How to spot manipulated video

Yesterday, I posted about “head lies”, which was mainly about how written words can reveal partial truth that, intentionally or not, is misleading or even deceptive. These days, however, a lot of the disinformation we see is delivered by video. The video above was released today by The Washington Post, and attempts to lay out some of the techniques used to alter videos and some tips on how we can tell they’ve been altered.

This video is good, as far as it goes, though by necessity it can’t go into any great depth about the various techniques. One thing that’s very good is that they show the same video, both unmanipulated and manipulated. At the very least, that helps us understand what they’re talking about.

The video manipulations they show were done to promote rightwing propaganda. That’s not to say that the Left never do it, however, most of what gets spread on social media, and becomes viral, really is from the Right. That may very well change in the upcoming election campaign when propaganda is theoretically more useful because more people are paying more attention. However, there’s likely to be so many video memes, including from foreign countries trying to influence the election, that it’s at least theoretically possible that none of them will be very effective. Lemons into lemonade?

As with avoiding “head lies”, the fight against being manipulated requires us to be sceptical and wary, especially of video, given how accustomed we are to believing and trusting video evidence. This video is a good contribution toward giving us the tools we need to be better guardians of truth.

To ‘Shepard’ truth and facts

The video above is from Brian Tyler Cohen, an actor and producer who is the on-camera host, and former managing editor for, Occupy Democrats, a Leftist organisation mostly on Facebook. It’s often been called “unreliable”, for a lot of reasons, however, this particular video features Fox’s Shepard Smith talking about the First Son-in-Law’s appearance at the TIME 100 event, where he said, basically the Russian interference in the 2016 US elections was no big deal (just “a couple Facebook ads”, he said), but the Mueller investigation, well, that nearly destroyed America.

In the video’s first part, Smith, who is pretty much the only sane host the Fox network, explains why Jared was not only wrong about the facts, but also dishonest and flat-out un-American when he blithely dismissed the Russian interference in the 2016 US elections. That’s followed by Cohen’s commentary. The format of this video is pretty typical of what Occupy Democrats now posts to Facebook.

I don’t usually share Occupy Democrats’ Facebook videos, mainly because they’re always interrupted near the beginning with an ad, and the video resumes after the ad. I absolutely hate that, and won’t help spread it. Sharing any Facebook video or post here is more complicated than it needs to be, too. However, Cohen has his own YouTube Channel where he posts the same videos, and his version is what’s up top.

Some of these videos are quite good in whole or in part, and this one is about a serious subject and the commentary at the end is fact-based. It’s also a reasonably good example of what Occupy Democrats’ Facebook videos are like.

Calling out lies is always important, and when Fox does it, it’s even better.

I originally shared the Facebook version to the AmeriNZ Facebook Page. This post is a revised and extended version of that.

The state of America

It has caused a constant state of confusion, the habitual lying by the current occupant of the White House. People of good character cannot understand how anyone can so brazenly and shamelessly lie about things that are so easily checked, and transparently lies. What such people don’t understand is that they’re not playing the same game. It’s not just that the current regime doesn’t care about truth or facts, it’s that they’re focused on one thing alone: Power.

The video above is the latest in Vox’s “Strikethrough” series of videos. They said of it: “For leaders like Trump and Putin, telling big lies isn't about persuasion – it's about power.” The reality is that the constant lying by the current occupant isn’t accidental, nor is it entirely deliberate, at least, not always. Instead, it’s part of a well-proven path to power employed by tyrants since the fascist dictators of decades ago. And there will be no letting up.

What the current regime’s opponents most need to understand is the conundrum they face: Fact-checking and debunking the regime’s constant lies only serves to reinforce them. It’s not because people reject the truth, though the regime’s supporters actively do. Instead, it’s that most people simply don’t pay close attention. When the current occupant’s lies are constantly repeated—even to debunk them—the lies enter people’s vague awareness, and they recall them as something that’s probably true—the opposite of what opponents want to happen.

So, debunking and fact-checking is actually totally counterproductive: It actually reinforces the lies the current occupant tells, gives them legitimacy for the majority of people who aren’t paying attention, and it helps the regime undermine faith in fact, truth and the evidence of our eyes and ears, which the current occupant himself recently told us all to ignore.

There are well-known reasons why this happens. About a month ago, TIME Magazine published “How Your Brain Tricks You Into Believing Fake News”, and it talks in some detail about the reasons that fake news—and the current occupant’s constant lies, too—work, even for smart, educated, and aware people.

And that’s the second thing that the current regime’s opponents most need to understand: People who believe the current occupant’s lies, or his regime’s genuinely fake news, aren’t stupid. They aren’t even necessarily supporters of the current regime. The reality is that the current occupant is playing them like a violin.

How do we move beyond that? We must tell an alternative story. First and foremost, we need to talk about the things that real people really care about. This is the strategy used successfully by Democrats all over the country in special election after special election. Voters don’t want to hear what we’re against—they want to hear what we’re FOR.

Second, we need to stop debunking and fact-checking the current occupant every few minutes. Instead, we need to talk about things that are based only on verifiable truth and that are fact-based, but we mustn’t compare them to the lies of the current occupant. We must pretend he’s never said a word.

Ignoring the current occupant is the hardest thing opponents will ever be called on to do, but it’s also the most necessary. We cannot tell an alternative story if we’re obsessed with singing from the current occupant's song sheet.

There’s an added fact about this strategy: The thing that infuriates the current occupant more than anything else is being ignored. Doing so is sure to make him lash out in unhinged anger, and that behaviour is always unattractive and off-putting to mainstream people, reinforcing his well-deserved image of being “just not right” and emotionally unstable. It’s important that we don't react in anger, but do show sadness and pity, to reinforce the obvious truth, namely, that he is unfit to be president.

None of this is about “attacking” the current occupant, but, rather, about letting him be himself. Meanwhile, we keep presenting our alternative story about the things that real people really care about, always based only on verifiable truth and that are fact-based.

We’ve tried it the other way, always reacting and debunking, and the support for the current occupant remains stubbornly high. It’s time to try a different way. And, anyway, shouldn’t we be focused on where we want to go and how we’ll get there? That’s what ordinary voters want. As well they should.

NOT speaking to the American people

There’s been a very noticeable talking point spouted by every one of Don’s apologists when they’re trying to defend the often unhinged Tweeting by the titular 45th president. They always say that “he’s speaking directly to the American people.” Oh, really? It’s an incredibly laughable and silly attempt at spin, and a pretty brazen lie. They know that, but it’s irrelevant to them and their goal.

Here’s why the claim is false: There are approximately 70 million frequent American users of Twitter, out of 328 million users worldwide. Pew Research found that in 2016 a mere 21% of Americans who used the Internet—not 21% of all Americans—were on Twitter.

Don has 31.8 million followers, which is a lot, absolutely, but he’s not even among the top 20 Twitter users as ranked by number of followers (former President Barack Obama is ranked third, behind Justin Bieber and Katy Perry). Don is ranked 33rd, placing him just above One Direction and behind BBC Breaking News.

So, Don isn’t all that popular in the larger picture, and he doesn’t even reach half of American Twitter users—who are fewer than 25% of Americans who use the Internet. So, that means that—being extremely generous—Don reaches at the very most far fewer than 10 percent of all Americans.

And yet Republicans and Don’s sycophants say Don uses Twitter to talk directly to the American people.

Let’s look at some more numbers. Don received 62,979,636 votes in the 2016 election, which was, of course, some 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton did. So, Don’s Twitter followers are fewer than half than the number of people who voted for him alone—and fewer than a quarter of people who voted.

