense as a coast-to-coast flight with four stops, but you — and you alone — are responsible for knowing the rules.

3. Take photos of your rental car

Anna Arreglado didn’t do that when she recently rented a car in Bardonia, N.Y. “My mistake,” says Arreglado, who works for a pharmaceutical company in Ridgefield, Conn. Sure enough, the car rental company came after her, insisting that she’d damaged the vehicle. She couldn’t prove that she’d returned the car unharmed. It was her word against the company’s.  Fortunately, Arreglado reads this column and knew how to fight back. She disputed the claim in writing and copied her state attorney general on the correspondence. “Within an hour of sending my e-mail, I got the case dropped,” she says.

Listen up, campers: Take pictures of your cars before and after your rental. Some customers allege that car rental companies have built a profitable business around charging you big bucks for small damage, and the only way to avoid a repair bill is to show an “after” image of your undented car. That, and maybe having the e-mail address of your attorney general.  Actually, the takeaway from Arreglado’s story applies to more than rental cars. Sometimes, a brief, polite e-mail to any travel company will get the resolution you want — if you copy the right people.

4. Assume nothing about your hotel

No segment of the travel industry — except perhaps the airlines — profits more from our collective ignorance than hotels. They would like you to think that they’re the only lodging option in town, but they’re not. Today’s accommodations cover the spectrum, from glamping to vacation rentals. Don’t lock yourself into a traditional hotel or resort, at least not without first shopping around. You might be able to find a bargain on Airbnb.com with a better location and fewer hassles. 

Travelers make other assumptions about their accommodations that aren’t necessarily true, too. For example, you’d imagine that the room rate you’re quoted is the room rate you’ll actually pay, maybe not including sales taxes.  But when Tom Alderman recently tried to book a room at his favorite casino hotel in Las Vegas, he was broadsided by a mandatory $14-per-night “resort” fee, which supposedly covered in-room wireless Internet access, use of the fitness center and “printing of boarding passes.” He was particularly outraged because the resort had repeatedly promised on its Web site to “never” charge a resort fee, like other Vegas resorts. “I’ll never stay there again,” says Alderman, a retired documentary filmmaker.  Resort fees are normally disclosed just before you push the “book” button, so don’t thoughtlessly click through. If you see a fee you don’t like, stop what you’re doing and look elsewhere for a room.

5. Don’t forget the paperwork

Having the right visas and permits and an updated passport is your responsibility, no two ways about it. That’s a difficult message for many travelers to hear. They rely on the advice of a travel agent or what’s posted on a Web site and believe (incorrectly) that those third parties should reimburse them when something goes wrong. This is especially common in the case of cruises, where a birth certificate, instead of a passport, is often enough to board a ship.  The consequences can be heartbreaking. A worried mom from Sacramento recently contacted me because her daughter and son-in-law, en route to their honeymoon in St. Lucia, had been stopped at the airport and denied boarding. The reason? The bride’s passport was due to expire soon — too soon for her to be allowed into the country. Some countries require your passport to be valid for six months from the date of your entry. An alert travel agent might have caught the problem, but now it was too late. And without travel insurance, the entire trip would be lost. “Can this trip be salvaged?” the mom wrote to me, with only hours before the vacation was to have begun. Sadly, it couldn’t be.  Point is, the most common travel mistakes are easily avoided with a little planning and by taking common-sense precautions. It looks easy, and sometimes it is easy. But the truth is, in many cases, there’s often a lot more to it, and questions arise. And that’s what this column and I are here for.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/travelers-most-common-mistakes-and-how-to-avoid-them/2014/05/15/4fca7b56-d54a-11e3-8a78-8fe50322a72c_story.html

Summer 2014: Best Vacation Escape Routes For Drivers Leaving The D.C. Area

(By Robert Thomson, Washington Post, 16 May 2014)

The Memorial Day weekend marks the traditional beginning of the summer travel season, and we’re back with our annual guide of problematic routes and roadways you might want to avoid in your rush to get out of the Washington region.  The 95 Express Lanes project is on a fast track, but that probably means summer vacationers won’t be going anywhere fast when they drive through that construction zone on Interstate 95 in Northern Virginia.  Of all the compass points travelers will follow on their getaways from the D.C. area in 2014, the most difficult — for the second summer in a row — will be due south. The express lanes project, begun in late summer 2012, is building “29 miles in 29 months,” said Walter J. Lewis III, project director for Fluor-Lane 95, the construction company.  The 2013 work included construction of nine bridges, sometimes forcing weekend detours on I-95. Through the rest of this year, the remaining work will include frequent weekend shutdowns of the HOV lanes in the middle of the interstate, limiting its capacity to handle vacation traffic.  While that slow ride is likely to be the biggest challenge at the beginning and end of long trips, it won’t be the only one. Here’s a look at what’s ahead along the main summer escape routes.

 

Northeast corridor

Classic route: I-95 to I-295, across the Delaware Memorial Bridge to the New Jersey Turnpike to northern New Jersey approaches to New York (about 227 miles).

Alternatives: Consider I-95 to I-695, just before Baltimore, to I-83 to York, Pa., and Harrisburg, Pa., then I-81 to I-78. Options include staying on I-78 across New Jersey toward New York or taking a more northerly course: following Route 22 just before Allentown, Pa., to Route 33 to I-80 across the top of New Jersey.

