The Ballot Box vs. The Mail Box

by Matthew Carpenter: Voting is a time-honored tradition in American politics. Although elections are held every year, the stakes feel much higher when people get to vote for president. Every vote matters, no matter how that vote is cast.

In just a few weeks, millions of Americans will begin to receive their absentee ballots for the 2020 general election. Shortly thereafter, many states will start early in-person voting, and in 53 days, Americans will head to the polls to cast their in-person ballots on Election Day.

This year is unique in American politics for many reasons. First, the very process of voting will be hotly contested at every possible juncture. Months ago, once the dust settled after the Democratic primaries, election lawyers immediately began descending on swing states to challenge long-held election laws put in place to protect the integrity of the vote. They argue COVID presents American voters with a unique threat, and in order to ensure Americans are able to cast their vote this year, we should remove safeguards on the mail-in voting process. But what do the American people think?

A recent poll looked closely at voters' attitudes about voting in the COVID era and made some startling discoveries. As many as six in 10 voters prefer to vote before Election Day, either by voting by mail or early in-person, and just 38 percent of voters prefer to vote in-person on Election Day. To put that in perspective, those numbers are almost the inverse of how voters preferred to cast their votes in 2016 -- with 41 percent saying they cast their vote before Election Day, and 58 percent saying they voted on Election Day. With more Americans planning to vote early this year, it's worth looking at how mail-in voting has worked out recently.

Mail-in voting largely relies on the U.S. Postal Service to deliver your ballot securely to your polling location. Before your ballot can be tabulated on Election Day, it changes hands multiple times. First, the postal worker collects your ballot and transports your ballot, then the post office organizes and sorts your ballot for delivery, and finally another postal worker delivers your ballot to the polling location. So before your ballot is even tabulated, it has to securely exchange hands multiple times.

Earlier this summer, there were so many discounted ballots -- thousands -- and other irregularities, in a municipal election in Paterson, NJ that a judge has ordered that a new election be scheduled. In fact, four people have been charged with unauthorized possession of ballots, tampering with public records, and falsifying or tampering with records. Other reports show mail-in ballots were improperly delivered by a postal worker who just left a box of mail-in ballots in the lobby of an apartment building instead of placing them in individual mail boxes. Some voters in Paterson claim to never have received their ballot in the first place.

Columnist and author John Fund recently spoke with Tony Perkins on "Washington Watch" about this issue and shared an experiment CBS and NBC did recently to test the U.S. Postal Services' capacity to handle mail-in voting. CBS sent 100 mock mail-in ballots through the postal service, and after one week they checked the to see if they had reached their destination. Not one of their mock ballots had been delivered! They then went back to the post office to see if maybe they were there, and not even half (41 out of the 100) were being stored in the back of the post office. Fifty-nine were still missing. After three weeks, the post office could account for 97 out of the 100. Three weeks! With less than two months left in the 2020 election, this sort of mismanagement can cause widespread confusion and anger, especially since Americans expect to know who the president will be for the next four years on the night of the election.

In most states, there are three different ways you can vote: Vote in-person early, vote in-person on Election Day, or vote by mail. If your state offers in-person early voting, that is a great option to consider. Voting in this manner ensures that you've handled your ballot yourself and if an emergency comes up Election Day, you're fine because your vote has been cast already.

Voting in-person on Election Day also affords the benefit of knowing you've been the one handling your ballot.

If you or a loved one are not able to vote in-person, then by all means, still vote by mail. The worst form of voting is to not cast a ballot at all. If you are voting by mail, you can often drop your ballot off at a drop-box at your local precinct designed to collect mail-in ballots. If you need to mail it back, put it in the mail early so that it has ample time to be delivered.

For more information on how to vote, and other educational resources related to the election, check out prayvotestand.org! Share this resource on your social media pages, with your friends, family, and neighbors, and let's make sure our votes count!
------------------------
Matthew Carpenter wrote this FRC Article.

---

Tags: Matthew Carpenter, FRC, Ballot Box, vs., The Mail Box To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Chinese Virologist Claims She Has Proof COVID-19 Was Made In Wuhan Lab

Dr. Li-Meng Yan

by Natalie Musumec: A Chinese virologist who has reportedly been in hiding for fear of her safety has stepped out into the public eye again to make the explosive claim that she has the scientific evidence to prove COVID-19 was man-made in a lab in China.

Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a scientist who says she did some of the earliest research into COVID-19 last year, made the comments Friday during an interview on British talk show “Loose Women.”

When asked where the deadly virus that has killed more than 900,000 around the globe comes from, Yan — speaking via video chat from a secret location — replied, “It comes from the lab — the lab in Wuhan and the lab is controlled by China’s government.”

When asked where the deadly virus that has killed more than 900,000 around the globe comes from, Yan — speaking via video chat from a secret location — replied, “It comes from the lab — the lab in Wuhan and the lab is controlled by China’s government.”

She insisted that widespread reports that the virus originated last year from a wet market in Wuhan, China, are “a smokescreen.”

“The first thing is the [meat] market in Wuhan … is a smokescreen and this virus is not from nature,” Yan claimed, explaining that she got “her intelligence from the CDC in China, from the local doctors.”

The virologist has previously accused Beijing of lying about when it learned of the killer bug and engaging in an extensive cover-up of her work.

She had said that her former supervisors at the Hong Kong School of Public Health, a reference laboratory for the World Health Organization, silenced her when she sounded the alarm about human-to-human transmission in December last year.

In April, Yan reportedly fled Hong Kong and escaped to America to raise awareness about the pandemic.

Now, she said she is planning to release scientific evidence to prove that the virus was made inside a lab in Wuhan.

“The genome sequence is like a human finger print,” she told the talk show. “So based on this you can identify these things. I use the evidence … to tell people why this has come from the lab in China, why they are the only ones who made it.”

Yan added, “Anyone, even if you have no biology knowledge, you can read it, and you can check and identify and verify by yourself.”

“This is the critical thing for us to know the origin of the virus,” she said. “If not we cannot overcome it — it will be life-threatening for everyone.”

She said she is coming out now because “I know if I don’t tell the truth to the world, I will be regretful.”

Yan also claimed that before fleeing China, her information was wiped from government databases.

“They deleted all my information,” she told “Loose Women,” claiming that people have been recruited “to spread rumors about me, that I’m a liar.”

Yuan Zhiming, the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, has previously denied reports that the bug accidentally spread from his facility.

“There’s no way this virus came from us,” Zhiming told state media in April.
-----------------------------
Natalie Musumec writes for the New York Post.

---

Tags: Natalie Musumec, New York Post, Chinese virologist, claims she has proof, COVID-19, Wuhan lab, China, Coronavirus, Chinese virologist, claims she has proof, COVID-19, Wuhan lab, China, Coronavirus To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Patriot Day, Remembering 9/11, Another Deep State Outrage, Prayers For Pastor MacArthur

Gary Bauer

by Gary Bauer: Patriot Day
President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and former Vice President Joe Biden are participating in various 9/11 memorial services today at the Pentagon, in New York City and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

President Trump issued a proclamation recognizing September 11th as Patriot Day. Below are some excerpts of his proclamation:

"In 2001, our Nation, united under God, made an unbreakable promise never to forget the nearly 3,000 innocent Americans who were senselessly killed on September 11. On this sacred day — Patriot Day — we solemnly honor that commitment. . .

