If 2020 was a hula hoop

 On PowerLine's "The Week in Pictures" this weekend:

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Presidential debate on CBS tonight at 9pm

 

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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The Final Debate This Week: The Fix Is In

 

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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COVID-19 stats and moving goal posts

 

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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Voting Alone

 

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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Steyn on the GOP: “A Useless Political Party”

 

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.

Mark concludes:

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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Trump auto rally today in Cleveland

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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