RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nysun.com/national/bidens-plagiarism-involved-more-than-kinnocks/91294/

Thanks are owed to Vice President Pence for, at the outset of his debate with Senator Kamala Harris, making reference to “plagiarism, which is something Joe Biden knows a little bit about.” The lead front-page New York Times news article about the debate dismissed it as “Biden’s 33-year-old plagiarism scandal.”

The scandal, which led in 1987 to Senator Biden dropping out of the Democratic presidential race, wasn’t so much that Mr. Biden had borrowed words or phrases. Politicians do that all the time. It’s that he had falsified his own background to make it seem more blue-collar than it is. That’s a charge that may resonate again in the current campaign.

Britain’s Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock had talked about his coal miner ancestors. “Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university…Was it because all our predecessors were thick? . . . Those people who could sing and play and recite and write poetry? . . . Those people who could work eight hours underground and then come up and play football?”

Mr. Biden had stolen the lines: “Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university? . . . Is it because I’m the first Biden in a thousand generations to get a college and a graduate degree? That I was smarter than the rest? Those same people who read poetry and wrote poetry and taught me how to sing verse? Is it because they didn’t work hard? My ancestors, who worked in the coal mines of northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours?”

https://pjmedia.com/election/matt-margolis/2020/10/12/videos-what-if-biden-and-harris-held-a-campaign-event-together-and-nobody-showed-up-n1039166

That is actually not a hypothetical question. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris held their first campaign event together in the battleground state of Arizona, and a local news reporter outside the event was left stunned at the lack of supporters rallying outside the event.

Trump campaign senior legal adviser Jenna Ellis noted that more people showed up to see her, Trump campaign director of strategic communications Marc Lotter, and senior adviser John Pence when they visited Arizona for an event.

While polls show Trump trailing in Arizona, the undeniable enthusiasm gap between Trump and Biden in this battleground state has me, for the first time, thinking that Trump might keep Arizona in the red this year.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/german-journalist-in-dc-says-he-received-3-ballots-in-mail-one-for-dead-person_3535708.html

A German journalist living in Washington who isn’t eligible to vote recently found three ballots in his mail.

Stefan Niemann is a United states correspondent for ARD, the German state-funded broadcaster.

On Oct. 10, he posted on Twitter a picture of a mail-in ballot for the upcoming election.

“The chaos that [President Donald] Trump lamented with the delivery of mail voting papers is here,” a translation of Niemann’s tweet says.

“I am not allowed to vote here. But three ballots came to my Washington address: for the previous tenant who moved five years ago, the landlady living in Puerto Rico, and her deceased husband.”

The tweet gained traction as Richard Grenell, former acting Director of National Intelligence and former ambassador to Germany, shared it on his Twitter the next day.

“German journalist living in the US (with no US voting rights) received multiple ballots in the mail,” he said. “This is outrageous.”

In another tweet, Niemann apparently responded to a comment.

“Yes, U.S. voters must first register and put a signature on file. What I’m saying is: the voter rolls are not up to date, also because registration systems are full of holes. Of course, there should be a comparison at the end so that everyone only votes once.”

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/11/is-big-tech-breaking-campaign-finance-laws/

The president and the GOP should weigh all of their options on how to pursue legal recourse against these companies for openly campaigning on behalf of Democrats in possible violation of federal law.

A mayoral candidate in Texas was arrested October 8 and charged with 84 counts of mail application ballot fraud; Zul Mohamed, running for mayor of Carrollton, forged nearly one hundred voter registration applications. “At the time of arrest, Mohamed was in the process of stuffing envelopes with additional mail ballot applications for neighboring Dallas County,” law enforcement officials reported. He also was charged with 25 counts of “unlawful possession of an official mail in ballot” and faces up to 20 years in prison.

The incident was just one more in a string of reports last week about rampant voter fraud.

But facts are a tough thing for our Big Tech overlords to accept. The day after the Texas arrest, Twitter issued another election-related decree allowing the company to censor and suppress posts critical of mail-in voting. 

In September—the same month the company’s public policy director left to join Joe Biden’s transition team—Twitter announced a “Civic Integrity” policy informing users how the platform would be monitored before and after Election Day. “We will label or remove false or misleading information about how to participate in an election or other civic process,” the policy warns.