"To fulfill our collective promise never to forget, we impart the memory of that fateful day to our children and grandchildren. The smoke that rose from the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and the Pennsylvania field carried away the souls of innocent Americans.

"As we recall the images of our American Flag raised from the ashes of Ground Zero and the Pentagon, we are reminded that good triumphs over evil. We recommit ourselves to fortifying our cherished American values so that future generations will know in their souls that the United States is the land of the free and the home of the brave."

Please take a few moments today to share with your children and grandchildren your memories from 9/11. There is an entire generation now with no memory of that day, who know only what they read in their history books.

Tell them about the courage of Todd Beamer, who led the first successful counterattack against the jihadists. Remind them of the courage of New York's finest, the police officers and fire fighters who rushed into the Twin Towers.

Tell them about the heroes like Captain Lincoln Leibner, who ran into the burning Pentagon, and of the Red Bandana man, Welles Crowther, who gave his life saving fellow co-workers in the South Tower.

Remembering 9/11
It is hard to believe that today marks the 19th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on our country. All of us have a story from 9/11.

I happened to be near the Pentagon, driving into Washington, D.C., when it was attacked by Islamic supremacists who turned American Airlines Flight 77 into a missile. I heard the roar of the engine as the plane flew over, and the force of the explosion rocked my vehicle.

Immediately after the attacks there was a tremendous outpouring of patriotism all across the country. Young men and women rushed to join the military to defend America against those who had declared war on us.

In recent days, I've heard people say that the country is so divided now that it would take another 9/11 to bring us together. Sadly, I disagree.

After 9/11 we saw celebrations of our suffering in Gaza and in the West Bank. If another 9/11 happened today, there is no reason to foolishly believe that the people in our streets burning Bibles and American flags, tearing down historical monuments, assaulting diners and threatening people sleeping in their homes would suddenly become patriots.

If America were viciously attacked again, we would see celebrations right here in our own country. And that fact doesn't have anything to do with Donald Trump.

After 9/11 we were shocked to learn that young Muslim children were taught that we were the "Great Satan" and that the only way they could find redemption was to kill us. We shook our heads in disbelief that adults would teach their children such hatred.

And then we sleep-walked for 19 years while our schools were taken over by radicals who taught our kids that our country is evil and that the only way they can redeem themselves is to tear America down.

As tough as the fights in Iraq and Afghanistan were, this fight will be even harder.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris can't win this fight. They have too many sympathies for the mob in the streets demanding an end to the America we know and love.

If anyone can win this battle, I believe Donald Trump and Mike Pence, who stand with patriots everywhere, can save this country.

What A Contrast
Did you catch the "protest porn" on the football field last night?

On the eve of the anniversary of 9/11, two NFL teams owned by billionaires made up of multimillionaire athletes began the game by sticking their fingers in the eyes of one of the most integrated fan bases of any sport.

The black national anthem (yes, there is one!) was played in addition to the Star-Spangled Banner. Can anyone explain to me how having two national anthems is supposed to bring us together? Aren't we supposed to be "one nation under God"?

Of course, having two anthems can't bring us together any more than some people disrespecting the anthem by kneeling in protest brings us together. It only serves to divide us.

And why don't we have a Hispanic national anthem and an Asian national anthem? If we keep going down the road of identity politics we will have them.

So billionaires and millionaires are telling people who have to save up their money to get into the stadium and fans at home who can't afford a ticket at all what a bunch of bigots they are. That's a really great PR move. They should be ashamed of themselves!

Meanwhile, I couldn't help but think of the contrast between Pat Tillman and Colin Kaepernick. Tillman gave up his football career to defend America. Kaepernick gave up his football career to trash America.

Maybe I'm off base. But I don't think this new woke NFL is going to be a big hit with most fans.

Another Deep State Outrage
If you need another reminder about just what a sham the Russia hoax was, we just got it.

Late yesterday a story broke that dozens of government-issued cell phones used by top ranking members of Robert Mueller's team were wiped clean before Department of Justice investigators and record keepers could examine them.

Some phones suffered "irreparable screen damage." Others were "nuked" because users entered a wrong password ten times. That means all communications, text messages and emails that should have been preserved were destroyed.

Clearly, Mueller's team learned well from Hillary's "Servergate" scandal.

I admit that I have on occasion entered the wrong password into my phone. But never ten times in a row. Yet multiple members of Mueller's team did just that.

In fact, the brilliant legal eagle Andrew Weissman, Mueller's chief prosecutor, managed to do it twice! One Mueller lawyer claimed his phone miraculously "wiped itself."

And somehow Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz still concluded that there was no evidence of bias in the FBI's investigation of the Trump campaign.

Well, Robert Mueller took over that investigation and this mass destruction of evidence is clear evidence of bias. It likely explains why Attorney General William Barr and U.S. Attorney John Durham both rejected Horowitz's finding.

Every Republican member of Congress should be demanding answers and prosecutions for this outrageous behavior. Subpoenas should have been issued yesterday and hearings should be scheduled for next week.

The Deep State corruption is as plain as daylight! And many Americans are beyond frustrated by the perception that there are two systems of justice in America – one for the well-connect left-wing elite and one for the rest of us.

My friends, some of you may not like President Trump's tweets. But this Deep State corruption should scare us all.

This is just one more reason to reelect the Trump/Pence team. If Biden/Harris win this November, the Durham investigation will be shut down and William Barr's efforts to restore integrity to the Justice Department will be over.

Prayers For Pastor MacArthur
Yesterday a Los Angeles County judge ordered Pastor John MacArthur to close Grace Community Church, citing an "immediate threat to public health" and potential "harm to the general public."

Something is seriously wrong when the government turns a blind eye to protests and riots, but deems churches an "immediate threat" and "harm" to the public.

I don't know what Pastor MacArthur will do, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear Sunday morning that he is preaching to a captive audience – behind the bars of the LA County jail.
-----------------------
Gary Bauer (@GaryLBauer)  is a conservative family values advocate and serves as president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families

---

Tags: Gary Bauer, Campaign for Working Families, Patriot Day, Remembering 9/11, Another Deep State Outrage, Prayers For Pastor MacArthur To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Mueller Team Members 'Accidentally Wiped' Phone Data

. . . A DOJ report notes that data from 27 phones was erased prior to being turned over.

by Thomas Gallatin : Newly released Justice Department records indicate that many of the cellphones issued to members of Robert Mueller’s special counsel team got some special treatment. National Review reports, “At least 27 cell phones were wiped of data before the DOJ inspector general could review them, some reset to factory settings and some wiped ‘accidentally’ after the wrong password was entered too many times, according to 87 pages of DOJ records regarding the phones issued to members of the special counsel’s office. Including mobile phones that were ‘reassigned,’ the Special Counsel’s office wiped a total of 31 phones.”

It sure looks like members of Mueller’s team, which was composed mostly of Democrats, took a page out of Hillary Clinton’s playbook on “handling data” and “accidentally wiped” their phones — maybe even with like a cloth or something. But seriously, are we supposed to believe these highly educated professionals are so incompetent that they are, en masse, forgetting passwords and “accidentally wiping” their cellphones?

