All that calm wore off and now I’m just pissed about a variety of things: The stolen election, Amazon being irrational (“No, we can’t split orders just because one item won’t be in stock until February 2021, we don’t have that power. No, there’s nobody you can escalate to.”), and BlueHost refuses to say anything but “You’re not optimized enough” when the blog craters during and Istalanche. And other things I can’t talk about
So enjoy a (shorter than usual) Friday LinkSwarm dominated by news of Democratic election fraud.
Pennsylvaniaâs Democratic election leaders violated state code on Monday when they authorized county election officials to provide information about rejected mail ballots to political party operatives, according to a Republican lawsuit filed in state court and obtained by National Review.
The lawsuit cites an email sent to county election directors at 8:38 p.m. on Monday by Jonathan Marks, Pennsylvaniaâs deputy elections secretary.
In the email, Marks wrote that âcounty boards of elections should provide information to party and candidate representatives during the pre-canvass that identifies the voters whose ballots have been rejectedâ so they could be offered a provisional ballot.
Democrats have been winning mail-in voting handily in Pennsylvania and mail votes are key to Joe Bidenâs chances of overtaking President Donald Trumpâs dwindling lead in the state.
Republicans argue the direction from Marks violates the stateâs election code, which states âno person observing, attending or participating in a pre-canvass meeting may disclose the results of any portion of any pre-canvass meeting prior to the close of polls.â
I am more offended by how ham fisted, clumsy, and audacious the fraud to elect him is than the idea of Joe Biden being president. I think Joe Biden is a corrupt idiot, however, I think America would survive him like weâve survived previous idiot administrations. However, what is potentially fatal for America is half the populace believing that their elections are hopelessly rigged and theyâre eternally fucked. And now, however this shakes out in court, thatâs exactly what half the country is going to think.
People are pissed off, and rightfully so.
Before I became a novelist I was an accountant. In auditing you look for red flags. Thatâs weird bits in the data that suggest something shifty is going on. You flag those weird things so you can delve into them further. One flag doesnât necessarily mean thereâs fraud. Weird things happen. A few flags mean stupidity or dishonesty. But a giant pile of red flags means that thereâs bad shit going on and people should be in jail.
Except for in politics, where apparently all you have to do to dismiss a bunch of red flag is be a democrat and mumble something about âfascist voter suppressionâ then you can do all sorts of blatant crime and get off.
Iâve been trying to keep up with the firehose of information about whatâs going on during this clusterfuck of an election. Last night I was on Facebook talking about the crazy high, 3rd world dictatorship level voter turnout levels in the deep blue areas of these swing states was very suspicious. Somebody gas lighted me about how âIâd have to do better than thatâ, so this was my quick reply, listing off the questionable bullshit I could think of off the top of my head:
The massive turn out alone is a red flag.
But as for doing betterâŠ
The late night spikes that were enough to close all the Trump leads are a red flag.
The statistically impossible breakdown of the ratios of these vote dumps is a red flag.
The ratios of these dumps being far better than the percentages in the bluest of blue cities, even though the historical data does not match, red flag.
The ratios of these vote dumps favoring Biden more in these few battlegrounds than the ratio for the rest of the country (even the bluest of the blue) red flag.
Biden outperforming Obama among these few urban vote dumps, even though Trump picked up points in every demographic group in the rest of the country, red flag.
The poll observers being removed. Red flag.
The counters cheering as GOP observers are removed, red flag.
The fact that the dem observers outnumber the GOP observers 3 to 1, red flag (and basis of the first lawsuit filed)
The electioneering at the polls (on video), red flag.
The willful violation of the court order requiring the separation of ballots by type, red flag.
USPS whistleblower reporting to the Inspector General that today they were ordered to backdate ballots to yesterday, red flag.
The video of 2 AM deliveries of what appear to be boxes of ballots with no chain of custody or other observers right before the late night miracle spikes, red flag.
Any of those things would be enough to trigger an audit in the normal world. This many flags and Iâd be giggling in anticipation of catching some thieves.
A CNN poll had Trump down 12 percentage points nationally entering the final week before the election. An ABC News/Washington Post poll in late October claimed Biden was leading in Wisconsin by 17 points. That stateâs voting ended up nearly even. YouGovâs election model showed Biden prevailing with a landslide win in the Electoral College. Progressive statistics guru Nate Silver had for weeks issued pseudo-scientific analyses of a Trump wipeout.
Pollsters were widely wrong in 2016. Yet they learned nothing about their flawed methodologies. So how do they remain credible after 2020, when most were wildly off again?
A cynic might answer that polling no longer aims to offer scientific assessments of voter intentions.
Pollsters, the vast majority of them progressives, have become political operatives. They see their task as ginning up political support for their candidates and demoralizing the opposition. Some are profiteering as internal pollsters for political campaigns and special interests.
Never again will Americans believe these âmainstreamâ pollstersâ predictions because they have been exposed as rank propagandists.
That bleak assessment wonât make much difference to pollsters. They privately understand what their real mission has become and why they are no longer scientific prognosticators.
Big liberal donors sent cash infusions totaling some $500 million into Senate races across the country to destroy Republican incumbents and take back the Senate. In the end, they may have failed to change many of the outcomes.
But did they really fail?
Democrats dispelled the fossilized notion that âdark moneyâ is dangerous to politics. They are now the party of the ultra-rich, at war with the middle classes, whom they write off as clingers, deplorables, dregs, and chumps.
In that context, the staggering amounts of money were a valuable marker. The liberal mega-rich are warning politicians that from now on, they will try to bury populist conservatives with so much oppositional cash that they would be wise to keep a low profile.
Winning is not the only aim of lavish liberal campaign funding. Deterring future opponents by warning them to be moderate or go bankrupt is another motivation.
Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey seemed unapologetic that his company was systematically censoring and de-platforming conservative users. In a recent hearing he talked to members of the Senate as if he were a 19th-century railroad baron.
Google has been accused of massaging its search results to favor progressive agendas. During the final weeks of the campaign, social-media platforms shut down accounts and censored ads and messages, providing an enormously valuable gift to Joe Biden.
Silicon Valley, like the 19th-century oil, rail, and sugar trusts, sees no reason to hide its partisanship and clout.
The media coverage of the election was unsavory. Journalists confirmed the findings of Harvard Universityâs Shorenstein Center, which in an assessment of news coverage of Trumpâs first 100 days in office found that 80 percent of the coverage was negative.
As in the fashion of the Russian collusion hoax, the media for weeks on end revved up their engines for a seemingly certain Biden landslide victory. They rarely cross-examined Biden on the issues. And they certainly stayed clear of the Biden family influence-peddling scandal.
What do all these power players â big polling, big money, big tech, and big media â have in common other than their partisanship and their powerful reach?
One, they stereotypically represent a virtue-signaling coastal elite that feels its own moral superiority allows it to destroy its own professional standards.
Two, they worry little about popular pushback because they assume that their money, loaded surveys, and Internet and media cartels create, rather than reflect, public opinion.
Three, while these elite cadres have enormous resources, they still are relatively unpopular. Despite being outspent 2 to 1, pronounced doomed by pollsters, often censored on social media, and demonized in print and on television, Trump was neck and neck with Biden â a fact that a few days ago was deemed impossible.
The wall-to-wall promises of a blue wave were delivered with all the certainty of prophecy. Joe Biden and Democrats would sweep the White House and all of Congress from sea to shining sea. Even a large voter survey that Fox News did with the Associated Press suggested as much.
Some 24 hours after the polls closed, President Trump still has a fighting chance to get 270 electoral votes, the GOP is holding on to a slim majority in the Senate and actually gained five House seats, narrowing the Demsâ majority to 12 seats.
We all make mistakes, and most of us try to avoid them. The problem with the unholy news-polling-social media-industrial complex is that the mistakes are so numerous and predictable that they begin to feel intentional.
He’s wrong on that: They’ve felt intentional for a long time now.
