RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/09/can_the_gop_accommodate_two_rock_stars.html

Fresh from his deft Martha’s Vineyard gambit, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis flew into Kansas on Sunday to rally support for Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt, now running for governor against incumbent Democrat Laura Kelly.

Saul Alinsky, the acknowledged master of forcing poseurs to honor their own policies, could not have done better than DeSantis. No political stroke in memory has succeeded in exposing liberal hypocrisy quite so effortlessly and effectively. Had the Islanders taken the 50 illegal aliens in, they might have checked DeSantis’s move and saved a little face, but they didn’t. They lived up to their most ludicrous stereotypes, calling in the National Guard and deporting the hapless Venezuelans to some sterile Army base on the mainland. It will be years before “Martha’s Vineyard” is anything but a template for a meme or a punch line to a joke.

Both Schmidt and U.S. Senator Roger Marshall had fun with Martha’s Vineyard in the speeches they gave preceding DeSantis’s. The SRO crowd at the Olathe (O-lay-the) Civics Center ate it up. When DeSantis took center stage, the thousands in attendance were primed. They surged to their feet and roared their appreciation. If it wasn’t clear before this past week, it was clear to everyone in Olathe. Ron DeSantis has arrived.

Before Donald Trump descended the golden escalator at Trump tower in June 2015, the GOP had gone more than a quarter-century without a rock star. Now, it has two, and that is the challenge. Although he ran as the moderate candidate in the 2020 GOP primary, Marshall, a medical doctor, has been a pleasant surprise for conservatives. That said, he did not mention Trump in his speech. Schmidt has also been tagged as something of a moderate, but one would not have guessed that from his intense and impressively disciplined speech. He did not mention Trump either.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-real-midterm-election-stakes-voting-spending-inflation-environment-filibuster-11663528778?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

“If Democrats add seats in the Senate and hold the House, there won’t be much of a check on progressive ambitions. If they accomplish this with inflation at 8%, they will be even more emboldened. That is what’s really on the ballot in November.’

If the election polls are right, Democrats have a good chance of adding to their majority in the Senate and even keeping it in the House. Toward that end they are trying to convince voters that abortion and Donald Trump are the main election issues. But the real issue, by far the most important for actual policy, is whether voters will put a legislative check on the political left.

Mr. Trump isn’t even on the ballot this year, and Joe Biden will be President at least through 2024. No national abortion law is likely to pass Congress as long as the 60-vote legislative filibuster rule remains in the Senate. Abortion law could change in many states depending on election results, but probably not in most.

In other words, the Democratic election strategy is a new version of their 2020 campaign bait-and-switch. Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress won by making the election a referendum on Mr. Trump and Covid-19. But once in office they pivoted to advance a far-left labor agenda and enact the biggest expansion of government in modern history. They succeeded on many fronts, and only the opposition of Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema prevented them from killing the filibuster to do much more.

The Democratic left hasn’t given up on any of this, however, as they are admitting if you pay attention. The media are ignoring this as they echo the abortion and Trump narrative. So it’s worth laying out what Democrats really have in mind, based on what they tried to do this Congress and are promising for the next.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-9-13-the-latest-pre-election-bait-and-switch-on-poverty-statistics

It’s September, in an even year. Labor Day has passed. The big mid-terms are less than two months away. It’s time for a pre-election bait and switch on poverty statistics to deceive any low information voters who aren’t paying attention to how the poverty scam works.

The poverty scam has been a big topic over the years at this blog, although perhaps less so in the most recent couple of years. This link will take you to all my prior posts on Poverty, some 129 in total. The most important recurring theme has been that the government cynically manipulates the poverty statistics so that the official measured rate of poverty never goes meaningfully down, no matter how much taxpayer money is spent, thus manufacturing a fake basis to hit up the people for ever increasing funding at regular intervals.

But there is an exception. When a big election is coming up and the Democrats are in power, suddenly alternative statistics magically emerge showing that poverty has dropped dramatically, all of course due to compassionate programs put in place by the Democrats. And thus we have two pieces from the front page of the New York Times in the past two days. From yesterday, it’s “A Quiet, Dramatic Blow to Childhood Poverty” (different headline in online version); and today it’s “Families Lifted By Safety Net Tell Their Stories” (again, different headline online). Both have the by-line of long-time Times “poverty” reporter Jason DeParle.

