Joe biden

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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integrity

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.

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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Why Joe Biden will win tomorrow

Joe Biden is going to win. I have been wrong before. I will be wrong again. And maybe I’m wrong today. But we do not have any significant data to suggest Donald Trump was ever in a position to win reelection, or that he is closing the campaign with any sort of momentum needed for a come-from-behind victory. Four years ago, we did have such data. In the RealClearPolitics national polling average, Hillary Clinton’s lead shrunk nearly six percentage points between October 18 and November 3, before ticking up a bit at the end. Her share of support throughout the duration of the general election campaign never reached 50 percent, an indication of soft support.

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safetyism

Will America succumb to safetyism? 

The outcome of Tuesday’s presidential election will reveal whether the feminized, therapeutic culture of the university has become the dominant force in the American psyche.During the last eight months of coronavirus panic, a remarkable number of Americans have deliberately — one might even say, ecstatically — embraced fear over fact. They have shut their ears to the data, available since March, showing how demographically circumscribed the lethal threat from coronavirus infection is: concentrated among the very elderly and those with multiple and serious preexisting health conditions. A remarkable number of Americans have voluntarily cowered in their homes despite the lack of a scientific basis for doing so.

The Pope really doesn’t like Republicans

Last week we learned that Pope Francis has torn up the Catholic Church’s teaching that same-sex civil partnerships are gravely immoral. This week he will be rooting for the pro-abortion candidate in the US presidential election. These two surreal developments are causing distress bordering on spiritual despair to conservative American Catholics. Whether you feel any sympathy for them depends on your point of view. The Pope, it is safe to say, is unlikely to lose any sleep over the matter. Francis dislikes the United States in general and its president in particular. That’s not surprising; so do most Argentinians. What is surprising is the depth of his contempt for conservative American Catholics.

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Trump has the momentum in the final week

I don’t believe in astrology, but, if I did, I’d have to say the stars are aligning for Donald Trump in the last 10 days of this tumultuous election. Beginning with the second presidential debate where Trump finally displayed presidential behavior and Joe Biden expressly proclaimed his goal to transition away from oil (i.e., kill it), virtually every unfolding event has aided Trump’s cause for reelection. Though he still might not win, the momentum is clearly behind Trump as Election Day nears.First, Biden’s comment on energy at the last debate certainly hurt him with energy industry workers and their families in western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, Texas, New Mexico and Colorado.

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The Philly riots could throw Pennsylvania to Trump

Rioters and looters in Philadelphia may have just paved Trump's road to victory in Pennsylvania. Biden helped last week when he admitted during the final presidential debate that he wanted to phase out US oil production. It was a boneheaded thing to say while trying to court blue-collar Americans in swing states, many of whom work in the energy sector. Now, Trump also has the 'law and order' narrative on his side. Walter Wallace Jr, a 27-year-old black man, was shot and killed by police in Philadelphia on Monday. It only took until that evening for protests to turn to looting and rioting. Just like in Minneapolis, Atlanta, Portland and other major cities, businesses were destroyed and individuals were harmed.

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tony bobulinski

Tony Bobulinski and implausible deniability

It turns out that the 2020 US presidential election is not between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, as we have been told. It is not even between Donald Trump and The Committee, that shadow compact of left-wing actors who settle on Biden as the most acceptable face for their radical make-America-over agenda. Everyone who gives the matter a moment’s thought knows that a vote for Joe Biden is really just a proxy vote for Kamala Harris. But last night, Fox News aired an extraordinary interview that Tucker Carlson conducted with Tony Bobulinski, a former naval officer who had been tapped by the Bidens, Hunter and Joe’s brother Jim, to be CEO of a financial company they were attempting to put together. Watch it here (unless YouTube has taken it down).

Dear Democrats, pack the court and nuke the filibuster. I dare you

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.

