ELECTIONS, MEDIA Comments turned off

Lesley Stahl Is Wrong And Trump Is Right: The Obama Administration Spied On The Trump Campaign By Margot Cleveland

Posted By on October 27th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/26/lesley-stahl-is-wrong-and-trump-is-right-the-obama-administration-spied-on-the-trump-campaign/

‘60 Minutes’ and Lesley Stahl falsely reported it is ‘unverified’ that the Obama-Biden administration spied on Trump’s campaign in 2016.

Last week, President Trump’s team released 38 minutes of unedited video capturing his contentious sit-down with Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes.” Sunday evening, CBS broadcast clips of the interview and amazingly let air proof of Trump’s charge that the media is fake news: “60 Minutes” and Stahl falsely reported that it is “unverified” that the Obama-Biden administration spied on Trump’s campaign in 2016.

Trump and not Stahl raised this scandal, as the unedited video showed, after he reversed roles with his interviewer and pushed her to say whether she thought it was okay for Hunter Biden to give “the big guy” a 10 percent cut of money raised by Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden’s son in China, and whether it was okay for China to give the Biden family one and a half billion dollars to manage and for Joe to then negotiate with China on behalf of Americans.

“60 Minutes” edited out those details of the Biden scandal, but let the television audience hear Trump say of it, “It’s the biggest scan…” before correcting himself, “the second biggest scandal. The biggest scandal was when they spied on my campaign.”

The next minutes continued with what would be a comic routine of “did not,” “did too,” did not,” if the subject wasn’t truly the biggest scandal in American political history.

“They spied on my campaign,” Trump repeated.

“But there’s no evide…real evidence of that,” Leslie countered.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Trump Takes The Lead In Pennsylvania; +3 Per New Poll

Posted By on October 27th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/26/trump-takes-the-lead-in-pennsylvania-3-per-new-poll/

A poll conducted by InsiderAdvantage for the Center for American Greatness of 400 likely voters in Pennsylvania shows Donald Trump now leading in the state. The poll was conducted the evening of October 25 by both IVR and live cell phone interviews. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.9 percent and is weighted for age, race, gender, and political affiliation. The results:

Donald Trump: 48.4%

Joe Biden: 45.5 %

Jo Jorgensen: 3 %

Undecided: 3 %

The same poll had Biden in the lead less than two weeks ago. Why? InsiderAdvantage’s Matt Towery explained why things have moved in Trump’s favor:

“These results indicate a stark shift in the contest. Our last survey of Pennsylvania showed Joe Biden leading Trump by three points. But that survey was before the last debate. Since the debate Trump has picked up support from younger voters, who based on our prior survey strongly oppose future lockdowns over Covid-19 spikes. Trump has also bolstered his lead among male voters by some twelve points. Biden continues to hold a seven point advantage over Trump among female voters. It would be nothing more than mere conjecture to attempt to correlate Biden’s statements on energy and fracking in the last debate contest with the shift towards Trump in this survey. However, Trump saw gains even among senior voters which have not been his strong suit this election cycle. That suggest that some issue or set of events has caused a late shift in the contest.”

Towery adds “Trump also continues to hold about 14% of the African American vote in this survey. In twenty years of polling, and as one who has polled Pennsylvania many times, I have never seen a Republican candidate consistently hold these type of numbers among black voters this close to an election. And this appears to be a developing trend in numerous states.”

Matt Towery accurately predicted a national victory for Donald Trump for major owned and operated Fox affiliates on air the evening before the 2016 presidential election. He has polled presidential races across the nation for twenty years. Specifically he has polled Pennsylvania for numerous news organizations, including the 2008 contest between Barack Obama and John McCain for Politico where his surveys showed an Obama victory. He retired from his nationally syndicated column (Creators) in 2016 and as CEO of InsiderAdvantage but returned to provide polling of the Trump-Biden contest this year.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Who’s Really To Blame For the Riots In American Cities? Pt. 2 With Michael Yon By Jeff Reynolds

Posted By on October 27th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/jeff-reynolds/2020/10/26/whos-really-to-blame-for-the-riots-in-american-cities-pt-2-with-michael-yon-n1084277

Leaders in American cities have spent most of 2020 deflecting blame for the violent riots that have dominated them. Much of the finger-pointing has focused on Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer, and other right wing groups. These groups have formed over the past half decade as a response to the chaos caused in Portland, along with many other large American cities, by radical leftist groups like Black Lives Matter protests, riots led by antifa and By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), and other militant marxist groups utilizing black bloc tactics to disrupt American free society.

