Joe biden

Why I’m not predicting a Biden blowout

From our US edition

In 2016, I was one of the very few people who publicly stated the night before the election that, despite the polling data, Trump was going to win 280 to 258. I made that prediction because what I was seeing and hearing across Ohio didn’t match what the polling said would happen. I put out a detailed electoral map showing which states he’d win. I got every state right except Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which I called for Clinton, I thought New Hampshire would go for Trump. I let history overinfluence my call on Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, as no Republican had won Wisconsin since 1984 and Pennsylvania since 1988. Right now, my gut is telling me something just isn’t right again between the polling and the facts on the ground.

biden

Antifa for Biden

From our US edition

Hey folks, it’s me, your friendly neighborhood antifa ringleader. You may recognize me from such news clips as ‘Small group of troublemakers seen smashing windows’ and ‘ANTIFA dude on fire in Portland’. That’s me in the black hoodie.I’m enjoying a bit of downtime ahead of another largely peaceful weekend (weather permitting!). Right now I’m changing flights — who knew there were flight changes in business class? — but I figured I’d take a break from my busy schedule of scheming to give you all an important message: vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on November 3.I know what you’re thinking: isn’t antifa a series of anarchist groups with little to do with center-left mainstream politics?

antifa biden
debates

What will happen in the debates?

From our US edition

From late September through to mid-October, Americans will get to watch Donald Trump and Joe Biden debate three times. Mike Pence and Kamala Harris will face off once. The debates may not matter, but if one candidate is going to commit a significant gaffe, it likely would occur in one of televisual spectacles. Brace yourselves. Both parties already are trying to shape expectations before the debates begin. On that front, Trump and his allies have made a major mistake. For months Americans have been inundated with claims from Trump, his son and countless media allies that Biden suffers from some type of mental deficiency such as dementia. Biden’s countless gaffes and resistance to doing unscripted interviews have fed into this belief.

Trump should take lessons in lying from Joe Biden

Gstaad It snowed on the last two days of August up here, and why not? We’ve traded freedom of speech for freedom from speech, so on an upside-down planet, snow in the Alps in August is the new normal. The world is suddenly a grim place, a sick prank when you think about it. It’s a kamikaze fantasy with the bad guys winning and being cheered on by the left and the media. The virus is now a metaphor, religion having been cast aside by the global elite who follow only their interests and think of the rest of us as cannon fodder.

Who will pay for a mega-spending Biden administration?

From our US edition

Over the last month, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has proposed roughly $4 trillion in new tax hikes. That is meant to the cover, at least partially, the $7 trillion in spending increases he’ll impose if he wins the White House. As part of his tax hike plan, Biden promises his tax increases won’t hit any American who earns under $400,000. But they will. Even the Washington Post analysis of Biden’s tax plan concedes that his tax plan will impact 82 percent of American earners if enacted as proposed.The reason it will hit so many Americans is because of the change he proposes to corporate taxes. There is broad consensus among tax experts that such an increase will lead to corporations ‘reducing investment returns and cutting working wages’.

tax spending

Blaming Trump for the riots is a Democratic disaster

From our US edition

After months of trying to spin the nationwide unrest as 'mostly peaceful' or ignoring it entirely, Democrats have discovered some fresh messaging: the riots are violent and they're Trump's fault. Joe Biden seized on this new storyline during a campaign speech in Pittsburgh on Monday, telling voters that Trump is 'stoking violence in our cities.' 'This president long ago forfeited any moral leadership in this country. He can’t stop the violence — because for years he has fomented it,' Biden asserted. This is one of the most dastardly and dishonest schemes the Democrats have ever cooked up.

usps

Delivering the goods?