You know, in the world we normal people dwell in, when you consistently fail, you get fired. But, as in so many of our garbage establishment institutions, when youâre a pollster there is no accountability. You keep failing and failing and failing and your dumb clients and the dumb media keep citing your garbage surveys. Itâs really remarkable. You would think they would have a little pride in themselves and not want to look like idiots, but no. Instead, itâs, âOur weighting gives us Biden +15 in Texas. Gee, that sounds right. Letâs go with that!â Except for a few outlets, always the ones that take conservatives seriously enough to reach out to them, itâs been a disaster. But next time, weâll hear once again about how, âAckshuuuuuallly, the polls were very accurate in 2020â as if we have the same memory issues as the guy they were trying to help. The nice thing is that even the least woke Republican is woke to the poll scam now.
WINNER: The Republican Partyâs Populist Wing
The battle for the soul of the Republican Party is over and we won. This is now the party of people who work for a living, people who have little companies, people who want their kids to grow up in a world of regular pronouns and where going to church isnât a hate crime. It is also a party that cares nothing about where your grandfather came from â we are winning black and Hispanic voters to our cause not by condescending âoutreachâ but by offering an agenda of good jobs and their kids not being sent off to fight idiotic wars. It is not the party of the Chamber of Commerce â hey geniuses, howâs that pivot to the Dems working out for ya? It is not the party of the bow tie dorks who snicker with their lib buddies over pumpkin-infused IPAs in Georgetown restaurant about those Walmart-shopping, Jesus-liking hicks who make up the base. It is not the party of Wall Street. We are a party that happily includes both the Amish and Lilâ Pump. And the Democrats are the party of hedge funders, college professors, Antifa bums, and people who think âThe Handmaidâs Taleâ is nonfiction.
Elections tell you what the parties actually look like, not what you imagine they look like ⊠so the coalitions become really clear. And in Florida, the population center, of course, Miami-Dade County, the biggest county in the state, Hillary Clinton [got] 334,000 votes there. An hour ago, with 84 percent reporting, Donald Trump had already outstripped that by more than 100,000 votes,â Carlson said on Tuesday evening.
Miami-Dade is 70 percent Hispanic,” he continued. “Thatâs not what you would have expected if youâve been watching for the past six months this attempt to racialize everything to make Trump the greatest racist in the worldâs history. Whether you buy that or not, you would expect that to depress the votes for Trump in Miami-Dade County but the opposite happened. Heâs doing better there with non-White voters than he did four years ago.â
The fundamental source of this agitation is that the Left was convinced the Court would always be on its side, becoming its personal tool for achieving desired outcomes outside the electoral process.
A fuller understanding requires looking back at recent history. And it requires looking at it more honestly than do the recent laments that, for example, Republican presidents over the past several decades have disproportionately appointed more justices to the Supreme Court than they deserve. For conservatives of a few decadesâ past â and still, even, to some extent now â this is not a sign of success but of a particularly cruel kind of failure, if not even their preferred appointees could be trusted once on the Court. The modern conservative legal movement, animated primarily by a renewed commitment to understanding the Constitution as it was understood by those who drafted it (known as originalism), didnât just come out of nowhere with the 1982 birth of the Federalist Society or the 1985 originalist stirrings of Reagan attorney general Edwin Meese. These and other stirrings came in response to a recognition on the right that the Left had either welcomed or been actively complicit in the transformation of the Supreme Court into a super-legislature, a way for liberals to achieve judicially what they could not electorally.
To conservatives, this fact alone comported ill with the Constitution, never mind that many of the decisions achieved by the Court â most notoriously Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationwide in 1973 â proceeded to do further violence to the constitutional order. Their response was not merely to capitulate to this state of affairs, but to work, slowly yet surely, to change it. The Federalist Society helped these efforts greatly, bringing originalist-inclined law students together, connecting them to like-minded professors, helping to seed law schools and courts nationwide with trustworthy exponents of its philosophy, broadly speaking, and more. And this was done despite significant resistance from the left, which treasured the Court and wished to keep it under its control. Liberals aghast at McConnellâs hardball today shouldnât just look back at the 2018 treatment of Brett Kavanaugh, but also to the infamous Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas hearings, the treatment of lower-court nominee Miguel Estrada, and more.
And yet, for all of the Rightâs successes on the Court, it must still witness what it views as fairly spectacular failures. The first Court with majority Republican appointees essentially affirmed Roe; in 2012 a Republican-appointed chief justice rewrote the Affordable Care Act to uphold it as constitutional; in 2015 the Court found a right to same-sex marriage in the 14th Amendment; and just this past summer, Neil Gorsuch, an apparent textualist, divined protection from transgender discrimination in legislation penned within living memory that originally contained no such protections. To be sure, the Right has had its triumphs â often though not always corresponding to defeats for the Left, only inasmuch as the Left was defying or hoping to defy the Constitution â such that it remains interested in the game. And so it is likely to remain, while still wary of the Courtâs ability to uphold the Constitution, even with an ostensible 6â3 majority.
Yet this complicated history, full of the kind of back-and-forth one would expect from the political process, helps to explain the depth of the Leftâs anger about the Courtâs current status. They are mad that conservatives discovered their thinly veiled attempts at transforming the judiciary and decided to try to recapture it with the help of a philosophy that emphasized a renewed commitment to the Constitution. Now that, after decades of patience and persistence, conservatives have established a beachhead on a Court liberals thought would always be theirs, they are infuriated. Some, such as Sheldon Whitehouse, see evidence of a nefarious conspiracy in what has been accomplished openly yet at great difficulty. But the true root of this remains a frustration that, in at least one area, the Right has refused to go along with the Leftâs capture of an institution, that it has not consented to the triumphalist narrative the Left imagines culminates with it forever in charge of everything, never dealing with anything more than token opposition.
There is also one particular aspect of conservative success in filling the federal courts that contributes to the tone of hysteria that creeps into these reactions. The federal appellate courts, and the Supreme Court in particular, are elite institutions â indeed, the most elite institutions in all of American government and the legal profession. They are populated by highly educated professionals. They work with ideas. They are one of the few institutions of government that actually consumes the work of academics and sometimes translates it into policy. Their output is expected to be scholarly in character and taught in law schools. To see such institutions in the hands of conservatives, particularly social and religious conservatives, is intolerable to people whose worldview depends so heavily on sneering at the inferior intellect of anyone who holds to socially conservative views. That sneering is especially apparent any time a conservative is described as intelligent; the gag reflex you see in response is visceral.
Elite or wannabe-elite institutions in our culture these days tend to be dominated by social liberals and progressives, who in turn seek to drive out all dissenters. To be a conservative on a university faculty is to be, at a minimum, badly outnumbered. Often there are more-or-less open efforts to stamp out any remaining vestiges of disagreement. We see the same thing with big newspapers, magazines, and other journalistic institutions; with the arts and entertainment; increasingly in large corporations as well. The tribunes of the legal profession itself â the bar associations, the journals covering the legal industry, the people who hand out awards â are dominated by the same groups, and rarely even engage with the possibility that their values might not be the only good ones. But no amount of desire for social ostracism can change the fact that the Supreme Court and the federal appellate courts sit atop the legal food chain, where the barâs disapproval must remain comparatively muted, if through clenched teeth. To a certain sort of progressive, this itself serves as a kind of standing rebuke, a nagging reminder that gets in the way of simply scorning the idea that conservatives could be capable of doing such a job.
I couldn’t post to Twitter yesterday, and briefly thought they’d finally banned me for spreading Disapproved Hunter Biden News. Sadly, it was down for everyone, not just me.
Perhaps the selective enforcement of content which is politically harmful to Democrats can be explained by recent hires by the Biden transition team.
According to Breitbart, Twitter Public Policy Director Carlos Monje left the social media giant to join Biden’s transition team in September. He will reportedly serve as co-chair of Biden’s infrastructure policy committee, and helped organize a fundraiser for the former VP this week, according to an invitation from Politico.
Meanwhile in October, Biden’s transition team hired Facebook executive Jessica Hertz to its general counsel to deal with ‘ethics’ issues. Notably, Facebook was the first platform to ban the Post article – with former Democrat staffer and Facebook communications team member Andy Stone tweeting that the company would be ‘reducing its distribution.’
Trump is back and this is a real race. I think we will win it.
Except all the polls are telling us Grandpa Badfinger is up +37, right? Weird how four years ago right now, we were hearing the exact same thing. Ignore the spinners who are solemnly informing you that your lying eyes are lying again and the 2016 polls were akshually very accurate. Baloney. A key component of effective gaslighting is plausibility, and I was there. You were there. All we heard in 2016 was how Trump was going down to a landslide defeat. Instead, everyone in the smart set got blindsided by the Trump Train.
