Fox Stays Silent About New Texts That Expose Hannity & Ingraham's Jan. 6 Hypocrisy

(By Brian Stelter, CNN Business, 14 December 2021)

Fox News did not bother to air Monday night's meeting of the House committee investigating the 1/6 attack. Neither did Newsmax or One America News. So right-wing TV audiences did not hear when Rep. Liz Cheney revealed that some of Fox's biggest stars pressed Mark Meadows for help during the siege of the Capitol.  "Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home," Laura Ingraham texted Meadows. "This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy."

She knew. They all knew. They all knew the truth right away. But by the night of 1/6, Ingraham was spouting conspiracy theories about "ANTIFA" and excusing the peaceful "patriots" who, let's be clear, paraded into DC based on a lie she pushed over and over again. Fox's pro-Trump programming was partly to blame for the Big Lie, so when that lie led to violence, of course some of the hosts panicked and tried to put out the fire.

On Monday, Cheney read two other texts from Fox stars to Meadows from 1/6. One was from Brian Kilmeade: "Please, get him on TV. Destroying everything you have accomplished." The other was from Sean Hannity: "Can he make a statement, ask people to leave the Capitol?" Cheney didn't specify what time those texts were sent. But I was struck by Hannity's casual tone about the unfolding terror. At least Kilmeade said "please, get him on TV."

The 1/6 committee has thousands of other texts and emails. Cheney shared just a tiny sampling on Monday. But the tiny sampling is deeply embarrassing for Fox and the Murdochs. As Maggie Haberman said, this "undercuts efforts by everyone whose name she read who might say Jan. 6 wasn't that bad." It "wasn't that bad" has been one of Fox's dominant themes this year. This banner on "Don Lemon Tonight" captured it perfectly: "Fox hosts and Donald Trump Jr. knew exactly what was happening and now they pretend it didn't happen."

"These texts prove something essential," Amanda Carpenter wrote for The Bulwark. "No matter what they say now, Trump's loyalists knew at the time that what was happening at the Capitol was not a peaceful protest. They knew that it was a dangerous attack on American democracy. And they knew that Trump was responsible for it. That's why they sent the texts pleading with him, through his staff, to make it stop." 

Or as SE Cupp put it on CNN just now, "Fox News viewers, you have been had."

Yes -- but here's what the Fox hosts will likely say if they're ever challenged about this. They'll say they condemned the riot at the time. And they all did, if only briefly. But Hannity and Ingraham also continued to lie about the election and strongly suggest that leftists were to blame for the Capitol chaos. And many Fox hosts have bashed other media outlets for continuing to report on the prosecutions and the probes -- in other words, for continuing to care about the terror. The memory-holing effort has been so extensive precisely because figures like Ingraham knew how bad it was. When she wrote "this is hurting all of us," I'm certain she wasn't thinking about America or the rule of law. She was thinking about "us" in the Trump-controlled Republican party. But she was right: This is hurting all of us.

Total silence from Fox

It's crucial to note that Fox didn't air the 7pm ET hearing live or address the revelations about the texts later in the day. "Fox viewers are being shielded from the Fox hosts' urgent texts to Meadows," MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell commented.  Hannity actually gabbed with Meadows during the 9pm hour but "did not mention the texts at all," as The Daily Beast's Justin Baragona noted here. (Hannity hit back at Cheney, however, by saying "I love how Liz is now partnered with the people that called her father a war criminal, a murderer, and a crook. Pretty amazing!")

During the chat, Meadows acknowledged that he is about to be held in criminal contempt. But here's how Hannity opened the hour: "The hyperpartisan predetermined-outcome anti-Trump January 6 committee just voted 9 to 0 to hold Mark Meadows in contempt for refusing to comply with their orders." With that framing, why would any Fox viewer take any committee action seriously? Further, Hannity focused on Capitol security failures; blamed Democrats for those failures; and brought up the rioting in the wake of George Floyd's death. This is Fox's tried-and-true approach whenever faced with the awfulness of 1/6: Dodge or distort or deflect.

A Fox spokesperson did not respond to my request for comment about the texts on Monday night.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/fox-stays-silent-about-new-texts-that-expose-hannity-and-ingraham-s-jan-6-hypocrisy/ar-AARMXis?ocid=entnewsntp

‘I Think We Should Throw Those Books In A Fire’: Movement On Right To Target Books

 (By Aaron Blake, Washington Post, 10 November 2021)

 Perhaps the most infamous quote of the 2021 Virginia governor’s race — and indeed of any 2021 race — belongs to Democrat Terry McAuliffe: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

What many people might not have fully processed is that the quote stemmed from a debate about books in schools. Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin (R) had attacked McAuliffe for, as governor, vetoing a bill to allow parents to opt their children out of reading assignments they deem to be explicit. The impetus was a famous book from Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, “Beloved,” about an enslaved Black woman who kills her 2-year-old daughter to prevent her from being enslaved herself.

While that effort took place years ago, it was rekindled as a political issue at a telling time. Not only are conservatives increasingly targeting school curriculums surrounding race, but there’s also a building and often-related effort to rid school libraries of certain books.

The effort has been varied in the degree of its fervor and the books it has targeted, but one particular episode this week showed just what can happen when it’s taken to its extremes. Shortly after the election result in Virginia, a pair of conservative school board members in the same state proposed not just banning certain books deemed to be sexually explicit, but burning them.

As the Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star reported Tuesday:

Two board members, Courtland representative Rabih Abuismail and Livingston representative Kirk Twigg, said they would like to see the removed books burned.  “I think we should throw those books in a fire,” Abuismail said, and Twigg said he wants to “see the books before we burn them so we can identify within our community that we are eradicating this bad stuff.”  Abuismail reportedly added that allowing one particular book to remain on the shelves even briefly meant the schools “would rather have our kids reading gay pornography than about Christ.”

It’s easy to caricature a particular movement with some of its most extreme promoters. And there is a demonstrated history of efforts to ban books in schools, including by liberals. Such efforts have often involved classics such as “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Of Mice and Men” for their depictions of race and use of racist language more commonly used at the time the books were written. More recently, conservatives have often challenged books teaching kids about LGBTQ issues.

But advocates say what’s happening now is more pronounced.  “What has taken us aback this year is the intensity with which school libraries are under attack,” said Nora Pelizzari, a spokeswoman at the National Coalition Against Censorship.  She added that the apparent coordination of the effort sets it apart: “Particularly when taken in concert with the legislative attempts to control school curricula, this feels like a more overarching attempt to purge schools of materials that people disagree with. It feels different than what we’ve seen in recent years.”

