Your Obligatory Trump-Biden Debate Post

September 30th, 2020

I tried to watch the debate, I really did, but I just hate hearing people talk over each other. It’s a personal aesthetic response, rather than a political one. But for those who didn’t and still want to, here’s the video.

Some reactions:

This Week in Democrat Voting Fraud for September 29, 2020

September 29th, 2020

A whole bunch of voting fraud stories, of various sizes, have popped up this week, two in Texas alone:

  • First up: “Biden’s Texas Political Director Implicated in Massive Mail-In Ballot Harvesting Scheme in Harris County”:

    A Biden Campaign operative in Texas is attempting to rig the 2020 election with the help of others in a massive ballot harvesting scheme, according to two private investigators who testified under oath that they have “video evidence, documentation and witnesses” to prove it. With the help of mass mail-in ballots, the illegal ballot harvesting operation could harvest 700,000 ballots, one Harris County Democrat operative allegedly bragged.

    The investigators—a former FBI agent and former police officer—claim that Biden’s Texas Political Director Dallas Jones and his cohorts have been “hoarding mail-in and absentee ballots” and ordering operatives to them fill out for people in Harris County illegally, “including dead people, homeless people, and nursing home residents in the 2020 presidential election,” Patrick Howley of the National File reported.

    While law enforcement agencies are reportedly investigating these potential crimes, nothing will be done about it until “well after the November 3, 2020 election” the former FBI agent said.

    Dallas Jones was appointed the Biden campaign’s Texas Political Director in late August.

  • More Harris County fraud:

    Texas’ largest county has been approving voter registrations even when people say they’re not citizens, according to a lawsuit announced Monday that found some of those people managed to cast ballots, too.

    The Public Interest Legal Foundation says it uncovered dozens of examples of people who registered in Harris County over the last two decades, either admitted they weren’t citizens or left the box blank, yet were registered anyway. They were removed from the rolls after they later stated, again, that they weren’t, in fact, citizens.

  • Also from Texas: More of that voting fraud that doesn’t exist:

    Attorney General Ken Paxton on Thursday announced the arrest of a Democratic county commissioner and three associates in Gregg County in East Texas on charges of election fraud in a 2018 election.

    In an announcement with potential significance for the November elections when voting by mail is expected to increase significantly because of the threat of COVID-19, Paxton said Gregg County Commissioner Shannon Brown, Marlena Jackson, Charlie Burns and DeWayne Ward orchestrated a vote-harvesting scheme to help win Brown win the Democratic primary two years ago.

  • The big voting fraud case from outside Texas is from Ilhan Omar’s Minneapolis, where a Somali-American connected to Ilhan Omar was caught on video bragging about his car full of illegally harvest ballots:

    A “ballot broker” boasts about keeping hundreds of absentee ballots in his car trunk. He brags about them being filled in by people other than the voters. Often, money changes hands. Witnesses tie the rampant fraud to the campaign chairman of a prominent member of the radical “squad” in the U.S. House. Loose election laws allow people to come from out of state, vote, and then leave again.

    Plus stories of forcing the elderly to hand over their ballots and carrying around a bag of money to pay for ballots.

    They even caught an on-camera exchange of money for ballots, which is a clear violation of federal law:

  • Speaking of voting fraud, Democratic judges have decided to implement ex-post facto voting law changes to allow mail-in ballots to be received seven days after the election and still be counted, including those missing postmarks and non-matching signatures, in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
  • Meanwhile, Colorado is mailing ballot registration reminders to the dead, or people that haven’t even been in the state for more than half a century.
  • BidenWatch for September 28, 2020

    September 28th, 2020

    Democrats panic (some more), Slow Joe slowjoes some more, Rand Paul asks DOJ to look into Hunter’s sleaze, and inside Biden’s vast haberdashery collection. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • The first Biden-Trump debate is scheduled for Tuesday. We’ll see if it actually happens.
  • “Biden Campaign Warns That For Debate Biden Will Need A Mask That Completely Conceals His Face And He Might Sound Different.”
  • Reasons for Biden supporters to worry:

    First, there are indications that Trump’s base of support — whites without college degrees — is more energized and committed to voting this year than key Democratic constituencies. And there is also evidence that polling does not reflect this.

    Second, Latinos, who are key to the outcome in several crucial states — Arizona and Florida, for example — have shown less support for Biden than for past Democratic nominees. Many Hispanic voters seem resistant to any campaign that defines them broadly as “people of color.”

    Third, absentee voting is expected to be higher among Democrats than Republicans, subjecting their ballots to a greater risk of rejection, a fate more common to mailed-in votes than to in-person voting.

    Fourth, the generic Democratic-Republican vote (“Would you be more willing to vote for a Republican or Democratic candidate for Congress?”) through early July favored Democrats by more than 10 points, but has since narrowed to 6 points.

    Fifth, the debates will test Biden’s ability to withstand three 90-minute battles against an opponent known for brutal personal attacks.

    Details further down:

    A Democratic strategist — who requested anonymity because his employer does not want him publicly identified talking about the election — analyzed the implications of the most recent voter registration trends for me.

    In Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, he said, overall

    registration is up by 6 points through August compared to the 2016 cycle, but net Democratic registrations are down by 38 percent. That’s about 150,000 fewer additional Democrats than were added in 2016.

    In addition, he continued, registration among whites without college degrees

    is up by 46 percent while registration by people of color is up by only 4 percent. That gap is made more stark when you realize that over the last four years, the WNC (white non-college) population has increased by only 1 percent in those states, while the number of people of color increased by 13 percent.

    The pattern was more pronounced in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin than it was in Michigan.

    On its own, increased registration among non-college whites would have only a negligible effect on total state voting, my source pointed out, but

    it becomes troubling if it reflects greater interest more generally for these voters in those states. And there are good reasons to believe that if that is the case, those additionally energized voters are very underrepresented in surveys now.

    On weakness of Biden support Hispanic voters:

    While Democrats have struggled for years with non-college whites, another set of problems for Biden and the party has begun to emerge this year in what many liberals had been counting on as a key constituency: the steadily growing Hispanic electorate.

    As Ian Haney López, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Tory Gavito, a human rights lawyer who is president of Way to Win and the founder of the Texas Future Project, wrote on these pages on Sept. 18:

    According to recent polls from Quinnipiac and Monmouth, 38 percent of registered Hispanic voters in 10 battleground states may be ambivalent about even voting. At least so far, this large group of Latinos seemingly perceives little reason to choose Mr. Biden over President Trump.

    Why? López and Gavito offer an explanation based on 15 focus groups and a national survey:

    Progressives commonly categorize Latinos as people of color, no doubt partly because progressive Latinos see the group that way and encourage others to do so as well. Certainly, we both once took that perspective for granted. Yet in our survey, only one in four Hispanics saw the group as people of color.

    In fact, the authors continued, the majority of Hispanics

    rejected this designation. They preferred to see Hispanics as a group integrating into the American mainstream, one not overly bound by racial constraints but instead able to get ahead through hard work.

    Another data point they found “even more sobering”: López and Gavito asked

    eligible voters how “convincing” they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points. Among other elements, the message condemned “illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs” and called for “fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.”

    As they expected, “almost three out of five white respondents judged that message convincing.”

    More disconcerting to López and Gavito, both liberals, was that “exactly the same percentage of African-Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos.”

    Poll after poll has shown that Hispanic Americans don’t want MS-13 and other criminal aliens in their community, but Democrats have pointedly ignored that in favor of pushing their “OMG, separated families!” and “racist dog whistle” talking points and pandering to hard left open borders activists.

    You have to get much further down before any mention of the Antia/#BlackLivesMatter riots. Completely missing from this piece: The words “Hunter Biden,” “Burisma” and “China”…

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • Biden, ‘The Great and Powerful’:

    Media bias is not new.

    In addition to the Russian collusion hoax and the phone-call impeachment farce, who can forget the marquee media toadies of JournoList and the release of John Podesta’s email trove?

    Or the moderator Donna Brazile’s primary debate questions, leaked through CNN, or Candy Crowley’s hijacking of a debate as moderator-turned-real-time-hack “fact-checker”?

    Nothing then is new to the media’s fusion and collusion with the “progressive party.”

    Yet never in American history have mainstream journalists not merely promoted a candidate but actively fused with his political candidacy to the point of warping, fabricating, and Trotskyizing the news and indeed history itself.

    The trope of a vast charade to create an illusionary powerful figure out of nothing is an old one in fiction, Hollywood and television. We remember “The Great and Powerful” Wizard of Oz fakery, a formidable screen image created backstage by gears and levers operated by a tiny man “behind the curtain.” Similar is the famous scene in an episode of the old Star Trek series, depicting a near comatose on-air John Gill used as a televised prop by his puppeteers, in a utopian federation project gone haywire.

    But reality has outdone art with the Biden campaign. The concoction is holistic, from the mundane construction of a fantasy, on-the-go candidate to the supposed middle-of-the road old Joe Biden from Scranton radiating an aura of kindness and moderation in times of plague, panic, and protest.

    For six months, Biden has run a Zoom campaign on the pretext of mandatory quarantines—our current version of a 19th-century, stationary presidential candidate, who campaigned by spitting out wit and wisdom while immovable on his front porch.

    Biden has conducted no free-wheeling, unscripted press conferences. He will not do extended one-on-one interviews with a disinterested journalist. He rarely will even try Trump-like cameo appearances on CNN or MSNBC to answer unscripted questions from supporters. His press events instead are Orwellian, requiring a media mass suspension of disbelief.

    The questions are canned. They are submitted in advance by “journalists,” whether formally or via electronic chatter. The inquiries are obsequious—seldom a word about Hunter Biden, China, Biden’s troubling racist remarks, his handsy past, his scary cognitive lapses, or his “contract” with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). Instead the softball, known-in-advance inquiries are in spirit carried over from the Obama years, phrased in the manner of “Were you outraged enough by Trump’s outrage?”

