RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-depressing-debate-spectacle-11601439976?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

No one expected a Lincoln-Douglas debate, but did it have to be a World Wrestling Entertainment bout? Which may be unfair to the wrestlers, who are more presidential than either Donald Trump or Joe Biden sounded in their first debate Tuesday night.

The event was a spectacle of insults, interruptions, endless cross-talk, exaggerations and flat-out lies even by the lying standards of current U.S. politics. Our guess is that millions of Americans turned away after 30 minutes, and we would have turned away too if we didn’t do this for a living.

Mr. Trump no doubt wanted to project strength and rattle Mr. Biden, but he did so by interrupting him so much that he wouldn’t let Mr. Biden talk long enough even to make a mistake. The President bounced from subject to subject so frequently that it was hard to figure out what he hoped to say beyond that Joe Biden is controlled by the Democratic left. Even when moderator Chris Wallace asked a question that played to the strengths of his record—such as on the economy—Mr. Trump couldn’t stick to the theme without leaping to attack Mr. Biden.

The former Vice President wasn’t much better, interrupting nearly as much. And for the candidate who says he wants to bring people together, he was ready with his own name-calling. He called Mr. Trump a “racist,” a “clown,” and told him to “shut up, man.” He spun out falsehoods as fast as the President, notably in asserting that 100 million people would be vulnerable to losing their health insurance due to pre-existing conditions. The Obama Administration set up a special fund for pre-existing conditions in the transition to ObamaCare, and the takers were only in the thousands. Mr. Trump didn’t know enough to be able to rebut him.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/joe-biden-campaign-strangest-in-history/

Joe Biden may be running for president — and then again, maybe he’s not.

M any argue that 2020 will be the most important election in history, given the wide divergence between the Trump administration’s view and those of Democratic Party’s hard Left, which seems to have captured the Joe Biden candidacy.

Perhaps. But most will at least agree that the 2020 campaign is certainly the strangest, craziest and most absurd in the last 120 years.Joe Biden may at 77 be the oldest major candidate of either major party ever to have run for president. But in this eerie 2020 landscape of pandemic, lockdown, recession, and riot, far stranger than Biden’s frailty is his campaign routine — or lack of same.

Until mid August, Biden more or less stayed ensconced in his basement, campaigning by electronic projection. Not since James Garfield and William McKinley ran their 19th-century presidential campaigns from their front porches has an American presidential candidate simply abdicated from the campaign trail and remained inactive and almost mute.

Biden certainly does not weigh in on many issues. We have no idea whether as president he would join the Jacobin pack to pack the Supreme Court, push to end the Electoral College, enact the full Green New Deal, or seek statehood for Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.

Does he unequivocally condemn the national rioting and looting? Would he reopen the border, stop deportations of illegal aliens, take down the new wall? Would Biden end fracking as part of his stated vow to phase out fossil fuels, as he has inferred in the past? Is China really a mere rival rather than an enemy? And if so, would he revoke Trump’s China-rollback policy? He has bragged of his role in the Iran Deal — would he bring that back? Biden’s silence only highlights the mystery, and magnifies the importance, of the first Biden–Trump debate — given that millions of voters are curious to meet for the first time the nominee of the Democratic Party and thereby will learn at last why, these past months, he either should have, or should not have, gone into hibernation.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2020/09/29/tulsi-gabbard-raises-

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) has raised an alarm over ballot harvesting and voter fraud, filing a bill to prevent the practice. Gabbard, a former presidential candidate, has shown an extraordinary willingness to buck the propagandistic groupthink in her party, and Democrats have not always appreciated it. Yet she is right to warn about ballot harvesting and voter fraud, and she even noted that the recent Project Veritas sting videos illustrate her point.

“We’re getting closer and closer to Election Day now, and it is critical to remember that the strength of our democracy lies in the integrity of our elections, that every one of us has to have faith that our vote will count,” Gabbard said in a video on Sunday.

