RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pre-existing-condition-fiction-11601507970?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Joe Biden claimed at Tuesday’s debate that “100 million people who have pre-existing conditions” will lose insurance if the Trump Administration wins an Affordable Care Act case at the Supreme Court. Democrats have terrified voters with this fiction for years, and Republican confusion has helped keep the fear alive. So let’s explain the reality one more time.

Stipulate first that the GOP attorneys general asking the court to strike down the Affordable Care Act are committing political malpractice. As we wrote Monday, Chief Justice John Roberts’s Court is not about to strike down the entire law, and Democrats know it. But the Trump Administration’s support of the lawsuit has handed Democrats a potent line of attack.

Yet on the merits, the left overstates the problem of pre-existing conditions to justify political control of health care. Mr. Biden’s 100 million figure may come from an estimate of how many Americans have a condition but aren’t enrolled in Medicare or Medicaid. Those two programs cover about one-third of the U.S. population, including seniors and the poor who have pre-existing conditions. Another roughly 160 million Americans have employer-sponsored insurance, where rules on pre-existing conditions date to 1990s privacy law.

The question is not how many Americans have a health condition, but how many Americans buying insurance in the individual insurance market have a condition that makes them difficult to insure at prices they can pay. Keep in mind that the Affordable Care Act set up a subsidized transitional plan for anyone with pre-existing conditions denied insurance in the individual market. Peak enrollment: about 115,000 in 2013.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/asking-the-wrong-questions-about-extremist-violence/

The misleading claim that Trump refused to condemn white supremacists helps obscure the truth about divisive racial issues rather than clarify them.

He did it again. When presented at the first presidential debate of 2020 with another opportunity to make a straightforward condemnation of white supremacists, he refused. Or at least that’s what many headlines screamed the next morning after the train wreck of a debate that was held in Cleveland. The responses from liberal Jewish groups and most of the chattering classes were angry. According to them, Trump had dog-whistled to extremists and made it clear that he was on the side of the neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and the Proud Boys, an offshoot of the alt-right that was recently seen marching in Portland, Ore.

As with so much of what this president has said, including his much-criticized comments about the August 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va., his comments were imprecise, and not uttered in the matter that politicians traditionally use and which they should employ.

It’s also true that like so much of the coverage of Trump’s statements, the summaries of the exchange are inaccurate and misleading.

Trump didn’t refuse to condemn white supremacists. But he didn’t state that position, which has been repeated many times during his presidency and put into policy, in the sort of normative declarative statement that, in theory, would have ended the discussion. That’s why—no matter how biased so much of the coverage of this event has been—Trump bears the responsibility for what followed.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/09/30/here-are-the-11-dumbest-most-slanted-questions-asked-by-chris-wallace/

It was not just Wallace’s interruptions or poor management that cemented his role as worst debate moderator of all time, but the off-topic and ridiculous framing of his questions.

Chris Wallace has received negative marks for his constant interruptions of President Donald Trump, and for his poor time management, but the worst thing about his moderation of the first presidential debate on Wednesday were the questions he asked.

Here are the 11 dumbest, most slanted questions asked by Wallace.

1. ‘What is radical about racial sensitivity training?’

“This month, your administration directed federal agencies to end racial sensitivity training that addresses white privilege or critical race theory. Why did you decide to do that, to end racial sensitivity training? And do you believe that there is systemic racism in this country, sir?” Wallace asked.

Wallace’s framing of the issue here was factually false and designed to make Trump look racist. Not only did he misconstrue the objectively racist idea of critical race theory as “racial sensitivity training,” but he then followed up Trump’s answer on the issue with another trick question, “What is radical about racial sensitivity training?”

