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ELECTIONS

Will Trump Win Pennsylvania? By Jim Geraghty

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/11/02/will-trump-win-pennsylvania/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

Voter-registration numbers indicate his standing

The best indicator of the Trump campaign’s standing in Penn­syl­vania is the voter-registration numbers.

In November 2016, Pennsylvania had 4.2 million registered Democrats, 3.3 million registered Republicans, and 1.2 million registered with “other parties” or none.

By June 2020, Pennsylvania had 4.09 million registered Democrats, 3.29 registered Republicans, and 1.21 million registered with other parties. Then the parties began their post-primary voter-registration drives — and Republicans added a net 135,619 voters between June and the final week of September, while Democrats added 57,985 and other voters increased by 49,995, Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report calculates. Add it all up: Democrats are down 66,778 registered members from November 2016, while the Republicans added 125,381, and “other” is up 61,313. The Census Bureau estimates the changes to each state’s population each year, and Pennsyl­vania’s population has mostly remained flat, gaining about 19,000 people over the past four years.

Party registration doesn’t always align with voting intention. Four years ago, Trump won Pennsylvania by 44,292 votes out of more than 6 million cast, a difference of about seven-tenths of 1 percent and the narrowest margin in a presidential election for the state in 176 years. People also forget that 70 percent of registered voters cast ballots. Trump didn’t need Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes to put him over the top, but it was an emphatic sign that the Democrats’ “blue wall” in the Upper Midwest had almost completely collapsed.

Playing with the potential scenarios of the Electoral College map makes it clear that Trump can fairly easily win a second term if he wins Pennsylvania, but it is particularly hard to get him to 270 electoral votes if he doesn’t. At Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, Pennsylvania is deemed “the single most important state of the 2020 election” and “by far the likeliest state to provide either President Trump or Joe Biden with the decisive vote in the Electoral College.”

Glenn Greenwald Resigns from The Intercept Alleging ‘Censorship’ of Views ‘Critical’ of Joe Biden By Zachary Evans

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/glenn-greenwald-resigns-from-the-intercept-alleging-censorship-of-views-critical-of-joe-biden/

Journalist Glenn Greenwald announced his resignation from The Intercept on Thursday, alleging that the outlet he co-founded was attempting to censor a column in which he criticizes Joe Biden.

Greenwald said he would continue publishing a freelance column, joining a number of journalists such as Matt Taibbi and Andrew Sullivan who have moved their work to the independent publishing platform Substack. Sullivan announced in July that he would leave New York Magazine, writing at the time that editors and writers at the publication were forced to commit to “critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity.”

Greenwald laid out the reasons for his own resignation in a Substack post.

“The final, precipitating cause [of resignation] is that The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden,” Greenwald wrote. Lashing out at “all New-York-based Intercept editors” who “vehemently” support Biden, Greenwald claimed that “modern media outlets do not air dissent; they quash it. ”

Greenwald wrote that the article his editors wanted to censor referred to newly-released documents pertaining to Joe Biden’s conduct in Ukraine and China. He criticized his former publication for “a deep fear of offending hegemonic cultural liberalism and center-left Twitter luminaries, and an overarching need to secure the approval and admiration of the very mainstream media outlets we created The Intercept to oppose, critique and subvert.”

Joe the Chameleon By Kyle Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/joe-biden-the-chameleon/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=third

Joe Biden is the guy at the party who can’t disagree with anybody. This is a problem for a would-be leader of the free world.

W hat kind of president might Joe Biden be should he be elected next Tuesday? No one can really say. Consider two widely circulated Biden videos.

Video one: (context here): Biden, campaigning in the New Hampshire Democratic primary and surrounded by activists, approaches a young progressive who says she worries that he won’t do enough to fight energy companies in the name of climate change. Biden takes her hand and says, “I want you to look in my eyes. I guarantee you. I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel.”Video two: Biden, campaigning for hard-hat votes in Pennsylvania, where fossil fuels harvested via fracking are the basis of an industry that enjoys widespread support, vows “a clean energy strategy that has a place for the energy workers right here in Western Pennsylvania,” adding, “I am not banning fracking. Let me say that again, I am not banning fracking, no matter how many times Donald Trump lies about me.”

