The final debate before Election Day is scheduled for this evening, October 22 at 9pm. You can tune into CBS. You can go to Conservative Treehouse for livestream links to CNN and to RSBN (UPDATED link here.) (Our household always goes to Right Side Broadcast News just to show support for their efforts.) Or, if you have had it with these debates, you can let Mr. Vodkapundit, a/k/a Stephen Green watch it for you and follow his live drunkblogging of the event here (UPDATED link here).
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Thomas Lifson at American Thinker is outraged at the corruption of the Presidential debates. As well he should be. Among his criticisms is the choice of “moderator”:
Two recent actions by the Commission
on Presidential Debates reveal the outrageous information control strategy
being implemented. Kristen Welker, the debate moderator, is a highly
partisan Democrat working for highly partisan NBC News. Welker even
celebrated Christmas at the Obama White House with her parents, major
donors to Obama.
And she gets to choose the topics – favorable to Biden, of
course.
Foreign policy, where President
Trump has triumphed in the Middle East, is verboten. And any mention
of Hunter Biden's activities as bagman for his father in selling American
foreign policy — despite being the major theme of Trump's campaign activities —
is MIA. But once again, climate change, already discussed in debate
#1and far down on the list of issues that most concern Americans, is on the
agenda.
But it just got worse — much
worse. The AP reports:
The nonpartisan Commission on
Presidential Debates announced Monday that the second and final debate between
the two candidates will have each nominee muted while the other delivers his
two-minute remarks at the outset of each of the six debate topics. The
remainder of each 15-minute block will be open discussion, without any muting,
the commission said.
Welker's handpicked, Dem-favoring
topics will get a monopoly in establishing the character of each segment of the
debate. This obviously is intended to force Trump to stick to the
subject Dems want covered. And pardon me if I do not trust this
assurance that the mute button, whose very existence is an outrage, will not be
further employed to silence Trump if he brings up Hunter's crooked deals on
behalf of his father, who gets a cut of 10 to 50 percent on the proceeds,
according to a text Hunter sent.
Mr. Lifson’s article is here.
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Katie Adams reports at Hospital Review:
The
Atlantic's COVID tracking project compiles data directly from the websites
of local or state public health authorities. When data is missing from the
websites, it supplements available numbers with information from official news
conferences. Data was last updated Oct. 18 or 19, depending on the state.
Hospital bed capacity counts are
based on 2018 data from the American Hospital Association.
And here are the stats for COVID-19 patients now hospitalized in Ohio:
Ohio: 1,154
State's hospital bed capacity:
33,157
And here’s Matt Walsh at Instapundit on the moving goal posts:
We need to stay locked down for 15 days
Actually a month
Actually two months
Actually three months
Actually until there's a vaccine
Never mind actually we can't trust
the vaccine
All political power games.
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Howard Husock explains why he will be voting on Election Day. In a column at City Journal, Mr. Husock's column starts off (h/t Stephen Green at Instapundit):
Voting Alone : Why I won’t be
casting my ballot early—and why you shouldn’t, either.
Even as the presidential campaign
continues, an estimated 6 million Americans in 27 states have already voted.
Early voting is now a fact of electoral life. I will not be joining in the
habit, however—and I urge you not to do so, either.
Voting early is akin to boxing
referees declaring one fighter the winner on points halfway through the
bout—not knowing that a knockout punch was on its way. It may be hard to
imagine what revelation about the candidates, at this point, would make much of
a difference. But history has demonstrated such possibilities.
Even before the Hunter Biden laptop made its way into the headlines. The rest of Mr. Husock’s column is here.
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Mark Steyn weighed in on this insane election cycle, censorship in the media, the “useless political party,” and more. He begins:
If anybody is around to write
history in a generation or two, October 14th 2020 will go down as the first day
of a new Year Zero. Yesterday, with less than three weeks to go in a national
election in a settled democratic society with an ostensibly free press, the
woke billionaires of the social media cartel decided to freeze and/or cancel
the Twitter/Facebook accounts of the President's press secretary, the Trump
campaign, Republican Senate candidates and Republican House members.
So America is now formally a
one-party state, at least as far as fair access to media platforms is
concerned.
He ran an image of what looks to me like an old mimeograph machine.
What's next? And by
"next" I mean Wednesday November 4th. Look for more woke pressure on website
registrars and banks and credit card companies to cease doing business with
Breitbart and Daily Caller and, well, me:
A couple of years back I used a
phrase, not entirely in jest, on one of our Clubland Q&As with reference to the death of the
big, messy, sprawling, decentralized internet of the turn of the century that I
miss so much since it was replaced by a tyranny of ever more doctrinaire and
capricious thought commissars. And I said that one day we'll be disseminating
SteynOnline via the last rusting Xerox machine in the woods. Well, the day of
the last rusting photocopier in the woods is heading towards us very fast.
Eight years ago conservatives blew
$1 billion trying to drag Mitt Romney across the finish line so that he could
become president and spend the next four years screwing us over. Imagine what
that billion dollars could've done starting an alternative to PayPal or
Facebook...
If Lindsey Graham and Martha
McSally and the Republican Senate survive on November 3rd, so be it. But those
of us who've expended our energies dragging this useless political party across
the finish line every two years need to get serious about redeploying our fast
depleting resources into fighting on the turf that matters. We are well past
the eleventh hour.
Mark’s full column is here.
And I wonder if any in Congress – or on the state and local levels -- are
able to move the GOP party back to core conservative values. President Trump is one man, and he’s been up
against both parties in the swamp that is DC.
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There was a Trump auto rally today in Cleveland, not that you would have known about it if you were checking cleveland.com. An eyewitness reports that the parade stretched out over more than a mile on westbound I-90. Fox 8 posted a video. (The video will pop up if you don't have an ad blocker.)
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Alan Bergstein column at American Thinker today is titled “It’s
Starting to Look Ugly for Democrats.” It’s
hard to know for sure. Most of the
alternative media sources that I go to are split between predicting a Trump landslide and
a Biden landslide. Jokers in the deck
include missing ballots, fake polls, outright voter fraud and ballot
harvesting, and ongoing attempts to undermine election deadlines, voter ID
requirements, and so on. Anyway, here is Mr. Bergstein’s conclusion:
The foundation of Biden's campaign
is cracking. Something drastic has to be done, now at the finish
line, to panic the voters, to short-circuit the voting process, to divert
voters' attention, to basically destroy the election and eventually declare the
outcome null and void. How to do this and what to expect in the days
ahead? Nothing's off the table for the radical left.
Look for those vandalous thugs in
the armies of the BLM and Antifa, who, in recent years, were in Spring
Training, to be called out in the next two weeks to strike fear into the hearts
of America. If polling places were to be vandalized and destroyed
prior to November 3, could there not be a demand by the Schumers and Pelosis to
call the election null and void due to "the denial of voting
opportunities"? If vehicles toting completed ballots were
hijacked, what then of a reliable count? Do you recall the two Black
Panthers in Philadelphia during the 2008 voting process who physically and
verbally intimidated voters in front of a polling station to vote in support of
Barack Obama? They were exonerated by Obama's wing man, Eric
Holder. It worked then for the Democrats, and look for more like
that to occur by November 3.
The Democrats cannot afford to lose
this election. If they do, they have no one else to blame but their
leaders. The effrontery to all of us to put an obviously ailing and
incoherent Joe Biden for the top spot and for the V.P., Kamala Harris, who
couldn't even carry her own state in the primaries, indicates their lack of
judgment. They are at wit's end and will risk the destruction of the
nation to regain power. They are capable of anything. And
that's scary. Watch out!
Read the rest here.
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