Even as the news broke Tuesday in Virginia, another school board just outside Wichita, announced that it was removing 29 books from circulation. Among them were another Morrison book, “The Bluest Eye,” and writings about racism in America including August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Fences,” as well as “They Called Themselves the K.K.K.,” a history of the white supremacist group. The books haven’t technically been banned, but rather aren’t available for checking out pending a review.  “At this time, the district is not in a position to know if the books contained on this list meet our educational goals or not,” a school official said in an email.

The day before, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) issued an executive order calling on state education officials to review the books available to students for “pornography and other obscene content.” Abbott indicated before the order that such content needed to be examined and removed if it was found. He reportedly did not specify what the “obscene content” standard for books should be.  Abbott added Wednesday that the Texas Education Agency should report any instances of pornography being made available to minors “for prosecution to the fullest extent of the law.”

The effort builds upon a review launched last month by state Rep. Michael Krause (R), who is running for state attorney general. Krause is targeting books that “contain material that might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex or convey that a student, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

Krause doesn’t say what he intends to recommend about such books, but he accompanied his inquiry with a list of more than 800 of them, including two Pulitzer Prize winner “The Confessions of Nat Turner” by William Styron and Pulitzer finalist “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

There has also been an effort by Republicans in Wisconsin not focused on books, but broadly on the use of certain terminology in teaching students. As The Hill’s Reid Wilson reported about the state GOP’s particular effort to ban critical race theory from schools:

[State Rep. Chuck] Wichgers (R), who represents Muskego in the legislature, attached an addendum to his legislation that included a list of “terms and concepts” that would violate the bill if it became law.  Among those words: “Woke,” “whiteness,” “White supremacy,” “structural bias,” “structural racism,” “systemic bias” and “systemic racism.” The bill would also bar “abolitionist teaching,” in a state that sent more than 91,000 soldiers to fight with the Union Army in the Civil War.  The list of barred words or concepts includes “equity,” “inclusivity education,” “multiculturalism” and “patriarchy,” as well as “social justice” and “cultural awareness.”

Back in September, a school district in Pennsylvania reversed a year-long freeze on certain books almost exclusively by or about people of color. A similar thing happened in Katy, Tex., near Houston, where graphic novels about Black children struggling to fit in were removed and quickly reinstated last month. Many such fights have been concentrated in Texas.

There has also been a recent effort by a conservative group in Tennessee to ban books written for young readers about the civil rights struggle. Supporters cite the anti-critical race theory law the state passed earlier this year. And school officials in Virginia Beach recently announced they’d review books, including ones about LGBTQ issues and Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” after complaints from school board members.  Indeed, oftentimes the books involved are the same.

As the Los Angeles Times reported this week, such battles are part of a much larger debate over excluding books that has been injected with new intensity amid the anti-critical race theory push and now, apparently, with the demonstrated electoral success of that approach.  The Spotsylvania County, Va., example is an important one to pick out. While the two members floating burning books have aligned with conservatives, the vote was unanimous. It was 6-0 in favor of reviewing the books for sexually explicit content. School officials expressed confidence in their vetting process but acknowledged it’s possible certain books with objectionable content got through that process.

The question, as with critical race theory, is in how wide a net is cast. Sexually explicit content is one thing; targeting books that make students uncomfortable or deal in sensitive but very real subjects like racial discrimination is another.  There is clearly an audience in the conservative movement for more broadly excluding subjects involving the history of racism and how it might impact modern life. And while it’s difficult to capture the targeting of books on a quantitative level nationwide, this is an undersold subplot in the conservative effort to raise concerns about what children might learn in school.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/11/10/i-think-we-should-throw-those-books-fire-movement-builds-right-target-books/?utm_campaign=wp_todays_headlines&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_headlines&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F3541dc9%2F618cf7c59d2fdab56b84bbc5%2F59698df69bbc0f6d71c2fb70%2F44%2F71%2F618cf7c59d2fdab56b84bbc5

COVID Effects On Businesses

How The Pandemic Pushed Restaurant Workers Over The Edge

(By Eli Rosenberg, Washington Post, 24 May 2021)

 Jim Conway started working in restaurants in 1982, making $2.13 an hour, plus tips.  And though the world has changed significantly in the nearly 40 years since then, his hourly wage has not. At the Olive Garden outside of Pittsburgh where he worked when the pandemic hit last year, he was making $2.83 an hour, the minimum wage for tipped workers in Pennsylvania, plus tips. So after being furloughed for months last spring, Conway, 64, decided to retire.

Being paid the rough equivalent of a chocolate bar an hour from the chain was little incentive for him to stick it out longer in the industry after so many years, especially with tips no longer a reliable source of income and lingering health concerns about covid-19.  “The main issue for me was safety,” Conway said. “There are lots of people who don’t want to participate in the old ways.”

Conway is one of the millions of workers who left the restaurant industry during the pandemic and haven’t come back. The industry has 1.7 million fewer jobs filled than before the pandemic, despite posting almost a million job openings in March, along with hotels, and raising pay 3.6 percent, an average of 58 cents an hour, in the first three months of 2021.

Restaurant chains and industry groups say a shortage of workers like Conway is slowing their recovery, as the sector tries to get back on its feet amid sinking covid cases, falling restrictions and resurgent demand in many areas around the country.

The issue has quickly become political, with Republicans blaming the labor crunch on the Biden administration’s move to boost federal unemployment insurance supplement, which has been a central part of the government’s response to the pandemic for most of the past year. GOP leaders and business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce say the extra unemployment insurance is a disincentive for some workers to return to work.

In interviews with The Washington Post, 10 current and former workers expressed a wide range of reasons they are or were reluctant to return to work. Some, like Conway, have left the industry or changed careers, saying they felt like the industry was no longer worth the stress and volatility.  Others said jobs that didn’t pay enough for them to make ends meet no longer felt appropriate to them. Others left after disputes with managers — over issues around safety and pay — and other flash points that have emerged in the past year.

All described the pandemic as an awakening — realizing that long-held concerns about the industry were valid, and compounded by the new health concerns. And forced to stop working or look for other jobs early on in the pandemic, many realized they had other options.  “The staffing issue has actually a lot more to do with the conditions that the industry was in before covid and people not wanting to go back to that, knowing what they would be facing with a pandemic on top of it,” said Crystal Maher, 36, a restaurant worker in Austin, who’s become more active on the industry’s labor issues in the past year. “People are forgetting that restaurant workers have actually experienced decades of abuse and trauma. The pandemic is just the final straw.”