    Biden’s Oz functionaries seemingly are always experimenting with all sorts of screen props. The trick is to discover how best their challenged candidate can square the circle of completing sentences and remaining semi-coherent, while not giving away the game that his illusionists are feeding him answers to synthetic questions.

    When asked point-blank on Fox News by Brett Baier whether Biden used a stealth teleprompter, his national press flak, T.J. Ducklo would not answer with a simple yes or no. Instead, he went on the attack, with the fossilized accusation that right-wing Fox News asks too many partisan questions.

    So we were left with a de facto “yes”: Biden does read off a stealthy teleprompter when answering canned press questions—and gives the impression he does not.

    But Biden, like the mirage of the Wizard of Oz, nonetheless can’t always keep the curtain closed.

    When he strains to see the teleprompter that sits just behind, and thus out of sight of, his camera lens, he slips and mutters “bring it closer”—reminding any who watch, except the media that helps collude in these orchestrations, that the question asked is not a serious one, but a prompt to facilitate the proper nonspontaneous response.

    Snip.

    Sometimes the effort is scary. When old photos reappear in a CNN puff piece about a younger Biden holding his young son at a long-ago Washington Redskins game, the team logo—the now-politically incorrect Redskins logo—is airbrushed from his son’s stocking cap. And then presto, legions of “disinterested” “fact-checkers” in the media emerge to confess that Biden, not CNN, supplied the doctored image.

    But, in turn, the Biden campaign assures the press that the doctoring was only for “copyright” reasons, as if candidates routinely photoshop out all the cap logos they wear. The impression is that Biden is terrified that his new leftist friends in the Ministry of Truth are combing his past and ordering embarrassing moments to go down the memory hole.

    As a general rule, the Soviet-style apologia for the media-Biden fusion—usually outsourced to a now utterly corrupt left-wing institution called “fact-checking”—only solidifies the fact that the media and the Biden campaign are indistinguishable.

    In Soviet times, one easily just assumed the opposite from Moscow’s party-line efforts and, presto, stumbled onto the truth. In the case of Biden’s optics and press conferences and appearances, we easily deduce that the downside of scripting and programming a compliant candidate far outweighs the existential risk of turning Biden loose to answer questions like a normal human being.

    True, even before his cognitive decline, Biden was known in Washington as someone whose incoherent and impromptu loquaciousness usually embarrassed his friends more than hurt his enemies—in addition to his long history of plagiarism and inflating his thin résumés with false data about his past.

    But with the onset of his cognitive decline, Biden’s own once-feeble social antennae are now more or less unplugged most of the day.

    The result is that he has a creepy propensity to blurt out patently racist tropes as if the old inner Biden who talked of Obama as “clean” and the first “articulate” black presidential candidate, and pandered to his working-class Democratic supporters with references to the inner-city “jungle,” is now free of his harnesses, bits, and halters.

    For some time, Biden unchained has shouted about “you ain’t black,” and, earlier, his Corn Pop series of inflated tales as Biden, the white knight, equipped with a chain no less, protecting the inner city from itself.

    Biden showed his tough-guy mettle with putdowns of a transitorily noncompliant black journalist and sneered that he is comparable to a “junkie” and drug addict. To a liberated Biden, blacks just don’t think independently like Latinos.

  • As First Presidential Debate Nears, Democrats Are Concerned About Biden. Ya think?

    The first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is happening on Tuesday night. Democrats are playing it cool, but there is real concern about how Biden will perform.

    In a format like this, Biden is on his own. There is no campaign handler who can suddenly step in and shut down the event by saying “OK, thanks so much everyone.”

    Sean Sullivan and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post wrote this rather revealing story:

    Trump readies a debate onslaught — and Biden allies worry

    President Trump is gearing up to launch blistering personal attacks on Joe Biden and his family in the first presidential debate on Tuesday, while Biden is bracing for an onslaught and worried allies are warning the Democratic nominee not to lose his temper and lash out, according to people with knowledge of the strategies in both camps.

    Trump has told associates he wants to talk specifically about his opponent’s son Hunter Biden and mused that the debates are when “people will finally realize Biden is just not there,” according to one adviser. The president is so eager to lay into his rival that he has called aides to test out various attacks, focusing on attacks that cast Biden as a longtime Washington insider with a limited record of accomplishment, said another adviser, who like many interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe private talks.

    Biden and his advisers are anticipating a venomous barrage, according to a person with knowledge of their thinking, and they are preparing to counter with an affirmative case for a Biden presidency. The Democrat wants to stay focused on how he would address the coronavirus pandemic and the country’s economic problems, which he blames Trump for worsening.

    The prospect of a cage match between a president for whom no subject is off-limits and a challenger who can be openly emotional is making some Biden advisers nervous. They see a fine line between Biden’s passion and empathy, which can appeal to voters, and the raw anger that sometimes gets him in trouble and could undercut his pitch as a calming alternative to a president who thrives on chaos.

    Two quick reactions. First of all, Joe Biden is “a longtime Washington insider with a limited record of accomplishment.” Second, why shouldn’t Trump go after Biden’s family? Hasn’t Trump’s family been fair game for Democrats and the media over the last four years?

    In another sign of the left’s utter panic, Nancy Pelosi is doubling down on her suggestion that Biden shouldn’t even bother debating Trump. Funny, she didn’t feel that way about Obama in 2008 or 2012. What changed?

    I think we all know the answer to that: The number of synapses still firing in Biden’s head.

  • The Biden campaign has “called a lid” (i.e., said Biden is not campaigning any more that day and reporters can go home) before noon nine times in September. Biden must have more lids than Charles Nelson Reilly.

    Biden is accomplishing the rare feat of making Hillary look like a workaholic in comparison…

  • Where’s Waljoe?

    Presumably, Biden is so exhausted from his rigorous morning routine of plug and denture maintenance that he only has energy enough to campaign fewer than two out of every three days.

    To his credit, Biden did manage to campaign for six days in a row during the first week of September. But since then, he’s ditched his own presidential campaign eight out of the last 18 days.

    That’s not a good look for a man who is supposed to have energy enough to hold the most demanding office in the world.

    I had a conversation with Bill Whittle on this same topic earlier this week, and Bill reminded me of his newly minted Whittle’s Law: When they let the optics look this bad, it’s because the alternative optics would look even worse.

    In other words, the former veep or his handlers have made the conscious decision that it’s safer for Tired Joe Biden to stay tucked away every other day or so than to have him campaign in the traditional, vigorous manner.

    What could possibly look worse than a presidential candidate who isn’t up to the job of campaigning?

    Well, this:

    He sounds out of breath from just walking to the podium.

  • More on the same subject:

  • More Democrats worry about Biden’s “laid back” approach:

    The final stretch of a presidential campaign is typically a nonstop mix of travel, caffeine and adrenaline. But as the worst pandemic in a century bears down on the United States, Joe Biden is taking a lower key approach.

    Since his Aug. 11 selection of California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate, Biden has had 22 days where he either didn’t make public appearances, held only virtual fundraisers or ventured from his Delaware home solely for church, according to an Associated Press analysis of his schedules. He made 12 visits outside of Delaware during that period, including Friday when he went to Washington and paid respects to the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

    During the same time, President Donald Trump had 24 trips that took him to 17 different states, not counting a personal visit to New York to see his ailing brother in the hospital or weekend golf outings. He was hitting Florida, Georgia, Virginia and the nation’s capital on Friday alone.

    Biden’s aides insist his approach is intentional, showcasing his respect for public health guidelines aimed at preventing the spread of the coronavirus and presenting a responsible contrast with Trump, who has resumed large-scale campaign rallies — sometimes over the objections of local officials. Still, some Democrats say it’s critical that Biden infuse his campaign with more energy.

    Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa said not traveling because of the pandemic was a “pretty lame excuse.”

    “I thought he had his own plane,” Hinojosa said. “He doesn’t have to sit with one space between another person on a commercial airline like I would.”

    When the Texas Democratic Party says you’re “lame,” maybe you have a problem…

  • Remember, if it were up to Joe Biden, Osama bin Laden would still be alive.
  • My breakdown of the Senate’s Hunter Biden report, in case you missed it.
  • When asked last year about Hunter’s crooked dealings, Biden’s response was injudicious:

  • Sen. Rand Paul is sending the DOJ Hunter Biden report to the Department of Justice for criminal referral. As well he should.
  • Biden compares President Trump to Nazi Germany’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. At this point, does any Democrat calling any Republican a Nazi count as news? (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Florida Republican see surge in registration. Hat tip…
  • Borepatch, who opines on why the polls are wrong.
  • Stephen Green wargames electoral college scenarios.
  • Liberals who think that Kamala Harris is going to walk over Mike Pence in a debate are warned to lower their expectations. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Slow Joe Reloaded:

  • “I lost the line.”

  • Speaking of Slow Joe’s ever more tenuous grip on reality, “Biden said he was a student at Delaware State University; school says otherwise.”
  • Biden makes a mountain out of an Irish molehill. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Heh, numerology division:

  • Agreed:

  • MSNBC talking head Dr. Vin Gupta fails to reveal he works as an advisor to the Biden campaign.
  • Evidently Joe’s been in the Senate for 180 years:

    Maybe his staff is afraid he’ll go on a rant about what swell guys John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis were…

  • Like BidenWatch? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    Trump Nominates Barrett To Supreme Court, And Democrats Are Already Melting Down

    September 27th, 2020

    As expected, President Donald Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court:

    “Today it is my honor to nominate one of our nation’s most brilliant and gifted legal minds to the Supreme Court. She is a woman of unparalleled achievement, towering intellect, sterling credentials, and unyielding loyalty to the Constitution, Judge Amy Coney Barrett,” Trump said at a press conference at the White House announcing Barrett’s nomination.