And it can happen again.
Now, it doesnât have to happen again. Nothing is written, and we have to fight for our victory. There are a lot of stupid people around â my district regularly re-e-elects Ted Lieu â and Oldfinger could build a Coalition of the Drooling to put him in the White House. But I think the Trump lightning will strike again.
Remember, the polls are the only data point in Bidenâs favor. The only one. And as we have seen they screwed up last time and their proponents have an interest in them being bad for Trump.
But Kurt, the libs say, âYou must hate science because the science of polling cannot be wrong! Itâs science.â Yeah, but so is phrenology. The fact is that not only do the polls have a track record of failure with regard to populists like Trump â remember that they also missed a number of Senate seats that were supposed to spin down the drain with The Donald â but many of the pollsters are retained by media outlets with an anti-Trump agenda. If these very fine people in the media lie about everything, like the âvery fine peopleâ quote, why would you buy the notion that thereâs some line they wonât cross when it comes to faking polls?
Am I saying they will push bullSchiff poll results to try to demoralize patriots? Yes, yes I am. You donât have to just make up numbers â though I would not put it past them. You just tweak the turnout model and fiddle with the cross-tabs and voila! â CNN has its narrative. After all, itâs not like in the editorial offices they are saying âSure, weâll lie about Trump/ Russia, Trump/COVID, and Trump/Nickelback, and hey, thereâs no way weâll fake a poll! We have scruples.â They would sacrifice their babies to Baal if A) they hadnât hit Planned Parenthood, and B) they thought it would ensure Trump loses.
Also: “Biden rallies look like the shopping mall in Dawn of the Dead, which is apt since the guy handling his media events is apparently George Romero. Only the flesh-eating zombies had more pep than the Delaware Dementiteâs fans.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“Democrats Were Awful Filth Questioning ACB.” Kamala Harris looked sad, but Mazie Hirono of Hawaii was probably the biggest loon.
Why do Joe Biden and Kamala Harris refuse to give a straightforward yes or no answer when asked whether they intend to âpack the Courtâ and expand it to a number larger than the nine justices that have been on the Court for the past 150 years?
Because a considerable portion of the Democratic Party wants to expand the Court beyond nine. In a recent YouGov survey, 47 percent of registered voters opposed expanding the size of the Supreme Court, 34 percent supported it, and 19 percent responded they didnât know how they felt. But self-identified Democrats were much more supportive: 60 percent wanted to expand the Court, 18 percent opposed the idea, and 22 percent didnât know.
It quickly became clear that in their attempts to strangle the Hunter Biden story, two social media giants left themselves gasping for air.
Twitter and Facebook took major steps to squelch the New York Post piece, but wound up giving it far more attention than if they had done nothing and let their millions of users share it freely.
For Twitter in particular, if you had to come up with a plan to reinforce conservative complaints about its liberal bias, you could hardly do better than for the tech giant to lock the Trump campaignâs account. Not to mention that of press secretary Kayleigh McEnany as well.
Hashtag: #Fail
In fact, Twitter chief Jack Dorsey admitted in a tweet that the companyâs conduct–censoring stories and locking accounts with little public explanation–was âunacceptable.â You got that right, Jack. But then he didnât do anything to fix it, apparently viewing the self-inflicted wound as just a PR problem. Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans plan to subpoena Dorsey next week.
After a few years of shoeing horses, briefly interrupted by a temporary job mining silver, I ran a brush-clearing and landscaping company as a side hustle. During this scramble for meaningful independence, the leftist tendencies Iâd absorbed at college dropped off bit by bit. Life as a capitalist entrepreneur brought out the best in me, even when I was flirting with homelessness. Moreover, being in the real working world pushed me into contact with people, ideas, and situations that challenged me in all sorts of ways. After a few near-fatal incidents with horses (one of which left my skull and jaw shattered), I began pursuing my own business full time in 2016.
Now in my early 20s, I still had a soft spot for socialist ideas, including a lingering resentment toward the wealthy. And so, from a progressive politicianâs perspective, I was hardly a lost cause. But I also was becoming aware that the Left didnât really have much interest in the challenges I was facing, being far more concerned with issues of race and gender identity. As a straight white male, I was supposedly luxuriating in a life of privilegeâa stereotype that had nothing to do with my experience as a blue-collar worker whoâd faced debilitating family traumas.
Speaking of crazy leftwing city councils, thanks to the SUPERgenius police defunding policies of Mayor Adler and the Austin City Council, some 911 calls have waits of between 2-6 hours.
Biden refuses to reveal his position on court-packing, but he still wants to take your guns and hike your taxes until your eyeballs bleed, plus more on the enthusiasm gap, fracking flip-flops, and we’re all going to be millionaires (the Weimer Republic kind). It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
“Hey Joe, are you gonna pack the courts?” “Not telling!”
As the Senate moves forward on the president’s Supreme Court pick, both former Vice President Joe Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, continue to deflect when asked if they would try to add more justices to the nation’s highest court, a practice known as court packing.
Biden and his party face increasing pressure because of the frustration of many progressives at the Republican effort to rush through a replacement for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a longtime liberal icon, with Amy Coney Barrett just before the Nov. 3 election. Because the addition of Barrett is expected to create a conservative majority on the high court some have called for adding more justices.
The question of adding seats to the Supreme Court also hinges on the battle for control of the U.S. Senate, where Republicans currently hold a slim 53 to 47 majority. If Democrats are able to wrest control of the GOP, maintain control of the U.S. House and Biden wins the presidency, the party would need to pass legislation expanding the court beyond its current limit of nine justices.
Lord knows progressive frustration is a just a swell reason to overthrow centuries of tradition.
âAccording to an analysis from Real Clear Politics, Biden holds a 4.4 percentage point lead over the president in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina and Arizona,â she explains. âHowever, Democrat Hillary Clinton was ahead of Trump by 4.8 points in these swing states this time in 2016âa slightly greater advantage than the one Biden currently has.â
Bidenâs leads in Pennsylvania and Michigan, two states Trump won, are also smaller than Clintonâs leads at this time four years ago. âThe Real Clear Politics average shows that Biden is ahead with a 6.3 lead in Pennsylvania and a 6.2 advantage in Michigan. Comparably, Clinton was leading in these two states by 9.2 points and 9.6 points, respectively, this time in 2016.â
Similarly, polls for Wisconsin and North Carolina show Biden with a smaller lead than they did for Hillary Clinton back in 2016.
The only outliers to this trend are Florida and Arizona. Bidenâs lead in Florida is at 3.5, compared to Hillaryâs 3.2 point lead in 2016. Biden also leads in Arizona by 3.4 points, compared to Trumpâs 0.7 point advantage in 2016.
NBC News featured several "undecided" voters at Monday's Biden Town Hall that had previously been featured as Biden supporters on MSNBC:pic.twitter.com/61ZRXmcktT
Asked about President Donald Trumpâs tax cuts, which most economists agree are largely responsible for the resurrection of the U.S. economy following the slow-growth Obama-Biden years, Harris said: âOn Day 1, Joe Biden will repeal that tax bill.â
Never mind that a President Biden will have no such power to ârepealâ anything. Thatâs Congressâ job, and if Biden isnât blessed with having both branches of Congress firmly in far-left Democratic hands, ârepealingâ the tax cuts wonât happen.
But then Harris went on to say Biden wouldnât raise taxes on those earning less than $400,000. Say what? By ârepealingâ Trumpâs tax cuts, he would be doing just that.
The truth is, Biden has played games with his tax plans all along. But the actual tax plans he has revealed would be nothing short of disastrous for working men and women, and the economy as a whole. Those plans plainly show that 77-year-old Biden, a lifelong politician, understands nothing about the private economy. That is, apart from it being a great source of graft for him and his family.
A report out just this week from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that taxes would rise about $4.3 trillion over the next decade under Bidenâs plans, while taxes under Trump would actually decline by $1.7 trillion over that period.
At least, you say, that $4.3 trillion in added taxes under Biden would cut the deficit more than Trumpâs plans, right? Wrong.