And yet, Republicans and Don’s sycophants say Don uses Twitter to talk directly to the American people.

Raw numbers aside, who follows Don? When I looked at Don’s followers, Twitter said that there were 162 followers I “might know”. Those people were all either journalists, political commentators, politicians, and/or political activists who absolutely do not support Don. What percentage of all his followers would fall into those categories? What percentage is even American? We have no idea.

So, if you deduct all the journalists, media types and activists throughout the world who follow Don, and also deduct the trolls, this means that the actual number of Americans that Don actually “speaks directly to” through Twitter is pretty insignificant.

And yet, Republicans and Don’s sycophants say Don uses Twitter to talk directly to the American people.

What all of this means is that most Americans who hear about Don’s Twitter tantrums probably hear about them only through newsmedia reports, most of which aren’t entirely favourable. If the newsmedia stopped reporting on Don’s Twitter tantrums, then the number of the American people that Don would be talking to would be very few indeed.

And yet, Republicans and Don’s sycophants would STILL say Don uses Twitter to talk directly to the American people.

As with so many things about Don’s regime, this isn’t about truth or facts, it’s about spin and propaganda. Republicans and Don’s sycophants know very well how few Americans Don is actually talking to, and how few of them actually care or agree with those Tweets. But they can still claim that he’s speaking “directly to the American people” because, in a sense, his is: Few Americans, maybe not the most engaged or sympathetic Americans, but they never actually claim otherwise.

The goal of Republicans and Don’s sycophants is to reinforce their narrative that journalists “lie” and newspapers and media companies are purveyors of “fake news”, and that only Don tells the truth, and he uses Twitter to bypass those “lying” purveyors of “fake news”. They want to undermine the news media and to sow distrust of truth and facts. They’re not really trying to defend Don’s often bizarre Tweets, they’re trying to sell a narrative.

And that’s why it’s important to debunk the incredibly laughable and silly attempt at spin by Republicans and Don’s sycophants. But as long as the newsmedia reports on Don’s Twitter tantrums, that won’t matter at all, and far too many people will accept the talking point.

We must be better than that

If there’s only one thing that those on the centre and left in the USA can agree on, it must be this: Facts matter. This isn’t about rote repetition of the phrase whenever we call out the lies and disinformation of our adversaries, even though debunking them is important. Instead, this means that we must be better than our adversaries in being extra super factually driven.

Today I saw an example of how important that is.

A nominally leftwing site posted a piece headlined, “BREAKING: GOP Launches Bill To Charge You With TERRORISM If You Protest Trump” (all caps in the original). Their Facebook teaser said a similar, “BREAKING: The GOP just launched a new bill to charge you with TERRORISM for protesting Donald Trump,” before adding, “Tyranny has arrived in America.” Not one word of this is true.

To be clear, Don and his Gang absolutely represent an existential threat to democracy, freedom, and liberty, and they absolutely are already flirting with tyranny. However, this was NOT and example of that.

The post, which was shared on the site in January with neither dateline nor byline, declares that, “A Republican lawmaker just introduced…” but that’s not true: It was actually last November when a state senator in Washington state talked about proposing a bill to make it possible to charge protesters that block traffic or disrupt economic activity with a felony for committing “economic terrorism”. I checked the official website of the Washington state senate, and the guy never actually introduced his supposed bill. In fact, he never introduced a single bill in the entire session that ended in December—not one bill.

The post goes on, “This would allow anyone that is deemed ‘disruptive’ to be charged with terrorism,” which is also not true: The guy was talking about economic disruption, and while that may seem like mere semantics, the site’s intent was clearly to imply that anyone engaging in their First Amendment protest rights could be charged with a felony.

The hyperbole continued: “This is the beginning of the end of American democracy as we know it. What’s next, is Team Trump going to start going after every American who posted a disparaging comment about Trump online?” The particular bill they’re talking about doesn’t exist, so the extreme question following is based on hot air and nothing else. It’s also an absurd question that can only be taken seriously if one believed that Republicans were really moving to make “protesting Donald Trump” illegal. The facts do not support that hyperbole.

I mention all of this because it’s an egregious example of propaganda divorced from fact and reality in order to rile up partisans—exactly like the right wing does. We must be better than that.

Every single time we screw up and share something that's utterly untrue (let alone things like this that are just incredibly misleading), our adversaries will jump to rub our noses in it and subject us to abject ridicule. Their media—Fox, their websites, along with their echo chamber on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc., etc., will all join the chorus. That matters because “Middle America”, who we need to win over, will think, "Jeez, the two sides are as bad as each other—always lying and exaggerating." That, in turn, means that when we use undeniably fact-based, unassailable information to mount legitimate criticism, “Middle America” won’t be listening, assuming we’re unreliable and “as bad as” those we criticise. To win, we MUST go out of our way to stick only to verifiable facts. ALWAYS, and without exception.

The particular site is suspicious. It uses a name that’s very similar to a legitimate progressive site, it goes out of its way, it seemed to me, to use emotive, hyperbolic language in an attempt to appeal to those on the Leftward side of Left—think “Bernie or Bust” types. And yet, many of their posts—and I looked at quite a few—don’t use such language consistently, and that made me feel they were posing as a site on the Leftward side of Left. That, or maybe it’s just not edited tightly enough.

In any case, here’s what I do:

I always follow the links to the post’s source(s). If a post on politics doesn’t include links, I move on assuming it’s either lying or incompetent. So, I follow the links—and whatever that links to—to try and get to the original source for the information. Sometimes this turns out to be a self-referential circle of links, with no mainstream verification, and that always raises a red flag. Rarely, I’ll try searching the subject to see if there’s any information from a reliable source. But if I’ve waded through self-referential ooze, I’m not likely to bother.

I try and verify conclusions purported to be based on official things. For example, I’ll read the text of a bill (which is how I found out that the bill in the example I talked about above doesn’t exist at the moment). If there’s a government report, it’s almost always available online somewhere. Same with scientific studies and opinion polls. When I do this, I sometimes don’t think the conclusions the author drew are justified, which has been a topic in several posts on this blog. Most times, however, the conclusions are legitimate, even if framed in a partisan way. But I can’t know that if I don’t check.

All of this can be a lot of work, and it can require a lot of time. So, I have one other rule I always follow: If I’m not certain about the trustworthiness of a site or what it shares, then I don’t share it. I rarely share political things, memes included, for this reason.

We have an obligation to be better than our adversaries. If we keep saying that "Facts Matter", we have to mean it. Scepticism and doubt are among our best tools right now, and that has to apply to those operating (or appearing to operate) on our side as well as those backing our adversaries.

Footnotes: I never link to sites at the farthest ends of the spectrum, so I won’t share a link to the post I’ve been talking about. However, you can copy and paste this link to get there: http://bit.ly/2iNyw28

Also, the site’s reviewed on Media Bias/Fact Check, which, while highly imperfect, is nevertheless pretty fair in its review of the site.

States of delusion: The Rightwing’s latest nutty obsession

There’s a notion popular among the USA’s rightwing at the moment that’s both wrong and dangerous. Nothing new in that, of course, but the danger is to democracy itself because they want minority rule, all based on an utterly delusional view of the United States’ population.

What currently has the USA’s rightwing in a frenzy is the map above: It represents which candidate carried which counties—Blue for Hillary Clinton and Red for Donald Trump. It’s totally misleading and even deceptive, but to the rightwing, the map looks like “proof” that states with large cities—New York and California in particular—would, all by themselves, determine who the US president was if it wasn’t for the Electoral College. That’s absolute nonsense, of course, but to understand why, and why it’s a dangerous belief, we first need to look at some more maps, starting with this one:

This map also shows the results by county, but shades them by percentage: The darker the colour, the higher the percentage for the winning candidate (and, of course, the lighter the colour, the lower the percentage). What this map shows us is that very few counties were solidly Republican or Democratic, and most were shades and tints.

