Good morning! Here is your news briefing for Thursday October 1, 2020
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AXIOS
🎃 Good Thursday morning, and welcome to October! President Jimmy Carter is 96.
- Today’s Smart Brevity™ count: 1,292 words … 5 minutes.
Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
President Trump made it clear at the debate that he’ll continue to call the results fraudulent — and contest the outcome in key states — no matter how wide the margin.
- That’ll be amplified by a massive amount of disinformation, even though the platforms are trying to curtail it.
Why it matters: Back in 2000, we didn’t know Bush v. Gore was going to happen. We know this is going to happen.
- Trump is telegraphing with clarity that even if he gets blown out, he’ll claim the election was rigged and votes were stolen.
Election officials, especially in areas with significant minority voting populations, need to prepare for an increased danger of “rogue Trump supporters taking matters into their own hands,” said Rick Hasen, a national election law expert at UC Irvine.
Pennsylvania, with a GOP legislature that could try to bolster Trump in the case of contested results, is a major focus of both parties’ post-election planning.
- Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told Axios: “The president’s statements, in combination with real activity on the ground in Philadelphia, has us sounding an alarm today and escalating our efforts to understand what’s happening.”
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon told Stef Kight: “What is distressing about the president’s remarks is I fear his supporters will take it upon themselves to mobilize large numbers to go to the polls” as poll watchers.
- Simon said they’ll be denied access: Minnesota allows only one poll watcher (called a challenger) per political party at each polling station.
- Simon added: “I fear … folks on the other side will feel the need to counter-mobilize.”
Share this story. Margaret Talev and Alayna Treene contributed reporting.
Three words Americans associated most with President Trump’s debate performance: Bully, childish and rude.
- Joe Biden: Weak, presidential and poor.
- The debate itself: Chaotic, Trump and variations on the word sh*t.
An Axios-SurveyMonkey poll (2,618 U.S. adults: ± 2-point margin of error) shows that Trump hurt himself more than Biden in what’s been called the worst U.S. presidential debate in history, Margaret Talev writes.
- Three times as many voters said President Trump did worse than they expected in the debate — 39% compared with 13% for Biden.
- A majority of Republicans (57%) and independents (61%) said their primary reaction was disappointment.
The bottom line: More than 9 in 10 people who say they’d already decided on Trump or Biden … planned to stick with their choice.
Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
Several voters in Youngstown, Ohio, who previously supported President Trump decided to stick with him, even if they were embarrassed by his debate performance, Alexi McCammond writes from a focus group.
- These voters largely felt that neither Trump nor Biden were speaking directly to them, or addressing the issues they care most about.
- The Engagious/Schlesinger focus group included 11 voters who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 but Trump in 2016.
The bottom line: These voters indicated there’s almost nothing that could change their minds between now and November.
- Adam A. said: “The 15 minutes I watched I didn’t get anything out of it, so I turned it off.”
New coronavirus infections rose over the past week in half the country, Sam Baker and Andrew Witherspoon write.
- Why it matters: The U.S. remains largely unable or unwilling to control the spread of the virus.
Nationwide, the U.S. averaged roughly 43,000 cases per day during the past week — essentially unchanged from the week before.
- Testing was up almost 9%. The U.S. is now conducting about 935,000 tests per day.
Illustration: Eniola Odetunde/Axios
Amazon’s decision to move Prime Day to Oct. 13-14 this year will pull the whole holiday shopping season forward by more than a month — and help make online retail bigger than ever, Dion Rabouin writes in his daily Axios Markets.
- Why it matters: The pandemic push toward online shopping, combined with the pull of Amazon Prime Day and the Christmas season, is setting up a bonanza for retailers — but only those with the ability to offer steep discounts, delivery and an attractive online platform.
Global online holiday sales are predicted to grow 30% from 2019’s strong levels, and digital revenue is expected to grow by an average of 90% over last year’s holiday season for companies offering options to buy online and pick up in-store, new projections from Salesforce show.
- The forecast says Prime Day’s move to October will pull 10% of November’s Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales forward a full month.
- That translates to $26 billion globally and $6 billion in the U.S.
What we’re hearing: “This is something we tried to do for decades,” Rob Garf, Salesforce’s VP of Industry Strategy and Insights, said during a presentation Wednesday — online retailers tried to offer smaller discounts in autumn hoping to lure customers through a game of “discount chicken.”
Between the lines: The jump in online sales comes largely at the expense of brick-and-mortar retailers, Deloitte says in “A Tale of Two Holiday Seasons.”
- 💰 Sign up for Dion Rabouin’s daily Axios Markets newsletter.
Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
Lawmakers are moving to push back on social media platforms in the days leading up to the election, Ashley Gold writes.
- Why it matters: Big Tech has become a punching bag for both the right and left. Tech policy has become increasingly fertile ground for grievance politics.
Today, the Senate Commerce Committee will vote to authorize subpoenas of three CEOs — Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg — to testify at a hearing on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the tech industry’s prized third-party content liability shield.
Our thought bubble: Time is on tech’s side to endure these particular regulatory headwinds. But a fuller reckoning may come next year.
⚡ Google will pay publishers more than $1 billion over the next three years to create and curate high-quality journalism for a new set of features called Google News Showcase, executives tell Axios’ Sara Fischer. Go deeper.
A variety of far-right fringe groups, just slivers on their own, together constitute a potential paramilitary force that’s hungry for violent clashes with political opponents, Axios’ Kyle Daly writes.
- Why it matters: President Trump’s failure to condemn extremist groups has been welcomed as an endorsement by a wide constellation on the fringes.
The Proud Boys remain relatively small — a Portland rally this past weekend billed as the group’s largest-ever gathering drew just a few hundred people.
- But the Proud Boys are part of a growing set of relatively new, often heavily armed far-right groups with ideologies and memberships that often overlap. The groups have pledged to violently oppose the left, and do much of their organizing online.
Go deeper: Other groups.
More than 73 million people watched Tuesday’s debate on television, according to Nielsen — down more than 13% from the record number who tuned in for the first debate of the 2016 election, Axios’ Sara Fischer writes.
- The ratings drop partly reflects the fact that more people are streaming now: About 15% fewer U.S. households have pay-TV than four years ago.
The Partnership for Public Service named Dr. Anthony Fauci the 2020 Federal Employee of the Year as part of the group’s Service to America medals, the “Oscars of federal government.”
- Join us on Axios.com on Monday at 8 p.m. ET for a virtual awards ceremony celebrating the best in government.
Click here to watch a video of Dr. Fauci getting home delivery of his award.
CLEAR, the secure-identity system familiar at airports and stadiums, is now being used to help restaurants reopen indoor dining for winter.
- In Manhattan, Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group is using CLEAR Health Pass as part of employees’ daily COVID screenings at Gramercy Tavern, Union Square Cafe and Blue Smoke.
How it works, per CLEAR: “Employees approach a CLEAR kiosk, where they receive a temperature check, and scan their QR code to share their health insights. … [E]mployees are issued a red or green Health Pass on their app.”
📱 Thanks for starting the day with AM! Invite your friends to sign up for Axios AM/PM.
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ASSOCIATED PRESS
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Oct 1, 2020 View in Browser  AP MORNING WIRE Good morning. In today’s AP Morning Wire:
TAMER FAKAHANY
The Rundown  AP PHOTO/ANDREW HARNIK Biden, Trump snipe from the trail; Debate rules to change after chaos; Trump’s Proud Boys remark echoes Charlottesville
Donald Trump and Joe Biden carried on their debate-stage sniping from the road and the rails, fighting for working-class voters in the Midwest while both parties — and the debate commission too — sought to deal with the most chaotic presidential faceoff in memory.
Biden called Trump’s behavior in the prime-time confrontation a “a national embarrassment.” The Democratic challenger launched his most aggressive day on the campaign trail all year, with multiple stops on a train tour that began in Cleveland and ended later in western Pennsylvania.
Trump proclaimed his debate performance a smashing success during an evening rally in Duluth, Minnesota.
“Last night I did what the corrupt media has refused to do,” Trump said. “I held Joe Biden accountable for his 47 years of failure.” Steve Peoples, Will Weissert and Kevin Freking report.
Voter Voices: While Trump and Biden debated, or traded verbal barbs, Americans cringed. The country struggled for words — printable words — to describe the display after one of the most rancorous and chaotic presidential debates since the dawn of the television age. Many went first to profanities. Others landed on more polite, but still biting, terms for the live, prime-time event, long considered evidence of the rigors of U.S. democracy.
“I was sad. It was sad, and it was very pathetic,” one voter said in Las Vegas.
In interviews with voters across key states, nearly all who watched recoiled from it. None said it would change their minds on how they planned to vote. Instead, voters on both sides said it only reaffirmed their positions. Michelle L. Price reports.
Far-Right Extremists: Trump attempted to walk back his refusal to outright condemn a far-right fascist group during his debate with Biden, but the inflammatory moment was far from the first time the president has failed to denounce white supremacists or has advanced racist ideas. Telling the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” at the debate drew fierce blowback. Trump then dramatically changed his approach in an effort to quell the growing firestorm emerging just weeks before the election, Jonathan Lemire, Michael Kunzelman and Mary Clare Jalonick report.
Trump went on to call out forces on the other end of the political spectrum and tried to attack Biden. It was an echo of the way he had blamed “both sides” for the 2017 violence between white supremacists and anti-racist protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Debate Rules: The presidential debate commission says it will make changes to future debate formats to avoid a repeat of the discordant first meeting between Trump and Biden. Moderator Chris Wallace struggled to keep control of the debate because of frequent interruptions, primarily by the president. The commission says it will announce its changes shortly, David Bauder reports.
AP Fact Check: Trump falsely blames Biden for US veteran deaths.
Voting Lawsuits: Democrats and Republicans are involved in hundreds of lawsuits across the country relating to the upcoming election. The lawsuits concern the core fundamentals of the American voting process, including how ballots are cast and counted. The cases are unfolding during an election made unique by the pandemic and by a president who refuses to commit to accepting the results, Eric Tucker reports.  AP PHOTO/WONG MAYE-E Looking for America: In Appalachia, people watch COVID-19, race issues from afar
With the U.S. roiled by the pandemic and protests over racial injustice, an AP team embarked on a road trip to look at the issues that have exploded onto the national consciousness this year through the eyes of different regions, myriad Americans.
First stop: the Appalachian foothills of southeast Ohio, looking for the echoes of a President Lyndon Johnson speech and the Great Society.
It’s a region that has barely felt COVID-19 and protests against systemic racism. Many people there view the rest of America from a distance as a place only explained with suspicion, anger and sometimes conspiracy theories, Tim Sullivan writes.
One man who runs a small auto repair business said, “You’re just sitting here minding your own business, and things start crumbling all around you.” Only God knows, he said, when America will return to normal: “And I sometimes think we’ve got Him scratching His head because this is a bunch of craziness.”
VIDEO: In Appalachian Ohio, war on poverty rages on.
The Looking for America series will continue as the team travels from Ohio and Illinois, to Kentucky and Georgia and Mississippi, and then out West, searching for windows into a country that can seem so contradictory, so confusing.  AP PHOTO/KIRSTY WIGGLESWORTH Push to bring coronavirus vaccines to the world’s poor faces trouble; Hospitals feel squeeze as virus spikes in US Midwest
An ambitious international project to deliver coronavirus vaccines to the world’s poorest people is facing potential shortages of money, cargo planes, refrigeration and vaccines themselves.
It is also running into skepticism even from some of those it’s intended to help most, Maria Cheng and Lori Hinnant report.
In one of the biggest obstacles, rich countries have locked up most of the world’s potential vaccine supply through 2021, and the U.S. and others have refused to join the project, called Covax.
US Midwest: The pandemic has tightened its grip on the region. With infections surging, some hospitals in Wisconsin and North Dakota are running low on space. Midwestern states are seeing some of the nation’s highest per capita rates of infection. While federal health officials again urged some governors in the region to require masks statewide, many Republicans have resisted, Todd Richmond and Lisa Marie Pane report.
US Airlines Jobs: American Airlines and United Airlines say they will furlough 32,000 workers between them because negotiations in Washington have failed to produce more federal aid for the industry. Airlines have lost billions of dollars because of a steep slump in travel during the pandemic. They have already received $25 billion in payroll help, but that money ends today. Congressional Democrats and the White House are still far apart on a larger relief bill that could include airline aid, David Koenig reports.
Global Economy Jobs: Unemployment rose for the fifth straight month in Europe amid concern that extensive government support programs won’t be able to keep many businesses hit by coronavirus restrictions afloat forever. The jobless rate rose to 8.1% in the 19 countries that use the euro currency in August, up from 7.9% in July.
The Meeting That Wasn’t: The U.N. General Assembly’s 2020 edition was distant, remote and technology-driven. It was also an example of two things — how technology can bring people together, and how that illusion of togetherness can also keep them apart. The world’s leaders talked about how technology can aid progress and help the U.N. in the pandemic era. But the constraints of this first attempt at a virtual U.N. meeting seemed just as towering as the opportunities. AP National Writer Ted Anthony reports.
Can the coronavirus travel more than 6 feet in the air? The AP is answering Viral Questions in this series.  AP PHOTO/ANDRE PENNER Brazil’s Pantanal Wildfires Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s government has said it mobilized hundreds of troops and federal agents to douse wildfires in the Pantanal — the world’s largest tropical wetlands and a biodiversity hot spot.
But dozens of local firefighters, tour guides, veterinarians and ranchers have told the AP there are few federal boots on the ground. What little concrete assistance has come mostly from hired planes dropping water from above, but that only happened after great delay and mainly targeted private ranches rather than protected areas.
Animals have perished, been injured or lost their habitat as almost one-quarter of the Pantanal went up in flames. Tatiana Pollastri and David Biller have that story.
In the meantime, Bolsonaro has attacked Joe Biden for saying during the U.S. presidential debate that Brazil should suffer “significant economic consequences” if devastation of the Amazon rainforest continues. He called Biden’s comments ”disastrous and gratuitous.” Other Top Stories Malaysian palm oil producer FGV Holdings Berhad vowed to “clear its name” after the U.S. banned imports of its palm oil over allegations of forced labor and other abuses. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Trade issued the ban order against FGV, saying it found indicators of forced labor, including concerns about children, along with other abuses such as physical and sexual violence. The action, announced a week after the AP exposed major labor abuses in Malaysia’s palm oil industry, was triggered by a petition filed last year by nonprofit organizations. Heavy fighting between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces over the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh has continued as statements from both sides indicated that the flare-up of a decades-old conflict that has killed dozens of people this week was no closer to an end. Azerbaijan’s president said Armenia’s withdrawal from the area was the sole condition to end fighting, a scenario at odds with Armenia’s views on the crisis. Nagorno-Karabakh lies within Azerbaijan and has been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces since 1994. Opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who is recovering in Germany after being poisoned in Russia by a nerve agent, is accusing Russian President Vladimir Putin of being behind the attack. Navalny’s supporters have frequently maintained that such an attack could have only been ordered at the top levels, though the Kremlin has steadfastly denied any involvement in it. In his first interview since the attack, Navalny told Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine that in his mind, “Putin was behind the attack.” Tokyo Stock Exchange officials are working to get trading back to normal by Friday after the bourse halted trading for the entire day due to what they said was a computer hardware and systems malfunction. Backups failed to kick in following the hardware failure. There was no indication that the outage resulted from hacking or other cybersecurity breaches. Most other Asian markets were closed for national holidays.  We’ll leave you with this…
Film Review: In “Save Yourselves!” NYC hipsters bake bread, eat quinoa, fight aliens
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CHICAGO SUNTIMES
Ex-pot regulator, now on Cook Co. Board, offered paid help to weed shop applicants
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PRO TRUMP NEWS
THE HILL
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ROLL CALL
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Morning Headlines
The Supreme Court begins its new term Monday on unsettled ground, still dealing with the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic and staring down a consequential health care case and the possibility of a contested presidential election that could redefine the public’s perception of the high court’s legitimacy. Read More…
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin offered a $1.62 trillion COVID-19 relief proposal in talks with Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday, offering more state and local assistance than GOP negotiators have to date in a sign of potential progress toward a deal. Read More…
Several lawmakers disclose opaque financial records
Federal law requires members of Congress to publicly file annual financial disclosure statements and periodically report certain stock transactions in excess of $1,000. However, members are not required to file in a uniform manner. That has left some reports opaque and partially illegible. Read More…
Click here to subscribe to Fintech Beat for the latest market and regulatory developmentsin finance and financial technology.
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Hand-to-hand combat in Cleveland and nobody wins
OPINION — There is no other way to say it. Tuesday night’s presidential debate was the worst representation of the democratic process I’ve ever seen. Both candidates came loaded for bear and intent on substituting personal attacks for policy discussion. What the country needs is a real discussion of competing ideas. Read More…
U.S. Agency for Global Media unrecognizable under Trump ally
Democrats and Republicans have joined in expressing anger and dismay at what has happened to the U.S. Agency for Global Media since a supporter of President Donald Trump was confirmed as its director in early June. Read More…
Invite-only: How one Hill aide is turning his political connections into a business
Ask Michael Hardaway to sign you up for his Sunday evening newsletter, and he’ll probably say no. His own parents aren’t even on the list. That kind of thinking has served him well in the world of politics, and now he’s hoping it will help him launch a startup in an already crowded field. Read More…
Schumer goes around McConnell to set up vote defending Obamacare
Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer is rattling the Senate cage, exercising a right every senator has — though one rarely utilized — in an effort to put Republicans on defense on health care in the home stretch of the 2020 campaign. Read More…
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POLITICO PLAYBOOK
POLITICO Playbook: The trillion-dollar decision
Presented by Facebook
DRIVING THE DAY
TODAY IS OCTOBER 1. Congress averted a government shutdown Wednesday. But today is a big day in Speaker NANCY PELOSI and Treasury Secretary STEVEN MNUCHIN’S seemingly endless quest to inject more than $1 trillion of fresh money into the economy.
PELOSI and MNUCHIN met for an hour and a half Wednesday afternoon to try to reach an agreement, but found many areas that needed work. Here’s what our sources told us remained open, and unsolved: state and local funding (long an issue … Dems want roughly $500 billion, and Republicans are near $250 billion), K-12 funding ($225 billion for Dems, and $150 billion for Republicans) and a host of tax provisions, some related to health care. These are not easy to bridge, and there’s ample skepticism among the onlookers that they will be able to get a deal. And if they do, it’s going to take some time to finish up. Lindsey McPherson at Roll Call had a bunch of the numbers Wednesday night
REPUBLICANS TELL US THE DEAL NEEDS TO BE LESS THAN $2 trillion for it to pass their muster, and Dems want a deal at $2 trillion plus — so that’s the first issue. Those aren’t firm demands, just the general feeling among the dozens of people we spoke to Wednesday. And even if it’s at $1.6 trillion — MNUCHIN’S offer — it faces an incredibly treacherous path in the GOP Senate, where insiders told us it may never make it to the floor.