The CRFB notes that its projections show a 10-year rise in federal deficits of $8.3 trillion for Biden, versus $6.9 trillion for Trump.
Enthusiasm for Trump among his voters âis historically high,â said Richard Baris, the director of Big Data Poll. âWe saw that very early in the cycle, in his primary vote totals,â when the president drew unusually large voter turnout in uncontested races.
âMeanwhile, Bidenâs enthusiasm level is historically low â so low that the Democrats run the risk of replaying 2016,â Baris said.
Just 46 percent of Biden voters in a recent Pew poll said that they strongly support him, compared to 66 percent of Trumpâs base.
Rank-and-file Dems are sounding the alarm.
âI look out over my Biden sign in my front yard and I see a sea of Trump flags and yard signs,â Pennsylvania voter Susan Connors told Biden worriedly at a CNN-sponsored town hall Sept. 17.
Experienced political hands have a saying: âYard signs donât vote.â And research appears to bear that out â a 2016 study found that political signage increases vote share by a mere 1.7 percentage points, on average.
Biden holds a 10-point lead in the RealClearPolitics national polling average, a commanding position with Election Day less than four weeks away. But the exuberant signs and displays of Trump passion may actually point to a yawning enthusiasm gap that could make a big difference on Election Day â just as they did in 2016.
Four years ago, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found a 13-point enthusiasm gap in Trumpâs favor, a result echoed by other surveys, The Hill reported.
Many people .â.â. said that the sheer volume of Trump signs they saw in 2016 â and the scarcity of Hillary Clinton signs â was their first clue that the polling was wrong and that Trump would have more success than the pundits had predicted,â Daniel Allott writes in âOn the Road in Trumpâs America: A Journey into the Heart of a Divided Nationâ (Republic Books), out Oct. 20.
It’s deja vu all over again… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
A federal appeals court has reinstated a fraud conviction of Hunter Biden’s longtime business partner, Devon Archer, reversing a decision by an Obama-appointed judge (and wife of Mueller special counsel lawyer) to vacate Archer’s conviction and grant him a new trial.
Archer and several of his business partners were indicted on March 26, 2018 in a $60 million bond scheme which defrauded Native Americans. Hunter was not implicated in the fraud, however Archer and the other partners repeatedly name-dropped the former Vice President’s son.
Following a trial which lasted nearly one-month, Archer was found guilty of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and securities fraud. After requesting that the district court set aside the jury’s verdict, Judge Ronnie Abrams – the wife of Mueller special counsel attorney Greg Andres (who himself was a Deputy Assistant AG in the Obama DOJ, according to RedState) – granted Archer’s wish. What’s more, Abrams was Hunter Biden’s classmate at Yale Law school.
In a unanimous opinion, a three-judge panel said that Abrams made a mistake by prioritizing her own theory above that of the jury’s, and that her assessment undercut the significance of the proof in its totality.
Mike Pence dominated in that debate. He was calm and cool. Rock-solid. Kamala Harrisâs body language and voice reflected her nervousnessâa stark contrast to her previous debate performances during the Democratic primary when she was still in the race. But neither her body language, her failure to answer questions, nor her constant reliance on fake stories as lines of attack were the key tell that she lost.
The liberal media conceded Penceâs victory by describing Penceâs debate performance. And their go-to explanation was to attack the vice president by accusing him of âmansplaining.â
ï»ż
“China Censors Mike Penceâs Debate Comments On China But Freely Broadcasts Kamala Harrisâs.” “‘China censored Penceâs comments on China,’ Canadaâs Globe and Mail Beijing Correspondent Nathan VanderKlippe reported. ‘Signal returned when Harris began talking again.'”
Of all the people they know — including RINOs and squishes and NeverTrumpers who voted against Trump in 2016 — many of the NeverTrumpers are now reluctant Trump voters, and many of 2016’s reluctant Trump voters are now enthusiastic Trump voters.
On the other hand, they don’t know anyone who has moved from voting for Trump in 2016 to voting for Biden.
One friend tells me that the suburban well-to-do Wine Moms and Squish Sisters he knows are now fully on the MAGA train.
Everyone they know who’s moved on The Trump Question (and Trump seems to be the only issue in 2020) has moved in favor of Trump.
They also note that the “Shy Trumper” effect — where Trump supporters won’t admit to pollsters they still support Trump — is still strong, based on their own experience.
One relates that he did not tell his own children that he voted for Trump, due to social pressure and the idea that he didn’t want to “normalize” Trump’s bad behavior to his children.
If you can’t tell your own kids you voted for Trump, you’re not going to tell a pollster.
And this person works in conservative politics, too!
If even people in the conservative movement can’t admit they’re Trump supporters — well good luck getting Wendy Wine Mom to admit that on the phone.
A friend of mine was a hardcore NeverTrumper in 2016 but now is a crawl-over-broken-glass Trump Voter. No, he doesn’t really like Trump, but unlike Jonah Goldberg and Steve Schmidt, he recognizes the profound threat the left poses to what is left of America.
He has kept in touch with his NeverTrump pals. Media types. The types who annoy you on Twitter.
And while he won’t Name Names, he tells me that many of the NeverTrumpers I hate are now “red pilled” Trump voters.
They just won’t admit it publicly.
Snip.
If there were a lot of Trump defectors, the media would be profiling them and lionizing them and promoting them 24-7.
But I haven’t seen a single story about Trump 2016-Biden 2020 defectors.
The media hasn’t found any — despite the fact that by announcing that you’re now a full-on Democrat Liberal, you gain employment opportunities and social prestige.
So if the media can’t find any of these people… do they even exist?
YouTuber Liberal Hivemind says that Biden is losing voters every day:
âThose blacks, always working menial jobs before they hop back on a city bus and head home to their housing projects. Anyway, Iâm Joe Biden. Vote for me cause Donald Trump is racist.â https://t.co/MHaxeYNcB7
chronicled many times over the last three years when Democratic senators questioned judicial nominees about their faith, suggesting in various forms that a candidateâs Catholic or Christian beliefs might render them unfit to serve on the bench.
Several of those questions were posed by Harris herself, focusing especially on Catholic candidates. In late 2018, for instance, Harris grilled Brian Buescher, nominated to be a federal district judge in Nebraska, about his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization with more than 2 million members worldwide who conduct charitable work. Hereâs one of Harrisâs written questions to Buescher:
Since 1993, you have been a member of the Knights of Columbus, an all-male society comprised primarily of Catholic men. In 2016, Carl Anderson, leader of the Knights of Columbus, described abortion as âa legal regime that has resulted in more than 40 million deaths.â Mr. Anderson went on to say that âabortion is the killing of the innocent on a massive scale.â Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed a womanâs right to choose when you joined the organization?
She went on to ask whether Buescher was âaware that the Knights of Columbus opposed marriage equality when you joined the organizationâ and whether he had âever, in any way, assisted with or contributed to advocacy against womenâs reproductive rights.â
Harris posed these and other similar questions to Paul Matey and Peter Phipps, Catholic nominees who, like Buescher, are members of the Knights. Among the questions she posed to Matey based on his involvement in the Knights were:
* Do you agree with Mr. Andersonâs description of abortion as âthe killing of the innocent on a massive scaleâ?
* Do you agree with Mr. Anderson that legal abortion in the United States has âresulted in more than 40 million deathsâ?
* Do you believe that a fetus is entitled to any protection under the U.S. Constitution?
Race snapshot:
Campaign snapshot for Sunday:
– Trump is fully recovered (it seems)
– None of the 34 allegedly infected at White House seem to be in medical danger, including Chris Christie
Borepatch thinks the election is over. “The only thing that the Democrats had going for them was the lockdown. The breathless hyping of the ‘rona was intended to fan the flames of fear which would justify further lockdown and economic devastation. They then blamed Trump for all this, while the media shamelessly covered for them. That’s all gone now.”
A keening wail of lamentation rings out across the land at Mr. Trumpâs possible, dastardly recovery. How dare he! â to paraphrase Saint Greta Thunberg. 209,000 other Americans died, and not him! What vile and unholy devices got him out of a sure death sentence? No doubt Democratic Party astrologasters and consulting augurers will be searching for clues among the orbiting planets and the spilled organs of sacrificed chickens in the days to come. Perhaps Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) can snare a few of the presidentâs attending physicians into his House Intel Committee and rev up another impeachment for going against doctorsâ orders. Wouldnât that be a delectable counter to the looming confirmation process for Ruth Bader Ginsburgâs replacement next door in the Senate this month?