Or take Route 50 across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, follow Route 301 to Route 896 (Churchtown/Boyds Corner roads) to Route 1 (toll) or Route 13. From there, drivers can reach I-295 and the Delaware Memorial Bridge, which connects with the New Jersey Turnpike.  For those who want to vacation while they travel, consider driving about 120 miles from the District to take the 80-minute ferry ride from Lewes, Del., to Cape May, N.J. Reservations recommended: 800-643-3779 or www.capemaylewesferry.com.

Travel tips: North of Baltimore on I-95, the Maryland House rest area has reopened, but 14 miles beyond that, the Chesapeake House in North East, Md., is now closed for reconstruction.

Approaching the Newark, Del., toll plaza, the two left lanes will take you to the highway-speed E-ZPass toll readers. Tune your radio to WTMC (1380 AM) for traffic reports.

Before leaving home, check the Delaware Department of Transportation Web site at www.deldot.gov for traffic conditions.

The widening of the New Jersey Turnpike continues between interchanges 6 and 9 in the central part of the state, but construction may end late this year. Tune to WKXW (101.5 FM) for New Jersey traffic reports.

New York’s Tappan Zee Bridge remains open as construction begins on a replacement span to take I-87/287 over the Hudson River.

Deep Creek Lake

Classic route: I-270 to I-70 west to I-68 west to Exit 14A at Keysers Ridge, Md., then follow Route 219 south (about 180 miles).

Alternatives: Between Frederick and Route 219, try portions of Route 144 and Alternate 40, which weave along with the interstates. Much of that route is the Historic National Road. Take it to enjoy a different drive to Western Maryland rather than to save time. Maryland travel maps, including a map of scenic byways, are available at ­www.marylandroads.com.

Travel tips: Maryland’s major roads — including I-270, I-70, and Routes 15 and 40 — pass through a bottleneck at Frederick. Try to avoid starting your trip between 1 and 8 p.m. Fridays.

Between school closing and Labor Day, the roads around Deep Creek Lake can get very crowded. There are peaceful state parks with cabins along the way west, including New Germany and Herrington Manor. At Frederick, vacationers could swing north on Route 15 to cabins at Cunningham Falls State Park in Thurmont.

Travelers can make reservations on the Department of Natural Resources Web site at ­www.dnr.maryland.gov.

The Maryland State Highway Administration has some highway repair projects in the western part of the state this summer, but they are unlikely to severely affect traffic flow during the peak travel times.

Eastern Shore

Classic route: Route 50 east to Ocean City (about 150 miles).

Alternative: There really isn’t a good highway alternative to the Ocean Gateway (Route 50). Around Wye Mills, Md., Route 404 branches east from Route 50 and heads for Rehoboth Beach on the Delaware shore, but it’s narrow and crowded.

Along the Route 50 corridor, there are some short breaks, including Route 662 at Wye Mills. Approaching the shore, Route 90 (Ocean City Expressway) provides an alternative way into the city, at 62nd Street.

Travel tips: The best Bay Bridge travel times for summer weekend getaways are Thursday and Friday before 10 a.m. and after 10 p.m.; Saturday before 7 a.m. and after 5 p.m.; and Sunday before 10 a.m. and after 10 p.m. The regular car toll for the bridge is $6, paid eastbound.

Headlight use is required at all times on the bridge. At peak periods, the westbound span is sometimes realigned for two-way traffic. In that case, the five lanes on the left side of the toll plaza are directed to that span. Drivers who want an E-ZPass Only lane for the exclusively eastbound span should use toll lanes 6 or 9.

Maryland offers traffic information for the bridge at www.baybridge.com. To get information about your entire route, dial 511 from within the state and use the voice-recognition system, or use the Web site www.md511.org.

Outer Banks

Classic route: I-95 south, to I-295 south, to I-64 east, to I-664 south, then I-64 to Exit 292 for Chesapeake Expressway/I-464/Route 17. Then keep left to continue to the Chesapeake Expressway (Route 168) and take Nags Head/Great Bridge Exit 291B to routes 168 and 158 and the Outer Banks (about 270 miles to Kitty Hawk, N.C.).

Alternatives: South of Fredericksburg, some I-95 drivers pick up Route 17 south at Exit 126 and take it to I-64 in the Hampton Roads area. Others take the I-295 bypass around Richmond into the Petersburg area, then take Route 460 east into Hampton Roads.

Drivers on the east side of the D.C. region could take Route 301, crossing the Potomac River on the Nice Bridge ($6 car toll collected southbound), then connect with Route 17 south. Drivers starting southbound trips from west of the D.C. area may avoid some of the I-95 congestion by taking Routes 29 and 17 to the Fredericksburg area.

Travel tips: I-95 traffic on Friday and Sunday afternoons can be stop and go between the District and Fredericksburg. Traffic volume is very high, plus there’s the 95 Express Lanes construction.

There will be lane closings on I-95 during off-peak hours and overnights, plus those weekend closings of the HOV lanes. Also watch for many construction vehicles turning into and out of the work areas.

Get information about Virginia traffic conditions through the 511 system. On the Web, it’s at www.511virginia.org. You can also call 511 from any phone in Virginia.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/dr-gridlock/wp/2014/05/16/summer-getaways-2014-best-vacation-escape-routes-for-drivers-leaving-the-d-c-area/