Tonya Breslow, the owner of Mis en Place, a restaurant staffing firm, said a huge number of restaurants she works with are dealing with shortages.  The firm recently surveyed 2,000 line cooks and back-of-the-house restaurant workers nationally and found just over a quarter, 26 percent, reported leaving the industry, while 41 percent of workers said they were still employed in the industry. That left about a third of respondents who had not gone back to work.  Of that group, most workers said they were not yet back, because they were either looking for the right opportunity, they had concerns about safety during the pandemic, or they did not plan to return to the industry.

A turbulent industry

The restaurant industry is famously volatile, home to strong personalities, tense workplaces, grinding hours and unpredictable scheduling. Issues like tip and wage theft, sexual harassment, and drug and alcohol abuse can be widespread, and there is often little in the way of formal job benefits such as health care, vacation time, sick pay or a livable minimum wage, though many workers do well in tips during flush times.

Turnover is a way of life; the average job tenure for hourly food service workers is less than two months, according to data compiled by Mis en Place.  This constant churn was affecting Jazz Salm’s life even before the pandemic.  The 37-year-old had worked for Carrabba’s Italian Grill, a Florida-headquartered chain, at different locations for more than 15 years, but said she had to find another job after one of the restaurants’ outposts, near Miami, burned down.  She got a job at a Chili’s in that area in early March of last year, but was furloughed when the pandemic shuttered the business after her first week.

It took her months to get approved for unemployment insurance in Florida, as the state’s system struggled to process the flood of applications in the early months of the crisis.  By the end of summer, Salm found a job at a Walmart, after moving back in with her mother in Sarasota. But shortly after starting work there, she registered a fever during the screening the store administered to workers before they clocked in, and was sent home to quarantine. The company required a two-week, quarantine, she said, even though she had tested negative days a few days before developing the fever.

Walmart pays employees if they’re sent home for failing a health screening, but Salm said she was unaware of the benefit, and thought she’d have to go two weeks without a paycheck.  She decided to quit the job and drive up the coast to go stay with a friend who had invited her to come live at her house in Upstate New York. She slept in her car along the way.  She said she tried to find a job at a restaurant but couldn’t. So she started taking care of her friend’s 81-year-old father-in-law, who had just returned from the hospital after receiving chemotherapy for throat cancer. The money takes care of her rent, groceries and some spending money.

She said she may return eventually to the food service industry in Florida, where restaurant owners have complained vociferously about the worker shortage, but it will take her time. She won’t be fully vaccinated until mid-June, for starters. And she wonders about getting trained and going into medical caregiving full time.  “I’m trying to trust the process and hope that this all works out and there’s not another spike or anything else,” she said. “The restaurant industry really doesn’t guarantee the money that I used to make, with this pandemic. Because if it flares up again, or God forbid something happens in the restaurant, you have to close it down, you’re out of work for weeks and there’s nothing you can do to make money. Other than find another job.”

Losing the city’s best

Allan Creasy, 39, had worked in restaurants and bars for more than two decades, most recently as a bartender at Celtic Crossing, an Irish bar in Memphis, where he was voted the city’s best bartender three times over the years by readers of the city’s alt-weekly newspaper, the Memphis Flyer.  Like others, Creasy said the pandemic proved to be the tipping point for him, exacerbating long-standing labor issues in the industry and drawing attention to how low his wages were: $2.13 an hour before tips — the minimum wage for tipped positions in Tennessee and at the federal level. 

After three months back at the bar after the initial lockdown, Creasy decided to quit and pursue a career change.  “I didn’t come back to the same job I left previously,” he said. “It was very difficult to constantly have to police people about mask-wearing. It was very difficult to try to bartend and run out to the back parking lot to deliver to-go food, and to deal with Uber Eats drivers and the like, while making significantly less money than I’d been making previously.”

And the pay had gotten worse — with his income dropping from about $60,000 a year around 2011 to less than $40,000 before the pandemic, he said.  “I’ve seen the number of people who are passionate about the restaurant industry slowly ebb away over the last 20 years,” he said. “In my opinion, it’s because the server’s minimum wage hasn’t changed. There is this belief that servers and bartenders are interchangeable.”  Creasy, who has a bachelor’s degree in history, has been doing fundraising and social media work for a local political action committee since. He’s making about the same amount of money he did at the bar but doing something that feels closer to his heart with less risk.  “You had so many folks working in the industry because they loved it, but now so many folks found a job in a warehouse making $15 an hour, or making as much money driving for Uber Eats, all these different businesses,” he said. “It’s not that we’re on unemployment. We did our unemployment stint, and we found something else.”

Nathaniel Santiago, 20, who works at a McDonald’s in the Fort Lauderdale area in Florida, said he believes the industry’s low wages are playing a role.  He had to move back in with his parents last year after losing his job at a manufacturing facility, before finding work at the fast-food chain, where he said he’s making $11 an hour — just $1,760 per month for full-time work, with no health care. That’s about $4 an hour below what is estimated to be a living wage for a single person with no children in that area — the minimum amount calculated for a person to be able to meet basic standards of living.

He also believes unemployment insurance is playing a role in the shortage, saying he’s heard from some friends and family members who say they are happy getting by with support from the government in the meantime.  “We need to pay workers $15 an hour at the moment,” he said. “People want to talk about inflation or that if you pay everybody $15 an hour, everything is going to get more expensive, but it already is. Food, clothing, gasoline, rent — you name it.”  Peter DeQuattro, 36, a line cook in Memphis who recently left a job because it paid less than $15 an hour, said he thinks the pandemic has changed the paradigm for low-wage workers — giving people more confidence to demand better wages.  “There is a growing movement of people, including myself, that just flat out refuse to work for somebody that isn’t willing to pay a living wage,” he said.

Companies dangle bonuses, incentives, appetizers

There are signs that businesses are reacting to the shortage.  Companies that pay less than $15 an hour — the amount many liberal economists and labor advocates say should be a baseline to provide people with something closer to a living wage in many areas of the country — are increasingly dangling incentives, bonuses and pay raises in front of workers in the hopes of staffing up. Pay is increasing in the industry as well: The median wage for nonmanagement restaurant and bar workers rose 70 cents an hour, to $14.50, in the past three months — a significant 5.1 percent jump.

