RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/election/rick-moran/2020/08/28/judge-rules-50000-iowa-absentee-ballot-applications-invalid-n862502

A state judge has invalidated more than 50,000 absentee ballot application forms sent to voters in Linn County, Iowa, the second-largest county in the state.

The county auditor’s office almost completely filled out the ballot applications, despite the secretary of state’s directions that only the election date be included. The auditor’s actions may have also been against a state law that forbids government workers from filling out the forms.

Judge Ian Thornhill agreed with the Trump campaign, which had sued the county over the ballot applications.

CNN:

 The judge sided with the Trump campaign and the Republican Party, which filed a lawsuit this month seeking to discard the absentee ballot request forms. The Trump campaign argued the forms should have been blank except for the election date and type, per the Iowa secretary of state’s directions. Local officials in Linn County, which is home to Cedar Rapids, ignored those directions and sent out the applications with more information anyway.

“It is implausible to conclude that near total completion of an absentee ballot application by the auditor is authorized under Iowa law where the legislature has specifically forbidden government officials from partially completing the same document,” Judge Ian Thornhill wrote in a Thursday ruling.

“Not every county can afford the prepopulated request forms,” the judge also noted.

https://spectator.us/trump-redefines-race-republican-national-convention/

Helplessness and passivity were the defining themes of the Democratic convention last week. The American people are unable to overcome COVID-19 and an even more all-pervasive racial guilt without the right man in the White House — the nation is weak, and truth be told its would-be savior, Joe Biden, is not strong. But he is nice. The convention emphasized not Biden’s 47-year record in government, but his family and the tragedies it has suffered. Even in building up the nominee, suffering was the dominant trope. Americans must huddle together, and somehow by huddling around Joe Biden everything will be all right.

This passivity was perhaps an inevitable byproduct of the rationale behind the Biden candidacy. Is he the best Democrat around? No — he’s obviously less of a leader than Bill Clinton or Barack Obama or, for that matter, Hillary Clinton, who along with Obama trounced Biden in the 2008 primaries. Biden is nobody’s first choice for president. But the logic of his campaign is that he doesn’t have to be anybody’s first choice, he just has to be unobjectionable. Trump is supposed to defeat himself, or else COVID-19 will defeat him. Biden doesn’t have to win, in any active sense. He just has to accept office when the coronavirus and the media has defeated Donald Trump. (Note how no one in the pundit class who blames Trump for the ravages of the virus has a bad word to say about Andrew Cuomo or Phil Murphy, Democratic governors whose states have had proportionally the most coronavirus deaths. If politicians are responsible for such deaths, why does the press only blame politicians from one party? Well, you know.)

For the Democratic strategy to work, for Biden to win by inertia, President Trump and the Republicans would have to play along. But this week they didn’t: the GOP convention tore up the media narrative and wrote a new script, one focusing on the violence raging in cities run by Democrats. But Trump and his party went beyond that: they made a detailed, policy-based argument that the past three years have been years of accomplishment. The President and his surrogates boasted of replacing NAFTA with USMCA, passing criminal-justice reform, getting a significant tax cut through Congress (though this didn’t receive as much attention as usual for a GOP convention), destroying Isis, and killing Qasem Soleimani, along with many less widely heralded achievements in foreign policy and regulatory reform. Beyond the individual policies, Trump and the GOP also pointed to their success in changing the terms of debate for both parties, and for the whole country, about China, trade and American industry. And they recommitted themselves to ending endless foreign wars in the Middle East and to strengthening border security.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/27/will-trumps-long-courtship-of-black-voters-work/

If so, it will mark Donald Trump’s greatest political achievement—at least equal to his stunning 2016 victory—potentially destabilizing the Democratic Party’s most faithful constituency in the future.

Democrats are panicking—and not just because their presidential candidate isn’t up to the task of running for president let alone running the country.

No, Democrats are fearful that Donald Trump’s four-year courtship of black voters will reap electoral dividends in November. “Both campaigns tell me that there is a chance that Donald Trump could overperform with African American men,” NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd admitted this week. “It’s a concern of the Biden campaign and it’s a focus of the Trump campaign.”

While Todd blamed Trump for “stoking racial tensions” in an attempt to win back suburban voters, the fact is that no other Republican president or candidate has worked harder to earn the long-elusive support of black Americans. “What have you got to lose?” Trump memorably asked black voters during a rally in August 2016. “You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose?”

Trump’s gauntlet was both a backhanded slap at the country’s first black president and a promise that he would do better. Turns out, it wasn’t empty campaign sloganeering; from negotiating a rare moment of bipartisanship to pass the First Step Act in 2018 to hosting the first-ever Young Black Leadership Summit at the White House, President Trump and his family have had some success in dismantling the partisan barrier between blacks and the Republican Party.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/president-trump-offers-choice-between-loving-and-daniel-greenfield/

When President Trump walked down the staircase to the strains of Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA, followed by chants of, “USA, USA”, it was not only a callback to his famous escalator moment, no longer at Trump Tower, but at the White House, but a contrast between the parties.

“How can the Democratic party lead our country when they spend so much time tearing down our country?” President Trump asked.

Where the DNC had the feel of some long zoom session in a liberal suburb where everyone works from home and tries to keep up with the latest politically correct trends, the RNC was unapologetically physical and patriotic, its speakers embraced the great landmarks and trademarks of the nation, demonstrating that you can be diverse without destroying America.