So Biden won’t ban fracking, but he will end fossil fuel, which is what fracking is for. Maybe the frackers will be allowed to keep working if they promise to frack only for pixie dust.

Biden is the kind of guy who, when speaking to an audience he thinks contains racist whites, brags about receiving an award from George Wallace or reminisces about his friendships with segregationist Dixiecrat senators such as Strom Thurmond, James Eastland, and John Stennis. Among those who place a high value on fighting for civil rights, though, he concocts a completely false tale about getting arrested trying to visit the great South African Nelson Mandela.

Donald Trump, Genie Trump saw that most of the Middle East was ready to love its children more than they hated Israel. He got it. And he acted upon it, to remarkable effect. Bruce Bawer

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/28/donald-trump-genie/

EXCERPT:
Throughout our lives, ever since the founding of Israel, peace in the Middle East has been the ultimate desideratum and the ultimate impossibility. Over the decades there were meetings and summits and accords aplenty, lots of handshaking and headlines, but nothing ever really happened.

If the job of trying to make peace in the Middle East had stayed in the hands of people like John Kerry, so it would have remained. Kerry perfectly fit the mold of the modern State Department functionary. He looked the part. He dressed the part. And he viewed the job in the same way that other functionaries before him had viewed it: it was all about holding endless decorous meetings with one’s Israeli and Palestinian counterparts, having pretty much the same conversations with them that one’s predecessors had had, hosting dinners and receptions with these people at which the usual compliments were exchanged and the usual toasts made, and, finally, giving speeches in which one said the same old things in the same old way.

Kerry was great at this. He could gas on for hours without ever saying anything fresh or surprising or moving the ball so much as a centimeter.

On December 28, 2016, at the end of his term as secretary of state, he delivered his valedictory oration, a 9,700-word declamation about peace in the Middle East most of which was comfortingly familiar to old hands at this sort of thing. He talked about how the Palestinians needed to clean up their act but also deserved a better life in a country of their own; he talked about how America was Israel’s great friend but expected Israel to stop settlements in the occupied territories; he paid obeisance to the United Nations, which, of course, would play a crucial role in any solution to the Middle East conundrum.

The one twist in Kerry’s speech that day involved the then-recent and unprecedented decision by the Obama government not to block an anti-Israel resolution in the Security Council. Defending the vote, Kerry explained that a two-state solution was “the only way to ensure Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state, living in peace and security with its neighbors.”

And then along came Donald Trump. Before his first term was over, he got the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Sudan to make peace with Israel.

And these aren’t just deals between governments that have promised not to make war on each other. They’re comprehensive agreements that will involve contact between all kinds of people at all levels of the societies involved. This is a far more remarkable achievement than just getting a few politicians and diplomats together to shake hands and smile for the cameras. No—it’s the kind of sweeping deal that is simply too big for the narrow imaginations of the typical professional diplomat or political hack, like John Kerry, to conceive.

But at the same time, it’s precisely the kind of deal that Donald Trump, a past master of the high-level business deal, excels in making. It’s the kind of achievement that could only be pulled off by someone who thinks outside the box.

2020 Election Is a Choice Between Rule-Changing and Respect for Constitutional Norms By Victor Davis Hanson

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/2020/10/29/2020-election-is-a-choice-between-rule-changing-and-respect-for-constitutional-norms-n1104289

In traditional presidential campaigns, the two major parties offer contrasting ideas and policies. The Democratic and Republican candidates barnstorm the nation to make their cases.

Not this year.

Democratic nominee Joe Biden is more or less a virtual candidate, mostly communicating from home via Zoom. He offers few detailed alternatives to the first four years of the Trump administration.