Costco, Chipotle and McDonald’s are among the publicly traded companies that have announced wage increases in recent weeks, and others, like Target, raised their wages in 2020 as the pandemic drew more attention to the plight of workers.  Local media outlets have been flooded with tales of the worker shortage, written mostly from the perspective of businesses, from Santa Fe to Connecticut. A brewery in Albuquerque is offering workers a free 64-ounce growler of beer after every shift; Applebees is offering free appetizers to people who apply to jobs, as it seeks to hire thousands of workers across the country.

Breslow, the owner of the staffing firm Mis en Place, knows restaurant owners who are offering bonuses as high as $3,000 to new hires, and others who are adding health insurance and 401(k) benefits to employee incentive packages.  “The country is scrambling to get that 33 percent,” Breslow said, referring to those workers who have not returned to the industry. “The leverage is unreal.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/05/24/restaurant-workers-shortage-pay/

 

 

The Perfect Storm Making Everything You Need More Expensive

(By Hanna Ziady, CNN Business, 9 June 2021)

 Steel, lumber, plastic and fuel. Corn, soybeans, sugar and sunflower oil. Houses, cars, diapers and toilet paper. Prices are rising almost everywhere you look.  The post-pandemic recovery is in full swing and the global economy is struggling to keep up. Following a collapse at the start of the pandemic as businesses closed and millions of workers lost jobs, demand has rebounded with a vengeance, spurred by government stimulus and consumers flush with savings.

But companies that idled factories or put workers on furlough during lockdowns are now unable to secure enough raw materials to build the houses, make the cars or assemble the appliances that are suddenly in high demand.  Companies are furiously trying to restock inventories following last year's global recession, straining supply chains already reeling from the pandemic to breaking point. A shortage of shipping containers and bottlenecks at ports have made matters worse and increased the cost of moving products around the world. Throw in accidents, cyberattacks, extreme weather and the huge disruption caused by the desperate hunt for cleaner sources of energy, and you have a perfect storm.

There's no telling how long demand will outpace supply, especially as the pandemic continues to rampage through some of the world's biggest economies. But there have already been shortages of everything from microchips and chicken to chlorine and cheese, and prices are spiking.

The big question is whether shortages and price hikes are temporary byproducts of the pandemic, or if the global economy is changing in ways that could permanently hike the cost of doing business and usher in a new era of inflation. The answer has huge implications for workers, investors, companies and governments. 

What is certain is that, for now at least, inflation is back and it's widespread.  Inflation in countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development surged in April to the highest level since 2008. Energy price hikes boosted average annual inflation across OECD countries to 3.3%. But prices are rising even when volatile food and energy costs are excluded.

How did we get here?

With US gasoline prices at a seven-year high, it's easy to forget that oil futures crashed last year. Brent crude, the global benchmark, briefly plunged below $20 a barrel last April, as coronavirus lockdowns cratered demand from airlines, motorists and manufacturers.  Brent has since shot up to over $70 a barrel on a dramatic turnaround in demand. US oil hit $70 a barrel on Sunday for the first time in nearly three years. A similar phenomenon is playing out across a host of commodities, industries and products.  "We've never really had anything quite that violent and rapid, both in terms of the change down and the change back up," said George Calhoun, director of the quantitative finance program at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. "It's clear that [the economic rebound] created a lot of disruptions, not just in supply chains, but in business models."

Take the auto industry, a prime example of how the events of the past year have upended supply chains, changed consumer behavior and are now fueling price pressures.  The pandemic temporarily shuttered car factories last year, while the recession that followed torpedoed sales. When automakers responded by cutting back vehicle production and thus orders for microchips, semiconductor manufacturers reassigned spare capacity to companies making smartphones, laptops and gaming devices — products in high demand from housebound consumers.

Then, when car sales bounced back faster than expected, manufacturers found themselves at the back of the line for chips. Widespread shortages have forced the likes of Ford (F), Volkswagen (VLKAF), Fiat Chrysler (FCAU) and Nissan (NSANF) to slash production and idle plants in some cases.  That has pushed the price of new cars higher and boosted demand for used vehicles, which are now one of the main sources of inflation in the United States.  Rental car companies, which sold thousands of vehicles early on in the pandemic to shore up their finances, are adding to the crush of demand and holding on to stock that would otherwise have been put up for sale.  At the same time, stimulus checks and low interest rates have made vehicle purchases more accessible to households, many of which want to avoid public transportation and carpooling during the pandemic.

The price of used cars and trucks in the United States jumped 10% over the previous month in April — the biggest increase since 1953, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Prices were up 21% compared with a year earlier, making used cars the primary driver of April's surge in US consumer prices.  "Demand continues to exceed supply for new vehicles and we expect this to continue through 2021, in part due to the production disruption," Mike Jackson, the CEO of AutoNation (AN), one of America's biggest car dealers, said on an earnings call with analysts in April.  "More important though, interest rates and consumer preference for vehicle ownership versus ride share and public transportation are supporting demand," he added. "Americans want individual transportation."

Commodity prices surge

As the pandemic recovery takes hold, the cost of raw materials needed to produce consumer goods and power vast infrastructure spending in China is soaring. US President Joe Biden's infrastructure proposal would only increase demand if approved by Congress.  Booming investment into green technologies is also adding to strong demand for metals such as aluminum and copper, which are used in electric vehicles. Tesla (TSLA) recently added $2,000 to the price of its Model 3. CEO Elon Musk blamed rising raw materials costs.  Iron ore, copper and steel, used to make cars, houses and electrical appliances, have hit record price levels in recent weeks. The Bloomberg Commodity Spot Index, which tracks price changes across a range of metals and agricultural commodities, has jumped roughly 60% over the past year.

In Shanghai, the price of rebar, a type of steel used to reinforce concrete, has fallen from record levels in May but is still 16% more expensive than at the end of last year.  Rising costs have pushed producer price inflation in China to its highest level in nearly 13 years. The country's producer price index — which measures the cost of goods sold to businesses — soared 9% in May from a year ago, according to government data released Wednesday.  In the United States, lumber shortages tied to sawmill shutdowns earlier on in the pandemic have spiked prices, adding nearly $36,000 to the price of an average new home, according to an analysis by the National Association of Home Builders Association.

It's not just the construction sector that's feeling the heat. The rising costs of resin and pulp, for example, are prompting Procter & Gamble (PG) and Kimberly-Clark (KMB) to increase the prices of household staples such as tampons, diapers and toilet paper.  A growing list of crises on the supply side has exacerbated the commodities crunch. The Suez Canal blockage delayed goods shipments in March. Drought in South America has weighed on corn and sugar output. A deep freeze in Texas and the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack tightened the market for plastic and fuel, while India's Covid-19 outbreak disrupted ports and supply chains.  "It's really been a perfect storm," said Warren Patterson, head of commodities strategy at ING.