    Barrett has served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit since she was appointed by Trump in 2017. The 48-year-old Notre Dame law professor clerked for late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and is a conservative Catholic mother of seven, including two adopted children from Haiti.

    When she was nominated to be a judge on the Seventh Circuit, three Democratic senators supported Barrett’s confirmation, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and former senator Joe Donnelly of Indiana. Over the past week, Senate Democrats have expressed vehement opposition to her nomination to the Supreme Court.

    You don’t say.

    Here’s the video of the announcement.

    Here’s the transcript. Barrett: “I love the United States and I love the United States constitution. I am truly humbled by the prospect of serving on the supreme court.”

    Also:

    I was lucky enough to clerk for Justice Scalia and given his incalculable influence on my life. I am very moved to have members of the Scalia family here today, including his dear wife, Maureen. I clerked for justice Scalia more 20 years ago, but the lessons I learned still resonate.

    His judicial philosophy is mine too, a judge must apply the law as written. Judges are not policymakers and they must be resolute and setting aside any policy views they might hold.

    Democrats are already melting down, now that their desperate attempts to somehow guilt-trip Trump into not nominating a Supreme Court justice have failed. (And this is why we have Trump: it’s very easy to imagine McCain or Romney caving. As Abraham Lincoln said of Ulysses S. Grant, “I cannot spare this man. He fights.”) The fact that Barrett is a believing Catholic woman, thus threatening the Democratic Party’s central holy sacrament of abortion, is driving them extra crazy. Democratic senators are already announcing that they won’t even meet with Barrett.

    As with Kavanaugh, expect Democrats to ignore all limits of human decency, even though some are already admitting that they don’t have the votes to stop her confirmation:

    More tweets:

    Dan Crenshaw And Texas GOP Drop This Year’s Coolest Campaign Ad

    September 26th, 2020

    This is that rare political ad you actually enjoy watching. Enjoy Texas reloaded.

    Complete with Superhero Landing™!

    And because I offer a full service blog, here are links for each of the candidates in the ad (in order of appearance):

  • Rep. Dan Crenshaw (Texas Second Congressional District) (Twitter)
  • Wesley Hunt (Texas Seventh Congressional District) (Twitter)
  • August Pfluger (Texas Eleventh Congressional District) (Twitter)
  • Beth Van Duyne (Texas Twenty-Fourth Congressional District) (Twitter)
  • Tony Gonzalez (Texas Twenty-Third Congressional District) (Twitter)
  • Genevieve Collins (Texas Thirty-Second Congressional District) (Twitter)
  • LinkSwarm for September 25, 2020

    September 25th, 2020

    Greetings, and welcome to the first LinkSwarm of fall! Strangely enough, we’re already getting some fall in our fall in Texas, as opposed to our usual Ever So Slightly Less Hot Late Summer. This week: Still more riots, Supreme Court pick news, more ugly truths about Crossfire Hurricane, and Lebanon goes boom again. Plus a bit of news that goes to eleven.

  • Yet another rash of Antifa/#BlackLivesMatter riots, this one ostensibly over the return of a single non-murder charge in the Breonna Taylor killing case.
  • Speaking of those idiots:

  • “Why Amy Coney Barrett is hands-down best pick to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg.”

    Amy represents an opportunity to showcase a generationally brilliant, special intellect — who also is a mom,” says O. Carter Snead, Barrett’s longtime faculty colleague at the Notre Dame law school, where Barrett also received her law degree.

    Her rare combination of hyper-intelligence and humility is a matter of bipartisan consensus. “The smartest person in the room and also the most humble” was how Snead and two other sources intimately familiar with Barrett described her, echoing each other almost verbatim.

    Harvard Law School prof Noah Feldman — a liberal who testified before Congress in favor of ­impeaching the president — hailed her as “a truly brilliant lawyer” in a 2018 column. Feldman should know. He and Barrett were members of the same class of Supreme Court clerks in 1998.

    “She was one of the two best lawyers” of the 40 clerks “and arguably the single best.” Feldman concluded: “She was legally prepared enough to go on the court 20 years ago.”

    When Trump nominated Barrett to the Seventh Circuit, every single one of those 40 fellow clerks endorsed her as a “first-rate” thinker, ­including such vehemently anti-Trump figures as Neal Katyal, solicitor general under Team Obama. The entire Notre Dame law faculty likewise endorsed her, “and that includes people who identify as liberal,” as Snead was quick to note.

    She is recognized as an expert on how judges are supposed to interpret statutes — a crucial role, as demonstrated by Justice Neil Gorsuch’s bizarre recent reading of “gender identity” into a civil rights statute enacted in the 1960s. She has also thought deeply about the relationship among the branches of government, a gnarly and seriously important area of law.

    To these achievements Barrett marries a vibrant Christian faith. For the evangelicals and Catholics the president needs to turn out in November, her pro-life bona fides are on display not just in her activities and statements, but also in her own family: She is a mother of seven, including one biological child with intellectual disabilities and two adopted from Haiti.

    Yes, Democrats and their ­media allies will attack and demonize her — viciously. But that’s no reason to nominate other candidates who have no record on life issues. As one conservative activist told me, “the left is going to burn everything down no matter whom we pick, so we might as well get the right person on the court.”

  • And why she’s the odds-on favorite.
  • Democrats worry that Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, is too old and senile to handle a Supreme Court nomination fight. Of course, they put it in slightly more delicate terms:

    Feinstein sometimes gets confused by reporters’ questions, or will offer different answers to the same question depending on where or when she’s asked. Her appearance is frail. And Feinstein’s genteel demeanor, which seems like it belongs to a bygone Senate era, can lead to trouble with an increasingly hard-line Democratic base uninterested in collegiality or bipartisan platitudes.

    Just this week, Feinstein infuriated progressives after declaring her opposition to ending the Senate’s legislative filibuster — a top goal of party activists if Democrats win full control of the Congress and White House in November. Some on the left called on her to resign over the comments, although other Democratic moderates have expressed similar views.

    It’s hard to pick which is the more interesting angle here: The hard-left planning to push for their suicidal court-packing/filibuster ending agenda, or the old guard of elderly Democrats hanging on to power ghastly Ringwraiths. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • Democrats: “We have the following list of demands for this Suprem-” Republicans: “Sorry, we remember your outrageous smear job on Kavanaugh. Suck it!” Also, remember this:

    There were electoral consequences, with every “incumbent Senate Democrat in battleground states who opposed the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination” losing his or her re-election bid. Sens. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, and Bill Nelson of Florida were all replaced by their Republican opponents, while Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia saved his seat by backing Kavanaugh. That fall-out handed Republicans the votes they now need to push through a new nominee to the Supreme Court before Nov. 3, 2020.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Trump wants the Supreme Court at full strength to thwart any Democratic attempts to steal the election. Foresight. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “The ‘primary sub-source’ for the Steele dossier was suspected of being a possible Russian agent and a ‘threat to national security,’ according to newly declassified FBI documents.”
  • The goal of the Michael Flynn investigation wasn’t enhancing national security, but to get Flynn fired. “The explosive new documents support Flynn’s latest claims that Obama-era Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI officials had conspired to set him up from the beginning and that they never had any legitimate basis for investigating him.”
  • “Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents tasked by fired former Director James Comey to take down Donald Trump during and after the 2016 election were so concerned about the agency’s potentially illegal behavior that they purchased liability insurance to protect themselves less than two weeks before Trump was inaugurated president, previously hidden FBI text messages show.”
  • More on the same subject. I get the impression that there’s so much information coming out about malfeasance during Crossfire Hurricane/FISAgate that I can’t keep up with it all…
  • “Gov. Abbott proposes increased penalty, mandatory jail time for 6 riot-related offenses.”
  • It’s not just Texas: Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis just proposed similar anti-riot legislation. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • For construction workers, not just a V-shaped recovery, but a Super-V.

  • Hezbollah arms depot in Lebanese town of Ayn Qana blows up real good.
  • Follow-up: Wirecard’s business was “almost entirely fraudulent.”
  • Arkansas Kroger’s fires Christian employees for refusing to wear a gay rights pin.
  • Ratings for NBA conference finals way down.
  • “‘This Is Spinal Tap’ Creators Reach Settlement On Long-Running Court Battle Over Rights And Income.” Good. Studios shouldn’t screw creators out of rightfully owed money, even if it is Meathead.
  • Today’s market to be hit by crazy high valuations is…(spins wheel)…rare plants? Now if only it would hit science fiction first editions I would be set!

  • Microsoft buys Bethesda.
  • Boom:

  • Child brought down by wild pack! Oh the humanity!

  • Hunter Biden Has Been A Very, Very Bad Boy

    September 24th, 2020

    And, this time, I don’t mean the “got thrown out of the Navy for doing blow” or “got pegged by prostitutes” things.

    No, this time it’s all about his and his father’s ties to corrupt Ukrainian and Chinese business deals, since the senate report on his dealings there came out yesterday. (That’s the official PDF, but here’s a more copy-and-paste-friendly version via The Federalist.)

    On April 16, 2014, Vice President Biden met with his son’s business partner, Devon Archer, at the White House. Five days later, Vice President Biden visited Ukraine, and the media described him as the “public face of the administration’s handling of Ukraine.” The next day, April 22, Archer joined the board of Burisma. Six days later, British officials seized $23 million from the London bank accounts of Burisma’s owner, Mykoloa Zlochevsky. Fifteen days later on May 13, Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma, with public reports showing Hunter and his firm being paid $50,000 to $166,000 per month (totaling more than $3 million over five years) for his and Archer’s board participation.

    Let ye who has not taken $3 million for working for Ukrainian oligarchs cast the first stone.

