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ELECTIONS

Trump’s Media Haters Still Don’t Get It Martin Kaufmann

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/25/trumps-media-haters-still-dont-get-it/

Editor’s note: This has been excerpted with permission from the author. To read the entire article, click here.

This is an actual headline that appeared in a “journalism” newsletter 13 days before the election: “How much coverage of Donald Trump is too much?”

The column is from Tom Jones, senior media writer at the Poynter Institute and, you’ll not be surprised to learn, a man consumed by Trump Derangement Syndrome. I’ve said in the past that Jones’ daily “Poynter Report” column would be more accurately titled, “Why I Hate Donald Trump and Fox News.” (For what it’s worth, Jones would dispute this. In 2020, I sent him an email pointing out glaring biases evident in his commentary. He responded, among other things, by writing, “I can promise you that I don’t have an agenda other than to point out really good journalism and call out shoddy journalism.” Self-awareness apparently isn’t his strong suit.)

These days I only occasionally read Jones’ tedious, predictable commentaries, and only then for the same reason that a child pinches himself: to see how much pain I can endure.

In this instance, Jones claims to be upset that the legacy media has devoted so much time to Trump trolling Kamala Harris in a McDonald’s photo op and his outrageous asides, most notably ruminating on the late Arnold Palmer’s junk.

Tulsi Gabbard Joins Republican Party, ‘The Party of Common Sense’ David Zimmerman

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/tulsi-gabbard-joins-republican-party-the-party-of-common-sense/

Tulsi Gabbard announced Tuesday night she is officially joining the Republican Party as she continues stumping for former president Donald Trump on the campaign trail two weeks out from the November election.

Gabbard left the Democratic Party to become an independent in October 2022 and endorsed Trump in August after Robert F. Kennedy Jr., also a Democrat-turned-independent, ended his longshot presidential campaign and threw his support behind the GOP nominee.

“It is because of my love for our country and specifically because of the leadership that President Trump has brought to transform the Republican Party,” Gabbard said at a rally in Greensboro, N.C., “that I’m proud to stand here with you today, President Trump, and announce that I’m joining the Republican Party.”

The move seemed to surprise Trump as he appeared on stage. After her speech, Trump said he “didn’t know” Gabbard had decided to join the Republican Party.

“I’m joining the party of the people, the party of equality, the party that was founded to fight against and end slavery in this country,” she said in explaining her decision. “It is the party of common sense and the party that is led by a president who has the courage and strength to fight for peace.”

In her leadup to the big announcement, Gabbard slammed her former party and Vice President Kamala Harris for being “anti-freedom,” “pro-censorship,” “pro-open borders,” and “pro-war.” She also criticized Harris for “shamelessly” accepting endorsements from “warmongers” like Dick and Liz Cheney, reiterating that a second Trump presidency represents peace. Trump has vowed to end the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza.

Kamala’s Inane Talking Points Only two talking points matter: Which candidate’s past record and current agenda best appeal to voters? And which candidate seems the most authentic and genuine? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/24/kamalas-inane-talking-points/

As Vice President Kamala Harris slips in the polls, the Democratic National Committee/Harris Campaign/mainstream media fusion talking points become even more absurd.

Claiming that J.D. Vance and Donald Trump were “weird” did not work—especially given the genuinely odd behavior of vice presidential candidate Tim Walz and would-be First Gentleman Doug Emhoff.

Nor was the next Harris meme convincing that the frenetic and non-stop Trump was somehow “exhausted,” “senile,” and “confused.” Voters know the workdays of the younger Harris are usually far shorter—or sometimes not workdays at all.

But Harris also falsely claimed the physically and mentally challenged Biden was, in her words, “absolutely authoritative” and “very bold and vibrant.”

Now Harris asserts that Trump is a “fascist,” a “dictator,” and “unfit” for office. But this new talking point will also not stop the Harris campaign’s hemorrhaging—and for a variety of reasons.

First, voters see the election as a conflict of two absolutely antithetical visions.

On the one hand, is the prior Trump 2017-20 concrete record: border security, no major wars abroad, calm in the Middle East, a deterred Russia, Iran, and China, low inflation, low interest rates, lower crime, lower taxes, strong deterrent military—and opposition to mandatory electric vehicle mandates, biological males competing in women’s sports, and the woke/DEI agenda.

On the other hand, is the Biden-Harris 2021-2024 record: the unchecked entry of 12-20 million illegal aliens and a destroyed border. People still struggle under Biden-Harris’s earlier hyperinflation and high interest rates. The horrific regional wars in Ukraine and the Middle East continue. Biden-Harris embraces the unpopular DEI/Woke agenda.

Harris herself knows that the Biden-Harris years were a failure. That is why she has shed almost all of their hard left-wing agendas—policies she has embraced for much of her adult life.

So suddenly, in the last 90 or so days, Harris has completely flipped and flopped.

Now she is for more of, not defunding, the police. She pivots for a secure border, not 20 million illegal aliens pouring across it. Harris brags about fossil fuel energy, not banning fracking, and for increasing, not cutting, defense.