POLICY IS MADE BY PEOPLE — a very small set of them. So here’s how we see the incentives at play, at the moment.
— PELOSI made a calculation a few months ago: The TRUMP ADMINISTRATION was going to come back to the table to negotiate with her on a Covid relief package if she just waited long enough. Some Democrats thought she should buckle and take offers for less than $2 trillion — she didn’t, and there was some grumbling that she had overplayed her hand. Talks broke down. Then PELOSI moved from $3.4 trillion to $2.4 trillion. And here we are, with talks restarted and the White House back at the table, showing its eagerness to cut a deal.
HERE’S A REALITY THAT’S QUITE CLEAR for PELOSI and House Democrats: JOE BIDEN is the favorite to win the White House, and a better deal isn’t too far around the corner if this falls apart. When PELOSI delayed the vote on her Dem Covid relief bill Wednesday, her leadership team saw it as the speaker giving this one last chance while MNUCHIN was serious, and while White House chief of staff MARK MEADOWS was out of the room. It seems as if Democrats will give the talks a few hours this morning, then if they fail, they’ll move to their bill and move on. It would be very hard at this point for Republicans to say with a straight face that PELOSI doesn’t want a deal, given her eagerness at this moment.
BUT MAN, if she gets a deal here, this Congress will be bookended by PELOSI owning the White House: besting President DONALD TRUMP in the shutdown in early 2019, and now this.
— MNUCHIN WANTS A DEAL. Everyone who interacts with him understands that. He participated extensively in an NYT Mag story about his prowess as a dealmaker — this story was noticed in the Capitol, and compounded the distaste and dislike for him among Republicans in and out of the leadership. He talks about his relationship with PELOSI — professional, he says. He has a president who cares little about the details, wants a deal, but faces constraints from Hill Republicans who are saying they’re tired of spending.
BUT MEADOWS IS NEVER FAR AWAY — he showed up to Capitol Hill on Wednesday, slipping into Senate Majority Leader MITCH MCCONNELL’S office while MNUCHIN was on the other side of the Capitol talking to PELOSI without him.
— MCCONNELL IS NOT going to put a bill on the floor that doesn’t command the support of a majority of Senate Republicans — or damn close to it — and a bill north of $1 trillion won’t accomplish that. Don’t assume that if TRUMP says jump here, MCCONNELL asks him how high. So if PELOSI and MNUCHIN come up with a deal — if they come up with anything — it’s not necessarily cool with MCCONNELL.
LISTEN TO WHAT MCCONNELL is saying. He made clear Wednesday what he thought of the negotiations: They are “very, very far apart.” Do you need him to say more?
IF A DEAL COMES TOGETHER, it will take another week or more to see any action. If PELOSI sees that a deal is in the offing, she’ll go for it and make it happen. If not, talks will peter out until after the election.
AIRLINES are beginning furloughs of tens of thousands of employees today, per WAPO. … WSJ says American and United will cut 32,000 jobs. … GOLDMAN SACHS is laying off 400, per BLOOMBERG.
MARKET WATCH … WSJ: “Stocks Finish Second Straight Quarter of Big Gains”
FOR THOSE WATCHING AT HOME — The Senate passed a $1.4 trillion bill to extend government funding until Dec. 10. More from Caitlin Emma
YOWZA! — OUT LATER THIS MORNING: PRIORITIES USA — the big Dem super PAC — brought in nearly $100 million in the third quarter. The $92.4 million haul included $59 million in September. This is nearly twice what it raised in 2016.
Good Thursday morning.
DRIVING TODAY: PELOSI’S news conference at 10:45 … House Minority Leader KEVIN MCCARTHY at 1 p.m.
A SPACE WORTH WATCHING — “At White House’s urging, Republicans launch anti-tech blitz ahead of election,” by Cristiano Lima and John Hendel: “The Trump administration is pressuring Senate Republicans to ratchet up scrutiny of social media companies it sees as biased against conservatives in the run-up to the November election, people familiar with the conversations say. And the effort appears to be paying off.
“In recent weeks, the White House has pressed Senate Republican leaders on key committees to hold public hearings on the law that protects Facebook, Twitter and other internet companies from lawsuits over how they treat user posts, three Senate staffers told POLITICO. They requested anonymity to discuss private communications.”
FOGGY BOTTOM VS. THE VATICAN … NYT’S JASON HOROWITZ and LARA JAKES in Rome: “Rebuffed by Vatican, Pompeo Assails China and Aligns With Pope’s Critics”: “The friction broke into the open on Wednesday as Mr. Pompeo arrived in Rome and met with prelates and others who are hostile to Pope Francis, while the Vatican denied him a meeting with the pontiff and rebuffed his efforts to derail the deal with China.
“‘Pompeo asked to meet’ the pope, who turned him down because Francis had ‘clearly said that he does not receive political figures ahead of the elections,’ Cardinal Pietro Parolin, who, as secretary of state, is the Vatican’s second-ranking official, told reporters.
“But to some observers on both sides of the tensions between the Roman Catholic Church and the Trump administration, Mr. Pompeo’s visit is as much about the coming presidential election as about China policy. Mr. Pompeo dismissed that suggestion as absurd, but intended or not, his trip signals that President Trump is on the side of those conservative American Catholics who worry about the church’s direction under Francis and think he is soft on China.”
NBC’S JULIA AINSLEY: “Internal document shows Trump officials were told to make comments sympathetic to Kyle Rittenhouse”: “In preparing Homeland Security officials for questions about Rittenhouse from the media, the document suggests that they note that he ‘took his rifle to the scene of the rioting to help defend small business owners.’”
ON THE TRAIL, POST-DEBATE … NANCY COOK in Duluth, Minn., and MATTHEW CHOI: “Trump basks in cheers of Minnesota rally, far from debate criticism”: “A day after fighting for attention in a nearly audience-free debate, President Donald Trump on Wednesday returned to his safe space: an adoring crowd of hundreds who were happy to declare him the winner.
“Trump visited Minnesota less than 24 hours after the first debate for a fundraiser outside of Minneapolis, followed by a campaign rally in Duluth at an airport hangar. Unlike the previous night, when he was criticized for refusing to condemn white supremacists and for deploying his pugnacious style on the debate stage, Wednesday marked a return to his rallies, where he receives little pushback and tons of applause and feeds off the energy of his base.
“He kicked off the event here by bragging about what he called high TV ratings for the debate, glossing over any criticism or negative headlines about the lack of substantial discussion. ‘Last night I did what the corrupt media has refused to do,’ Trump said. ‘I held Joe Biden accountable for his 47 years of lies, 47 years of betrayal and 47 years of failure. I held Joe accountable for shipping your jobs and dreams abroad and for bowing to the violent mob at home.’ ‘Joe Biden is too weak to lead this country,’ he added.” POLITICO
THE BIDEN BEAT — “Back in his comfort zone, Joe Biden hits Amtrak and the campaign trail,” by WaPo’s Annie Linskey aboard Joe Biden’s campaign train: “Normal campaigning can feel a little odd after all those months spent mostly campaigning virtually. Biden hadn’t had a day this busy since he essentially sewed up the nomination in March, and it showed.
“As he was speaking in Cleveland, a freight train pulled out of the yard, honking, and Biden went a little off-track. ‘Here comes the train that he’s trying to make sure you . . .’ Biden said, his words, with no clear destination, becoming inaudible as the train honked louder. Later, in Alliance, he referred to the debate in an unusual way. ‘Tables like the one that we saw last night were ones that were set by Trump,’ Biden said. It was not clear what he meant.”
GOP HAND-WRINGING OVER TRUMP … WAPO’S BOB COSTA and MATT VISER: “Belligerent Trump debate performance stokes fears among Republicans about November” … NYT’S ALEX BURNS, JONATHAN MARTIN and MAGGIE HABERMAN: “G.O.P. Alarmed by Trump’s Comments on Extremist Group, Fearing a Drag on the Party”
— ALEX ISENSTADT and GARY FINEOUT: “Parscale steps away from Trump campaign as wife denies physical abuse”
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER: “Memory sticks used to program Philly’s voting machines were stolen from elections warehouse,” by Jeremy Roebuck and Jonathan Lai: “A laptop and several memory sticks used to program Philadelphia’s voting machines were stolen from a city warehouse in East Falls, officials confirmed Wednesday, setting off a scramble to investigate and to ensure the machines had not been compromised.
“Though it remains unclear when the equipment was stolen, sources briefed on the investigation said the items vanished this week. The laptop belonged to an on-site employee for the company that supplies the machines. It and the USB drives were the only items believed to have been taken. City officials vowed Wednesday that the theft would not disrupt voting on Nov. 3.”
SWAMP READ — “Biden transition elevates former Facebook exec as ethics arbiter,” by Alex Thompson and Theo Meyer: “Joe Biden’s transition team named Jessica Hertz, until recently a Facebook executive focused on government regulations, as its general counsel on Wednesday and charged her with navigating conflicts of interest and other ethical issues for the Biden administration-in-waiting — a move that drew immediate fire from the left. …
“Hertz will oversee a team responsible for ‘enforcement, oversight, and compliance’ of the ethics plan that Biden’s team also released Wednesday. In it, they promise to reestablish many of the rules President Barack Obama instituted to limit the role of former lobbyists in the 2008 transition — which Biden was also involved in.” POLITICO … Biden’s ethics plan
TRUMP’S THURSDAY — The president will leave the White House at 12:45 p.m. en route to Bedminster, N.J. There, he’ll participate in a roundtable with supporters at 3 p.m. and deliver remarks at a fundraiser at 3:45 p.m. Trump will then return to Washington, arriving at the White House at 6:30 p.m.
ON THE TRAIL: BIDEN will attend a virtual fundraiser.
PLAYBOOK READS
WHAT RATCLIFFE IS UP TO … ANDREW DESIDERIO and KYLE CHENEY: “National Intelligence chief gave little notice for briefing on Russian assessment”
HELENA BOTTEMILLER EVICH: “Trump requires food aid boxes to come with a letter from him”: “The Agriculture Department last week began mandating that millions of boxes of surplus food for needy families include a letter from President Donald Trump claiming credit for the program.
“The USDA’s $4 billion Families to Farmers Food Box Program has distributed more than 100 million boxes to those in need since May, with the aim of redirecting meat, dairy and produce that might normally go to restaurants and other food-service businesses. But organizations handing out the aid complain the program is now being used to bolster Trump’s image a month before a high-stakes election – and some even have refused to distribute them.
“‘In my 30 years of doing this work, I’ve never seen something this egregious,’ said Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, executive director of the Ohio Association of Food Banks. ‘These are federally purchased boxes.’ The letter comes in both English and Spanish on White House letterhead and features Trump’s bold signature: ‘As President, safeguarding the health and well-being of our citizens is one of my highest priorities,’ it reads. ‘As part of our response to coronavirus, I prioritized sending nutritious food from our farmers to families in need throughout America.’”
PUTIN WATCH … AP/BERLIN: “Russia’s Navalny accuses Putin of being behind poisoning”: “Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who is recovering in Germany after being poisoned in Russia by a nerve agent, accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of being behind the attack in comments released Thursday. Navalny’s supporters have frequently maintained that such an attack could have only been ordered at the top levels, though the Kremlin has steadfastly denied any involvement in it. …
“[Navalny] has posted frequent comments online as his recovery has progressed, but in his first interview since the attack, he told Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine that in his mind, ‘Putin was behind the attack,’ in a German translation of his comments. ‘I don’t have any other versions of how the crime was committed,’ he said in a brief excerpt of the interview conducted in Berlin on Wednesday and to be released in full online later Thursday.” AP
WSJ: “Justice Department Opens Ventilator Antitrust Probe Focused on Medtronic,” by Brent Kendall: “The Justice Department is investigating whether acquisitions by Medtronic limited competition in ventilator manufacturing, according to people familiar with the matter, an antitrust probe that emerged from complaints about device shortages during the coronavirus pandemic. Medtronic has received a civil subpoena from the Justice Department formally requesting more information, the people said.” WSJ
DEEP DIVE — “A Pro-Trump Militant Group Has Recruited Thousands of Police, Soldiers, and Veterans,” by The Atlantic’s Mike Giglio
FIRST IN PLAYBOOK — BOOK CLUB: Gary Ginsberg is writing a book called “First Friends: The Powerful, Unsung (and Unelected) People Who Shaped Our President, and Our Country.” The book will be published by Twelve, an imprint of Hachette, next fall. He most recently ran comms for SoftBank and is a Time Warner, News Corp. and Clinton White House alum.
MEDIAWATCH — “Chris Wallace Calls Debate ‘a Terrible Missed Opportunity,’” by NYT’s Michael Grynbaum: “‘I’m just sad with the way last night turned out.’ Chris Wallace, the ‘Fox News Sunday’ anchor and moderator of Tuesday’s melee of a debate between President Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr., was on the phone Wednesday from his home in Annapolis, Md., reflecting on — his words — ‘a terrible missed opportunity.’ ‘I never dreamt that it would go off the tracks the way it did,’ he said.
“In his first interview since the chaotic and often incoherent spectacle — in which a pugilistic Mr. Trump relentlessly interrupted opponent and moderator alike — Mr. Wallace conceded that he had been slow to recognize that the president was not going to cease flouting the debate’s rules.
“‘I’ve read some of the reviews. I know people think, well, gee, I didn’t jump in soon enough,’ Mr. Wallace said, his voice betraying some hoarseness from the previous night’s proceedings. ‘I guess I didn’t realize — and there was no way you could, hindsight being 20/20 — that this was going to be the president’s strategy, not just for the beginning of the debate but the entire debate.’”
— James Surowiecki will write a “Money Talks” column for the business publication Marker. He previously wrote The Financial Page for The New Yorker. Talking Biz News
PLAYBOOKERS
Send tips to Eli Okun and Garrett Ross at politicoplaybook@politico.com.
SPOTTED at a virtual party Wednesday night for Susan Glasser and Peter Baker’s new book, “The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III” ($28.88 on Amazon), hosted by David Rubenstein, Mike Abramowitz and David Marchick: Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), Andrea Mitchell, Bob Kimmitt, Cathy Merrill Williams, Chris Christie, Chris Matthews, Daniel Yergin, David Malpass, Jake Siewert, Ken Duberstein, Lesley Stahl, Mack McLarty, Neal Wolin, Dina Powell McCormick, Paula Dobriansky, Meredith Baker, Afsaneh Beschloss, Richard Haass, Sally Quinn, Sylvia Burwell, Tom Brokaw, Tom Nides, Fred Ryan, Wendy Sherman, Don Baer, John McLaughlin, Josh Bolten, Ben Ginsberg, Steve Hadley, Patrick Gaspard, Wendy Anderson, Bruce Andrews and Steve Case.
SPOTTED at the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute’s virtual gala Wednesday night celebrating 96 honorees as 2020 Angels in Adoption: former Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Susan Neely, first lady Melania Trump, Sens. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Jim Risch (R-Idaho), Reps. Karen Bass (D-Calif.), Donna Shalala (D-Fla.) and Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.), Magnolia Earl, Todd Tilghman, Miranda and Luke Caldwell, Dan Fogelman, Chrissy Metz and Sterling K. Brown.
FIRST IN PLAYBOOK — Joshua Whitehouse has started in the White House liaison’s office at the Department of Defense. He most recently was White House liaison at DHS and is a former New Hampshire state representative.
TRANSITIONS — Andrew Taverrite is now comms director for the Senate Judiciary Dems. He previously was New Hampshire comms director for Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign, and is a Planned Parenthood alum. … Dan Lee has joined the front office of the managing director and chief administrative officer at the World Bank Group. He previously was a strategy officer at the International Finance Corporation, and is a Bush White House and Charlie Baker alum. …
… Francis Reynolds will lead ServiceNow’s global government affairs, public policy and advocacy agenda. She previously was VP and head of government and public affairs at the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America. … Stephan Miller is starting at Kivvit as director of digital strategy. Also joining Kivvit: former New York Gov. David Paterson, Kelly Meissgeier and Josh Vlasto. Announcement … Allan Adler will retire from the Association of American Publishers this month after 24 years. He is currently EVP and general counsel.
BIRTHDAY OF THE DAY: Rob Seidman, SVP at the Glover Park Group. How he thinks the Trump presidency is going: “To quote Dire Straits, ‘sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug.’” Playbook Q&A
BIRTHDAYS: Former President Jimmy Carter is 96 … Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) is 47 … Rep. Grace Meng (D-N.Y.) is 45 … Rep. Jimmy Panetta (D-Calif.) is 51 … Tommy Andrews, special assistant to the president for legislative affairs, is 34 … WSJ politics editor Ben Pershing is 45 … WaPo’s Jose Del Real … Jennifer Storipan, executive director of the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration, is 41 (h/t Jess Vaughn) … Kenny Cunningham, COO of the Article III Project and founder of Cunningham Communications … Tim Hannegan of HLP&R Advocacy is 57 (h/t Jennifer Poersch) … CNN correspondent Brian Todd … Alex Gleason, VP at Crossroads Strategies (h/t Evan Williams) … AEI’s Joe Antos … Alisa La, special assistant to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (h/t Kristen Hawn) … POLITICO’s Evan Semones, Andy Goodwin, Marie French and Mallory Anne Sheehan … Yousra Fazili (h/t John Hudson) … former British PM Theresa May is 64 …
… Heather Reams, executive director of Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions … Brook Ramlet … Michael Knopf, VP at MediaLink (h/t Christian Emanuel) … Laura Fullerton, deputy staff director for the House Foreign Affairs GOP, is 51 … P.G. Sittenfeld is 36 … Scott Eckart … Daniel Clifton … Cammie Croft, chief community officer at FWD.us … Nayyera Haq, SiriusXM Progress host and proud mom of Zoya (h/t Ben Chang) … Nikolai Wenzel … Sharon Yang, comms director for Gina Ortiz Jones’ congressional campaign … Rose Lichtenfels … Scott Rosenthal … David Kerr … Robert Rosen of the Gates Foundation … CRC Public Relations SVP Mike Thompson … Joanne Peters … Chad Babin … Eric London (h/t Tim Burger) … Catherine Dennig … Theo Yedinsky … Jeremy Lott … Candice Rogers … Gretel Truong … Susan Peacock … Lorraine Adams … Vinh Nguyen … Chris Berg … IBM’s Vera Rhoads … Justin Hunter is 52
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THE DISPATCH
The Morning Dispatch: Ohio Is a Swing State Once Again
Plus, a quick update on schools and COVID data
| The Dispatch Staff | 1 hr | 2 |
Happy Thursday! Your Morning Dispatch team saw one another in person yesterday (outdoors, socially distanced) for the first time since March. Nice to remember we’re more than disembodied heads and shoulders on Zoom calls!
Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories
- The United States confirmed 39,657 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday per the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, with 5.1 percent of the 784,478 tests reported coming back positive. An additional 914 deaths were attributed to the virus on Wednesday, bringing the pandemic’s American death toll to 206,888.
- The Senate voted 84-10 to approve the stopgap spending bill passed by the House last week that will avert a government shutdown, funding the federal government through the general election into early December. President Trump signed the legislation shortly after midnight.
- Just more than 73 million people tuned in to Tuesday night’s presidential debate on television per Nielsen ratings, a 13 percent decrease from the 84 million who watched Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s first debate in 2016. Millions more likely streamed the debate online or watched clips on social media, but such data are elusive.
- The Commission on Presidential Debates is weighing changes to the debate format after the tumultuous exchanges between President Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden. “Last night’s debate made clear that additional structure should be added to the format of the remaining debates to ensure a more orderly discussion of the issues,” it said in a statement. “The CPD will be carefully considering the changes that it will adopt and will announce those measures shortly.”
- California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a series of policing bills on Wednesday that will ban chokeholds, require the state’s attorney general to investigate all fatal police shootings of unarmed individuals, and reform California’s probation and juvenile justice systems.
- House Democrats will reportedly urge Congress to curb the power of large technology companies after a 15-month investigation by the Antitrust Subcommittee into Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon.
Ohio: A Swing State Once Again
After the debate in Cleveland on Tuesday night, CNN conducted a focus group of 14 undecided Ohio voters to gauge how the event played in what is shaping up to be one of the most important states in the presidential election. Only three of the 14 voters believed one candidate stood out over the other on the debate stage—a microcosmic view of the neck-and-neck race in Ohio as a whole.
Neck-and-neck in Ohio is bad news for Trump. Of the four Rust Belt states he flipped four years ago—Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Ohio—Ohio was by far his most decisive victory. The Buckeye State went blue in both 2008 and 2012—by 4.6 and 3 points, respectively—but Trump won it by 8.1 points in 2016 on his way to sweeping the Midwest (save Illinois and Minnesota) and taking the White House. In Michigan he won by 0.2 points; in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin he won by 0.7.
To be in a statistical tie with Joe Biden in Ohio 33 days out, therefore, is less than ideal for the president’s re-election chances. A recent Quinnipiac University poll had the former vice president up 1 point in the state; a Fox News poll had him up 5. Biden doesn’t even need Ohio—he has multiple other pathways to get the necessary 270 electoral votes. But for Trump, losing it would almost certainly be a death knell.
So why have we heard so much about Florida, Pennsylvania, and Arizona but almost nothing about Ohio? Trump’s large margin of victory four years ago may have led Democrats to write off the state and Republicans to become complacent. “Part of the reason why it just has not gotten the attention it normally has, is that there’s sort of an intimidation factor,” said Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report.
“When you actually look at the numbers [from 2016], what you see is that Donald Trump got a little over 51 percent,” Walter told The Dispatch. That’s enough to win, obviously, but not the smashing victory that an 8-point margin might imply. Nearly 5 percent of the state’s vote went to third-party candidates or write-ins. The 2018 gubernatorial race should have been a warning to Republicans that Trump’s dominance in the state may have been fleeting: Mike DeWine beat his Democratic opponent, Richard Cordray, by just 3.7 points.
Another Note on Schools and COVID-19
In assessing U.S. schools’ fight to contain COVID, one major difficulty is that schools’ decentralized governance and myriad different reporting structures make it difficult to find general data in real time. Earlier this week, we talked briefly about one effort to address this problem: Brown University’s COVID-19 School Response Dashboard, a new public health effort compiling several types of infection information from schools around the country in a format that’s easy to grasp at a glance.
The dashboard reported its most recent two weeks of data on Wednesday, showing that—despite rising COVID cases in many communities around the country—schools are still largely holding steady—and low. Compared to the first two weeks of September, staff confirmed and suspected COVID infection rates crept up from 0.5 percent to about 0.6 percent. Meanwhile, the rate for students confirmed and suspected inched down from 0.2 percent to 0.16 percent.
Local news stories continue to bubble up about outbreaks at reopening schools. What remains to be seen—and what will matter in the end, as a matter of policy—is not whether the virus is showing up among people attending schools, but whether it is spreading at schools. Efforts like the Brown University dashboard will hopefully give us insight into questions like these in the weeks ahead.
Worth Your Time
- Ever since FiveThirtyEight launched its general election polling averages on June 18, Joe Biden has led Trump by at least 6.8 points nationally. But despite the Democratic nominee’s steady advantage, survey respondents tend to think both candidates have an equal chance of winning in November. Part of this hinges on voters’ focus on battleground states. “If we look at potential tipping-point states, the race is a bit closer, but not that much closer,” writes FiveThirtyEight elections analyst Nate Silver. He breaks down the top three sources of election anxiety among Biden supporters: How likely is it that Trump wins the Electoral College but loses the popular vote by a wide margin? What if the polls are wrong? Can Trump actually steal the election?
- Sarah Longwell has conducted hundreds of focus groups with Trump voters over the past few years, honing in on female swing-state voters in particular. She checked in with nine of them after Tuesday night’s debate: “There’s no sugar-coating it: Whatever Donald Trump was trying to do last night backfired with this group spectacularly.” Here’s what one woman in Texas—who went into the night planning to vote for Trump—said: “I don’t know if I am going to stick with him. That was awful last night. I’m moving more towards the fence, I really am. It was despicable behavior, the way he attacked Joe’s sons, one of whom is dead, it was terrible.”
- In a piece for TheAtlantic, Derek Thompson debunks the myths and conspiracy theories surrounding voter fraud while acknowledging the risks that the surge in mail-in-voting presents to this election season. (For a terrific read on the latter, please see Sarah’s analysis in The Sweep from back in early August.)Thompson writes: “Mail votes are more convenient, but more easily disqualified,” he writes. “They are more error-prone, but not statistically fraudulent; they are more likely to expand the electorate, but at the cost of increasing the total number of rejected ballots.” More than 550,000 absentee and mail-in ballots were disqualified during the 2020 primary season, a startling figure that should keep election officials on high alert as we inch ever closer to November 3rd. Since Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to vote by mail, Joe Biden is in a bit of a conundrum: “Democrats’ big edge in early voting and mail votes might be a salutary achievement,” Thompson writes. “But in a close election, the combination of innocent mistakes by voters, mass litigation in close states, and conspiracy theories about mail-in voting could create the mother of all electoral headaches.”
Presented Without Comment
Toeing the Company Line
- As Sarah reminds us on yesterday’s Dispatch Podcast, presidential candidates go into debates with a strategy, basing their metric of success on their ability to boost turnout within a pre-existing base. Did either presidential candidate achieve what they wanted to during Tuesday’s debate? Are undecided voters who tuned in now more or less likely to show up to the polls? After a post-debate recap, Sarah and the guys also discuss the electoral and national security implications of the New York Times’ report on Trump’s tax returns, and DNI John Ratcliffe’s letter to Sen. Lindsey Graham making public unverified raw intelligence from Russia just weeks before the election.
- David watched Tuesday night’s debate, and he saw a bully. “One can legitimately hold his [Biden’s] feet to the fire on taxpayer support for abortion, for the stunning concessions in the Iran deal, and for the Obama administration’s failures in Iraq and Syria—failures that led not just to the rise of ISIS but also to the reinsertion of American ground troops and the expansion of Middle East wars,” he writes in his latest French Press (🔒). “Trump charts a different path—one that relegates substance to the dark corners of the stage and puts style at the very center. And that style is the chaotic, performative, and swaggering toughness of the bully …”
- On the site today, Christian Schneider predicts that even if Donald Trump loses in November, some things will not go back to normal. He suggests that political parties, local politics, Congress, and the media have all been subject to changes that will be hard to reverse.
- Also, Dalibor Rohac looks at the populist authoritarians to whom Trump has been compared, and decides that there is not much populist about Trump. “And even if he wins again in November, it will be thanks to the peculiarities of the Electoral College—not because he would have an unequivocal majority of Americans behind him. That does not make his election illegitimate, as some on the left suggest, but it does make him an odd tribune of America’s supposedly voiceless majority.”
Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), Audrey Fahlberg (@FahlOutBerg), James P. Sutton (@jamespsuttonsf), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).
Photograph by Alex Wong/Getty Images.
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KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE— With the first debate now in the books, we have close to 20 rating changes across the Electoral College, Senate, and House. — Joe Biden is now over 270 electoral votes in our ratings as we move several Midwestern states in his favor. — Changes in the battle for Congress benefit Democrats almost exclusively. We’re moving two Senate races in their direction, as well as several House contests. Table 1: Crystal Ball Electoral College rating changes
Table 2: Crystal Ball Senate rating changes
Table 3: Crystal Ball House rating changes
About Tuesday nightTrailing nationally and in more than 270 electoral votes’ worth of states, Donald Trump needed more help from Tuesday night’s debate than Joe Biden did. We don’t think Trump did help himself, and it is possible that he actually made his path to a second term harder by demonstrating the poor behavior that seems to turn off so many voters. Trump’s performance was so outrageous that it made us ponder whether we should make him a significantly bigger underdog in our ratings than he already has been: We’ve had Biden leading Trump in our Electoral College ratings since early April, and Biden’s been slowly inching up in our ratings ever since, while Trump has been receding. That will continue in our rating changes today, although arguably we could or even should go a lot further. But we have also been cautious throughout this election cycle, cognizant of an electorate that doesn’t seem to swing that much, even in the face of events that one might expect to change minds. Electoral College changesWith a stable national lead and a bevy of polling showing him running significantly better with northern white voters than Hillary Clinton performed four years ago, Joe Biden appears to be turning back the clock a bit on the United States’ political transformation. Namely, after Clinton hemorrhaged white voters in northern small town and rural areas in 2016, Biden appears to be bringing some of those voters back into the Democratic fold while also improving on Clinton’s margins with white suburbanites. If this pattern holds in the actual results, it could pay major dividends for Biden in the Great Lakes region, where American presidential elections are so often won and lost and where the electorates in the competitive states are whiter than the nation as a whole. We have several Electoral College changes this week, all in this region. We are moving Minnesota from Leans Democratic to Likely Democratic. We are also moving its neighbor, Wisconsin — the decisive state in the 2016 presidential election — from Toss-up to Leans Democratic. And, finally, we’re moving Iowa and Ohio, both of which voted for Donald Trump by margins approaching double digits in 2016, from Leans Republican to Toss-up. These changes push Biden over the 270 electoral vote mark in our ratings, shown in Map 1. Map 1: Crystal Ball Electoral College ratings In Iowa, the tell may have been that Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) has been locked in a very competitive contest with businesswoman Theresa Greenfield (D), and it seems like the presidential race is not much different (though Trump typically polls a little better than Ernst). Meanwhile, Biden’s lead in Wisconsin has been as good or even better than his lead in Michigan and Pennsylvania, two states we’ve had in the Leans Democratic column since June (Pennsylvania) or since we debuted our Electoral College ratings last year (Michigan). Biden’s leads are in the five-to-seven point range in all three states. Minnesota voted slightly more Democratic than these states in 2016, and the president’s bid to flip the state does not appear to be succeeding. We think it merits being in a less competitive category than the Michigan-Pennsylvania- Now, how might we be wrong about the Midwest? Simple: It is possible that pollsters across many different methods and firms are just overestimating Democratic support among white voters, and it’s showing up most dramatically in this region. That said, there are reasons to believe that Trump’s great performances with white voters will be hard to replicate this year. The president has never showed much ability to appeal to a wider audience than the voters who backed him in 2016, and exit poll data suggests that a number of voters took a chance on Trump: He did better than Clinton with voters who had an unfavorable view of both candidates. A small number of these voters may be falling by the wayside: For instance, an ABC News/Washington Post poll that had Biden up nine points in Pennsylvania showed 8% of 2016 Trump voters crossing over to Biden while just 1% of Clinton voters were crossing over to Trump. It’s easy to think of the Trump electorate as immovable, and much of his backing is rock solid, but not every single one of his 2016 supporters was 100% behind him. In the midst of 2020’s bad environment — a global pandemic and a rocked economy — it would make sense that any incumbent president would struggle to add new voters and retain everyone from his last election. Biden also may simply be a better fit for these voters than Clinton was, and the electorate is not static from cycle to cycle. We may also be compelled to move Texas and especially Georgia to Toss-up sooner rather than later. At the very least, these states are consistently closer in polls than 2016’s decisive trio of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It may be, though, that if Biden is turning back the clock slightly to 2012, the Midwest states, even Iowa and Ohio, are better targets than those emerging battlefields of the Sun Belt. This is also why we continue to hold Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina in the Toss-up category. Of those, Arizona is closest to Leans Democratic. All told, the president continues to need a significant shift in the numbers — or an even bigger polling error than we saw in 2016 — to bring this race back into true Toss-up territory. The clock keeps ticking to Election Day, and votes are already being cast. The SenateMap 2: Crystal Ball Senate ratings The picture for Trump is not good in the Centennial State: as of Wednesday, polling aggregates from FiveThirtyEight give Biden a clean 51%-41% advantage. As one Republican operative summed up in July, “Jesus Christ himself couldn’t overperform Trump by double digits.” Senate polling since then has born this out: while Gardner generally performs better than Trump, he often lags his Democratic challenger, former Gov. John Hickenlooper (D-CO), by high single-digits. Hickenlooper, who has tried to strike a postpartisan tone, was never a darling of the left. Still in late June, he turned back a primary challenge from former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff — who ran as a more strident liberal, and actually placed first at party’s (less binding) caucus — by a 59%-41% vote. Though his 2020 presidential bid went nowhere, Hickenlooper did win reelection in a hostile 2014 midterm, and he was the only Democrat to win statewide in Colorado that year. The former governor has underwhelmed in this race against Gardner, but that ultimately may not matter much in a nationalized contest. Gardner scored a significant legislative win this summer with the passage of his Great American Outdoors Act — but on the campaign trail, he’s very much aligned himself with the president. As a result, Gardner receives near-unanimous support from Republicans, but an early September poll from Morning Consult shows him losing Independents — the largest voting bloc, by registration, in the state — by 29 percentage points. Exit polling from 2014 had Gardner carrying the Independent vote 50%-42%. The looming Supreme Court confirmation battle could also limit Gardner’s crossover appeal. Though it appears he’ll support Trump’s nominee, judge Amy Coney Barrett, Democrats have worked to define her as an opponent of abortion rights and of the Affordable Care Act. In 2014, Democrats probably overplayed the abortion issue against Gardner — then-Sen. Mark Udall (D) hammered Gardner’s pro-life stances ad nauseam. But with a 6-3 conservative court looking more like a reality, Udall’s former attacks may now seem less abstract. Even before the court vacancy, Gardner’s opposition to the ACA seemed to be hurting his electoral standing. So the coverage of the court hearings may emphasize two issues where Republicans are out of step with the Colorado electorate. This pushes our rating to Likely Democratic and emphasizes, in our ratings, that Gardner is clearly the most vulnerable Republican senator. If nationalization looms large in Colorado, Alaska is a state that, politically, seems to march to the beat of its own drum — but it’s also a state that Senate Republicans seem to be worried about. First-term Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) is locked in an increasingly competitive race with Al Gross, an independent who is running as the Democratic nominee. In September, the Senate Leadership Fund — a group allied with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) — invested $1.6 million in the Last Frontier, a tangible sign that the Republicans aren’t taking the race for granted. For Republicans to lose in Alaska, they often have to be on the wrong side of a major local issue. Gross’ campaign is pointing to the state’s controversial Pebble Mine project. In recently publicized tapes, the project’s CEO seemed to brag about his connections to local politicians, including Sullivan. Though Sullivan later voiced his opposition to the project, Gross had already featured the issue in his ads. Like Gardner in Colorado, the imminent Supreme Court hearings may not necessarily lift Sullivan. Alaska has something of a libertarian streak: though it’s a red state, its residents tend to favor abortion rights, an issue that’s likely to play prominently into both parties’ messaging during the confirmation process. During the last Supreme Court hearing, the Alaska Federation of Natives — in a rare move — announced it opposed the confirmation of now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh. But Sullivan supported Kavanaugh anyway, and another Supreme Court fight could help motivate this key Democratic constituency to turn out (roughly 15% of the state’s population are Alaskan Natives). The Gross campaign may have suffered a setback when the state’s ballot design was unveiled. He’ll be labeled as the Democratic nominee — this is technically accurate, as he won that primary, but is somewhat at odds with the “independent Alaskan” he frames himself as. Alaska is notoriously hard to poll, but a pro-Gross internal from late September showed the race essentially tied. Sullivan is still the favorite, but we’re not counting Gross out — we’re moving the race to Leans Republican. The overall contest for the Senate majority remains highly competitive, but the increasing number of Leans Republican-rated races in our ratings — we now have four, in addition to three GOP-held seats where we favor the Democrats and another two listed as Toss-ups — suggests the possibility that, on a good night, Democrats could make very substantial Senate gains. The HouseTable 4: Crystal Ball House ratings
The headline changes include shifting a number of Leans Republican districts to Toss-up: the open seat in VA-5 — a central Virginia district that covers the University of Virginia — as well as those held by Reps. David Schweikert (R, AZ-6), Jim Hagedorn (R, MN-1), and Jeff Van Drew (R, NJ-2). In VA-5, former Campbell County Supervisor Bob Good (R) beat Rep. Denver Riggleman (R) at a nominating convention, and now Republicans are concerned that Good is going to kick away the seat against Cameron Webb (D). These are all Trump-won districts where Democrats nonetheless appear to be running strong challenges. Schweikert, Hagedorn, and Van Drew all have different problems. Schweikert was hurt by a longstanding ethics investigation that harmed his standing and fundraising. Hagedorn, who only narrowly won a Trump +15 district in 2018 after losing several previous attempts, is locked in a close rematch with veteran Dan Feehan (D), and Hagedorn also has had to deal with a controversy involving taxpayer-funded mailers. Van Drew, who switched parties last year, may see his Trump-won district flip to Biden, and he faces Amy Kennedy (D), who is married to former Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D) of Rhode Island. Another red-district Democratic target is the at-large seat in Montana, where 2018 nominee Kathleen Williams (D) may hold a small lead on state Auditor Matt Rosendale (R), who unsuccessfully challenged Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) last cycle. A recent New York Times/Siena College poll actually had Williams up 44%-41%, although the undecideds appeared to be a fairly Republican-leaning group. Still, a Likely Republican rating doesn’t reflect the competitiveness of this seat, so we’re moving it to Leans Republican. We just moved Iowa to Toss-up in the presidential race. If the 2018 gubernatorial race there is any indication, even if Trump carries the state by a few points, Joe Biden could very well flip three of the state’s four districts: IA-1, IA-2, and IA-3. Most of the GOP’s strength in Iowa is concentrated in the northwestern IA-4, while its three other districts are more Democratic than the state. Help from the top of the ticket could benefit Democrats in these districts, which is part of the reason we’re upgrading Rep. Abby Finkenauer (D, IA-1) from Toss-up to Leans Democratic, though she still faces a strong challenge from state Rep. Ashley Hinson (R). It may be, however, that the open IA-2 is the hardest hold for Democrats. We now rate all three of these seats as Leans Democratic. Three additional first-term Democratic House members move from Leans Democratic to Likely Democratic. Several weeks ago, we moved Rep. Jared Golden (D, ME-2) from Toss-up to Leans Democratic on account of his huge financial edge over his challenger, former state Rep. Dale Crafts (R), and Biden’s likely improvement in Golden’s sprawling, Trump-won district. Since then, several polls have indicated that Golden is up by double-digit margins, and we’re upgrading him as a result. We’re also upgrading Reps. Lizzie Pannill Fletcher (D, TX-7) and Lauren Underwood (D, IL-14), both of whom occupy formerly Republican suburban districts where Biden should perform well. Fletcher has a strong challenger, veteran Wesley Hunt (R), who, if he loses, perhaps just picked a poor year to run; Underwood faces a perennial candidate, state Sen. Jim Oberweis (R), who Republicans are not enthusiastic about. In another Democratic-trending Chicagoland district, we’re moving Rep. Sean Casten (D, IL-6) to Safe Democratic, and we’re making the same move in the St. Petersburg/Clearwater seat held by Rep. Charlie Crist (D, FL-13). Neither faces strong opposition and there’s not much reason to think either would lose. The one district we’re moving in favor of Republicans is CA-21, held by Rep. T.J. Cox (D). Cox’s Central Valley district backed Clinton by 15 points, but Cox was lucky to beat well-regarded Rep. David Valadao (R, CA-21) in 2018, and Cox has faced questions about his finances and ties to the district. The Democratic tide in the district very well could save Cox, although Republican polling has Valadao up 11 points (this is an extremely difficult district to poll, and Cox’s performance in the state’s top-two primary gives him some reason for optimism, as we wrote after the California primary). This is a Toss-up for now. One final note: There is a truly bizarre situation going on in MN-2, a suburban/exurban Twin Cities seat held by Rep. Angie Craig (D) that could impact the rating in her seat. There is a law in Minnesota that specifies if a major party candidate dies within 79 days of an election, the election is postponed to a later special election. In MN-2, there was a candidate from a pro-marijuana legalization party who died recently. This party was specified as a major party because of the performance of one of its candidates in a 2018 statewide race. So as of now, the November election between Craig and Tyler Kistner (R), a veteran running a credible campaign, has been postponed to a February 2021 special election. Craig is suing, arguing that postponing the election would violate federal law. If in fact the November election is postponed, we are moving this district from Likely Democratic to Toss-up, and for the purposes of organizing the House in January, this would at least temporarily count as a Democratic loss (though not a Republican gain). But because of the truly bizarre circumstances, we are not changing the rating yet as we wait for more clarity. With these rating changes, we now have 232 seats at least leaning to the Democrats, 188 seats at least leaning to the Republicans, and 15 Toss-ups. Splitting the Toss-ups down the middle 8-7 one way or the other would produce a 4-5 seat net gain for the Democrats compared to the House results two years ago. Read the fine printLearn more about the Crystal Ball and find out how to contact us here. Sign up to receive Crystal Ball e-mails like this one delivered straight to your inbox. Use caution with Sabato’s Crystal Ball, and remember: “He who lives by the Crystal Ball ends up eating ground glass!” |
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| © Copyright by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia |
Today’s rating changes solidify our belief that the Democrats are better-positioned to net seats this year than the Republicans. We’re shifting a dozen races, all but one in the favor of Democrats.