Posts deemed inaccurate about “election rigging, ballot tampering, [and] vote tallying” will be subjected to Twitter’s heavy hand. The new policy will enable Twitter censors to slap an alert that reads “This is disputed” and redirect users to what it considers “credible information.” An example cited by the company in its announcement shows a user comment flagged for expressing concern about unreliable results from mail-in votes.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16556/the-plot-against-america

It seems that this election is not just about which candidate gets elected — it is ultimately about America’s commitment to empirical facts, its extraordinary Constitution and its determination to maintain its leadership role in the world by refusing to allow cheating and corruption, in either its elections or its governmental institutions. One can only hope that the ideals of the Founding Founders will prevail.

From Europe, the culture war raging in the United States is disturbing. In the presidential election, it seems that radical anti-American forces are questioning the very foundation on which Western civilisation was built. The New York Times seems too similar to the propaganda we were fed by the Hungarian Stalinist Pravda during the days of communist tyranny.

Contaminating the Past

In the Western world, the past has become the target of an ideological crusade. Many of its historic monuments and symbols are being vandalised, defaced or destroyed altogether. In the United States, the national flag has been treated with derision and denounced by leading members of its cultural institutions as a symbol of racism, oppression and discrimination. Commentators have been regularly condemning their nation’s past and portraying it as a source of irredeemable shame.

In recent times, hostility towards the very foundation on which different Western nations rest has acquired a systematic form. This trend is most strikingly articulated by The New York Times’ 1619 Project — to devalue and criminalise the founding of the United States.

Through distorting America’s history, this project claims that the year 1619, and not 1776, constitutes the origin of the United States. It was in 1619 that African slaves arrived in Jamestown, and this event has been rebranded as the origins of the US. Why? Because the 1619 Project insists that the US was founded for the purpose of entrenching slavery and that to this day, this nation is dominated by that legacy. According to this inaccurate version of the past, the American Revolution was not so much a war of independence but a selfish act of preserving exploitation and oppression. In this way, the contribution of the American Revolution to the development of the Western ideals of individual liberty and personal responsibility is erased from history. America’s Declaration of Independence and — especially for the time — its remarkably advanced liberal and democratic Constitution and Bill of Rights are implicitly renounced as slave-owners’ charters.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/10/12/dems-plan-to-pack-the-senate-and-the-electoral-college-as-well-as-the-supreme-court/

Joe Biden has so far refused to answer the question of whether he’d pack the Supreme Court with leftist justices. But he hasn’t even been asked about a more worrisome scheme he and his party are cooking up to ensure Democrats’ election victories well into the future.

So far, Biden has inartfully dodged the question of whether he would support adding justices to the Supreme Court. All he would say in the debate was “Whatever the position I take, that will be the issue” and in Arizona, he said, “You’ll know my opinion on court-packing when the election is over.”

Biden knows court-packing doesn’t poll well, and so with the help of the press, he is avoiding the topic. But Senate Democrats have already made it clear that they will take that route should President Donald Trump get Judge Amy Coney Barrett on the bench.

What hasn’t received nearly enough attention, however, is the other plan Democrats are hatching to take seize control of the Senate, and make winning the presidency easier, by granting statehood to Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.

As the Washington Examiner reported: “Key Democratic leaders, already mulling adding more justices to the Supreme Court if they take the White House and Senate, are also eager to add two more states, a move that could shift the Electoral College permanently to liberals.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said recently that: “Believe me. On D.C. and Puerto Rico, particularly if Puerto Rico votes for it — D.C. already has voted for it and wants it — I’d love to make them states.”

Biden has long supported D.C. statehood, and during remarks at a Hispanic Heritage Month kickoff event in Kissimmee, Florida, he said that Puerto Rican statehood “would be the most effective means of ensuring that residents of Puerto Rico are treated equally.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/if-biden-were-a-republican/

Here’s what the press would be asking the former veep.

Mr. Biden, you have a history of cultivating disturbingly close relationships with white supremacists.