    Also, with a full name like “Mykola Vladislavovich Zlochevsky,” this Tom Lehrer song keeps coming to mind, since the scansion is so close:

    Snip.

    Moreover, this investigation has illustrated the extent to which officials within the Obama administration ignored the glaring warning signs when the vice president’s son joined the board of a company owned by a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch. And, as will be discussed in later sections, Hunter Biden was not the only Biden who cashed in on Joe Biden’s vice presidency. Former Acting Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Kyic (sic) George Kent and State Department official Amos Hochstein raised concerns.

    From the conclusion:

    The records acquired by the Committees show that Hunter Biden and his family were involved in a vast financial network that connected them to foreign nationals and foreign governments across the globe. Hunter Biden and Archer, in particular, formed significant and consistent financial relationships with the corrupt oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky during their time working for Burisma and their firms made millions of dollars from that association while Joe Biden was vice president and the public face of the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy. Rosemont Seneca Thornton, an investment firm co-founded by Hunter Biden, received $3.5 million in a wire transfer from Elena Baturina, who allegedly received illegal construction contracts from her husband, the former mayor of Moscow. Moreover, Archer’s apparent receipt of money for a car from Kenges Rakishev of Kazakhstan while Vice President Biden was in Kyiv is especially concerning in light of the timing. And finally, Biden and Archer’s work with Chinese nationals connected to the Communist regime illustrate the deep financial connections that accelerated while his father was vice president and continued after he left office.

    Let he who has never received a $3.5 million wire transfer from the wife of the mayor of Moscow…

    Also, you know that bit up top where I said that this Hunter Biden scandal didn’t involve prostitutes? Yeah. Well, turns out it does:

    Records on file with the committee, the report says, “confirm that Hunter Biden sent thousands of dollars to individuals who have either: 1) been involved in transactions consistent with possible human trafficking; 2) an association with the adult entertainment industry; or 3) potential association with prostitution.”

    The report continued, detailing that some transactions were Russian- and Ukrainian-linked to what “appears to be an Eastern European prostitution or human trafficking ring.”

    Let ye who has never transferred money to an Eastern European sex trafficking ring…

    A few more tidbits:

  • Hunter Biden opened a bank account with Gongwen Dong to fund a $100,000 global spending spree with James Biden and Sara Biden. [I am trying to verify that the Gongwen Dong mentioned is the same Gongwen Dong who is CFO at Radiance Property Holdings Ltd. in Beijing. – LP]
  • Hunter Biden had business associations with Ye Jianming, Gongwen Dong, and other Chinese nationals linked to the Communist government and the People’s Liberation Army. Those associations resulted in millions of dollars in cash flow. [I believe the Ye Jianming in question is the founder and former Chairman of CEFC China Energy Company Limited (an energy and finance conglomerate) who has been in detention in China since 2018 on charges of bribery. -LP]
  • Let ye who has never opened a six-figure family slush fund with Communist Chinese officials…

    In addition highlighting these corrupt practices, the report highlights how Obama Administration officials knew about them, knew they were a problem, and swept them under the rug, even when they involved transfer of American military technology to communist China:

    The Chairmen’s investigation into potential conflicts of interest began in August 2019, with Chairman Grassley’s letter to the Department of Treasury regarding potential conflicts of interest with respect to Obama administration policy relating to the Henniges transaction. During the Obama administration, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) approved a transaction that gave control over Henniges, an American maker of anti-vibration technologies with military applications, to a Chinese government-owned aviation company and a China-based investment firm with established ties to the Chinese government. One of the companies involved in the Henniges transaction was a billion-dollar private investment fund called Bohai Harvest RST (BHR). BHR was formed in November 2013 by a merger between the Chinese-government-linked firm Bohai Capital and a company named Rosemont Seneca Partners. Rosemont Seneca was formed in 2009 by Hunter Biden, the son of then-Vice President Joe Biden, by Chris Heinz, the stepson of former Secretary of State John Kerry, and others.

    Evidently exporting American military technology to China was just a business opportunity to corrupt family members of high-ranking Obama Administration officials.

    If we had a truly independent press corps, reporters would ask Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden about his son’s financial shenanigans at his very next press conference.

    I wouldn’t hold your breath…

    Why Does The Liberal Overclass Hate Joe Rogan?

    September 23rd, 2020

    Glenn Greenwald has a piece up on why the liberal elites hates Joe Rogan:

    Rogan is rarely discussed in mainstream political and media circles, which raises its own questions. Why does someone who packs such a big punch in terms of audience size and influence receive so much less media attention than, say, cable news hosts with audience sizes far smaller than his? Presidential candidates certainly recognize Rogan’s importance: All of the major Democratic candidates, according to him, requested to appear on his show. (The only ones he invited on were Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, and Andrew Yang.)

    Rogan was in the news this week after President Donald Trump favorably responded to a guest’s suggestion that Rogan host a four-hour, sit-down presidential debate between the two candidates. The mere suggestion that someone like Rogan could host as prestigious and high-minded an event as a presidential debate prompted condescending scorn from establishment media precincts.

    Prior to that, one of the few times Rogan was discussed in mainstream political circles was when outrage among establishment Democrats ensued after Sanders touted a quasi-endorsement from Rogan. The argument was that Rogan’s views are so repellent, bigoted, and anathema to liberalism that no Democratic candidate should be associated with him (this anger was shared by some of Sanders’ own supporters including, reportedly, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez).

    What is it, by the standards of U.S. political and media orthodoxy, that makes Rogan so radioactive? In March, billionaire and former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg — who spoke at the 2004 GOP Convention in the middle of the Iraq War and war on terror to urge the reelection of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and who presided over and repeatedly defended the racially disparate “stop and frisk” police practice — endorsed Joe Biden for president, and Biden not only accepted but celebrated the endorsement, praising Bloomberg in the process…

    What are the standards that make Michael Bloomberg an acceptable endorsement to tout but not Joe Rogan, given that the billionaire three-term mayor and former Republican has taken far worse positions and done far more damage to far more people than the podcaster could ever dream of doing?

    Snip.

    What makes all of this more confounding is that Rogan is a fairly basic political liberal on almost every issue: He believes in the need for greater social spending for the nation’s poor and working class, opposes war and militarism, favors drug legalization, is adamantly pro-choice and pro-LGBT rights, and generally adheres to liberal orthodoxies on standard political debates. That is why he was so fond of Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard, and why Andrew Yang — whose signature issue was the universal basic income — was one of the few candidates he deemed worth talking to.

    The objections typically raised to Rogan concern his questioning of some of the very recent changes brought about by trans visibility and equality, particularly asking whether it is fair for trans women who have lived their entire lives and entered puberty as biological men to compete against cis women in professional sports (a question also asked — and even answered in the negative — by LGBT sports pioneer Martina Navratilova, among many others), and whether young children are emotionally and psychologically equipped to make permanent choices about gender reassignment therapies and gender dysphoria.

    If embracing and never questioning the full panoply of trans advocacy is a prerequisite to being permitted in decent society, I seriously doubt many prominent Democratic politicians will pass that test (even Kamala Harris, from San Francisco and the very blue state of California, has a very mixed record on trans rights). Moreover, though polling data is sparse, the data that is available show that there is still much work to do in this area: Only a small minority of Americans believe it is fair to allow trans women to participate in female professional sports.

    If the standard is that anyone who even entertains debates over the maximalist and most controversial questions in this very new and evolving social movement is to be cast out as radioactive, liberalism and the Democratic Party will be a very small group. It will also have to proceed without the vast majority of political leaders whom they currently follow. Even on this issue of trans rights, Rogan’s views are in accord with the standard Democratic Party view: He advocates full legal protection and dignity for the right of trans people to live with their gender respected.

    The other critique centers on Rogan’s willingness to invite on his show various pundits with far-right views. That’s a bizarre criticism of someone who purposely hosts a program designed to foster dialogue with people across the political spectrum. After all, if one employs the blatantly irrational tactic of attributing to Rogan the views of all his guests, he would be simultaneously everything and nothing.

    Snip.

    While Rogan is politically liberal, he is — argues former Obama 2008 campaign strategist and Rogan listener Shant Mesrobian — culturally conservative, by which he does not mean that Rogan holds conservative views on social issues (again, he is pro-choice and pro-LGBT rights). He means that Rogan exudes culturally conservative signals: He likes MMA fighting, makes crude jokes, hunts, and just generally fails to speak in the lingo of the professional managerial class and coastal elites. And it is those cultural standards, rather than political ones, that make Rogan anathema to elite liberal culture because, Mesrobian argued in a viral Twitter thread, liberals care far more about proper culture signaling than they do about the much harder and more consequential work of actual politics.