This message was sent to rickbulow1974@gmail.com from goodpolitics@virginia.edu
Larry J. Sabato
UVA Center for Politics
PO Box 400806
Charlottesville, VA 22904
THE BLAZE
THE FEDERALIST
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NOQ REPORT
NOQ Report Daily |
- Trump is fighting for Evangelicals by tackling Critical Race Theory
- Candace Owens has deja vu. Hopefully, America will as well on election night.
- Media claims President Trump won’t denounce white supremacists. Let’s go to the tape…
- Black Proud Boys member debunks mainstream media’s white supremacist narrative
- Biden says he’s not a socialist. His ad on the ‘Biden Plan’ to buy votes is pure Marxism.
- Top five MUST WATCH moments from the First Presidential Debate
- Joe Biden failed to make Americans feel he can keep them safe from rising anarchy
| Trump is fighting for Evangelicals by tackling Critical Race Theory
Posted: 01 Oct 2020 04:03 AM PDT One of the most surprising acts of President Trump was him taking up the fight against Critical Race Theory. In September, I reported on Trump’s initial action to exterminate teachings of Critical Race Theory on taxpayer dollars within the federal government. With President Trump, I judge him by his record, but I am willing to be far more lenient when he has taken up an ideological purge within a massive federal government that honestly can’t wait to go woke. I noted then: I initially wanted to write how shameful it is that President Trump is willing to do what seminaries are not, purge this pagan ideology. And I want to lament at how Al Mohler is asking how we can prevent the infiltration of Cultural Marxism after having hired Cultural Marxists and fired their opposition. However, I have a different take. I agree with what Tom Ascol said, that this can be an edifying experience for the church. But maybe it is also a victory of our grassroots movement. It is clear we hold little to no institutional power, so why should we expect adversaries to do as Christ would? Yet perhaps it is this grassroots movement of Christians fighting this false gospel that ultimately earned the favor of Trump, who is most willing to listen to evangelicals. This would be evident by the fact that Trump retweeted Tom Ascol. Perhaps this is politics sending a shockwave upstream or perhaps it is the true church circumventing conventional means to impact culture. In any case, we should praise God for this event and edify our local assemblies to follow suit if they haven’t already. During the first presidential debate Trump doubled down on his decision and ended up debating Chris Wallace over the merits of Critical Race Theory. Chris Wallace, being a Fox News hack, is likely on board with this ideology as evident in how he framed the question. In this video we hear Trump reject the premise of Wallace’s bias question and make as good a case as one can expect Trump to make. I do not consider Donald Trump to be a subject matter expert on Critical Race Theory. But Donald Trump knows enough. He knows it’s very bad for the United States. And he’s willing to fight it. This is an indictment on pastors to start confronting this pagan ideology in the church. At the same time its a reminder why Trump is supported by grassroots evangelicals. I did not vote for Trump in 2016, because I thought he’s be a Mitt Romney on policy. But Trump is willing to take on some of the most pressing cultural issues that Evangelicals like myself care about. There should be no question why this Evangelicals are a core constituency in Trump’s base. COVID-19 may take down an independent news outletNobody said running a media site would be easy. We could use some help keeping this site afloat.Colleagues have called me the worst fundraiser ever. My skills are squarely rooted on the journalistic side of running a news outlet. Paying the bills has never been my forte, but we’ve survived. We have ads on the site that help, but since the site’s inception this has been a labor of love that otherwise doesn’t bring in the level of revenue necessary to justify it. When I left a nice, corporate career in 2017, I did so knowing I wouldn’t make nearly as much money. But what we do at NOQ Report to deliver the truth and fight the progressive mainstream media narrative that has plagued this nation is too important for me to sacrifice it for the sake of wealth. We know we’ll never make a ton of money this way, and we’re okay with that. Things have become harder with the coronavirus lockdowns. Both ad money and donations that have kept us afloat for a while have dropped dramatically. We thought we could weather the storm, but the so-called “surge” or “2nd-wave” that mainstream media and Democrats are pushing has put our prospects in jeopardy. In short, we are now in desperate need of financial assistance. The best way NOQ Report readers can help is to donate. Our Giving Fuel page makes it easy to donate one-time or monthly. Alternatively, you can donate through PayPal as well. We need approximately $11,500 to stay afloat for the rest of 2020, but more would be wonderful and any amount that brings us closer to our goal is greatly appreciated. The second way to help is to become a partner. We’ve strongly considered seeking angel investors in the past but because we were paying the bills, it didn’t seem necessary. Now, we’re struggling to pay the bills. This shouldn’t be the case as our traffic the last year has been going up dramatically. June, 2018, we had 11,678 visitors. A year later in June, 2019, we were up to 116,194. In June, 2020, we had 614,192. We’re heading in the right direction and we believe we’re ready talk to patriotic investors who want to not only “get in on the action” but more importantly who want to help America hear the truth. Interested investors should contact me directly with the contact button above. Election year or not, coronavirus lockdowns or not, anarchic riots or not, the need for truthful journalism endures. But in these times, we need as many conservative media voices as possible. Please help keep NOQ Report going. Check out the NEW NOQ Report Podcast. American Conservative MovementJoin fellow patriots as we form a grassroots movement to advance the cause of conservatism. The coronavirus crisis has prompted many, even some conservatives, to promote authoritarianism. It’s understandable to some extent now, but it must not be allowed to embed itself in American life. We currently have 8000+ patriots with us in a very short time. If you are interested, please join us to receive updates.
 The post Trump is fighting for Evangelicals by tackling Critical Race Theory appeared first on NOQ Report – Conservative Christian News, Opinions, and Quotes. |
| Candace Owens has deja vu. Hopefully, America will as well on election night.
Posted: 30 Sep 2020 09:37 PM PDT In 2016, Democrats had one primary strategy they used to try to defame Donald Trump. They said he was a racist. They claimed he supported white supremacists. They said he was a bigot who would take away the rights of minorities, women, and the entire LGBTQ community. If that all sounds familiar, fast-forward four years and we’re hearing the same thing all over again, as Candace Owens pointed out.
Of course, anyone who doesn’t get their mindset injected into their brains by mainstream media knows the President has brought more prosperity and freedom to minorities, women, and the entire LGBTQ community than any president, including his predecessor. That’s what makes it so strange that Democrats have the gall to try the same strategy this year. The Democrats’ tactics would be funny if they weren’t so sad. But as Candace Owens notes, the deja vu we’re seeing in their strategies should translate to deja vu on election night. Let’s hope, nay, let’s fight for that! COVID-19 may take down an independent news outletNobody said running a media site would be easy. We could use some help keeping this site afloat.Colleagues have called me the worst fundraiser ever. My skills are squarely rooted on the journalistic side of running a news outlet. Paying the bills has never been my forte, but we’ve survived. We have ads on the site that help, but since the site’s inception this has been a labor of love that otherwise doesn’t bring in the level of revenue necessary to justify it. When I left a nice, corporate career in 2017, I did so knowing I wouldn’t make nearly as much money. But what we do at NOQ Report to deliver the truth and fight the progressive mainstream media narrative that has plagued this nation is too important for me to sacrifice it for the sake of wealth. We know we’ll never make a ton of money this way, and we’re okay with that. Things have become harder with the coronavirus lockdowns. Both ad money and donations that have kept us afloat for a while have dropped dramatically. We thought we could weather the storm, but the so-called “surge” or “2nd-wave” that mainstream media and Democrats are pushing has put our prospects in jeopardy. In short, we are now in desperate need of financial assistance. The best way NOQ Report readers can help is to donate. Our Giving Fuel page makes it easy to donate one-time or monthly. Alternatively, you can donate through PayPal as well. We need approximately $11,500 to stay afloat for the rest of 2020, but more would be wonderful and any amount that brings us closer to our goal is greatly appreciated. The second way to help is to become a partner. We’ve strongly considered seeking angel investors in the past but because we were paying the bills, it didn’t seem necessary. Now, we’re struggling to pay the bills. This shouldn’t be the case as our traffic the last year has been going up dramatically. June, 2018, we had 11,678 visitors. A year later in June, 2019, we were up to 116,194. In June, 2020, we had 614,192. We’re heading in the right direction and we believe we’re ready talk to patriotic investors who want to not only “get in on the action” but more importantly who want to help America hear the truth. Interested investors should contact me directly with the contact button above. Election year or not, coronavirus lockdowns or not, anarchic riots or not, the need for truthful journalism endures. But in these times, we need as many conservative media voices as possible. Please help keep NOQ Report going. Check out the NEW NOQ Report Podcast. American Conservative MovementJoin fellow patriots as we form a grassroots movement to advance the cause of conservatism. The coronavirus crisis has prompted many, even some conservatives, to promote authoritarianism. It’s understandable to some extent now, but it must not be allowed to embed itself in American life. We currently have 8000+ patriots with us in a very short time. If you are interested, please join us to receive updates.
The post Candace Owens has deja vu. Hopefully, America will as well on election night. appeared first on NOQ Report – Conservative Christian News, Opinions, and Quotes. |
| Media claims President Trump won’t denounce white supremacists. Let’s go to the tape…
Posted: 30 Sep 2020 08:00 PM PDT Chris Wallace and Joe Biden debated President Trump last night. During multiple parts of the debate, they asked the President about the violence that is taking place around the country, mostly perpetrated by Antifa and Black Lives Matter “activists.” Mainstream media took selective snippets of what he said and used those clips as “proof” the President supports white supremacists. That is, of course, ridiculous. But the media narrative is what it is. All we can do as patriots is fight back with the truth. The President’s personal social media guru, Dan Scavino, put out a video clearly debunking the narrative.
Mainstream media and Democrats are spreading lies about President Trump and white supremacists. As Dan Scavino demonstrated in this video, we have the truth on our side. We just need to get it out to the masses. COVID-19 may take down an independent news outletNobody said running a media site would be easy. We could use some help keeping this site afloat.Colleagues have called me the worst fundraiser ever. My skills are squarely rooted on the journalistic side of running a news outlet. Paying the bills has never been my forte, but we’ve survived. We have ads on the site that help, but since the site’s inception this has been a labor of love that otherwise doesn’t bring in the level of revenue necessary to justify it. When I left a nice, corporate career in 2017, I did so knowing I wouldn’t make nearly as much money. But what we do at NOQ Report to deliver the truth and fight the progressive mainstream media narrative that has plagued this nation is too important for me to sacrifice it for the sake of wealth. We know we’ll never make a ton of money this way, and we’re okay with that. Things have become harder with the coronavirus lockdowns. Both ad money and donations that have kept us afloat for a while have dropped dramatically. We thought we could weather the storm, but the so-called “surge” or “2nd-wave” that mainstream media and Democrats are pushing has put our prospects in jeopardy. In short, we are now in desperate need of financial assistance. The best way NOQ Report readers can help is to donate. Our Giving Fuel page makes it easy to donate one-time or monthly. Alternatively, you can donate through PayPal as well. We need approximately $11,500 to stay afloat for the rest of 2020, but more would be wonderful and any amount that brings us closer to our goal is greatly appreciated. The second way to help is to become a partner. We’ve strongly considered seeking angel investors in the past but because we were paying the bills, it didn’t seem necessary. Now, we’re struggling to pay the bills. This shouldn’t be the case as our traffic the last year has been going up dramatically. June, 2018, we had 11,678 visitors. A year later in June, 2019, we were up to 116,194. In June, 2020, we had 614,192. We’re heading in the right direction and we believe we’re ready talk to patriotic investors who want to not only “get in on the action” but more importantly who want to help America hear the truth. Interested investors should contact me directly with the contact button above. Election year or not, coronavirus lockdowns or not, anarchic riots or not, the need for truthful journalism endures. But in these times, we need as many conservative media voices as possible. Please help keep NOQ Report going. Check out the NEW NOQ Report Podcast. American Conservative MovementJoin fellow patriots as we form a grassroots movement to advance the cause of conservatism. The coronavirus crisis has prompted many, even some conservatives, to promote authoritarianism. It’s understandable to some extent now, but it must not be allowed to embed itself in American life. We currently have 8000+ patriots with us in a very short time. If you are interested, please join us to receive updates.
The post Media claims President Trump won’t denounce white supremacists. Let’s go to the tape… appeared first on NOQ Report – Conservative Christian News, Opinions, and Quotes. |
| Black Proud Boys member debunks mainstream media’s white supremacist narrative
Posted: 30 Sep 2020 04:02 PM PDT Now that we’re in debate season, of course mainstream media wants to bring up racism. They’re particularly infatuated with white supremacy and have attached that description to the Proud Boys despite the fact there are zero documented cases of the organization promoting any form of bigotry. But mainstream media does as mainstream media does, and they’re spreading this lie fervently following President Trump’s unwillingness to denounce them. Why should he? As this video shows, the organization does not embrace racism. This comes from the mouth of someone who has experienced real racism and is now a member of the Proud Boys. Edwin Arthur did not trust or vote for President Trump in 2016, but he’s voting for him this year.