“Media Criticizes Trump For Downplaying Virus Threat By Not Dying.” “Every hour that he lives is another hour that the severity of this virus is undermined!”
Some of the worst things about it is the element of transformation of the formerly mild-mannered and kindly into founts of seething malevolence.
Itâs deeply unsettling to see the rage come over a person, as I recently did when looking into the eyes of a previously genial acquaintance who was shrieking with rage at me, her eyes narrowed with what looked like hatred.
People donât like what threatens them, especially if they have no immediate factual answer to some of the evidence presented to them. Whatâs left to them is to explodeâwhich this person did, ultimately getting into her car and peeling off with tires screeching. I would guess, although I donât know, and Iâm certainly not about to ask, that she and plenty of other people I know might be rejoicing, openly or secretly, in Trumpâs diagnosis.
Are they âpossessed?â Is this âdemonic?â I donât know, but I donât think so. I tend to think in psychological terms because these people are, for the most part, not inherently evil. They are filled with self-righteousness, and they have been whipped up into a fever pitch by an MSM and Democratic Party bent on doing so for political reasons. This is no accident.
Wishing that your opponent dies of a disease is pretty bad, but some go beyond the passive voice when hoping for our deaths. They seek to do it. Exhibit A is tech overlord Dick Costolo, a former Twitter CEO apparently, who tweeted on September 30th, âMe-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I’ll happily provide video commentary.â So Dick, which by coincidence also happens to also be your name, you want to play horsey, huh?
I guess casually cheering the murder of political opponents gets you some guffaws from your pals in Palo Alto cafes. But those of us who have ventured outside of the carefully constructed (and costly, in terms of sweat and blood) safe space that is the United States, and who get that the natural state of man is not driving Teslas and sipping bespoke Napa Chardonnay in prosperous, secure enclaves with oneâs liberal cronies, know better. People who cheerlead political murder tend to be people who will support political murder given the chance to make it happen.
One challenge for the dilettantes of death is to find the people who would actually commit political murder for them, but money and institutional inertia make that possible. As we have seen, woke zillionaires can fund their own lilâ revolutionaries. They are the ones behind Antifa, and if Donald Trump is reelected, we will likely see the DoJ (once Trump rids himself of the worse than useless FBI Director Christopher Wray, who never met self-serving establishment narrative he didnât eagerly hump like a horny dog rubbing on the nearest leg) forced by Bill Barr to concede that this is an Astroturfed RICO conspiracy paid for by rich leftists. Yet, Antifa is not a combat organization (unless you are one person surrounded by a dozen of these brownshirts) but an information operation asset.
But the Dicks of the elite are spoiled and soft and while this all seems like fun and games to them, with somebody else doing the murdering, they donât realize that history holds that the status quo doesnât remain in effect for everyone else when one group decides to alter it to its advantage. That is the plan â the establishment, outraged at the people who held them accountable for their legacy of failure, incompetence, and corruption by electing Donald Trump and a Republican Senate, intend to alter the status quo to ensure that this outrage never happens again. They intend to add states to increase their leverage. They intend to change voting laws to allow cheating and impose âcampaign finance lawsâ that will be enforced against your candidates but not against establishment candidates to ensure there are no more troublesome populist alternatives. They intend, using tech companies and big corporations, to impose thought control and punish dissenters by cutting them off from access to the routine modes of living in this society â social media, banking, transportation, education. They intend to pass laws to disarm you so the ultimate failsafe of freedom is negated. And they intend to pack the Supreme Court to ensure they canât be stopped by that pesky Constitution.
But they will expect you to remain static and to respect and obey as if nothing has changed. You must be loyal to the institutions that betrayed you becauseâŠwell, thatâs unclear. Perhaps they hope youâll just keep going along as if nothing is different out of habit, or from fear of losing what little they have left to you.
Yet, the notion that Americans will wake up one morning, see that they are no longer free, shrug, obediently line up to turn in their Remingtons and Mossbergs and reconcile themselves to serfdom is not in the cards.
More studies find face masks ineffective against the Wuhan coronavirus than found them effective. I suspect that N95 masks might well be effective, but not this ‘wear any damn thing” Virus Theater we’re stuck in.
Arizona’s Republican governor Doug Ducey puts the kibosh on last-minute Democratic attempts to force through online voting.
Authorities arrested a North Texas candidate on dozens of felony voter fraud charges after catching him red-handed with a box of mail-in ballots belonging to local voters.
Carrollton mayoral candidate Zul Mirza Mohamed was charged Wednesday with 109 felonies for fraudulently requesting and obtaining mail-in ballots he alleged were for nursing home residents.
According to a press release from Denton County Sheriff Tracy Murphree, his office was tipped off to the possible mail-ballot harvesting scheme on September 23 by the Denton County Elections Office.
Multiple mail ballots had been requested on behalf of Carrollton residents to be sent to a post office box in Lewisville, which purportedly belonged to a nursing home facility. Investigators contacted the voters and found they had not made the ballot requests.
Investigators also learned the post office box was obtained using a fake Texas driverâs license and fake student ID from the University of North Texas, and they began surveilling the post office.
On October 7, investigators saw the suspect pick up a box of requested mail-in ballots and take them back to his residence in Carrollton. Officers obtained a search warrant for Mohamedâs home and inside found the fake driverâs license and box of ballotsâseveral of which had been opened.
Iâm a police officer in a major American city. Many of you reading this have seen a movie or TV show set in this city. Some of you have vacationed here. We have a big problem with poverty, unemployment, people scamming the welfare system, drugs, and violent crime.
Honestly, though, who I am and where I work isnât importantâwhat I stand for is. I show up every day Iâm scheduled to work, on time, and I work. I donât hang out at the station, I handle calls for service and I constantly back up other officers. I quickly progressed to different specialized units and, over time, even began to help out at the academy and became a Field Training Officer.
But after a couple of high-profile incidents where suspects wound up dead, we were essentially told to stop pursuing the bad guys: Too much liability for the city. So, if a violent felon who shot someone last week is spotted and you know itâs him? Depending on the ranking officer working, youâre most likely not going to be allowed to go get him.
Snip.
Call someone out on being a worthless lazy officer? Is that worthless lazy officer a lieutenantâs mistress?! You just earned yourself a transfer to night watch in some outpost no one wants to work.
In every major city thereâs a punishment assignment. Everyone whoâs ever been a city cop knows this to be true.
After a while, that same lazy officer whoâs been sitting in that same lieutenantâs lap, or whoâs never really done anything noteworthy, except maybe they went to the right school or are in the right clique, they now have time on the job and they take the sergeants test. They pass and, if your department doesnât go straight down the list, theyâre now a supervisor! Newer officers have no idea theyâre working for someone whoâs telling them someone elseâs war stories or making themselves seem more important than they really were in the situation.
Roll call training is all about administrative work and checking boxes off for monthly audits. We barely talk about that stolen silver SUV that is absolutely raping us nightly with auto burglaries. Oh, and since our policies are out there for anyone to read (including the bad guys) in the âinterest of transparency,â they know we canât pursue them for a property crime once they blow the red light at the intersection after we light them up and they flee. Never mind the fact that that stolen SUV is occupied by a wanted felon for armed robber in possession of a stolen AK-47. Itâs just a property crime, right? No big deal. If they t-bone a family of four and kill someone, the fleeing felon isnât at fault. I am.
Snip.
You have mayors bowing to the political pressure from a small, very vocal, minority that wants to defund (read: abolish, in many cases) the police.
Some mayors have made it known to their department brass theyâd rather endure the optics of Revolutionary Communists (read: ANTIFA/BLM) rioting, looting, and burning their cities down, than have their police officers be seen wading into the fray with riot batons in hand.
You realize that if cities abolish police departments, gated communities are going to hire private police forces, made up of nearly all ex-police from the agency that just disbanded (see Minneapolis when that happens) and ex-military guys. The city wonât have oversight and their rules and regulations are going to be way more relaxed. Less area to patrol and a large pay raise? Less crime? Sign me up!