This is shown even more starkly in this map:

This map shows the counties as Red, Blue, or Purple, the latter representing counties where the winning margin for the candidate who won the county—whether Hillary or Don—was 10% or less. As before, the more Blue a colour is, the more heavily it went for Hillary and the more Red it is, the more it went for Don.

Putting all this together, the map at the top of this post is misleading: The USA is NOT a giant swathe of Red, but more Purple than either Red OR Blue. This is born out by election data that shows that Independents—those who are neither Republican nor Democratic—determine most elections because there are somewhat more of them than either Democrats (usually in second place) or Republicans (in third place). It’s important to note that the exact percentages fluctuate constantly, but the Republican Party is always the smallest of the three divisions, and the Democratic Party is always in second place or roughly equal with independents; it’s been this way for many, many years. [Update: Gallup reported in early January that "Independent Political ID in US Lowest in Six Years" as more Americans chose to identify as either Republican or Democratic, but they still outnumber Democrats, in second place, and Republicans, in third place.]

What we can also see from the second and third map is that there are votes for both parties in every state—every, single, state. Even in populous states like California and New York, campaigning there has value, especially if it’s covered by the regional newsmedia. This is because without the Electoral College, every vote matters, whereas with the EC, Republican presidential votes don’t matter much in New York or California, nor do Democratic votes matter in Texas. We cannot possibly know how many people don’t vote in such states because their vote doesn’t matter, but it’s nonsensical to assume it doesn't or wouldn’t matter for such “irrelevant” voters.

Moreover, the rightwing belief conveniently ignores the fact that Texas and Florida both have large cities—Miami is the USA’s fourth largest city and Houston is the sixth—yet Texas is strongly Republican (for now), and Florida is more Purple than anything.

The danger in the rightwing’s delusion is that it creates two Americas: The first is the “real” America, located in the Red counties in the map up top, and “other” Americans in the Blue counties in the same map. The “other” Americans are suspect to rightwingers, in part merely for being Liberal (or, at least, not Conservative), but also for their higher concentration of brown and black people. Rightwing rhetoric constantly talks of Latinx people as being “illegal” and of black people wanting “handouts”. This language both shapes and describes the attitudes that the Rightwing has toward black and brown people, and also toward the cities in which they live.

I’ve seen and read many people—pundits and ordinary people alike—singing the praises of the “real” Americans, and either explicitly or implicitly saying that urban residents are the exact opposite of the supposedly wonderful, kind, thoughtful, and friendly people of the “real” America. Rationally, the view that all rural people are “good” and all urban people are “bad” is no more true than the reverse would be: People are complex and diverse, and it’s bigoted to imply that one set of people is “better” merely because of where they live.

This attitude is also anti-democracy: Elections are waged on the premise that the majority rules, that whoever has the most votes wins the election. There are problems with the way elections are done in the USA, and there are many needed reforms, but it’s nevertheless the foundation on which democracy is built. The obsession with viewing the USA as being divided into “real” Americans and everybody else undermines that precisely because it supposes that the minority should be able to dictate election results.

The biggest problem with the rightwing obsession is that people living in rural areas are a small minority of the USA. According to the US Department of Agriculture (or download the PDF with the data), rural counties account for 72% of the USA’s counties, but only about 15% of the USA’s population in 2014. Put the other way round, 85% of the US population—the overwhelming majority—live in 28% of counties. We see that most dramatically in the map up top, where the large swathes of the USA in red, most of them sparsely populated.

The rural population of the USA declined by 30,000 people per year 2010-2014, and the only rural counties to experience an increase were in scenic areas or counties involved in energy booms. Urban areas, meanwhile, have grown by more than 2 million a year. The rural poverty rate in 2014 was 18.1%, compared to an urban poverty rate to 15.1%.

So, the rightwing obsession is wrong for several reasons, beginning with the fact that the USA is a mostly urban nation, and it’s unthinkable that a mere 15% of the population should be allowed to dictate to the other 85% who the president should be. Also, every state has supporters of both parties, but under the current system using the Electoral College, some voters don’t matter because there are far more supporters of the other party. And, finally, people who live in urban areas are people who live in urban areas, and people who live in rural areas are people who live in rural areas, but they are ALL American. The rightwing needs to learn all these things, the last one in particular.

Democracy matters, and is based on the principle that the majority rules. That didn’t happen in 2016, the second time this century. Making bizarre and bigoted excuses for why that should always be the case is an insult to democracy and liberty, and downright un-American.

The USA deserves more democracy, not less. Conservatives ought to be ashamed of themselves for arguing the opposite.

The important points

• The USA is a mostly urban nation, and is becoming more urban all the time (which is common in many countries).
• Every US state has voters who support both parties – the USA is mostly “purple”, that is, split between the two parties.
• Abolishing the Electoral College would give everyone an equal vote, regardless of where they live, and will make voters of both parties matter in states in which they currently don’t.
• People who live in cities are people who live in cities, and people who live in rural areas are people who live in rural areas; they are ALL American.

Political Notebook 6: The USA’s ‘Ministry of Truth’?

Is the USA heading for its own version of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth? To be sure, the country’s rightwing media, the Republican Party, and Don’s recent campaign all engaged in blatant attempts to re-invent the past and spin the present, both to hide the truth. But now that they have total power in Washington, this has much bigger implications.

Toward the end of the recent presidential campaign, the USA’s mainstream newsmedia began—very belatedly—engaging in real-time fact-checking to not just point out when Don was lying, but also to show the video evidence that he was lying about things he’d actually said. This was, it turned out, a largely hopeless endeavour, since Don’s fervent fans refused to believe anything that contradicted what their Leader was saying then, even if he was denying something they’d heard him say.

As a result of all this, there was a wholesale re-writing of history: President Obama and Hillary Clinton became singlehandedly responsible for the rise of Isis, Obama was responsible for the Global Financial Crisis (and Don’s fans wondered why President Obama didn’t take more presidential action to deal with it—before he was actually president…), and so on.

After eight years of obstructing President Obama, the Republican Party found that all they had to do was blame him for the obstruction and for everything that George Bush 2 had done wrong. They had discovered the core of Orwell’s “MiniTrue”.

The Ministry of Truth wasn’t only about rewriting the past, but also framing the present. That is now at the centre of the incoming regime and its hardcore supporters. Last week, we saw several bizarre examples of this, from various fervent fans, leaders of the hard right, and even Don himself.

Rightwingers in the USA, from the alt-right creeps to run-of-the-mill hard-right types, backed a boycott of PepsiCo because of totally made-up claims about the company’s (conveniently non-white and female) CEO. They called for the boycott over wild accusations of things she’d never actually said, and they quoted her wildly out of context about other things to make it seem as if she’d condemned Don, which she never did.

Then, we saw the spokesbigot for a powerful anti-gay hate group claiming that Planned Parenthood paid “$1500 per week” for people to protest Don and what he’ll do to the USA. To be clear, as if common sense weren’t enough, there is absolutely ZERO evidence that there is even a tiny bit of truth, which means that the bigot must be both lying and fully aware that he’s lying. Not that this is anything new for him, of course.