But what are these right wing groups? Are they fascists, white supremacists, and defenders of the systems of racism endemic to America’s core, as alleged by the Left? Are they the dreaded militias hell bent on domestic terrorism? How do they compare to antifa, BLM, or BAMN?

Michael Yon, a war correspondent who has covered insurrections all over the globe, came to Portland in September to gather intelligence on the civil unrest in the streets. This is part two of his conversation with PJ Media, in which he describes his investigation into the right wing groups that have sprung up to oppose antifa and BLM and their black bloc tactics to create chaos and destruction across the Pacific Northwest.

Part One: How Close Is the U.S. to Civil War? A War Correspondent Is in Portland to Find Out

“Groups like Proud Boys,” Yon said, “form in these vacuums when you feel like the government is not doing their job, and you fear for the lives of your family, yourself, you fear for your community being burned down. That’s when militias form everywhere. That’s what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it’s happened in America. Our whole country was formed on militias.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

If We’re Doing a Mask Mandate, Do It Right! Because “science.” By Julie Kelly

Posted By on October 27th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/26/if-were-doing-a-mask-mandate-do-it-right/

As predicted, this week is filled with fear and recriminations about COVID-19 as Election Day nears. The Biden campaign—cognizant of the fact that the Left has turned the president’s handling of coronavirus into his biggest political weakness—along with the unhinged news media, is exploiting every case and death in a ghoulish attempt to defeat Donald Trump on November 3.

The alleged “party of science” is condemning the president for failing to “control” the novel coronavirus, which is the most unsciency thing ever because it’s impossible to control a virus without the widespread use of immunizations over a long period of time and even that isn’t a guarantee. Only a few deadly viruses in history, perhaps unbeknownst to the Democratic Party’s credentialed class, have been completely eradicated.

The annual flu vaccine can combat just a handful of influenza strains. The Centers for Disease Control admits that “Flu viruses are constantly changing so it’s not unusual for new flu viruses to appear each year.” Despite Herculean efforts to “control” influenza, a vaccine is only about 40 to 60 percent effective. Millions of Americans still contract the illness and tens of thousands, including children, die each year. This year’s vaccine targets a form of the Hong Kong flu first identified in 1968, the year I was born.

But somehow, Donald Trump was supposed to contain, control, or completely stop a novel (that means new) coronavirus within a matter of months. Joe Biden warns that if he’s elected, he will initiate all sorts of virus-killing measures, most of which already have been implemented by the Trump Administration. “I’m going to shut down the virus not the country,” Biden, who it must be noted is not an epidemiologist, promised at last week’s debate.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

English Departments in the Ideological Thrall of Identity Politics When the curricula become all about “social justice.”Richard L. Cravatts

Posted By on October 27th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/english-departments-ideological-thrall-identity-richard-l-cravatts/

In July, the English Department of the University of Chicago posted an odd statement on its website. In response to the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and the supposed “thousands of others named and unnamed who have been subject to police violence,” the department announced that, “For the 2020-2021 graduate admissions cycle, the University of Chicago English Department is accepting only applicants interested in working in and with Black Studies.” What is the motivation for the targeting of that particular area of study now? The statement, in the tortured language academia is so adept at generating, explains that English as a discipline “has a long history of providing aesthetic rationalizations for colonization, exploitation, extraction and anti-Blackness,” and is “responsible for developing hierarchies of cultural production that have contributed directly to social and systemic determinations of whose lives matter and why.”

Apparently, the Chicago faculty believe that it is part of the mission of the English Department to mobilize its intellectual resources to address social problems and that the work of “undoing persistent, recalcitrant anti-Blackness in our discipline and in our institutions must be the collective responsibility of all faculty, here and elsewhere,” as the statement pretentiously proclaims.