Major media outlets constantly fan the flames of civil unrest nationwide. In a race to be first with many stories, they finish last in credibility. The initial tragedy de jour is front-page news, leading all newscasts in prime time. Meanwhile, the retraction or exoneration of the officer is buried. No apologies from the likes of Shaun King, MSNBC, CNN, or Al Sharpton. Theyâve all already moved on to the next rage-bait.
Who gives a fâ if some honest hard-working cop had his or her life ruined and is in financial shambles because they got a no-win call dropped in their lap, right? All cops are bastards, anyway. Black Lives only seem to matter when cops are involved in the death, justified or not, of a black person.
Every single week, in many major cities all across this country, murders within the black community occur â oftentimes with stolen firearms. Iâve lost count of the bodies (mostly black, never in my case shot by police) Iâve stood over. Sometimes at night when Iâm trying to fall asleep I hear the blood-curdling screams of family members (mostly mothers) who rush to the scene and are held back at the police tape.
So, in a knee-jerk reaction to a high-profile incident, in an effort to placate a mob, there is talk of not only defunding the police but abolishing them. Do you know what that leads to nationwide? Cops like me are not being proactive. At all. Because the juice isnât worth the squeeze.
Seven of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s own aides have accused him of “improper influence, abuse of office, bribery and other potential criminal offenses” in relation to Austin investor Nate Paul.
Former Paxton assistant and current United State congressman Chip Roy called on Paxton to resign, which is not a good sign.
Speaking of Democratic governance, Baltimore’s next mayor is complaining about Donald Trump when he should be complaining about his fellow Democrats:
Baltimore is no more âunjustâ now than it was before its murder rate soared half a decade ago. What has changed is that Baltimore is less policed than it was back then. And thatâs thanks to the policies and pronouncement of its pathetic Democrat mayors and other leading pols.
It seems clear that Brandon Scott will continue in their tradition. Thus, it seems equally clear that Baltimore will remain exhibit A when informed people talk about the breakdown in law and order under the watch (if you can call it that) of Democratic mayors.
Today’s Democratic politician receiving a felony indictment comes to you from Rochester, New York, where Democratic Mayor Lovey Warren was indicted on felony campaign finance fraud charges. “At issue are transfers made from Ms. Warrenâs political action committee to her campaign committee that far exceeded the $8,557 limit that a campaign could receive from an individual donor.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
“Democrat Party official arrested for allegedly pulling knife on ‘Women for Trump.'” “The communications director for the Democrat Party of Washington County, Oregon [Clayton John Callahan], was arrested after allegedly pulling a knife on female Trump supporters at an outdoor event hosted by the Oregon Women for Trump.”
Some quality trolling in the footnotes. In response to Google being obnoxiously evasive about market share questions, the subcommittee noted 'interesting how Microsoft was obnoxiously evasive about market share.'
The Red Headed Libertarian notes that the MSM seems to intentionally conflate anarchists with legal militias, and offers a brief history lesson:
DJT was asked to denounce âmilitias & white supremacistsâ at the debate.
Conflated Political language is never by accident.
Dems failed to repeal 2A based on the prefatory clause so now they take on operative clause-
In Heller, Scalia said militias are made up of individuals.
— The Red-Headed Libertarian âą (@TRHLofficial) October 8, 2020
Their response was to deny Congress power to abridge the ancient right of individuals to keep and bear arms, so that the ideal of a citizensâ militia would be preserved.
— The Red-Headed Libertarian âą (@TRHLofficial) October 8, 2020
Like antifa, Joe Biden is just an idea, CNN skews its poll even more than usual, more “inappropriate” touching, and Biden refuses to take a position on, well, just about everything. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
Lost in the blinding gaslighting over Donald Trumpâs remarks about white supremacists during the first presidential debate was the fact that Joe Biden proved again that heâs little more than a stand-in propped up by a compliant political press.
Biden was unable to answer even the most rudimentary queries about his beliefs, never mind specifics about policy. Apologies to the Twitter expert class, but opposing Donald Trump is neither a moral doctrine nor a policy agenda.
There is plenty to dislike about the president, but you rarely have to guess where he stands. Biden, on the other hand, says âI am the Democratic Party,â and yet, after a half century in American politics, we have virtually no idea what his presidency would look like.
Bidenâs already put a lid on his past, and the press has obliged. The same reporters who will comb over 15 years of Trumpâs tax returns have shown zero curiosity in nearly 40 years of Senate papers Biden has buried somewhere in a University of Delaware basement. Then again, thereâs not a single significant piece of legislation Biden sponsored in his 36 years in Senate that he still supports, so maybe it doesnât matter.
Thanks to the media, though, I know more about some flaky QAnon candidate in Georgia than I do about the presidential frontrunnerâs foreign-policy positions. Or much else. If Republicans were threatening to destroy the constitutional order by packing the courts and throwing out the legislative filibuster â one that Bidenâs mentor Barack Obama once argued was an indispensable tool of a representative democracy â there would be massive pressure on the head of the party to stake out a public position.
Bidenâs basement has proved more of a tomb than a front porch. And his vice-presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, the avatar of the âHarris Admiration,â seemed almost as scarce as Biden. Until now, both thought it wiser to let Trump AgonistĂȘs flail at his existential enemies and to let the press do its now-accustomed work of churning out periodic hit jobs on Trump. When Biden gave a rare scripted interview, his obsequious interviewers grimaced as they sought to prop him up when he bizarrely claimed that he had served 180 years in the Senate or that 200 million Americans had died from the coronavirus.
Technology has allowed Biden to hobble along now and then with Zoom and Skype. Hidden teleprompters and a conspiracy of toady journalists have passed off fake press conferences as spontaneous rather than scripted events.
Biden was never up to 16- to 18-hour days, as we learned in the year-long primary fights. So staying home purportedly also gave him rest and the chance to run an occasional on-screen Wizard of Oz campaign â and again let the ram Trump beat his head against the media, the virus, and the chaos of the cities.
So without current technology, a slavish media, the weirdest year in American history, and strong polling, Biden could not have gotten away by disappearing from a presidential campaign for months on end.
Yet there were other reasons that the once loquacious motor-mouth Biden never really campaigned. He became a virtual candidate in quite another sense: He has acted as an emissary for a Bernie Sanders socialist agenda that otherwise would have stayed underground after expiring and being buried in the Democratic primary. A prisoner of ideology, Biden found it wiser not to rebel and comment on the issues â well aside from the pragmatic worries of his handlers that he might detour to yet another âYou ainât blackâ revelation.
If Biden were to openly oppose any of the hard-left ideologies that his handlers and masters embrace â if he endorsed fracking, issued a list of liberal rather than hard-left judges, or objected to dismantling the Electoral College â he would lose his new base and with them a close election.
And yet if Biden were to explicitly and publicly advocate the Sanders, AOC, or Warren neo-socialist agenda, he would also lose, turning off his supposed swing-voter and independent suburban constituents.
So Biden in the vortex stays nearly mute â a quietude certainly well suited to his age, the prior news cycles of 2020, his cognitive limitations, and his hope that he can win with a rope-a-dope, run-out-the-clock strategy.
And now? The polls tighten. This strange year is gradually normalizing. Biden should be rested, after his months-long hiatus. And so will he in the eleventh hour actually conduct a campaign? Yes and no.
His strategists still seem to suffer from the Hillary disease. As in 2016, Trump is frenetic in the swing states, the Democratic candidate is virtually nonexistent.
As in 2016, Biden and the Democrats talk of a 70 to 90 percent likelihood of victory and an Electoral College blowout. They speculate about who will be the nationâs next cabinet officers, oblivious that such arrogance only feeds their blindness.
As in 2016, a few polls â Rasmussen, Trafalgar, Emerson, Zogby â show Trump nearly even or ahead in some states and are thus dismissed. Mainstream polls, as in 2016, likely âproveâ their absence of bias by under-sampling working-class Democratic constituencies and over-sampling suburbanites, many of them Republicans â as if they cannot be accused of party asymmetries even as they do not reflect accurate ideological affinities.
And the polling outfits that in 2016 assured a Clinton victory are now once against cited for their reassurance that the Democrat remains clearly ahead.