Even “mainstream” Republicans got into the act. One US Senator that the media decided to anoint as a “voice of reason” when he criticised Don took to social media to say—now that Don is elected—that he wonders why the newsmedia isn’t “reporting on paid rioting”, mimicking Don’s earlier unhinged rant as Leader of the Republican Party. Maybe they don’t report it because it’s a total, absolute and complete lie? Just a guess, Ben.

And then Don himself got into the act of lying about reality. He tweeted an utter lie that he’d “convinced” Ford to not do something they were never—EVER—going to do, which Don knew and decided to lie about, anyway, probably to inflate his ego and make himself seem like a player of some sort. Even the restrained Associated Press called Don’s lie “misleading”.

This is nothing new, of course. A BuzzFeed analysis found that “Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News On Facebook”. What this means is that Don’s most fervent fans are used to fake news, lies, and spin, and have neither the aptitude nor the inclination to seek out facts, and THAT means that we’ll see a LOT more of the this sort of lying, obfuscation, spin, and utter bullshit.

This social media trend carries on in so many ways. Rightwingers on Facebook were sharing their declaration that not only had Don actually won the popular vote and not Hillary Clinton, they said it had been a landslide. As The Washington Post reported, in this case, it wasn't a lie as much clever and selective use of data to change the narrative from the truth—that they lost the popular vote—to one they liked, that they’d actually won it in a landslide. And their bizarre changing of facts to suit their propaganda was popular among rightwingers.

Within the past week, Corey Lewandowski, Don’s campaign manager until he was fired when he allegedly roughed-up a female journalist and then became a paid pro-Trump shill on CNN, declared that Don had “won the election campaign by the largest majority since Ronald Reagan in 1984." That was a lie—a demonstrably false lie, as Mother Jones pointed out. And so did Talking Points Memo. But, hey, at least ol’ Corey was honest about how the Republican FBI Director helped Don win.

Don’s Ministry of Truth may be mostly informal and partly outside of government, but that doesn’t change its intention to hide the truth, to lie about facts, and to spin reality to suit Don’s political ends.

In Don’s America, it seems, Ignorance Is Strength.

November 20: This post has been updated to include information on the attempts by the righwing to pretend that Don won the popular vote and that his was "the largest majority since Ronald Reagan in 1984."

The election will NOT be ‘rigged’

The US election will NOT be rigged. In fact, it’s impossible to rig the US presidential election, so anyone—including Donald and his fervent fans—who claim otherwise either don’t know what they’re talking about or they’re flat out lying, end of story.

The video above is the latest from the Vlog Brothers’ John Green, and goes into great detail about why it’s impossible to rig the presidential election. It does a great job of explaining why this is, including some very simple and clear reasons.

First, the popular vote doesn’t elect the president, the Electoral College does. In order to win the presidency, a candidate has to win at least 270 Electoral Votes, and to do THAT, they need to win the largest number of votes—called a plurality—in enough states to add up to 270.

Each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia have their own election laws. But, it’s not merely 51 elections that have to be rigged, because each state is further divided into smaller units that administer elections (for example, in my native Illinois, it’s county clerks), and that's broken down further to thousands of polling places in individual states.

So, to “steal” an election, a conspiracy would have to rig the election in literally thousands of elections around the country, including areas controlled entirely by Republicans. This is utterly impossible.

In-person voter fraud—that is, where someone votes in place of someone else, living or dead, votes more than once, or votes without being eligible—is incredibly rare. In fact, the frequency of both the lightning strikes that John mentioned and also shark attacks is greater in a single year than in-person voter fraud has been for decades combined.

Absentee vote fraud happens at roughly ten times the frequency of in-person voter fraud, but even it is exceedingly rare, more like the frequency of lightning strikes/shark attacks—both of which are, of course, themselves extremely rare.

So, without people to commit voter fraud, there would have to be a massive conspiracy to somehow intercept and destroy ballots that are for the other candidate before they’re counted. That can’t happen. Or, they could somehow insert hundreds or perhaps thousands of pre-marked ballots into ballot boxes in counties throughout a state they want to “steal”, without anyone noticing. That, too, is impossible.

That leaves some sort of manipulation of voting machines in the places that use them. But there has never been a verified case of that actually happening. Such claims turned out to be simple, run-of-the-mill malfunction, or tinfoil hat conspiracy theories, utterly without supporting evidence.

But even if it was possible to somehow manipulate a voting machine, they’d have to do that in counties throughout a state they wanted to “steal”, and repeat that in enough states to ensure victory. Moreover, they'd also have to skew the results enough to ensure victory, but not so much that they'd attract attention. A polling place serving an electorate that's 98% Republican, for example, would be suspicious if it returned 98% of votes for the Democrat. At the same time, they'd have to ensure they had enough votes to cover for any unexpectedly high turnout—again, without having too many votes. That’s clearly not even remotely possible, especially when it would have to be replicated thousands of times.

The important point here is that the presidential election isn’t national, and it’s not even done in 50 states and DC: It’s done in hundreds or thousands of jurisdictions within each of those 50 states. That gives as close to 100% certainty as possible that the election will be free and fair.

When Donald and his surrogates deliberately lie about how the election will be “rigged”, that’s nothing less than an attack on the very Constitutional foundation upon which US democracy is built. Donald playing coy about whether he will participate in the 228-year-old tradition of the peaceful transfer of power is completely un-American. Inciting violence among his supporters for when he loses is seditious.

And speaking of sedition, Donald is also engaged in that when he incites his most frothing fans to interfere with the election, to disrupt the process and prevent lawful voters from exercising their constitutional right to vote. That’s where real election fraud could happen: Donald’s fans using intimidation and even violence to prevent people from lawfully voting.

But regardless of whether or not Donald’s fans behave themselves and obey the law, we know one thing for certain: The US presidential election will NOT be “rigged”.

Worth Quoting: Dan Rather

Veteran journalist Dan Rather posted this to his Facebook Page yesterday, and I think he’s nailed it:

I felt a shudder down my spine yesterday watching Donald Trump's fusilade against the press. This is not a moment to be trifled with. It wasn't his first tirade and it won't be his last.

I was reminded of my college journalism professor, the late Hugh Cunningham, who would exhort his young charges in a thundering voice to "never let them scare you." It was his most important lesson. One of Edward R. Murrow's favorite words was "steady." That also bears repeating today.

This is a dirty, nasty election. And it is only going to get worse. The reporters in the trenches need no lecture from me. They are walking through daily minefields, bracing themselves against winds of discontent whose effects no one can predict.

I know what it is like to sit in those seats and feel the scorn and even wrath of politicians of all political persuasions. Attacking the press for unfair coverage has long been a bipartisan pursuit. Sometimes it works. I am happy to say that more often it doesn't. But Trump's brand of vituperation is particularly personal and vicious. It carries with it the drumbeats of threatening violence. It cannot be left unanswered.

This is not about politics or policy. It's about protecting our most cherished principles. The relationship between the press and the powerful they cover is by its very definition confrontational. That is how the Founding Fathers envisioned it, with noble clauses of protection enshrined in our Constitution.

Good journalism—the kind that matters—requires reporters who won't back up, back down, back away or turn around when faced with efforts to intimidate them. It also requires owners and other bosses with guts, who stand by and for their reporters when the heat is on.

I still believe the pen is mightier than the sword. And in these conflicted and troubled times, we should reward the bravery of the men and women not afraid to ask the hard questions of everyone in power. Our nation's future depends on it.

Drumpf lashes out whenever journalists dare to question his bombasts, exaggerations, and outright lies. We should expect the sort of attacks on the media that we saw Drumpf make the other day. But what we must also have are fearless journalists who will stand up to Drumpf’s bullying to tell the truth. I hope we get that.