    Lefty Greenwald is right in that Rogan isn’t a conservative, and in the general vicinity of the answers he’s looking for, but not quite on target. A few points:

  • Rogan isn’t just opposed to tranny madness, he’s critical of almost the entire Critical Race Theory/Social Justice Warrior agenda. That’s why he’s had people like James Lindsay and Bret Weinstein on his show.
  • The left (falsely) feels that their supposed ability to police the boundaries of acceptable speech gives them a huge political advantage, and Rogan’s willingness to engage in anti-PC speech and terminology enrages them.
  • When Glennwald says “That’s a bizarre criticism of someone who purposely hosts a program designed to foster dialogue with people across the political spectrum,” that’s the point. Social justice Warriors don’t want dialog across the political spectrum, they want monolithic conformity and unwavering surrender to their demands so that they can burn the entire system down.
  • Remember, Social Justice Warriors hate liberals far more than they hate conservatives, and not just for the fact they stand in the way of the more immediate and important goal of seizing control of the Party. Social Justice Warriors hate liberals the same way the Islamic State hated Shiites far more than they hated Christians. You and I may be infidels, but to Social Justice Warriors, regular liberals are heretics who must repent or be destroyed.
  • Rogan is also hated by the Democratic Party regulars for refusing to hew to the party line. Mainstream Democrats will never forgive him for giving Tusli Gabbard a platform after they deemed her beyond the pale, or for daring to point out that Joe Biden has dementia. Ditto his support of Bernie Sanders, who the Party’s corrupt wing regarded as their biggest threat to maintaining control of the Party.
  • It’s not just language that gives Rogan an air of cultural conservatism. Rogan doesn’t believe in gun control, one of the few issues (along with abortion and a fervent desire to increase the size and scope of the federal government) that still ties the Democratic Party’s increasingly disjointed factions together.
  • Finally, what standards make Michael Bloomberg acceptable to Democratic Party elites and not Joe Rogan? Simple: money. The corrupt wing running the DNC is always willing to chuck ideological purity over the side to do the bidding of its donor class, while the insane wing is happy to sell temporary indulgences for sufficient quantities of Danegeld.
  • But Greenwald is right about one thing: Much of the elites loathing of Rogan, like that of President Trump, is instinctive, visceral and cultural. How dare that uncouth man be so influential? He’s not one of us.

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

    China Perfidy Roundup for September 22, 2020

    September 22nd, 2020

    Time to zig while everyone else is zagging over the Supreme Court nomination fight, and once again offer up a roundup of Communist China’s ongoing perfidy:

  • Trump’s war against the China class:

    Chances are that by the time you get to the end of this article, there will be news of another information operation targeting Donald Trump. There’s one a day now—each trumpeting a new mortal threat to the republic or some dastardly revelation based on sources that are usually anonymous. Whatever it is, it will serve the same purpose as the hundreds of similar sallies launched over the last four years—namely, to preserve and protect the position and privileges of America’s ruling elite.

    Trump stories are rarely about Trump. The same stories, or versions of them, would have targeted anyone who threatened to sever the American political, corporate, and cultural elite’s economic lifeline to the Chinese Communist Party. It is largely because Trump sought to decouple the United States from the CCP that America’s China Class, which owns the platforms on which Americans communicate, has waged a relentless campaign of information warfare against him through its social media and prestige media brands.

    Consider the last two anti-Trump info ops: He gratuitously denigrated the historical suffering of African Americans, and he expressed contempt for America’s war dead. These are the sort of false allegations that political operatives are tasked to manufacture and disseminate during election season. Their purpose is to reinforce a negative impression of the opposing party among whatever cohort is being addressed, and make the target spend resources—time and money and sometimes blood—on defense. That’s politics 101, since the time of the Romans.

    What’s new is that this is now journalism too. Since the internet defunded the press at the end of the 20th century and social media became the dominant player in America’s information space, journalism has abandoned the traditional standards and practices that once defined reporting. For instance, the smear holding that Trump is contemptuous of the military was supposedly based on four anonymous sources recalling exchanges from three years ago, which have been contradicted by dozens of named sources, some of whom were physically present when the comments were supposedly made—and some of whom have been public Trump opponents. In traditional journalistic terms, that’s not a news story—that’s a failed attack line.

    The press that existed in America from the end of the 19th century until the turn of this one was designed to inform, influence, and sometimes inspire or inflame fellow citizens. But for people under 30, the only kind of “journalism” they’ve ever known is more like Pravda in the old Soviet Union or the kinds of party media found throughout the Third World. Journalism is an insider’s game, in which the stories are often outlandish, but rarely true; their actual news value is the hints they may offer about shadowy maneuverings that affect people’s lives but take place out of public view, like the rise or fall of a particular colonel who is pictured standing closer to or farther away from El Caudillo or Al Rais. Stories aren’t about the realities they purport to depict; the real stories are always the stories about the story.

    American journalists, who now draw their paychecks directly and indirectly from the country’s largest economic interest—technopolies like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook—are now turning the public sphere into a phantasmagoria of conspiracy theories and hysteria to cement the politburo’s position and privilege.

    Accordingly, the debate in Washington, D.C., over which great power is feeding more disinformation into the 2020 election cycle isn’t real—it’s not Russia, as collusion impresario and Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff claims, nor, as Attorney General William Barr says, is it China, though he’s closer to the truth. The source of the purposeful disinformation pouring into the American public sphere like untreated sewage is the American elite, led by its tech oligarchs, who own the platforms on which information campaigns are staged and laundered to protect their core interests—foremost among them being cheap Chinese labor and access to Chinese markets.

    Snip.

    By the time the Clinton White House granted China most favored nation trade status in 2000, all of Washington knew that America was running a vast trade deficit that was destined to increase with accession to the World Trade Organization. The price for lifting tens of millions of rural Chinese peasants out of poverty through favorable trade arrangements would be tens of millions of American lives ruined, even as large American companies like Apple and Nike and bankers like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs got richer. The elite reasoned that they had no choice: The rise of China was inevitable. Why fight it?

    American political and corporate elites didn’t choose decline. They chose to get rich. By shipping America’s manufacturing base off to China, they seized a business opportunity the likes of which had never been seen before—an enormous captive labor force controlled by an authoritarian regime that guaranteed the steady production of goods at a fraction of what it would cost at home. American cultural elites (Hollywood, sports, art, etc.) who exploited the increasingly large Chinese market for their products provided cover for the China Class cohort with messaging that dovetailed with CCP propaganda.

    Who were Americans to judge a great and ancient civilization like China’s for jailing dissidents and enslaving the Uighur minority? Doesn’t America have its own history of slavery and political prisoners? It’s racist to protect American jobs. Those jobs aren’t coming back and there is nothing to be done about it, as Barack Obama famously said—unless you have a magic wand …

    Calling out the American elite for betraying American interests in the service of their own personal and corporate bottom lines helped Donald Trump win the presidency. But it’s not clear that he truly understood how deeply entwined Beijing’s interests were with America’s China Class—and that trying to decouple the two would lead to an attempt at a permanent coup by the new techno-elite, targeting not just him and his supporters but the foundations of the republic, from our military to the media, and from our justice system to the institution of the presidency itself.

    The American elite’s financial relationship with China is the key to understanding what’s been happening in America the past four years. Any president, Democrat or Republican, who took on China would have been targeted by the China Class. Because it was Trump flying the Republican banner who sided with America’s working men and women, the Democrats resorted to alliances with powers that now threaten the stability and security of the country.

    Overstated? A bit. But there are several kernels of truth in there…

  • Related: Major U.S. media companies that have ties to China. It’s an extensive list…
  • “Coronavirus Shock Claim: Refugee Scientist Says Virus Came from Army Lab“:

    Hong Kong-based virologist Yan Li-Meng, currently in hiding at an undisclosed location, claims that the COVID-19 coronavirus came from a People’s Liberation Army lab, and not from a Wuhan wet market as Beijing has claimed.

    EconoTimes reports on Yan:

    Speaking on a live stream interview on Taiwan’s News Agency Lude Press, she said, “At that time, I clearly assessed that the virus came from a Chinese Communist Party military lab. The Wuhan wet market was just used as a decoy.”

    “I knew that once I spoke up, I could disappear at any time, just like all the brave protesters in Hong Kong. I could disappear at any time, even my name would no longer exist,” Yan said according to a translation.

    Yan has been in hiding in the U.S. after fleeing Hong Kong in April. She last made waves in July after an interview with Fox News:

    Yan told Fox News in an exclusive interview that she believes the Chinese government knew about the novel coronavirus well before it claimed it did. She says her supervisors, renowned as some of the top experts in the field, also ignored research she was doing at the onset of the pandemic that she believes could have saved lives.

    She adds that they likely had an obligation to tell the world, given their status as a World Health Organization reference laboratory specializing in influenza viruses and pandemics, especially as the virus began spreading in the early days of 2020.

  • Here’s a shocker: Twitter has suspended her account.
  • The Crimes of the Red Emperor:

    On July 30th, Chinese state media published details of the upcoming fifth plenary session. The Party’s leaders have traditionally used the conference to lay out their next five-year plan, but this time a new detail was included—a pointed reference to “targets for 2035.” The date may give us some indication of how long Xi Jinping intends to retain his position as president. China has reached a crucial stage of its development, with superpower status at last in sight, and Xi has decided that only one man can be trusted to guide the country through the final stages of its glorious journey. That man is himself, of course. He has assumed the role of Great Helmsman, famously ordering the removal of presidential term limits in 2018 to ensure that the inferior leaders of the future don’t botch the job.

    In the years since becoming president, Xi has drawn state powers to himself like no other Chinese leader since Mao. Today he oversees all aspects of economic, political, cultural, social, and military reform, and at the same time he directs all aspects of national, internet, and information security.1 This dramatic fortification of his personal power requires him to focus on the silencing of dissent—again, to a greater degree than any of his predecessors since Mao. But dissent crops up in many and varied forms, even in China, and as a result we find that the president’s power base is built on countless personal tragedies.

    Xi has authorised his secret police to kidnap, “interrogate” (torture), and detain for six months anyone charged with endangering state security, which means, in reality, anyone who has expressed heretical views. Tens of thousands have disappeared as a result. Others have been caught in his anti-corruption dragnet—a convenient cover for him to get rid of dissenting voices. And more than a million people have been locked in concentration camps, most of them guilty only of belonging to the wrong ethnic group. If Xi really does stay in power until 2035 then we can expect the casualties to keep piling up for another 15 years. We owe it to these victims to tell a few of their stories, and to remember some of their names.

    Xi’s Gestapo thugs will sometimes come for TV newscasters just before they are due to go on air, but in 2018 they came for an elderly professor while he was actually on the air. Six or seven policemen turned up to drag Sun Wenguang, 83, away from his live interview with Voice of America. These are cynical terror tactics. It’s one thing to read a detached news report about someone having been arrested; it’s quite another to actually hear the panic in the old man’s voice as he shouts: “What are you doing? What are you doing? It’s illegal for you to come into my home!” That interview will not quickly be forgotten by Chinese listeners to Voice of America.

