Precedents in SCOTUS nominations

 

Instapundit has the goods (click to embiggen if necessary):

DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY: But the important thing to Alyssa Milano is that someone is paying attention to Alyssa Milano.

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Pamela Geller: Big Tech censorship and the Election

 

At American Thinker, Pamela Geller comments on Allum Bokhari’s new book on Big Tech censorship.  It’s worse than we thought.  Ms. Geller begins:

Allum Bokhari, the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News, has performed an extraordinarily valuable service by giving us his new book #Deleted: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal the Election. 

. . .

In #Deleted, Allum Bokhari tells the whole shocking story. For those who don’t realize the implications of what is going on, he includes a Prologue entitled “The Typewriter That Talked Back” that is as amusing as it is disturbing, and that makes abundantly clear even to the most technically challenged among us what is really happening to our foremost and most important freedom, right under our noses. Bokhari paints a vivid picture of a 1968 in which a typewriter refuses to type, typing instead its own message: “We regret to inform you that your last letter violated our terms of service (Rule 32: Abusive & Offensive Content). We have suspended access to your typewriter for 24 hours.” Newsstands remove from sale magazines that third-party “fact-checkers” have deemed to be “fake news.” The Post Office returns your mail because you told a joke in a letter that a censor found offensive.

It’s all funny until you realize that all this is exactly what email providers and big tech censors are doing to Americans today, every day on the Internet. In the pre-Internet world of 1968, it would have been preposterous. Americans would not have accepted it. But it has all happened gradually, as we gave away our freedom by clicking our agreement to dense and unreadable Terms of Service that turned over our right to say what we believe to shadowy, anonymous guardians of acceptable opinion. Most Americans today are only dimly aware, at best, that it is happening at all, and those that are approach it with grim resignation. After all, what are you going to do? Start your own Facebook?

Having been one of the early targets of social media censorship on Facebook, YouTube et al, I have for many years advocated for anti-trust action against these bullying behemoths. Bokhari makes an airtight case in #Deleted for why such action is necessary.

Read the full column here.  And it’s scary to think that even if millions of Facebook users cancelled their accounts, nothing would change.

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Today’s meme on next week's debate

The Trump - Biden debate is scheduled for next Tuesday, Sept. 29 in Cleveland.  Will it actually take place? Meme via Patriot Post:

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Boos for Gov. DeWine

 

Paula Bolyard at PJ Media reports on the Trump rally in Dayton and his introduction of Gov. Mike DeWine:

President Trump, as is customary at these events, introduced Republican Gov. Mike DeWine at his rally in Dayton, Ohio, on Monday—only to have the audience loudly boo the governor, who had imposed a statewide masking order in July that has been wildly unpopular with the president’s base.

“We’re joined today by a real good friend of mine, somebody that’s been with me from the beginning and I’ve been with him from the beginning, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine,” the president began. “Where’s Mike?” he asked, to a spattering of applause. Trump looked around, seemingly unable to spot DeWine in the crowd—and then the boos began. “What’s that all about?” he quipped, looking a bit confused. “He’s opening up,” Trump said, trying to defend the governor. “He’s a good man.”

The rest of the report is here.  President Trump describes Gov. DeWine as “a good man”?  The Ohio Governor who keeps moving the goalposts on mask mandates and onerous regulations that hamper opening up businesses?  Gov. DeWine seems to have been enjoying his role as a petty tyrant.  Not good.

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Rent-a-mobs: Update by Michelle Malkin

Sunrise logo (yes, the outfit has its own logo) via Wikipedia

Michelle Malkin is now blogging at UNZ.com.  In her column today, “Sunrise Movement: the Riotous Left's Pot-Banging Brats,” Ms. Malkin names names and puts the endless rioting and violence in context. She begins:

Wake up. The “community organizers” of the left are in full wildebeest mode. Now is not the time for bending down, rolling over or playing nice. From now until Election Day (and likely until the end of the year), you can expect screaming banshees carrying identical, preprinted signs to turn up in the middle of the night at the private homes of elected politicians, Donald Trump campaign and administration officials, law enforcement officers, judges and conservative leaders.