While some observers lauded the department’s decision to focus graduate study on Black Studies, critics, including University of Chicago’s own president, Robert Zimmer, were quick to question a department committing itself to a political movement and activism supporting it. “[S]ome members of the University community have expressed concern that the exclusive disciplinary commitment effectively represents a political test for admission,” Zimmer wrote, in responding to the controversy, and “[t]he idea or even implication that there would be a political criterion applied to admission to our doctoral program would be incompatible with the fundamental principles of our University.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Rep. Omar: Biden Will Turn Left After Election Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on October 27th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/10/rep-omar-biden-will-turn-left-after-election-daniel-greenfield/

Nice of her to point this out to anyone deluded enough to think otherwise.

Rep. Ilhan Omar told “Axios on HBO” that given the way progressives have shaped Joe Biden’s policy platform, she and other members of “The Squad” expect a liberal turn from him if he’s elected.

Illiberal is the correct term.

“I know that when the policy platform was being put into place, a lot of our feedback was incorporated throughout his platform,” Omar said.

“We will have a cohort of progressives that are very clear about their objectives for wanting the implementation of Medicare for All and a Green New Deal and raising the minimum wage and not allowing for fracking,” Omar said.

“There has been a level of responsiveness … to the policies that we are advocating for that we know will have not just a future in his administration, but a future in the upcoming administrations after his,” she added.

So expect that ban on private health insurance and on any energy that doesn’t come from expensive Chinese solar panels. Along with millions of lost jobs.

And if Biden succeeds, then the socialist caucus will be influencing future Democrat administrations too.

MEDIA Comments turned off

The Dirty Deals of NPR Decades of gross bias and disinformation. Joseph Klein

Posted By on October 27th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/its-time-defund-npr-joseph-klein/

National Public Radio (NPR) does not serve the American taxpayers who are paying its bills. Most recently, NPR did its part to shield Joe Biden from the fallout of the Biden family pay-for-access corruption scheme. That’s nothing new. NPR has long served as the leftwing progressive Democrat Party’s propaganda arm. Back in 2016, for example, NPR shilled for the disastrous nuclear deal pushed by the Obama administration, after receiving funding from a pro-nuclear deal advocacy group. It is long past time to end the gravy train and defund NPR.

On October 22nd, NPR’s public editor rationalized NPR’s decision to suppress coverage of the New York Post’s expose of the Hunter Biden e-mails implicating Joe Biden himself in his son’s business dealings. NPR’s managing editor Terence Samuel tweeted: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.” 

The Media Research Center retorted: “How exactly is doing what is supposed to be your job of reporting and investigating a story with credible sources to be a ‘waste of time?’

David Folkenflik, NPR’s media correspondent, tried to kill the messenger that broke the story on the e-mails which were reportedly recovered from Hunter Biden’s laptop computer. Folkenflik attacked the New York Post as “suspect” and speculated “whether those emails were somehow hacked and doctored, or completely fabricated.” Folkenflik repeated the baseless claim, debunked by the FBI and Director of National Intelligence, that the New York Post story may have been part of Russia’s disinformation campaign.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

French Outrage Will Samuel Paty’s beheading make any difference in Macron’s Islam policy?Bruce Bawer

Posted By on October 27th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/french-outrage-bruce-bawer/

On October 2, as I reported here recently, French president Emmanuel Macron gave a major speech – well, a long one, anyway – in which he vowed, after years of passivity and appeasement, to get tough on Islam. This was no small promise. France is arguably Ground Zero for European Islam, whose adherents – now constituting roughly 10% of that country’s population – represent an existential threat to French secular governance, to French culture and the French language, to French law and order, to the survival of France’s welfare state and its national economy as a whole, and to the core Gallic values of liberté, égalité, fraternité.    

Exactly two weeks after Macron’s speech, an atrocity took place that seemed to challenge Macron to act upon his lofty words. Abdoullakh Abouyezidovitch Anzorov, 18, a Moscow-born Chechen who had lived in France since 2008, beheaded Samuel Paty, 47, a teacher of history and geography at a secondary school, the Collège du Bois d’Aulne, that is located in a Paris suburb. Anzorov then posted a picture of Paty’s severed head on Twitter.