    “Deng Xiaoping kept everyone together by promising to make them rich,” says Nicholas Bequelin, East Asia Director of Amnesty International. “What keeps things together under Xi is fear. Fear of the system, where no matter how high you are, from one day to the next you can disappear.” 243 Party officials are reported to have killed themselves during Xi’s first few years in office, apparently terrified at the prospect of investigation by his dreaded Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. It is not difficult to understand why they might have chosen this route. Both body and will are broken in the Party’s detention centres. Each of those officials knew that after just a few months in police custody, he would no longer be the same person.

    Several sad examples of Chinese individuals broken by torture snipped.

    Xi Jinping has more in common with an emperor of the ancient world than the chairman of a revolutionary vanguard party. Despite this, somewhat paradoxically, he has resurrected the language of Mao’s era. In the words of John Garnaut, one-time advisor to the Australian government, “Xi’s language of ‘party purity’; ‘criticism and self-criticism’; ‘the mass line’; his obsession with ‘unity’; his attacks on elements of ‘hostile Western liberalism,’ ‘constitutionalism,’ and other variants of ideological ‘subversion’—this is all Marxism-Leninism as interpreted by Stalin as interpreted by Mao.”

    The Communist Party of the 21st century is a classic Chinese dynasty rather than the temporary guardian of a workers’ revolution. Its leaders are concerned with the Party itself, not with communism. But Xi is using elements of Marxism-Leninism as the glue to hold society together—like a religion, perhaps, or like Confucianism in earlier dynasties. “Our red nation will never change colour,” he tells the people. And with the return of the old phrases comes the return of the old practices. Xi knows that Western ideas are forever infecting the minds of his subjects; always perverting the purity of students, of lawyers, of government officials. Like Stalin and Mao, he knows that regular purges are necessary in order to preserve the spiritual health of the people.

    Xi’s main legacy, however, is surely the Xinjiang nightmare. Over the past few years a million or more Uyghur Muslims (and smaller numbers of Kazakhs and Kyrgyz) have been shut in concentration camps scattered about the western province. This mass incarceration is a response to terrorist attacks carried out by Uyghur separatists in Kunming and Ürümqi in 2014—attacks that came at the end of decades of tension between Uyghurs and Han Chinese, the country’s dominant ethnicity.

    The camps are designed to stamp out extremist thinking. Unfortunately, as with so many of Xi’s policies, there is no concern for collateral damage. Party leaders have been given instructions to round up anyone acting suspiciously, but this definition of “suspicious” appears to have been provided by a paranoid schizophrenic. Uyghurs have been interned for growing a beard; making plans to travel abroad; praying too much (or, on other occasions, not praying enough); setting clocks to two hours after Beijing time; even simply having been born in the 1990s. The wrong skin colour is itself cause for suspicion.

    From the outset, Xi told his officials to show no mercy. They took him at his word, and now the personal tragedies are mounting.

    Read the whole thing.

  • A look at how quickly China has put up massive new concentration camp complexes for Uighurs. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • The biggest reason behind the Uighur genocide: One Belt One Road:

  • China as faltering contender:

    The conventional wisdom has long been that, if there is to be a major war involving China and the U.S., it will be the result of either of a rising China initiating war to displace the failing U.S. hegemon, or a declining U.S. initiating a war to stymie a rising China. But this ignores the possibility that systemic or hegemonic war between China and the U.S. may not have anything to do with a rising power. It ignores the possibility that such a war might be initiated by what I will call a faltering contender, a once-rising power whose ascent is running out of steam and whose leaders believe that it must decisively reshape the global order now while it still can.

    The logic linking a faltering bid for hegemony to systemic war is simple enough. Faced with the prospect that it is losing the demographic or developmental race with other potential challengers, or merely with non-hegemonic rivals, a faltering contender will sometimes launch what might be thought of as a war of desperation. In this kind of war, a faltering contender will initiate hostilities because, having realized that it has reached the peak of its relative power, it decides it must initiate war now, even under unfavorable circumstances, because if it doesn’t, it will not only fail to achieve predominance but will face the prospect of catastrophic defeat in the near future. Such wars are not caused by states leaping through open windows of opportunity created by the military advantage they enjoy over their potential rivals. Instead, they are caused by stalled rising powers, at a current or imminent military disadvantage, attacking despite this disadvantage because it is the least bad of several very bad options open to them.

    Analogies to Germany in World War I and Japan in World War II snipped.

    China’s explosive economic growth since the beginning of reform in 1979 is a unique success story, as is the concomitant growth of its military power and global influence. Few could have predicted that within one generation of Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972, China would have risen to undisputed number two in the global pecking order. China now has the world’s second-largest economy, a world-class military with growing force projection capabilities, a worldwide network of ‘silk roads’ making it a central node in the global economy, and a diplomatic profile that makes it, if not an ‘indispensable nation,’ then something pretty close. And yet, at precisely the moment when its tide has reached heights not seen for centuries, the Chinese leadership has reason to believe that China’s star may not be in the ascendant much longer. President Xi’s failed One-Belt initiative, botched COVID-related ‘medical soft power’ play, abrogation of the ‘one-country, two-systems’ modus vivendi with Hong Kong, inconclusive border clashes with India, failure to sustain China’s economic momentum, policy-induced demographic time-bomb, and a growing sentiment that China is becoming less powerful and therefore less relevant player on the world stage suggest that China is no longer a rising power, but a faltering one. Viewed through this lens, the picture of the future that comes into focus is one of counterbalancing, containment, economic ‘decoupling,’ social turmoil, ethnic unrest, and general entropy culminating in collapse. Unless a forward-thinking Chinese leader might conclude, decisive steps are taken now to put things aright. And what might those steps be? Well, if history is any guide, they might include launching a war of desperation in the hope of securing the best geopolitical settlement possible before China is weakened to the point where it is simply condemned to another ‘hundred years of humiliation.’ What that war might look like – how it might erupt, whom it might involve, what course it might take – cannot be forecast with any certainty. But then neither could the war started by Germany in 1914 nor that by Japan in 1941. The point is that in those two earlier cases, the only rational course of action for the faltering challenger was the strategic Hail Mary pass. The question is, will a China whose rise is similarly stalling throw a comparably desperate strategic pass the early in the 21st century?

  • Chinese Antivirus Firm Was Part of APT41 ‘Supply Chain’ Attack.”

    The U.S. Justice Department this week indicted seven Chinese nationals for a decade-long hacking spree that targeted more than 100 high-tech and online gaming companies. The government alleges the men used malware-laced phishing emails and “supply chain” attacks to steal data from companies and their customers. One of the alleged hackers was first profiled here in 2012 as the owner of a Chinese antivirus firm.

    Charging documents say the seven men are part of a hacking group known variously as “APT41,” “Barium,” “Winnti,” “Wicked Panda,” and “Wicked Spider.” Once inside of a target organization, the hackers stole source code, software code signing certificates, customer account data and other information they could use or resell.

    APT41’s activities span from the mid-2000s to the present day. Earlier this year, for example, the group was tied to a particularly aggressive malware campaign that exploited recent vulnerabilities in widely-used networking products, including flaws in Cisco and D-Link routers, as well as Citrix and Pulse VPN appliances. Security firm FireEye dubbed that hacking blitz “one of the broadest campaigns by a Chinese cyber espionage actor we have observed in recent years.”

    Snip.

    One of the men indicted as part of APT41 — now 35-year-old Tan DaiLin — was the subject of a 2012 KrebsOnSecurity story that sought to shed light on a Chinese antivirus product marketed as Anvisoft. At the time, the product had been “whitelisted” or marked as safe by competing, more established antivirus vendors, although the company seemed unresponsive to user complaints and to questions about its leadership and origins.

    Those charged also include Zhang Haoran, Jiang Lizhi, Qian Chuan and Fu Qiang.

  • YouTube bans thousands of Chinese Astroturf accounts.
  • Is China stockpiling commodities?
  • Maybe because they’re on the brink of a major food shortage?
  • “Trump administration to soon end audit deal underpinning Chinese listings in U.S.

    The Trump administration plans to soon scrap a 2013 agreement between U.S. and Chinese auditing authorities, a senior State Department official said, a move that could foreshadow a broader crackdown on U.S.-listed Chinese firms under fire for sidestepping American disclosure rules.

    The deal, which set up a process for a U.S. auditing watchdog to seek documents in enforcement cases against Chinese auditors, was initially welcomed as a breakthrough in U.S. efforts to gain access to closely guarded Chinese financial information and bestowed a mark of legitimacy on Chinese regulators.

    But the watchdog, known as the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), has long complained of China’s failure to grant requests, meaning scant insight into audits of Chinese firms that trade on U.S. exchanges.

    The lack of transparency has prompted administration officials to lay the groundwork to exit the deal soon, according to Keith Krach, undersecretary for economic growth, energy and the environment, in a sign the PCAOB will give up on efforts to secure information from the Chinese.

    Good.

  • Journalist debunks NBC puff piece on Wuhan biolab.
  • “U.S. charges two Chinese nationals over coronavirus vaccine hacking scheme, other crimes.” That would be Li Xiaoyu and Dong Jiazhi.
  • “Chinese database details 2.4 million influential people, their kids, addresses, and how to press their buttons.” I’m surprised it’s that small. The OPM breach under Obama alone exposed over 4 million people.
  • “How a Chinese agent used LinkedIn to hunt for targets.”

    His doctorate research was about Chinese foreign policy and he was about to discover firsthand how the rising superpower seeks to attain influence.

