RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/29/u-s-economy-roared-back-to-life-in-q3-with-fastest-growth-in-history/

The United States economy made history in the third fiscal quarter of 2020 when gross domestic product jumped at a record rate, signifying a resurgence in the economy following a depletion during COVID-19 lockdowns.

Data shows this jump is the largest output gain since the 1940s when the government began to track GDP data.

GDP for the third quarter, which is measured as the total goods and services produced from July to September, rose at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 33.1 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce‘s Bureau of Economic Analysis.

This rebound is a drastic contrast to the 31.4 percent decrease in real GDP during the second quarter, following the 9 percent decline from the first to the second quarter, and a 7.4 percent increase from the second to the third quarter.

This surprising and historical economic growth, the BEA report released on Thursday states, was spurred by increases in “consumer spending, inventory investment, exports, business investment, and housing investment that were partially offset by a decrease in government spending,” on both the federal and state level.

Despite fears that economic recovery from the pandemic would be difficult, this drastic GDP growth reflects a return in consumer activities such as shopping and eating out at restaurants or bars as more states and cities begin to open up from government-mandated lockdowns due to coronavirus, resulting in personal consumption increasing 40.7 percent, gross private domestic investment increasing 83 percent, and residential investments increasing 59.3 percent.

President Donald Trump celebrated the GDP growth, noting that Democratic Presidential Nominee Joe Biden’s policies would have the opposite effect if elected.

“GDP number just announced. Biggest and Best in the History of our Country, and not even close. Next year will be FANTASTIC!!! However, Sleepy Joe Biden and his proposed record setting tax increase, would kill it all. So glad this great GDP number came out before November 3rd,” Trump tweeted.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/11/02/will-trump-win-pennsylvania/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

Voter-registration numbers indicate his standing

The best indicator of the Trump campaign’s standing in Penn­syl­vania is the voter-registration numbers.

In November 2016, Pennsylvania had 4.2 million registered Democrats, 3.3 million registered Republicans, and 1.2 million registered with “other parties” or none.

By June 2020, Pennsylvania had 4.09 million registered Democrats, 3.29 registered Republicans, and 1.21 million registered with other parties. Then the parties began their post-primary voter-registration drives — and Republicans added a net 135,619 voters between June and the final week of September, while Democrats added 57,985 and other voters increased by 49,995, Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report calculates. Add it all up: Democrats are down 66,778 registered members from November 2016, while the Republicans added 125,381, and “other” is up 61,313. The Census Bureau estimates the changes to each state’s population each year, and Pennsyl­vania’s population has mostly remained flat, gaining about 19,000 people over the past four years.

Party registration doesn’t always align with voting intention. Four years ago, Trump won Pennsylvania by 44,292 votes out of more than 6 million cast, a difference of about seven-tenths of 1 percent and the narrowest margin in a presidential election for the state in 176 years. People also forget that 70 percent of registered voters cast ballots. Trump didn’t need Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes to put him over the top, but it was an emphatic sign that the Democrats’ “blue wall” in the Upper Midwest had almost completely collapsed.

Playing with the potential scenarios of the Electoral College map makes it clear that Trump can fairly easily win a second term if he wins Pennsylvania, but it is particularly hard to get him to 270 electoral votes if he doesn’t. At Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, Pennsylvania is deemed “the single most important state of the 2020 election” and “by far the likeliest state to provide either President Trump or Joe Biden with the decisive vote in the Electoral College.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/joe-biden-the-chameleon/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=third

Joe Biden is the guy at the party who can’t disagree with anybody. This is a problem for a would-be leader of the free world.

W hat kind of president might Joe Biden be should he be elected next Tuesday? No one can really say. Consider two widely circulated Biden videos.

Video one: (context here): Biden, campaigning in the New Hampshire Democratic primary and surrounded by activists, approaches a young progressive who says she worries that he won’t do enough to fight energy companies in the name of climate change. Biden takes her hand and says, “I want you to look in my eyes. I guarantee you. I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel.”Video two: Biden, campaigning for hard-hat votes in Pennsylvania, where fossil fuels harvested via fracking are the basis of an industry that enjoys widespread support, vows “a clean energy strategy that has a place for the energy workers right here in Western Pennsylvania,” adding, “I am not banning fracking. Let me say that again, I am not banning fracking, no matter how many times Donald Trump lies about me.”

So Biden won’t ban fracking, but he will end fossil fuel, which is what fracking is for. Maybe the frackers will be allowed to keep working if they promise to frack only for pixie dust.

Biden is the kind of guy who, when speaking to an audience he thinks contains racist whites, brags about receiving an award from George Wallace or reminisces about his friendships with segregationist Dixiecrat senators such as Strom Thurmond, James Eastland, and John Stennis. Among those who place a high value on fighting for civil rights, though, he concocts a completely false tale about getting arrested trying to visit the great South African Nelson Mandela.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/28/donald-trump-genie/

EXCERPT:
Throughout our lives, ever since the founding of Israel, peace in the Middle East has been the ultimate desideratum and the ultimate impossibility. Over the decades there were meetings and summits and accords aplenty, lots of handshaking and headlines, but nothing ever really happened.

If the job of trying to make peace in the Middle East had stayed in the hands of people like John Kerry, so it would have remained. Kerry perfectly fit the mold of the modern State Department functionary. He looked the part. He dressed the part. And he viewed the job in the same way that other functionaries before him had viewed it: it was all about holding endless decorous meetings with one’s Israeli and Palestinian counterparts, having pretty much the same conversations with them that one’s predecessors had had, hosting dinners and receptions with these people at which the usual compliments were exchanged and the usual toasts made, and, finally, giving speeches in which one said the same old things in the same old way.

Kerry was great at this. He could gas on for hours without ever saying anything fresh or surprising or moving the ball so much as a centimeter.

On December 28, 2016, at the end of his term as secretary of state, he delivered his valedictory oration, a 9,700-word declamation about peace in the Middle East most of which was comfortingly familiar to old hands at this sort of thing. He talked about how the Palestinians needed to clean up their act but also deserved a better life in a country of their own; he talked about how America was Israel’s great friend but expected Israel to stop settlements in the occupied territories; he paid obeisance to the United Nations, which, of course, would play a crucial role in any solution to the Middle East conundrum.

The one twist in Kerry’s speech that day involved the then-recent and unprecedented decision by the Obama government not to block an anti-Israel resolution in the Security Council. Defending the vote, Kerry explained that a two-state solution was “the only way to ensure Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state, living in peace and security with its neighbors.”

And then along came Donald Trump. Before his first term was over, he got the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Sudan to make peace with Israel.

And these aren’t just deals between governments that have promised not to make war on each other. They’re comprehensive agreements that will involve contact between all kinds of people at all levels of the societies involved. This is a far more remarkable achievement than just getting a few politicians and diplomats together to shake hands and smile for the cameras. No—it’s the kind of sweeping deal that is simply too big for the narrow imaginations of the typical professional diplomat or political hack, like John Kerry, to conceive.

But at the same time, it’s precisely the kind of deal that Donald Trump, a past master of the high-level business deal, excels in making. It’s the kind of achievement that could only be pulled off by someone who thinks outside the box.