It is not true that Trump banned diversity training from federal agencies, only trainings that teach racist, anti-American ideas such as “critical race theory” or “white privilege.”

https://spectator.us/debate-mud-wrestling-match-biden-won/

EXCERPT:

Some of Biden’s comments could come back to bite him. He strenuously denied his son Hunter had received millions from the former mayor of Moscow. Disproved already, he said. He denied any corruption in Hunter’s dealings in Ukraine and China. Putrid as those financial deals were, Trump missed an opportunity by turning them into personal attacks. The telling point is that these deals epitomize the Swamp, where insiders like Biden enrich themselves and their family thanks to their positions and connections. Those points might come up in the campaign’s final month, but they were lost in the mudslinging. So was Biden’s constant flip-flopping on fracking and his preposterous promise that transforming America into a green paradise will pay for itself and create thousands of jobs. These issues should be huge liabilities for Biden, and Trump could have used the debate to nail his opponent on them. He didn’t.

Biden’s biggest contradiction went unnoticed. He lambasted Trump both for not locking down the country early enough or long enough and for the “depression” caused by those very lockdowns. It is perfect legitimate to criticize the president’s response to COVID. But it is sheer demagoguery to say earlier, longer, tougher lockdowns were essential and then pretend the president is Herbert Hoover for ordering the lockdowns he did.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/project-veritas-video-ilhan-omar-implicated-cash-frontpage-editors/

Project Veritas honcho James O’Keefe presents a new bombshell undercover video, this time exposing a ballot harvesting scheme that implicates Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar in one of the biggest voter fraud schemes in American history — caught on tape. Don’t miss the video below:

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/09/30/the-pandemic-on-bidens-watch-killed-13-times-as-many-children-as-covid/

Imagine the reaction of the public to a new virus outbreak that targeted children, sending 10 times as many to hospitals, and killing 13 times as many as COVID-19.

Would you call the government’s handling of this pandemic a success?

That is what happened in 2009 when the H1N1 – aka, the swine flu – pandemic swept across the land. While the total number of deaths from the swine flu was much lower than COVID-19, its impact on children and younger adults was far more severe.

Consider these numbers:

According to the Centers for Disease Control’s latest numbers, out of the more than 200,000 people who died with COVID-19, only 92 were under age 18.

But 1,282 children died from the H1N1 pandemic of 2009-2010, when Barack Obama was in the White House and Joe Biden was vice president.

The number of children hospitalized from COVID has been around 8,000. The number hospitalized because of H1N1 – 86,813.

The swine flu was particularly worrisome because, unlike COVID and the seasonal flu – this one targeted the young more than the elderly.

In fact, fully 10% of the deaths from H1N1 were age 17 or younger, while just 13% were over age 65.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/30/trump-wins-round-one-barely/

There was no clear winner in Tuesday’s presidential debate and the country was the loser. 

President Trump could have won decisively if he had just followed Napoleon’s famous advice not to “interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” The moderator, Fox News Channel’s Chris Wallace, did an excellent professional job largely without bias, and undoubtedly more fairly than those who will conduct the next two debates, but he didn’t come down hard enough on the interruptions. If Trump had just allowed Wallace to follow up on his questions of Biden, the former vice president would have stumbled badly. Trump’s irritating interruptions created an incoherent cacophony that enabled Biden to escape severe embarrassment. 

On balance, Trump almost certainly won, but a very few viewers would have had the perseverance to listen carefully enough to note that Trump defended his own record quite capably, and Biden was very shaky and imprecise both in criticism of his opponent and in explaining why he should be president. As was expected, the fact that he got through 90 minutes in the ring with Trump without becoming incomprehensibly muddled, empowered his supporters to claim that in limping out intact, he had won.

For those who followed it carefully or replay it, it will be clear not only that Trump is a much more forceful and articulate man than Joe Biden, but that he also clearly won the argument, insofar as it could be perceived within the tumult of interruptions.

The Democrats can claim the partial victory of their candidate having survived to fight another day, but the Democratic campaign—which has consisted exclusively of nonstop defamation of the president with a new false allegation every week—was discredited by Biden’s failure to make any of his accusations stick, or even sound like he believed them himself.