NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Bombshell Allegation: Hillary Orchestrated Collusion Hoax to Distract from Her Emails, According to Russian Intel By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on September 30th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/allegation-hillary-clinton-orchestrated-collusion-hoax-to-distract-from-her-emails-according-to-russian-intel/

Hillary Clinton personally signed off on the Russiagate farce to distract attention from her email scandal, according to a Russian intelligence analysis that was obtained by U.S. intelligence agencies in July 2016.

That is the bombshell allegation that National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe has just dropped on the Senate Judiciary Committee, with the first presidential debate just a few hours away and with former FBI director James Comey scheduled to testify before that Committee tomorrow morning.

Ratcliffe’s letter to Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) asserts that in late July 2016, American intelligence agencies “obtained insight” into an analysis by Russian spies, which alleged that Democratic “U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a plan to stir up a scandal” against her Republican opponent, Donald Trump. The plan involved “tying [Trump] to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee.”

Let’s put this information in context.

Mrs. Clinton was cleared of criminal charges in a July 5, 2016, press conference by then-director Comey. This prompted outrage over whether the Obama administration had distorted the criminal law applicable to mishandling classified information in order to give Clinton a pass. The email scandal would dog Clinton throughout the campaign.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The road to hell? Really? Liberty is important, but surely so is protecting life and health Melanie Phillips

Posted By on September 29th, 2020

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/the-road-to-hell-really?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIj

The number of MPs who are in potential revolt over the government’s Covid restrictions is apparently rising.

They protest that they aren’t being consulted and parliament is being sidelined over measures which threaten people’s liberties. 

The main focus of their ire is that these restrictions are being introduced through regulations made by ministers. This complaint is echoed by three briefings published by the Constitution Unit, the Bingham Centre and the Hansard Society.

Ministers are given powers under acts of parliament to make such regulations. They come into force immediately, with parliament able to approve them for up to 28 days.

Their instant application, which so concerns MPs, is precisely why ministers say they are needed: to combat the threat from the virus which develops and changes all the time and so needs the fastest possible interventions.

But the result has been a succession of stop/go/stop measures which are undoubtedly contradictory and confusing and have squandered public trust.

The MPs’ concern about their inability adequately to advise, warn or hold the government to account over mistakes it is making over the virus is understandable. Even Boris Johnson didn’t seem to know the answer, when he was asked today how his own rules on household mixing are supposed to apply in the north-east.  

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Strangest Campaign in History? By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on September 29th, 2020

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.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Media Gunning For Scott Atlas Because He Keeps Exposing Coronavirus Lies By Joy Pullmann

Posted By on September 29th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/09/29/media-gunning-for-scott-atlas-because-he-keeps-exposing-coronavirus-lies/

Everything he says is false,’ NBC News quoted CDC Director Robert Redfield as saying of Atlas. That’s just not true, top epidemiologists told The Federalist.

“Dr. Scott Atlas is arming Trump with misleading data” about COVID-19, Centers for Disease Control Director Dr. Robert Redfield told a colleague Friday, according to a Monday report by NBC News political reporter Monica Alba.

Within hours, numerous outlets ideologically allied with NBC amplified the coverage. Here are some screenshots of the Google News results for the story just a short while later, but is Redfield’s assertion correct? The Federalist spoke to numerous epidemiologists to find out.“Everything he says is false,” NBC News quoted Redfield as saying of Atlas’s coronavirus recommendations. That’s just not true, top epidemiologists told The Federalist.

“Dr. Redfield is a prominent and respected scientist, so I respect his opinion, but I don’t know what he’s thinking,” said Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya, an epidemiologist and medical professor at Stanford University, in response to the NBC story. Bhattacharya has advised public officials including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on COVID-19 response. “I think the evidence is more strongly with Dr. Atlas,” he continued.

In an interview, Atlas said the constant media characterization of President Trump’s coronavirus response as detached from scientific expertise is “completely false.” He said the president’s policies are informed by infectious disease experts from the world’s top medical and research institutions, including Bhattacharya and John Ioannidis of Stanford University Medical Center, Martin Kulldorff and Katherine Yih of Harvard Medical School, and Sunetra Gupta and Carl Heneghan of Oxford University.