To quote Joe Biden, “That’s a bunch of malarkey.”

Adding further suspicion of a cover-up were the number of notable members of Team Mueller whose phone data was inexplicably lost. That includes Andrew Weissmann, who, as The Federalist observes, was “the lead Mueller prosecutor the New York Times referred to as the special counsel’s ‘pit bull.’ After working under Mueller at the FBI as general counsel, Weissmann led the government’s case against former Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort.” Weissmann “accidentally” wiped his phone. Twice.

Another noteworthy counsel member whose phone data was dubiously lost was disgraced FBI lawyer Lisa Page, the infamous and illicit paramour of former FBI agent Peter Strzok, both of whom were exposed for sharing anti-Trump texts. National Review notes, “The cell phone of FBI lawyer Lisa Page was misplaced by the special counsel’s office. While it was eventually obtained by the DOJ inspector general, by that point the phone had been restored to its factory settings, wiping it of all data.”

“Misplaced.” “Restored to its factory settings.” Gee, what an unexpected turn of events.

The most likely motive behind this almost certainly deliberate destruction of evidence is tied to what happened to Strzok — his anti-Trump bias was exposed via his text messages, and he was removed from the special counsel team. Other counsel members took note and engaged in “accidental” actions to avoid being revealed as the Trump-hating hacks they are. The question is, was their anti-Trump animus the only thing Mueller’s team members sought to hide?
----------------------
Thomas Gallatin is a Features Editor at The Patriot Post.

---

Tags: Thomas Gallatin, The Patriot Post, Mueller Team Members, 'Accidentally Wiped,' Phone Data To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

The “Diabolical” China Virus Is Worse Than 9/11

Cliff Kincaid

by Cliff Kincaid: A Wall Street Journal article about coronavirus carries the fascinating headline “‘Really Diabolical’: Inside the Coronavirus That Outsmarted Science.” The subtitle is equally intriguing and says in part: “SARS-CoV-2 is a wily virus, with mysterious origins and a powerful ability to infect and spread….” But the authors spend most of their time trying, unsuccessfully, to trace the virus to a natural outbreak from bats.

They write, “Taken on its own terms, SARS-CoV-2 is the infectious disease success of the past 100 years. Almost unmatched in the annals of emerging human contagions, it has parlayed a few chance infections into a pandemic of around 27 million confirmed cases so far.”

Here in the U.S., the "confirmed" death toll is approaching 200,000. Even if these figures are adjusted to reflect the fact that 94 percent of COVID-19 death cases had underlying poor health conditions, it’s more deaths from the China virus than from 9/11—by a large amount. And it’s continuing to kill people.

Ironically, the China virus came from a country ruled by a regime that persecutes its own Muslims.

But our media do their best to protect the Red Chinese communist regime from its criminal complicity in what amounts to the use of a virus as a weapon of terror.

The authors of the Journal article do not pursue the obvious conclusion that the “diabolical origins” of coronavirus are in a Chinese lab and its “mysterious origins” are man-made. Instead, they say, “Initially, it was widely believed the virus made its home in bats, which harbor hundreds of different kinds of coronaviruses. But it ventured into new species.” That means it infected human beings, by accident we are led to believe.

One particular doctor is finally named, and he is said to have “shared his findings with experts from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, adding to a growing body of evidence that led China to confirm to the world that the virus was leaping from person to person.” The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention is an official body that obviously didn’t do its job as advertised.

Notice the words, “experts,” “growing body of evidence,” and “led China to confirm.”

This is how modern-day journalism attempts to persuade you to accept conclusions that the virus is somehow naturally occurring. That’s what China wants you to believe. Like the Islamic perpetrators of 9/11 and the anthrax mailings, the Chinese want to avoid responsibility and retaliation for what they have done to the American people and the world.

The reference to “diabolical origins” is said to be from Peter Piot, the head of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and a co-discoverer of Ebola, who fell victim to the coronavirus himself in March. “This virus is really diabolical, it came like a thief in the night with an insatiable appetite for victims to devour,” he is quoted as saying.

It doesn’t sound like an ordinary coronavirus. Piot went on, “It behaves unlike any other virus. It spreads through our respiratory system because there are receptors in our noses and throats—but then it goes through your entire body: blood vessels, the heart, every organ could be targeted. It’s crazy.”

Crazy? Not when the origin of the virus is a communist country ruled by mass murderers. This is madness with a purpose.

The biographies of the two Journal reporters indicate they are highly-educated people who have graduated from the finest schools. The end of the article carries the notation: “The Wall Street Journal is examining the causes of the coronavirus catastrophe and the bungled response that followed.”

The bungled response includes the media reporting.

For an explanation as to why reporters may be going soft on the Communist regime, consider a separate article in the Journal about how “Chinese authorities haven’t renewed expiring press credentials for at least five reporters working for U.S. media outlets….” and that one of them works for the Journal. For the time being, they are allowed “to continue working with their expired press credentials for now.”

The Chinese regime is waiting to see which publications tailor their content to suit the regime.

The real scandal, not covered in this Journal article, continues to be the source of the virus – and China’s role in spreading it. This is by far more important than whether to wear a mask, a subject on which people may understandably differ for a variety of reasons.

The readers of the article saw through it. One commented, “Mysterious origins? Not a chance. The only winner from COVID appears to be China. Without any use of force, they silenced the Hong Kong protesters and decimated most Western economies. Without a doubt, they have ushered in a new era of biological warfare....”

Another said, “The inevitable conclusion is that this virus was bio-engineered in China and deliberately spread to the rest of the world as a bio-warfare attack.”

Still another wrote, “Interesting article. Also interesting in that it does not mention a word about the Wuhan laboratory with its ‘bat lady’ who studies viruses in bats from the most obscure locations. Not a word about the lax protocols used at that lab either.”

The responses from readers demonstrate that people are extremely skeptical of what they see, read, and hear. They can’t understand why the paper went out of its way to absolve the Chinese communist authorities. The comments also reveal that readers have access to other sources of information and they compare and contrast that information with what the Journal is reporting as fact. This is all good news.

Most reasonable and thinking Americans understand the basic fact that the coronavirus came out of China, and that China, and China alone, is responsible for this killing machine ravaging the world. But less understood is whether American medical expertise was used in an effort to make the virus more dangerous than the ordinary flu.

The facts show that China has been directly involved in controversial coronavirus research funded by America's National Institutes of Health (NIH). In the middle of this scandal is NIH director Dr. Francis Collins, an Obama holdover who publicly affirms his Christian faith but has a long history of collaborating with the officially atheist communist Chinese regime.

In addition to the matter of China engineering the virus, this is an area that deserves more investigative reporting from papers such as the Journal. But telling the complete truth risks permanent expulsion of the paper’s reporters from China and a negative reaction from the Medical Deep State here in the U.S.
---------------------
Cliff Kincaid is a veteran journalist, media critic, director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism, and writes for RenewAmerica.

