RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/28/trump-is-doing-better-in-michigan-and-wisconsin-than-polls-suggest/

A week-long trip through these Midwest battleground states talking with ordinary people convinced us the polls aren’t telling the full story.

There’s something afoot in Michigan and Wisconsin. If you believe the polls, former Vice President Joe Biden is set to win both these states in November—battlegrounds President Donald Trump narrowly carried in 2016, and can ill afford to lose this time around.

Some pollsters say Biden is ahead by as much as 17 points in Wisconsin and a dozen points in Michigan, suggesting the Democrats have rebuilt their so-called “blue wall” in the industrial Midwest. If that’s true, the president’s path to reelection is in jeopardy. But then, the same pollsters also put Hillary Clinton comfortably ahead in both states just four years ago.

We just spent a week driving through Michigan and Wisconsin, talking with farmers, bartenders, politicians, priests, and ordinary voters, from suburban Detroit to western Wisconsin, and what we saw and heard left us with a very different impression: Trump’s support here is not reflected in the polls, and he might well win both states.

Just north of Detroit in Macomb County, which twice voted for Barack Obama but flipped for Trump four years ago, there were few signs of a robust Democratic ground game. We talked to one bar owner, a Democrat who volunteered for Obama’s reelection, who told us he’s worried Trump might win here again—not just because Trump supporters are so motivated, but because the neighbors and customers who tell him they’re not voting for Trump don’t seem excited about Biden.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/hunter-biden-on-tape/

I n a newly released recording, a man purported to be Hunter Biden is heard rambling about (a) his legal representation of Patrick Ho, a convicted former Hong Kong official he refers to as “the f***ing spy chief of China”; (b) his business dealings with Ye Jianming, the corrupt Chinese high roller, whom Hunter describes as “my partner, who is worth $323 billion … and is now missing”; and (c) his complaints about his “best friend in business, Devon” — presumably, Devon Archer, the now-convicted fraudster who was Hunter’s business partner — who had “named me as a witness without telling me in a criminal case and my father without telling me.”

Quite the crowd the Bidens run with.

While no date has been given for this recording, I theorize that — assuming it is authentic — it happened in approximately May 2018, for reasons I’ll get to.

The recording is the latest installment of information presumably from Biden’s laptops, which is being rolled out by Raheem Kassam, using his new project, The National Pulse. Kassam is a British commentator and former UKIP party adviser who is close to Steve Bannon — Kassam ran Breitbart-London when Bannon was Breitbart’s executive director.

Bannon is currently facing federal fraud charges. He is, of course, a former White House adviser who had a falling out with President Trump but has retained ties with him. Bannon was one of the prominent Trump outside advisers (Rudy Giuliani being the other) whom the New York Post identified as having alerted the paper to the existence of the Hunter Biden materials. Kassam appears regularly on Bannon’s War Room broadcasts — and, indeed, they appeared together Tuesday and played what they represented to be the Hunter Biden recording.

https://spectator.us/morning-america-mourning-biden-trump-campaign-messaging/?

In the countdown to Election Day, the two campaigns are taking starkly different approaches.

Joe Biden is sitting on a lead in the polls, trying to run out the clock, while Donald Trump is making a frenzied dash for the finish line, selling optimism.

Both strategies make sense.

Like a football team leading in the final quarter, Biden’s goal is simply to keep the clock ticking down to zero. Nothing fancy. Just avoid mistakes and prevent the other team from getting the ball back.

To avoid those mistakes, Biden is rarely leaving his basement. When he does, his goal is less to rouse voters than to prove he’s still alive and capable of traveling across state lines. He speaks to small crowds and says whatever’s on the teleprompter. He avoids impromptu comments, where he repeatedly makes unforced errors, and refuses to hold press conferences, where he might face hard questions.

Avoiding press conferences has been easy. The COVID crisis has been a perfect excuse for Biden and Kamala Harris, his vice presidential candidate. Harris has not given a press conference since she was named several months ago. Joe has given very few and almost none recently. The supine media hasn’t pressed them.

Reporters aren’t demanding answers or making the candidates pay a price for the silent treatment. The reason is painfully obvious. It’s not just that most reporters and media operations consider the Democrats ‘our ticket’. That’s been true for decades. What’s different now is that they consider this particular Republican a danger to the Republic.

Protecting the country from another four years of Trump in the White House is a more important, more patriotic duty for journalists than their normal job of asking hard questions, demanding evidence and investigating big stories. That’s why, when reporters do get a rare opportunity to ask Joe Biden a question, they toss him softballs. That’s why, when CBS finally asked Harris a crucial question about how progressive she really is, they allowed her to wave it off. She laughed uproariously and, in a non-sequitur, started talking about her family heritage. For CBS, that was good enough. No follow up. They let stand her answer as a laugh.