Heather Mac Donald Prophets of Doom The dishonesty with which the media has portrayed Donald Trump from the beginning threatens our civil coexistence.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/prophets-of-doom

A quiz: Who said the following, and which speaker did the New York Times deem dark and demagogic?

“We’re not going to have a country” if my opponent wins.

My opponent is “a threat to our democracy and fundamental freedoms.”

“There is one existential threat:” my opponent.

“The only existential threat to humanity is climate change, and [my opponent] didn’t do a damn thing about it.”

The 2024 presidential election “might carry near-existential stakes.”

Blacks and Hispanics “have to wake up knowing that they can lose their very life in the course of just living their life. . . . [they] have to worry about whether their sons or daughters will come home after a grocery store run or just walking down the street or driving their car or playing in the park or just sleeping at home.”

“America must heed this warning”: my opponent is a “fascist.”

“No one has ever been as dangerous to this country” as my opponent.

“Folks don’t care if tanks roll by on the way to the store as long as the milk doesn’t cost more than 4 years ago.”

Answer key: The first quote is from Donald Trump. The rest are from: Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Joe Biden, the New York Times, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Kamala Harris, and a New York Times reader.

Despite the media caterwauling, voters aren’t buying that Trump is a ‘threat to democracy’ By Jonathan Turley

https://nypost.com/2024/10/23/opinion/despite-the-media-caterwauling-voters-arent-buying-that-trump-is-a-threat-to-democracy/

“Democracy dies in darkness” is the Washington Post’s slogan, but can it handle the light?

The Post has been doggedly portraying the election between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris as a choice between tyranny (Trump) and democracy (Harris). Yet when it commissioned a poll on threats to democracy shortly before the election, it did not quite work out.

Voters in swing states deem the greater threat to democracy to be Kamala Harris, who is running on a “save democracy” platform.

The poll sampled 5,016 registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

When asked whether Trump or Harris “would do a better job” of “defending against threats to democracy,” 43% picked Trump while 40% picked Harris.

Notably, this was the same result when President Biden was the nominee. While over half said that threats to democracy were important to them, the voters trusted Trump (44%) more than Biden (33%) in protecting democracy.

Even with the slight improvement for Harris, the result was crushing for not just many in the Harris campaign but the press and pundits who have been unrelenting in announcing the end of democracy if Harris is not elected.

Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) has declared with authority that either you vote for Harris, or this “may well be the last real vote you ever get to cast.”

I have long criticized the apocalyptic, democracy-ending predictions of Biden, Harris and others as ignoring the safeguards in our system against authoritarian power.

Nevertheless, Harris supporters have ratcheted up the rhetoric to a level of pure hysteria. Recently, Michael Cohen, a convicted felon and Trump’s disbarred former lawyer, told MSNBC that if Trump wins the election, he will “get rid of the judiciary and get rid of the Congress.”

Bill Clinton Makes the Case for Donald Trump Oops. by Jenny Beth Martin

https://www.frontpagemag.com/bill-clinton-makes-the-case-for-donald-trump/

Kamala Harris isn’t happy with Bill Clinton. The former president, a Democrat All-Star for decades, made trouble for the Harris campaign Sunday when he acknowledged an obvious truth that Harris would rather not talk about – Laken Riley would very likely be alive today if not for the lax border security policies ordered and implemented by the Biden-Harris administration.

“You got a case in Georgia not very long ago, didn’t you – they made an ad about it – a young woman who had been killed by an immigrant,” said Clinton at a Harris campaign event in Fort Valley, Georgia. “Yeah, well, if they’d all been properly vetted that probably wouldn’t have happened.”

Bill Clinton, meet Michael Kinsley, the liberal journalist who famously defined a “gaffe” as “when a politician tells the truth.”

On February 22 of this year, Riley’s body was found close to a walking trail in a wooded area near the Athens, Georgia campus of the University of Georgia. She had been a nursing student at Augusta University. Law enforcement authorities disclosed the following day that they had captured and charged an illegal immigrant from Venezuela, Jose Antonio Ibarra, with Riley’s murder.

Ibarra was only present in the United States because the Biden-Harris administration had made a deliberate decision to allow him into the country. According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Ibarra had been detained by the Border Patrol on September 8, 2022, after he was caught entering the country unlawfully near El Paso, Texas.

It is unclear whether he had, after his apprehension, entered an asylum claim.

Whether he had or had not, he had entered the country unlawfully. He should have been detained and then deported. But the Biden-Harris administration – acting through Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and his subordinates, carrying out a policy the Biden-Harris administration had earlier decided – had made a choice to allow Ibarra to remain in the country. So he had been released.

60 Minutes Officially Announces: Yes We Edited the Harris Interview and We’re Proud of It By Jeffrey Blehar

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/60-minutes-officially-announces-yes-we-edited-the-harris-interview-and-were-proud-of-it/?utm_

I’d like to add a brief note tonight on a kerfuffle of less matter and moment than the other debates of greater importance currently raging throughout American political media. (To name but one example: How many times will Kamala Harris and her media surrogates try to sell “Donald Trump is old and tired” as a campaign talking point before giving up at the transparent futility of it all?)