---

Tags: Cliff Kincaid, Diabolical, China Virus, Is Worse Than, 9/11 To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

The Campaign Is at Knife's Edge

Michael Barone

by Michael Barone: The presidential campaign is at knife's edge. Both parties' campaigns assume that patterns of support will closely resemble those in 2016. And both are making surprisingly little effort, considering how close that contest turned out to be, with the 46 crucial electoral votes decided by just 77,744 votes, to increase their levels of support.

The past three years and 10 months have seen little outreach by President Donald Trump to most of those who didn't vote for him in 2016, particularly to the college-graduate suburbanites who tipped the House to Democrats in 2018. He seems unwilling or unable to squelch the undisciplined tweets and ad libs that repel such voters, and he seems nonplussed by the prospect of losing the national popular vote again.

Trump has made appeals to non-college-graduate blacks and Hispanics, and polls show some moving toward him, as non-college-graduate whites did four years ago, and probably for similar reasons. But he's essentially banking on replicating his 2016 inside straight, when he carried the 75 electoral votes of Florida by no more than 1.2% and carried Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin by no more than 1%.

The bad news for Trump is that he is trailing Joe Biden in polls in all four states, and in other states he carried in 2016 as well. The bad news for Democrats is that the RealClearPolitics polling average shows a narrowing of Biden leads since their high points last summer.

Target state Biden leads may be narrowing even more than his national poll lead, leaving their numbers not far out of line with polls at this point in 2016. Analyst Nate Silver pegs Trump's current chance of winning at 25%, about the same as his 29% pre-election estimate in 2016.

Why hasn't Biden done better? He's not weighed down by negatives like Hillary Clinton, who was regarded as honest and trustworthy by only one-third of voters. As the nominee of the non-incumbent party, he has wide leeway to stake out positions and set priorities with a view to maximize his vote.

But he doesn't seem to be trying to do so. Just as Trump is looking for something like a carbon copy of his 2016 narrow victory, Biden's campaign, like Hillary Clinton's, has moved to the left of the Obama and Bill Clinton administrations.

Biden is hostile toward fracking, amenable to ninth-month government-funded abortions, eager to raise taxes to the highest levels since Reagan, fond of green energy policies producing electricity blackouts in high-tech California.

What he's unwilling to say has been significant as well. Just as broadcast networks and CNN have portrayed Black Lives Matter demonstrations as "mostly peaceful," even when fires rage in the background, Biden and other Democrats made no mention whatever, much less a denunciation, of violent rioting at their virtual national convention last month. That even though, as an academic study revealed, there have been some 570 violent riots in 220 cities and towns since late May.

After the Republicans' virtual convention and after polling showed public concern, Biden suddenly broke his silence on rioting, blaming right-wing extremists but not the more numerous antifa terrorists. Of course, no reporter, in the brief period the Biden campaign has allowed the candidate to be questioned, has brought up the subject.

The likelihood is that Biden can ride out the campaign while maintaining near or total silence on this and other issues, and in the primaries, he showed the capacity to hold his own in debates. But that strategy is risky, since Biden, like Trump, is capable of self-harm, and it's obvious that many Democrats are nervous.

One reason is that Democratic voters are much more risk-averse than Republicans, and hence, more likely to say they'll vote absentee or by mail. That's risky in states that aren't used to tabulating such ballots and where voters aren't used to following absentee ballot instructions.

This raises the possibility that election night returns will show Trump far ahead in target states, with his lead being nibbled down as mail ballots are tabulated. The possibilities for fraud, misinformation, lawsuits and delay are manifold. Democrats have taken to predicting that, if defeated, Trump will not leave office, just as the leftist Sally Kohn predicted four years ago that "if Trump wins, Hillary supporters will be sad. If Hillary wins, Trump supporters will be angry."

That turned out to be a case of projection: Democrats have been angry about Trump winning and trying furiously to expel him from office ever since. We're at knife's edge for the eight weeks until Election Day, and maybe for weeks after that.
-----------------------
Michael Barone is a Senior Political Analyst for the Washington Examiner and a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel  and co-author of The Almanac of American Politics Shared by Rasmussen Reports.

---

Tags: Michael Barone, editorial, Rasmussen Reports, The Campaign Is, at Knife's Edge To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Remembering 9/11 in a Woke Year

. . . What do the heroes of September 11 mean in a year of hating police officers?

by Daniel Greenfield: The 19th anniversary of 9/11 has been the nation’s darkest in this dreaded cycle.

The Black Lives Matter riots that attacked the statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Christopher Columbus, and Abraham Lincoln, did not spare 9/11 memorials.

The statue of a police officer was beheaded and toppled in Plymouth, MA at a 9/11 memorial honoring those who had died in the attacks. But the 2,000 pound steel beam from the World Trade Center proved beyond the ability of the vandals to topple.

When Black Lives Matter racists defaced statues and memorials in the Boston Common, including the ‘Glory’ regiment, they didn’t spare the 9/11 memorial in the Public Garden.

A 9/11 memorial honoring five fallen firefighters was defaced and the American flagpole was cut down in Washingtonville, NY,.There was also vandalism at the Decatur, IL memorial site, and a red, white and blue rearing horse 9/11 memorial in Rochester, NY was smeared with red paint.

Beyond the radical attacks on the monuments of September 11 were the attacks on its heroes.

The NYPD has suffered its worst days since 9/11 with over 400 officers injured in the BLM riots. Police and firefighters went from the heroes of a nation to being smeared as soulless monsters.

“I could see no difference between the officer who killed and the police who died, or the firefighters who died,” Ta-Nehisi Coates, an intellectual godfather of Black Lives Matter, wrote, “They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were the menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.”

“Between the World and Me”, the hateful tract in which Coates dehumanized the police officers and firefighters who had died trying to save people of all races and creeds, became a bestseller, was a Pulitzer finalist, and has repeatedly shown up on corporate anti-racism reading lists.

All of this makes commemorating September 11 into an awkward task that Democrats avoid.

The 9/11 Memorial & Museum tried to cancel the Tribute in Light, whose beams that fill the night sky are used to light the space of the fallen towers of the World Trade Center, and the reading of the names of the fallen dead by 9/11 family members. It took an outpouring of anger from family members and alternative events by Tunnel2Towers to get the museum to reverse course.

While the leadership of the mismanaged museum blamed the pandemic for their decision, local Democrats had long viewed the ceremonies as intolerant and out of touch with their agenda.

Last year, Nicholas Haros Jr., the son of a 9/11 victim, had blasted Rep. Ilhan Omar's minimization of the attack on America at the reading of the names, while wearing a t-shirt decorated with her comments minimizing the Islamic atrocity, “I was attacked, your relatives and friends were attacked, our constitutional freedoms were attacked and our nation’s founding on Judeo-Christian principles were attacked. That’s what some people did."

Meanwhile, the Tribute in Light had been decried as a symbol of “extreme nationalism”.

There had always been a deep discomfort with the patriotism of September 11 and with its heroes and victims, the former were mostly working class white men from the bridge and tunnel crowd, and the latter were mostly white middle class men and women, many from outside the city and state, who were also insufficiently diverse and representative of the “New America”.

Even early on there had been efforts to replace the firefighters raising the flag at Ground Zero with a more diverse group in an official memorial. In the long years after the men of the NYPD and the FDNY had raised up the courage of a nation, both organizations, like the military, have been gutted by political correctness, and have turned into shadows of their former selves.

