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ELECTIONS

Joe Biden’s Covid Fairy Tale His plan seems to be to wait until a magical sprite waves her wand and makes the virus vanish in a poof.By David Gelernter

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-bidens-covid-fairy-tale-11604011900?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

The Democrats want to turn Covid against the president, and they appear to be succeeding. But their strategy makes no sense in the end—perhaps because Joe Biden makes no sense.

The first big problem is that President Trump’s handling of the plague has been sensible from the start. Be careful until treatment improves and a vaccine is ready. Pour all the money and resources you’ve got down the throats of America’s best research labs. This scheme is working. Fatality rates are way down, treatment has improved, and several vaccines are almost ready, all in record time.

It’s hard to attack a plan that is accomplishing its goals. Consider Mr. Biden’s claim that our high Covid death rate is the president’s fault. Actual scientists have other explanations, such as the high rates of pre-existing conditions in the U.S., and New York City—with its large population and population density—being one of our first hot spots and still exercising heavy influence on the figures. Our death rates remain lower than those of several large European countries. This accusation is pure Bidentalk: not merely false but greasy.

If Mr. Biden were a sensible man, he’d be promising more programs like Operation Warp Speed—the federal effort to accelerate the development of a vaccine. Naturally, Americans remain scared of the disease: It is highly infectious and can be serious to the elderly and, occasionally, to others. It’s hard to notice progress when you’re frightened.

No Newsroom Is Safe If The Intercept Can Fall Victim to Media Groupthink By Jack Crowe

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-newsroom-is-safe-if-the-intercept-can-fall-victim-to-media-groupthink/

Glenn Greenwald founded The Intercept in 2013 with the explicit goal of creating a news outlet that would be insulated from the partisan and financial pressures inherent to corporate media.

As he acknowledges in a resignation letter published Thursday, that project has ultimately failed.

The Intercept’s editors, who Greenwald notes repeatedly are almost all based in New York, forbade him from publishing a column airing well-documented allegations of Biden family corruption. They told him that he couldn’t publish the piece as written at The Intercept, supposedly in violation of his contract, and discouraged him from publishing it elsewhere, as doing so would be “unfortunate and detrimental to The Intercept.”

“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. 

In so doing, the editors were following in the footsteps of their media betters at the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC, all of which have either ignored the documents and first-hand accounts of corruption proffered by the former CEO of a Biden family business, or woven them into some meta-narrative about the importance of media gatekeeping in protecting credulous readers from foreign disinformation.

The Five Reasons America Should Reelect Trump

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-five-reasons-america-should-reelect-trump_3557735.html

Elections are about choices. When it comes to the presidency, the choice is between two people and the policies they likely will pursue. In 2020, I am choosing to vote for the reelection of President Trump and here are the most important reasons why.

Before I list those reasons, I note that four years ago, I wanted three things out of a Trump presidency. First, I wanted him to enact tax and regulatory reform so that the economy could grow beyond the average of 2 percent a year in growth that was the result of years of too much growth in government spending and regulations. Keep in mind, the higher spending and regulation is as a percentage of the economy, the lower economic growth becomes.

Second, I wanted him to keep us safe. I wanted a strong national defense that wouldn’t appease Iran and Russia.

Finally, I wanted President Trump to appoint Judges that would NOT be judicial activists. I wanted the Constitution to preserved.

So, here are the reasons I will vote to reelect President Trump.

Trump Kept His Promises and Is Always Pushing Ahead. Trump promised to do those three things above and, lo and behold, he kept him promises. Indeed, Trump has kept more promises than any President in modern times. He literally shows up to work and demands that progress be made regardless of the time of year or election cycle. Hence, taking on North Korea in an Election year (2018) and Middle East Peace in 2020.

Elections are about choices. When it comes to the presidency, the choice is between two people and the policies they likely will pursue. In 2020, I am choosing to vote for the reelection of President Trump and here are the most important reasons why.

Before I list those reasons, I note that four years ago, I wanted three things out of a Trump presidency. First, I wanted him to enact tax and regulatory reform so that the economy could grow beyond the average of 2 percent a year in growth that was the result of years of too much growth in government spending and regulations. Keep in mind, the higher spending and regulation is as a percentage of the economy, the lower economic growth becomes.

Second, I wanted him to keep us safe. I wanted a strong national defense that wouldn’t appease Iran and Russia.

Finally, I wanted President Trump to appoint Judges that would NOT be judicial activists. I wanted the Constitution to preserved.

So, here are the reasons I will vote to reelect President Trump.

