RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-trump-boom-is-real-11603659361?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

There’s often more to the macroeconomy than what meets the eye. My friend Alan Blinder published an op-ed recently declaring that the employment surge during Donald Trump’s presidency is a “convenient myth.” He noted that unemployment had declined steadily since 2010 and that there was no acceleration in job growth after the 2017 tax reform. But there’s little reason to think the expansion held for a record-long 10 years merely on its own steam; Mr. Trump’s policies gave it new life.

After any recession, employment grows quickly because there is a surplus of job seekers. Late in a recovery, when the unemployment rate has already fallen sharply, growth becomes much harder to come by. Common sense suggests that further progress is more difficult at a 4% unemployment rate than at 8%

It’s easy to look at steadily declining unemployment and conclude that no later variables had much effect. But a better question is how much unemployment declined relative to what experts predicted. Take the Federal Reserve, the body on which Mr. Blinder and I served together.

In December 2016, the Fed predicted that 2017 would close at a 4.5% unemployment rate. In fact, it ended at 4.1%. The Fed in 2016 also projected that 2018 would end with 4.5% unemployment, believing further improvement was virtually impossible. But unemployment reached 3.9% in 2018. Ditto for 2019: The Fed predicted 4.5%, but unemployment fell to 3.5% that year, a multidecade low. Under Mr. Trump, the unemployment rate fell to a level the Fed hadn’t even considered. The Fed’s 2016 predictions for GDP were 0.7 percentage points too low for 2017, 0.5 points too low for 2018 and 0.4 points too low for 2019.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/keep-an-eye-on-the-michigan-senate-race-11603659430?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Michigan hasn’t elected a Republican U.S. senator since 1994, and Republicans this year are working to save more than half a dozen seats in the upper chamber. But the Senate race in Michigan presents an unexpected pickup opportunity. Recent polls show Republican John James, a 39-year-old African-American Iraq war veteran, within striking distance of first-term Sen. Gary Peters and outperforming President Trump, who narrowly carried the state in 2016. The Real Clear Politics average has Mr. Peters leading 48.6% to 43.4%.

Mr. Peters, 61, was the only nonincumbent Democrat elected to the Senate in 2014. But his GOP opponent answered questions clumsily and repeatedly stumbled on the trail. Mr. James looks more formidable.

A Detroit native, he served eight years in the military before joining his family’s company, James Group International. He is now CEO of Renaissance Global Logistics, a subsidiary. Although he lost a 2018 challenge to Sen. Debbie Stabenow by 6.5 points, he was fighting a strong undertow: Democrats swept Michigan’s statewide offices, flipped two congressional seats and picked up five seats each in the state House and Senate.

Running on the same ticket as Mr. Trump may be both a blessing and curse. While the president may motivate Republican-leaning voters who didn’t turn out in 2018, he may do the same for Democrats. To flip the Senate seat, Mr. James will need to persuade moderates who dislike Mr. Trump but are leery of progressive policies.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/10/fauci-prepping-biden-victory-daniel-greenfield/

Don’t wear masks. Make everyone masks. Sure, why not? Just say it in a soothing voice with a pleasant bedside manner.

In a CNN interview on Friday, Fauci was asked if he thought Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s plan to fight for mandates on mask-wearing across the country would be helpful.  

Fauci told CNN’s Erin Burnett that it would be a “great idea” to have everybody wearing masks uniformly. He also responded to criticism that mandates on masks would be difficult to enforce. 

Everyone? In the entire country? Much of which, at a county level, has only experienced a limited infection impact?

As Fauci’s own mask-wearing, or lack thereof at sporting events, reminds us, he doesn’t believe any of this stuff.

But it’s the stupid thing that Biden has come up with on the advice of an advisor and donor base limited to the New York, San Francisco, and other big blue city crowd. And Fauci, readapting to the media’s expectations of a Biden victory, is all in on it.

“One of the issues though, I get the argument that ‘Well, if you mandate a mask, you’re going to have to enforce it and that’s going to create more of a problem,’” Fauci said. “Well, if people are not wearing masks, then maybe we should be mandating it.” 