In more detail

The video above was all over my social media today, and it’s actually quite good. It goes into detail about one of the groups I was talking about the other day, and what makes them so truly awful.

After I watched the video above, I noticed that last month Media Matters For America also posted a video (below) specifically on North Carolina’s infamous “bathroom bill”. In that video, they talk about some of the same things I mentioned in my post on Saturday, and also my post on Friday.

I’m glad to see others working on exposing the extent and true nature of what the radical right professional anti-gay industry is up to. As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (1856-1941) famously said, “Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” This will test whether he was right.

Worth Quoting: George Takei

Today the mayor of Roanoke, Virginia issued a statement (at right) trying to order that Syrian refugees not receive any government assistance, even though the order is invalid and illegal. In doing so, he also betrayed his ignorance of American history when he wrote approvingly of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s internment camps for Japanese people.

George Takei, one of the folks who endured FDR’s prison camps, took down mayor what’s-his-name:

Earlier today, the mayor of Roanoke, Virginia, Mr. David A. Bowers, in the attached letter, joined several state governors in ordering that Syrian refugees not receive any government assistance, or be relocated to their jurisdiction. Apart from the lack of legal authority to do so (under the Refugee Act of 1980, only the President has authority to accept or deny refugees), his resort to fear-based tactics, and his galling lack of compassion for people fleeing these same terrorists, Mayor Bowers made the following startling statement:

“I’m reminded that Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to sequester Japanese foreign nationals after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and it appears that the threat of harm to America from Isis now is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then.”

Mayor Bowers, there are a few key points of history you seem to have missed:

1) The internment (not a "sequester") was not of Japanese "foreign nationals," but of Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens. I was one of them, and my family and I spent 4 years in prison camps because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. It is my life’s mission to never let such a thing happen again in America.

2) There never was any proven incident of espionage or sabotage from the suspected “enemies” then, just as there has been no act of terrorism from any of the 1,854 Syrian refugees the U.S. already has accepted. We were judged based on who we looked like, and that is about as un-American as it gets.

3) If you are attempting to compare the actual threat of harm from the 120,000 of us who were interned then to the Syrian situation now, the simple answer is this: There was no threat. We loved America. We were decent, honest, hard-working folks. Tens of thousands of lives were ruined, over nothing.

Mayor Bowers, one of the reasons I am telling our story on Broadway eight times a week in Allegiance is because of people like you. You who hold a position of authority and power, but you demonstrably have failed to learn the most basic of American civics or history lessons. So Mayor Bowers, I am officially inviting you to come see our show, as my personal guest. Perhaps you, too, will come away with more compassion and understanding.

George Takei, writing on Facebook

Footnote: Mayor what’s-his-name is a Democrat. Unfortunately.

Absurd flag flapping

The debate over New Zealand’s flag, to the extent it happens at all, will probably be pretty quiet. I think—but don’t know—that most New Zealanders just aren’t interested in all this and are ignoring it. The fringe, however, are already spreading nonsense.

Today I saw the unsigned graphic at left on Facebook. To the casual reader, it makes no sense whatsoever: Why would the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) “need” anything, much less a new flag? The meme doesn't say. So, what’s this all about?

Chances are I wouldn’t have known, but, coincidentally, Roger Green emailed me a comment that had been left on a YouTube video of a segment on the New Zealand flag that was on John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight show a year or two ago (I saw it at the time and I thought it was stupid). But recently someone left a comment that was just, well, weird, and Roger sent the comment to me.

So, I went to the video and found a similar one that “credited” two people. One of them had posted the same thing as a comment on a TV3 post of a story they’d done about the flag, a week or two ago. That one, at least, was in full paragraphs. I eventually found the concept was taken from a guy who runs a far-right “news” site/radio show/etc. based in Dunedin. He peddles all sorts of mostly far-rightwing conspiracy theories.

What they were promoting is something they call “due authority” which, they’re convinced, only exists if the British Union Jack remains on the New Zealand flag. Why would that matter? Well, it doesn’t—not at all, not in even the remotest possible way. End of story—except to the conspiracy theorists, of course.

“Due authority” as they're using it is an entirely made up concept that has no relationship whatsoever to constitutional law. It does pop up in commercial law, however, especially with contracts, where a person (particularly someone who's part of an organisation) offering a thing to be sold (like a security) has to have the legal capacity—due authority—to execute and deliver on the agreement.

This seems to be related to a particularly wacky far-right, conspiracy-theory based movement called the “Freemen on the land”, active in several English-speaking countries. They believe that the only laws that are valid are those they agree to, and that such agreed to laws form a contract between the government and these so-called “free men”. If such a thing was really true (spoiler alert: it absolutely isn’t true), then, maybe, “due authority” might have some relevance. However, it’s completely irrelevant (this movement, by the way, is related to, but quite different from, the even more extremist “Sovereign Citizen” movement in the USA).

The site where this stuff seems to have originated quotes from a Cabinet Office paper from 2004, “New Zealand’s constitution – past, present and future” (PDF available). This document was a sort of briefing paper prepared for the then-Labour Party-led government. I don’t know the context of the briefing paper, but in 2003 the government had abolished the right of appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (usually just called the Privy Council) in London as the final court of appeal, replacing it with a Supreme Court of New Zealand.

The reason that’s important is that it demonstrates how easy it is to make constitutional change in New Zealand because New Zealand’s constitution isn’t entrenched. That means that the monarchy or anything else in the constitution can be removed or changed by a vote in Parliament (though huge changes—like becoming republic—would go to referendum).

Nevertheless, the conspiracy theorists cite as their "evidence" the section of the Cabinet Paper that begins by saying, “Some links and institutions inherited from the United Kingdom remain. Some are ‘core’ to our current system of government”. The list includes the Queen as head of state of New Zealand, appointment of the Governor-General by the Queen, and “various statutory references to the Queen and the Crown”, among others; these three are central to New Zealand as a constitutional monarchy.

However, the conspiracy theorist then jumps in his copy of the list, moving immediately to include “the union jack on New Zealand’s flag” on his list (and putting it in all caps), without bothering to mention it’s actually included on a list of items in the next, entirely separate section, that calls the things “more symbolic”. That omission was clearly deliberate.

So: The links to the UK listed in the Cabinet Paper “could be reformed without changing New Zealand’s constitution in any fundamental way”, as the Paper puts it, and the Union Jack on our flag is symbolic. And, of course, anything in the constitution can be changed easily at any time.

In short: The flag is not the constitution, the constitution is not the flag, and the conspiracy theorists' “due authority” is an entirely imaginary thing that doesn’t actually exist in constitutional law, and has nothing whatsoever to do with either the constitution or the flag.

The TPPA, meanwhile—assuming it is ever finalised—will go before a Select Committee in Parliament which will vote on it, but, ultimately, the Cabinet alone will decide whether New Zealand signs on, and that’s entirely within our constitutional system for them to do this. Whatever happens, it won’t matter what flag is flying over Parliament!

The most important thing to know about all this is that whether the TPPA is approved or not has nothing whatsoever to do with any flag. In fact, the decision about the TPPA may be over before the second flag referendum, or the current flag may ultimately win and the TPPA could still be approved, anyway.

This is all knowable stuff, easily researched from official sources. But some people clearly prefer to make up their own story and spread utter nonsense.

Ah, politics…

Taking on the cynical myth

The video above features Alan Colmes taking on rightwing crackpot Todd Starnes and his constant promotion of the cynical myth of Christian “persecution”. Starnes gave it his best shot, but…

Starnes is a serial liar, saying things that are absolutely not true, or spinning things in such a way that they may as well be an outright lie. Blogger Joe.My.God. (where I found this video—I don’t actually watch Fox, of course) frequently quotes Starnes verbatim, which is as good a place as any to find evidence of how little regard Starnes has for the truth or for facts: He’s all about the spin.

