4/1/20 Keith:
I have been wondering whether the mendacity and incompetence of Pres. Trump on this has changed your mind about voting for him. We should resume our blog; Verna says the country needs us.
Regards,
Keith

4/2/20 Mark: Would you feel better with Joe Biden at the helm?

4/2/20 Keith: Yes. He’s decisive and experienced in dealing with public issues. He also has access to the most knowledgeable people in the US, and knows how to work with them. If he had been our President 3 months ago we would now be in much better health and the economy likewise. Do you have reasons to disagree?

4/3/20 Mark: The man can barely remember his own name at this point. His past experience is irrelevant if he's suffering from dementia, which he obviously is now. I have a fair amount of respect for Cuomo and some of the other Democrats operating at the state level - they're honestly trying to grapple with this problem - but your national Dems are focused on nothing other than regaining power and are already in overdrive trying use the crisis to restore the momentum they squandered in their impeachment drive. There's absolutely nothing that a Democratic administration would have done in the early stages of this that would have  positioned us materially better than we are now, whatever picture their spin-doctors may be trying to paint.

Furthermore, if we can blame all our problems on Trump, what excuse do the Europeans have? They seems to be in generally worse shape than we are. Maybe the despicable Trump has somehow undermined them too.

4/4/20 Keith: It seems that we disagree about important facts: does Biden have dementia or not? Are national Dems just trying to regain power or are they proposing thoughtful ideas for reducing the damage? Could a different President have done any better than Trump? I guess that until we can agree on such facts, it would be hard to have a satisfying discussion. 

I am not entirely opposed to what Trump did. He made a good move by banning travel from China and Europe in January. But by eliminating the pandemic crisis team Obama had created, and not replacing it with an independent and competent team once the crisis became apparent, he has made the federal response much less competent than it could have been. That he has also consistently tainted expert advice by self-promotion and fecklessness is also true, I think, but probably any President would have introduced political calculations as well, so I don’t emphasize this issue.

4/8/20 Keith: Just wondering what you think of Trump firing several of the quasi-independent inspectors-general meant to supervise expenditures in the Covid-19 bailout and in various cabinet agencies. Also, that as Business Week reports, the drug he’s been touting, hydroxychrloroquine, is made by firms that he and his friends have stakes in. And the now naked Republican desire to suppress voting by likely Democratic supporters. Just curious.

4/8/20 Mark: The Dems have always been pretty adept at voter fraud. For one famous example, it's what carried JFK over the top in 1960 - LBJ working Texas and Joe Kennedy's mob cronies in Chicago. They're almost certainly getting more scientific about it now in the current environment. There's obviously a fine line between voter suppression and combating fraud, and I have to be a little suspicious of the Dems' odd obsession now with the 'suppression' issue. They never seem even to define it very clearly, much less explain why they consider it such a serious issue. I believe their real problem lies elsewhere.  I'm forced to conclude that they're fully aware of the the tactics their own operatives are gearing up for in the coming election, and they know they'll be facing credible charges of fraud. I think they're engaging in preemptive rhetoric.

4/10/20: Keith: I agree with you that Democrats have used dishonest tactics at the ballot box, and would certainly do so again. I despise it. But how is their current concern about "suppression" so odd, given the many Republican efforts to change voting rules in ways that make it harder for Democratic-leaning constituents to vote? Even Trump himself has admitted that “Republicans should fight very hard when it comes to statewide mail-in voting. Democrats are clamoring for it,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans.”--by Quint Forgey, Politico, 4/8/20 9:48 am EDT Updated 4/8/20 10:48 am EDT.

Do you remember Kris Kobach, formerly the Kansas Secretary of State and later, briefly, head of Trump's Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, aka the Voter Fraud Commission? The Commission met only once and then disbanded. Kobach later tried to have Kansas require voters to present proof of citizenship before voting as a legitimate and necessary protection against voter fraud. He presented as evidence a study that  "Over a 20-year period, fewer than 40 non-citizens had attempted to register in one Kansas county that had 130,000 voters. Most of those 40 improper registrations were the result of mistakes or confusion rather than intentional attempts to mislead, and only five of the 40 managed to cast a vote." The federal judge, a George W. Bush appointee, overturned the legislation, holding that “the court finds no credible evidence that a substantial number of noncitizens registered to vote.” See https://www.propublica.org/article/kris-kobach-voter-fraud-kansas-trial, an exhaustive review of Kobach's efforts (and those of his sole expert witness, one Jesse Richman, a thoroughly discredited professor at Old Dominion university) by Propublica. 

Another voter fraud hunter, the current Governor of Texas Greg Abbott, likewise came up empty when he claimed there was massive voter fraud in the form of non-citizens voting. Although his Secretary of State Whitley took the fall for the false claim, Abbott had initiated it months before Whitley took office. As Newsweek wrote,  "The state abandoned the purge in April after they were legally challenged by civil rights groups, who accused Whitley of wrongly targeting naturalized citizens. After he publicly admitted that tens of thousands had indeed been wrongly identified for removal, Whitley resigned from his position last month" https://www.newsweek.com/texas-governor-greg-abbott-spearheaded-voter-purge-that-used-flawed-data-dps-emails-show-1442217

These efforts are basic Republican policy these days, as a Republican Trump adviser stated last year in a leaked recording in Wisconsin: "At a November 21 event meeting of the Republican National Lawyers Association's Wisconsin chapter, Clark spoke for about 20 minutes, and the speech was recorded by a liberal advocacy group and provided to the AP."Traditionally it's always been Republicans suppressing votes in places," Clark told the group, which included Wisconsin State Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald and the executive director of the state's Republican party."Let's start protecting our voters," he continued, partly referring to Election Day monitoring of polling places. "We know where they are [...] Let's start playing offense a little bit. That's what you're going to see in 2020. It's going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program." https://www.businessinsider.com/leaked-audio-trump-adviser-republicans-rely-voter-suppression-justin-clark-2019-12

I could go on, but you get the point: voter fraud has, for quite some time, been the basis for systematic Republican efforts to make voting harder for Hispanic and black people. Republicans have spent much time, money and effort to prove the premise, that there is widespread and serious fraud. But it has been disproven in every case I have ever heard about.

Could widespread mail order voting be vulnerable to fraud? Yes. Are there ways to protect its legitimacy? I suggest the answer is "yes" again. One fairly simple approach is to use statistical sampling to verify the legitimacy of random samples of mail votes. With the use of scanning machines and data mining, this would be feasible everywhere. I am sure that there are other approaches, such as having ballots printed in a way that prevents copies. Protecting the ballot doesn't have to discriminate against voters, and it shouldn't. 

So that's my answer to your claim that the Democratic concern with voter suppression is "odd." I would also like to see your answers to the other questions I asked. 

But let me add something else: it may be fortunate for the country that Donald Trump is President during this Covid crisis. If you recall, when Obama became President in 2008, Republicans fought hard against his efforts to bail the country out, basing their effort on claims of fiscal responsibility and the dangers of larger government deficits. As a result, Obama's efforts were, indeed, too weak to fully reverse the damage. But now that a President beloved of Republicans is there, and cares about nothing except his own return to office in November, there isn't a peep of Republican opposition to the trillions he is spending--and I think those expenditures are well worthwhile.