Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories

‘He said, she said’ reports from the MAGA march

It’s all so infantile isn’t it? Antifa jackals harass Donald Trump fans during their ‘Million MAGA March’ on the streets of DC. The ‘protesters’ steal Trump caps and set them on fire. They throw fireworks at people. Skirmishes break out, some people get hurt. There’s a stabbing. Underpaid online reporters stalk the scenes with their iPhones, trying to record the violence and make it go viral. Social media users dutifully share scraps of aggro-porn. President Trump, sounding not unlike a teenager reporting on fisticuffs in high school, tweets: ‘ANTIFA SCUM ran for the hills today when they tried attacking the people at the Trump Rally, because those people aggressively fought back.’ Which hills?

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Washington State is a worrisome window into the future

SeattleI have seen the future, and it looks much like Washington State.But let’s get there by steps. The Pacific Northwest, for much of its history dominated by the logging and fishing industries, has an aggressive blue-collar tradition. Radical groups like the Industrial Workers of the World — or so-called Wobblies — used to congregate there. Sometimes on a Saturday night in downtown Seattle old anarchists can still be found singing their ballads of longshoremen’s revolts. The place has been called 'the hideout capital of the USA’, a far-flung outpost where generations of the nation’s failed, fed-up, and felonious have gone to disappear.

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refusing election result

Can you really blame Trump supporters for refusing to accept the election result?

It's been a week and a half since Election Day and the results are still not certified — some votes counts, like in Georgia, are close enough to require a recount, and there are numerous legal challenges put forth by the Trump campaign. Still, because the mainstream media has 'called' the race for Joe Biden, the left has arrogantly told Trump supporters to just concede already. The allegations of voter fraud, fact checkers claim, are unsubstantiated and baseless. Some of them may very well be, but it was a pretty well accepted fact in America (until Donald Trump brought it up, that is) that people cheated in elections. In fact, Biden's newly minted chief of staff, Ron Klain, tweeted in 2014 that 68 percent of people believe elections are rigged 'because they are.

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Why would Biden grant the press access now?

Joe Biden had barely finished his acceptance speech on Saturday when journalists, tired and weary of four years of mean tweets, started congratulating each other. Jake Tapper was dropping 'Bye Felicias' on Twitter like a catty mean girl to White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. Jim Acosta could finally take a break. It was no longer a dangerous time to tell the truth in America. ​Members of the national media seem to be under the impression that the result of the 2020 election was about them and their adversarial relationship with Donald Trump. Margaret Sullivan, writing at the Washington Post exhaled, 'The media never fully learned how to cover Trump. But they still might have saved democracy.’ At ease, soldiers.

The Trumpist agenda going forward

While Donald Trump appears to have lost the 2020 presidential election, Trump’s agenda of populism focused on the working class and putting America first won, well, bigly. Contrary to the Democrats’ claim that Joe Biden’s razor-thin win gave them a mandate, the only mandate America’s voters gave this year is that they want more Trumpism. To wit, the swing of roughly the same number of voters in a handful of states by which Trump won in 2016 is the gap of Biden’s win. Going forward, Republicans must focus on maintaining that sentiment and fight off attempts by NeverTrumpers and Establishment Republicans to throw Trumpism out with Trump.

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Biden’s NeverTrump transition

Former Vice President Joe Biden hasn't yet been officially certified as the winner of the 2020 presidential election and the Trump campaign has launched numerous legal challenges to the results. Nonetheless, Biden is moving ahead with his transition team under the assumption he will be the next president. On Monday, he announced that his coronavirus task force would include Dr Rick Bright, a whistleblower from the Trump administration. Bright was a high-ranking Health and Human Services official until he was demoted in May of this year. Bright alleged in a whistleblower complaint that he was ousted because he was critical of the Trump administration's response to COVID-19 and was resistant to efforts to fast-track the distribution of hydroxychloroquine to treat the virus.

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wings joe biden songsheet

Joe Biden’s shaky songsheet

In his victory speech on Saturday night, Joe Biden quoted the 1970s Roman Catholic hymn, ‘On Eagle’s Wings’. The President-elect said that its message helped him cope with his various personal tragedies, which are undoubtedly very real and sad. Still, Cockburn wonders whether Biden is correct in his assessment that this particular hymn ‘captures the faith that sustains’ America. If Biden is right about that, then Cockburn wonders whether the ‘battle for the soul’ of the nation was even worth having.Of course, Cockburn doesn’t pretend to be a Catholic, let alone a good one, but having borrowed a friend’s Bible, he suspects that the hymn in question — a bastardization of Psalm 91 — rather misses the point.