This is not conjecture. A nationwide agitation force milked the dead body of George Floyd to create the current anarchotyranny. Now, in keeping with her dying wish, the mob will use the fresh corpse of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to try to bully Republicans into submission over President Donald Trump’s rightful Supreme Court nomination. The ultimate goal: obstruction and delegitimization of Trump’s reelection.

On cue, a bunch of demonstrators all in matching yellow-and-black T-shirts from the Sunrise Movement turned out in front of South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham’s house in Washington, D.C., this weekend, banging pots, pans and buckets. The disrupters also blasted airhorns, pointed strobe lights at the windows and crashed cymbals to punctuate their collective fit over Ginsburg’s passing. Not a single one was arrested for disturbing the peace.

One organizer shrieked at Graham (who was not at home at the time): “You are an old white man desperately clinging to power that you can’t hold onto much longer because we’re coming for it. And in the meantime, you are not filling that Supreme Court seat. Not on our watch. The people will decide who fills that seat. No justice, no sleep!”

Another threatened: “Anyone who is seeing this can do the same thing to your representative, can do the same thing learning about how to hold them accountable. Make sure they know if they do some evil (expletives), they know there will be consequences for it.”

Shrieker Number One concluded: “We will vote, we will organize, we will strike, and we will keep showing up in your goddamned driveway at the crack of dawn to let you know that WE ARE WIDE AWAKE!”

Who is the Sunrise Movement? It’s as organic as Spam and as genuine as AstroTurf. This full-time rent-a-mob is an adjunct of the Sierra Club (annual budget: $100 million; top donors: Michael Bloomberg, George Soros). The Sierra Club provided five-figure initial seed grants to Sunrise’s educational arm, as well as Beltway office space. Other original funders of Sunrise: The Rockefeller Foundation and Wallace Global Fund (which has also contributed to the George Soros-subsidized Tides Center, Color of Change cancel culture guerilla warriors, and far-left legal policy groups Alliance for Justice and the Brennan Center for Justice).

The Sunrise Movement’s co-founder, Evan Weber, is a former Occupy Wall Street organizer. Two others, Sara Blazevic and Varshini Prakash, are Green New Deal zealots and Bernie Sanders activists who teamed with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to push the Democrats even further left. Prakash serves as an advisory board member of Climate Power 2020 along with Soros-funded Center for American Progress head John Podesta, former Obama administration environmental czar Carol Browner, former Obama administration science czar John Holdren, former Obama administration Secretary of State John Kerry, former Obama administration EPA head Gina McCarthy, and former Obama administration U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power.

Ms. Malkin's full column is here. And guess what?  Here's from the Sunrise Movement's website:

Sunrise is a movement to stop climate change and create millions of good jobs in the process. We currently have 8 hubs in Ohio looking for volunteers including: Athens, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Kent, Oberlin and Youngstown. See website for contact information for each hub.

It sounds so benign.

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Therapeutic totalitarianism

 

Nicholas J. Kaster’s column today at American Thinker has a sobering analysis of the local and state governments’ endless mask mandates, lockdowns, and other joys of the never-ending pandemic:

We have entered the seventh month of coronavirus panic, with large parts of America still partly or wholly shut down. What began as a 15-day expedient designed to “flatten the curve,” has gradually become the norm in American life. The goalposts have continued to shift. First, the focus was on hospital overcrowding; then it moved to overall deaths; then it moved to number of positive cases; now it seems to be shifting to the availability of a vaccine. The real endgame appears to be the November election.

. . .

Many have seen parallels in this creeping authoritarianism to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. And indeed, there are some: the obsessive mask conformity, the endless and often contradictory edicts by state governors and mayors, and the tiresome mantras celebrating obedience (e.g., “Alone together”).

But a closer analogy to our current predicament can be found in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Huxley’s novel, published in 1932, 17 years before Orwell’s, envisions a dystopia that is sated but soulless, where the people’s every earthly need is met, but at the cost of their liberty and humanity.

. . .