Instead, Biden is running on the idea that Donald Trump caused the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic recession, and that he’s responsible for violence in the streets.

But Biden rarely offers contrasting visions of what he would have done differently than the Trump administration — or, for that matter, major European countries that are now in worse economic shape and fighting another coronavirus spike.

Even in the final days of the race, Biden is making far fewer campaign appearances than Trump. The challenger is outsourcing to the media his defense against allegations that the Biden family has peddled influence to foreign interests for millions of dollars that were routed into family coffers.

An inert Biden is playing the role of good ol’ Joe from Scranton, while his supporters hope not to just to change the presidency but to alter the very rules of how America has been governed for decades and even centuries.

Not long ago, the left favored the Electoral College. California, New York and Illinois gave Democrats more than 100 automatic Electoral College votes.

The left bragged that their “Blue Wall” lock on solidly Democratic, union-heavy Midwestern states had ensured Barack Obama two presidential terms — and in 2016 would guarantee Hillary Clinton the presidency as well.

But in 2016, the Blue wall crumbled — perhaps permanently.

Now, furious progressives plan to end the constitutionally mandated Electoral College by hook or crook. They feel it is no longer serves their election purposes.

If Trump Wins, There Must Be a Reckoning for the Destructive Left By David Solway

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2020/10/28/if-trump-wins-there-must-be-a-reckoning-for-the-destructive-left-n1103880

It doesn’t take a fount of political wisdom to say that if Biden and the Democrats carry the Electoral College, America is lost, perhaps forever. The U.S. will become a Leninist country. Madness and ignorance will have triumphed.

If Trump and the Republicans survive on November 3, as I hope and suspect they will, certain policies will have to be enacted to ensure that the country never again approaches the brink of social, political and economic perdition as it has in recent times, most emphatically engineered by the administration of Barack Obama premised on the “radical transformation” of America. And these policies will need to be draconian. Leftist sentiment will always exist, but the institutional left will have to be extirpated root and branch.

In other words, the gloves will have to come off and the institutional power sources engaged in the destabilization of the country must be put to bed once and for all. A reckoning must come.

To begin with, the universities will have to be purged—an ugly word, but an appropriate one in the present context. The political contagion that has infected the nation spread like a virus from the wet market of the educational establishment, which has sent its ideologically septic graduates to populate the professions, the intelligence agencies, political associations, public organizations and, indeed, the culture taken as a whole. Perhaps the damage may be irreparable, but, in any case, the plague must not be allowed to continue. Teachers who indoctrinate their students should be stripped of tenure and fired. Administrators, whether diversity officers, deans, provosts or presidents, should be dismissed. So-called “Studies Programs”—Gender Studies, Critical Race Studies, Fat Studies, Queer Studies, etc.—which produce resentful and unemployable students and waste precious university resources, will have to be abolished. It may not be easy but a reckoning must come.

‘The Biden Five’: The Definitive Breakdown of One of America’s Most Corrupt Families

https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2020/10/28/the-biden-five-the-definitive-breakdown-of-one-of-americas-most-corrupt-families/

Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute and senior contributor at Breitbart News, explained how Joe Biden’s family members — dubbed the Biden Five — monetized political connections and influence in an interview aired on Tuesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.

The Biden Five is composed of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden; his younger brothers Frank Biden and James Biden, his sister Valerie Biden, and his daughter Ashley Biden.

Marlow highlighted Schweizer’s latest book, Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite, as “the gateway into understanding not just Joe Biden and the Biden family, but also the entire institutional Democratic Party at this moment and their corruption.”

Marlow described Schweizer’s investigation of the Biden family as yielding “indisputable evidence that Joe Biden is running a crime-like syndicate where he is, if nothing else, enabling his family members to get rich, without really any noticeable skill, using the American people’s good name.”