As in 2016, when millions would not reveal their preferences and were written off as mythical voters, so too now we are told that the proverbial stealthy Trump voter remains an exaggeration and a likely no-show.
As in 2016, when Hillary dismissed Trumpâs road-runner-like feverish visits to swing states as an ossified strategy, at least compared with the tactics of her twentysomething technical wizards, so too Bidenâs youngsters now laugh off Trumpâs calcified ideas, such as knocking on millions of doors to talk to voters in person.
And as in 2106, when Hillaryâs social-media masters and tech experts proved incompetent, so too Bidenâs scripted tele-campaigning is often plagued by glitches, inadvertent glimpses of teleprompter reflections, and prompts left on the script that Biden dutifully speaks out loud, giving the game away.
Long ago, we knew that Biden was physically not up for a normal campaign. Yet the freakish year of 2020 gave him the chance to outsource his candidacy to the weird cycle of events that drove down Trumpâs polls.
Biden sends mixed signals on whether he supports the socialist “Green New Deal,” but his own proposals look like the Green New Deal’s Little Brother:
For starters, the Biden Plan does include the following:
âEnsure the U.S. achieves a 100% clean energy economy and reaches net-zero emissions no later than 2050.â
âOn day one, Biden will make smart infrastructure investments to rebuild the nation and to ensure that our buildings, water, transportation, and energy infrastructure can withstand the impacts of climate change.â
âHe will not only recommit the United States to the Paris Agreement on climate change â he will go much further than that.â
âThe Biden plan will make a historic investment in our clean energy future and environmental justice, paid for by rolling back the Trump tax incentives that enrich corporations at the expense of American jobs and the environment.â
âBiden will set a target of reducing the carbon footprint of the U.S. building stock 50% by 2035, creating incentives for deep retrofits that combine appliance electrification, efficiency, and on-site clean power generation.â
âMake climate change a core national security priority.â
These are just a few examples of the radical progressive elements in Bidenâs plan.
Plus Green New Deal Supporter Kamala Harris would be waiting in the wings.
Kyle Rittenhouse’s layer threatens to sue Biden for libel for falsely calling him a white supremacist. As well he should.
The Obama administration oversaw the lowest point in the US-Israel relations since Israelâs establishment in 1948. Biden was party to regular leaks of Israeli intelligence and political attacks targeting Israel on the global stage. In 2010, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the US to mend relations. The prime minister was taken in and out of the White House through a side door with no official media related to the visit.
Biden also worked to pass the Iran nuclear deal, which Israel heavily opposed. There are reports that in a 2014 meeting, Obama threatened to shoot down Israeli fighter jets should they target facilities in Iran. Biden does not get to run on the Obama-Biden record and play coy to these events. It is no coincidence that a month before Netanyahu addressed the House of Representatives, the Obama administration decided to declassify a 386-page report on Israeli nuclear capabilities.
“The wife of a Massachusetts transit police officer who was injured in the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers accused Joe Biden of touching her inappropriately and making a suggestive comment in 2014.” Hey, remember when we were supposed to believe all women during #MeToo? It already seems a million years ago…
Not that our media will report any of them:
This is the most complete indictment of media bias ever.
Why does CBS think voters in…Australia need to know about these serious charges against Biden, but not voters in…America (where heâs actually on the ballot)?
“Biden Transition Team Member Worked With CCP Officials For Over a Decade.” “Suzy George, a new addition to the transition team of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, is a former principal of Albright Stonebridge Group, a consulting firm that has extensive links to the Chinese Communist Party.”
The ghost:
I simply cannot believe that #JoeBiden is running for President of the United States and is a complete ghost. Where is this guy? What the hell is a âlidâ? Why are you in your basement, Joe? Will somebody please lay out a trail of hundred dollar bills so this guy will get going?!
It's also interesting to note that the Left has switched focus from Trump himself to his wife and family. Looks like they're starting to run out of ammo.
(1) If he wins, Biden will almost certainly sign off on ending the filibuster to pack the courts and add two new states for a permanent Democrat majority that will leave the Constitution behind.
(2) Trump may have announced that heâs about to reveal that the Democrats, from Obama on down, engaged in a coup against an American president.
France has accused Turkey of sending Syrian jihadists there to fight for Muslim Azerbaijan. Remember that Turkey killed over 1.5 million Armenians during the rise of the Young Turks as part of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, so the bad blood there goes back a long ways.
Quick conclusion: Relative to the number of infections fewer people have died in the US than in Australia. So for all the talk about not letting us have a US style health system, it has performed relatively better than ours did. True, Australian base levels of health are higher than US levels. Relatively fewer people got infected here than in the US. (We can argue about why that happened in the comments â probably policy errors in themselves at the State level in the US). Once infected, however, it looks like the chances of survival was higher in the US.
“Clare Bronfman Becomes First NXIVM Sex-Slave Trafficker to Get Jail Time.” Namely six years and nine months. You know it’s a crazy year when you don’t have time to pay attention rich, powerful weirdos being tried for running a sex cult…
Coinbase SJW babies: We have to be woke! Coinbase CEO: There’s the door.
The Texas House District 148 battle features a fight between a Hispanic Republican against a Democratic candidate with even more ties than usual to communism. “During a July 2018 presentation, âThe Art and Science of Building the Communist Party,â Chairman of the Houston chapter of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) Bernard Sampson boasted that his club had placed four communist party members on the Texas ballot, including Morales-Shaw who he specifically identified as a member of his group.”
I think the explanation for plummeting viewership is fairly obvious, even if Strauss would rather not talk about it. Conservative America is disgusted with the NBA, and therefore is tuning it out. Weâre disgusted with the way the league kowtows to China and even more disgusted with the embrace of the radical BLM movement by the league and its players.
I didnât watch a minute of the playoffs this year and rarely even checked the scores. Not because of what many of the players think about the police and about America, in general, as slanderous as those views are. And not even because players made pro-BLM gestures before the games began.
My problem was what was allowed, indeed encouraged, during the games. I will not watch any sports event during which the preaching of politics or ideology occurs.
I guess Iâm not alone.
Conservative Americaâs divorce from the NBA is a sign, I think, of things to come. Unless corporate America steps back from its embrace of woke leftism, we are going to have to divorce ourselves from large swathes of it. To the extent feasible, we may have to divorce ourselves from many of Americaâs public schools. And so forth.
New South Korean mini nuclear reactor that can’t melt down approved for use in the United States. First plant is scheduled to come online in Utah, but not until 2029. Faster, please.
And here’s the post I was tempted to write: “Fuck You WordPress, Yet Again (Block Editor).”
Ireland’s Supreme Court rules that Subway bread isn’t. You would think that if it used that much sugar it would taste better. Then again, I’m not sure I’ve bought a Subway sandwich since the heyday of the $5 Footlong era…
âToday it is my honor to nominate one of our nationâs most brilliant and gifted legal minds to the Supreme Court. She is a woman of unparalleled achievement, towering intellect, sterling credentials, and unyielding loyalty to the Constitution, Judge Amy Coney Barrett,â Trump said at a press conference at the White House announcing Barrettâs nomination.
Barrett has served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit since she was appointed by Trump in 2017. The 48-year-old Notre Dame law professor clerked for late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and is a conservative Catholic mother of seven, including two adopted children from Haiti.
When she was nominated to be a judge on the Seventh Circuit, three Democratic senators supported Barrettâs confirmation, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and former senator Joe Donnelly of Indiana. Over the past week, Senate Democrats have expressed vehement opposition to her nomination to the Supreme Court.
You don’t say.
Here’s the video of the announcement.
Here’s the transcript. Barrett: “I love the United States and I love the United States constitution. I am truly humbled by the prospect of serving on the supreme court.”
I was lucky enough to clerk for Justice Scalia and given his incalculable influence on my life. I am very moved to have members of the Scalia family here today, including his dear wife, Maureen. I clerked for justice Scalia more 20 years ago, but the lessons I learned still resonate.
His judicial philosophy is mine too, a judge must apply the law as written. Judges are not policymakers and they must be resolute and setting aside any policy views they might hold.