The latest problem: JBS Meat, a major beef and pork producer, suffered a cyberattack that forced the company to shut down plants in North America and Australia last week. Factories have since come back online but the disruption could cause wholesale meat prices to jump, analysts said.  Food prices are already rising due to a surge in demand for agricultural commodities such as corn and soybeans driven by China, where demand for animal feed is soaring as hog herds recover from an African swine fever outbreak, according to Patterson. The government has also been rebuilding depleted domestic corn reserves, he added.

On the supply side, dry weather in Brazil, Thailand and Europe has weighed on crop yields, while Russia, the world's leading wheat exporter, has implemented an export tax to bolster domestic supplies and cool prices.  Global food prices rose for a twelfth consecutive month in May and at their fastest monthly rate in more than a decade, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. The FAO Food Price Index, which tracks a wide range of products, was nearly 40% higher last month than its level a year ago.

While the cost of raw ingredients accounts for a small portion of the price that consumers pay for goods in supermarkets and restaurants, food companies such as Nestlé (NSRGY) and Unilever (UL) have already announced price increases on certain product lines in response to commodity inflation.  An increase in supply could ease prices gains, particularly because at these levels there is strong incentive for farmers to plant more crops, Patterson said. In other words, the trend could be temporary.  "The move we've seen across most commodities is part of the usual recovery, a cyclical uplift," he added. "As we see the global economy normalize, once we've recovered, demand will ease off and I expect prices to. I'm not of the view that we're in a commodities super cycle."

Logistics and labor costs climb

Commodities are not the only factor driving prices higher, however.  Logistics and labor costs have also increased and a shortage of workers in some industries could intensify pressure on companies to raise wages even further.  "When it comes to the economy we're building, rising wages aren't a bug; they're a feature," Biden said in a speech during a recent visit to Cleveland, Ohio.  Labor shortages, which have also become a problem in Europe, are partly related to the speed at which economies reopened and are likely to normalize once welfare payments dry up, stimulus checks have been spent and workers in sectors such as hospitality and travel feel more confident that businesses won't be forced to shut again, said Andrew Kenningham, chief Europe economist at Capital Economics.

But that's little consolation to companies trying to get products out the door. For Whirlpool (WHR), which makes washing machines, fridges and ovens, the rising cost of commodities, labor and logistics has led to several rounds of price increases.  "That's the only way to mitigate significant cost inflation," CEO Marc Bitzer said in an interview with Bloomberg Television last month. "There is talk or hope that this is a temporary blip. We see it elevated for a sustained period," he added.  Supply chain constraints have forced the company to make products based on the goods it has available rather than on customer orders. "That is anything but efficient or normal but that's how you have to run it right now," Bitzer said. "The supply chain is pretty much upside down."

In Germany, the industrial heart of Europe, supply chain disruptions exacerbated by the Suez Canal blockage offer one possible explanation for an unexpected drop in industrial orders in April, according to Carsten Brzeski, head of research at ING.  A growing list of companies around the world have flagged higher supply chain costs — from engine manufacturer Cummins (CMI) to exercise equipment maker Peloton (PTON) — partly driven by soaring shipping charges, which have made it much more expensive to move goods. If demand remains elevated, more firms may opt to pass these costs on to customers.

The Logistics Managers' Index, a US economic indicator, attests to rising cost pressures in supply chains. The monthly gauge asks corporate supply chiefs where they see future expenses relating to inventory, transportation and warehousing.  In May, respondents predicted that over the next 12 months costs across all three categories would experience their highest increase in the nearly 5-year history of the index.

The end of easy choices

With price hikes apparent on store shelves and in official data, inflation expectations among businesses and consumers are rising, according to various surveys. That in itself poses a challenge. If businesses and consumers think that higher prices are here to stay, they may change their behaviors in ways that cause price pressures to persist.  For example, workers might demand higher wages, forcing companies to increase the price of their goods and placing additional upward pressure on salaries.

At least for now, central bankers are of the view that price hikes will prove transient and are unlikely to lead to persistently higher inflation — even as some economists including former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and former Bank of England governor Mervyn King sound the alarm.  "Neglecting inflation leaves global economies sitting on a time bomb," Deutsche Bank economists warned in a research note this week. If central banks wait too long to raise interest rates they will be forced into "abrupt" policy changes, causing significant disruption to markets and the economy, they argued.

Yet Federal Reserve officials remain sanguine. "Although continued vigilance is warranted, the inflation and employment data thus far appear to reflect a temporary misalignment of supply and demand that should fade over time as the demand surge normalizes, reopening is completed, and supply adapts to the post-pandemic new normal," Lael Brainard, a Federal Reserve governor said in a speech last week.  Policymakers in the United States and Europe are "looking through" upward pressure on prices and "basing monetary policy decisions on where they think inflation will be in two years' time rather than in the next six to 12 months," said Kenningham of Capital Economics.

Still, whereas a year ago concerns centered on deflation, the risks now are "much more balanced and possibly tilted to the upside in some cases," Kenningham told CNN Business.  "The risks of inflation rising on a sustained basis are much higher in the United States than in Europe," he added, pointing to far more generous financial support for US households, which has propped up income and helped boost savings to levels not seen in more than 70 years.  "In brief," wrote the Deutsche Bank economists, "the easy policy decisions of the disinflationary 1980-2020 period appear to be behind us."

https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/09/business/rising-prices-inventories-post-pandemic/index.html

Marvel And DC Comics Face Backlash Over Pay: ‘They Send A Thank You Note And $5,000 – The Movie Made $1 Billion’

 As comics giants make billions from their storylines and characters, writers & artists are speaking out about the struggles for fair pay.

(Sam Thielman, The Guardian, 9 August 2021)

Watch any superhero movie and you will see a credit along the lines of “based on the comic book created by”, usually with the name of a beloved and/or long-dead writer or artist. But deep, deep in the credits scroll, you will also see “special thanks” to a long roster of comic book talent, most of them still alive, whose work forms the skeleton and musculature of the movie you just watched. Scenes storyboarded directly from Batman comics by Frank Miller; character arcs out of Thor comics by Walt Simonson; entire franchises, such as the Avengers films or Disney+ spinoff The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, that couldn’t exist without the likes of Kurt Busiek or Ed Brubaker.