It’s one thing to denounce white supremacy itself, which the President has done on multiple occasions. It’s another thing altogether to accept mainstream media’s premise that the Proud Boys are racist as an organization. That’s simply not true. COVID-19 may take down an independent news outletNobody said running a media site would be easy. We could use some help keeping this site afloat.Colleagues have called me the worst fundraiser ever. My skills are squarely rooted on the journalistic side of running a news outlet. Paying the bills has never been my forte, but we’ve survived. We have ads on the site that help, but since the site’s inception this has been a labor of love that otherwise doesn’t bring in the level of revenue necessary to justify it. When I left a nice, corporate career in 2017, I did so knowing I wouldn’t make nearly as much money. But what we do at NOQ Report to deliver the truth and fight the progressive mainstream media narrative that has plagued this nation is too important for me to sacrifice it for the sake of wealth. We know we’ll never make a ton of money this way, and we’re okay with that. Things have become harder with the coronavirus lockdowns. Both ad money and donations that have kept us afloat for a while have dropped dramatically. We thought we could weather the storm, but the so-called “surge” or “2nd-wave” that mainstream media and Democrats are pushing has put our prospects in jeopardy. In short, we are now in desperate need of financial assistance. The best way NOQ Report readers can help is to donate. Our Giving Fuel page makes it easy to donate one-time or monthly. Alternatively, you can donate through PayPal as well. We need approximately $11,500 to stay afloat for the rest of 2020, but more would be wonderful and any amount that brings us closer to our goal is greatly appreciated. The second way to help is to become a partner. We’ve strongly considered seeking angel investors in the past but because we were paying the bills, it didn’t seem necessary. Now, we’re struggling to pay the bills. This shouldn’t be the case as our traffic the last year has been going up dramatically. June, 2018, we had 11,678 visitors. A year later in June, 2019, we were up to 116,194. In June, 2020, we had 614,192. We’re heading in the right direction and we believe we’re ready talk to patriotic investors who want to not only “get in on the action” but more importantly who want to help America hear the truth. Interested investors should contact me directly with the contact button above. Election year or not, coronavirus lockdowns or not, anarchic riots or not, the need for truthful journalism endures. But in these times, we need as many conservative media voices as possible. Please help keep NOQ Report going. Check out the NEW NOQ Report Podcast. American Conservative MovementJoin fellow patriots as we form a grassroots movement to advance the cause of conservatism. The coronavirus crisis has prompted many, even some conservatives, to promote authoritarianism. It’s understandable to some extent now, but it must not be allowed to embed itself in American life. We currently have 8000+ patriots with us in a very short time. If you are interested, please join us to receive updates.
The post Black Proud Boys member debunks mainstream media’s white supremacist narrative appeared first on NOQ Report – Conservative Christian News, Opinions, and Quotes. |
| Biden says he’s not a socialist. His ad on the ‘Biden Plan’ to buy votes is pure Marxism.
Posted: 30 Sep 2020 03:46 PM PDT Former VP Joe Biden keeps on trying to deny he’s a socialist to the point of projecting his authoritarianism and socialist national agenda on President Trump. His own commercials show that is a lie, with his plans following right along the lines of Marxist edicts of vote-buying wealth redistribution. Anyone who has studied the socialist left will note that they are full of promises paid for with other people’s money and that they will lie to cover their true intentions. Beijing Biden is no exception aside from the fact that he spends more time than others in denying his base ideology. Wealth redistribution to buy votes is a fundamental principle of the socialist leftConsider the grandiose words of a latecomer to the collectivist party, Karl Marx:
Compare the ‘Biden plan’ that promises free stuff for votes while assuring everyone that: ‘The wealthy and big corporations will pay more while you benefit’. Can you get any closer to a forcible wealth redistribution promise? We’re not going to directly link to the video of the commercial entitled ‘The Biden Plan’ but it can be found online. We should note that it’s n where to be found on his You Tube page. Are they hiding it? Couple this 30-second advert for socialism with the sheer number of articles that detail the obvious:
All of those firmly establish that Biden is moving to the far left. His online ads also make the case. Radical leftists have two prominent and reprehensible features: They lie and they make promises paid for with other people’s money that will never be fulfilled. Socialist Joe Biden fits right in with that crowd. COVID-19 may take down an independent news outletNobody said running a media site would be easy. We could use some help keeping this site afloat.Colleagues have called me the worst fundraiser ever. My skills are squarely rooted on the journalistic side of running a news outlet. Paying the bills has never been my forte, but we’ve survived. We have ads on the site that help, but since the site’s inception this has been a labor of love that otherwise doesn’t bring in the level of revenue necessary to justify it. When I left a nice, corporate career in 2017, I did so knowing I wouldn’t make nearly as much money. But what we do at NOQ Report to deliver the truth and fight the progressive mainstream media narrative that has plagued this nation is too important for me to sacrifice it for the sake of wealth. We know we’ll never make a ton of money this way, and we’re okay with that. Things have become harder with the coronavirus lockdowns. Both ad money and donations that have kept us afloat for a while have dropped dramatically. We thought we could weather the storm, but the so-called “surge” or “2nd-wave” that mainstream media and Democrats are pushing has put our prospects in jeopardy. In short, we are now in desperate need of financial assistance. The best way NOQ Report readers can help is to donate. Our Giving Fuel page makes it easy to donate one-time or monthly. Alternatively, you can donate through PayPal as well. We need approximately $11,500 to stay afloat for the rest of 2020, but more would be wonderful and any amount that brings us closer to our goal is greatly appreciated. The second way to help is to become a partner. We’ve strongly considered seeking angel investors in the past but because we were paying the bills, it didn’t seem necessary. Now, we’re struggling to pay the bills. This shouldn’t be the case as our traffic the last year has been going up dramatically. June, 2018, we had 11,678 visitors. A year later in June, 2019, we were up to 116,194. In June, 2020, we had 614,192. We’re heading in the right direction and we believe we’re ready talk to patriotic investors who want to not only “get in on the action” but more importantly who want to help America hear the truth. Interested investors should contact me directly with the contact button above. Election year or not, coronavirus lockdowns or not, anarchic riots or not, the need for truthful journalism endures. But in these times, we need as many conservative media voices as possible. Please help keep NOQ Report going. Check out the NEW NOQ Report Podcast. American Conservative MovementJoin fellow patriots as we form a grassroots movement to advance the cause of conservatism. The coronavirus crisis has prompted many, even some conservatives, to promote authoritarianism. It’s understandable to some extent now, but it must not be allowed to embed itself in American life. We currently have 8000+ patriots with us in a very short time. If you are interested, please join us to receive updates.
The post Biden says he’s not a socialist. His ad on the ‘Biden Plan’ to buy votes is pure Marxism. appeared first on NOQ Report – Conservative Christian News, Opinions, and Quotes. |
| Top five MUST WATCH moments from the First Presidential Debate
Posted: 30 Sep 2020 11:29 AM PDT Debates are often folly for sound bites. In fact, that’s pretty much all they are anymore as many voters wait until after the debate to hear about what was said. Last night’s presidential debate was especially challenging because the candidates spent as much time talking over each other as they spent answering questions. Joe Biden in particular failed to address many important issues and sidestepped questions left and right. The Trump campaign put out a video with five highlights from the debate. While there were some highlights of President Trump laying out his vision, the most telling clips were those in which Biden failed or outright refused to answer direct questions from both moderator Chris Wallace and the President himself. Joe Biden will not keep us safe from Antifa anarchists. He will pack the courts if elected. Meanwhile, President Trump has a clear vision for success and recovery that takes advantage of our greatest strength: Unity. COVID-19 may take down an independent news outletNobody said running a media site would be easy. We could use some help keeping this site afloat.Colleagues have called me the worst fundraiser ever. My skills are squarely rooted on the journalistic side of running a news outlet. Paying the bills has never been my forte, but we’ve survived. We have ads on the site that help, but since the site’s inception this has been a labor of love that otherwise doesn’t bring in the level of revenue necessary to justify it. When I left a nice, corporate career in 2017, I did so knowing I wouldn’t make nearly as much money. But what we do at NOQ Report to deliver the truth and fight the progressive mainstream media narrative that has plagued this nation is too important for me to sacrifice it for the sake of wealth. We know we’ll never make a ton of money this way, and we’re okay with that. Things have become harder with the coronavirus lockdowns. Both ad money and donations that have kept us afloat for a while have dropped dramatically. We thought we could weather the storm, but the so-called “surge” or “2nd-wave” that mainstream media and Democrats are pushing has put our prospects in jeopardy. In short, we are now in desperate need of financial assistance. The best way NOQ Report readers can help is to donate. Our Giving Fuel page makes it easy to donate one-time or monthly. Alternatively, you can donate through PayPal as well. We need approximately $11,500 to stay afloat for the rest of 2020, but more would be wonderful and any amount that brings us closer to our goal is greatly appreciated. The second way to help is to become a partner. We’ve strongly considered seeking angel investors in the past but because we were paying the bills, it didn’t seem necessary. Now, we’re struggling to pay the bills. This shouldn’t be the case as our traffic the last year has been going up dramatically. June, 2018, we had 11,678 visitors. A year later in June, 2019, we were up to 116,194. In June, 2020, we had 614,192. We’re heading in the right direction and we believe we’re ready talk to patriotic investors who want to not only “get in on the action” but more importantly who want to help America hear the truth. Interested investors should contact me directly with the contact button above. Election year or not, coronavirus lockdowns or not, anarchic riots or not, the need for truthful journalism endures. But in these times, we need as many conservative media voices as possible. Please help keep NOQ Report going. Check out the NEW NOQ Report Podcast. American Conservative MovementJoin fellow patriots as we form a grassroots movement to advance the cause of conservatism. The coronavirus crisis has prompted many, even some conservatives, to promote authoritarianism. It’s understandable to some extent now, but it must not be allowed to embed itself in American life. We currently have 8000+ patriots with us in a very short time. If you are interested, please join us to receive updates.
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| Joe Biden failed to make Americans feel he can keep them safe from rising anarchy
Posted: 30 Sep 2020 09:07 AM PDT In the heat of last night’s debate, there was a lot of discussion on social media about Chris Wallace’s clear bias towards helping Joe Biden. Bickering between the two candidates seemed to annoy many. A few zinger lines made headlines, as they always do. But there’s one thing that was not properly discussed at the debate that’s at top of mind for millions of America. Which candidate is more capable and willing to keep Americans safe in the face of rising crime and anarchy? Conventional wisdom would say that since it’s all rising now under President Trump, that Biden would be the one who has the advantage on that particular argument. But during the debate, he didn’t just fail to take advantage of that notion. He avoided it throughout. Debates usually come down to two things: Sound bites and general sentiment. The sound bites almost always come out as headlines since it’s zingers and gaffes that make for media fodder. But general sentiment is much more challenging to quantify and report on, especially when the debate itself was a convoluted mess. Nevertheless, we have a window into how people feel about a particular topic based on presence in—and absence from—post-debate takes. As of noon Eastern the day after the debate, the sentiment that Joe Biden made people feel safer in the face of rising anarchy is non-existent. I’m not seeing it discussed in any of the shows, even from progressive mainstream media. I’m definitely not seeing it on social media as the main point of contention is about who won and whether or not Biden was wearing a listening device. Do Americans feel they’ll be safer under Biden? That does not seem to be the case. It was conspicuous that President Trump called out Antifa while Joe Biden inaccurately quoted FBI Director Christopher Wray in saying that Antifa is “an idea.” Despite mainstream media’s best efforts to downplay Antifa as a threat by calling their anarcho-communist actions and violence “peaceful protests,” Americans are waking up to the truth that they are a major threat to leftist cities and they are spreading throughout the country. Joe Biden could have come out strongly against the anarchy. Instead, he gave a lukewarm, obligatory denouncement of “all violence” and let Chris Wallace change the subject for him. In other words, he will NOT keep us safe and the people know it. COVID-19 may take down an independent news outletNobody said running a media site would be easy. We could use some help keeping this site afloat.Colleagues have called me the worst fundraiser ever. My skills are squarely rooted on the journalistic side of running a news outlet. Paying the bills has never been my forte, but we’ve survived. We have ads on the site that help, but since the site’s inception this has been a labor of love that otherwise doesn’t bring in the level of revenue necessary to justify it. When I left a nice, corporate career in 2017, I did so knowing I wouldn’t make nearly as much money. But what we do at NOQ Report to deliver the truth and fight the progressive mainstream media narrative that has plagued this nation is too important for me to sacrifice it for the sake of wealth. We know we’ll never make a ton of money this way, and we’re okay with that. Things have become harder with the coronavirus lockdowns. Both ad money and donations that have kept us afloat for a while have dropped dramatically. We thought we could weather the storm, but the so-called “surge” or “2nd-wave” that mainstream media and Democrats are pushing has put our prospects in jeopardy. In short, we are now in desperate need of financial assistance. The best way NOQ Report readers can help is to donate. Our Giving Fuel page makes it easy to donate one-time or monthly. Alternatively, you can donate through PayPal as well. We need approximately $11,500 to stay afloat for the rest of 2020, but more would be wonderful and any amount that brings us closer to our goal is greatly appreciated. The second way to help is to become a partner. We’ve strongly considered seeking angel investors in the past but because we were paying the bills, it didn’t seem necessary. Now, we’re struggling to pay the bills. This shouldn’t be the case as our traffic the last year has been going up dramatically. June, 2018, we had 11,678 visitors. A year later in June, 2019, we were up to 116,194. In June, 2020, we had 614,192. We’re heading in the right direction and we believe we’re ready talk to patriotic investors who want to not only “get in on the action” but more importantly who want to help America hear the truth. Interested investors should contact me directly with the contact button above. Election year or not, coronavirus lockdowns or not, anarchic riots or not, the need for truthful journalism endures. But in these times, we need as many conservative media voices as possible. Please help keep NOQ Report going. Check out the NEW NOQ Report Podcast. American Conservative MovementJoin fellow patriots as we form a grassroots movement to advance the cause of conservatism. The coronavirus crisis has prompted many, even some conservatives, to promote authoritarianism. It’s understandable to some extent now, but it must not be allowed to embed itself in American life. We currently have 8000+ patriots with us in a very short time. If you are interested, please join us to receive updates.
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ARRA NEWS SERVICE
ARRA News Service (in this message: 15 new items) |
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- Americans Deserve a Better Debate
- 6 Highlights From Trump-Biden Debate
- Who’s Funding Shady Ballot Harvesting Schemes?
- Biased Media
- CAGW Names NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio September 2020 Porker of the Month
- We Have an Income Tax, Not a Wealth Tax
- The Culture of Genocide
- Rock the Vote
- Americans Don’t Care About Biden’s Tax Returns, They Care About Their Own
- Trump-Biden I: Reality Is Reality
- Obama Admin Briefed on Claims Hillary Clinton Drummed up Russia Controversy to Vilify Trump, Distract From Emails
- 6 Charts Show America’s Big Debt Problem
- Will You Stand with Trump?
