RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/coping-with-the-covid-winter-11603840305?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Perhaps you’ve heard winter is coming. Or as Joe Biden warned last week about a third virus wave, “We’re about to go into a dark winter, a dark winter.” He’s playing up the worst case as the election nears, so some context is in order.

Virus cases are increasing, but this is inevitable as cooler weather arrives and Americans go indoors. Cases have also been climbing across Europe, in some countries more than in the U.S. But the good news is that America is better prepared to handle another virus surge, and progress toward a vaccine continues.***

The seven-day U.S. rolling case average has nearly doubled from the recent low in mid-September. Cases are more geographically dispersed than in the spring and summer, rising even in states with strict restrictions and mask mandates. This includes New York and its neighbors whose governors were hailed for supposedly controlling the virus. The increase has been most acute in upper Midwest states that weren’t hit as hard earlier. Some of the increase is due to more testing, which is detecting more asymptomatic cases.

Most concerning are hospitalizations, which are up by about 40% since mid-September though are still 30% or so below spring and summer peaks. Most hospitals have ample capacity to treat virus patients while continuing elective procedures, which were stopped during the spring. Covid patients occupy 13% of hospital beds in Wisconsin, 15% in South Dakota and 15% in North Dakota. According to North Dakota’s virus data dashboard, 45% of non-ICU hospital patients classified “with Covid” are admitted for other reasons and test positive for the virus.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/supreme-court-ballot-wisdom-11603840218?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The campaign to stigmatize the Supreme Court is already under way, even before new Justice Amy Coney Barrett hears a case. Witness the media hyperventilating after the Justices ruled 5-3 late Monday that Wisconsin’s Nov. 3 ballot deadline must remain in place.

The order sustained an appellate-court ruling that had halted a federal judge’s intrusion saying ballots mailed on time could be counted even if they arrived six days late. The judge claimed Covid-19 as the excuse, but Badger State law says absentee ballots must arrive by Election Day.

Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh wrote opinions that should help educate lower-court judges who think they can rewrite state election law on election eve. Justice Kavanaugh cited the Court’s precedents that “recognize a basic tenet of election law: When an election is close at hand, the rules of the road should be clear and settled.”

Justice Gorsuch added that Wisconsin has gone to extraordinary lengths to take account of Covid, including sending all registered voters an absentee-ballot application and return envelope in the summer that they have been able to return since September

If Wisconsin’s Nov. 3 deadline can be thrown out due to Covid and despite the many avenues for casting a vote, Justice Gorsuch wrote, then “what about the identical deadlines in 30 other States?” Why bump the deadline six days and not 10 days? Other judges, he continued, might well “unfurl the precinct maps and decide whether States should add polling places, revise their hours, rearrange the voting booths,” and so forth.

https://acdemocracy.org/america-on-the-precipice-november-7-2020/

Is the United States prepared for the aftermath of the upcoming Presidential election? Imagine this scenario, bearing in mind that all of its elements are eminently plausible.

On the morning of November 5, 2020, the election results are inconclusive, and neither candidate has conceded. Remarkably, most public polling over the past six months failed to predict this outcome. Either a large number of voters kept their preference to themselves or lied to the pollsters.

Substantiated reports of errors and blunders in tallying ballots and evidence of widespread mail-in voters’ fraud, lead both parties to challenge the results before the Supreme Court, which invalidates the election. A new election day has yet to be announced.

Conflicting disinformation campaigns flood traditional and social media, most of which are controlled by the Left. They are spreading falsehoods and fake news, including disinformation spawned by U.S. enemies, to further confuse and incite large segments of the population, especially the young. Real and fake images of clashes between law enforcement and rioters increase racial tension, goading the public into arming themselves against the police and causing more violent outbursts. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/10/donald_trump_is_poised_to_become_among_the_most_transformative_presidents_in_american_history.html

The nation stands on the cusp of the third and perhaps most notable political realignment in the past 160 years, as those on both sides of the political spectrum recognize that the 2020 election has evolved into a watershed moment in American history.  Since 2016, the Ruling Class has recognized the existential threat Donald Trump poses to them.  The power structure of the Ruling Class and the objectives of the left have been upended by him and his ongoing transformation of the Republican Party, threatening their status and sinecures. The Democrat party’s leftist political allies have acknowledged that he is a dire threat to their grand scheme of radically transforming the United States

This cabal knows 2020 is their last chance to take advantage of what remains of the old Democrat coalition in order to seize the reins of power in near perpetuity.  Another four years of a Trump Administration and a renewed and unabashedly populist/nationalist Republican Party that will be the home for the middle and working classes, regardless of race or ethnicity, will set back the machinations of the Ruling Class and the Left for generations.  