The “big two” comic companies – Marvel and DC - may pretend they’ve tapped into some timeless part of the human psyche with characters such as Superman and the Incredible Hulk, but the truth is that their most popular stories have been carefully stewarded through the decades by individual artists and writers. But how much of, say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s (MCU) $20bn-plus box office gross went to those who created the stories and characters in it? How are the unknown faces behind their biggest successes being treated?

Not well, according to Brubaker who, with Steve Epting, revived Captain America’s sidekick Bucky Barnes to create the Winter Soldier, portrayed by Sebastian Stan in Marvel’s films and shows. “For the most part, all Steve and I have got for creating the Winter Soldier and his storyline is a ‘thanks’ here or there, and over the years that’s become harder and harder to live with,” Brubaker recently wrote in a newsletter.

“I have a great life as a writer and much of it is because of Cap and the Winter Soldier bringing so many readers to my other work,” he added. “But I also can’t deny feeling a bit sick to my stomach sometimes when my inbox fills up with people wanting comments on the show.” (Marvel told the Guardian it had to “decline to comment out of respect for the privacy of [Brubaker and Epting’s] personal conversations [with the company].”)

Comic creators are “work-for-hire”, so the companies they work for owe them nothing beyond a flat fee and royalty payments. But Marvel and DC also incentivise popular creators to stay on with the promise of steady work and what they call “equity”: a tiny share of the profits, should a character they create or a storyline they write become fodder for films, shows or merch. For some creators, work they did decades ago is providing vital income now as films bring their comics to a bigger audience; they reason – and the companies seem to agree – it’s only fair to pay them more. DC has a boilerplate internal contract, which the Guardian has seen, which guarantees payments to creators when their characters are used. Marvel’s contracts are similar, according to two sources with knowledge of them, but harder to find; some Marvel creators did not know they existed.

A Marvel spokesman said there was no restrictions on when creators could approach the company about contracts, and said that they are having ongoing conversations with writers and artists pertaining to both recent and past work. A DC spokesman did not return multiple requests for comment. But the use of these contracts is at these companies’ discretion and the promised money can fall by the wayside.

“The squeaky wheel gets the grease,” Jim Starlin, who created Thanos, recently told the Hollywood Reporter; Starlin negotiated a bigger payout after arguing that Marvel had underpaid him for its use of Thanos as the big bad of the MCU. Prolific Marvel writer Roy Thomas got his name added to the credits of Disney+ series Loki after his agent made a fuss. But these are creators that Marvel needs to keep happy; things can go very differently if nobody cares when you complain.

Bestselling author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who wrote a run of Marvel’s Black Panther and followed Brubaker and Epting’s Captain America run with his own a few years later, says that he believes Marvel has moral obligations to its artists and writers that go beyond contracts.  “Long before I was writing Captain America, I read [Brubaker and Epting’s] Death of Captain America storyline, and Return of the Winter Soldier, and it was some of the most thrilling storytelling I’d ever read,” Coates says. “I’d rather read it than watch the movies – I love the movies too – but it doesn’t seem just for them to extract what Steve and Ed put into this and create a multi-billion dollar franchise.”

Coates says he feels fairly treated when it comes to his own work, but he is adamant that lesser known names deserve better treatment from the big studios, no matter what their contracts say: “Just because it’s in a contract doesn’t make it right. If I have some kind of leverage over you, I can get you to sign a contract to fuck you over. It’s just legalist.”

Over the decades, Marvel and DC have become parts of Fortune 500 companies: the Walt Disney Company owns Marvel, and DC is owned by a subsidiary of AT&T. Now, deciding what share of the success their comic creators deserve is a matter of complex wrangling between Marvel and DC, which want to maintain good relations with their talent, and the vast bureaucracies above them.

Among creators, there is a general sense that it has become harder to get paid at Marvel. One source told the Guardian that Marvel subtracted its own legal fees from a protracted negotiation over royalty payments. Others who have worked for DC and Marvel say both count on artists and writers preferring not to spend time chasing them for royalties.

“Lawyer up, always, with comic book company contracts,” says Jimmy Palmiotti, longtime writer of DC characters such as Jonah Hex and Harley Quinn. “They are not in the business of feeding you the math.” Once a year, freelancers are allowed to audit the returns on their creations for DC and Marvel, but Palmiotti says it happens too rarely: “I can count on one hand the number of creators who’ve actually audited a major comics company.”

According to multiple sources, when a writer or artist’s work features prominently in a Marvel film, the company’s practice is to send the creator an invitation to the premiere and a cheque for $5,000 (£3,600). Three different sources confirmed this amount to the Guardian. There’s no obligation to attend the premiere, or to use the $5,000 for travel or accommodation; sources described it as a tacit acknowledgment that compensation was due.  Marvel declined to comment on this, citing privacy concerns. “We can’t speak to our individual agreements or contracts with talent,” said a spokesman.

Several sources who have worked with Marvel say that remuneration for contributing to a franchise that hits it big varies between the $5,000 payment, nothing, or – very rarely – a “special character contract”, which allows a select few creators to claim remuneration when their characters or stories are used. There are other potential ways to earn more – many former writers and artists are made executives and producers on Marvel’s myriad movies, cartoons and streaming series, for example – but those deals depend on factors other than legal obligation.  “I’ve been offered a [special character contract] that was really, really terrible, but it was that or nothing,” says one Marvel creator, who asked not to be named. “And then instead of honouring it, they send a thank you note and are like, ‘Here’s some money we don’t owe you!’ and it’s five grand. And you’re like, ‘The movie made a billion dollars.’”

Both Marvel’s “special character contract”, or DC’s equivalent, a “creator equity” contract, are ways to keep creators happy enough that they don’t hold back all of their original creations for competitors. DC pioneered these contracts back in the 1970s and 1980s, responding in part to Marvel’s treatment of Captain America creator Jack Kirby. Jim Shooter, then Marvel’s editor-in-chief, refused to return original art to Kirby unless he signed a lengthy release form allowing the company to adapt his creations – including the Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Black Panther and the X-Men – without any compensation. DC saw an opportunity to score PR points, and offered Frank Miller, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons what appeared to be much better contracts for works such as Ronin and Watchmen. (The company used a technicality to renege within a few years).