Colmes, on the other hand, called Starnes on a few of his outrageous claims, and also pointed out how US and state governments are overwhelmingly dominated by Christians. Faced with that fact, Starnes tried to spin his way out—and failed miserably to do so. In fact, any time Colmes presented Starnes with a fact that challenged Starnes’ myth promotion, Starnes tried to spin the facts.

Still, Starnes is a capable media operator, which is why he’s used on Fox in the first place, and it’s also why people might believe his bovine excrement. As a side note, I don’t often see Alan Colmes, but this was by far the best I’ve ever seen him do. In the past, I thought he was so awful that he was of no use to our side; maybe I was wrong about him.

In any case, I know it’s somewhat jarring to see me posting a video from Fox “News”, a channel about which I have absolutely nothing good to say. However, as important as it is to keep challenging the far-right’s cynical myth of Christian “persecution”, it’s also important to make sure the mainstream knows that the myth IS being challenged, and without such videos, people like me would never know it was happening on Fox.

This issue is not going away. After the US Supreme Court rules on marriage equality, it's certain to become the focus of the rhetoric from the USA’s radical rightwing as they seek to enshrine their anti-LGBT bigotry into law. We need to be ready to take them on when that happens.

Taking Down an Anti-Gay Infomercial

In the video above, Matt Baume takes on the virulently anti-gay “Family” Research [sic] Council’s new video. The group puts out anti-gay propaganda videos all the time, and all of them say absurd things. “F”RC needs to be held accountable for what it says.

The “F”RC video, according to the YouTube description for Matt’s video, is “about how the gays are going to ruin everything with all their pesky marrying and doing business and existing. The video's full of crazy claims, half-truths, and homophobia, and worst of all builds to a sneaky sales pitch at the end.”

So, Matt takes the video apart point by point, and it’s embarrassing for the “F”RC. As always, this has nothing to do with the anti-gay group’s opinions, it’s about facts alone: Everyone, even homophobes, are entitled to hold whatever opinions they want—but they’re not entitled to their own facts.

This is the sort of takedown I wish I had the patience and calmness to do, because there’s so much chicanery in the far right anti-gay industry that needs to be exposed as the bovine excrement it is.

But, I don’t have the patience and calmness to do that. Well, not usually. So, I’m glad that Matt did and I hope he continues to do it. This video is an example of how to do it.

However, there was one thing that made me chuckle: Matt criticised Tony Perkins for turning his propaganda video into a commercial at the end, and then Matt did that at the end of his video. However, Matt’s podcast is free, unlike Tony’s DVDs, so it’s different—and kinda funny.

But after such dark topics in that video, it was also kind of nice to have something to smile about at the end.

All in all, a good video, and I think Matt did a great job.

Indiana law is different on purpose

A firestorm has rained down on Indiana since its Republican legislature passed, and its Republican governor signed, a “Religious Freedom Restoration Act”. The governor claims it’s not about discrimination. He’s lying.

Indiana’s Republican Governor, Mike Pence, has been whining in the media that his law is “no different” from RFRAs in other US states, but that’s absolutely NOT true. No matter how many times Pence and the rightwing media repeat the lie, it doesn’t suddenly make it true.

The whole purpose of Indiana’s RFRA was to enable discrimination against LGBT people. As the map above from ThinkProgress (CREDIT: Dylan Petrohilos/ThinkProgress) shows, Indiana is the ONLY state where their RFRA applies to disputes between private individuals—and “person” is defined to include for-profit businesses and corporations—even when the state of Indiana isn’t a party in the dispute.

Garrett Epps, writing for The Atlantic, explains why Indiana Republicans deliberately wrote their law the way they did:

(T)here’s a lot of evidence that the new wave of “religious freedom” legislation was impelled, at least in part, by a panic over a New Mexico state-court decision, Elane Photography v. Willock. In that case, a same-sex couple sued a professional photography studio that refused to photograph the couple’s wedding. New Mexico law bars discrimination in “public accommodations” on the basis of sexual orientation. The studio said that New Mexico’s RFRA nonetheless barred the suit; but the state’s Supreme Court held that the RFRA did not apply “because the government is not a party.”

In Indiana, Democrats offered an amendment to say explicitly that the proposed RFRA law did not permit businesses to discriminate. Naturally, Republicans voted that amendment down, giving clear evidence that enabling anti-LGBT discrimination was their specific intent.

These latest crops of RFRA bills are NOT motivated not by a genuine desire to protect “religious freedom”; instead, they’re motivated purely by anti-gay animus, the extremist religionists’ desire to prevent LGBT people from being full and equal citizens. The far right know they lost the battle to stop marriage equality, but they think they can still make life difficult for LGBT people.

Obviously Indiana’s governor knew all that. He held a private signing ceremony for the RFRA—something that was unusual enough that the Indiana media commented on it. Moreover, Pence flat out refused to say who attended, releasing a photo of a few religious people standing around him. Media reports say that there were around 80 people who attended, including three of Indiana’s most vicious professional anti-gay religious activists—men who are well known for their extreme anti-LGBT rhetoric (see image below). One of those far right anti-gay groups that was represented is one that Pence actively supported. They made clear in ALL their lobbying materials that the point of the bill was to discriminate against LGBT people.

We also now know that Pence has a long history of being anti-gay, sometimes stridently so. No wonder the radical right professional anti-gay activists love him so much!

The irony in all this is that Indiana doesn’t include LGBT people in its state civil rights laws (and Pence declared LGBT people will not be added), so discrimination against LGBT people is perfectly legal in most of the state. However, four municipalities, including Indianapolis (whose Republican mayor opposed the RFRA) DO protect the civil and human rights of LGBT people. The RFRA could be used to undermine those local protections.

So, when Mike Pence claims Indiana’s RFRA isn’t about discrimination, he’s lying. When he claims it’s “just like” all the other RFRAs on the books, he’s lying. When he claims he doesn’t understand why such anger is being directed at him and the other Republicans in power in the state, he’s lying. He’s lying to cover up the fact that “getting” LGBT people was the whole point of their RFRA.

Indiana’s law is different from all other RFRA laws on purpose. Mike Pence knows that, and he knows that allowing discrimination was the intent all along. He was in on it from the beginning and, given his record, he obviously approved of that goal. More and more people around the USA are beginning to understand all that, and that’s why so much anger is being directed at Indiana and Pence for bringing his entire state in disrepute. Mike Pence is lying whenever he says otherwise. We’re not the big fools Pence clearly thinks we all are.

This image was distributed by GLAAD, though not  made by them.

Another smackdown

Yesterday, I wrote about how one of the most prominent spokesmen in the anti-gay industry was finally challenged on his nonsense. Today I found out he’d had another smackdown when one of his usual deceptions was revealed as a lie.

In the heated discussion on “Fox News Sunday,” professional anti-gay religious/political activist Tony Perkins, who is a leader of the anti-gay hate group the “Family” Research [sic] Council [whatever…] made a lot of claims that were either utter nonsense or that were deliberately deceptive (in blunt terms, he brazenly lied).

Tony never says anything new, and quite frankly it’s tiring to have to constantly debunk the same bovine excrement over and over and over. So, in my post I didn’t even bother to take down one of his biggest lies and smears. Fortunately, Politifact was on the case.