This isn’t an actual thought.

But then again, Fauci doesn’t do actual thoughts. He does pleasantries. He never says anything substantial. Instead he says meaningless things, agrees with anyone he’s talking to, and does little expect give everyone the impression that he’s an empathetic professional, without actually substantiating that in any way. That’s what being a political doctor means.

All you can say about Fauci is that, unlike Birx, he’s better at faking warmth and relevance, but there’s still nothing there.

Fauci panders to anyone who’s in charge, and pivots from radically different views, because his goal is access to power, not to actually accomplish anything, but to be at the top of the heap.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/09/i-didnt-vote-for-trump-in-2016-but-id-crawl-over-broken-glass-to-vote-for-him-now/

I don’t care about the tone of his tweets nor if his opponents think he’s rude. I’ve seen that he is a patriot who genuinely loves the United States of America and its people.

Even though I had voted for every Republican presidential candidate since 1980, I didn’t vote for Donald Trump in 2016.

Many Republican nominees had been huge disappointments to me, and I wasn’t going to vote for yet another GOP candidate I thought would betray my trust. I couldn’t imagine Trump as a genuine conservative who would champion limited government, respect individual freedom and liberty, and protect the unborn — but was I ever wrong. Although I didn’t vote for Trump in 2016, I would crawl over broken glass to vote for him in 2020.

In 2016, I was convinced Trump was just another New York liberal. On election night, however, I smiled. I was happy that at least Hillary Clinton wouldn’t be president, and I suspected that the next four years with Trump would at least be entertaining.

The primary reason I didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 was that I didn’t believe him. I didn’t trust that he would be pro-life, a non-negotiable issue for me. His bluster and bravado didn’t appeal to me. I took him literally but not seriously, in contrast to his supporters who took him seriously but not literally (credit to Peter Thiel for identifying this significant distinction).

By the time Trump took office, I was willing to give him a chance. He was the president, after all, and deserved the opportunity to prove himself. During the first year of his presidency, I was impressed by his commitment to keeping his campaign promises, unlike most politicians. By the end of 2017, I classified myself as a Trump supporter because of what he had already done as president.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/10/25/2016s_reluctant_trumpers_are_2020s_avid_trumpers.html
““It wasn’t until after he was president that I fully understood the power of Donald Trump’s message.” 

Four years ago, the media enjoyed covering the phenomenon of so-called Never Trumpers; Republicans who wouldn’t vote for Donald Trump.

There was speculation that these voters, many well connected to the Washington establishment, would put the icing on the electoral cake for Hillary Clinton. Of course, this notion proved fanciful. The Never Trumpers are back in 2020. They’re no greater in number, but the media has gobbled it up again.

But there’s another group of Republicans: those who enthusiastically supported GOP candidates other than Donald Trump before he was nominated. They remained cautious about Trump even after the Republican National Convention. Ultimately, though, they pulled the lever for Trump over Hillary. Call them “Reluctant Trumpers.”

They’re still around, too. But’s there’s a difference: they are now enthusiastic Trumpers. I know. I’m one of them.

Four years ago, I was national co-chair of Carly Fiorina’s fledgling campaign. She and I had served on the board of the American Conservative Union together, and I wanted a conservative candidate. Having supported conservatives since my days on Ronald Reagan’s campaign staff, I wasn’t yet convinced of the bona fides of former Democrat Donald Trump.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ocasio-cortez-declines-to-promise-support-for-pelosi-as-speaker-will-back-most-progressive-candidate/

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday hedged on whether she would support Nancy Pelosi as House speaker again, saying she will support the “most progressive” candidate.

“If Speaker Pelosi runs again, as she just indicated she will if the Democrats keep the House, will you support her?” CNN’s Jake Tapper asked the freshman congresswoman during an interview on CNN.

“Again, I want to make sure that we win the House. I do believe that we will, but it’s critically important that we are supporting Democrats in tight swing races, making sure that not only all of them come back but that we grow our majority. I believe that we have to see those races as they come, see what candidates are there,” Ocasio-Cortez responded.