“The extreme comments that have been reported are an attempt to delegitimize me and undermine the president of the United States,” Atlas said, not a dispassionate, science-based position. “There can be different opinions about scientific evidence, but to say I’m citing false information is a lie,” he said later.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

College No Place for Free Speech Fans, Rankings Show By J. Peder Zane

Posted By on September 29th, 2020

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/09/29/college_no_place_for_free_speech_fans_rankings_show_.html

When it comes to protecting free speech, America’s colleges and universities are earning a failing grade. That’s the upshot of a comprehensive new study that asked almost 20,000 students at 55 schools how tolerant and open to controversial ideas their campuses are.

The University of Chicago received the highest score – just 64.2 points out of a total of 100; DePauw University was at the bottom, with 44.2 points. The University of Arkansas, the University of Minnesota, UC-Berkeley and Princeton were bunched in the middle with about 53 points.

Even accounting for grade inflation, that still smells like an F.

The College Free Speech Rankings generated by the survey – which was commissioned by RealClearEducation (RCE) in partnership with The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) – are significant because they offer the first-ever national ranking of free speech based on student perceptions.

RCE and FIRE, which ranked the schools, based  80% percent of each school’s  score on a series of questions that measured two key aspects of free speech: tolerance for allowing controversial speakers on campus and students’ responses when asked how free they feel to hold open conversations about controversial topics such as abortion, transgender rights, and racial justice. The remaining 20% of the score was based on the freedom students feel to express their opinions, their perception of the administration’s support for free speech and FIRE’s rating of each school’s official policies toward free speech.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Dem Tulsi Gabbard Raises the Alarm: ‘Ballot Harvesting Has Allowed for Fraud and Abuse’ BY TYLER O’NEIL

Posted By on September 29th, 2020

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.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Ruthie Blum : Amy Coney Barrett, Jewish liberals and the US Constitution

Posted By on September 29th, 2020

https://www.jns.org/opinion/amy-coney-barrett-jewish-liberals-and-the-us-constituti

For Jews who worship at the altar of abortion and gun control, RBG was practically a religious figure, and filling her seat with a Catholic who rejects judicial activism is blasphemous.

The apoplexy on the part of Democrats in general and Jewish liberals in particular to the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court was to be expected. Anything that President Donald Trump does drives them crazy.

But the fact that he decided to fill the seat vacated by the Sept. 18 death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg before the fast-approaching election has been more than they can tolerate. How dare the president exercise his right to do so, they have been moaning, when his days in office are numbered?

Or so they have been praying. Literally.

Indeed, when news of Ginsburg’s death on the eve of Rosh Hashanah reached many Reform and Conservative congregants (the Orthodox don’t tune into electronic devices on Friday night, and certainly not during the Jewish New Year), their rabbis devoted the following morning’s services to her legacy.

RBG, as she came to be called, had been their heroine. She was not only the first Jewish woman to sit on the Supreme Court and the second woman after Sandra Day O’Connor. She was a warrior for all left-wing causes, whose opinions on and off the bench gained her the adoration of liberals far and wide, including in Israel, which has one of the Western world’s most politically interventionist Supreme Court.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Democrats’ Frivolous Three-Pronged Attack on Judge Barrett By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on September 29th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/the-democrats-frivolous-three-pronged-att

Progressives’ main arguments against President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee don’t withstand scrutiny.Doing some commentary over the weekend about President Trump’s nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, I was struck by not just the emptiness but the outright deceptiveness of the three main Democratic lines of attack against her. These are early days, so perhaps Barrett’s opposition will find something of substance that gains some traction. For now, the main salvos against her are frivolous:

(1) President Trump has a litmus test for nominees, who must take predetermined positions that support his policy agenda; (2) Relatedly, Judge Barrett will “destroy” the Affordable Care Act, consideration of which comes up on the Supreme Court’s oral-argument docket the week after Election Day; and (3) Barrett, a devout Catholic, is on a crusade to overturn Roe v. Wade (1973).

I will take these in order.. Litmus Test

There is no evidence that President Trump has imposed a litmus test on judges whom he would nominate to the Supreme Court. That Democrats say there is a litmus test, tirelessly, on every media platform available to them, is not proof of anything other than a campaign to drive a fact-free political narrative into the public’s consciousness. Specifically, there is no evidence that Judge Barrett, in order to be nominated, had to agree to take the Trump administration’s position of staunch opposition to Obamacare and abortion. As I noted on the Corner earlier today, it is not unusual for Trump-appointed judges to rule against the administration.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Weak Leading the Woke What We Ask About When We Ask About Joe by William Voegeli

Posted By on September 29th, 2020

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?

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Meet a Secret Trump Voter ‘Being a lesbian who’s voting for Trump is like coming out of the closet again.’ By Bret Stephens

Posted By on September 29th, 2020

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.)