Politics

In the end, there was nothing the protesting left, the heavily slanted progressive media or the Democratic party could do. Amy Coney Barrett is now a Supreme Court justice. Cable news voices like Jake Tapper were left aghast that she dared to attend her swearing-in ceremony at the White House. That was it. Going forward, we are left with a litany of threats about court packing (legislatively expanding the amount of seats on the Supreme Court) and ending the legislative filibuster. The latter would allow Democrats to pass a radical agenda, which includes statehood for Washington DC and Puerto Rico, a Green New Deal to end fossil fuels and whatever other fanatical ideas have been floating around in progressive circles.

In just over a week, the Empire hopes to strike back. Joe Biden personifies the foreign policy of endless war that Democrats and neoconservatives pursued for 25 years, from the end of the Cold War until the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Biden voted for the biggest and most foolish intervention of that era, the Iraq War of 2003. He has not so much repudiated this act as tried to exculpate himself for it, claiming that in voting to authorize military force he didn’t think military force would be used. This is not credible on its face, and not the way anyone understood the vote at the time. It was as clear a vote for war as any vote has been since World War Two.

It’s hard not to be impressed by Donald J. Trump’s sheer tenacity, especially when you consider he just had COVID. The President just gave a very long and energetic speech at a rally in New Hampshire, and now he’s off again on to another event in Maine. ‘I’m doing three or four of these suckers a day,’ he says. ‘That’s not bad.’ He’s drastically down in the polls. All those clever mathematical models suggest he has about a 10 percent chance of winning. Yet he’s a fanatically competitive man, an extraordinary campaigner, and a political force that nobody quite understands. He is also a great finisher.

Make no mistake about it, I’m a suburban middle-class mom of two and a Trump supporter. I have been ever since I saw him coming down that escalator. I’m voting for Donald Trump because he has clear, defined goals for Americans — all Americans — and for America. Despite the left’s constant attacks on him, he persists and delivers — that’s tenacity. He doesn’t back down. He’s a fighter and that’s what we need for our country, now more than ever. When I voted for him in 2016, I saw this man as more of a regular American than any career politician. What you see is what you get. Just the truth — that’s what we needed in 2016 and what we still need in 2020.

Election polling has been largely consistent since the pandemic hit the US: Joe Biden is the heavy favorite. But one historically accurate pollster is sticking to his own data, which shows a closer race than expected.Raghavan Mayur is the president and founder of TechnoMetrica, which runs the IBD/TIPP poll. His polling predicted the winner of the past four presidential elections. IBD/TIPP was one of only two polls in 2016 that had Donald Trump beating Hillary Clinton. Mayur has received widespread praise for his accuracy, yet he still largely remains an outlier in 2020 polling.‘I’m a small business guy — I don’t have the time to go around looking at what other people do,’ he told The Spectator. ‘I do what we do. And it has turned out to be pretty good.

8:30 p.m. ET — Matt McDonald: Hello and welcome to The Spectator’s live blog for the second and final debate between President Donald Trump and former vice president Joe Biden. Tonight's proceedings kick off in 30 minutes at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. Hopefully we can offer a better quality of debate… 8:31 p.m. ET — Amber Athey: I just took an hour-long boomer nap to really simulate the experience of Biden and Trump preparing for the debate stage. Feeling very refreshed and ready to call anything I disagree with Russian disinformation. 8:32 p.m. ET — Chadwick Moore: I'm wondering if Trump goes in attack-dog style again it will be more effective this time, given the scandals.

Mike Pompeo has ‘every reason to believe’ director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe’s assessment that the recent story about Hunter Biden and his emails is not the product of Russian disinformation. https://twitter.com/jseldin/status/1318933935007633410 'I have every reason to believe he's got it exactly right,' the secretary of state said during a Wednesday press briefing in response to a question from The Spectator. The New York Post's report contains emails purportedly from Hunter Biden in which he discusses setting up meetings between foreign business associates and vice president Joe Biden.

The most under-appreciated fact of the 2020 presidential campaign is that Kamala Harris, the woman likely to soon replace the geriatric Biden should the Democratic ticket win, is a creature of San Francisco political machine. Harris was born 56 years ago today in Berkeley, the daughter of two graduate students, and spent her formative years in the East Bay. She attended Howard University where she learned nothing about rap, returning to the Bay Area afterwards. Her political career took off after an affair with then California State Assembly Speaker, and the future mayor of San Francisco, and the City’s powerbroker, Willie Brown. Brown was twice her age at the time, and his wife was battling cancer.

Sigmund Freud famously noted that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. In the case of fracking, even Freud would have acknowledged that fracking is about so much more than just fracking. That is why the issue is so important to voters beyond those in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas where so much oil and natural gas is produced. That is also why Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have tried to walk back their positions on fracking from the Democratic primary, when they said they’d ban fracking and cease the use of carbon-based energy sources, as well as push for the budget-busting and progressive utopian Green New Deal. Of course, it’s about jobs.

Trump hatred has been with us since he announced his candidacy five years ago. But we can all feel the escalating fever pitch of fury that has marked the weeks leading up to the election. In social settings, friends of otherwise sound temperament seem uncharacteristically uncontrolled in their visceral rage when referring to the President. Just mention his name and you'll be interrupted with 'Oh I hate him, he's a sociopath' or the requisite 'If he wins, I swear I'm moving out of the country!'The question, I always wonder, is why this intense level of revulsion? It is so deep, so impervious to reasoned discussion. Policy differences can’t account for this level of skin crawling. The conversation is really never about SALT deductions or fracking. Even abortion is of secondary concern.