- Sailor Behind Pearl Harbor Shooting Was ‘Insider Threat’ with Underdiagnosed Mental Issues
- First the Uighurs, Now the Tibetans
| Americans Deserve a Better Debate
Posted: 30 Sep 2020 10:43 PM PDT
The number of people who told me today they turned off the debate after 15 or 20 minutes was sobering. This debate was so bad it justifies asking if we can’t really approach the next three debates from a totally different perspective. The anecdotal unhappiness and dissatisfaction I have been picking up from a wide range of people was capture by Ben Domenech, who wrote in The Transom: “America Got What It Wanted and It Was Terrible: “For all the people who are upset about last night’s horrible debate, they should pause and ask themselves: wasn’t that just an accurate reflection of where we are as a nation? Two septuagenarians bashing each other with bursts of bombastic bullshittery and competing whatabouts is the content you will find on Facebook and cable news every single day. To the extent people are disappointed, remind yourself: these men both have nearly 90 percent ratings with the two largest political parties in America. They both bested huge fields of candidates to get their respective roles. This is the show you asked for, and you got it.” To quantify Ben’s complaint, note that Chris Wallace, the moderator, interrupted the President of the United States 76 times and only interrupted joe Biden only 15 times, by Charlie Kirk’s count. Note that the BBC found Trump cut in on Biden a total of 73 times. To be fair to President Trump, the one-sidedness of Wallace’s moderating did not give him much choice. Again, to cite Domenech, Wallace’s “choice to engage repeatedly just didn’t work. It resulted in repeated instances of Biden talking for two minutes in which he’d throw out multiple claims about Trump, Trump would interrupt with a rejoinder, Wallace would tell Trump to stop talking, and then at the end of the two minutes Wallace would move on to the next question. Trump, infuriated, would bulldoze him and respond anyway. Biden would interrupt with his denial. And on and on.” If Trump had to choose between passivity and being a bulldozer, he made the right choice. It may have cost Mitt Romney the presidency when he allowed then-CNN reporter Candy Crowley to assert a controversial rebuttal of Romney’s point on President Barack Obama being slow to recognize the killing of our ambassador in Benghazi as an act of terror. In effect, Romney was being double-teamed by Crowley and Obama almost as if they were a tag team in a wrestling match. Faced with that kind of moderating, Trump simply blew through it and insisted on making his points. He looked aggressive and contentious doing it, but passivity would have been even worse. As the president said to Wallace, “I guess I’m debating you, not him.” It is simply a fact that a conservative candidate in a presidential debate must assume he or she will be double-teamed, and the deck will be stacked. That double-teaming was obvious last night. However, the nature of the modern news media and the political press – combined with the intensity of the social media – cheats the American people of the kind of serious debate they deserve. The Commission on Presidential Debates is a big part of the problem. It is a fossilized institution dating back to 1987 and run by politicians a generation or more out of their time. The most famous debates in American political history were the Abraham Lincoln-Stephen Douglas debates of 1858. They were intelligent, serious, and focused on the great issue of slavery, which was beginning to tear the country apart and leading toward a civil war. These seven debates were each three hours long. There was a timekeeper, but no moderator. America is on the verge of, or in the middle of, a series of crises which may determine the survival of our country. We face a Chinese competitor that will force dramatic changes on us if we are to match and overmatch its capabilities. For example, our infrastructure must be massively rebuilt if we are going to compete with China and other countries which are modernizing. Our education system is a disaster and needs to be thoroughly overhauled – in k-12, college, and adult education. We must defeat the anti-American movement which is dominating too many schools and seeking to dominate too many streets and cities. This year’s disaster with COVID-19 is proof we need a profound overhaul of our public health service. We must rebuild our cities in an inclusive model that eliminates the sense of racial conflict and provides every American of every background a real opportunity to learn, work, live safely, and give our children and grandchildren an even better future. We must get back to the tempo of economic growth, which in February had given us the lowest African American and Latino unemployment rates in history and had begun to raise the income for the poor at a faster rate than for the wealthy. Finally, once we have defeated COVID-19, we must develop a fiscal plan to move us back to the balanced budgets we achieved in the late 1990s. With all these vast challenges, surely it should be possible to invent a dialogue, discussion, or debate between the adults who are seeking to be lent power by their fellow citizens. Let’s see if we can start this theme with next week’s vice-presidential debate. Tags: Newt Gingrich, commentary, Americans Deserve, a Better DebateTo share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| 6 Highlights From Trump-Biden Debate
Posted: 30 Sep 2020 10:24 PM PDT
Here’s six matters the two discussed in the debate, which was moderated by Fox News anchor Chris Wallace. 1. Election IntegrityWith COVID-19 prompting significant mail-in or absentee voting, election integrity has become a major topic of discussion. Biden suggested it’s not a concern. “There are going to be millions of people, because of COVID, that are going to be voting by mail-in ballots,” Biden said. “We’re going to make sure the people who want to vote in person are able to do that because enough poll watchers are there to make sure they can socially distance.” He added, referring to Trump, “This is all about trying to dissuade people from voting because he’s trying to scare people into thinking that it’s not going to be legitimate.” The former vice president stressed that he would accept the results either way. “If I win, that will be accepted. If I lose, that will be accepted,” Biden said. “By the way, if he says he’s not sure what he’s going to accept, let me tell you something, it doesn’t matter. If we get the votes, it’s going to be all over, He’s going to go.” Trump warned of fraud, bringing up numerous examples of primaries earlier this year where mail-in balloting was a problem. Trump made a distinction between absentee ballots—or what he called solicited ballots—and mass mail-in ballots. “As far as the ballots are concerned, it’s a disaster. A solicited ballot is OK. You’re asking. They send it, you send it back. I did that,” Trump said. “They are sending millions of unsolicited ballots across the country. There is fraud. They found them in creeks. They found some with the name Trump in a wastepaper basket. They are being sent all over the place. They sent two in a Democrat area. This is going to be fraud like you’ve never seen.” Trump later added, “We might not know for months because these ballots are going to be all over. Take a look at what happened in Manhattan. Take a look at what happened in New Jersey. Take a look at what happened in Virginia and other places. They’re not losing 2% or 1%. They are losing 30% and 40%. It’s a fraud and a shame.” As for the final results, Trump said, “I am urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully.” He said if it’s a fair election, “I am 100% on board.” President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden squared off for the first of three debates Tuesday night. Here’s six matters the two discussed in the debate, which was moderated by Fox News anchor Chris Wallace. 1. Election Integrity Biden suggested it’s not a concern. The left is actively working to undermine the integrity of our elections. Read the plan to stop them now. Learn more now >> “There are going to be millions of people, because of COVID, that are going to be voting by mail-in ballots,” Biden said. “We’re going to make sure the people who want to vote in person are able to do that because enough poll watchers are there to make sure they can socially distance.” He added, referring to Trump, “This is all about trying to dissuade people from voting because he’s trying to scare people into thinking that it’s not going to be legitimate.” The former vice president stressed that he would accept the results either way. “If I win, that will be accepted. If I lose, that will be accepted,” Biden said. “By the way, if he says he’s not sure what he’s going to accept, let me tell you something, it doesn’t matter. If we get the votes, it’s going to be all over, He’s going to go.” Trump warned of fraud, bringing up numerous examples of primaries earlier this year where mail-in balloting was a problem. Trump made a distinction between absentee ballots—or what he called solicited ballots—and mass mail-in ballots. “As far as the ballots are concerned, it’s a disaster. A solicited ballot is OK. You’re asking. They send it, you send it back. I did that,” Trump said. “They are sending millions of unsolicited ballots across the country. There is fraud. They found them in creeks. They found some with the name Trump in a wastepaper basket. They are being sent all over the place. They sent two in a Democrat area. This is going to be fraud like you’ve never seen.” Trump later added, “We might not know for months because these ballots are going to be all over. Take a look at what happened in Manhattan. Take a look at what happened in New Jersey. Take a look at what happened in Virginia and other places. They’re not losing 2% or 1%. They are losing 30% and 40%. It’s a fraud and a shame.” As for the final results, Trump said, “I am urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully.” He said if it’s a fair election, “I am 100% on board.” 2. Forest Fires and Green New Deal “You need forest management … the forest floors are loaded up with trees, dead trees that are years old and they’re like tinder, and leaves and everything else—you drop a cigarette in there, and the whole forest burns down. You’ve got to have forest management,” Trump said. Later he added, “Every year, I get the call, California’s burning, California’s burning … if you had forest management, good forest management, you wouldn’t be getting those calls.” Asked by Wallace if human pollution and greenhouse gas emissions were contributing to global warming, Trump said, “To an extent, yes.” Biden spoke of weatherizing buildings, and increased use of electric-powered vehicles. “We can get to net zero in terms of energy production by 2035,” the former vice president said, adding that millions of jobs would be created. He also attributed the dramatic weather in recent years to climate change, saying: After Trump brought up the Green New Deal, an environmental plan released by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Biden said, “I don’t support the Green New Deal.” 3. Health Care “Your party wants to go socialist medicine,” the president said. Biden responded that his Democratic primary opponents attacked him for not supporting a “Medicare for All” plan. “The platform of the Democratic Party is what I, in fact, approved of,” Biden said. Wallace suggested Trump had no plan to replace Obamacare. “Of course I have,” Trump responded. “We got rid of the individual mandate.” 4. Confirming Barrett and Court Packing “We should wait and see what the outcome of this election is,” the former vice president said, adding, “It’s just not appropriate to do this before the election.” He did make it clear that it wasn’t personal. “She seems like a very fine person, but she has written before she went on the bench that she thinks that the Affordable Care Act is not constitutional,” Biden said, referring to Amy Coney Barrett, who currently serves as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit. When asked about the appropriateness of appointing Barrett to serve on the Supreme Court before the election, Trump stated, “Elections have consequences.” “A president is elected for four years,” Trump said. “We are not elected for three years. I’m not elected for three years.” Trump also said of Barrett, “She is going to be as good as anybody that has served on that court.” Some Democrats have called for ending the filibuster and filling the Supreme Court with additional liberal justices, if Democrats win the presidency and the Senate. Wallace asked Biden, “Are you willing to tell the American people tonight whether or not you will support ending the filibuster or packing the court?” Biden said he wasn’t going to answer the question. “Whatever position I take on that, that will become the issue,” Biden said. “The American people should speak. You should go out and vote. … Vote and let your senators know how you feel about this. I’m not going to answer the question because the question is … ” Trump kept interrupting before Biden finished his point about why he wouldn’t answer. 5. Racism and Critical Race Theory “I ended it because it’s racist. I ended it because a lot of people were being asked to do things that were absolutely insane,” Trump said, adding, “It was a radical revolution taking place in our military, in our schools, all over the place. You know it and so does everybody else.” The president continued: “He’s the racist,” Biden said of Trump. “The fact is there is racial insensitivity. People need to be made aware of what other people feel like, what insults them, what is demeaning to them. It’s important to them to know. Many people don’t want to hurt other people’s feelings. It makes a gigantic difference in how a child is able to grow up and have a sense of self-esteem.” 6. Law and OrderTrump talked about the riots in numerous cities across the country. “The people of this country want and demand law and order, and you’re afraid to even say it,” Trump said. When Trump pressed him, Biden said he was for law and order. However, later Biden said, “Antifa is an idea, not an organization.” Tags: Fred Lucas, The Daily Signal, 6 Highlights, Trump-Biden DebateTo share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| Who’s Funding Shady Ballot Harvesting Schemes?
Posted: 30 Sep 2020 09:42 PM PDT
Conservative talk radio host and grassroots activist Vicki McKenna blew the whistle after hearing ads played during her daily show on 1310 WIBA. “Last week on my radio program, we played Biden campaign ads,” she told me. “They were all about something called ‘Democracy in the Park.’ It was an advertisement about how Madison, Wisconsin, would have 200 parks hosting ballot harvesting events.” The ads were punctuated by a disclosure that they were “paid for by Joe Biden for President.” On Saturday, Sept. 26, as advertised by the Biden campaign, Madison poll workers turned out across the city to register voters and collect absentee ballots, even though in-person absentee ballot collection is not supposed to start until two weeks before Election Day, according to Wisconsin state election law. Several of McKenna’s listeners showed up to photograph the city government workers’ activities promoted by the Biden for President campaign. The poll workers stuffed ballots into “red zipper bags with no security whatsoever. The poll workers witnessed people’s (blank) ballots, just like you would if you did an in-person absentee ballot, threw them in the red zipper bags, and we don’t know what’s become of these ballots since,” McKenna told me. Imagine sheaves of ballots carelessly stuffed into cheap, canvas, pizza delivery-style totes. Then imagine them being carted away by unknown drivers to unknown locations for unknown reasons. Observers captured photos of several stuffed red bags being loaded into an unmarked white van parked outside Madison’s municipal government building. “It’s clear from legal analysis: this is not legal and does not comport with Wisconsin election law,” McKenna argues. “There’s some serious questions about (Democratic) campaign coordination with the city of Madison.” Now, enter a shady entity called the “Center for Tech and Civic Life.” It just so happens that this nonprofit “election reform advocacy group,” based in Chicago and founded in 2012, has showered more than $6 million in the five largest cities in the crucial swing state of Wisconsin. In July, using COVID-19 as a pretext to boost mail-in and absentee voting, the center released the following amounts to governmental grantees: –City of Milwaukee: $2,154,500. –City of Madison: $1,271,788. –City of Green Bay: $1,093,400. –City of Kenosha: $862,779. –City of Racine: $942,100. According to the Center for Tech and Civic Life’s website, they fielded over 1,100 applications from across the country for their purported “COVID-19 Response Grant Program” to “provide funding to U.S. local election offices to help ensure they have the critical resources they need to safely serve every voter in 2020.” Grants are to be used to encourage alternatives to in-person voting, “voter education and outreach efforts,” “early in-person voting” and vote by mail — all tactics being deployed by anti-Trump, “color revolutionary” forces to drag out the election long past Election Day. There is nothing “nonpartisan” about this enterprise. The Center’s top staff (many of them Barack Obama campaign tech gurus) come from a now-defunct liberal nonprofit called the New Organizing Institute, whose far-left donors include George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, the Ford Foundation and Atlantic Philanthropies. CTCL director Tiana Epps-Johnson is a former Obama Foundation fellow. The center received $250 million from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Trump-bashing Google is a top corporate partner. Other donors include the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Democracy Fund (founded by “Never Trumper” billionaire and eBay former chairman Pierre Omidyar). Chicago political activist Jay Stone has filed a legal complaint against CTCL, alleging that its grant scheme “artificially inflates Democrat Joe Biden’s statewide Wisconsin vote total and enhances Joe Biden’s chances of winning Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes” by targeting private funds to Democratic-run cities under the guise of enhancing pandemic safety and election integrity. In addition to Wisconsin, Democratic-run jurisdictions in battleground state Pennsylvania that have received CTCL infusions include Delaware County ($2.2 million) and Philadelphia (a whopping $10 million). McKenna warns that the alarm-raising “Democracy in the Park” scheme in CTCL-subsidized Madison, Wisconsin, will be back in action on Oct. 3. I reached out Monday to CTCL to confirm whether its grants are being used for the tote bag ballot-harvesting program touted by the Biden campaign. No reply. Maybe I’ll get a reply to these questions: If, as it plainly appears, private big tech and left-wing philanthropic funding are being used to rig the election process in the most important battlegrounds of our country, where the heck are the Justice Department and Attorney General Bill Barr? Why haven’t these dubiously collected ballots already been tracked down, segregated and secured? And finally: Is this what the “peaceful transfer of power” is supposed to look like in America? Tags: Michelle Malkin, Rasmussen Reports, Who’s Funding, Shady, Ballot Harvesting, Schemes?To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| Biased Media
Posted: 30 Sep 2020 09:26 PM PDT
That was The Washington Post’s headline about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But when Justice Antonin Scalia died, the headline was, “Supreme Court conservative dismayed liberals.” When the founder of ISIS was killed, the headline was: “Austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State, dies.” But when President Donald Trump’s brother died, the headline was, “younger brother of President Trump who filed lawsuit against niece, dies.” At news conferences, Vice President Biden gets softball questions. After an article in The Atlantic claimed Trump called fallen military members “losers,” one reporter asked Biden, “What does it tell you about President Trump’s soul?” “It’s not even softball!” complains The Hill’s media reporter, Joe Concha. “It’s T-ball, except when you put a beach ball on the tee!” Trump does get nastier questions. What we used to call “mainstream media” is now “woke” media. Many don’t even try to be objective. That’s the topic of my new video this week. Watching CNN during this summer’s protests, I noticed that reporters kept calling protests “mostly peaceful,” even when reporting violence. CNN posted the words, “Mostly peaceful protests” on the screen when flaming cars were on the street behind their reporter. CNN defended itself, citing a study that said “93% of protests were… peaceful.” But that’s silly. When planes crash, we don’t put “99% landed safely” on the screen. As Concha puts it, “When people start dying and losing their businesses, that’s your story!” I push back: “Most people who work there consider themselves journalists. They try to get it right.” “I don’t know if I agree with that, John,” Concha replies. “More and more are playing to a crowd.” CNN once tried to look like a neutral news network. No more. Now it does whatever it can to scare people or make Trump look bad. In March, CNN sneered at the president for misleading people by claiming the U.S. did more COVID-19 tests than any other country. They, correctly, pointed out that per capita, “South Korea and Italy tested many times more.” CNN was right to adjust for population. But then, to make Trump look worse, CNN suddenly stopped adjusting for population. They scolded the president, saying, “The U.S. had more coronavirus cases than any country in the world!” But that’s just wrong! Adjusted for population, 28 countries, including France, England, Ireland and Norway had more cases. CNN sneers at Trump all day. I asked their spokesperson if CNN considers its reporting objective. No response. During the Democratic National Convention, CNN didn’t bother fact-checking Democrats’ speeches. But during Trump’s speech at the Republican Convention, CNN suddenly put up a black ticker tape “fact-check” across the screen. Why not fact-check the DNC, too? “There’s a reason we didn’t fact-check Democrats!” said CNN’s Chris Cuomo. “They are not lying the way Trump does.” But they lie, too. Democrats were deceitful enough that the AP and BBC found a need to fact-check. For example, Michelle Obama complained that under Trump, “children are torn from their families and thrown into cages!” But that border-control policy began under her husband’s administration. CNN’s Van Jones admits that CNN overtly favors Biden, saying after Biden’s acceptance speech, “As long as he didn’t embarrass himself, we were going to come out here and praise it.” “Maybe CNN’s just being honest,” I say to Concha. When I was at ABC, everyone pretended to be apolitical (but nearly all were on the left). Concha replies, “CNN’s prime-time lineup, Anderson Cooper, Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon, have the title of anchor, not opinion maker.” Fox at least calls its prime-time anchors “opinion” hosts. News hosts like Chris Wallace and Bret Baier play it pretty straight. It’s clear that most reporters don’t like Trump — or even Republicans. Last election, 96% of journalists’ political donations went to Hillary Clinton. Why? “Our national media are in two cities, New York and Washington,” says Concha. “When you’re surrounded by everybody else in a city and newsroom that goes the other way, it’s almost impossible not to start to conform.” Tags: John Stossel, Biased Media, Rasmussen Reports To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| CAGW Names NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio September 2020 Porker of the Month
Posted: 30 Sep 2020 09:02 PM PDT
Mayor De Blasio has been called the worst mayor ever in New York City. While reasons appear plentiful both before and after the COVID-19 pandemic began earlier in 2020, his most recent actions will do nothing to change anyone’s mind about his abject incompetence. His request for $5 billion from the state has offended members of his own party and angered both the New York State and New York City comptrollers, especially since he refuses to cut the city’s budget. If he slashed just 2 percent, he would save $1 billion. There are other reasonable and easy solutions to resolve NYC’s budget crisis like having city workers pay insurance premiums, since 90 percent of them currently get free healthcare. City employees make 75 percent more than the median wages for private sector workers, making it sensible to freeze their paychecks for two years. Instead, Mayor De Blasio is ignoring practical cuts, begging for more money, and driving New York City residents out in droves. CAGW President Tom Schatz said, “Mayor De Blasio continues to show the nation why he has earned the title of the New York City’s worst mayor. He consistently fails to put the best interests of the taxpayers first and does nothing to stop the city from turning into a fiscal disaster. His disdain for hard-working NYC residents was made clear when he defied his own coronavirus rules and went to his gym. His response has been unfocused, confusing, and sometimes downright wrong. It is hard to think of anything good to say, other than he cannot run for mayor again in 2021, giving New York City taxpayers some hope for the future. For refusing to reform the city’s budget while begging for more money, Bill De Blasio can put his award for “Porker of the Month” right next to the plaque for “New York City’s Worst Mayor.” Tags: CAGW, Names, NYC Mayor, Bill De Blasio, 2020, Porkers of the Month To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| We Have an Income Tax, Not a Wealth Tax
Posted: 30 Sep 2020 08:29 PM PDT
And as night follows day, the subject came up in the debate. “Mr. President, as you well know, there’s a new report that in 2016, the year you were elected president, and 2017, your first year as president, that you paid $750 a year in federal income tax each of those years,” said moderator/Biden spokesperson Chris Wallace. “I know that you pay a lot of other taxes, but I’m asking you this specific question: Is it true that you paid $750 in federal income taxes each of those two years?” “I paid millions of dollars in taxes, millions of dollars of income tax,” Trump responded. After a lot of crosstalk (yeah, there was some of that last night), Biden finally made his point: “The tax code that put him in a position that he pays less tax than on the money a school teacher makes is because of him. He says he’s smart because he can take advantage of the tax code. And he does take advantage of the tax code. That’s why I’m going to eliminate the Trump tax cuts.” Where to begin? How about with the 16th Amendment, which established that “Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes.” Incomes, not wealth. If Trump — or anyone else in this country — has no taxable income in any particular year, he won’t pay an income tax. The Republicans’ Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 didn’t change that, and neither did any legislation governing the income tax since the 16th Amendment was ratified in 1913. But the Left’s narrative is that Trump is wealthy and therefore should be paying his “fair share.” Not only is he not doing that, leftists allege, he’s rigging the game for the wealthy and then cheating, though apparently by using legal deductions. Biden hoped to drive this point home by releasing his own 2019 returns, which show that he paid nearly $300,000 in federal taxes on a little less than $1 million in adjusted gross income. That 29.5% tax rate, by the way, is far below what Democrats insist it should be for millionaires. Why didn’t Biden voluntarily pay more? He never says, though his returns show that he too “took advantage of the tax code” in claiming deductions to reduce his bill. Indeed, since leaving the White House in 2017, the Bidens have earned more than $16 million from speeches and book sales, most of which they funneled through two S corporations. That helped them save $500,000 in taxes by avoiding the Obama-Biden 3.8% ObamaCare tax on the “rich.” It’s perfectly legal, but it sure smacks of hypocrisy from a man whose campaign insisted the released returns prove Biden “will look out for [the American people] and not [his] own bottom line.” But never mind all that. The real story here is that Democrats are once again busy weaving a narrative that deliberately conflates income with wealth because their entire tax policy is built on fomenting and exploiting envy. Tags: Nate Jackson, Patriot Post, We Have an Income Tax, Not a Wealth TaxTo share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| The Culture of Genocide
Posted: 30 Sep 2020 08:11 PM PDT
Very careful. Totally careful. Totalitarian-ly careful. Speaking to students earlier this month in a Zoom meeting as part of Pomona University’s Model United Nations, Roy took issue with Hong Kong students and protesters for “provoking mainland intervention,” arguing the millions who marched for basic democracy “went too far” and should have used more “self-restraint.” The U.S. foreign affairs veteran even decries the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, which he also concludes “set back the cause of reform in China for decades.” And here I was thinking that the massacre of an estimated 3,000 to 10,000 unarmed Chinese civilians by the People’s Liberation Army is what detoured that noble cause. “China has come under criticism from U.S. officials following revelations of mass forced sterilization of Uyghur women, as well as the internment of over one million Uyghurs in camps where detainees are forced to learn Communist Party ideology. Reports of torture, rape, and other abuses have emerged from these camps,” writes National Review’s Zachary Evans. “Genocide is generally used to refer to the extermination of a people or nation,” Ambassador Roy explains. “Genocide is not taking place in Xinjiang.” Yet according to the United Nations, the Chinese Communist Party’s manner of oppression does constitute “genocide/b>.” “More accurately,” even Roy acknowledges, “there is what can be called ‘cultural genocide<.’”* That is merely the extermination of a people’s customs, religion, ethnicity and, imperatively, their freedom . . . but kindheartedly not murdering all of them. Okay, Mr. Ambassador, let’s choose our terms precisely. Protesters in Hong Kong have a word for the Beijing government: “ChiNazis.” This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. * What a coincidence! “China seized control over Tibet in 1950 in what it describes as a ‘peaceful liberation’ that helped the remote Himalayan region throw off its ‘feudalist’ past,” notes a recent Al Jazeera report. “But critics, led by exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, say Beijing’s rule amounts to ‘cultural genocide.’” Tags: Paul Jacob, Common Sense, The Culture of Genocide To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| Rock the Vote
Posted: 30 Sep 2020 07:35 PM PDT . . . The Rock (Dwayne Johnson), Once known as leaning politically conservative, has sold the country out to China endorsing Biden.