The FDNY has a diversity monitor who has cost the organization $23 million, and a top diversity official who was sued for excluding one of the firefighters who raised the flag at Ground Zero from a color guard ceremony.

Nicholas Garaufis, a Clinton judge, and Mayor Bill de Blasio imposed their vision of diversity on the FDNY to ensure that "the racial, ethnic and gender demographics of the department’s firefighters reflect that of the city’s population as a whole" along with the "full integration of a mixed-gender workforce."

But the heroism of the FDNY and NYPD on September 11 came from the fact that its men did not reflect a random sampling of the city’s population. They were extraordinary men, heroes who went where no one else would dare, climbing 100 stories in the hope of saving someone.

If Islamic terrorists were to fly planes into the Freedom Tower today, there would be fewer members of the FDNY’s mixed-gender and fully diverse workforce who would climb 100 stories with 60 pounds of gear on their backs while a skyscraper was tottering and burning on all sides.

On 9/11, firefighters around the country will commemorate their heroism by climbing 110 stories.

That’s the traditional kind of heroism. It’s out of step with the millennial ethos of performative hysteria spread virally across social media which turns victimhood into celebrity. The men who lived and died on that day were not victims and they were not trying to get famous. They did their duty. But to many the concept of duty has become as alien as frock coats and top hats.

19 years after 9/11, men and women born after the attack will be able to vote.

The politics of the present are being formed by radicals who, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 11 years old at the time, were children on September 11. The meaning of the day is as incomprehensible to them and as distant as Pearl Harbor.

The Obama administration had tried to shift the meaning of September 11 away from heroism to volunteerism. Its idea of commemorating the attack on America was cleaning up parks. As time goes by, there will be no need to actively suppress the commemorations, they’ll be irrelevant.

If we let it happen.

History is made up not only of dry facts, but emotional connections. The stories that define us are the ones that matter because they endow life with meaning. For millions of Americans, the death of an ex-con who had robbed a pregnant woman at gunpoint gave their lives meaning. That’s why so much of the country is burning and so many of its memorials have fallen.

The Islamic terrorists who attacked us on September 11 had beliefs that gave their lives meaning. So did the SS soldiers who marched through Poland or their NKVD counterparts.

It is not the mere presence of evil that creates a crisis, but the absence of meaningful opposition to it. And meaningful opposition comes from a deep moral passion without which life is empty.

The 19 hijackers lied to the passengers that if they didn’t resist, they would be allowed to live.

Mohammed Atta told Flight 11 passengers, “Nobody move. Everything will be okay. If you try to make any moves, you’ll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet.”

It worked three times. And then when Americans realized what was at stake, it stopped working.

Atta and his band of Jihadist butchers understood that what normal Americans wanted was to be comfortable and safe. They wanted to recline back in their seats, plug in their headphones, and wait out the interminable passage of time they would spend flying in a tin can in the sky.

“Take prisoners and kill them. As Allah said: 'No prophet should have prisoners until he has soaked the land with blood,’” Atta told his men.

"Just stay quiet, and you’ll be okay," he lied to the infidel hostages.

The leftist radicals, who have been in league with Islamic terrorists, defending them in court, propagandizing for their “civil rights” in the press, and funding their networks, now call themselves, “woke”. Another September 11 anniversary reminds us that we need to wake up.

In our streets, the radicals chant, “Death to America”, they burn flags, desecrate churches and synagogues, and topple the statues of the nation’s founders. And their media allies and Democrat apparatchiks tell us to go along with it and we’ll be okay. The rioters and stabbers just want to issue their demands and make their point. If we stay quiet, they’ll leave us alone.

The 19th anniversary is another warning from the bloody echoes of history that they won’t.

When the Jihadis and BLMers chant, “Death to America”, believe that they mean it!

The enemies of our nation are also the foes of our history. They don’t just want to topple Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and every historical figure who wasn’t up to date with contemporary woke views on, in the words of a D.C. commission calling for the removal of the Washington Monument and Jefferson Memorial, “age, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity”. No, they want to be rid of the courage and heroism of our entire history because they know that the power of Americans to resist their brutality and hate comes from our history.

That includes September 11.

On a cool fall day, millions of Americans woke out of a hazy dream of the end of history and remembered that we were a nation, not a borderless global order, that we needed heroes, not diversity, that history wasn’t over, that we still had enemies, and that what mattered was not the color of your skin or your politically correct virtue signaling, but whether you would rush the cockpit or sit in your seat hoping that despite everything you knew, they wouldn’t kill you.

On the 19th anniversary of that cool fall day, we are passing through fire and havoc, flying over ruined cities and fallen rubble because too many of us had fallen asleep until the guttural voice came on again reading its hateful demands. And many of our fellow passengers kneeled while the anthem played, they disgraced their country, and the memory of our fallen dead.

Many others woke up. We know where the plane headed toward the right side of history flies. And we don’t intend to let it follow that familiar arc toward social justice and mass murder.

An anniversary only matters as much as it brings meaning and purpose into our lives.

No amount of wishing or willing can raise the dead of September 11 out of their ashen graves. All we can do this anniversary, and every one before it and since, is to keep resisting the terrorists, domestic and international, to stay awake and ready in the long flight of history.

We must remember our heroes and honor their valor because we may need to imitate it.
----------------------
Daniel Greenfield (@Sultanknish) is Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an investigative journalist and writer focusing on radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

---

Tags: Remembering 9/11, in a Woke Year, Daniel Greenfield To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

A Focused Trump Can Still Pull It Out

by Patrick Buchanan: Trump needs to convert a Mr. Congeniality contest into a decision of whom you want to lead the nation in this perilous hour. Whom do you want in the Oval Office dealing with the current crises: Mr. Nice Guy or the guy who showed he could get the job done before the pandemic came ashore?

If Donald Trump loses the election, history will attribute his defeat to a pandemic that killed 200,000 Americans during his reelection campaign, and a historic depression deliberately induced to put the economy in a coma as the nation suffered through that pandemic.

But despite the worst hand dealt a sitting president since Herbert Hoover in 1932, Trump is by no means cooked.

Since the conventions of the DNC and RNC, Trump has narrowed the gap in several battleground states that will decide the winner of the Electoral College. One Florida poll found that Trump had erased Joe Biden’s margin and pulled even.

Trump’s denunciations of the riots that have gripped U.S. cities since the Memorial Day death of George Floyd have already forced Biden to come out of his basement to deplore the violence. And the contrast in their appearances has been dramatic.

Trump speaks out in the open, before huge crowds, in arenas and airport hangers. Biden, a socially distancing septuagenarian who is sheltering in place, looks more like an applicant for a retirement home residency. This may explain why Trump has made marginal gains among African American voters and more impressive gains among Hispanic voters.

Biden is also hurt by the mental and verbal lapses he seems to experience with every set of remarks, reinforcing the impression that he has lost more than a step to Father Time.

But Trump has had his problems as well since the GOP convention, beginning with book-length attacks on his character by his niece, Mary Trump, and his personal lawyer Michael Cohen.