    After his presentation, Jun Wei, also known as Dickson, was, according to US court documents, approached by several people who said they worked for Chinese think tanks. They said they wanted to pay him to provide “political reports and information”. They would later specify exactly what they wanted: “scuttlebutt” – rumours and insider knowledge.

    He soon realised they were Chinese intelligence agents but remained in contact with them, a sworn statement says. He was first asked to focus on countries in South East Asia but later, their interest turned to the US government.

    That was how Dickson Yeo set off on a path to becoming a Chinese agent – one who would end up using the professional networking website LinkedIn, a fake consulting company and cover as a curious academic to lure in American targets.

    Five years later, on Friday, amid deep tensions between the US and China and a determined crackdown from Washington on Beijing’s spies, Yeo pleaded guilty in a US court to being an “illegal agent of a foreign power”. The 39-year-old faces up to 10 years in prison.

    Snip.

    In 2017, Germany’s intelligence agency said Chinese agents had used LinkedIn to target at least 10,000 Germans. LinkedIn has not responded to a request for comment for this story but has previously said it takes a range of measures to stop nefarious activity.

    Some of the targets that Yeo found by trawling through LinkedIn were commissioned to write reports for his “consultancy”, which had the same name as an already prominent firm. These were then sent to his Chinese contacts.

    One of the individuals he contacted worked on the US Air Force’s F-35 fighter jet programme and admitted he had money problems. Another was a US army officer assigned to the Pentagon, who was paid at least $2,000 (£1,500) to write a report on how the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan would impact China.

    In finding such contacts, Yeo, who was based in Washington DC for part of 2019, was aided by an invisible ally – the LinkedIn algorithm. Each time Yeo looked at someone’s profile it would suggest a new slate of contacts with similar experience that he might be interested in. Yeo described it as “relentless”.

    According to the court documents, his handlers advised him to ask targets if they “were dissatisfied with work” or “were having financial troubles”.

  • How China killed globalism:

    When globalism’s obituary is finally written, and the mourners file past in their crisp suits and pantsuits, the cause of death will almost certainly read, the People’s Republic of China.

    China is the most obvious offender. Even before the Wuhan virus cut off countries from each other, the communist oligarchy had abused the world economy with massive digital theft, even more massive counterfeiting, product dumping and every possible form of economic warfare.

    That’s why any halfway serious adult on the other side supports Trump’s fight against China.

    Last year, even George Soros, the uber-globalist, called Trump’s trade war with China his greatest achievement. This year, during the coronavirus crisis, Soros came out against working with the People’s Republic of China against the virus.

    This certainly doesn’t buttress my theory that both Soros and China are backing antifa/#BlackLivesMatter, but it doesn’t entirely invalidate either.

  • China threatens to retaliate to restrict drug exports to America in retaliation for America restricting semiconductor exports. I keep saying that semiconductor equipment exports are a lot more critical and less replaceable. (Hat tip: Stephen Green.)
  • Chinese-made phones were infected with money-stealing malware straight out of the box.
  • China is ramping up nuclear and missile forces to rival the U.S..
  • China war scenarios.
  • University of Pennsylvania can’t explain $3 million donation from China.
  • And they’re not the only ones still taking Chinese money.

    Dozens of universities, including Columbia and Stanford, are hosting the Chinese government-funded Confucius Institute despite increasing scrutiny from the federal government.

    Many elite universities with Confucius Institute programs appear to be unfazed by the Trump administration’s decision last week to designate the D.C-based headquarters of the program as a “foreign mission”—a label the U.S. government applies to entities it finds to be directly controlled by a foreign power. Despite the announcement, nearly 50 colleges and universities will continue their partnership with Confucius Institute programs, which comes with up to $1 million in Chinese government funding.

    The cushy partnership between American universities and the Chinese regime has restricted academic freedom on campus, frequently forcing administrators and faculty members to self-censor to avoid Beijing’s wrath. While many universities rely on the organization to support Mandarin language classes and Chinese culture lessons, the program also bars its staff from discussing topics considered taboo by the Chinese Communist Party, such as the Xinjiang concentration camps or the Hong Kong protests.

  • Former deputy mayor of Jixi city in northeastern Heilongjiang Province flees to the U.S., “reveals the tight control of speech and information in China, the regime’s cover-up of COVID-19 cases, [and] Communist Party officials secretly taking medicine to prevent virus infection.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Ren Zhiqiang, former chairman of a state-owned real estate group who “openly criticized Beijing’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic was sentenced to 18 years in prison on corruption charges Tuesday, a court announced.”
  • India looks to ban 275 more Chinese apps.
  • Qualcomm lobbies for Chinese chips.
  • “Chinese miners in Hwange National Park put Zimbabwe wildlife at risk.” Particularly elephants.
  • Truth:

  • “Disney Editing Blunder: This Uighur Concentration Camp Can Be Clearly Seen In The Background Of ‘Mulan.'”
  • BidenWatch for September 21, 2020

    September 21st, 2020

    Greetings regular readers! I’m so glad you survived yesterday’s tragic mass die-off! Plus Biden campaign troubles, fundraising updates, the “Harris Administration,” and the Burisma report looms. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • Biden says 200 million people will die from the Wuhan coronavirus by the time he finishes his speech.

  • “Biden Says Trump Is Responsible For All Deaths Throughout Human History Since The Dawn Of Time.”
  • Is the Biden Campaign Struggling?”

    One of the lessons of 2016 was that the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign had all kinds of internal reports of problems, signs of insufficient support and enthusiasm in key states, and ominous indicators that they were nowhere nearly as strong and effective as most of the coverage suggested.

    The problem was that only a few reporters knew about those, and the ones that did had pledged to keep what they were seeing and hearing secret until after the election for their campaign narrative books. Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes wrote in Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, “over the course of a year and a half, in interviews with more than one hundred subjects, we started to piece together a picture that was starkly at odds with the narrative the campaign and the media were portraying publicly.” Florida Democratic political consultants warned the campaign they were in danger of losing the Sunshine State. Clinton’s Wisconsin volunteers lacked basic resources such as campaign literature to distribute while door-knocking. The Service Employees International Union wanted to send more volunteers to Michigan and the Clinton campaign told them to keep their people to Iowa instead.

    If you had really good Democratic Party or liberal activist-group sources, you heard these portentous stories that look like really key indicators in hindsight. If you didn’t, you were dependent upon the polls and the dominant narrative in the media that the Clinton campaign was an experienced, well-oiled machine while the Trump campaign was a bunch of amateur stumblebums constantly beset by infighting.

    Fast-forward to today, and it feels like these kinds of, “hey, the Democratic nominee’s campaign may not be as strong as it looks” stories are leaking out into the general news coverage much more frequently.

    Earlier this week, the New York Times wondered aloud about Democratic strength in Nevada:

    Nevada’s Democratic political machine was held up as a model for other states where neither party has consistently dominated. But it was a machine built for another era.

    Its success relied on hundreds of people knocking on thousands of doors for face-to-face conversations with voters. Now, there are fewer than half as many people canvassing for Democratic voters as there were in September 2016. And some Democratic strategists warn that Nevada could be in 2020 what Wisconsin was in 2016 — a state that the Democrats assume is safely in their column but that slips away.

    The Washington Post reported that Latino Democrats are worried about Biden having lackluster numbers among this demographic:

    Top Latino Democrats are voicing growing concern about Joe Biden’s campaign, warning that lackluster efforts to win the support of their community could have devastating consequences in the November election.

    Recent polls showing President Trump’s inroads with Latinos have set off a fresh round of frustration and finger-pointing among Democrats, confirming problems some say have simmered for months. Many Latino activists and officials said Biden is now playing catch-up, particularly in the pivotal state of Florida, where he will campaign Tuesday — the start of National Hispanic Heritage Month — for the first time as the presidential nominee. Reaching out to Latino voters will be a key focus on the visit, according to a person with knowledge of the trip. Biden’s campaign said he will be in Tampa and Kissimmee, two areas with large Puerto Rican populations.

    Plus concerns about the campaigns in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

  • Speaking of which:

    “I can’t even find a sign,” [Don] Sabbe says outside a Kroger’s in Sterling Heights, where surrounding cars fly massive Donald Trump flags that say “No More Bullsh-t” and fellow shoppers wear Trump T-shirts for their weekend grocery runs. “I’m looking for one of those storefronts. I’m looking for a campaign office for Biden. And I’m not finding one.”

    The reason Sabbe can’t find a dedicated Biden campaign field office is because there aren’t any around here. Not in Macomb County, the swing region where Sabbe lives. It’s not even clear Biden has opened any new dedicated field offices in the state; because of the pandemic, they’ve moved their field organizing effort online. The Biden campaign in Michigan refused to confirm the location of any physical field offices despite repeated requests; they say they have “supply centers” for handing out signs, but would not confirm those locations. The campaign also declined to say how many of their Michigan staff were physically located here. Biden’s field operation in this all-important state is being run through the Michigan Democratic Party’s One Campaign, which is also not doing physical canvassing or events at the moment. When I ask Biden campaign staffers and Democratic Party officials how many people they have on the ground in Michigan, one reply stuck out: “What do you mean by ‘on the ground?’”

  • Speaking of swing states, voters believe Biden wants to defund the police and hasn’t done enough to condemn rioting.

    Among all Wisconsin voters, 56 percent say Biden hasn’t done enough to denounce the rioting versus just 31 percent who say he has. (Even among Democrats, 28 percent think he hasn’t done enough.) The numbers are similar in Minnesota at 54/35. Biden has said repeatedly that he doesn’t want to defund the police and he’s made several on-camera statements condemning the violence over the past few weeks, but that message isn’t getting through. And it’s helping to keep Trump close.