The idea of a riskless utopia is pure fantasy, of course, but the power that will accrete to the ruling class is very real.

Mr. Kaster’s column is here.

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Where are the alternatives to Facebook?

Dan Bongino is investing in an alternative to YouTube.  I hope he and others also attempt to start up alternative to Facebook.  From the Patriot Post: 

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Today is Constitution Day

Today is Constitution Day. From the Constitution Center website:

On September 17, 1787, the Founding Fathers signed the most influential document in American history, the U.S. Constitution.

Every year, the National Constitution Center hosts the best Constitution Day celebration in the country. We are the place to turn to help you commemorate this historic day while meeting your federal education requirements, at the Center and online!

Live Online Programming

This year students and teachers can join us from anywhere for FREE engaging, educational live programs and award-winning resources. Tune in all week long for engaging and interactive programs, featuring National Constitution Center scholars and other special guests!

Much more at the website with links and resources.

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The Great COVID-19 Hoax

photo credit: Milwaukee Independent 

Some skeptics probably rank man-made global warming/cooling as the world’s Biggest Hoax.  Alicia Colon nominates the COVID-19 lock-down and related control tactics (think: face masks) as the Biggest Hoax.  Both hoaxes are all about money and power.  Her article “Falling for the Biggest Hoax in History” at American Thinker begins:

It will probably take months if not years for the truth of the Covid-19 pandemic to emerge, but when it does will any politician take responsibility for the lies and disinformation or the damage this hoax caused this great nation? I don’t think so, but what it did prove was what happens when the Democrats are in charge. They may not be in the White House but it is the House that wields the power over legislation and our money.  Couple this power with the useful idiots in the mainstream media to promote the widespread hysteria, and we then had the total capitulation of a frightened nation that accepted an unprecedented total lockdown of its existence. Shame on us.

Further into the article:

In previous severe flu seasons, there were much higher death rates yet there were no mandatory lockdowns.  Why do I call this pandemic a hoax?  The only reason why politicians, especially the Democrats in charge, pushed for shutting down the economy was because economic destruction was their ultimate goal. Trump’s strong economy, low unemployment numbers for all Americans was a real obstacle to a Joe Biden victory. Democrats have seized on this pandemic because they never let a crisis go to waste.

Americans have been gaslighted. We can’t take anything reported by the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, CNN, MSNBC, the Drudge Report and the Alphabet Networks as gospel because it’s all designed to frighten and delay the recovery. . . .

Read Ms. Colon’s complete article here.

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Hanson on “Biden: The Great and Powerful”

 

The great Victor Davis Hanson explains the bizarre Biden campaign in “Biden: The Great and Powerful” at American Greatness.  From the article:

So the lightweight Biden was reflated as a sort of centrist hot air balloon to be used to float the hard-Left basket carriage beneath across the election defining line.

But fusion/collusion is not just a matter of a Potemkin veneer. Biden’s agenda is a fantasy creation. His role was to save the party from Sanders, win suburbanites, and pander to the party’s socialist sympathizers of Antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement. That is an impossible task because today’s Democratic Party is a conglomeration of squabbling tribes and looney agendas. 

Biden is now ordered to keep still on the issues of the day, because what he once said to get nominated and please the Left would lose him the election. He wants to defund the police, but not to defund the police. He wants to phase out fossil fuels and end fracking but not to end fracking in Electoral College-rich Pennsylvania. 

The rioting, Biden insists, is due to police brutality but not due to it entirely. Trump’s COVID policies killed thousands, but Biden’s own bromides are either identical or would be less effective. 

And on and on, as Biden is made to wink and nod to the Left that his only role is to get them elected before collapsing at the finishing line. 

The media thinks this will work, and so owns the project. Biden will stay sequestered, visit a key state occasionally, pop out of the plane to say he is “barnstorming” Michigan or Wisconsin and then fly back into his Biden bunker for more Zoom puff interviews—and hope progressive polls show that he can endure weekly bleeding until November 3.