This month brought an Atlantic article by editor Jeffrey Goldberg alleging that Trump had disparaged the sacrifices of dead and wounded U.S. soldiers from World War I, Vietnam and the Middle East wars.

Though Goldberg relied on anonymous sources to carry out his takedown of Trump, more than a dozen Trump staffers and advisers present at the meetings where Trump allegedly demeaned America’s warriors denied Goldberg’s allegations.

The Atlantic article was a kill shot aimed at the president by a hostile media. While it did not succeed, it drew blood, and the White House recoil testified to that.

Comes now “Rage,” the latest book by Bob Woodward, to which Trump contributed 18 interviews. The book is damaging because, at the least, a national debate about the issues raised by Woodward distracts massively from Trump’s campaign imperative — taking down Biden so that he is seen as an unacceptable alternative to Trump.

Biden’s strategy remains what it has been: Turn the election into a referendum on whether the American electorate wants four more years of Donald Trump. As Trump’s approval rating has been underwater since taking the oath on Jan. 20, 2017, such a referendum should result in a rejection of Trump and, de facto, a victory for Biden.

Trump must instead present this election as a binary choice: Which of the two, Biden or Trump, has the leadership capacity, the superior ideas on the critical issues, and the ability to carry out his agenda?

Trump needs to convert a Mr. Congeniality contest into a decision of whom you want to lead the nation in this perilous hour. Whom do you want in the Oval Office dealing with the current crises: Mr. Nice Guy or the guy who showed he could get the job done before the pandemic came ashore?

With seven weeks left in the campaign, Trump’s agenda of issues appears more appealing than Biden’s.

Trump wants to secure the border against any new flood of illegal migrants from the global south while Biden’s party is pro-amnesty and open borders, and favors sanctuary cities and abolishing ICE.

Trump wants to extricate America from the forever wars of the Middle East, as do most Americans. Where Biden is going to raise taxes by trillions, Trump is a proven low-tax and less-regulations leader.

Trump has appointed 200 federal judges and two Supreme Court justices and sought to elevate constitutionalists to the federal courts. Biden has thus far declined to engage on the issue.

On putting down urban anarchy, Biden is playing catch-up. His convention did not even address the issues raised by the Portland, Seattle and Minneapolis riots and the soaring murder rates in Chicago and New York.

On abortion, Trump has proven solidly pro-life, while Biden wants all taxpayers, including fellow Catholics, to subsidize what his Church teaches is the cold-blooded killing of the innocent unborn.

Trump needs to stay focused on the issues where the divisions are clear and compelling. The debates will show whether Joe has lost it and cannot be entrusted with the destiny of the republic.
--------------------
Patrick Buchanan (@PatrickBuchanan) is currently a blogger, conservative columnist, political analyst, chairman of The American Cause foundation and an editor of The American Conservative. He has been a senior adviser to three Presidents, a two-time candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, and was the presidential nominee of the Reform Party in 2000.

---

Tags: Patrick Buchanan, conservative, commentary, A Focused Trump, Can Still Pull It Out To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Poll Workers

by Kerby Anderson: A few weeks ago, one of my radio guests brought up a potential problem in this election that I had never considered. Fortunately, this is something we can fix, with your help. We may not have enough poll workers at the polls.

Many states will face a shortage of thousands of poll workers this time because so many of them are older and face a potentially higher risk for the coronavirus. That may cause them to cancel their plans to work the polls for the election.

The process of attrition has been taking place for some time. Older retirees are the most likely demographic to work in America’s polling places. But many of them are getting too old to work or even have died. They should have been replaced by younger workers, but that is not happening and it looks like they will be shorthanded.

The citizens working the polls usually do it out of a sense of civic duty. It isn’t very attractive to the younger generation who don’t have much interest in working twelve-hour days for what is often less than minimum wage.

In a recent article, John Fund estimates that we should have about 900,000 poll workers. They are responsible for checking in voters, getting them the proper ballot, and answering questions. A shortage of poll workers could mean longer lines and many delays.

The Pew Research Center reports that a majority (58%) of poll workers in the last election (2018) were age 61 or older. That is a demographic that is more vulnerable to the coronavirus and therefore less likely to want to work the polls.

This is where you can help. You may be willing to work in the polls or know young people who would like to do so. You can contact your local political party and find out when the next training will take place. We need poll workers for this election, and you can volunteer and make a difference.
-----------------
Kerby Anderson @KerbyAnderson) is an author, lecturer, visiting professor and radio host and contributor on nationally syndicated Point of View and the "Probe" radio programs.

---

Tags: Kerby Anderson, Viewpoints, Point of View, Poll Workers To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

A Tale of Two White, Bigoted Team Owners

by Larry Elder: Assuming one can still call an owner of a professional basketball team an “owner,” this piece is about two of them. Both owners are white and bigoted, but only one was white, bigoted and incredibly stupid.

The first was named Ted Stepien. In 1980, this advertising magnate purchased the abysmal NBA Cleveland Cavaliers. Stepien thought he had a formula for success. White fans, he insisted, preferred to watch white players. The Cavaliers’ stadium, at the time, was located between Cleveland and Akron, Ohio, in a predominantly white demographical area. Stepien felt fans would come if the players looked like them. In 1981, he told Sport Magazine: “I feel that whites should have a position in the athletic world. Sometimes they’ve given it up…Professional sports in general would gain greater respect if whites competed more with Blacks in athletics, as much as Blacks want to compete more in the business world.”

Stepien stacked the team with white players for the white fans. In 1980, he told a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette sports writer: “No team should be all white and no team should be all Black, either. That’s what bothers me about the NBA: You’ve got a situation here where Blacks represent little more than 5% of the market, yet most teams are at least 75% Black and the New York Knicks are 100% Black. Teams with that kind of makeup can’t possibly draw from a suitable cross-section of fans.”

Stepien made a series of bad player trades that hurt the team’s competitiveness for years. How bad were his deals? A rival general manager said: “They overestimated the talent of the people they brought in. … They’ll be impressive walking through airports, but they won’t play well. … The vultures were circling. Every club in the league was saying — I was saying — ‘What can we cook up with them?'”

The team played even worse than before. The team also drew even fewer fans. White fans, Stepien learned, did not enjoy watching white players lose any more than they enjoyed watching Black players lose. Turns out, it was the “lose” part that fans, irrespective of their own race or the race of the players, objected to. Embarrassed, the league pressured him to sell and eventually instituted the “Stepien rule,” forbidding any team from trading its first-round pick in consecutive years.

This brings us to the second bigoted owner, Donald Sterling, who owned the NBA Los Angeles Clippers. For a long time, Sterling was content to lose games with a skinny payroll as long as he made a profit. A 2014 article on Grantland, an ESPN-owned website, said: “Since 1981, when he bought the team, Sterling’s Clippers have compiled not merely the worst winning percentage in the NBA, but the worst winning percentage in all four major American sports, and that includes several teams that didn’t even exist when Sterling first graced the Association with his presence.”