Brubaker has recalled once attending Comic-Con, where he watched Roz Kirby yell at Jim Shooter about his mistreatment of her husband in the middle of a panel on creators’ rights. (The panel, incidentally, included Moore and Miller, who were celebrating the apparent fairness of their own contracts at DC.) Decades later, Brubaker helped Marvel find success with his Captain America run with Steve Epting. According to sources, Brubaker and Epting showed up in tuxedos to the premiere party for Captain America: The Winter Soldier, a movie directly based on their comics, only to find that they weren’t on the list. Brubaker texted Sebastian Stan, the actor who played his and Epting’s character, Bucky Barnes, and he let them in.

Some creators told the Guardian that they did not know that Marvel even had the special character contract like DC. In fact, the Guardian has seen an application for the “Marvel Special Character Contract”, in which creators can formally ask Marvel whether one of their characters qualifies for extra payouts. In the application form, Marvel explicitly reserves the right to tell creators their characters aren’t original enough to get the bonus, warning that “the decisions are final” and not subject to appeal. DC uses the same measure; in 2015, the studio was criticised for cancelling payments to writer Gerry Conway for his character Power Girl, which the company retroactively decided was derivative of Supergirl and therefore ineligible for the contract, according to Conway. He no longer receives payments for her, he confirmed to the Guardian. DC did not respond to request for comment.

The Power Girl incident highlights how ethically fuzzy these contracts are, since they’re issued by DC and Marvel, drawn up unilaterally by the companies, and paid out when the companies account for their many films, TV shows, video games, trading cards, action figures and sundry other merch. One creator, who asked to remain anonymous, said he and other creators sometimes go to Target to take pictures of action figures of their characters for which payments are due, to demonstrate that their cheques are short.

DC and Marvel came into their own at a time of change in copyright law. The Copyright Act of 1976 gave artists the one-time right to cancel their contracts with IP holders, an option many exercised after witnessing the mistreatment of Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who were left penniless. Artist Al Jaffee once claimed his pay cheques from EC Comics were issued with contracts on the back, so he couldn’t cash them without signing over the rights to his work. This was a common practice throughout the industry, including at Marvel, and one that was reevaluated in the wake of the act.

As comics publishers evolved into major media operations, their staff grew concerned about mistreatment of talent. There were famous fights over royalties, and thorny questions over what credit was due to thousands of co-creators working in a shared universe. In 2000, a consortium of publishers founded a charity to directly aid artists who’d fallen on the hardest times, called the Hero Initiative. (Marvel is a founding member, and AT&T lets employees donate directly from their paycheques.) By the 1980s, people who worked in comics at every level were fans, in the same way that even the ushers on Broadway can sing and dance if called upon. In 1986, DC editor Paul Levitz and DC president Jeanette Kahn were working on new schemes to more fairly compensate writers and artists. Moore, Gibbons, and Miller’s contracts were meant to usher in a new era of fairness. It was a long time coming: some were already looking askance at DC after its treatment of Siegel and Shuster came to light during the production of the 1978 film Superman.

But Moore and Gibbons’s Watchmen was a huge success, going through multiple reprints – unprecedented for a graphic novel – and DC never had to let its right to republish lapse, so it never did. The pair had a right to a share of merchandise profits; DC produced merch, classified it as “promotional items” and told Moore and Gibbons they weren’t owed anything. The vaunted in-house contracts that can make creators’ lives livable can always be subverted.

To the extent that there is any semblance of fairness in the industry now, it’s primarily Levitz’s doing, alongside Kahn and Karen Berger, who is now at Dark Horse Comics. Levitz left DC in 2009, but his influence is still felt across the industry.  “You want to create a situation where you never get to the old Russian joke where they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work,” Levitz says. “You want people to win when the companies win. I’m proud of the fact that we improved the quality of how we treated creative people.” More than one creator recounts calling Levitz to ask for more money because of a scene in a lucrative Batman movie that lifted plot points or names from their work, then being shocked when they got it.

Many of his peers say that Levitz was a bulwark against meddling by executives at Warner Brothers. For years, he blocked the publication of Watchmen sequels, of which Moore and Gibbons disapproved – something DC did soon after Levitz left, to widespread condemnation. Without another Levitz, the “big two” are once again attracting the criticism that led to the creation of these elusive “special” contracts in the first place. Some creators have left the medium entirely, but others have founded their own studios, such as Image and Dark Horse, providing creators with alternative outlets. As Marvel and DC may find, more creators – Brubaker and Jupiter’s Legacy creator Mark Millar are already among them – will simply not work for them again.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/aug/09/marvel-and-dc-face-backlash-over-pay-they-sent-a-thank-you-note-and-5000-the-movie-made-1bn?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-1

Oscars Analysis: How Chadwick Lost, Frances Won and the Show Went Off the Rails

 (By Scott Feinberg, The Hollywood Reporter, April 26,2021)

Sunday night's 93rd Academy Awards brought an end to the longest Oscar season in 87 years — one that considered 14 months' worth of films, and that wrapped up 441 days after the 92nd — at downtown Los Angeles' Union Station, which, as others have noted, was fitting, because it was, in some ways, a trainwreck.

The show was produced by extremely talented people (Steven Soderbergh, Stacey Sher and Jesse Collins) under unenviable circumstances (during a global pandemic, with most commercial films pushed to next season when more movie theaters will have reopened, etc.). But the Oscars are not graded on a curve, and unfortunately far too many decisions about the ceremony were badly miscalculated.

I can only assume that the producers insisted upon and the Academy granted them final cut, and the producers, recognizing that nothing could stop this from being the lowest-rated Oscars in history, decided to try a bunch of out-there stuff: not only not having a host (for the third year in a row), but also having no comedy bits, music performances or film clips; giving a biographical sketch of virtually every nominee; waiting until deep into the show to present a highly anticipated award; presenting not one but two Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Awards on the air; not playing off any longwinded acceptance speeches; and presenting best picture as the third-to-last award of the night, rather than the last.

The good news, I suppose, is that we now know beyond any shadow of a doubt that the Academy's longtime accountants, PwC, do not share the voting results with the producers before the envelopes are unsealed, because there is no way that the producers would have chosen to end the show with the best actor Oscar going not to the late Chadwick Boseman (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom), whose widow was in attendance and ready to give a speech, as she had at virtually every other awards show this season, but instead to Anthony Hopkins (The Father), who apparently couldn't be bothered to show up.

The producers gambled, hoping for a big emotional moment to end the show, and unfortunately lost in shocking fashion — not because Hopkins isn't a worthy winner (he is), but because the night ended with a gut-punch rather than a group celebration. (For the record, best picture has been the last award presented at every Oscars ceremony since 1972, when Charlie Chaplin was given an honorary award after best picture was announced. It also was not last at several ceremonies early in the Academy's history, but was at the vast majority of them.)