Schweizer noted the internationalization of the Biden family’s business dealings following Joe Biden becoming vice president.

“There’s no question about it. Joe Biden is the planet around which the moons of his family travel,” Schweizer said, “and the gravitational pull is Joe Biden’s power and his position, and the family has enriched themselves based on the positions he has.”

Schweizer continued, “Before Joe Biden is vice president of the United States, they’re really not doing many international deals, but once Joe Biden becomes vice president of the United States, suddenly, they’ve got foreign governments and foreign entities falling over themselves to cut them in on deals that they have no background or no expertise in. There’s a direct link between the corrupt acts of the family and the policy positions and power that Joe Biden has.”

50 Things a Biden Presidency Would Mean for America Worse than the zombie apocalypse? Don Feder

Below are The Top 50 Reasons Why a Biden Presidency Would Be Worse Than The Zombie Apocalypse:

Another lockdown – Which will Kevorkian what’s left of the economy.
 
Amnesties and other incentives for illegal immigration – Joe promised another amnesty bill in his first 100 days to satisfy the urgent need for more Democrat voters. No border wall, ICE defunded, sanctuary cities subsidized.
 
Back to the era of bad trade deals – Give away the store to get it done. Joe understands trade, based on his vast business experience.
 
Biden Care – “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” – not. Six-month delays for routine tests. Why should Canadians have all the fun?
 
Black Lives Matter — in charge of combating white privilege and institutional racism with quotas, reparations and looting.
 
Biden’s Cabinet — Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, Secretary of State Illhan Omar, Secretary of Commerce Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Secretary of the Treasury Bernie Sanders.
 

5 More COVID Charts Democrats — And The Press — Don’t Want You To See

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/10/29/5-more-covid-charts-democrats-and-the-press-dont-want-you-to-see/

When coronavirus cases started spiking in June, Democrats and the press treated it as a fresh sign that President Donald Trump had failed to contain the disease.

“There are now about 30,000 new cases per day in the United States, about 10 times higher than the roughly 3,000 new cases per day in the European Union,” noted one outlet.

“Experts from Europe have criticized a series of failings in the U.S., which they said had left Americans exposed to infection while in Europe, as lockdown eases, infection remains low,” reported another.

Joe Biden emerged from his bunker in the summer long enough to declare that “while other nations took steps to get control over COVID-19, Trump took no responsibility.”

So how do Joe and company explain the fact that coronavirus cases are now exploding in Europe at rates far higher than the U.S., that the share of positive test results is higher in Europe, as is the case fatality rate?

“There’s no question that the European region is an epicenter for disease right now,” said the World Health Organization’s Dr. Michael Ryan. “Right now we are well behind this virus in Europe so getting ahead of it is going to take some serious acceleration in what we do.”

Vote for Joe Biden? Seriously? Biden is Bernie Sanders’s grim party in sheep’s clothing. Daniel Henninger

https://www.wsj.com/articles/vote-for-joe-biden-seriously-11603926854?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

The 2020 presidential election has been defined by three events: the emergence of the coronavirus in March, the George Floyd protests after May 25, and Rep. Jim Clyburn’s endorsement in February of Joe Biden before the South Carolina primary. There has also been one major nonevent: the Biden presidential noncampaign.

A cold-weather resurgence of the virus in the upper Midwest and Plains States has put the pandemic in front of voters in the election’s final week, while the importance of the other two events in shaping the outcome has faded, especially the Clyburn coronation.

Forgotten by many voters is that back in mid-February, after losing in Iowa and New Hampshire, it looked as if former Vice President Biden’s listless campaign would become his third failed attempt at the presidency.

Mr. Biden had distinguished himself in the primary debates only by surviving them. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the other moderate alternative to the progressive insurgency of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, wasn’t gaining traction. Mike Bloomberg landed and left like an evening moth. In short, a path was opening for Vermont democratic socialist Bernie Sanders to secure the party’s nomination.