One Nothingburger, All The Trimmings

     NPR has cogent analysis of last night's Presidential speech.  Tl;dr? A nothingburger with cheese, pickles, lettuce (oh, lots and lots of fine Taylor Farms lettuce), tomato, mushrooms, Ranch dressing, onion, mustard, ketchup, toothpaste, horseradish, grill-toasted sesame-seed buns and a dead mouse -- but no burger.

     China illicitly stole voter rolls?  Those are a matter of public record.  In many cases, you can make just like a Ministry of State Security spook, and download 'em yourself over the Internet, free for nothing!  No skull or duggery required, Mao jacket optional.

     Foreign countries -- notably China, Russia and Iran -- have tried to interfere in our elections, at least as far back as 2020?  You bet they have; we knew about it then and we know about it now, and they still haven't got into the election machinery to yank levers.  They mostly do indirect things, like fund influencers and leak damaging real information and disinformation, and the state and Federal governments are well aware of it, since they're constantly playing Whack-A-Mole against 'em -- and winning.

     OMG, there are 250,000+ non-citizens registered to vote?  Guess what, there kind of are, and there are two main sources.  The first is paperwork screwups, things like asylum-seeker Hector interacts with state or city governments in some way, getting permission to drive or signing up to pay his sewer bill and so on, and there's one more form to fill out, thanks to voter-registration outreach efforts.  The person behind the counter neither knows or cares if he's a citizen, oops.  Or, and this is a gotcha, Hector follows all the rules, and eventually becomes a shiny new U.S. citizen, Social Security number and all.  Of course he registers to vote -- unlike you, Hector is fresh off Civics classes, and he wants to be a good citizen.  But Homeland Security doesn't have any automatic mechanism to connect new-citizen Hector with asylum-seeker or Temporary Protected Status Hector, and when their SAVE list of non-citizens is compared with lists of registered voters, there he is.  (If he gets snatched by ICE, he will have to prove he's a citizen, and they're very picky about what counts as proof, something that has happened over and over in the past 18 months.)  And there are rather a lot of overlapping names with incomplete data; do they match, or not?  Well, maybe; ICE and CPB appear to be finding out in ways that are often quite rough.  Oops, wrong Hector.

     On and on the claims went, and it was all stuff with a relatively high ooga-booga-scary quotient and little real substance.  None of it was new.  And he capped it off by calling ABC and NBC "complicit" with his enemies in not carrying the speech, and suggesting their licenses to use the high-value public airwaves free for nothing should be taken away.  (TV networks as such don't have licenses, other than for the handful of stations they own directly.  Outside of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, odds are the ABC/CBS/Fox/NBC station you watch is owned by a company other than a network.  PBS doesn't own any at all.)

     I watched the speech on CBS, who cut away before the President was done speaking and were surprisingly critical of the content, with extensive on-the-spot debunking from experts.  I don't know if Tony Dokoupil and Margaret Brennan still have jobs as of this morning, but they didn't pull any punches last night.  (I listened to NPR's coverage a little, too, with similar fact-based debunking.  They were both very careful to do their homework, shedding lots of light with little or no heat.)