What, by the way, was all the hoopla about the telecast being like a movie? Yes, it was shot with high-def cameras, but other than that? It feels like that was something the producers felt they had to say in order for the telecast to receive the classification of a film/TV production, which, in turn, allowed them to have attendees go maskless while on-camera — which itself was a bit questionable, not because it wasn't safe (everyone in attendance was COVID-tested multiple times), but because it doesn't really model best practices for the world at a time when even the vaccinated president of the United States is still masking up, and sets up Hollywood to be called "a bunch of hypocrites."

Anyway, more interesting than the show is how we wound up with the 23 winners that we did.

Chloé Zhao's Nomadland was the best picture frontrunner from start to finish, which is not an easy thing to sustain (ask the folks behind La La Land), especially in a season as long as this one — people often tire of the same narratives and winners.

The Academy's preferential ballot makes predicting best picture trickier than it used to be, but the reality is there weren't any alternatives to Nomadland of the same caliber, and no one fellow nominee ever really gained enough momentum to seriously threaten it — not even the Netflix-backed Mank, with its field-leading 10 noms, or The Trial of the Chicago 7, a movie theoretically built for the preferential ballot.

Nomadland is a beautifully made movie that has something to say about America today (even if it is set a few years ago), and when people head into the Dolby for future Oscars ceremonies and scan the names of past best picture winners, nobody will blink an eyelid when they see Nomadland among them, as it also would have won in most recent years, as would have Zhao, who became the second woman and first woman of color to win best director. In other words, no pandemic-era asterisk necessary.

Something that should be noted about Nomadland's rise and endurance: It's a testament to the taste and understated but effective campaign skills — working within a budget — of Searchlight's departing chiefs Nancy Ultey and Steve Gilula (and their team), class-acts who previously won top honors for Slumdog Millionaire, 12 Years a Slave, Birdman and The Shape of Water and, deservedly enough, get to go out on top.

Another notable thing about Nomadland's victory: It is the first truly female-centric best picture winner since Terms of Endearment 37 years ago! Winners like Chicago and Million Dollar Baby had male leads alongside female leads, but Nomadland was The Frances McDormand Show.

It's appropriate that McDormand became only the second woman to have won at least three best actress Oscars (Katharine Hepburn won four) — she's that good — although it must have been tough for Glenn Close to have to watch that from the audience, as Close's loss in the supporting category (for the decidedly mediocre Hillbilly Elegy) makes her 0-for-8, the worst Oscar record of any actress ever. Poor Diane Warren also lost again, making her 0-for-12 in the song category.

I was one of the few who predicted McDormand's win, reasoning that if Academy members loved Nomadland as much as they seemed to, then they clearly must have loved McDormand's performance, too, since the two are inextricable. Moreover, in a season in which the top contender, according to one Academy member with whom I corresponded, was "apathy," one could feel confident that voters actually watched Nomadland, if no other film, prior to voting.

Promising Young Woman was also a best picture nominee, meaning it, too, was widely seen and admired, so I assumed Carey Mulligan also had a real shot. But I never really bought the idea that Viola Davis was going to win for Ma Rainey, even after her surprising SAG Award win, given that the Academy overlooked her film in the best picture category. (This fact should have also given many of us more pause in assuming that Boseman would win over Hopkins, whose film, The Father, was a best picture nominee, and had already proven popular enough to win BAFTA Awards for Hopkins and adapted screenplay.)

It's unfortunately brutally hard to win an Oscar as a film's sole nominee, especially this year, when Academy members who did vote saw fewer movies than in years past, and, I would guess, the percentage of Academy members who voted at all was lower than in any other year. Frankly, I suspect that most voters cast their final ballots without having even watched The United States vs. Billie Holiday (featuring Andra Day's Golden Globe-winning performance) or Pieces of a Woman (for which Vanessa Kirby won Venice's best actress prize).

By the way, the fact that most voters only watched a handful of nominees is also probably why, to the surprise of most, the best original song Oscar was awarded to "Fight for You" from Judas and the Black Messiah — a best picture nominee — and not to more heavily campaigned songs from, say, a film that was in contention for but missed a best picture nom ("Speak Now" from One Night in Miami), a non-English-language film ("Io si [Seen]" from The Life Ahead) or a Will Ferrell comedy that was otherwise never part of the awards conversation ("Husavik" from Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga).

Sometimes, though, a true underdog can ride a wave all the way to the winner's circle — pardon the pun, you'll get it in a moment — as was the case with the documentary My Octopus Teacher. It was amazing to watch the organic rise of this film, which was not even one of Netflix's internal top priorities until relatively late in the season, when it became undeniable that people simply loved the movie and told all of their friends about it. The fact that it ended up beating Time and Crip Camp is something that would have been unimaginable just a few months ago. It's a great win for South Africa and octopuses everywhere.

Meanwhile, five years after #OscarsSoWhite, the Academy certainly seems to have significantly addressed its struggles with inclusion. Not only was the best picture directed by a woman and the best director that same woman, but both supporting acting winners were people of color (Judas' Daniel Kaluuya and Minari's Yuh-jung Youn, who gave the speeches of the night); the best original screenplay winner was a promising young woman (Promising Young Woman's Emerald Fennell); Ma Rainey's Mia Neal and Jamika Wilson became the first-ever Black winners of the best makeup/hairstyling award; statuettes were awarded to H.E.R., one of the writers of "Fight for You," and John Batiste, one of the composers of the score for Soul, both people of color (Soul, incidentally, was the first Pixar film to feature a Black protagonist); and, in one of my favorite results of the night, Two Distant Strangers, a film about police brutality, won best live-action short, making writer/co-director Travon Free the first-ever Black winner of that award.

The Oscars producers also leaned into diversity in their selection of presenters, which is admirable, although one can't help but wonder what middle-America made of the fact that only four of the 18 presenters — Bryan Cranston, Brad Pitt, Harrison Ford and Joaquin Phoenix — were white males.

The ratings will be out tomorrow. My guess is they will not look pretty. It will be interesting to see how the Academy and ABC react as they begin thinking about the next Oscars ceremony a year — or, more likely, just 10 months — from now, back at the Dolby. But for now, and perhaps for years to come, the conversation regarding the 93rd Oscars will probably center on how a planned farewell to a wonderful actor and gentleman, Boseman, went so terribly wrong.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/race/oscars-2021-analysis-how-chadwick-lost-frances-won-and-the-oscars-went-off-the-rails

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