Anzorov’s motive? During a class on freedom of expression, Paty had shown his students some of the famous cartoons of Muhammed that had been published to international outcry in 2005 in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten and later reprinted in Charlie Hebdo. According to the parent of one of Paty’s pupils, Paty had permitted Muslim youngsters to leave the classroom before he displayed the cartoons, saying, “Go out, I don’t want it to hurt your feelings.” That invitation proved to be insufficient, alas, to avoid offending Anzorov’s feelings.

Shortly after the murder, Anzorov was shot dead by police; at least 15 other people have since been arrested in connection with the crime. One of them, a parent of one of Paty’s pupils, had started an online campaign to demonize Paty and exchanged text messages with Anzorov before the murder; four of those detained were pupils at the school, including two pupils of Paty, aged 14 and 15, who were apparently paid by Anzorov to identify Paty outside the school; four were members of Anzarov’s family; and yet another was a noted Islamic preacher, Abdelhakim Sefrioui, who had made anti-Paty videos. Also in the wake of the murder, about 40 raids have been made on the residences of suspected radicals.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Polling expert explains why polls are junk and why he’s betting on Trump

Posted By on October 27th, 2020

http://joannenova.com.au/2020/10/polling-expert-explains-why-polls-are-junk-and-why-hes-betting-on-trump/

55% of Americans are better off than they were 4 years ago. It would amazing for Trump to lose to one of the weakest, low charisma candidates a major party has ever run. But he is one man against a machine that includes the media, the judiciary, and the Tech Giants and a global pandemic.
The 900 hp passion of the Trumpers is swamping the pitiful gatherings for Harris-Biden. But how much does that reflect what the 10% in the middle are thinking?

Two experts with great track records predict the winner. One says Trump. One says Biden. One of them is much more convincing than the other.

It’s worth recalling Hillary was bleaching lap tops, and practically having seizures on camera, and she still won 60 million votes just like Donald Trump did. Enthusiam counts but it isn’t everything.

Trump had this election in the bag in January for his State of The Union, then all the normal election rules were tossed into orbit.

Barnes disassembles polling data like a machine

Ciara Haley and George Szamuely talk to renowned litigator and political analyst Robert Barnes about polls and why they are of such limited usefulness.

 This man owns polling analysis. The detail. The details! And all off the cuff…

h/t To WokeBuster and RickWill

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Anarchy in New York? One senses order slipping away. Seth Barron

Posted By on October 27th, 2020

https://www.city-journal.org/anarchy-in-new-york

After Attorney General William Barr designated New York, along with Portland and Seattle, as “anarchistic” cities, Gotham mayor Bill de Blasio expressed outrage. He characterized it as a political attack on “black and brown cities”—though Portland and Seattle are two of the whitest cities in the nation—and denied that New York is remotely lawless or otherwise anarchic. Now the mayors of the three jurisdictions, facing the loss of federal funding, have sued the administration, calling the designation false and illegal.

It’s true that New York City wouldn’t be confused for Tegucigalpa or Mogadishu. And its violent crime rate, while soaring, is still much lower than that of Baltimore or St. Louis, for instance. But comparing New York today with the New York of even a few years ago makes clear that the city is undergoing a serious fracturing of civic order—one trending toward further disintegration.

One late summer Sunday morning, Demetrius Harvard, a 30-year old Bronx man, stood on a subway platform in Greenwich Village and methodically threw construction material onto the tracks. Bystanders tried to stop him, and someone even went into the train well to remove the debris, but Harvard persisted in his sabotage. Eventually, he succeeded in derailing an uptown A train, injuring several passengers.

You had to read to the end of tabloid news reports to get the real story. Two weeks earlier, in the same neighborhood, Harvard had tossed a steel bench through a bus window. He was arrested, charged with criminal mischief, and immediately “ROR’d”—released on his recognizance—with no bail.

This cycle is now all too common in New York, where public order and safety have been buffeted by chaotic forces. Criminal-justice reform at the state level removed bail as an option for all but the most heinous charges. Locally, the NYPD has stopped enforcing many quality-of-life laws. The city council passed a law forbidding cops from applying pressure to the chest or back of an arrestee while trying to handcuff him, on the premise that this tactic is tantamount to asphyxiation; officers dealing with a resisting suspect would thus potentially face assault charges if they attempt to restrain him with vigor.