From our US edition

Seattle My local post office in suburban Seattle seems to be rigged to obstruct customers these days. After standing motionless for half an hour awaiting my turn, I find that I've lost the will to live even before the inevitable altercation with the masked clerk squinting back at me through a sheet of plastic. When you ask for the slightest bit of 'consumer assistance' — as their cheerful mission statement on the wall promises they’re only too happy to provide — they seem to get ferociously cross. Not long ago I was read the Riot Act by a young USPS employee because I politely asked if I might be allowed an inch or two of Scotch tape from one of the dozen or so open rolls of it I could see on the shelf behind her.

Why I’m voting for Kamala Harris (and Joe Biden)

From our US edition

The presidential election hurtles towards us like a portentous comet; hailing joyous salvation, or foreshadowing unfathomable doom. Of course the latter of those refers to the possibility of decent Americans being forced to endure four more years of Donald Trump in the White House. Life under Trump’s hateful regime has been intolerable. Could you even call it ‘life’? More like simply surviving. Eking out a paltry existence each day like a season finale of The Walking Dead. Desperately holding onto the tentative hope that one day Trump will be overthrown, his army of MAGA zombies finally silenced, and his fascistic dictatorship brought to an end — via the means of a democratic election (seeing as every possible method of impeachment has failed).

2016 all over again

From our US edition

I’m not an election prognosticator. I have no magic insight telling me what will happen on November 3, 2020. Frankly, I have zero idea. But what I do have is a great memory and some polling data that suggests Joe Biden’s media-assisted campaign is headed for an eerily similar crash landing to the one that happened in 2016. The media has once again sealed itself in a suffocating bubble, within which the impossible Trump victory can’t happen. The Democrats find themselves strapped to a low-energy candidate who is a bystander as social upheaval scorches battleground states. It has the look and feel of fall 2016. Democrats, start panicking now. First, Joe Biden’s poll numbers are starting to tighten.

2016

The Trump show: he could just win again

‘Keep America Great’ is President Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election slogan and it sounds off. The phrase doesn’t have the same ring as Make America Great Again, the mantra that Trump pinched from Reagan and repeated to victory in 2016. As an acronym, KAG is uglier than MAGA. The words particularly jar when America’s cities are burning, homicide rates are spiking, almost 180,000 Americans have died of or with Covid, and the country is reeling from the largest economic shock of all time. You call that great? Then again, 2020 is an even crazier year than 2016, and the maddest news is that Donald Trump might be about to defy the odds again and win.

Where is Biden’s post-convention bounce?

From our US edition

Convention season ain’t over till the dead cat bounces.  A dead cat bounce, as followers of the animal spirits of the market know, is a small recovery in the value of a declining asset. As the wisdom of those who work in tall buildings has it, even a dead cat bounces if you drop it from a high window.The week before the Democratic convention, the polls showed Donald Trump trimming Biden’s double-digit lead into single figures. The numbers varied, but they averaged out to suggest that Biden was 7 or 8 percent ahead — not yet within the margin of error, but trending toward it.The Democrats’ non-conference that was nearly in Milwaukee was meant to arrest that decline.

dead cat bounce

Why isn’t Joe Biden being tested for COVID-19?

From our US edition

Joe Biden has faced questions on his mental and physical acuity throughout his presidential bid. For example, he first said he is cognitively tested ‘all the time’ and then clarified to say he has not had a formal cognitive test But there is a larger issue lingering over the 77-year-old — Joe Biden has not been tested for COVID-19. Joe Biden receives Secret Service protection and intelligence briefings similar to that of the President. So why is he refusing to be tested regularly, as the President is, for a highly contagious virus that has killed 173,000 Americans? As of August 19, COVID-19 has claimed the lives of approximately 41,000 Americans aged between 74 and 85. Joe Biden is an American aged between 74 and 85.

biden

Who really wants to delegitimize the election result?