While trying to provide “evidence” for his religious belief that marriage is only for male/female couples who make babies, Tony declared: "We know from the social science that children do best with a mom and a dad."

I knew that this was a bald-faced lie, one designed to attack the right of same-gender couples to marry, sure, but also to smear and defame all same-gender couples that are raising children, or that may do so in the future. The intent behind this tired lie is to portray all LGBT people, but especially those with children, as dramatically inferior to heterosexuals and, therefore, portray us as people who don’t deserve equal treatment under the law.

So, Politifact decided to look at Tony’s claim. They went to the “F”RC website, which lists 10 supposed “reasons” to support their claims. It didn’t go well for Tony:

Perkins said that based on social science, we know "that children do best with a mom and a dad." The research cited on the website of Perkins’ group, the Family Research Council, does not provide any support. It relies on books rather than peer-reviewed research, it quotes selectively or mischaracterizes from the work it cites, or at best, challenges the quality of the methodology behind findings that go against its position.

In contrast, we found recent peer-reviewed social science research that finds that at the very least, children of lesbian parents do as well as other children.

We rate Perkins’ claim False. [emphasis added]

It’s worth reading the Politifact site to see why the stuff on Tony’s site doesn’t support his claims, let alone contain relevant facts. It turns out, this isn’t the first time that Politifact has ruled the parenting assertion as false: They did so back in April in response to idiotic comments made to ABC (USA) News by another prominent far-right professional anti-gay religious/political activist.

Politifact goes on to note something that I have, as well:

The American Psychological Association produced a comprehensive review of studies going back three decades. The most relevant section focuses on research that compares the children of lesbian or gay parents. The studies looked at children in terms of their school performance, their relations with their peers, intelligence, self-esteem and a number of other variables.

According to this review, "the belief that children of lesbian and gay parents suffer deficits in personal development has no empirical foundation." [link in the original]

Despite all the real, verifiable and reputable evidence, activists in the radical right anti-gay industry persist in spreading the same lie and smear. It keeps popping up everywhere (even here in New Zealand). While it’s good to see rightwingers being smacked down for repeating the lie, it does get tiring to have to do it so often. Maybe that’s just another tactic the radical right is using, trying to wear us all down.

Fortunately, truth and facts don’t take time off, and radical right anti-gay activists are now seeing themselves regularly (and easily) debunked. Sadly, neither the constant repetition of anti-LGBT lies and smears, nor the debunking of them, seem likely to end any time soon. But as long as they keep lying and defaming, we'll keep exposing them for what they are.

And that’s a fact.

A bigot gets schooled

The news media has long used anti-gay bigots to provide “balance” when discussing LGBT issues. This lazy practice is made all the worse by the news media never holding those bigots to account. Until now.

The clip above is from Chris Wallace’s “Fox News Sunday” programme. It features conservative Republican attorney Ted Olson, who was the co-attorney in the case that led to the end of California’s anti-gay Proposition 8 as well as the case challenging Virginia’s ban of same-sex marriages.

The anti-gay bigot is hate group leader Tony Perkins of the “Family” Research [sic] Council [whatever…], who spun the same distortions, red herrings and outright lies that are his usual tactics. This time, the host stood up to him, and this time someone who is way smarter than Perkins and who actually knows what he’s talking about—Olson—was able to expose Perkins spin as utter nonsense without ever once getting personal or condescending.

The smug Perkins’ crusade against marriage equality boils down to three propositions: 1. Gay people are icky, 2. Marriage is only about making babies and raising them, 3. If gay couples can marry, then heterosexuals won’t.

Let’s rehash life in the real world yet again (again): No one gives a flying flip that Perkins hates gay people or that his organisation thinks homosexuality should be a crime. In a free society, people are entitled to hate whoever they want, no matter how stupid that hatred is, and they’re entitled to think other people are icky, even though thinking that makes them look really, really stupid. Obviously, everyone has the right to think stupid things—that is not now, nor has it ever been, an issue in this debate (engaging in or inciting violence based on that hatred is another matter entirely).

However, bigots like Tony and his gang DON’T get to impose their bigotry on others or to enshrine their hatred in law. If the people he hates so much aren’t free to live their lives in peace and with legal equality, then no one is free. Tony’s brand of theocratic authoritarianism is the very opposite of freedom.

Marriage is not about babies—how many times do we have to repeat this before they understand it? If marriage were only about making babies, then heterosexual couples who cannot or choose not to have children would be forbidden to marry. Tony and his cronies retort is that they could make babies, and their god could miraculously allow couples who can’t have children to be able to (which underscores that their argument is entirely based on religious views).

There are two things wrong with Tony’s pathetic marriage = babies line. First, as Ted Olson said, “There are thousands and tens of thousands of children in same-sex house holds. They deserve the same respect and decency that other people have that are living right next door.” Exactly so.

But if the divine miracles thing for “barren” couples was really a reason in favour of marriage, then it would be equally true for same-gender couples. If Tony's god can’t miraculously make a same-gender couple have a baby, then it isn’t a very powerful god, and I don’t think Tony and his gang would argue that. So, instead, they've conjured up a god who, quite coincidentally, of course, thinks just like they do, with all the same prejudices.

Tony and his lot always—always—say that allowing same-gender couples to assume the commitments and responsibilities of marriage will somehow destroy opposite-gender marriages—clearly the most stupid argument rightwingers have ever come up with, and they have quite a lot of pathetically stupid arguments. Ted Olson exposes that idiotic talking point as the nonsense it is by pointing out the obvious: “There’s no heterosexual couple that is going to decide to get divorced, or not to get married, or not to raise children, just because another couple next to them is treated equally and with respect and decency.” Exactly.

For me, some of Olson’s best points were refuting Tony’s claim that the recent decisions are a “back-alley type Roe v Wade decision” (the irony of the phrase apparently escaping Tony). Tony, as per usual, whined on and on about judges deciding things, and Olson schooled him: “We have a Constitution and a Bill of Rights precisely because we want protections from majority rule. When the majority in a legislature or a popular vote take away rights of individuals that are protected by the Bill of Rights, then we have an independent judiciary to rectify that situation. It's happened again and again and again throughout this country's history."

Tony has never presented a single rational secular reason for opposing marriage equality, and all of his supposed arguments are, in fact, based on prejudice, religious bias or both. Still, the entire anti-gay industry is just like Tony, though some are even worse.



It was great to see someone—especially someone on Fox—standing up to Tony for a change. Until now, Tony’s transparent anti-gay bigotry has always been given a free pass, and challenges to his dopey talking points, shallow thinking or the utter nonsense of his “arguments” have been very rare and mild.

When even Fox starts to lose patience with a rightwing extremist, then the game is over. Tony just refuses to accept reality—I don’t think he is capable of doing so.

All of which means that while this was a rare rebuke for Tony, it won’t be the last time—at least, not until all 50 US states have marriage equality, and that’s not far away now.

Related: A shorter version of the video can be found on Talking Points Memo: “Fox Host, Ted Olson Gang Up On Tony Perkins In Gay Marriage Debate”.

Showing reality

During this election, the only political things I’ve posted to this blog have been official campaign graphics or photos from the campaign. The only exceptions to that were illustrations to show what I was talking about. I made a deliberate choice to stay focused and not to adopt the negative partisan attacks of our opponents. But today, I needed to make an exception, since a little truth-telling was needed.

Late this morning, I happened to have Twitter up when the National Party Tweeted a photo of their visit to Glenfield Mall. “Fantastic welcome at Glenfield Mall this morning with plenty of support for NZNationalParty from locals”, they said, along with a photo. The day before, I’d seen lots of people Tweeting photos of David Cunliffe and Labour’s visit to the same mall, and it was obvious to me that National’s superlatives were a bit misplaced. So, I made and posted the photo above, Tweeting, simply, “Compare and contrast: Campaigns visit Glenfield Mall.”