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Joe Biden’s endless wars

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.

joe biden endless wars

Trump sealed the deal last night

First, let me pay brief homage to Kristen Welker, moderator of Thursday night’s debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. A White House correspondent for NBC, she is pretty clearly not an enthusiast for President Trump. But unlike the wretched Chris Wallace, she did not make the debate a two-versus-one shouting match against the President. And unlike Steve Scully, who was scheduled to moderate the canceled second debate, she did not covertly consult with one of the President’s enemies and then lie about it when exposed.

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debate bruises biden trump

A serious debate that leaves Biden with lingering bruises

Thursday night’s debate was far calmer and more substantive than the street brawl that preceded it. If we score it like a boxing match, it was pretty close. Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden landed punches. Neither had to be carried out on a stretcher. But that’s the wrong way to look at it. It matters, obviously, that neither candidate won a decisive victory and that Trump needed one more because he’s trailing, according to polls. But the debate helped Trump in another way. Biden said things he will regret. Time and again, he made false or misleading claims and politically-questionable promises. Three stand out: 'super predators’, fracking and family corruption.

The final 2020 presidential debate — live blog

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.

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leave

But seriously: will Trump refuse to leave?

At a drinks party in Washington DC just after Donald Trump was elected, someone from the old regime told me: ‘This will end with tanks on the White House lawn.’ It was a popular opinion that night, although there was confusion over whether the tank barrels would point inwards or outwards. Would Trump do something so outrageous that he would have to be removed by the US military? Or would he declare himself president-for-life with help from the generals? At the time, I put this down to shock at Trump’s unexpected victory, an early example of Trump Derangement Syndrome. But now, in the final stages of the 2020 campaign, you hear speculation like this from both sides of the political divide. Dictatorship, state of emergency, civil war?

Pompeo: no reason to believe Hunter Biden story is Russian disinformation

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.

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Get ready for Russiagate 2.0 if Trump wins

If Trump is reelected, prepare for Russiagate 2.0. This time it'll be even crazier. The Hunter Biden story has given the President's opponents an excuse to do what they do best: shout 'Russia' at any allegation they don't like. It sounds insane that they would double down on a strategy that has failed so miserably before. The Democratic party's obsession with the Trump-Russia conspiracy alienated average Americans and with very little payoff. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's multi-year investigation indicated that there was insufficient evidence to show collusion between Trump and Moscow, though it did find that Russia had attempted to hack the election.

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Behind the social-media blackout of Biden family corruption

Hunter Biden is now the subject of multiple stories involving serious corruption. Whether he committed any crimes is a question for prosecutors and the courts. Whether he was paid handsomely for his family’s political clout is a question for voters.You wouldn’t know that from ABC's pathetic town hall with his father Joe Biden on Thursday night. They spoke with him for 90 minutes and didn’t ask a single question about the shocking emails published by the New York Post. That’s either journalistic malpractice or public-relations work. After all, the emails raise profound questions that the candidate needs to answer. They appear to show his son, Hunter, repeatedly using his last name to fill his pockets.Hunter’s family is his only asset.

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Battle for the boomers

This year’s presidential election may see a new pattern that may prove disastrous for the GOP. Former vice president Joe Biden appears on track to win an impressive share of the oldest voters, without losing support among the young.The relationship between age and political party preference is not linear, but for many election cycles older voters have been, on average, more Republican than younger voters. According to exit polls, in 2016 voters age 65 and older gave Donald Trump 52 percent of their votes. In 2012, Mitt Romney won 56 percent of this cohort.The correlation between age and vote choice gives the Democrats a compelling narrative.

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Oh, there’s Hunter…

Res ipse loquitur. What a card Joe Biden is. Here he is to Fox News a year ago: 'I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.' Ha, ha, ha. Peter Schweizer exploded that bald faced lie in his film Riding the Dragon and elsewhere. And just today the New York Post prints an email captured from Hunter Biden’s computer. It’s from a Ukrainian businessman named Vadym Pozharskyi, who in 2015 was an adviser to Burisma, the shady Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter sat. Hunter had no experience in the energy sector. But his dad was vice president of the United States and apparently that was worth the $50,000 per month that Hunter collected in fees.

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