Democrats are already melting down, now that their desperate attempts to somehow guilt-trip Trump into not nominating a Supreme Court justice have failed. (And this is why we have Trump: it’s very easy to imagine McCain or Romney caving. As Abraham Lincoln said of Ulysses S. Grant, “I cannot spare this man. He fights.”) The fact that Barrett is a believing Catholic woman, thus threatening the Democratic Party’s central holy sacrament of abortion, is driving them extra crazy. Democratic senators are already announcing that they won’t even meet with Barrett.
If you talk to people with adopted children of another race, you'll learn to your horror that there is, in fact, a significant left-wing movement opposing & denouncing mixed-race adoption & working to turn adoptees against white parents. This stuff does not come out of nowhere.
âJudge Barrettâs nomination has merely renewed attention to a fundamental conflict, centuries underway, between Catholicism and the American ethos.â
The real conflict is between the NY Times and their narrowly educated writers and the American ethos.
For many left-wing feminists, ACBâs nomination is personal. She embodies the rebuttal to the feminist lies theyâve built their life on: that in order to be accomplished and fulfilled, you must sacrifice faith, marriage and children. Itâs gotta be hard to watch.
Seeing a few politicos who for years championed a conservative court go on the attack against Amy Coney Barrett in personal terms because OrangeManBadâąïž suggests they either never really believed what they said or Trump has truly broken them.
My eight-year-old son said, âAmy Coney Barrett created climate change by having 7 children, and itâs racist to rescue black kids from Haiti, and she will take my right to have an abortion if/when I choose to become a woman!â
Greetings, and welcome to the first LinkSwarm of fall! Strangely enough, we’re already getting some fall in our fall in Texas, as opposed to our usual Ever So Slightly Less Hot Late Summer. This week: Still more riots, Supreme Court pick news, more ugly truths about Crossfire Hurricane, and Lebanon goes boom again. Plus a bit of news that goes to eleven.
Yet another rash of Antifa/#BlackLivesMatter riots, this one ostensibly over the return of a single non-murder charge in the Breonna Taylor killing case.
Amy represents an opportunity to showcase a generationally brilliant, special intellect â who also is a mom,â says O. Carter Snead, Barrettâs longtime faculty colleague at the Notre Dame law school, where Barrett also received her law degree.
Her rare combination of hyper-intelligence and humility is a matter of bipartisan consensus. âThe smartest person in the room and also the most humbleâ was how Snead and two other sources intimately familiar with Barrett described her, echoing each other almost verbatim.
Harvard Law School prof Noah Feldman â a liberal who testified before Congress in favor of Âimpeaching the president â hailed her as âa truly brilliant lawyerâ in a 2018 column. Feldman should know. He and Barrett were members of the same class of Supreme Court clerks in 1998.
âShe was one of the two best lawyersâ of the 40 clerks âand arguably the single best.â Feldman concluded: âShe was legally prepared enough to go on the court 20 years ago.â
When Trump nominated Barrett to the Seventh Circuit, every single one of those 40 fellow clerks endorsed her as a âfirst-rateâ thinker, Âincluding such vehemently anti-Trump figures as Neal Katyal, solicitor general under Team Obama. The entire Notre Dame law faculty likewise endorsed her, âand that includes people who identify as liberal,â as Snead was quick to note.
She is recognized as an expert on how judges are supposed to interpret statutes â a crucial role, as demonstrated by Justice Neil Gorsuchâs bizarre recent reading of âgender identityâ into a civil rights statute enacted in the 1960s. She has also thought deeply about the relationship among the branches of government, a gnarly and seriously important area of law.
To these achievements Barrett marries a vibrant Christian faith. For the evangelicals and Catholics the president needs to turn out in November, her pro-life bona fides are on display not just in her activities and statements, but also in her own family: She is a mother of seven, including one biological child with intellectual disabilities and two adopted from Haiti.
Yes, Democrats and their Âmedia allies will attack and demonize her â viciously. But thatâs no reason to nominate other candidates who have no record on life issues. As one conservative activist told me, âthe left is going to burn everything down no matter whom we pick, so we might as well get the right person on the court.â
Democrats worry that Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, is too old and senile to handle a Supreme Court nomination fight. Of course, they put it in slightly more delicate terms:
Feinstein sometimes gets confused by reportersâ questions, or will offer different answers to the same question depending on where or when sheâs asked. Her appearance is frail. And Feinstein’s genteel demeanor, which seems like it belongs to a bygone Senate era, can lead to trouble with an increasingly hard-line Democratic base uninterested in collegiality or bipartisan platitudes.
Just this week, Feinstein infuriated progressives after declaring her opposition to ending the Senateâs legislative filibuster â a top goal of party activists if Democrats win full control of the Congress and White House in November. Some on the left called on her to resign over the comments, although other Democratic moderates have expressed similar views.
It’s hard to pick which is the more interesting angle here: The hard-left planning to push for their suicidal court-packing/filibuster ending agenda, or the old guard of elderly Democrats hanging on to power ghastly Ringwraiths. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Democrats: “We have the following list of demands for this Suprem-” Republicans: “Sorry, we remember your outrageous smear job on Kavanaugh. Suck it!” Also, remember this:
There were electoral consequences, with every âincumbent Senate Democrat in battleground states who opposed the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nominationâ losing his or her re-election bid. Sens. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, and Bill Nelson of Florida were all replaced by their Republican opponents, while Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia saved his seat by backing Kavanaugh. That fall-out handed Republicans the votes they now need to push through a new nominee to the Supreme Court before Nov. 3, 2020.
“The ‘primary sub-source’ for the Steele dossier was suspected of being a possible Russian agent and a ‘threat to national security,’ according to newly declassified FBI documents.”
The goal of the Michael Flynn investigation wasn’t enhancing national security, but to get Flynn fired. “The explosive new documents support Flynnâs latest claims that Obama-era Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI officials had conspired to set him up from the beginning and that they never had any legitimate basis for investigating him.”
“Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents tasked by fired former Director James Comey to take down Donald Trump during and after the 2016 election were so concerned about the agencyâs potentially illegal behavior that they purchased liability insurance to protect themselves less than two weeks before Trump was inaugurated president, previously hidden FBI text messages show.”
More on the same subject. I get the impression that there’s so much information coming out about malfeasance during Crossfire Hurricane/FISAgate that I can’t keep up with it all…
“âThis Is Spinal Tapâ Creators Reach Settlement On Long-Running Court Battle Over Rights And Income.” Good. Studios shouldn’t screw creators out of rightfully owed money, even if it is Meathead.
Today’s market to be hit by crazy high valuations is…(spins wheel)…rare plants? Now if only it would hit science fiction first editions I would be set!
The Democratic Party establishment is having a full-bore freakout over President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell exercising their constitutionally enumerated powers to nominate and confirm a Supreme Court replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Furious Democrats are considering total war â profound changes to two branches of government, and even adding stars to the flag â if Republicans jam through a Supreme Court nominee then lose control of the Senate.
On the table: Adding Supreme Court justices … eliminating the Senate’s 60-vote threshold to end filibusters … and statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico. “If he holds a vote in 2020, we pack the court in 2021,” Rep. Joe Kennedy III (D-Mass.) tweeted.
Why it matters: Democrats are enraged by GOP hypocrisy of rushing through a new justice for President Trump after stalling President Obama’s final nominee.
Dems aren’t optimistic about blocking the nominee. But they have many ways of retaliating if they win Senate control â and are licking their chops about real movement on ideas that have been pushed futilely for decades.
For instance, the Constitution doesn’t fix the number of justices, which could be changed by an act of Congress and the president’s signature, according to the National Constitution Center.
Also, Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer said that if “Senate Republicans move forward with this, then nothing is off the table for next year.”
I don’t think Democrats have thought their cunning scheme all the way through.
If Democrats really want to contemplate total war*, then what’s to prevent Republicans from implementing those same measures next year if they win?
Eliminate the filibuster? Bring it on! Packing the court with two more justices? Why not four?
Democrats seem to be operating on the old Soviet doctrine of “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable.” We should take any “if we win, we’ll do X” proposal as a blueprint of our own (assuming it’s not outright unconstitutional; after all, Republicans, unlike Democrats, still respect the Constitution).
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
*Like pretty much all their rhetoric these days, “total war” is drama queen overstatement. In a real left-right no-hold-barred, actual honest-to-God shooting war, the right wins because we have all the guns.