From our US edition

On Thursday afternoon, prior to the final night of the Democratic convention, four New York Times opinion columnists gathered to discuss the political landscape. Of course, millions of people do that every single day. The special conceit of the Times opinion staff is that it believes its discussions are worth broadcasting to the world. The special curse for the rest of us is that many find them worth listening to. The theme of Thursday’s discussion was the awful, terrifying, unspeakable, unthinkable idea that a major presidential candidate might delegitimize an election outcome.

bari weiss election

China disappears at the DNC

From our US edition

Members of media hailed the all-digital Democratic National Convention and convention coordinator Stephanie Cutter, the former Obama adviser famous for smearing Mitt Romney as a killer. The Washington Post’s conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin gushed that the week-long Zoom show should be nominated for an Emmy. Honest onlookers, however, would notice that there wasn’t an explanation as to why the event had to be held this way: China.

china
joe biden

Sleepy no more: Joe Biden unmasked

From our US edition

It was like an Elvis sighting. ‘WHERE’S HUNTER,’ Trump kept bellowing in his tweets. Well, there was the recently reclusive 50-year-old lobbyist Hunter Biden, the black sheep of the family, who almost brought down his pappy’s campaign with his Ukraine shenanigans. He looked youthful with his hair slicked back, dark suit, white shirt, and blue tie, appearing at the Democratic convention together his sister Ashley to endorse him for president. Hunter probably will retreat back into seclusion for the duration of the campaign, but it was a smart move to feature him so prominently, a version of the courtroom tactic of getting the unpleasant facts before the jury before the prosecution can air them.

policies

Joe Biden offers platitudes, not policies

From our US edition

Joe Biden’s speech was effective in many ways and sure to please his supporters. But anyone who expected him to say something substantive about his policies left empty-handed. He did little more than spin gauzy pictures of a rosy future.First, the good news for Biden supporters. He looked strong, never stumbled, and delivered the speech with remarkable empathy, energy, and modulated tones. His performance showed no traces of the confusion he has shown occasionally or the cognitive decline he has been charged with. He was at his best.Biden also made the best of his strongest quality: he’s a likable guy, whose tragedies have made him deeply sympathetic to others facing their own difficulties. He’s not faking that, and it shows.

joe biden

Joe Biden’s DNC speech

From our US edition

Good evening. Ella Baker, a giant of the civil rights movement, left us with this wisdom: give people light and they will find a way. Give people light. Those are words for our time. The current president has cloaked America in darkness for much too long. Too much anger. Too much fear. Too much division. Here and now, I give you my word: if you entrust me with the presidency, I will draw on the best of us not the worst. I will be an ally of the light not of the darkness. It's time for us, for We the People, to come together. For make no mistake. United we can, and will, overcome this season of darkness in America. We will choose hope over fear, facts over fiction, fairness over privilege.

A country for old men

From our US edition

When 83-year-old New Jersey congressman Bill Pascrell shared a photo of American lawmakers meeting a Chinese trade delegation in Washington in 2018, he probably didn’t expect it to go viral on Weibo. (You wonder, rather cruelly, if the congressman is familiar with the term ‘viral’ at all.) But it did go viral — gleefully and potently viral — on Chinese social media. Why? The picture showed two delegations at a table. The Chinese look young, or at least they do when sat opposite the Americans. They look grizzled in the original sense of the word: like gray-haired old men. This image was cannily juxtaposed on Weibo with another one, taken in 1901 in Beijing, at the close of the Boxer Rebellion.

old men gerontocracy
democrats

The Democrats have learned nothing in four years

From our US edition

On night two of the Democratic National Convention, Jack Schlossberg, son of Caroline Kennedy and grandson of President John F. Kennedy, hammered a cynical final nail in the coffin of the more palatable and moderate party that his grandfather once represented.Speaking in a slight lisp, Schlossberg, who was named in 2017 to Vanity Fair’s ‘best dressed list’, intentionally perverted one of the most iconic quotes in American political history.‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,’ John F. Kennedy said in his inaugural address on January 20, 1961.On Tuesday evening, the former president’s grandson tossed that old-timey sentiment aside, while still trying to capitalize on JFK’s memory.