A secretly taped 2013 conversation between Sterling and his then-girlfriend was publicly released. The most eye-raising parts have to do with Sterling, then 79 years old, telling his less-than-half-his-age girlfriend that he does not want her attending games with Black people, particularly with former Los Angeles Laker great Magic Johnson. She can “sleep with them,” he said, just “don’t bring them to my games.” As for Johnson, said Sterling, she can “admire him, bring him here, feed him, f–k him … but don’t put him on an Instagram for the whole world to have to see…And don’t bring him to my games.” Eventually, the league forced Sterling to sell his team.

But in the years right before he lost his team, Sterling decided he wanted to win. Despite his bigotry, nearly all of Sterling’s players were Black. His player payroll was among the highest in the league. In 2013, he gave an experienced championship-winning Black coach, Doc Rivers, a three-year, $21 million contract.

Booker T. Washington, an ex-slave, wrote an autobiography called “Up From Slavery.” He said: “When a Negro girl learns to cook, to wash dishes, to sew, or write a book, or a Negro boy learns to groom horses, or to grow sweet potatoes, or to produce butter, or to build a house, or to be able to practice medicine, as well or better than some one else, they will be rewarded regardless of race or color. In the long run, the world is going to have the best, and any difference in race, religion, or previous history will not long keep the world from what it wants…No man who continues to add something to the material, intellectual, and moral well-being of the place in which he lives is long left without proper reward. This is a great human law which cannot be permanently nullified.”

Why would the bigoted Sterling sign a Black coach and assemble a highly paid roster of mostly Black players? He was bigoted, but not completely stupid. He wanted to win.
---------------------
Larry Elder (@larryelder) is a best-selling author and radio talk-show host, an American lawyer, writer and radio and television personality who is also known as the "Sage From South Central." To find out more about Larry Elder. Visit his website at LarryElder.com for list of other articles.

---

Tags: Larry Elder, A Tale of Two White, Bigoted Team Owners To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Why are Wall Street banks funneling $40 billion into the Chinese Communist Party via the Ant Group IPO?

by Robert Romano: Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley are underwriting part of what could be a $40 billion initial public offering (IPO) for Ant Group Co. in Hong Kong and Shanghai, which China-controlled megacorporation Alibaba owns a 33 percent share of, raising concerns that the money will be ultimately funneled to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and military.

The move by prominent U.S. banks, particularly to underwrite the IPO in Hong Kong, also legitimizes China’s takeover of Hong Kong. With the national security law being imposed on Hong Kong, the Trump administration has declared China in violation of the 1984 Sino-British Declaration treaty, since autonomy for Hong Kong was not supposed to lapse until 2047 under the treaty. And President Donald Trump has waived trade privileges for Hong Kong.

The Trump administration is also withdrawing federal employee retirement investments from China — leading the world in divestment from Beijing.

All of which calls into question why Wall Street is now expanding its operations in favor of the CCP. Why are these investment banks supporting the crackdown of human rights in Hong Kong?

There is no question of Ant Group and Alibaba’s ties to the CCP. Alibaba co-founder and former executive chairman Jack Ma is a member of the Chinese Communist Party who hand-picked his successor Daniel Zhang and in Sept. 2019 China began officially assigning state officials to work at 100 companies including Alibaba as part of its Party Committees system to govern boardrooms.

The CCP is using Party Committees to expand “its authority and supervision over organizations, creating different nuances of corporate governance with Chinese characteristics,” Federica Russo reported at the Diplomat in Dec. 2019.

Russo explained, “A Party Committee is formed by a group of senior CCP members who are given a leadership position inside the halls of public and private companies operating in China. The legal pillars sustaining such a committee’s activity are marked in the 2012 Constitution of the Communist Party of China. In China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) the committee’s leading position refers to its competence in setting the right decision, keeping in mind the big picture, and supporting the meeting of shareholders and boards of directors to decide on major issues. Within private enterprises, however, it implements Party’s policies and operates through the Trade Union and the Communist Youth League Organization…”

The level of state control is complete, Russo reports, with the Party Committee “being responsible for the allocation of funds relative to important issues, cadres’ appointments or dismissals, and new projects… The members of the Party Committees could also become part of the board of directors or the executive team… The Party unit must oversee the system of appointment of the executives.”

Meaning, anyone investing in the initial public offering of Ant Group, which could be one of the largest in history, will be putting their money directly into the hands of the CCP.

The same can be said of the $381 billion that U.S. residents have invested in China and Hong Kong as of May 2020, according to the U.S. Treasury. A good chunk of the investment that includes manufacturing in China that is built on child and slave labor, according to the annual report on child and forced labor by the Department of Labor Bureau of International Labor Affairs. The report details any investment in companies producing textiles are made by child labor, artificial flowers, Christmas decorations, coal, footwear and garments and nails are made by forced labor, and bricks, cotton, electronics, fireworks and toys are made by child and forced labor.

In response, the Trump Administration and U.S. Customs & Border Protection is now moving to block the importation of some Chinese products produced with child and/or slave labor including tomatoes and cotton.

The Department of Defense has blasted a vast concentration camp system in China — what Beijing calls “re-education centers” — that could be housing up to 3 million Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province alone. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs Randall Schriver told a Pentagon briefing, “The [Chinese] are using the security forces for mass imprisonment of Chinese Muslims in concentration camps,” justifying the use of the term because “given what we understand to be the magnitude of the detention, at least a million but likely closer to three million citizens out of a population of about 10 million”.

And then there is the ongoing genocide for organs of political prisoners including Falun Gong, the Uighurs and others, according to the Independent Tribunal Into Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in China. The tribunal found, “Forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale… of unmatched wickedness — on a death for death basis — with the killings by mass crimes committed in the last century.” The organ extractions allegedly occur while the victims are still alive in some cases.

What these Wall Street investment banks are doing, by underwriting these Chinese IPOs, with Beijing’s appalling human rights record, is beyond tacit consent — it is complicity. The money will support the CCP’s agenda top to bottom. It legitimizes the takeover of Hong Kong, endangers Taiwan and may even underwrite slavery and mass murder. History will one day look back on this moment and ask what they were thinking.
------------------
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government.

---

Tags: Robert Romano, Americans for Limited Government, To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Desperately Derailing Donald

. . . The effort to stop President Trump is growing comical.

Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson: One always expects the media surprise leak of a purported hidden scandal as a presidential campaign winds down. Remember the last-minute “discovery” of George W. Bush’s undisclosed 24-year-old DUI arrest in 2000? Or the October 7, 2016 effort of the Washington Post to publish the hoarded 11-year-old “Access Hollywood” tape, just two days before Donald Trump’s second debate with Hillary Clinton?

We should expect lots of these “bombshells” and “walls are closing in” pseudo derailments. Except Trump has been the most widely investigated, probed, attacked, and smeared president in history. And so the scandal-field has pretty well been picked over, as those fired like Omarosa Manigault Newman, Anthony Scaramucci, John Bolton, and others have long ago more or less lectured us that Trump is nuts, crazy, dangerous, stupid, ignorant, and so forth.

In terms of bombshells, what does the Left do after the 2016 suit to decertify voting machines, the FISA court abuse, the effort to sabotage electors’ votes, the first impeachment drive, the Logan Act gambits, the Emoluments Clause joke, the 25th Amendment ruse, the Russian collusion hoax, the 22-month-asleep-at-the-wheel Mueller and his “all-stars,” Ukraine! Ukraine!, the second impeachment drive, and the 2020 trifecta of Trump as Typhoid Mary, Bull Connor, and Herbert Hoover?

