RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/21/trumps-greatest-accomplishments-are-what-he-hasnt-done/

Under immense pressure by the media and other Democratic operatives, at a time when nearly all global leaders were using the pandemic as an excuse to seize greater control, Trump did not.

When President Donald Trump returned from Walter Reed Hospital, where he was being treated for COVID-19, he landed on the White House lawn in Marine One, walked up to the White House, scaled the steps, and waved from the balcony. It was a beautiful scene for tens of millions of Americans who had spent days in prayer for their president.

The media reaction was beyond hysterical. Some said that Walter Reed had destroyed its reputation by taking in a sick patient and returning him healthier. The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin sought to defund the hospital because it had done its job. Angered by his triumphant and quick return to the White House, they said the scene was reminiscent of dictators. NBC News’ presidential historian Michael Beschloss tweeted:

While the tweet was amplified by Beschloss’ fellow Resistance members, Americans with better knowledge of presidential history than the presidential historian for NBC News responded with pictures of every other president pictured at the balcony, be it President Barack Obama (many, many times — once with Communist Dictator Xi Jinping, no less), President George W. Bush, President George H.W. Bush, President Ronald Reagan, President Jimmy Carter, President Richard Nixon, … on back to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/the-questions-joe-biden-should-answer-about-hunters-emails/

First, Joe Biden’s Praetorian Guard argued that the New York Post’s Hunter Biden scoop was “Russian disinformation.” The DOJ, FBI, and DNI each publicly disagreed. No one in the Biden camp has denied the veracity of a single email thus far. Yet, as of this writing, the Post’s Twitter account is still frozen, and most major news outlets won’t report the story.

The next deflection was to play on your emotions: “How dare you mock a father struggling with the addiction of his son?!’” This isn’t about Hunter’s addictions, predilections, or life choices, but about his favor-trading, and whether a presidential candidate benefited from them during his tenure as vice president of the United States. We shouldn’t mock those with addiction, but a person isn’t inoculated from scrutiny merely because he’s an addict, either.

Today, a Wisconsin reporter finally asked Biden what he thought about Senator Ron Johnson accusing his family of profiting from Hunter’s shady arrangements.

It should be said that reporters have adopted a pusillanimous positioning in which they refuse to ask Biden straightforward questions, but rather frame queries as baseless accusations from “the Right.” This, of course, allows the candidate to skip answering the question all together and simply attack.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/how-trump-should-approach-the-final-debate/

The so-called mainstream polls of the swing states show the race narrowing. If the trend continues at the current rate, President Trump could poll even in two weeks—in addition to the “other” polls that show him near there already.

So Trump’s mission at the final debate on Thursday is to continue to accelerate his momentum, not to take risks to melt down Joe Biden with verbal fireworks.

Every 10 days, the campaign starts anew. Trump’s rallies are back. He miraculously beat COVID-19 in near record time. Judge Amy Coney Barret proved stellar. If most voters poll they are better off than four years ago, and they think Trump will win, it’s increasingly difficult to believe the disconnect that they are intent on voting against someone who will win and would likely continue to make things better for them.

No one has quite figured out how to calibrate the data on early voting, the Republican surge in swing state registrations, and the effect of the nation’s biggest campuses, mostly in the swing states, being either closed down or at least not fully open on Election Day.

Biden is inert. He’s running a virtual campaign in fear of the virus, of questions about Hunter Biden, and of his suspected intention to pack the court or stop fracking—of most anything.

Trump took risks along with 100 million Americans who feed, fuel and make things for Americans: you can no more run a campaign from the basement than you could a presidency—or country.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/new-twist-in-the-hunter-biden-saga-a-white-house-meeting-for-elite-chinese-group/

J ust imagine if something like this happened during the Trump administration, and ask yourself what the media-Democrat complex would be saying.

In November 2011, an elite group of Chinese Communist Party members and billionaire cronies of the repressive regime in Beijing secured a meeting in the White House, said to be with Vice President Biden and other Obama administration officials, through Hunter Biden’s associates.

News of the meeting has been broken by Peter Schweizer and Seamus Bruner. Schweizer, who has spent years tracking Washington’s web of money, influence and access, is the author most recently of Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, which focuses on the Biden family — among other intriguing money trails on both sides of the political aisle.

Schweizer and Bruner have obtained the cooperation of Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Bevan Cooney, who is serving a federal prison sentence for a fraud scheme. Another Hunter Biden business partner, Devon Archer, was also convicted (and has had his conviction reinstated by the Second Circuit federal appeals court after a trial judge in the Southern District of New York set it aside). Hunter Biden was featured in the evidence but not charged.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/10/born_for_this_moment.html

It’s almost comical how Donald Trump makes the Left stumble and snort in frustration. Right when they think they’ve finally got him in another of their traps, he turns the tables and then rubs their faces in it. He has been handing the leftist monster its head for going on four years and you’d think they’d learn.

