RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-do-democrats-explain-biden-11664219485?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Last month this column noted the significant number of Democratic candidates hoping that President Joe Biden would exercise his right to remain silent in their congressional districts. Reuters and the Washington Post found various candidates who didn’t want to campaign with the president and a striking number of Democrats have avoided even commenting on the subject.

Since then, the president’s standing in public-opinion surveys has improved somewhat but he remains unpopular. Meanwhile at least one Democratic House candidate seems to have found a clever way to deflect questions about Mr. Biden.

Will Weissert reports today for the Associated Press on Ohio Democrat Greg Landsman. Mr. Weissert writes that Mr. Landsman won’t say if the president will help or hurt his campaign and reports:

[Mr. Landsman] doesn’t think the president will visit the southwest Ohio swing district before the November midterm elections and insists that, in thousands of conversations while campaigning, Biden usually “just doesn’t come up.”

In political conversations during a campaign for federal office, the president of the United States usually goes unmentioned? This sounds like a job for those vaunted fact-checkers that new and old media companies keep telling us they employ.

Mr. Weissert reports on another Ohioan who has perhaps been hearing voter complaints about Mr. Biden a little too often:

Two hundred miles north in Toledo, Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur, the longest-serving woman in House history, has been more direct, producing an ad saying she “doesn’t work for Joe Biden” mere weeks after greeting the president at the Cleveland airport in July.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/09/22/an-open-letter-to-ron-desantis/

Dear Ron (if I may),

The commentator David Brooks asserts that once the FBI raided Donald Trump’s pleasure palace in August, and rallied the faithful to his persecuted side, your fledgling campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 was basically over. Formerly America’s Most Loveable Conservative and now a Biden Democrat in sheep’s clothing, Brooks may or may not enjoy the insider access to your people that he claims, so I’m going straight to the source. Please assure me that you’re not hanging up your hat, but reserving it to toss in the ring.

Allow me to introduce myself. I am a disaffected registered Democrat. I voted for Joe Biden on the assumption that he was a boring, moderate placeholder who could steady the national ship after the nauseous high seas of the Trump presidency. Two years on, I’m still sick to my stomach. Biden is captive to a radical left that has made the party I joined at 18 unrecognisable. It is now intolerant, racially obsessed, fiscally incontinent, eager to encourage dependency on the state and politically high-handed. But I cannot stick putting 2016’s crude, anti-democratic boor back in the White House. So the prospect of facing down a none-of-the-above contest in 2024 – a Trump vs Biden redo, much less Trump vs that idiot Kamala Harris – makes me suicidal. I’ve never voted Republican in my life. But if you were to secure the nomination (admittedly dependent on whom you ran against), I could be tempted to defect for the first time in nearly 50 years.

They say you’re insufficiently ‘charismatic’. But have you seen the Democratic competition? C’mon man, what passes for eloquence from our current occupant of the White House-cum-care home is making the same lame statement, word for word, three times in a row (for instance, on Putin’s threatened use of nuclear weapons: ‘Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.’). Could this guy conceivably pass for charismatic? Is Kamala charismatic? Apoplectic loathing for the vice-president is about the only thing that unites the whole country right now. Is meek softy Mayor Pete charismatic? Or Gavin Newsom, the slick, vain huckster who has turned the Golden State into the world’s largest open-air pit latrine? Granted, the 2016 primary candidate, Amy Klobuchar, while hardly magnetic, is at least likeable. Yet she rarely appears in journalists’ speculative lists of credible alternatives to Biden. Moreover, I reject the characterisation of Trump as charismatic. People flock to him because he’s an arrogant bully, not because he’s so charming. Sure, Ron, you’re a bit stodgy, and not the most rousing speaker in the world, but in comparison with the rest of this lot, you’re Abraham Lincoln. Jesus, while we wish her the best, the UK’s new PM won the Tory leadership contest with the charisma of a cardboard box.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/triple-threat-conservative-texas-latinas-convert-border-democrats

Republicans are betting on three Trump-aligned Hispanic women to reel in and convert Hispanic voters on the Texas border who have long voted straight ticket and not elected a conservative to Congress in more than a century.

When support for former President Donald Trump jumped between 2016 and 2020 among Hispanic voters in the three congressional districts that encompass hundreds of miles of South Texas, the Republican Party set out to lock down the predominantly Hispanic regions.

The Republican Party believes its ticket to success on election night is through Monica De La Cruz, Rep. Mayra Flores, and Cassy Garcia. The three are outspoken and unashamed of being anti-abortion, pro-border security, and patriotic. They have branded themselves the “Triple Threat” — the GOP equivalent to the progressive “Squad” that was elected to the House of Representatives in 2018.

“It’s the perfect storm, but the right storm,” said Garcia, the GOP nominee for the 28th Congressional District, where incumbent Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) is seeking a 10th term. “It’s exciting to see so many Hispanics embracing the Republican Party, and this is an extremely positive development that’s good for our community and our party. Hispanics are commonsense voters. We believe in the American dream and hard work, personal responsibility, and the importance of faith.”

The women in Texas’s 15th, 28th, and 34th districts are trying to appeal to Hispanics with policies and views straight out of the Trump playbook, focusing on President Joe Biden’s inflation woes and the unaddressed influx of 3.6 million illegal immigrants since he took office.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/09/insidious_voter_fraud.html

There are two kinds of voter fraud. One is obvious voter fraud. That’s the kind we know about and hear about every day:

Voting machines programmed to ‘flip’ votes from one candidate to the other.
Pre-printed bogus ballots stuffed into voting machines to inflate the count.
Voter participation that exceeds 100% of the number of registered voters in that precinct.
Observers/poll watchers of one party being ushered out of the tabulation area so that the other side is free to manipulate the totals.
“Mules” being hired to stuff ballot pickup boxes with additional fraudulent ballots.
Mysterious boxes of additional ballots — all for one candidate — suddenly materializing in the wee hours of the morning being added to the vote count.
Legitimate absentee ballots not being counted because they’d likely be for the “wrong” candidate.
State voting laws and procedures being illegally changed to favor one party over the other.
Mail-in voting procedures — such as signature matching and verification — being intentionally disregarded as long as the vote is for the “correct” candidate.

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.