Joe Biden Clinched Communist China’s Vote in the Final Debate Ben Weingarte

https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-clinched-communist-chinas-vote-final-debate

While Moscow was surely tickled over Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s baseless chalking up of verified revelations of politically devastating and national security-threatening Biden family corruption to Russian disinformation, it was Beijing that got the last laugh from the final presidential debate.

During the contest, the former vice president, in effect, made his closing argument to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—not that it needed reassurance, given Biden’s decades of invaluable support for communist China’s rise.

Biden affirmed that if elected president, America would return to the untenable U.S. posture toward China of weakness, appeasement and managed decline—the position long-favored by the globalist political establishment that backs him—with the CCP’s helping hand.

He did so, in touching upon three topics: the Chinese coronavirus, competition and corruption.

On the coronavirus, Biden made clear that he would neither blame the CCP for its culpability in spreading the disease nor punish it for its malign behavior. The CCP surely took this as a favorable signal. Where President Trump plainly said of the coronavirus, “it’s China’s fault,” former Vice President Biden instead pointed his finger at President Trump, putting every fatality on the president. “Anyone [who] is responsible for…[220,000] deaths should not remain as president of the United States of America,” Biden declared. This from a man who, several times during the debate, claimed he was a unifier of all Americans—63 million of whom voted for the man Biden essentially called a mass murderer.

One would think holding a broadly unpopular China to account for its malign behavior in connection with the disease would be something about which most Americans could agree. At least half the country did as of July 2020, according to Pew. Yet when asked by moderator Kristen Welker of NBC if, as President Trump indicated he would, a would-be President Biden would “make China pay” for its coronavirus cover-up, Biden refused. He replied: “What I’d make China do is play by the international rules. …We need to be having the rest of our friends with us saying to China, ‘These are the rules. You play by them, or you’re going to pay the price for not p[l]aying by them economically.'”

The American dream vs. the dark winter Jessica Curtis

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/10/the_american_dream_vs_the_dark_winter.html

We’ve finally reached the home stretch for the 2020 election, in what seems like the longest year of our lifetimes.

As candidates tend to do, President Trump is now saying the 2020 election is the most important of his lifetime.  Where this election falls in terms of historical importance is up for debate.  There is no uncertainty around the importance of a presidential election in any year, but that’s particularly the case when one side openly advertises its desire to rip America up by its roots and plant an entirely new system in its place.

What has become clear throughout this campaign is the two entirely contrasting views on where to take our country.  We’re voting for two very different versions of America: Joe Biden’s pessimistic view versus President Donald Trump’s optimistic view.

President Trump’s vision for America sees blue skies ahead.  He vows to reproduce the record economy that saw stocks and 401(k)s going through the roof before COVID-19.  Wages went up for everyone, most noticeably for the lowest wage–earners.  We had record-low or near-record-low unemployment for virtually every demographic group.  Now we’re staring down potentially record-setting third-quarter GDP numbers, showing we do have the ability to return to prosperity.

U.S. Economy Roared Back To Life In Q3 With Fastest Growth In History By Jordan Davidson

https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/29/u-s-economy-roared-back-to-life-in-q3-with-fastest-growth-in-history/

The United States economy made history in the third fiscal quarter of 2020 when gross domestic product jumped at a record rate, signifying a resurgence in the economy following a depletion during COVID-19 lockdowns.

Data shows this jump is the largest output gain since the 1940s when the government began to track GDP data.

GDP for the third quarter, which is measured as the total goods and services produced from July to September, rose at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 33.1 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce‘s Bureau of Economic Analysis.

This rebound is a drastic contrast to the 31.4 percent decrease in real GDP during the second quarter, following the 9 percent decline from the first to the second quarter, and a 7.4 percent increase from the second to the third quarter.

This surprising and historical economic growth, the BEA report released on Thursday states, was spurred by increases in “consumer spending, inventory investment, exports, business investment, and housing investment that were partially offset by a decrease in government spending,” on both the federal and state level.

Despite fears that economic recovery from the pandemic would be difficult, this drastic GDP growth reflects a return in consumer activities such as shopping and eating out at restaurants or bars as more states and cities begin to open up from government-mandated lockdowns due to coronavirus, resulting in personal consumption increasing 40.7 percent, gross private domestic investment increasing 83 percent, and residential investments increasing 59.3 percent.

President Donald Trump celebrated the GDP growth, noting that Democratic Presidential Nominee Joe Biden’s policies would have the opposite effect if elected.

“GDP number just announced. Biggest and Best in the History of our Country, and not even close. Next year will be FANTASTIC!!! However, Sleepy Joe Biden and his proposed record setting tax increase, would kill it all. So glad this great GDP number came out before November 3rd,” Trump tweeted.

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.