“But right now, there are still many states in our country that allow for something called ballot harvesting,” she warned. “This is a system that allows for third parties to collect and deliver ballots for other people, potentially large numbers of people.”

“Unfortunately, ballot harvesting has allowed for fraud and abuse to occur by those who could tamper with or discard ballots to try to sway an election,” the Democratic congresswoman warned.

https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-weak-leading-the-woke/

Let’s start with an easy one.

How old is Joe Biden?

As this issue goes to press, 77. America’s median age is 38, which means that more than half the country is less than half Biden’s age. If inaugurated on January 20, 2021, exactly two months after he turns 78, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., will be older on his first day in office than Ronald Reagan was on his last day as president. Reagan was the oldest president prior to Donald Trump, who is three and a half years younger than Biden and became president almost four years ago. As a result, Trump will reach the age of 78 years and seven months in January 2025, at the conclusion of what would be his second term. Biden will be that old in June 2021.

Last year, when Biden was a candidate for the Democratic nomination, he (or at least his advisors) suggested he would serve only one term if elected. Having become the nominee, he said more recently that he would “absolutely” consider seeking a second term in 2024. If that quest overcomes all obstacles, political and medical, Biden would leave office in January 2029 at 86, an age surpassed by only seven ex-presidents.

To think of Biden’s age another way, he is older than his party’s nominee in each of the seven most recent presidential elections: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Kerry, Al Gore, and Bill Clinton. One must go back to 86-year-old Michael Dukakis, who lost the 1988 election to George H.W. Bush, to find a Democratic presidential nominee born before Biden was.

How long has Joe Biden been in government?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/28/opinion/trump-voters.html

Chris is a registered Democrat in her 50s who lives in Manhattan. She’s well-educated, well-traveled and well-informed. She has voted for candidates of both parties over the years and was enthusiastic for Bernie Sanders in 2016.

She’s asked me not to publish her last name. It would not go down well for her at the store where she works as a manager if her colleagues knew that she plans to vote for Donald Trump.

Chris is also gay. “Being a lesbian who’s voting for Trump is like coming out of the closet again,” she tells me.

Readers of this newspaper who conjure an image of a Trump voter probably think of people like Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple who pointed guns at protesters outside their St. Louis home in late June. But if Trump defies current polling and wins again, it’ll be thanks to a discreet base of support from voters like Chris, who fit into none of the cultural or demographic stereotypes of the Trump base.

It’s worth understanding where she’s coming from.

Start with the economy. “I haven’t seen double digit [gains] in my 401(k) since the internet boom of the late ’90s,” she says. “It went up 19.6 percent” in the year before the pandemic. “Look at the stock market,” she says. (Up about 35 percent from four years ago.) “Look at gas prices.” (About the same as what they were when Trump took office, but well below the $3.31 per gallon at the midpoint of the Obama administration.)

https://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2020/09/28/meet-a-canadian-citizen-who-voted-in-american-elections-n975812

I have waited more than two years to write this piece. During those 26 months, I have been waiting for one single news outlet to cover the case of Christine Chernosky, a Canadian citizen who voted in an American presidential election.

Remember the name: Christine Chernosky.

Despite all of the news outlets that cover elections, including well-funded philanthropic projects such as Pro Publica, the American Prospect, and even the fey leftist law professor who fancies himself the oracle of all the latest election news, Rick Hasen – not one single news outlet mentioned Christine Chernosky, the alien who voted in the presidential election.

We will get to why in a moment, but first some context.

I and others who study elections closely have been saying for at least five years that the greatest foreign influence on American elections is foreigners voting in them.

The problem has been documented in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and especially in sanctuary cities. It isn’t hard to find problems either. So many aliens are getting on the rolls that they write letters asking to be taken off when they realize it fouls up their naturalization applications to be breaking federal law by registering to vote.

Pennsylvania has allowed thousands, if not more, aliens onto their voter rolls. To add insult to injury, they are hiding the extent of the problem. I have been locked in federal litigation with Pennsylvania for years trying merely to obtain the government records associated with the mop-up Democrats in Pennsylvania’s executive branch attempted.