Before getting to a detailed consideration of the two latest pieces from the Times, let’s have a review of some history. My first post on what I called the “poverty scam” goes all the way back to the very beginning of this blog in November 2012. That linked post pointed out that almost all government “anti-poverty” spending was in-kind, rather than in cash, and that the Census Bureau systematically and cynically excluded all in-kind spending and tax credits when calculating its official measure of poverty. Thus, no matter how much money was spent via these programs, the poverty rate would never go down, and the seemingly high poverty rate could regularly be used as a basis to advocate for yet more anti-poverty spending. From the November 2021 post:

There is nothing honest about the exclusion of in-kind benefits from the definition of poverty. The main results of the exclusion are (1) the public thinks that the “poverty” rate is measuring something about material deprivation, but it is not, and (2) additional spending, even hundreds of billions of dollars of it, cannot ever make any dent in the poverty rate, even as the government spends more per family in poverty than the median income of a family of four in the entire country.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/virginia-election-official-indicted-over-discrepancies-in-2020-race/?utm_source=

Aformer county election official in Virginia was indicted Wednesday on corruption charges after her successor found “discrepancies” related to the 2020 election.

Virginia attorney general Jason Miyares brought the charges against Michele White, who served as the Prince William County registrar of voters until she resigned last year. White is facing felony counts of corrupt conduct as an election official and making a false statement as an election official and her misconduct is reported to have occurred between August and December of 2020.

Eric Olsen, who is replacing White, said that he discovered “discrepancies” while going through election-related documents in the registrar’s office. The issue could have affected a small number of votes, but apparently not enough to change the results of any election.

“I was going through some documents in the office and I saw some matters that needed to be reported to the state,” he said.

Miyares’s office has declined to provide specifics about White’s behavior, but interestingly, she stepped down from her post in March 2021 after an emergency board meeting ahead of the Virginia primaries.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/09/13/democrats-in-key-battlegrounds-are-refusing-to-debate-republican-opponents/

Democrat candidates in pivotal races across the country are avoiding opportunities to defend their platforms before the voters.

Democrat candidates in pivotal races across the country are avoiding opportunities to defend their platforms before the voters two months before the November midterms.

On Sunday, Arizona Secretary of State and fall gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs became the latest Democrat nominee to refuse a debate with her Republican rival. In a statement, the Hobbs campaign declared former television anchor Kari Lake too extreme to share the stage with the Democrat candidate.

“Unfortunately, debating a conspiracy theorist like Kari Lake — whose entire campaign platform is to cause enormous chaos and make Arizona the subject of national ridicule — would only lead to constant interruptions, pointless distractions, and childish name-calling,” Hobbs campaign manager Nicole DeMont said. “We must respectfully decline the invitation.”

Hobbs’ campaign had demanded separate half-hour interviews instead.

Lake called on Hobbs to “grow a spine” in a video published on Twitter.

“I have asked the Clean Elections Commission to extend the deadline for you to confirm your attendance to the day of the debate,” Lake said, announcing plans to speak across from an empty chair on Oct. 12 if need be.

https://townhall.com/columnists/byronyork/2022/09/14/the-democrats-filibuster-scheme-n2613042

Vice President Kamala Harris appeared in a pre-taped interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last weekend. As is often the case with her interviews, Harris said a few awkward, ill-informed or downright odd things. For example, she claimed that the U.S.-Mexico border is “secure.” When asked if she was confident of that, Harris answered, “We have a secure border in that that is a priority for any nation, including ours and our administration.” It’s hard to figure out what that meant.

The most newsworthy thing Harris said concerned the state of the Senate filibuster. Democrats have been in control of the Senate since the 2020 election, but with a 50-50 tie, they do not control a majority of seats. Their margin of control is the vice president’s tiebreaking vote. But even to get to that point on a partisan measure, Democrats have to unite all 50 of their senators. That has been difficult when two centrist Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, sometimes declined to go along with their colleagues.