Earlier this month Kamala Harris sat down for an interview with 60 Minutes, and it went just about as well her other various media encounters have: rather poorly. She served up her usual word salad, and I don’t recall there being much for me to say about it that wasn’t already covered well enough by my colleagues.

One little detail that nagged at me, however, was the way in which 60 Minutes edited their interview with Harris after first airing a preview of it on Face the Nation. When interviewer Bill Whitaker queried Harris about the Biden-Harris administration’s diplomatic relationship with Israel, Harris began with a rambling, lost prelude that amounted to her typical rhetorical churn. Then she collected herself and remembered her canned answer.

Later on, when the interview aired on 60 Minutes, that opening word jumble — which made Harris look remarkably weak — was edited away from Harris’s response. Instead of looking like a deer in the headlights unable to quickly answer, she was presented to viewers as a crisper speaker and thinker than she was.

Are Dems Out Of Options To Stop Trump?

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/22/are-dems-out-of-options-to-stop-trump/

Two impeachments, 88 felony counts (with guilty verdicts on 34 of them), a massive fine, two assassination attempts, unrelentingly hostile media coverage, a last-minute candidate switcheroo, and Donald Trump is still showing signs that he will win the election in two weeks.

So, what do Democrats still have up their sleeve to stop Trump? They must have something.

Back in May, we asked what the Democrats’ Plan B was if their lawfare campaign against Trump failed, and offered five options – four of which have come to pass. Here is what we said then.

Dump Biden … We’ve long suspected that swapping Biden out at the last minute has been the Democrats’ plan for some time, especially since mainstream reporters started parroting Democratic talking points about how Biden was 100% guaranteed to be the nominee.

Well, we were right about that one.

Reassemble the election rigging team … Evidence is currently emerging that the Biden administration has been using taxpayer money on a government-wide effort to selectively register voters most likely to vote for the Democrat – i.e., rig the election.

Big Tech is also doing its share. Podcaster Joe Rogan complained recently that “You can’t find a negative story about Kamala Harris on Google if you tried.” Meta’s chatbot refused to answer questions about the Trump assassination attempt. Amazon’s Alexa gave starkly different answers when asked the same question about Trump and Harris. The companies, of course, deny tilting their algorithms. Google blamed “bugs,” Meta denied AI chatbot bias, and Amazon blamed an “error” that was “quickly fixed.” Funny how these “errors” always go in one direction.

Cheat … Even if election fraud is widespread and obvious, the same institutions that rallied to ‘save’ the 2020 election will deny it all and accuse anyone who claims otherwise of being an insurrectionist.

Interest Payments Top Defense Spending For First Time In History — Thank You Kamala

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/19/interest-payments-top-defense-spending-for-first-time-in-history-thank-you-kamala/

SUNNY HOSTIN: Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?

KAMALA HARRIS: There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of — and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact.

On Friday, the Treasury Department released a report showing the kind of impact Harris is talking about. If nothing else does, it should cost her the election.

The latest monthly Treasury report shows spending and revenues for the full fiscal year 2024, which ended in September.

Among the terrible results: The federal deficit topped $1.8 trillion in 2024 — the third highest in history and eclipsed only by the two COVID-19 panic spending years.

That’s not for lack of revenues, which were up by nearly half a trillion dollars this year. Spending under Biden-Harris this fiscal year climbed more than $617 billion – a 10% increase.

But the real shocker is the explosive growth in interest payments on the national debt.

These payments hit $882 billion in FY 2024, the Treasury report says. That’s a 35% jump from last year.

And it’s $8 billion more than we spent on National Defense.

Michigan Voter Rolls Claim 8.4M Voters, When There Are Less Than 8M Eligible Residents By Eric Lendrum

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/18/michigan-voter-rolls-claim-8-4m-voters-when-there-are-less-than-8m-eligible-residents/

The voter rolls in Michigan claim that there are 8.4 million people registered to vote in the crucial swing state, even though the state’s total population is almost half a million less than that.

According to the Daily Wire, the state of Michigan had previously been sued by the Republican National Committee (RNC) over the extremely inflated voter rolls, and other concerns regarding election integrity. But Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D-Mich.) dismissed such concerns in a statement on Wednesday, claiming with no evidence that these lawsuits “lay the groundwork to overturn the results of the election if they don’t like them.”

“The RNC and its members are concerned that Defendants’ failure to comply with the NVRA’s voter-list maintenance obligations undermines the integrity of elections by increasing the opportunity for ineligible voters or voters intent on fraud to cast ballots,” the RNC’s lawsuit states.

A spokeswoman for Benson’s office, Angela Benander, even admitted that there are at least 606,800 inactive voters currently on the rolls, but they will not be purged until 2027. Voters who become ineligible include those who have moved to another state, those who have mail returned from their address as “undeliverable,” and voters who do not vote in two or more consecutive federal elections.

In total, 78 of Michigan’s 83 counties appear to have more registered voters than residents of voting age. The largest county in the state, Wayne County – where the city of Detroit is located – has only 1.3 million residents of voting age, but 1.4 million registered voters, according to data from the U.S. Census. Another example is Genessee County, with 351,000 registered voters but less than 300,000 residents.