Every four or five days the media will blast the airways with, “Trump is ripping out mailboxes,” “Trump won’t concede and will have to be forcibly removed,” “Trump insulted our war dead as ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’ as he hid from the rain to keep his hair dry.” Most recently Bob Woodward’s book queued up for its turn of 72 hours of smears, right after gab-bag Jeffery Goldberg’s anonymous sources faded out. 

Will this joint project of progressive ideologues of the Democratic Party and the major media work? 

Read the complete article here. 

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Not just any yard sign

Sent from my friend Shirley who drove around the Perry area and found this creatively festooned barn (click to embiggen):

 

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Michael Anton on “The Coming Coup”

 

Michael Anton is the author of The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return. He was interviewed on Mark Levin’s “Life, Liberty, and Levin” on Fox.  He was a great guest, so I looked up his essay on American Mind, “The Coming Coup?”, which starts off:

Democrats are laying the groundwork for revolution right in front of our eyes.

As if 2020 were not insane enough already, we now have Democrats and their ruling class masters openly talking about staging a coup. You might have missed it, what with the riots, lockdowns and other daily mayhem we’re forced to endure in this, the most wretched year of my lifetime. But it’s happening.

It started with the military brass quietly indicating that the troops should not follow a presidential order. They were bolstered by many former generals—including President Trump’s own first Secretary of Defense—who stated openly what the brass would only hint at. Then, as nationwide riots really got rolling in early June, the sitting Secretary of Defense himself all but publicly told the president not to invoke the Insurrection Act. His implicit message was: “Mr. President, don’t tell us to do that, because we won’t, and you know what happens after that.”

All this enthused Joe Biden, who threw subtlety to the winds. The former United States Senator (for 26 years) and Vice President (for eight) has not once, not twice, but thrice confidently asserted that the military will “escort [Trump] from the White House with great dispatch” should the president refuse to leave. Another former Vice President, Al Gore, publicly agreed.

One might dismiss such comments as the ravings of a dementia patient and a has-been who never got over his own electoral loss. But before you do, consider also this. Over the summer a story was deliberately leaked to the press of a meeting at which 100 Democratic grandees, anti-Trump former Republicans, and other ruling class apparatchiks got together (on George Soros’s dime) to “game out” various outcomes of the 2020 election. One such outcome was a clear Trump win. In that eventuality, former Bill Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, playing Biden, refused to concede, pressured states that Trump won to send Democrats to the formal Electoral College vote, and trusted that the military would take care of the rest.

The full essay is here. 

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Katie Hopkins on Breaking Back In

 

 photo from the Front Page article

Katie Hopkins is a much-needed breath of fresh air and a shot in the arm.  She’s been censored, abused, and quarantined, but she is traveling in the US, and her report “Breaking Back” at Front Page Magazine starts off:

The time for asking permission is over. Waiting for approval has to be a thing of the past.

It’s a way of thinking that has served me well in recent weeks breaking back into the USA and beginning a rolling speaking tour across the States. My mission is to support Donald J. Trump. But I have been taught by my audiences that there is something far more important to do. My mission is to gather people together and remind ourselves who we really are. And we are the side of love, laughter and light.

The things I am learning along the way have given me a burning new faith and optimism which perhaps can only be gleaned by being amongst people and by defying the very rules that seek to keep us apart.

Brits are currently banned from the USA - even those with visas. It is not a Muslim ban (although my country will be a Muslim majority in twenty years). It is a corona ban, on the basis that inflated British COVID death rates made the British Isles appear as the epicenter of some infernal plague. We have ‘The Science' to thank for that.

It became impossible to sit at home as a passive observer when everything we know and love is being fought for on the other side of the Atlantic. At some fundamental level, I needed to be a part of this fight. I needed to break back into America.

There is no way to overstate the significance of the election faced by American people in November.

The 2020 Presidential election is a tipping point for Western Civilization. It marks the last stand of the right against the very wrong, of law and order against anarchy and chaos, and democracy over socialism. It is not political but biblical in proportion.

. . .

Read the rest here.  What a pick-me-up.  