“I am committed to making sure that we have the most progressive candidate there. But, if Speaker Pelosi is that most progressive candidate, then I will be supporting her,” she concluded.

The New York progressive’s remarks came just moments after Pelosi confirmed on CNN that she intends to run for speaker of the House should Democrats retain their majority in the chamber.

Last year, Pelosi clashed with Ocasio-Cortez and three other freshmen progressive congresswomen after the four voted against an emergency border-aid bill brought to the floor by leadership, saying they wanted to see more protections for migrants in the measure.

https://spectator.org/bidens-hostility-to-israel/

The year I began my rabbinic studies in Jerusalem, a full-fledged war broke out on Yom Kippur. My fellow students and I set aside our books and made ourselves useful wherever help was needed. Whether helping work in the city’s largest bakery so everyone could have bread, working in a home for severely disabled children, or one of the city’s major hospitals, along with my fellows, I did what I could.

Joe Biden was the number-two person in an administration that in every way sought to lower its commitment to Israel, and to undercut its ability to succeed as a nation or even to defend itself.

What has never left me is an acute appreciation of how slender is the thread upon which Israel’s survival hangs. We did not know that Syrian tanks had penetrated the Israeli lines and, had they been better led, could have unhinged all of Israel’s defenses. We did not know how useless the Bar Lev fortifications had proven against Egypt. That all came later. But that this was a moment of existential crisis was known by all instinctively. It was in the air.

What a difference it made when the news came that America had created an air lifeline for Israel. In the terrible fighting, the IDF had nearly exhausted its ammunition and necessary military hardware. Taking great diplomatic risk, President Nixon decided to set up a continuous air ferry of supplies that enabled Israel to continue to fight, to turn the tables, and to remove the threat of extinction that a Syrian-Egyptian conquest would have meant.

Ever since that time, when I was in my early twenties, I have made a candidate’s position on Israel a top priority in elections. By the time the next presidential came up in 1976, Nixon was gone and Ford’s policy was being unduly demanding of Israel. I was by no means a conservative then, and there was little else about Ford that inspired me, so I voted for the mysterious man from Georgia. But by the time 1980 rolled around, Carter had shown that he blamed Israel exclusively for the failure of Camp David to lead to full Middle East peace, and his fatuous policy towards Iran had allowed that country to turn into a seething cauldron of hatred against Israel and America. I voted for Reagan, though I also was voting for Teddy Kennedy for the Senate because of his friendliness to Israel’s cause.

https://nypost.com/2020/10/24/biden-corruption-claims-all-but-confirmed-with-hunter-emails/

Thanks to three brave Americans, we now know that Joe Biden has long misled the public about his involvement with his family’s foreign business entanglements while he served as vice president.

At considerable personal risk, former Biden family business partners Tony Bobulinski and Bevan Cooney, and computer shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac, have come forward with tens of thousands of primary-source documents — internal corporate records, emails, and text messages — detailing years of business dealings that centered on trading on the Biden name. This material suggests that, despite Joe Biden’s insistence that he knew nothing about his family’s business deals, he was well aware of his son Hunter Biden’s business ventures in China, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and elsewhere.

These new troves constitute hard evidence of Biden family corruption, and confirm our reporting dating back to our 2018 book “Secret Empires.”

In 2018, when we first broke the foreign influence scandals that have now engulfed the former vice president, it seemed apparent that China and Ukraine were not paying Biden’s family members for their expertise, they were buying access to the vice president of the United States. This was never a scandal solely about Hunter or Joe’s brothers, James and Frank. It was, and has always been, a Joe Biden scandal.

For nearly three years, Biden and his surrogates have responded to the scandal with an increasingly unconvincing series of denials — including another from the former Vice President in his last debate with President Trump.

In response to “Secret Empires,” one of Joe Biden’s aides said “we aren’t going to engage on a politically motivated hit pieces …” Team Biden did not bother to respond to specific allegations that the Biden family vacuumed up millions, in the exact locales where Biden was Obama’s policy “point man.”