The photos were exactly as shared—no cropping or manipulation—and I made no comment beyond adding the date of the visit and the weather conditions at the time. I felt people could draw their own conclusions from the photo (and, indeed, someone suggested that rainy days draw people to malls, sunny days do not; I don't think that was true in this case, but it shows that people could form their own viewpoint).

The point is, National was trying to claim a lot of support support and I thought people should be able to judge that claim by comparing like with like, nothing more. As I suggested a moment ago, not everyone who saw it saw things the same way I did, which is fine.

A little later, the National Party candidate also Tweeted a photo from the visit, adding, “the public response was pretty phenomenal!” The photo showed him alone, talking to no one as TV cameras pointed at John Key at the edge of the photo. There was a lot of empty space behind him, apart from some people from Young Nationals who were visiting the Shore to help with John Key’s campaign. Other photos they posted showed very few ordinary people with either one of them, certainly nothing like the photos of Labour’s visit yesterday. Despite being tempted to do so, I didn’t do another compare/contrast comparison of the candidates’ receptions, because I wasn’t out to embarrass or belittle National.

Obviously, this is trivial stuff and none of it matters in the overall scheme of things. After all, there are many reasons why Labour had more support than National did, including the weather, the fact that Sunday is often a quiet day at Glenfield Mall, and, of course, the biggest reason, the fact that the mall is in a pretty red area, overall.

The exercise wasn’t really about who had the bigger and more enthusiastic turnout at a local Mall, but that claiming a thing doesn’t make it true. For whatever reason, John Key and the National candidate in this electorate didn’t get as good a reception as Labour Leader David Cunliffe and the Labour candidates did the day before. I felt that people had a right to see the unvarnished truth to fairly judge what I felt was mere spin.

I just wish the NZ news media were better about showing the reality about things that really matter.

234 people find marriage equality in NZ

New data from Statistics New Zealand reports that 117 same-gender couples were married in the quarter ending September 30, 2013. Marriage equality became law on August 19, so the stats cover only half the quarter.

61 female couples were married in the quarter, as were 56 male couples. 77 couples were New Zealand resident, and 40 were overseas residents.

In the same quarter, 11 female couples and 12 male couples had civil unions (as did 10 opposite-gender couples). Of the same-gender couples, 16 were New Zealand resident and 7 were not. For some reason, Statistics New Zealand doesn’t report statistics on residency of opposite-gender civil union couples.

What do these statistic tell us? Well, not much, really. It’s only six weeks worth of data, after all. However, one thing that did strike me about the data so far is that 25 of the 61 female couples—about 41%—were transfers from civil unions. Similarly, 22 of 56 male couples (just over 39%) were transfers from civil unions. That’s a pretty high percentage of same-gender civil union couples who actually wanted to be married.

Naturally, that’s not how our adversaries on the religious far right see it. My old pal Bob McCoskrie headlined his post on the statistics, “Just 77 same-sex marriages. 33 couples agree there’s no discrimination with civil unions”. Bob was being impish there, even a bit churlish. Since he has a well-deserved reputation for not understanding statistics, it’s worth fact-checking and correcting his spin.

Bob says it’s “just 77” couples because he removes the 40 from overseas. So, what he was really talking about was 77 New Zealand couples; he must think it sounds better for him politically to make the number as small as possible. He goes on to compare the roughly one third of same-gender marriages being among foreigners to the roughly 10% of opposite gender couples, as if that means something. Actually, it does, as Bob well knows: New Zealand is the ONLY country in the Asia Pacific region with marriage equality, so we should expect that marriages of foreign same-gender couples will remain a high percentage, at least until Australia adopts marriage equality some day. Opposite-gender couples can get married wherever they want to, and few of them presently choose New Zealand to do so.

Bob also erroneously said, “Despite the new marriage laws, 33 same-sex couples still chose civil unions, which have been available since 2005.” In fact, 33 couples chose civil unions, of which only 23 were same-gender couples. We have no information on why this is so: It could be rejection of marriage as an institution, it could be that plans for a civil union were too far advanced to change—in fact there could be many reasons why those couples chose civil unions.

In any case, it's irrelevant. Bob churlishly declared, “33 couples agree there’s no discrimination with civil unions”, but that’s not even remotely true—as he meant it. Those couples have no discrimination ANY MORE. When marriage equality became law, for the first time ever, ALL couples, same-gender and opposite-gender, could pick the relationship status that best fit their needs, ideals, etc. Previously, only opposite-gender couples could marry—same-gender couples were forbidden to do so. Opposite-gender couples could choose civil unions and move from civil union to marriage or vice versa. However, same-gender couples could choose only civil unions. THAT was the discrimination.

So, the reality is that 117 same-gender couples chose the responsibilities and obligations of marriage, just as their heterosexual friends, family and acquaintances have always been able to do. The fact that 33 couples—a third opposite-gender—chose civil unions means that they, too, were embracing the newfound equality under law, because all of them could choose either civil unions or marriage.

In the months ahead, Bob and his far right comrades will continue to attack and belittle marriage equality (I can easily imagine the mocking press releases they’ll issue when the first divorce of a same-gender couple is granted). They will continue to put the word marriage into quotation marks when referring to the marriages of same-gender couples, despite it being the law of New Zealand. Such churlishness is in their nature, it would seem.

Most of the time, I simply laugh at the obvious desperation of our adversaries. Because they’re mean-spirited more often than not, they invite mockery. Generally I avoid that, preferring to just correct their misinformation. But the headline of this post is actually gently mocking my pal Bob: He used the lowest possible number to talk about gay people marrying, and I used the highest possible number—117 couples means 234 individuals.

However, there’s a strong truth in my headline that’s missing from Bob’s lame attempt at spin: 234 PEOPLE have experienced true equality and been married. Those people, those 117 couples, are finally equal to opposite-gender married couples, but not just because they were married, but because they had the same, equal choice on whether or not to marry. The same is true, actually, of the 23 same-gender couples who chose civil unions.

So, to correct Bob’s spin, the reality is that 140 couples—280 people—experienced full equality. To me, that is always something worth celebrating.

Source of statistics on marriages and civil unions: Statistics New Zealand (spreadsheets of the data are available for download from their site).

Nothing to see

In this video, Democrats eviscerate Republican US Representative Darrell Issa, the crackpot from California, who has made a career out of staging phony politically-motivated “investigations” of President Obama. Issa has brought this ignominy on himself.

Before the 2010 elections, Issa pledged non-stop “investigations” of the Obama Administration. Since then, he’s become an utter joke: Nothing he’s done has ever amounted to anything, of course—crackposts like Issa never do anything of any real or lasting significance.

And that’s the tragedy in this: ALL governments must be held accountable, but by his clownish and obviously partisan actions, Issa degrades the very concept of oversight. Thanks to Issa, oversight is assumed to be politically motivated, petty, irrelevant and the butt of jokes. If crackpots like Issa were shunted to the irrelevancy they so richly deserve, Congress might do its duty to provide real oversight, not purely partisan political games. But we haven’t seen that in 20 years or more, so I guess there’s no reason to think that it’ll happen anytime soon.

Issa is a joke. Repubicans are a joke. House Speaker Johen Boehner is a national joke, but they control Congress. All of us—within the US our overseas—are diminished because of that. The only way to end the joke is to end Republican control. I’m not sure that CAN happen, though. And that’s NOT a joke.