They have been playing hide-the-facts the whole time.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/whats-at-stake-in-2020/

In short, the future of American government

The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg has clarified what is at stake in the 2020 election. It is not, as some believe, democracy itself. Nor is it, as others assume, our continued existence as a nation. Democracy will survive Donald Trump, and the United States of America will outlast Joe Biden. The question that 2020 will help to answer is what sort of democracy, and what sort of nation, America will be as it prepares to enter the second quarter of the 21st century.

The reaction to Ginsburg’s death, and to Republican plans to fill her seat on the Supreme Court, underscores the choice before the electorate: Does it prefer to live in a democratic republic ordered toward the principles of the Founders and the constitutional structure they designed to protect individual liberty? Or would it rather dwell in a plebiscitary democracy where the original meaning of the Constitution, when it is not explicitly repudiated, is politely overlooked in order to satisfy ever more radical egalitarian demands?

Needless to say, the answer is up in the air, and has been for some time. But we may be nearing a settlement, one way or another. The civil unrest of the past several months has made unignorable the existence of a large body of opinion that holds something is terribly wrong with America as founded, something that cannot be redeemed, and that American history and American institutions must be drastically revised to atone for the injustices committed against racial minorities. President Trump, in his inimitable way, has made the opposite argument, and called for a renewed appreciation of the American story and a resurgence of national pride.

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2020/09/25/nancy-pelosi-still-doesnt-think-biden-should-debate-trump/24630616/

The first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden is set for Tuesday, but Rep. Nancy Pelosi still wishes it wasn’t happening.

The House Speaker said last month that she didn’t think there should be presidential debates this year since the president will “probably act in a way that is beneath the dignity of the presidency.”

She doubled down Friday in an interview with CBS This Morning but emphasized that it’s not because she feared Biden might not do well.

It’s “not that I don’t think [Biden] will be excellent, but I just think the president has no fidelity to fact or truth,” Pelosi said. “And, actually, in his comments the last few days, no fidelity to the Constitution of the United States.”

Pelosi added that comments by Trump “and his henchmen” suggest he won’t accept the election results if he loses, which poses “a danger to our democracy.”

“Why bother?” Pelosi asked. “He doesn’t tell the truth. He isn’t committed to our Constitution.”

Interviewer Gayle King suggested that Pelosi’s use of the word “henchmen” is as insulting as Trump calling her “crazy.”

Pelosi’s response? Bring it on!

“Every knock from him is a boost for me,” she said. “If he wants to help me raise money, he can keep knocking me.”

You can watch the complete interview below. Pelosi’s comments about the debate start around the six-minute mark.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/the-arson-party/

EXCERPT DECENT AFTER WILLIAMSON’S HABITUAL TRUMP BASHING…RSK

“What evidence do we have that the Democrats will abide peaceably if they lose? Portland? Seattle? St. Louis? Washington? “Never concede”? Why are we talking about peace and order in November rather than peace and order right here and right now?”

A bout that peaceful transfer of power . . .

Ah, but Republicans, of all people, must affirm their peaceable intent. Anybody remember a bunch of guys in short-sleeved white button-down shirts and ties from Jos A. Banks raising hell in Provo when Mitt Romney lost? Of course you don’t — it didn’t happen. The only time National Review subscribers have ever been close to rioting was when the ship’s bar temporarily ran out of Glenmorangie on one particularly thirsty post-election cruise.

Republicans are always right on the edge of political violence, or so we are told — by people who refuse to acknowledge that Democrats have gone over that edge. Democrats can shoot, loot, and burn all day, and it’s a “mostly peaceful protest.” During the 2000 Florida recount, some Republicans did the very un-Republican thing of staging a protest — not a “mostly peaceful” protest but an actual, honest-to-goodness peaceful one. What did the Democrats call it? “The Brooks Brothers riot.”