RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-debate-downgrade-for-foreign-policy-11603236203?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

The 2020 presidential election won’t be remembered for its lucid debate and elevated discourse. The candidates themselves bear part of the blame, but the Commission on Presidential Debates hasn’t helped.

We argued on Oct. 17 that the commission has outlived its usefulness (see the response nearby from commission board member Newton Minow). Debate moderators’ longwinded and leftward-slating questions make the show about the moderators themselves and leave viewers none the wiser.

The next debate, scheduled for Thursday night at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., also isn’t promising based on the subjects the commission says will be covered: fighting Covid-19, race in America, climate change, American families, national security, leadership. The first two were part of the first presidential and vice presidential debates. Climate change is loaded with progressive assumptions (how will you raise taxes, further empower the federal government, and generally do what Democrats want to do anyway?).

We’re not sure what “American families” and “leadership” might entail, but why should a commission get to decide what subjects are crucial to debate and the public to hear?It’s especially outrageous to limit national security—we assume that means foreign policy—to one sixth of one debate. President Trump has a reasonable case that his Administration has achieved a major breakthrough between Gulf Arab nations and Israel, brought about by rejecting the foreign-policy establishment’s consensus opinions. The Trump Administration defenestrated consensus opinion by moving the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and leaving the Iran nuclear deal. The dire consequences predicted by think-tank poobahs never came about.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-bidens-and-china-business-11603236651?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Most of the media is ignoring the emails found in Hunter Biden’s laptop, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t news. Joe Biden has an obligation to answer questions about his son’s influence-peddling and his own financial dealings—notably regarding China.

The New York Post last week obtainedthe contents of a laptop purported to belong to Hunter. The Post has been transparent that it obtained its copy of the hard drive from Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who says he received it from the owner of a Delaware computer-repair shop, where it was abandoned in 2019. Mr. Biden derides this as a “smear campaign,” while House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff calls it without evidence “Russian disinformation.”

Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe says the government has no intelligence to support the disinformation claim. A repair-shop order from April 2019 contains Hunter’s name and what appears to be his signature. The shop owner supplied a subpoena showing the computer and hard drive were seized by the FBI in December 2019. And the Biden campaign hasn’t said the emails are phony.

The emails regarding Hunter’s business in Ukraine have been widely reported. But as intriguing is a May 2017 email thread that includes a discussion about “remuneration packages” for six people as part of a business deal with a now-defunct Chinese energy titan, CEFC China Energy. The Chinese company was international news a few years ago, after the U.S. government charged a CEFC-funded organization with money laundering, and its CEO was detained by Chinese authorities. CNN reported in 2018 that “at its height” CEFC was “hard to distinguish” from the Chinese government.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/20/after-seeing-bidens-tax-plan-rapper-50-cent-hops-on-the-trump-train/

Rap icon 50 Cent, also known as Fif, announced he is endorsing President Trump in the upcoming 2020 election after a look at Joe Biden’s tax plan. The Grammy award-winning musician shared a photo on Instagram of the top tax rates by state under the new Biden tax plan.

The rapper, who lives in New York, where the top tax bracket will be 62 percent under a Biden presidency, wrote in his caption: “👀WHAT THE F**K! (VOTE ForTRUMP) IM OUT, 🏃‍♂️💨F**K NEW YORK The KNICKS never win anyway. 🤷🏽‍♂️I don’t care Trump doesn’t like black people 62% are you out of ya fucking mind. 😤”

The post is a big turn-around from 2016, when Fif endorsed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

Until now, Fif has expressed a distaste for Trump’s policies. This April, he said of President Trump’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, “You wanted a reality show host as president, well now you’re on ‘Survivor.’”

Fif has said many times that Trump has the “attitude of a rapper.” What is a rapper attitude? Fif explained in 2018 when he went on Conan O’Brian’s late-night talk show.

https://www.discoursemagazine.com/politics/2020/10/20/the-need-to-know/

Hunter Biden’s laptop, abandoned at a Delaware repair shop, is now the centerpiece of what could potentially be a huge pay-to-play controversy that directly affects the presidential election. The incendiary emails and pictures on the computer detail lucrative business dealings by the former vice president’s son. They were first reported on Wednesday, October 14, by the New York Post, which received them from Rudy Giuliani. More emails are sure to be disclosed between now and the November 3 election.

These emails raise two overriding questions:

Are they real? Or are they a dirty trick by Joe Biden’s domestic political opponents or a foreign enemy?
If the “Delaware emails” are real, do they implicate the vice president himself? Or do they simply detail the dealings of a man who profited enormously from his family name but did so without his famous father knowing, helping or profiting?

Americans deserve to know the answers to both questions. And we need to know now, before Election Day.

The term “Delaware emails” is important here because there are others that potentially point to corrupt insider dealings. Specifically, the emails on the laptop are different from another set of 26,000 emails belonging to Hunter Biden’s ex–business partner, Bevan Cooney. Those, too, include troubling details about business arrangements with foreign partners, many closely linked to the Chinese Communist Party. Cooney is now in prison for some of his corrupt deals. A second partner, Devon Archer, is awaiting sentencing. Hunter Biden was never charged. Cooney has now given direct, unfettered access to his email account to Peter Schweizer, a journalist who specializes in official corruption. Schweizer has begun releasing the emails and his findings through Breitbart. So far, no one, including the Biden camp, has raised any questions about the authenticity of the Cooney emails.

https://canadafreepress.com/article/dems-are-in-full-panic-mode

After the 2016 presidential election, Democrats were consumed with anger, indignation, and a burning unquenchable fury. They had basked in smug satisfaction during the previous eight years as Barack Obama began to fulfill his campaign promise of October 28, 2005 of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” from our Democratic Republic into a socialist utopia. And they were blind with rage that Hillary had been denied the next eight years to complete the mission. 