Trump is far smarter than the idiot liberal segment of the population wants to acknowledge — perhaps because their narcissism can’t handle the fact that he’s smarter than they are. And it’s real-world smarts across the broad swath of human behavior.

Trump understands people at levels few ever attain. That’s why he was able to calm down the North Koreans after nobody else had gotten anywhere with them for 70 years. That was a foreign policy triumph. Domestically, the Left knew that they’d nail him at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner which he wouldn’t dare to dodge because it was so prestigious. He did dodge it, and rubbed their faces in it by staging a rally that obligated many of those same snotty correspondents to go to the despised Rubeland on the night of the dinner. He hit them squarely where it hurt most, in their prestige.

Trump restored the situation in Syria by withdrawing our troops when everybody screamed that that would ignite WWIII. It didn’t. Then he wedded foreign with domestic policy by completely defusing the marching caravans out of Central America when the Idiot Left was just sure they finally had him snookered. In a domestic policy triumph with significant foreign policy implications, he supercharged the economy when the Left was certain they had hobbled it so thoroughly that “new normal” was their byword for how things now had to be.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-debate-downgrade-for-foreign-policy-11603236203?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

The 2020 presidential election won’t be remembered for its lucid debate and elevated discourse. The candidates themselves bear part of the blame, but the Commission on Presidential Debates hasn’t helped.

We argued on Oct. 17 that the commission has outlived its usefulness (see the response nearby from commission board member Newton Minow). Debate moderators’ longwinded and leftward-slating questions make the show about the moderators themselves and leave viewers none the wiser.

The next debate, scheduled for Thursday night at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., also isn’t promising based on the subjects the commission says will be covered: fighting Covid-19, race in America, climate change, American families, national security, leadership. The first two were part of the first presidential and vice presidential debates. Climate change is loaded with progressive assumptions (how will you raise taxes, further empower the federal government, and generally do what Democrats want to do anyway?).

We’re not sure what “American families” and “leadership” might entail, but why should a commission get to decide what subjects are crucial to debate and the public to hear?It’s especially outrageous to limit national security—we assume that means foreign policy—to one sixth of one debate. President Trump has a reasonable case that his Administration has achieved a major breakthrough between Gulf Arab nations and Israel, brought about by rejecting the foreign-policy establishment’s consensus opinions. The Trump Administration defenestrated consensus opinion by moving the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and leaving the Iran nuclear deal. The dire consequences predicted by think-tank poobahs never came about.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-bidens-and-china-business-11603236651?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Most of the media is ignoring the emails found in Hunter Biden’s laptop, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t news. Joe Biden has an obligation to answer questions about his son’s influence-peddling and his own financial dealings—notably regarding China.

The New York Post last week obtainedthe contents of a laptop purported to belong to Hunter. The Post has been transparent that it obtained its copy of the hard drive from Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who says he received it from the owner of a Delaware computer-repair shop, where it was abandoned in 2019. Mr. Biden derides this as a “smear campaign,” while House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff calls it without evidence “Russian disinformation.”

Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe says the government has no intelligence to support the disinformation claim. A repair-shop order from April 2019 contains Hunter’s name and what appears to be his signature. The shop owner supplied a subpoena showing the computer and hard drive were seized by the FBI in December 2019. And the Biden campaign hasn’t said the emails are phony.

The emails regarding Hunter’s business in Ukraine have been widely reported. But as intriguing is a May 2017 email thread that includes a discussion about “remuneration packages” for six people as part of a business deal with a now-defunct Chinese energy titan, CEFC China Energy. The Chinese company was international news a few years ago, after the U.S. government charged a CEFC-funded organization with money laundering, and its CEO was detained by Chinese authorities. CNN reported in 2018 that “at its height” CEFC was “hard to distinguish” from the Chinese government.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/20/after-seeing-bidens-tax-plan-rapper-50-cent-hops-on-the-trump-train/

Rap icon 50 Cent, also known as Fif, announced he is endorsing President Trump in the upcoming 2020 election after a look at Joe Biden’s tax plan. The Grammy award-winning musician shared a photo on Instagram of the top tax rates by state under the new Biden tax plan.

The rapper, who lives in New York, where the top tax bracket will be 62 percent under a Biden presidency, wrote in his caption: “👀WHAT THE F**K! (VOTE ForTRUMP) IM OUT, 🏃‍♂️💨F**K NEW YORK The KNICKS never win anyway. 🤷🏽‍♂️I don’t care Trump doesn’t like black people 62% are you out of ya fucking mind. 😤”

The post is a big turn-around from 2016, when Fif endorsed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

Until now, Fif has expressed a distaste for Trump’s policies. This April, he said of President Trump’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, “You wanted a reality show host as president, well now you’re on ‘Survivor.’”

Fif has said many times that Trump has the “attitude of a rapper.” What is a rapper attitude? Fif explained in 2018 when he went on Conan O’Brian’s late-night talk show.