So a goal of Democrats in this November’s election — a dream scenario, actually — would be to win 52 seats. That way, even if Manchin and Sinema defected, there would still be 50 Democratic votes for a partisan measure, and Harris could cast the tiebreaking, winning vote.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/ron-desantis-shows-in-florida-how-to-play-politics-as-a-team-sport/

As I have noted on a couple of recent occasions, what Republicans lack right now is a party leader who prioritizes the best interests of the party and its voters. This affects the party’s ability to recruit the best candidates, get them nominated, and get them elected. One of the essential conservative critiques of Donald Trump as a party leader has always been that everything was about Trump: He has often preferred that the party lose rather than win without him. This impulse could be tempered so long as he was in office; as president, Trump was often willing to keep his endorsements on much the same page with the candidates Mitch McConnell supported — even when McConnell’s judgments were wrong — and to back in the general people he opposed in the primary. But the fundamental problem of Trump’s character and motivations reasserted itself, first in the 2021 Georgia runoffs and again in 2022.

For a contrast, look at what Ron DeSantis is now doing. On a national level, DeSantis conspicuously stayed out of Republican primaries, but he is lending a hand where it is most wanted and needed — even at the cost of putting him onstage with extremely sketchy Republican statewide nominees such as Doug Mastriano and Kari Lake, or backing candidates such as Lee Zeldin who have a serious uphill battle. But within Florida, DeSantis was much more engaged in the primaries; now that they’re over, as Gary Fineout of Politico reported this morning, DeSantis is putting $2.5 million of his colossal $122.5 million campaign war chest into expanding the Republican majority in the Florida Senate:

DeSantis has already had a hand in helping mold the state Senate to his liking, endorsing several Republicans even though Senate GOP leaders had initially planned to support other candidates. The apparent thinking behind DeSantis’ help is that he wants to assist Senate Republicans across the board and not any one candidate. But it’s also yet another reason that DeSantis will likely expect support for his legislative agenda if — as expected — he wins another term.

This is the way.

https://www.aol.com/computer-experts-urge-georgia-replace-113517195-154148485.html

A group of computer and election security experts is urging Georgia election officials to replace the state’s touchscreen voting machines with hand-marked paper ballots [which were foolproof and what CA had] ahead of the November midterm elections, citing what they say are “serious threats” posed by an apparent breach of voting equipment in one county.

The 13 experts on Thursday sent a letter to the members of the State Election Board and to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who’s a non-voting member of the board. It urges them to immediately stop using the state’s [notorious, programmable] Dominion Voting Systems touchscreen voting machines. It also suggests they mandate a particular type of post-election audit on the outcome of all races on the ballot.

The experts who sent the letter include academics and former state election officials and are not associated with efforts by former President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

The midterm elections are just two months away. A switch to hand-marked paper ballots could easily be made by then [but will not] because state law already provides for them to be used as an emergency backup, the letter says.

State Election Board Chair William Duffey responded in an email to The Associated Press that the “security of our election equipment is of paramount interest to the State Election Board as is the integrity of the election process in Georgia.” He noted that the alleged breach in Coffee County is being investigated by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and secretary of state’s office investigators and said the FBI [Hah!] has been asked to assist.

“The investigation is active and ongoing,” Duffey wrote. “Information developed will be considered to evaluate the impact of the Coffee County conduct.”

Raffensperger’s office has repeatedly said that Georgia’s elections remain secure because of varied security mechanisms in place. Spokesperson Mike Hassinger said in an email that the office will respond “in due time with due care” and that the response will be “addressed directly to the authors, rather than leaked to the media to obtain some sort of rhetorical advantage.”

In presidential election years and midterm years, I have regularly made predictions on the winners, and intend to do the same in the coming months. I think the current cycle is very unsettled. I was skeptical of forecasts for a red wave and giant gains for the GOP, especially in the House, early in the year, and I also don’t think some of the supposedly settled senate races favoring Democrats have really been settled. After reviewing the records of polling firms for many years, it is also apparent that some firms are wrong in one direction routinely and are unreliable. . The Washington Post/ ABC poll had Biden ahead by 17 points in Wisconsin, a week before election day in 2020, in a state he won by 0.7%. Wisconsin, with a few exceptions (when Obama was on the ballot), has always had close statewide contests. I won’t give much weight to the ABC/Post poll on this year ‘s Wisconsin’s senate and governor’s race. If you want the polar opposite-a reliable poll, consider the Des Moines Register surveys, which have tracked results in that state with remarkable accuracy.