The final night of the RNC wasn’t just a powerful antidote to the DNC, or even to the mainstream media alone, but to the hypocritical totalitarianism and the corporate buzzwords that we have been drowning in since the winter gave way to the spring, and to fear and violence.

President Trump and the array of speakers for the fourth night did not deny that we are a nation in crisis, instead they lit a torch to light the nation’s way out of the tyranny of terror and lies. 

https://pjmedia.com/election/megan-fox/2020/08/27/jack-brewer-scores-touchdown-in-stunning-defense-of-president-trump-and-the-republican-party-at-rnc-n852998

Former NFL star Jack Brewer delivered one of the best speeches of the night on Wednesday. He absolutely destroyed the “Republicans are racist” lie that Democrats run on every election. He began by describing the racism he saw as a child and scolded people for comparing the KKK to Republicans.

I remember my dad’s bravery when he personally stood up against a KKK rally in my town. In my house, my father taught me to back down from no one. I know what racism looks like, I’ve seen it firsthand. In America, it has no resemblance to President Trump and I’m fed up with the way he’s portrayed in the media, who refuse to acknowledge what he’s actually done for the black community.

Then Brewer launched into the refusal of black people who vote for Democrats to wake up, even when faced with the fact that mass incarceration was a Democrat strategy. He also confronted the “Fine People Hoax” head-on and called the media liars.

https://pjmedia.com/election/tyler-o-neil/2020/08/27/5-things-to-know-about-night-4-of-the-republican-national-convention-trumps-powerful-speech-n856943

The Republican National Convention (RNC) was absolutely incredible, especially after the Democrats’ Gaslighting America Telethon. Each night had inspiring moments, but Thursday closed out the convention with Ann Dorn (widow of David Dorn), Alice Marie Johnson, and Stacia Brightmon, a formerly homeless mother who found her way to a career thanks to an apprenticeship program championed by President Donald Trump. Trump himself closed out the night with a mammoth speech on the gorgeous White House South Lawn.

The Republicans blew the Democrats out of the water. After the Democratic National Convention, Trump — not Democratic nominee Joe Biden — got a poll boost. The president’s numbers are only likely to rise even higher after this powerful convention. After all, since Democrats didn’t delve into their policies at their convention, Republicans got the chance to define Joe Biden as a candidate.

Here are 5 things to know about the final night.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/08/the_republican_convention_ends_on_a_high_note__literally.html

The Democrats and Republicans approached their virus-era conventions in different ways. The Democrats opted for a dark, barren, and claustrophobic convention, bounded by the size of a computer monitor. The Republicans, however, chose a magnificent convention, one with a sense of spaciousness and color. After three dynamic days, it was hard to know if they could keep that momentum for the fourth day — but they did.

On Thursday, Republicans again used the vast and splendid Andrew Mellon auditorium as a backdrop for many of the speeches. And then, for Ivanka’s and the President’s addresses, the setting moved to the White House’s South Lawn. Behind the speakers was the beauty of the White House; behind the audience was the symbolism of the Washington monument. It was a wonderful culmination to a powerful convention conducted under challenging circumstances.

Before I even get to the substance of the speeches, compare how Biden and Trump appeared:

Trump’s setting was open, brilliant, and powerful. Biden’s looked like a high school student council election. It’s true that Trump benefitted from the symbolism of the White House, but the Democrats could easily have found an equally beautiful and powerfully symbolic site . . . if they’d wanted to. They didn’t even try, though, both because their goal was to make the point that America is a grim and dark place, and because Joe would have been overwhelmed if taken off that high school auditorium stage.

https://spectator.us/protesters-clearing-path-trump-kenosha-black-lives-matter/

‘This city is not going to stop burning itself down until they [the protesters] know that this officer has been fired.’ Thus spoke Whitney Cabal, a leader of the Kenosha chapter of Black Lives Matter, in response to the latest police shooting in Wisconsin. The use of the passive in that sentence is revealing.

As Theodore Dalrymple has pointed out (see ‘The knife went in’) it is common for people to assign motive to inanimate objects when they are loth to admit to being in the wrong. I suspect that the suitably named Ms Cabal knows that the state of Wisconsin did not auto-combust this week, as Krook does at the end of Bleak House. True, there was first a police shooting and arrest. But someone must then have put a match to the place. The American public, press and politicians know that. But any willingness to say it appears now to fall along strictly party-political lines.

It is one of the most striking things about the violence and unrest that have followed the killing of George Floyd. Not the violence, but the increasingly ostentatious desire of a portion of the population to pretend they do not see it. Some friends in New York tell me of gang robberies at restaurants in broad daylight, of lootings, shootings and boarded-up shops. ‘Peaceful demonstrations’, I am assured by other friends, who identify as ‘liberals’ though have mysteriously stayed away from the city of late.

The same story is rolling out across America. The left says that there are nightly protests for ‘social justice’. When these protests involve mass lootings, such as those in Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, they are claimed (if acknowledged at all) to be the actions of a tiny fringe. Such dogged blindness has a clear political and cultural purpose. The political purpose is a desire to prevent the reelection of Donald Trump. The wider justification would appear to be a belief that ‘anti-racism’ is such an important omelette of a cause that a few broken eggs — or cities — is a price worth paying.