As segregationists were dying off in the 1970s, you went out of your way to be pals with them, then bragged about it. You once called notorious segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond “one of my closest friends.” In 1988, when you were mounting a run for president that collapsed when your multiple acts of plagiarism came to light, you deployed a dog whistle when you bragged that the arch-racist former Alabama governor George Wallace had given you a leadership award in 1973. Also in 1988 you noted approvingly that the press would refer to you and Thurmond as the “marvelous marriage” and “the odd couple.” You later delivered a eulogy at Thurmond’s funeral in 2003

You once told Mississippi senator John Stennis, a racist opponent of school desegregation, that you viewed him as a “hero” and were honored to take over his office after he retired. In 2010 you gave a eulogy at the funeral of Senator Robert Byrd, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan whom you called “a dear friend.” As recently as 2008 you were still bragging that you had “deep personal relationships” with segregationist senators James Eastland, Stennis, and Thurmond, and said, “All these men became my friends.” As recently as 2016 you fondly recalled that you welcomed the assistance of Stennis in one of your Senate reelection campaigns even though Stennis once said, “Those who would mix little children of both races in our schools are following an illegal, immoral, and sinful doctrine.” Isn’t your record of supporting these avowed white supremacists disturbing, disgusting, and disqualifying?

Mr. Biden, President Obama said of you, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up.” If the person you worked most closely with considers you a foul-up, why should the American people entrust you with the highest position in the republic?

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-10-10-the-difference-that-a-packed-supreme-court-would-make

The impending confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court promises to bring us a Court with a 6-3 “conservative” majority. As a result, Democrats could be facing decades in the Supreme Court wilderness. Even if Biden wins the election for President, the only member of the Court likely to retire in the next few years is Justice Breyer, who recently turned 82; but since Breyer is one of the Court’s “liberals,” Biden’s replacing of Breyer would not change the Court’s ideological balance. The next oldest Justice is Clarence Thomas, currently 72, which is youthful by today’s Supreme Court standards.

But there’s another possibility. Congress could potentially increase the number of Justices, giving Biden as President the ability theoretically to add four, or six, or even more Justices in an attempt to cement a permanent Democratic majority. In fact, Congress has changed the number of Justices multiple times in the past, although the last time was in 1869. In recent days, prominent Democrats — including Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts, Congressman Jerrold Nadler of New York (my Congressman!), and former Attorney General Eric Holder — have advocated that if Barrett is confirmed, Democrats should retaliate by expanding the number of Justices to regain the majority of the Court.

The last President to float the idea of adding Justices to shift the Court’s ideology was Franklin Roosevelt. The effort occurred in 1937, just after Roosevelt had been re-elected in a landslide in 1936, and had swept in with him super-majorities in both the House and Senate. Roosevelt had become frustrated with a Court that had struck down some of his most significant initiatives, the most famous being the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, which was struck down in the Schechter Poultry case of 1935. Roosevelt sought to seize the opportunity of his big new Congressional majorities, proposing to add six more Justices, to make a Court of 15. On the assumption that the new Justices would be loyal political allies, the six new Justices would be sufficient to give Roosevelt a majority to uphold any new legislation he could get enacted. The initiative immediately earned the nickname of “court packing.”

https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2020/10/08/rejected-mail-ballots-projected-major-factor-2020-election/3576714001/

Rejected ballots in the 2020 election battle between President Donald Trump and Joe Biden could become the post-election focus.

In a normal election year in any given state, hundreds or even thousands of absentee ballots get tossed for everything from late postmarks to open envelopes. 

North Carolina rejected 546 ballots for missing witness signatures in the 2012 presidential race. Virginia tossed 216 ballots in the 2018 midterms because they arrived in an unofficial envelope. Arizona discarded 1,516 ballots for nonmatching signatures the same year.

The 2020 presidential election will not be normal.

Absentee ballot rejections this November are projected to reach historic levels, risking widespread disenfranchisement of minority voters and the credibility of election results, a USA TODAY, Columbia Journalism Investigations and PBS series FRONTLINE investigation found.

At least 1.03 million absentee ballots could be tossed if half of the nation votes by mail. Discarded votes jump to 1.55 million if 75% of the country votes absentee. In the latter scenario, more than 185,000 votes could be lost in Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – states considered key to capturing the White House.