 Tags: editorial cartoon, AF Branco, Rock the VoteTo share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| Americans Don’t Care About Biden’s Tax Returns, They Care About Their Own
Posted: 30 Sep 2020 07:19 PM PDT
Biden desperately wants to avoid talking about his almost half-century in American politics. He has a spent his career in Washington outsourcing American jobs abroad and hollowing out our nation’s manufacturing base. Joe doesn’t want to talk about his vote for the disastrous NAFTA trade deal that set off the giant sucking sound of U.S. manufacturing jobs leaving our country. Biden doesn’t want to talk about his vote to give China ‘most favored nation’ trade status twenty years ago. This gave China the lowest tariff rate on the card and encouraged U.S. manufacturers to relocate to China. He certainly doesn’t want to talk about how he negotiated a Memorandum of Understanding that allowed Chinese companies to be part of the U.S. stock exchanges without meeting basic transparency and open books standards that U.S. companies must meet. This single decision created billions of dollars in capital for China while putting U.S. investors at extraordinary risk. Instead, Biden wants to talk about tax returns. One thing we know about President Trump’s tax return is that it won’t show a penny earned from the U.S. taxpayer. Trump has chosen to donate his salary to the U.S. Department of Agriculture for farmer outreach programs in the first quarter, and health related federal programs in the second, third and fourth quarters of 2019. Meanwhile 2019 is only the third year in almost half a century that Biden has not received a salary from the taxpayers, setting aside his very generous federal government retirement pension. No one cares about Joe Biden or Donald Trump’s tax returns. They care about their own tax returns. Under a Biden administration one thing is certain, more than 60% of Americans will see their taxes go up if he keeps his promise to repeal the Trump tax cuts. Americans will see their job prospects plummet as Biden puts the federal government boot on our energy and manufacturing sectors. His energy policies will end the energy production jobs that have revitalized Pennsylvania and Ohio among other states. Biden’s energy schemes make us dependent on middle eastern oil producers who don’t like us very much. When Biden talks about his tax returns, ask yourself what his green new deal, Paris Climate Accord, increased income taxes, and increased regulatory agenda will do to yours? Tags: Rick Manning, Americans for Limited Government, Americans Don’t Care About, Biden’s Tax Returns, They Care About Their OwnTo share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| Trump-Biden I: Reality Is Reality
Posted: 30 Sep 2020 06:59 PM PDT
“Perception is reality.” And when it comes to the first debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, “perception” favors the former veep. He stayed on his feet. He was lucid. He had good prepared lines on his sons and other matters. He talked into the camera effectively. Meanwhile, Trump was a bully. Interrupting and talking over Biden and moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News. Out-of-bounds in his attacks on Biden’s son and his drug addiction. Turning the event what one CNN commentator surprisingly called a “s—. show.” Winner: Not-As-Sleepy-as-Usual Joe. Well, here’s one long-time communications practitioner’s response to that whole line of argument. To put it politely, bullcrap. Perception is not reality. Reality is reality. You just have to make sure people know about it. And the reality is that Donald Trump wiped the debate floor with Biden and his plugged pate. The president was admittedly not at his best. He too often failed to accomplish his most important job for the evening: underscore his many accomplishments as chief executive and paint a visionary picture of the next four years, while contrasting Biden’s wild and expensive schemes. When Wallace gave him a shot to explain why he should get four more years in the job rather than turn it over to his opponent (the basic question Teddy Kennedy flubbed in his famous interview with Roger Mudd), Trump once again missed the opportunity to point to his slam-bang second-term agenda and repeat his pronouncement that the “best is yet to come.” But the president clearly did have a strategy, one that recalls the famed statement first attributed to Finley Peter Dunne’s wise-cracking Irishman, Mr. Dooley, “politics ain’t beanbag.” His obvious plan: rattle Biden into making mistakes. Trump forced the Delawarean into a number of indefensible and outright untrue statements (that will never be reviewed by the “fact-checkers” who once again dug into the president). The prez got onto the record, and the public consciousness, questions about Biden that would not normally get picked up in mainstream media coverage. In particular, issues relating to the former vice president’s son Hunter and his cash-raking from a rogue’s gallery of American enemies. And his kowtowing to Sanders and his party’s radical left wing. The president pushed the longtime senator into exaggerations about the extent of lost health coverage in the event of Obamacare repeal and COVID-19. Trump brought out the VP’s weaselly positions on opposing violence in the streets. But Barack Obama’s wingman’s biggest mistake, under pressure from Trump, was losing his cool and failing to adhere to the political “norms” to which he and his party so frequently appeal. Get this: in a single debate, the Democratic candidate told the president of the United States, on national television, to “shut up, man.” Called him a clown and a racist. And termed him the worst president in history (an especially ludicrous statement given that Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama held the office in this commentator’s lifetime). The moderator’s response to such extraordinary breaks in decorum? Calling the president out for breaking debate rules, when both men were guilty at various times. Wallace let Biden get away not only with disrespect for the office of president and the conventions of political debate, but also with an approach of slipping, sliding, prevaricating and outright running from his record and his party’s positions – for example, repeatedly and simply responding “that isn’t true” to charges that were in fact well-grounded. To charges that he gave in to the Sanders/AOC wing on health care and climate policy. (In particular, Trump had Biden against the ropes and pummeled him on the Green New Deal.) And to charges relating to specific payments Hunter had received. To Trump’s contrast of the candidates’ records on criminal justice reform and the economy. And even in defending the indefensible behavior of educators who truly are teaching the younger generation, as POTUS rightly pointed out, to hate America. Like a referee covering up a weaker fighter and sending an aggressive opponent back to his corner, Wallace repeatedly enabled Biden to slip away just as Trump was landing roundhouses and body blows. The most outrageous part of Wallace’s Candy Crowley-like disgraceful performance was failing to pin Biden down on whether he would acquiesce to Democratic suggestions of court-packing, opposed by more than 60% of independent voters. The job ahead for the president and his partisans: finish the job Trump started. First, by countering Sleepy Joe’s “nice guy” image with reminders of “shut up” and insults slung at the office of president. More important, by hammering at the former vice president’s outright lies and other wedges the president started on corruptocracy, law and order, health care and most important, the Green New Deal. President Trump flushed Joe Biden out and exposed his weaknesses on any number of subjects. That’s the reality of Tuesday’s debate, and the president and his team need to get to work getting public “perception” aligned with it. Tags: Bob Maistros, Issues and Insights, Trump-Biden I, Reality Is Reality To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| Obama Admin Briefed on Claims Hillary Clinton Drummed up Russia Controversy to Vilify Trump, Distract From Emails
Posted: 30 Sep 2020 06:21 PM PDT
DNI John Ratcliffe informed the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that the prior administration obtained Russian intelligence in July of 2016 with allegations against Clinton, but cautioned that the intelligence community (IC) “does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.” Ratcliffe’s letter doesn’t offer specifics on the intelligence but does reveal that former CIA Director John Brennan’s handwritten notes show that he briefed Obama on the information. According to his letter, the intelligence included the “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.” In a statement on the letter, Ratcliffe pushed back on the idea he was advancing “Russian disinformation.” “To be clear, this is not Russian disinformation and has not been assessed as such by the Intelligence Community. I’ll be briefing Congress on the sensitive sources and methods by which it was obtained in the coming days.” Politico reported that Nick Merrill, Clinton’s spokesperson, called the allegations “baseless b——t.” “This is Russian disinformation,” tweeted Rachel Cohen, spokeswoman for Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va. She added that it was “laundered by the Director Of National Intelligence and Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. This is extraordinary.”
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said he would review the information, noting that Ratcliffe would make it available in a classified setting. “This latest information provided by DNI Ratcliffe shows there may have been a double standard by the FBI regarding allegations against the Clinton campaign and Russia,” Graham said. “Whether these allegations are accurate is not the question. The question is did the FBI investigate the allegations against Clinton like they did Trump? If not, why not? If so, what was the scope of the investigation? If none, why was that?” In September of 2016, U.S. intelligence officials also forwarded an investigative referral on Clinton purportedly approving “a plan concerning U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections” in order to distract the public from her email scandal. That referral went to former FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok. Tuesday’s letter will likely add to mounting scrutiny of the DOJ’s initial investigation into Trump’s campaign and Democrats’ influence on foundational information like the Steele Dossier. That probe eventually evolved into a multi-year, special counsel investigation that cost American taxpayers more than $30 milion. Under Attorney General William Barr, the Justice Department has been reviewing the process Obama’s DOJ undertook in order to probe the origins of the Russia investigation. Last week, Barr penned a letter to Graham stating that the source of the infamous Steele dossier — which informed a the FBI’s surveillance of the Trump campaign — was under investigation for suspected contact with Russian intelligence officers. Tags: Sam Dorman, Fox News, Obama Admin, Briefed on Claims, Hillary Clinton, Drummed up Russia Controversy, to Vilify Trump, Distract From EmailsTo share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| 6 Charts Show America’s Big Debt Problem
Posted: 30 Sep 2020 05:40 PM PDT by David Ditch: It’s no secret that the COVID-19 pandemic has hurt the nation’s finances. Congress responded to the crisis with trillions in relief spending, causing a massive surge in debt. That debt increase does not mean we face a crisis tomorrow. However, we now have a clear picture of what is coming our way, and it isn’t pretty. The Congressional Budget Office updated its long-term budget forecast on Sept. 21. The following charts, based on the budget forecast’s data, illustrate just how bad the numbers are.  This year, the federal government will spend over twice as much money as it raised in tax revenue. That is far from ideal, but it almost certainly will improve next year. Yet, the real problem is the amount of debt we have already accumulated. Any household with finances that look like this would receive plenty of scrutiny from a responsible bank when asking for more loans. We cannot expect the global financial system to keep providing the federal government with cheap credit forever if sky-high deficits continue. The consequences of even moderately higher interest rates would be severe.  Currently, the cost of paying interest on the debt is not a huge portion of federal spending. However, if we look at it relative to the size of the annual deficit, we see how much closer we would be to balancing the budget without the burden of debt. The Congressional Budget Office report anticipates that interest rates on federal debt will increase, although only by a few basis points. Yet even a modest rate increase on such a large public debt—currently $20.9 trillion—will cause interest payments to explode. By 2050, paying interest on the federal debt will consume 8.1% of the nation’s output, roughly an entire month’s productivity. That would be a tremendous drag on economic growth, choking the prosperity and opportunity that are at the heart of the American Dream.
 In 2019, the amount of public debt per person was approaching $50,000. Just a year later, we have added nearly $10,000 in debt for every person, from children to retirees. Things get worse the further out we go. Today’s newborns will face a debt of over $107,000 by the time they turn 18, and a staggering $180,000 by age 30, even after adjusting for inflation. This extra debt would not be used to pay for extravagant new benefit programs, infrastructure improvements, or a stronger national defense. In fact, that debt comes as a result of simply allowing spending on today’s programs to grow unchecked.
 As the chart makes clear, the federal government has a spending problem. Spending was already above the historical average in 2019, and it will grow relative to the size of the economy every year from 2021 on. In contrast, tax revenue soon will return to average levels, even if Congress makes the entire Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent. The cause of the spending spike is unsustainable growth in a few programs, most notably Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Reforming these programs is the single most important thing Congress can do to put America on a better financial path. If Congress keeps waiting, only drastic measures will be strong enough to correct the imbalance.
 America ran up a massive debt to fund the vital work of winning World War II. The postwar economic boom helped bring that debt down quickly. Unfortunately, the federal debt increased relative to the economy even during the years of strong growth prior to COVID-19. Only a combination of pro-growth economic policy and spending restraint can prevent the unprecedented levels of debt that we see on the horizon.
 To focus on the nub of the spending problem, this chart provides a helpful thought exercise. Due to the rapid increase in projected spending on interest, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, just those spending categories would consume all tax revenues by 2036. This leaves out spending on national defense, operational costs for all federal agencies, veterans’ benefits, most welfare programs, natural disasters, infrastructure, and more. Further, this projection assumes that Congress allows much of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act to expire, meaning that even a tax hike wouldn’t solve the problem. While the problems highlighted in the Congressional Budget Office report and these charts are serious, America has overcome greater challenges in the past. The Heritage Foundation’s “Blueprint for Balance” plan provides policymakers with ideas that can put us on the path to a responsible federal budget. A combination of sustained leadership and greater public awareness can turn the ship of state in the right direction. The sooner the work begins, the better. Tags: David Ditch, The Daily Signal, 6 Charts, Show America’s, Big Debt Problem, ————————- |
| Will You Stand with Trump?
