1. Dershowitz: Trump May Try To Deny Biden 270 Electoral Votes, Put Election in Congress.
Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz predicted that President Donald Trump will attempt to settle the presidential election in a way not seen since the 19th century.
In an interview with Newsmax, the longtime legal expert said Trump no longer is attempting to reach 270 Electoral College votes but will instead focus on denying Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s chances of getting 270 votes.
[…]
“What he’s trying to do is to deny Joe Biden 270 votes, by challenging in Pennsylvania, Georgia, in Nevada, in Michigan, in Arizona,” Dershowitz remarked, adding that not allowing Biden to reach 270 out of 538 votes would eventually force House state delegations to vote, where Republicans have an advantage over Democrats. Currently, the GOP has a 26-23-1 state delegation majority in the House of Representatives.
“If he can keep the Biden count below 270, then the matter goes to the House of Representatives, where of course there is a Republican majority among the delegations of states, and you vote by state if it goes to the House,” Dershowitz said. “He’s trying to follow the playbook of three elections of the 19th century.”
2. K.T. McFarland on the Communist China Threat and the Unique Workings of Trump Foreign Policy
I supported him for the following reasons. He understood that you needed to first fix the American economy because, without economic growth, we don’t have any leverage over anybody. He secondly realized these endless wars in the Middle East, which we were not winning, we were expending American blood and treasure, and they were getting us not what we wanted.
Finally, they were focusing our attention so much on the Middle East and terrorism, which were important but not the first priority. The first priority should have been China, the growing threat of China, not only economic but military, and potentially a digital cyber threat. We were ignoring all that.
[…]
So the policies were driven by the following architecture. Number one, fix the American economy. Number two, encourage American fracking, so we could become not only independent of foreign oil and natural gas, but we could export it. We could be the new economic center for energy supplying to the world. He understood [what I consider to be] what was an important element that nobody else really focused on because he was a businessman. He realized, by the trade deficits that we had, [that] the Chinese need to sell more stuff to us than we need to sell to them. The Iranians need to sell more stuff than we need to sell to them. The Germans need to sell more stuff to us than we need to sell to them.
So we could go to those countries with a trade war and say, we want you to renegotiate our trade agreements, They’re lopsided. You have very high tariffs against our stuff. You’re taking advantage of our generosity that we did fifty, sixty and seventy years ago. We just want a new deal. We don’t want [to have] no trade agreement. We just want a fair one, a reciprocal one. He understood that would be the leverage.
3. Austria’s New Hate Speech Law
- Austria’s proposed law is modeled on Germany’s much-criticized NetzDG law, also known as the censorship law, which came into effect in January 2018 and requires social media companies to delete or block any online unlawful content within 24 hours or 7 days at the most or face fines of up to 50 million euros.
- If the proposed law is passed, the freedom of speech of Austrians online will be subject to the arbitrary decisions of corporate entities, such as Twitter, Google and Facebook.
- With Austria’s draft online hate speech law, yet another European country is taking another step towards making online censorship an institutionalized feature of European hate speech laws.
- “We too often make bad laws with good intentions. Online platforms should not censor the freedom of expression,” said Chairman of the Senate Law Commission Philippe Bas after the decision of France’s Constitutional Council. It can only be hoped that European lawmakers eager to censor free speech online will heed the ruling of the French constitutional court.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16739/austria-hate-speech-law