I think the GOP has an advantage on issues of concern to most voters-starting with the open border, with illegals numbering close to 4 million crossing in 19 months since Biden decided the best policy was whatever Trump did not do. The migrant surge is from many places, not primarily from Central America or Mexico, and enormous quantities of deadly fentanyl is coming with them. Over 100,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses in a year, which in addition to covid deaths accounts for a loss of 3 years in life expectancy since 2019. Surging crime, especially violent crime and increases in suicide deaths have also contributed. to the life expectancy decline. Nationally, murders are up near 50% in 3 years, as the war on cops initiated by the left and advocacy groups like BLM after George Floyd’s death, led to large jumps in police retirements , the election of district attorneys more sympathetic to criminals than victims, and more aggressive behavior by thugs who think they will likely pay no price for crime.. Today there is much more crime, and many fewer police. It should not be surprising that many people of all races are leaving Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles.

Teachers unions pressed for distance “learning” and it looks like not that much learning took place, with major drops in test scores for public school students, especially those in areas where schools were closed, and particularly among black and Hispanic students. Keeping schools open and teaching basic subjects would do much more for minority kids than DEI initiatives.
Parents who had a chance to see what their kids were learning online, were also shocked to discover how woke politics had moved down the education tree from colleges to high schools, and primary schools. Joe Biden won Virginia by 10%, but Glenn Youngkin defeated a popular former governor by 2% a year later, largely based on a campaign focused on issues, especially education. Americans by enormous margins, believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. This usually is not a good sign for the party in power, and incumbents generally.

Then throw in the highest inflation rate in 40 years, a looming or existing recession, rising interest rates, sinking stock prices, and economic fears are growing. All of this favors Republicans.

On the other hand, Democrats will have a huge campaign financing advantage. It is the Republican party which now relies more on small gifts, and Democrats, who are funded by the plutocrats, especially in the tech industry, and the old standbys- Hollywood, trial lawyers, academia, public employee unions. Democrats have had more money to spend, and still have more money on hand to spend in every competitive senate race.

And then there is free media- which also is far more provided to the left than the right. Donald Trump received a lot of free media due to the unusual nature of his candidacy both times he ran. That has changed . Now we have nationally televised prime time coverage of the January 6 commission, with all members of the committee appointed by the Speaker, and all members in the bag with their conclusions before the first day of testimony . Then throw in Hollywood allies of the Democrats stage managing the hearings. Of course, maybe you disagree and think Jamie Raskin was openminded on the subject at the start.

The Democrats have also gotten an enthusiasm boost from the Dobbs decision on abortion rights. This will likely result in a wide gender gap this year, and increased turnout by Democrats, who lagged in this department earlier in the year.

The Democrats are also winning the distraction battle- focusing on January 6, Donald Trump, the GOP’s supposed “semi fascist ultra maga” supporters , the invented “assault on democracy”, the Mar A lago raid, and did I mention Donald Trump? If Trump remains the big news story through November, it will be a good year for Democrats.

It is somewhat amazing that a campaign speech by the president who ran on unifying the country, will be delivered and broadcast in prime time, and enable him to slander half the voting population. Then again, anyone who has seen Biden deliver “remarks” of late, has seen an angry dim-witted man, and maybe this is unappealing to voters who are not locked in their partisan corners. The dim-witted part , of course, has been evident for most of Biden’s career. It is remarkable to consider the cynicism which produced his candidacy (with most of his opponents ordered to drop out after South Carolina) so that the real powers that be could manipulate and hide Biden and avoid a Sanders nomination, which might have sunk the Democrats in 2020.

This is not a pleasant stew to consider digesting, Things are moving in different directions politically. I think it is possible that Republicans win control of both the Senate and House, or that Democrats retain control of both. It is also possible, and maybe a bit more likely, that each party win one of the houses of congress, with Dems ahead in the Senate contest, Republicans in the House. But the races are close, just as the current split between the parties in congress is near equal. And even though, Biden and the Democrats won in 2020 by 7 million votes out of 158 million cast, a shift of 25,000 votes in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin , (less than 0.3% of the votes in those states), would have enabled Trump to win a second term. If Democrats do not understand why Republicans care so much about the Hunter Biden laptop story and social media cancellation of it, this is because they believe, and it is almost certainly true, that had this story not been suppressed, the evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption might have shifted the few votes needed by Trump to win in 2020 (Biden won all of the states decided by 2% or less). . And it is of course also true that Trump likely would have lost in 2016, had Jim Comey not reopened the Hillary Clinton investigation 11 days before the election, due to the contents on Anthony Weiner’s computer which were words, and not photographs. Trump won Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, all by less than 1% in 2016.