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The need to concede

The political and emotional climax of US presidential elections comes when the losing candidate, accompanied by a teary spouse, tersely but gamely concedes defeat and wishes the victor well. With anxiety, I worry what might happen if this little-noted but critical ritual fails to take place in 2020. No law requires a concession speech, no agreement demands it; but this informal ceremony has an essential role in confirming the paramount rule of democracy, that the losing candidates has heard and accepted the voters’ verdict. After a hard-fought, even vicious, campaign, the vanquished assures the victor he accepts the results, permitting the country to move forward.

Pfizer U-turns at warp speed

Pfizer announced Monday that a coronavirus vaccine the company was working on had proven to be 90 percent effective at preventing COVID-19. It is not only great news for the country, but appeared to be a big win for the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed. Vice President Mike Pence praised the 'public-private partnership' for spurring development of the vaccine. It turns out that Fox News's Sean Hannity was essentially right when he said that Trump could cure cancer and the media still wouldn't like him. Pfizer immediately distanced itself from its partnership with the Trump administration. The media quickly followed suit, determining that the President deserves no credit for the vaccine's quick development.

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jonathan sacks

Jonathan Sacks: morality is not optional

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who died on Saturday at the age of 72, was a modern Maimonides, a guide to the perplexed in an age of spiritual confusion and moral dissolution. A philosophy student before he entered the rabbinate, Sacks combined the legacies of Athens and Jerusalem and became the leading public intellectual and ethicist of our time. A source of pride to Britain’s small and sometimes beleaguered Jewish community, Sacks did not just work to improve the moral state of the Jewish people and defend the state of Israel. Adeptly linking the particular to the universal, he defended the religious conscience, and identified the common ground through which interfaith negotiations have transformed Jewish-Christian relations.

Was the Green party’s ballot exclusion significant?

Within the last year, election officials and judges in a few key swing states reduced the Green party’s erstwhile ballot access to write-in only. They likely intended to reduce the Greens’ vote share to the benefit of Joe Biden and the Democratic party.Voters in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin might have noticed the unusual absence of the Green party’s presidential ticket from their 2020 ballots. Democrat-controlled courts and Democratic election officials denied Green presidential candidate Howie Hawkins and his VP pick Angela Walker a place on those states’ ballots.

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Joe Biden: let this grim era of demonization in America begin to end

My fellow Americans, the people of this nation have spoken. They have delivered us a clear victory. A convincing victory. A victory for 'We the People.'We have won with the most votes ever cast for a presidential ticket in the history of this nation — 74 million. I am humbled by the trust and confidence you have placed in me.I pledge to be a President who seeks not to divide, but to unify. Who doesn’t see Red and Blue states, but a United States. And who will work with all my heart to win the confidence of the whole people. For that is what America is about: The people. And that is what our administration will be about.I sought this office to restore the soul of America. To rebuild the backbone of the nation — the middle class.

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concede

Trump should concede — with a caveat

The networks have made official what seemed to have occurred when Georgia flipped from red to blue: Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. We can spend the next few months analyzing why Donald Trump lost as I started to do on Friday, but fundamentally few of the voting irregularities cited by the Trump campaign appear to be widespread enough to reverse one, let alone several, of the states Trump would need to flip to get to 270 electoral votes. That doesn’t, of course, mean the Democrats in the big cities didn’t engage in shenanigans. It simply means it will be hard to prove what they did after the fact.

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Why did Florida’s Cubans vote for Trump?

At its narrowest point, the Florida Straits is only 93 miles wide. You could swim it, if you were exceptionally motivated and athletic. I remember the first time I landed at Miami airport. I was struck by the amount of Spanish being spoken, and the signs advertising Cuban coffee. I immediately understood the dynamic that led to southern Florida jokingly being dubbed ‘Northern Cuba’.As one of the earliest states to announce its results, Florida crushed Biden supporters’ hopes for a landslide early in the night. Trump’s victory has been attributed to the Cuban vote. Comedian Jaboukie Young-White tweeted ‘the kkkubans came out in full force’ after Trump’s victory in Florida was announced.

Why Trump lost

With the last dominoes of Georgia and Pennsylvania falling, there is now clarity on the 2020 election cycle. Based on all of the data available at the time and, more fundamentally, the political antennae cultivated over the last three decades, I predicted Donald Trump would be reelected with a 305 to 233 electoral vote victory. My presidential tally was wrong. Joe Biden will secure at least 306 electoral votes, assuming North Carolina also doesn’t fall when final numbers are released next week.But (there is always a but), in my defense, I was also right.

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nixon

Richard Nixon took the high road in 1960. Donald Trump should now

‘You gotta swallow this one, they stole it fair and square.’ That’s a Republican hack speaking to Richard Nixon, as fabricated in Oliver Stone’s 1995 biopic about our nation’s 37th president. The reference is to the 1960 election, in which Nixon’s opponent John F. Kennedy prevailed by 303 electoral votes to his opponent’s 219, although the popular margin was a scant 113,000, or about 0.16 percent, out of 68,837,000 ballots cast.