Posted: 30 Sep 2020 03:38 PM PDT
As you read this article, men, women, teenagers, college students, and even children are at work to ensure the next four years is met by the man who has stood up for you, stood up for me, and in fact, stood up for all of us against government overreach, government flaws, and government failures. Donald J. Trump brought something unique to the Presidency. Perhaps for the first time in history, he brought a leader to the White House who could not be bought, pushed, or “negotiated” into compromising you and your values. The number one reason the media, elites, Hollywood, and Democrats do not like Trump is their lack of control. In politics, you always trace the money, and you’ll find who pulls strings. With Donald J. Trump, nobody except Trump and his supporters pull the strings. He pulls those strings for you. As stated, children, teenagers, men, women, and college students across America have been hard at work. They have been working, not for pay, riches, or even political favors or rewards…they have been working to push Trump over the top for another four years. They have been standing up when threatened, they have been raising their voices when told to shut up, and they have lined yards with signs, worn hats, and publically endorsed Trump. They have taken these actions at a time in our history when your support for a candidate could cost you your life…in fact, it did cost at least one man his life. These…heroes, if you will…continue in the face of COVID-19 to operate headquarters, put up the signs, and share the information. Maybe you are one of them wearing a Trump hat, bearing a sticker on your car, or a flag in your yard. Maybe you are doing your part. Or, maybe you’re one of the silent majority standing in the back afraid of what will happen, afraid of voicing your opinion or even putting a yard sign out… You’re what I call the “Adrians” of the fight for Trump. You may remember a now-classic moved called Rocky II. In the movie Rocky, the underdog, and one that everyone expected to lose, is fighting for himself and Adrian, his wife. When Adrian is in the hospital, Rocky will not leave her side. He won’t train for the fight, he won’t work, he won’t do anything except stay with Adrian – it’s simple – Adrain, or you the silent majority for Trump – is the only reason he will or will not fight. Trump is very much like Rocky at this point. Trump cares about the American people. He has the trainers, the supporters like those already working headquarters, but he is concerned about the silent majority as they are his “Adrain.” If you remember the rest of the movie, Adrian wakes up, and Rocky tells her that if she doesn’t want him to fight, he won’t. In other words, if he doesn’t hear it from her, all the other support means nothing. Her response is powerful. She simply says, “I want you to win,” to which the rest of Rocky’s supporters say, “What are we waiting for? Let’s go.” Do you want Trump to win? Is it important for you to have another four years of economic, global, and American success? Do you believe Trump has your interest at heart? If so, he needs to hear from you now. With 35 days to go, Trump needs to hear your “Adrain” voice saying, “I want you to win.” He needs to hear it at the rallies, in the streets, on signs, in donations, on bumper stickers, and on flags. He needs to hear the exit polls that say, “I voted for Trump.” He needs the workers going to the public. He needs your support now whether it if financial or you find a headquarters and group to donate your valuable time toward victory. As you likely know, Rocky went on to win as the underdog. Trump is that underdog now. The polls show Biden leading; the Democrats are hovering and waiting to take the White House. Your time to say, “I support Trump” and show that support is not yet gone…it is now. To you, it is simple – There stands the President…will you stand with him? You must stand with Trump or in January, you may just wonder what happened to your country. Tags: Clinton Thomas, Texarkana GOP, Will You Stand , With TrumpTo share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| Sailor Behind Pearl Harbor Shooting Was ‘Insider Threat’ with Underdiagnosed Mental Issues
Posted: 30 Sep 2020 10:34 AM PDT  by Gina Harkins: A sailor’s mental health problems were underdiagnosed and not properly communicated to his command in the months leading up to last year’s fatal shooting at a Hawaii shipyard, a newly released investigation into the attack found. Navy officials say they still haven’t pinpointed exactly what drove Machinist’s Mate Auxiliary Fireman Gabriel Antonio Romero, a 22-year-old assigned to the fast-attack submarine Columbia, to shoot three civilians at the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard Dec. 4, 2019. Romero killed two Defense Department employees that day — Vincent J. Kapoi, a metals inspector apprentice, and Roldan A. Agustin, a shop planner — and injured another using his M4 service rifle. As law enforcement personnel responded within seconds, Romero shot and killed himself using a Navy-issued M9 pistol. A 190-page investigation into the murder-suicide found no explanation for why Romero targeted the three people who were shot that day. The report stated, though, that the sailor “had long-developing problems that in aggregate should have raised concerns about his mental condition, and his maturity, stability, and dependability.” “He constituted an insider threat,” investigators found. “… If these risk factors would have been shared among medical providers and the USS COLUMBIA chain of command before December 4, 2019, the Navy may have interrupted the chain of events that led to this tragedy.” The shooting was one of two fatal attacks at Navy facilities that week. Two days later, a Saudi officer opened fire in a classroom building at Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida, killing three and injuring several others. The two incidents prompted the Navy’s No. 2 officer to direct separate investigations into the attacks; those reports provided detailed recommendations for the service and other lead agencies. Now, officials say the service has stood up a special working group, organized by the Navy’s Security Coordination Board, to help prevent similar attacks from happening again. The group, the service said in a Tuesday news release about the investigation, will implement findings and recommendations after the attacks that will “make the Navy safer and more secure.” “The safety and livelihood of our Sailors is dependent on this effort,” former Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Robert Burke wrote in a May endorsement letter. An Ordinary Day The sub to which he was assigned was in Dry Dock 2, inside the controlled industrial area at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard on Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam. The sailor Romero replaced that day told investigators the watch turnover was ordinary. “Romero took possession of the M4 rifle with 90 rounds of ammunition and M9 pistol with 45 rounds of ammunition and made required entries in the duty logbook,” the investigation states. The investigation also details how, on the day of the shooting, Romero missed duty muster because he was attending a semi-annual training requirement. Romero was supposed to check in with the duty section leader before reporting to his watch station, but he didn’t do so. While he was found not to have drugs or alcohol in his system, the missed security and safety brief, the report states, “demonstrates a lack of procedural compliance and was a missed opportunity for duty section leadership to assess Romero’s suitability for watch before he was issued a firearm.” Before Romero began his first roving patrol, he told the petty officer of the deck — the other armed topside watch stander for the Columbia, “I’ll be back.” What happened next occurred within seconds, the report states. Romero began walking around Dry Dock 2 from port to starboard around the same time three civilian employees who had been working on the sub earlier that day left their workstations in a trailer. Romero turned, approaching the three from behind. “The Petty Officer of the Deck observed Romero chamber a round, raise his M4 rifle, and begin firing at the civilians,” the report states. The three fell to the ground about 15 feet from Romero’s position. As first responders rushed to the scene, Romero turned the pistol on himself. He died at the scene. Kapoi and Agustin were pronounced dead at local hospitals, while the third victim was treated and later released. “If shipmates would have reported potential risk indicators to supervisors, the chain of command may have aggregated them with other known risk factors to recognize that circumstances warranted his rescreening for armed watch standing,” the report states. Troubling Signs “This tragic event was heartbreaking to our community and our valued shipyard workforce, and we must work hard to restore confidence in the Navy’s ability to protect our most valuable assets — our people,” Adm. John Aquilino, U.S. Pacific Fleet’s commander, said in the statement. After qualifying to be a watchstander soon after being assigned to the Columbia, Romero’s performance in other areas began to slip, the investigation found. “Romero quickly fell behind in his other qualifications, and the chain of command took administrative action to address exceeding the qualification deadline of 12 months, poor performance, and continued tardiness,” the investigation states. “He received written counseling or extra military instruction on ten separate occasions in the months before the shooting, beginning in June 2019, and he had to attend after-work study periods for his qualification delinquency.” Less than three months before the shooting, Romero was counseled for sitting down while on watch, which led to a remedial review of watch standing principles. Then, when on temporary duty to another sub to earn qualifications for a submarine warfare pin, Romero didn’t interact with other sailors and displayed a low level of knowledge, giving the impression he didn’t want to be there. He was sent back to the Columbia before his temporary duty was complete to build up more knowledge for his qualifications, the report states. When counseled for poor performance, Romero often cried, according to the investigation. A little more than a week before the shooting, Romero was informed he didn’t pass the Naval Advancement Exam and wouldn’t be promoted to E-4. The day before the shooting, Romero faced an executive officer inquiry following a November disciplinary review board for repeated tardiness and qualification delinquency. The executive officer asked Romero whether his mother would be happy if she knew he was squandering the opportunity the Navy gave him, according to the report. Romero, the investigation states, again became emotional and began to cry, expressing his desire to stay in the Navy. The XO issued a Page 13, a form of formal written counseling, stating that if Romero was late to work again, he’d face nonjudicial punishment from the commanding officer. Romero didn’t sign it, claiming, according to the report, that the XO told him he didn’t need to do so until the end of the week. The XO was planning to clarify the matter by personally delivering the Page 13 the next day, Dec. 4. “The Page 13 was not signed or delivered before the shooting incident,” the investigation states. As Romero faced professional challenges while assigned to the Columbia, he began seeking mental health treatment. It started in March 2019, when Romero went to the Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu to report that he had had a hard time focusing at a traffic court hearing earlier that day. “Romero denied any suicidal or homicidal ideations,” the report states. “TAMC staff called a Tripler Police Department Officer to conduct a contraband search as a precautionary measure and contacted the command to provide support. Romero’s division chief went to the emergency room, where TAMC staff told him that Romero was not a risk to harm others or himself.” The center noted in Romero’s electronic medical record that the sailor had a possible diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder, the report adds. He was then referred to the Naval Submarine Support Command’s embedded mental health program clinic in Pearl Harbor for further evaluation and treatment. But that clinic can’t receive outpatient referrals through the electronic medical record system, according to the investigation. The TAMC staff, according to the report, “did not inform the division chief, the eMHP staff, or USS COLUMBIA’s medical department representative (MDR) by telephone, email, or other means.” Romero didn’t go to the embedded mental health program clinic until September, after telling his division chief he’d been having difficulty sleeping and was worried about his health, the report adds. During a 90-minute clinical interview, the force psychologist described Romero as “odd, awkward, guarded, and confused,” according to the report. In his intake questionnaire, Romero said he was having problems “with mood stress,” the investigation states, adding that he wanted to call his father more, think about the future and take time to relax. When describing how frequently he felt certain problem areas, Romero reportedly answered that he frequently felt no interest in things, almost always had difficulty concentrating, frequently felt there was something wrong with his mind, sometimes felt hopeless about the future, and sometimes had disturbing thoughts that he couldn’t get rid of. He went to the clinic eight times over three months and, according to the report, was not diagnosed with a mental disorder. That left him qualified for continued submarine duty without any limitations, the investigation states. “Romero never expressed suicidal ideations or threats of violence toward others during his eMHP Clinic visits,” the report adds. Shortfalls IdentifiedA forensic psychologist who was assigned to the investigation took issue with Romero’s mental health assessment. Though the psychologist did not treat Romero and acknowledged the staff who did “could not have reasonably predicted his violent behavior,” he found the force psychologist “under-diagnosed and inadequately managed Romero’s mental condition.” “An accurate diagnosis likely would have disqualified Romero from submarine duty,” the psychologist wrote. “… The prioritized likelihood of diagnosis (beginning with most likely) were the following: Autistic Spectrum Disorder; Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder; Social Anxiety Disorder; Personality Disorder (Avoidant and Borderline features); Anxiety Disorder; Depressive Disorder; and Adjustment Disorder.” In his endorsement letter of the investigation, Aquilino stated that, while the Submarine Force embedded mental health program is valuable, he’s concerned the clinic “failed to strike the balance between supporting the submarine community readiness and providing necessary mental health resources to submarine Sailors, to include diagnosing Sailors when necessary so they can receive further treatment.” Navy officials, in the Tuesday statement on the probe’s findings, also said the investigation uncovered communication barriers between health care professionals and leaders, which place “undue emphasis on patient confidentiality, particularly where Sailors may have access to weapons. Aquilino made several recommendations on that front in his endorsement letter, including reviewing whether underdiagnosis is a pattern within the embedded mental health program, and reviewing processes for sharing records between military treatment facilities, like the one Romero visited in Honolulu, and command-level clinics. “The service member’s right to confidentiality must be balanced against evaluating what information is necessary to relay to the chain of command,” the admiral wrote. “This not only ensures our Sailors are receiving the best care, but also garners crucial support from the chain of command necessary for a successful resiliency approach. “The overly-conservative stance on patient confidentiality served neither the patient nor the command well in this situation,” Aquilino added. Tags: Gina Harkins, Military.com, Sailor Behind Pearl Harbor Shooting, Was ‘Insider Threat,’ Underdiagnosed Mental IssuesTo share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| First the Uighurs, Now the Tibetans
Posted: 30 Sep 2020 08:53 AM PDT
Now the party is using the same playbook to deal with another troublesome religious and ethnic minority: Tibetans. So far in 2020, Beijing has pushed “more than 500,000 [Tibetan] rural laborers into recently built military-style training centers.” It’s being called a “vocational training” program, which is Chinese Newspeak for “forced labor.” The goal is to reform “backward thinking,” and turn Tibetan speakers into Chinese ones. The only way China changes is if it pays a real price, an economic one. If not, Beijing’s “business as usual” will target more religious minorities, including Christians. Tags: John Stonestreet, Uighurs, Tibetans, Chinese Communist PartyTo share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
(Washington, D.C.) – Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) 
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Opinion: The Left Has Delusions of Grandeur Over Kamala’s Odds in Veep Debate
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NBC MORNING RUNDOWN
Thursday, October 1, 2020
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Good morning, NBC News readers.
Internal documents seen by NBC News reporters show that Trump officials were told to make comments sympathetic to the teenager charged with killing two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin. And there is more fallout from the debate slugfest — including some amusing internet memes you may have missed.
Here’s what we’re watching this Thursday morning.
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DHS memo told officials to make comments favorable to Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse
Federal law enforcement officials were directed to make public comments sympathetic to Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager charged with fatally shooting two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, according to internal Department of Homeland Security talking points obtained by NBC News.
In preparing Homeland Security officials for questions about Rittenhouse from the media, the document suggests that they note that he “took his rifle to the scene of the rioting to help defend small business owners.”
Rittenhouse, 17, supported Trump and police on his social media pages before he traveled from his home in Antioch, Illinois, to Kenosha on Aug. 25 with an AR-15-style rifle, authorities say. Rittenhouse was arrested on first-degree murder charges and is fighting extradition to Wisconsin. His attorneys argue that he was acting in self-defense.
Former Homeland Security officials said it was unusual for law enforcement officials to be instructed to weigh in on a particular group or individual before investigations had concluded.
“It is as unprecedented as it is wrong,” said Peter Boogaard, who was a spokesperson for Homeland Security during under the Obama administration.
Kyle Rittenhouse, left, walks in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on the night of the shooting. (Photo: Adam Rogan / The Journal Times via AP)
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Trumpworld is ‘worried’ about debate performance fallout
President Donald Trump’s allies expressed worries after the chaotic first debate that he had squandered one of his last opportunities to change the dynamics of a race in which he is trailing, coming off as mean and angry rather than confident and in command.
Advisers say Trump missed repeated chances to deal blows to Democratic nominee Joe Biden in areas they had prepped for and failed to lay out his own case for what a second term would look like.
While there is a consensus among those close to the campaign that Trump probably didn’t lose any votes among his base, his performance likely didn’t win over some of the voters he needs most either.
Biden slammed Trump’s debate showing as “a national embarrassment” on the campaign trail Wednesday.
The Commission on Presidential Debates announced Wednesday that it is considering format changes for remaining debates after Trump repeatedly disregarded the rules, resulting in the verbal brawl that negated any substantive policy conversation.
Meantime, Trump’s call to supporters to watch polls “very carefully” during the debate alarmed Democrats and election experts who called the president’s rhetoric “dangerous” and warned against possible voter intimidation.
There is still a lot to unpack from the debate. Our Into America podcast digs into the contentious issues of race, protests and police that were brought up during the debate.
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‘We’ve been forgotten’: The long fight and dangerous threat at one Superfund site
New Jersey has 114 Superfund sites, the most in the nation, and Newark, the state’s largest city, is home to four of them.
Superfund sites are some of the nation’s most polluted land that’s been marked by the EPA for clean-up.
One in Newark’s Ironbound neighborhood, a former chemical plant where cleanup is priced at $1.4 billion, is especially problematic.
It’s one of nine in the state, and 74 nationwide, that not only are vulnerable to the effects of climate change but contain uncontrolled toxic wastes that could damage human health, an investigation by InsideClimate News, the Texas Observer and NBC News found.
Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, an environmental nonprofit, warned about the dangers of major weather events and rising sea levels in terms of clean-up plans.
“With Superfund sites and climate change, we’re playing Russian roulette with a loaded gun,” Tittel said of a potential disaster. “It’s a matter of when, not a matter of if.”
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Plus
- The E.U. launched legal action against the U.K. over London’s plan to unilaterally breach a Brexit withdrawal agreement both sides signed last year.
- Some 1,600 customers say Wells Fargo paused their mortgage payments without their consent during the Covid-19 pandemic, far more than previously known.
- Snapchat has helped 1 million users register to vote, a possible boon to Democrats.
- As many as 50,000 airline workers could be out of a job after Congress failed to pass a last-minute deal to extend coronavirus relief aid to the embattled industry.
- However the Senate did manage to pass a bill to avert a government shutdown.
- “We will always love you”: Chrissy Teigen and John Legend are mourning the loss of their third child.
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THINK about it
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Live BETTER
Life’s too short to drink bad coffee. Cooking guru Mark Bittman shows how to make a better cup of coffee at home.
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Shopping
Here’s what you need to know about air quality monitors, according to doctors.
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One fun thing
The first debate was full of mockery, name-calling and taunts.
It also launched a million internet memes. We rounded up some of the funniest ones.
And just when you’d forgotten about Weird Al Yankovic, he’s back with his own take on the debate for the New York Times. Forgive me if his “we’re living in the apocalypse” refrain gets stuck in your head all day.
Some Twitter users couldn’t resist posting photoshopped images of Biden wearing the “biggest mask I’ve ever seen” that Trump mockingly suggested. (Image: @TylerTatro1)
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NBC FIRST READ
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From NBC’s Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, Carrie Dann and Melissa Holzberg
FIRST READ: In a single month, Biden outspent Trump over the airwaves, $153 million to $57 million
We’ve told you how Joe Biden passed President Trump in the money race.
Now let’s show you how Biden is spending his money – and how Trump isn’t, at least over the advertising airwaves.
Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images
In the month of September alone, the Biden campaign spent $153 million on TV and radio ads, while the Trump campaign spent $57 million, according to ad-spending data from Advertising Analytics.
That’s nearly a 3-to-1 spending advantage.
Now GOP outside groups – which get less bang for the buck on ad rates than campaigns do – came to Trump’s rescue, narrowing Team Biden’s overall advantage versus Team Trump’s (campaign + outside groups) to $189 million to $127 million.
Still, it’s remarkable that an incumbent who began raising money so early and who once had such a significant cash-on-hand advantage over Biden is getting outspent here.
And check out the battleground state spending since Labor Day between the two campaigns, per NBC’s Ben Kamisar:
So after Labor Day, Biden outspent Trump 2-to-1 in North Carolina and expensive Florida, 3-to-1 in Michigan, and more than 4-to-1 in Pennsylvania.
The ONLY state where the Trump campaign had the spending advantage over Biden is Georgia.
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The top ad markets in September
Staying with the ad spending last month, here were the top individual markets in the presidential race from Sept. 1 to Sept. 30, per Advertising Analytics:
Orlando/Daytona Beach FL: $23 million
Phoenix: $22 million
Tampa/St. Pete, FL: $20 million
Miami/Ft. Lauderdale, FL: $15 million
Philadelphia: $15 million
Charlotte, NC: $14 million
Raleigh/Durham, NC: $14 million
Detroit: $11 million
Pittsburgh: $10 million
So three of the Top 4 markets are in Florida, and two of the Top 9 are in Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
Sounds about right.
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Trump’s next debate is two weeks away
As Barack Obama found out in 2012, when you struggle in your first debate – or have a negative storyline or two from it – you have to wait until you get your next shot.
The next presidential debate is Oct. 15 in Miami. That’s two weeks from today.
And that puts a lot of pressure on Vice President Mike Pence in the Oct. 7 VP debate.
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TWEET OF THE DAY: Just say no
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DATA DOWNLOAD: The numbers you need to know today
7,270,398: The number of confirmed cases of coronavirus in the United States, per the most recent data from NBC News and health officials. (That’s 42,800 more than yesterday morning.)
208,208: The number of deaths in the United States from the virus so far. (That’s 976 more than yesterday morning.)
103.94 million: The number of coronavirus tests that have been administered in the United States so far, according to researchers at The COVID Tracking Project.
73.1 million: How many people tuned in to the first debate, according to Nielsen.
More than a million: The number of users Snapchat says it has helped register to vote.
84 to 10: The Senate vote to pass a stopgap government funding bill.
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2020 VISION: Trump goes after Omar
A day after President Trump refused to denounce white supremacy during the presidential debate, and the same day that Trump claimed to not know who the Proud Boys are, the president attacked Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., last night.
And he didn’t stop rallygoers from chanting “lock her up.” Here was Trump:
“Now, and what about Omar? Where she gets caught harvesting? What the hell is going on? I hope your U.S. attorney is involved. What, what is going on with Omar? I’ve been reading these reports for two years about how corrupt and crooked she is [LOCK HER UP CHANTS]. Let’s get with it, let’s get with it.”
Those comments came after President Trump railed against the idea of allowing more refugees into the country – Omar came to the U.S. as a refugee from Somalia.
“It’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen. But they pledged a 700 percent increase in refugees, 700 percent. Congratulations, Minnesota.”
On the campaign trail today: Mike Pence stumps in Iowa.
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THE LID: Temperament tantrum
Don’t miss the pod from yesterday, when we looked at what the debate revealed about Trump’s temperament — and how voters viewed it four years ago.
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ICYMI: What ELSE is happening in the world?
Homeland Security officials were instructed to make comments sympathetic to Kyle Rittenhouse, according to talking points obtained by NBC News.
Trump is trying to drive a wedge between Biden and progressives. Some leaders on the left say it won’t work.
Many of Trump’s allies are worried that his debate performance did nothing to change the dynamic of the race.
The GOP is mobilizing an army of poll watchers. What’s not exactly clear is how it will play out.
Chris Wallace called Tuesday’s debate “a terrible missed opportunity.”
Swing state voters hated the debate. Did any change their minds?
Brad Parscale is stepping down from the Trump campaign to get “help” after an incident with police.
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October 01 2020
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Episode 283: No-So-Subtle Signage 
JP Morgan: The S&P 500… 
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