  • Biden took a campaign trip to Duluth, Minnesota. It didn’t work out so well:

    Democrats are concerned that a groundswell of support for President Trump outside of Minnesota’s Twin Cities may be enough to win him the state over 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

    Biden, the former two-term vice president and 36-year Delaware senator, visited carpenter apprentices and other union workers near Duluth on Friday, his first trip to Minnesota in more than 1,000 days, according to the Trump campaign.

    Yet, despite his team releasing scant details about his itinerary, even to the local press, Republicans outnumbered Democrats at Hermantown’s Jerry Alander Carpenter Training Center, worrying those who are opposed to Trump clinching a second term on Nov. 3.

    The Republican National Committee and the Minnesota GOP organized roughly 300 people to line Miller Trunk Highway for Biden’s stop. Democrats had less than half that number and told the Washington Examiner they didn’t know one another. Some, though, had traveled more than two hours from Minneapolis to see their party’s standard-bearer.

    Tommy Moe, a retired miner from Virginia, Minnesota, predicted that the presidential race in his state would be close again after 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton defeated Trump by only 1.5 percentage points (or 45,000 ballots). Moe, 65, based his prediction on the number of union workers he knew who felt “an affinity” for Trump because of the China trade deal and his unorthodox approach to politics.

    “We didn’t have a very good turnout,” he said. “If the Democrats don’t get their act together and start getting as fired up as the Republican side is … we need a turnout. Democrats win if they turn out.”

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • “Model that predicted 5 of past 6 presidential elections has Trump in 2020 by ‘landslide.”

    “I focus on early primaries and the way the candidates perform in those early contests,” Norpoth said in the press release. “It’s a very good predictor, and a leading indicator of what’s going to happen in November.”

    The professor said he was unsurprised at the model’s prediction this year, citing Trump’s performance in the primaries earlier in the winter.

    “When I looked at New Hampshire and I saw that Donald Trump got 85 percent of the votes … I was pretty sure what the model was going to predict,” he said in the release.

    Joe Biden, on the other hand, pulled down only 8.4% in New Hampshire, Norpoth said, a number that is “unbelievable for a candidate with any aspirations of being president,” he stated.

  • Enjoy some “Oh God, how I hate Trump, but Democrats are insane” hand-wringing from American Enterprise Institute wonk Danielle Pletka:

    [Three paragraphs of pro-forma #OrangeManBad snipped]

    I fear that former vice president Joe Biden would be a figurehead president, incapable of focus or leadership, who would run a teleprompter presidency with the words drafted by his party’s hard-left ideologues. I fear that a Congress with Democrats controlling both houses — almost certainly ensured by a Biden victory in November — would begin an assault on the institutions of government that preserve the nation’s small “d” democracy. That could include the abolition of the filibuster, creating an executive-legislative monolith of unlimited political power; an increase in the number of Supreme Court seats to ensure a liberal supermajority; passage of devastating economic measures such as the Green New Deal; nationalized health care; the dismantling of U.S. borders and the introduction of socialist-inspired measures that will wreck an economy still recovering from the pandemic shutdown.

    I fear the grip of Manhattan-San Francisco progressive mores that increasingly permeate my daily newspapers, my children’s curriculums and my local government. I fear the virtue-signaling bullies who increasingly try to dominate or silence public discourse — and encourage my children to think that their being White is intrinsically evil, that America’s founding is akin to original sin. I fear the growing self-censorship that guides many people’s every utterance, and the leftist vigilantes who view every personal choice — from recipes to hairdos — through their twisted prisms of politics and culture. An entirely Democratic-run Washington, urged on by progressives’ media allies, would no doubt only accelerate these trends.

    Nor do Biden’s national-security positions reassure me. While he promises a welcome change in style and a renewed respect for U.S. alliances, Biden would, like Trump, pull our troops from the Middle East and South Asia. Worse yet, he would slash defense spending and likely renew the Obama administration’s misbegotten love affair with Iran’s tyrants. Then there is the Democratic Party’s hostility to the state of Israel. Biden supporters will clamor that the candidate’s history is very pro-Israel, but as president would he be strong enough to stand up to the new Democratic Party’s less-than-ardent support for the Jewish state?

    To which I can only reply: What the hell took you so long to figure this out? (And then, to prove the extent of her Beltway Blinders, she turns out a paragraph on “execrable gun-toting racists.”)

  • “The former vice president’s campaign reported on Sunday that it and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) began September with $466 million in the bank – roughly $141 million more than the cash on hand for the president and the Republican National Committee (RNC).” Snip. “The infusion of cash allowed the Biden campaign to vastly outspend Trump’s team to run TV ads in August and September.” Big ad spends and no ground game? Sounds like Team Biden is trying to rerun the Jeb! strategy…
  • The Burisma report is due out this week:

    Republicans are preparing to release a report in a matter of days on their investigation focused on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, a move they hope will put fresh scrutiny on the Democratic nominee just weeks from the election.

    The controversial probe, spearheaded by Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), is focused broadly on Obama-era policy and Hunter Biden’s work for Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings.

    The GOP report, which is set to be released this week, is expected to argue that Hunter Biden’s work impacted Obama-era Ukraine policy and created a conflict of interest given then-Vice President Joe Biden’s work in the area.

  • “Biden Institute Board Member, Obama-Era Cabinet Sec Met With Chinese Communist Party To ‘Create More Ties,’ Visited Communist Propaganda Front.” That would be Obama Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx.
  • AOC thinks hard-left Democrats can make Biden dance to their tune.
  • Kamala Harris called the next Presidential Administration “the Harris Administration“…
  • … and so did Joe Biden.

  • Biden’s incoherent Iran policy:

    Trump, Biden claims, “could not rally a single one of America’s closest allies” to support the extension of the [arms] embargo. What he neglects to mention is that the expiration date on the embargo was set by the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated by the Obama administration and described by Biden as “a policy that was working to keep America safe.” That policy was, per Biden, discarded by Trump in favor of one “that has worsened the threat.” So which is it: Did the Obama-Biden Iran policy keep America safe? Or is the best argument against the Trump administration that they have failed to successfully roll back Obama-era policies?

    Snip.

    He fails entirely, in his op-ed ostensibly addressing the Iranian threat, to come even close to describing the full extent of how its regime has targeted U.S. forces in the Middle East, committed grievous human-rights violations against its own people, and funded terrorist organizations and plots around the globe. His failure to reckon fully with the evil of Ayatollah Khamenei seems indicative of not only his less serious estimation of the Iranian threat, but also the fact that he has made his peace with the current regime staying in power over the long term. He makes this belief explicit when he calls “Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’” strategy “a boon to the regime in Iran.” He again avoids explaining how, probably because this claim is untrue by every available metric.

    Maximum pressure has effectively choked the Iranian economy. The JCPOA had helped Iran achieve GDP growth rates of 12.5 percent in 2016 and 3.7 percent in 2017. In 2018 — the same year the U.S. exited the deal — Iran’s economy contracted by 5.4 percent. 2019 was even worse, at -7.6 percent. Notably, this economic disaster has led to Iranians flooding into the streets many times over the last two years to protest not only pocketbook issues, but the regime’s restriction of basic freedoms. While Biden may be content to leave the ayatollahs in power, the Iranian people appear to be far less willing. Furthermore, Iran’s regional position has been undermined by the Trump administration’s successful efforts to strengthen Israel’s relationships with Arab nations, including the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain.

    Instead of backing maximum pressure, Biden supports what he calls a “smart way to be tough on Iran.” Ignoring Iran’s flagrant violations of the JCPOA even before the U.S.’s withdrawal, the sunset provisions on the agreement, and Israel’s discovery of documents detailing Iran’s nuclear program, Biden falsely asserts that the JCPOA had “verifiably block[ed] Iran’s pathways to a nuclear weapon.”

  • Trump “Strongly Approve” number hits highest level ever.
  • Creepy Joe plays Spanish-language song “Despacito” whose lyrics translate into things Creepy Joe is famous for. “I want to breathe your neck slowly.”
  • “Biden Attempts To Appeal To Hispanics By Performing Authentic Mexican Hat Dance While Firing Pistols Into The Air.”
  • “A man featured in a campaign video with Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is under federal investigation for soliciting sex with minors, according to USA Today.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Ace of Spades HQ has a Slow Joe speech roundup.
  • College professors give seven times as much to Biden as Trump. That’s quite shocking. I would have expected the ratio to be more like 20-1 or 50-1. Biden must have remarkably poor fundraisers. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • ” Democrats’ new strategy for winning the White House: Threaten riots if they lose.” The public doesn’t seem so hoit on the idea…
  • Team Trump isn’t messing around:

    (Hat tip: ConservativeTreehouse.)

  • “CNN Forum Throws Nothing But Softballs and Pathetic Biden Strikes Out Anyway.” “A real low point came when the declining Biden couldn’t remember what to call the place where the mail goes.”
  • It was even more slanted than the snippets suggest.
  • “Here Are Biden’s Biggest Lies From His CNN Town Hall.” Including his fracking flip flops and that golden oldie, the Fine People Hoax. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • It wouldn’t be a Democratic “Town Hall” if they’re weren’t at least one plant:

  • Feel the enthusiasm:

  • Slow Joe getting even slower:

  • More:

  • A theme emerges:

  • How old is he Johnny?

  • Profiles in pandering.
  • “Biden Getting Excited As Segregation Coming Back Into Style.”

    Segregation, what a blast from the past! I remember when I was already a full-grown man in the year 1960 and me and the boys would gather outside the soda shop to make sure only the white folks got in. Maybe those jeans and that jacket I wore are back in style again too. Jill? Where’s that trunk with all my old clothes?”

    “I was way ahead of the curve on this one, man.”

  • “Genius Trump Nominates Joe Biden To Supreme Court Forcing Dems To Accuse Him Of Sexual Assault.”
  • “Biden Forgets To Put On Clothes, Media Praises His Majestic Outfit.”
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