Over the past four years, this reality has been the catalyst for uncontrolled hysteria, mainstream media fabrications, unverified and oftentimes unverifiable false accusations and Democrat congressional overkill directed at Donald Trump and the working/middle class coalition he has been constructing.  The ruling elites coupled with their ally of convenience, the radicalized American left, have been panicked into believing that they must to do everything possible, including election fraud, to defeat Donald Trump before he fully succeeds in the political realignment of the parties.  However, they erroneously believe this realignment will cease once President Trump is no longer in the Oval Office.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/trump-vs-biden-a-rundown/

Foreign policy, domestic policy, character, transparency.

Biden so far has issued no substantive critique of Trump’s foreign policy other than banalities that Trump’s comportment and unpredictability have offended allies and tarnished America’s reputation.

But who exactly, according to Biden, is offended?

China? Russia? Iran? Turkey? And all those states that, given their records, should be offended?

Or are the aggrieved Arab World, Israel, Brazil, Poland, and India, angry at Trump’s outreach to them all?

Most likely, Biden believes that German-controlled Western Europe rightly loathes Trump.

It certainly may. But Europe tends to be fond of charismatic would-be-intellectual presidents such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who wax eloquently about cooperation rather than upping Western defenses in the manner of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.

But, more specifically, where exactly would Biden fault Trump’s record abroad?

Would Biden seek a reset or detente with China? Would he stop efforts to force China to adhere to international trading accords or make China come clean about its role in the origins and spread of COVID-19?

More specifically, might Biden fault Trump for selling lethal weapons to Ukraine when previously he apparently thought that move was too provocative? Would Biden have forgone killing Qasem Soleimani and Abu Baghdadi, given his own prior advice to not go after Osama bin Laden?

What exactly bothers Biden about current foreign policy? Restoring close relations with Israel after the Obama-administration ostracism?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/another-pollster-sees-a-trump-win/

The president will carry Pennsylvania and prevail in the election, according to Jim Lee of Susquehanna Polling and Research.

T he Trafalgar Group’s Robert Cahaly is an outlier among pollsters in that he thinks President Trump will carry Michigan, Pennsylvania, or both, and hence be reelected with roughly 280 electoral votes. (I explained his thinking here.) Last week another pollster, Jim Lee of Susquehanna Polling and Research, echoed some of Cahaly’s points about shy Trump voters being missed by pollsters. “There is definitely a submerged Trump vote,” Lee said. Asked for a prediction, he hedged a little but then predicted a Trump win: “I can’t call it. If the turnout is going to be what I think, Trump wins it.”

Lee goes further than some other analysts in suggesting that pollsters may be deliberately overstating the strength of Democratic candidates in order to dampen Republican turnout. In this press release, he calls it “the very definition of ‘voter suppression’” for a poll, by Franklin & Marshall College, to claim Hillary Clinton was ahead by eleven points among likely voters in surveys taken from October 26–30, 2016. He frankly calls this “liberal bias.” Yet, Lee notes, Franklin & Marshall and its lead pollster are still taken seriously by the media and cited as nonpartisan experts. He thinks there should be professional consequences for pollsters who are so wildly inaccurate as to raise serious questions about their impartiality.

In a recent interview for WFMZ, Lee elaborated, saying, “When pollsters get the results back and they look suspicious, or they should, because they’re showing one candidate with a double-digit lead in a state that was carried by one candidate by, you know, a point or two, they should realize something’s not right and that’s where the art of polling comes in.” Lee calls attention to what he describes as “garbage polls” showing a double-digit lead for Joe Biden in the past few weeks in Pennsylvania. He sees this as a replay of 2016 and adds, “I called on the American Association of Public Opinion Research to crack down on egregious polling to tighten standards for firms that clearly don’t understand the landscape of Pennsylvania.” (According to the FiveThirtyEight survey of pollsters, Franklin & Marshall is more reliable than Susquehanna.)