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Joe Biden wins the presidency

Joe Biden will become the 46th president of the United States. Decision Desk HQ, a non-partisan election results site, declared that Biden had won the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and therefore the presidency, at 8:50 a.m. ET on Friday morning. AP, CNN, ABC, NBC, Reuters, CBS and the New York Times called Pennsylvania for Biden at 11:30 a.m. ET Saturday morning. A win in Pennsylvania takes Biden to 273 Electoral College votes, past the threshold of 270 needed to secure the White House. The Democratic candidate then won Arizona, Georgia and Nevada, putting him at 306 electoral votes. The Associated Press and Fox News both called Arizona for Biden earlier in the week. Fox's decision is said to have incensed Trump senior advisers.

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The subtle sexism of ‘feminist’ Democrats

Over the past five years, we’ve seen an endless stream of hand-wringing and hysteria around the misogyny of Donald Trump. The President is the White Patriarchy epitomized: a man who believes women are objects for his grabbing, useless unless they are pretty to look at or satisfying their husbands. What a jerk!To be fair, Trump is a jerk. And, in my opinion, a misogynist. But he’s not the only one. There’s a group that prides itself on #MeTooing the world, tweeting the words cishetero patriarchy as much as possible in an effort to really stick it to the man (Jack Dorsey must be tormented) and repeating, ad nauseam, that Trump’s win is proof that Americans just loooove their bigotry. Yet they don’t seem to have much respect for women themselves.

Is America a banana republic?

Is it all over bar the litigation? Joe Biden is six Electoral College votes shy of victory, unless Arizona flips. The Trump campaign will contest to death. They’ll claim voter fraud in Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania — or any state they have narrowly lost. Those claims may have legitimacy; it’s too early to tell. But nobody said democracy was fair. The pursuit of power is a grubby business. With an electorate as big as America’s there will always be shadiness around the edges. We all knew that a late and vast blue mail-in surge was coming. We just didn’t know it would be this late. Donald Trump will cry foul. He has been suggesting that the election would be rigged for years. Mail-in voting is indeed open to all sorts of abuses.

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Why did Trump lose support among white men?

As of Wednesday morning, Joe Biden seems to have the easiest path to victory in the presidential election. He currently holds leads in Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin with most of the remaining votes being mail-ins that should break in his favor. If Biden does pull it off, he may owe a big thank you to white men. Democrats claimed in 2016 that Trump’s shock victory was the result of white grievance politics. The President’s base, they said, was made up of white working-class voters railing against changing demographics in their country and getting payback for the country electing its first black president. Van Jones famously called it a ‘whitelash’.

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ben sasse

Has Ben Sasse won it for Joe Biden?

Will a Republican senator from Nebraska be the man who hands Joe Biden the White House? Ben Sasse has tried his best to do that. Sasse easily won reelection in the safe red state of Nebraska on Tuesday, leading his Democratic opponent by nearly 30 points with 85 percent of the vote in. But President Trump has not fared so well; in fact, he lost the vote in Nebraska’s Second Congressional district. Since Nebraska, like Maine, divides its Electoral College votes by district, that means Joe Biden gets an elector from Nebraska. And for that, Biden can thank Sasse, who next to Mitt Romney is the sitting Republican senator who has been most outspokenly critical of President Trump.

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The integrity of the Constitution must be protected

As I write this, the outcome of the US presidential election remains undecided. To judge by media reports, it may take days to determine who the winner is. A few quick observations: The pollsters got it wrong again. Forty-eight hours ago, the chatter was all about a Democratic landslide. Observers were confidently speculating about who would land the top jobs in a Biden administration. I don’t pretend to understand the science of polling. But I know a bankrupt enterprise when I see one. Many observers worried about a close election with no clear outcome leading to a constitutional crisis of some sort. The wilder and more irresponsible speculation imagined US troops being summoned to intervene and sort matters out. It grieves me to say that such scenarios remain possible.

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Donald Trump’s remarkable victory

Despite the suspension of vote-counting in Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan and Wisconsin, President Trump leads in all of those states by substantial margins compared to the number of ballots to be counted and has almost certainly been reelected, bringing the Senate and some House gains behind him. That he has done this in the teeth of the pathological hatred of 95 percent of the American national political media and Hollywood, Silicon Valley and most of Wall Street is an astonishing achievement. One would ransack the British media unsuccessfully trying to find a trace of the fact that he has had the most successful first term of any American president except Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Nixon.