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Gary Varvel: remembering 9/11

Artwork via Townhall

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And the lockdowns continue

 

Dennis Prager’s column at Front Page Magazine has updates on the China virus lockdowns; he  highlights the insanity in his state of California, but New York, New Jersey, and Michigan are just as bad.  And Ohio is still requiring masks, social distancing, etc.  Why?

Why can people eat with no mask in an airplane -- inches, not six feet, from strangers -- but cannot eat in a California restaurant, which is so much bigger than the inside of an airplane, while sitting six feet from others? Because [Gov.] Newsom ordered it, the Los Angeles Times supports it and, like sheep, Californians have accepted it.

. . .

I conclude with the words of a Swedish medical doctor, Sebastian Rushworth:

"Covid is over in Sweden. People have gone back to their normal lives and barely anyone is getting infected any more. I am willing to bet that the countries that have shut down completely will see rates spike when they open up. If that is the case, then there won't have been any point in shutting down in the first place ... Shutting down completely in order to decrease the total number of deaths only makes sense if you are willing to stay shut down until a vaccine is available. That could take years. No country is willing to wait that long."

Except that so far, the US is still mostly shut down.  Read the rest here.

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Gary Varvel cartoon on the lockdown

 A great cartoon by Gary Varvel at Townhall:

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All About Voter Fraud

 

A friend of mine just asked for some links to reports and information relating to voter fraud, especially as it affects this election cycle.  I put together this list of links, most of which have appeared on this blog, but here are key reports for reference.

This Legal Insurrection report cites the claim that voter fraud is a myth. Here is one first-hand account that shows how it is done: “Confessions of a voter fraud: I was a master at fixing mail-in ballots” by Jon Levine at the New York Post.

John Solomon lists cases of recent election fraud at Just The News.

Project Veritas (James O’Keefe) has taped undercover videos about social media and Google interference. 

Robert Epstein is a longtime liberal and an expert on how Google (and FB) can interfere with elections; he is quoted at Breitbart.

And here is how the Democrat party is setting the table; click here.

If you are in Cuyahoga County, click here to learn about temporary employment opportunities at the Board of Elections. 

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Cleveland’s Trump boat rally

Cleveland joins the list of cities holding Trump boat rallies.  Here are photographs from this afternoon:

 

Click to embiggen.

Images by PatDooley Photography at https://www.facebook.com/Pat44113

UPDATE:  And click here for a report with video of New Jersey's Trump boat parade. 

 

Chuckle of the Day

 Meme from social media:

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COVID-CON job

art credit: thebanningmuseum.org

Brian C. Joondeph, M.D. at American Thinker covers the “Fear Porn” from Drs. Fauci and Birx and the corrupt media, and he concludes:

In the past week, two pillars of the COVID Con collapsed: deaths and positive tests. Back in April, the news was all about death counts. Fox News ran a death tally on the screen, much like the running score of football game. Cable news shows talked about nothing but rising death counts, spreading fear porn to justify recommendations for staying at home and shutting down the U.S. economy.

. . .

The NY Times found, “Up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus.” Yet lockdowns of businesses and schools continue based on these wildly inaccurate numbers.

Is this purposeful or incompetent? I suggest the former. President Trump downplayed testing in favor of therapeutics such as hydroxychloroquine. The Democrat-media establishment immediately pushed for more testing and told everyone that hydroxy was as deadly as cyanide.

Fox News crank Neil Cavuto said of hydroxy, “It will kill you.” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, claiming an “evidence-based” approach to combating the Chinese flu, pushed for “testing, testing, testing.” Yet both of those admonitions were fear-based, not evidence-based.

Here we are now with deaths and positive cases overstated by 90 plus percent, all to create fear and uncertainty ahead of a presidential election. How many excess deaths can be attributed to media gaslighting? How many people delayed necessary medical care or cancer screening, afraid to leave their homes over the daily barrage of fear porn from CNN and Fox News?

This is information warfare, weaponizing medical data to influence an election, regardless of the cost in lives and economic damage. But the Big Con is being exposed, darkness to light. Hopefully voters are noticing and awakening to the con pushed by the left and the media.

Read Dr. Joondeph's column here.