Even more infuriating was the fact that everything the 2016 victor stood for was a repudiation of nearly a century of leftist strivings. In fact, candidate and then President Trump promised to overturn the Regressives’ most cherished “values,” including sky-high taxes, open borders, a weakened military, flawed foreign treaties, ongoing wars, the illiteracy roadmap called Common Core, and generations of impoverished, uneducated, imprisoned Blacks, et al.

THE WORLD’S BIGGEST TEMPER TANTRUM

Rejecting nearly 250 years of the peaceful transition of presidential power, Democrats launched a four-year war against President Trump, manufacturing a Russian-collusion hoax, a Ukraine hoax, a Stormy Daniels hoax, an impeachment hoax, on and on. All came to naught, but their efforts did expose the deep systemic corruption at the highest reaches of the Obama regime––corruption involving crimes as serious as sedition and treason!

“Coincidentally,” on the heels of the impeachment failure came the China virus, not only bringing our economy––and the entire world––to a halt, but giving rise to unrestrained violence by bought-and-paid-for anarchist groups such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter in about 15 Democrat-run cities. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/10/20/elect-joe-biden-hell-be-the-worst-president-in-u-s-history/

Ranking modern presidents, from first to worst, is an entirely subjective matter. That said, we’re quite sure Joe Biden will be, if elected, the most destructive president of our lifetimes if not of all time.

At I&I we tend to look at Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama as being the worst presidents from our lifetimes. Carter saw himself as the caretaker of the country’s inevitable decline rather someone who would lift it from its malaise. Obama managed the worst economic recovery in our post-war history, allowed ISIS to grow into a terrorist power, and rolled over for Iran’s mullahs. His was the most divisive presidency of modern times. If this nation is on the brink of another civil war, as some suggest we are, it’s because he set the tone for the bitter separation we see today among Americans.

At least Carter led the deregulation of the airline, trucking and rail industries, and in his 1978 State of the Union address acknowledged “we really need to realize that there is a limit to the role and the function of government.”

Biden would neither do nor say any such thing.

Here, though, is what can expect from a Biden presidency:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/10/trump-doubles-support-among-young-black-voters-daniel-greenfield/

“Trump has also gained real ground among nonwhite voters. To be clear, he still trails Biden considerably with these groups, but in UCLA Nationscape’s polling over the past month, he was down by 39 points with these voters, a double-digit improvement from his 53-point deficit in 2016.

While older Black voters look as if they’ll vote for Biden by margins similar to Clinton’s in 2016, Trump’s support among young Black voters (18 to 44) has jumped from around 10 percent in 2016 to 21 percent in UCLA Nationscape’s polling.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/how-trump-might-be-winning/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

I’m far too dumb to be able to shed any light on polls, but I do know something about celebrity and I think I can guarantee this: If President Trump wins re-election, Robert Cahaly is going to become very famous very quickly.

Who is Robert Cahaly? The chief pollster for the Trafalgar Group, the only major polling organization that publishes its results and correctly predicted Donald Trump’s 2016 victories in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Cahaly predicts Trump is again going to win Michigan, along with Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Texas. He calculates that Trump will be reelected with roughly 280 electoral votes.

You can, and should, listen to Cahaly make these bold predictions on a special edition of The Editors podcast in which Rich Lowry interviews Cahaly for an hour (he writes about it here). I’ve been bobbing along with the conventional wisdom that says Trump is headed for a blowout defeat in the popular vote and the Electoral College, but Cahaly has a completely different take. It’s wild.

The pollster says that he employs different methods from his competitors and warns that the others are badly underestimating how social-desirability bias is artificially inflating Joe Biden’s numbers. People who hate Trump are willing, indeed eager, to give up their time to talk about how much they hate Trump, according to this view. And some polls take a long time, offering a slate of 20 or 25 questions to go through. You have to really want your opinion to be counted if you’re willing to give away that much of your time for nothing.

https://pjmedia.com/election/tyler-o-neil/2020/10/19/election-interference-big-tech-censored-trump-more-than-60-times-left-biden-unscathed-n1068955

Is Big Tech interfering in the 2020 election? If so, tech companies did not start with the suppression of The New York Post‘s Hunter Biden bombshell story last week — although that act was arguably the most egregious.

Facebook and Twitter have censored President Donald Trump or his reelection campaign 65 times but have not censored Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his campaign a single time, according to a new report from the Media Research Center’s (MRC) Techwatch.

Techwatch analyzed two years of social media posts from Trump, Biden, and their respective campaigns, between May 2018 and October 16, 2020. The analysis did not include any ads from political action committees (PACs) or super PACs in support of Trump or Biden. It also focused on social media posts, not paid advertisements, from the campaigns.

Twitter

Twitter labeled, fact-checked, and removed tweets from the president and his campaign 64 times since Trump’s election in 2016. The company appears to have ramped into high gear this past May.

Twitter put “public interest” notices on Trump’s tweets about mail-in voting, COVID-19, and the Black Lives Matter protests. The company deleted a satirical video retweeted by the president following a fact-check from the Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact. The company also deleted three Trump tweets about hydroxychloroquine on July 28, 2020.

Twitter has also cracked down on memes that Trump tweeted or retweeted. The company removed a meme from his June 30 tweet showing the president saying, “In reality, they’re not after me. They’re after you.” Logan Cook, a meme creator who goes by the handle Carpe Donktum, made a video mocking the Democrats’ reaction to Trump’s 2019 State of the Union address. After Trump retweeted it, Twitter removed the video following a copyright complaint. Twitter also removed a Carpe Donktum video showing two toddlers hugging one another with fake CNN chyrons at the bottom after Trump retweeted it.