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Trump will sweep the remaining battleground states

As of 1:00 a.m. on Election Night, assuming Montana and Alaska go to Donald Trump and Nevada goes to Joe Biden, the presidential race sits at a standstill with Joe Biden at 243 electoral votes and Donald Trump at 216 electoral votes. Ignoring the single electoral votes in Maine and Nebraska, that leaves five states left to be awarded. The focus over the next two days will be on how many votes are left to count compared to what the current margins between the two candidates are in those states.Here is a breakdown and what Biden needs to do to overcome the Trump leads in the remaining five states, with my prediction on what likely will occur:Georgia (16 electoral votes)With 82 percent of precincts reporting, Trump leads by 310,107 votes out of 4,108,591 total votes cast.

Extraordinary delusions and the madness of crowds, New York Times edition

Anyone who wants to peek into the engine room of the mainstream media’s megalomania should pay close attention to the Twitter account of the New York Times. You have to act fast, though, because some of the most revelatory tweets soon disappear like dew on a feminist’s jackboot. No, silly, those messages are not suppressed by Twitter.  This is the New York Times, after all, warden of wokeness, prefect of political correctness. The commissars of conformity running Twitter exist to enforce the dispensation smiled upon by the New York Times and other unofficial outposts of Democratic machine, not silence them. But every now and then the Times, like other such tools of The Narrative, fail to observe the important advice offered by Gertrude Stein.

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plywood

Will the Plywood Party win?

As has been my habit for the last few presidential elections, the afternoon of Election Day found me in Manhattan at a discreet, semi-secure, undisclosed location for a long and thoughtful lunch. The 2016 iteration of this ceremony was exceedingly thoughtful and found some of our party pushing luncheon well into tea time. Indeed, it was about 11:30 p.m. on election night 2016 when, smiling in front of my computer, I had a call from the last hold out from our band of what Athenaeus called Δειπνοσοφισταί, 'learned banqueters’, still brightening the corridors of our place of congregation.

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Pre-election perspectives from Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh On the eve of the 2020 election, as President Trump and former VP Joe Biden are neck-in-neck, Pennsylvania is emerging as the most significant state. Pollsters and pundits predict that, as this crucial swing state goes, so will the nation. On Saturday, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the city’s leading local newspaper, endorsed Donald Trump, the first time it has endorsed a Republican presidential candidate since 1972. Four years ago, talking with Western Pennsylvanians at random revealed unlikely pockets of support for Trump. Synthesizing interviews, voter registration patterns and breaking news, I speculated Pennsylvania would pivot red — and it did.

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My final election prediction: Trump 305 to Biden 233

I’m doubling down. In 2016, against virtually all of the polling data and sophisticated analysis, I predicted Donald Trump would defeat Hillary Clinton 280 to 258. To the shock of the world, he ended up winning 304 to 277. Four years later, the world finds itself again facing an American presidential election in which the vast majority of polling data and prognosticators indicate a Joe Biden win by a fairly solid majority. At last check, the polling aggregator at RealClearPolitics puts Biden ahead nationally 51 percent to 44.3 percent and in top battleground states 48.9 percent to 46 percent, which would give Biden a 335 to 203 electoral victory. The latest betting odds show Biden favored 64.3 percent to 34.8 percent.

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The red wave is inbound

So, the party of peace and love is planing to riot in New York, Washington and other places where their acolytes have critical mass. They’ve put the world on notice about that. And they’ve been assiduous in pushing a rationale: that the polls all along have had Joe Biden ahead. Ergo, if Joe Biden loses, it will be because Trump stole the election. This tweet sums up the logic: 'Polls released now on the eve of the Election are predictive polls & no longer "snapshot in time" polls. If @JoeBiden leads by double digits, but @realDonaldTrump somehow "wins" by a point or two, it won’t be the polls that are wrong — the fix will be in.' https://twitter.com/AmandiOnAir/status/1322378847711563776 There is a bonus, too.

Democrats get last-minute election jitters

The Biden campaign is far from confident heading into Tuesday's election and their behavior proves it. It's not uncommon for campaigns to blitz multiple states with television ads and rally appearances in the final few days before the election; Trump, for example, has been holding multiple rallies per day in key swing states. However, Biden's last minute rush to turn out the vote stands in stark contrast to his months-long strategy of sitting back and letting Trump talk his way out of victory. Clearly the campaign is feeling some serious unease with the latest polls and is second guessing keeping Joe in the basement for so long.

Laïcité

Life, liberty and the pursuit of laïcité

The French were asking for it, weren’t they? All that laïcité is the political equivalent of a short skirt. What did Marianne think would happen if she went out like that?The very act of being French, Politico tells us, ‘incites’ Muslims to murderous rage. A New Yorker writer explains that Charlie Hebdo cartoons are ‘effectively hate speech’, which effectively implies that Samuel Paty, the teacher who showed the cartoons to his pupils in a class on free speech, got what he deserved. The New York Times tells us that there are fine people on both sides: the real victims of Islamist terrorism in France are French Muslims, who are left feeling uncomfortable.