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Joe Biden’s Pittsburgh event

 A Tale of Two Camera Shots!  These images were shared by Sundance at Conservative Treehouse.  

What you saw on TV:

This is the image that actually reflects the event:

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Another Biden Word Salad

It’s funny but it’s not funny.  Matt Palumbo at The Bongino Report:

Joe Biden finally emerged from his basement once again today, to, among other things, blame President Donald Trump for the riots occurring across the country. How President Trump is responsible for riots being carried out by people who hate him remains a mystery, but it appears that Democrats realized that these riots were damaging them in the polls so they finally began pretending to care about the destruction.

It wouldn’t have been a Biden event without a notable and quotable gaffe, and he provided one for us.

Attempting to slam President Trump’s coronavirus response, Biden said “Covid has taken this year, just since the outbreak, has taken more than 100 years, look, here’s, the lives, it’s just, when you think about it. More lives this year than any other year for the past 100 years.”

Shakespeare couldn’t have worded it better.

Now I can’t imagine why so many on the left don’t want Biden to debate…

The report here includes the CNN video.

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Voter Fraud: With Evidence

Deborah Weiss published an article the other day at FrontPage Magazine, “Voter Fraud: With Evidence.  Ms. Weiss used to “work on the congressional committee which deals with contested elections.”  Her article concludes:

It is a lie that Trump and the Republicans want to "suppress the vote." It is clear that he wants to protect the integrity of each citizen's vote. Any effort to ensure vote integrity is framed as voter suppression by the Democrats. The only votes Trump wants to "suppress" are those that are fraudulent and those are the ones that the Democrats need in order to win.

To make matters worse, in their usual Alinskyite way, the Democrats have propagated the narrative that Trump doesn't want post office voting because he wants to steal the election, when clearly it is they who want to do this, as the confusing, diluted, mail-in voting scheme serves no other purpose. In the event that the Democrats win, they'll claim victory even if Trump challenges potentially illegal votes. But in the event they lose, they'll argue that Trump "stole" the election. There's a reason that Biden already hired 700 election attorneys to prepare.

Further, many Democrat states are reducing the number of polling stations drastically, so you'll likely have to wait on very long lines November 3rd. Most will have the option of voting in person early under this new voting regime, and under the circumstances, that is what I suggest. The Democrat scheme to have all mail-in ballots with no safeguards, in my view is designed to cause chaos and confusion in the outcome of the most important election in our lifetimes. It is an attempt to undermine confidence in our system and destabilize our country. Unfortunately, I see only two outcomes: 1) Biden wins and we become a socialist country, losing America as we know it forever or 2) Trump wins and there will be riots across America, amidst accusations of a stolen election. Hillary Clinton has already advised Biden not to concede the election “under any circumstances.” America is no longer "We the people." It is the tale of two cities, with only "us" and "them." We live in scary times.

Read the rest here.

RELATED: “Confessions of a voter fraud: I was a master at fixing mail-in ballots” by Jon Levine at the New York Post.

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That’s a wrap: RNC

 

Most of you probably watched most or all of the conventions.  Over at PJ Media, several contributors were live-blogging, and Bryan Preston’s closing comments were spot-on:

President Trump closed out the greatest speech of his career and the strongest political convention either party has produced since I have been watching political conventions. 

Both parties faced numerous logistical and structural problems thanks to the COVID pandemic. The Democrats allowed COVID to confine them to crummy Zoom calls, empty speeches in dark and empty rooms, cloying and shaming rhetoric, and a depressing spirit.

The Republicans tore up the script and came up with a better one, that had no time for hacks and grifters. It brought real Americans with real stories forward. It showcased American history and pride. It showed us Fort McHenry. It unabashedly supported citizens, public safety, the possibility and joy of redemption, the agony of loss, the power of unity, and our nation's role in the world. 

The RNC convention could have been blighted by COVID as the Democrats' was. But the parties have a different character. The Democrats sank into the mire because that's who they are. The Republicans rose above it because that's who we are. Democrats want Americans as victims. Republicans want Americans as victors. 

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CNN's Baghdad Bob moment

Just in case you somehow missed this one...

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