RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/trump-s-winning-voter-registration-battle-against-biden-key-states-n1241674

In the last few weeks, Joe Biden has led President Donald Trump by a fairly consistent 8-point average in national polls and has maintained leads in more than enough battleground states to win the Electoral College, including Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — all states Trump won in 2016.

But there are signs Trump’s ground operation is paying off when it comes to registering new voters in key states, an advantage that could become important if the race tightens before Nov. 3.

The Trump campaign has boasted that it knocks on more than a million doors a week, a claim that’s impossible to independently verify. In sharp contrast, the Biden campaign had ditched a ground game for virtual outreach, citing Covid-19 concerns — even though academic research has routinely concluded door-to-door canvassing is the “most consistently effective and efficient method of voter mobilization.” Only just now has the Biden campaign decided to restart its in-person voter contacts in some battleground states.

As deadlines approach, new data from the past few months shows Republicans have swamped Democrats in adding new voters to the rolls, a dramatic GOP improvement over 2016, even if new registrations have lagged 2016 rates across the board. It’s a sign that in a pandemic, Democrats are struggling to seize traditional opportunities to pad their margins, such as the return of students to college campuses.

Of the six states Trump won by less than 5 points in 2016, four — Arizona, Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania — permit voters to register by party. In all four states, voter registration trends are more robust for the GOP than four years ago.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Issues remain: COVID-19, the economy; riots in blue-run cities versus law and order, the Supreme Court, climate and the Green New Deal, illegal immigration, China, Russia and the Middle East. While voters know where Mr. Trump stands on these issues and what he has done, they received little insight as to what Mr. Biden would do. Mr. Trump was accused for not condemning far-right, white supremacists. That is not precisely true if one reads the transcript. Interestingly, Chris Wallace did not ask Mr. Biden to condemn left-wing extremists like Antifa, which is an “idea, not an organization,” according to Mr. Biden.

When I awoke on Wednesday morning, I received the following from a friend, a former British jurist now retired and living in Switzerland: “There can be no greater symbol of American decline than the sight of those two elderly gentlemen slugging it out without dignity or sell-restraint.”

It is hard to disagree with my friend’s assessment, and it is remarkable how far removed from Margaret Thatcher we have come. While it is likely that Mr. Trump did not pick up undecided voters, I suspect more damage was done to Mr. Biden. Mr. Trump played the role he has played for the past four and a half years – a crude, unabashed disruptor of political norms. On the other hand, Joe Biden, who has been largely invisible for the last few months, confirmed concerns of those who worry about his mental acuity. While most of his comments and answers were lucid, he stumbled over words and phrases, and his eyes, especially as time went on, took on a glazed, empty look. Mr. Trump is rude, while Mr. Biden is not well. The first we have known for years; the second we are just realizing.

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2020/10/01/crazy-moderator-of-second-presidential-debate-served-as-an-intern-for-joe-biden-n992980

C-SPAN’s Steve Scully, who will moderate the second presidential debate, got his start as a staff assistant in Sen. Ted Kennedy’s communication office, and prior to that worked as in intern in the office of then-senator Joe Biden.

The second presidential debate is scheduled for October 15, just two weeks from now.

Scully’s complete work and education records — both impressive — can be found here on his page at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs.

You might know Scully as the guy who handles C-SPAN’s open phone lines, a job he handles affably and with grace.

Scully is generally well-regarded in Washington and in the media, but out here where I am in flyover country, he may at least be seen as too chummy with Democrats to serve as an honest broker for the second presidential debate.

Tweets like this one from 2016, and currently making the retweet rounds, don’t help.

“Love,” really?

Whatever else you might say — and I nearly bit right through my tongue — that is not a good look for the supposedly non-partisan moderator of a presidential debate.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/on-court-packing-biden-is-afraid-of-losing-the-radical-left/

He knows Democrats are unlikely to have the votes to abolish the Senate filibuster and pack the Court. He’s playing coy on the issue to preserve his base.

 I t is always better to be ahead than behind, so former vice president Joe Biden is no doubt relishing the solid lead he maintains in national polls. But we don’t have a national election; we have 50 state elections, and the race is still tight in the battleground states, where every vote continues to count.

Consequently, Biden cannot afford to ignore the radical Left, which doesn’t have much enthusiasm for him, but is enthusiastic about defeating President Trump.

That is the main reason why Biden is dodging questions about whether he favors court-packing, which would require eradicating the Senate filibuster, which, in turn, would open the floodgates for the enactment of other radical elements of the Left’s agenda: government-monopolized health care, statehood for Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, the Green New Deal, Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Accountable Capitalism Act, etc.

When a politician is dodging a question, he is trying to fool somebody. On court-packing, it comes down to whether Biden is trying to string along his core left-wing supporters or dupe moderate voters (in particular, independents, centrist Democrats, and Republicans who have grown weary of the, shall we say, challenging Trump persona).

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/10/01/two-october-surprises-the-democrats-cant-do-anything-about/

Joe Biden wants the public to think the country is falling apart under President Donald Trump. COVID-19 is running rampant. The economy is in shambles. It’s all Trump’s fault.

“They’ve done nothing to help small businesses. Nothing. They’re closing,” Joe Biden said in the presidential debate on Tuesday. “He ought to get on the job and take care of the needs of the American people,” he said, referring to Trump.

But Biden will have to confront two major economic reports that both will provide very good news about the economic recovery from the pandemic shutdowns, which has been growing faster than economists had projected.

Both will come as surprises to a public that has been fed a steady diet of Democratic doom-and-gloom talking points.

On Friday, the Labor Department will release its September jobs report. The consensus among economists is that the economy created 850,000 jobs and that unemployment will drop to 8.2% from August’s 8.4%.

If that forecast holds up, it will mean the economy has created 11.5 million jobs in just five months – regaining more than half of the jobs lost during the shutdown.

Given that the jobs numbers have consistently come in better than economist projects, it won’t be surprising if unemployment falls below 8.2%.

Let’s compare. During the last recession, the economy shed had 8.7 million jobs when the job market bottomed out in February 2010 (even though the recession ended in June 2009).

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-bidens-obamacare-tax-avoidance-11601488381?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Joe Biden slammed President Trump at Tuesday’s debate for both his tax policies and his personal tax management: “The tax code that put him in a position that he pays less tax than on the money a schoolteacher makes,” Mr. Biden said, “is because of him.” The reference was to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which Mr. Trump signed in 2017.

The challenger also vigorously defended the Affordable Care Act, promising to “expand ObamaCare” and faulting Mr. Trump for supporting a legal challenge to it. “ObamaCare is personal to me,” Mr. Biden declares in a campaign ad.

Yet Mr. Biden has taken advantage of the tax code to avoid paying the taxes that fund ObamaCare. I reported in August that in 2017 and 2018 Mr. Biden and his wife, Jill, characterized large amounts of book and speaking income as corporate profits rather than taxable wages, allowing them to circumvent Medicare and ObamaCare payroll taxes, of 2.9% and 0.9% respectively, on that income. The Bidens released their 2019 tax return before the debate, and again they use this dodge.

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.”