The point is, in Jussie Smollett fashion, the demand for scandals is outrunning the supply and time grows short.

It’s no wonder that one of Joe Biden’s largest campaign contributors, billionaire Laurene Jobs of the Apple fortune, who owns most of The Atlantic, had the former Obama Administration megaphone Jeffrey Goldberg exhume a two-year-old and long-ago-refuted charge that President Trump did not wish to visit a U.S. military cemetery in France because he variously was afraid of the rain, that he would get his hair wet, and that he did not wish to celebrate “losers” and “suckers.” All this was from a left-wing media that not long ago damned a “militaristic” Trump for being infatuated with generals, and putting far too many in his White House, while needlessly spending billions on manpower and equipment to repair a military hollowed out by the Obama Administration.

The resuscitated scandal hit-piece was primed for all the left-wing cable news shows and supposedly would dominate the otherwise quiet Labor Day weekend news.

The problem was that the charge was calcified — and for a reason.
Security memos long ago had shown that the weather, not Trump, had deterred low-flying presidential helicopters. Goldberg’s “sources” remain anonymous. Supposedly they were afraid of Twitter reprisals (when has fear of a left-wing Twitter ever scared off a left-wing scandal-monger?), and thus could not be found or checked to determine whether they stood by their hearsay charges.

The presidential entourage of that day all denied Goldberg’s accusations, including Trumphobe and former White House insider and National Security Advisor John Bolton, coming off a tell-all book attacking the president as a nincompoop and a dangerous nut.

Goldberg’s work, then, is symptomatic not just of the growing desperation of the Left to blow up Trump’s current polling trajectory, but the poverty of the muck material still left to work with.

Expect more October “smoking gun” surprises surrounding Trump’s stale tax returns, a casino bankruptcy or two, a Mooch tidbit, a Michael Avenatti crumb, a retired general’s sudden memory recovery, or perhaps even an old undiscovered Stormy tweet.

“Summers of Love”
The “summer of love” and “largely peaceful” tropes of late spring and early summer are now belied by the flames, firebombs, and looting that often offer on-scene backdrops for fake news accounts, as journalists seem about to ignite as they assure us of calm.

Recently, there was another riot in Rochester, New York in which Black Lives Matter sought to destroy restaurants and attack diners as they ate — as a prelude to entering the suburbs, climbing roofs, and waking the supposedly largely complacent white “racist” populace up to their culpability for the rioters’ unhappiness.

Their delayed anger grew over a just-released video of the death, six months ago, of an arrested African-American youth, while in Rochester police custody. That tragedy supposedly justified manhandling strangers with warnings of “give us our shit” and “do not record crimes” with cell phones.

These now nightly recurring riots and violence have a common theme: blue-state governors and blue mayors of the nation’s larger and middle-sized cities have institutionalized police procedures to detain supposedly dangerous or erratic acting suspects, which are either dangerous to the suspect or can easily appear post facto to be so on selectively edited or incompletely aired videos.

Local and municipal Democratic officials apparently have no answers in their cities for endemic African-American disparities, asymmetrical crime rates, and the proper behavior of their worn-out and beleaguered police, who are called by frightened businesses and bystanders to remove often dangerous suspects from their shared communities.

The result is that suspects now routinely resist arrest, confident either sympathetic district attorneys won’t prosecute them, or police themselves will have to choose between losing their lives arresting those not willing to be arrested or losing their careers and livelihood in the effort. We know the consequences: police simply are not responding to calls from crime-infested areas, and those arrested don’t think the police will use force to make arrests stick—and so resist.

Nor do liberal officials know how to tamp down often violent protests over such deaths that often target their own police forces, and sometimes even the homes of the mayors themselves who struggle to show their sympathy with the rioters.

Add it all up and officials either contextualize or condole the ensuing violence sparked by their own actions, or strain to condemn it by blaming Donald Trump, the Emmanuel Goldstein of our age.

Either way, it is not a convincing strategy to reassure torched businesses or innocent diners or demoralized police who are spat upon and made the targets of firebombs, that a more vigorous Joe Biden will tame fellow blue-state America officeholders and quell the violence.

Biden Unbound
As for the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer, the mounting anger over the sanctioned violence has not only prompted the media to exhume and enhance old saw Trump stories, refashioned as autumn campaign surprises, but also has forced Joe Biden out of his basement.

But to do what exactly?

The question assumes that there was not a reason why Biden was in his basement in the first place, near-mute for three months. For a time, seclusion was a winning strategy because otherwise to see and listen to Biden is to conclude that he is non compos mentis.

In addition, the media had driven down Trump’s ratings by blaming him for COVID-19, the lockdown, recession, and looting, and was playing out the clock by reframing the election as Trump versus the media and the coronavirus.

But the strategy was not updated to recalibrate changing momentum in response to changing news cycles. And Biden became even rustier by his basement sabbatical. So now he is out and we are immediately reminded of the reasons he hibernated in the first place and should have stayed there.

We now witness surreal Biden press events. Questions are scripted from an “approved” list of reporters who apparently send fuzzy inquiries in advance and, like North Korean journalists, queue up to repeat them in public. Biden then either looks at his notes or a teleprompter for his canned answers, but stumbles through his responses. He often gives the game away by reading out loud his handlers’ prompts such as “end of quote” or “topline message,” while an uneasy rogue reporter occasionally blurts out loud in frustration that she wants to ask a question “not on the paper.”

Sure-Thing Polls?
No one knows the exact state of the presidential race. The polls are all over the place and many are weaponized. Scan Emerson, Rasmussen, Trafalgar, and Zogby polls, and Trump is near dead even or even ahead in some key states. Read the surveys discredited after 2016 like Reuters and Politico, and Biden is winning across the board.

But all pollsters seem to concede something is terribly wrong with this increasingly discredited institution. How can IBD/TPP assure us that in his favorability ratings Trump is down by 16 points even as Emerson shows us he is up by two and Rasmussen by four?

Something is rotten.

Either the pollsters are abjectly incompetent, or deliberately selecting flawed demographics that they know will reflect their own biases, and they do so to add momentum to their preferred candidate.

Or their subordinates who gather the data are massaging the numbers to reflect their own choices.

Or the respondents are deliberately misleading their questioners either out of fear or from spite.

The record of bias and error from 2016 might suggest all three reasons.

60 Days More of Scripts
What then can we expect in the next 60 days from the Biden campaign?

About every week or so there will be a media/Democratic/leftist fusion zombie scandal that suddenly arises from the past but with new unnamed sources and anonymous rumors, and pushed as the long lost magic spike to drive into Count Trump’s heart.

Or we will have more rioting, spreading to smaller cities in the manner of Kenosha and Rochester, all well-organized and aimed at suburban and largely middle-class whites, to terrify them that no one is safe thinking they at least do not live in Portland or Chicago.

These riots will be contextualized by Biden with the now-familiar damnation of Trump and police excess, albeit with a nugget thrown in about the need for peaceful change. And then we will see a campaign stop, press conference, or interview in which Biden will have the scripted questions, scripted answers, and inadvertently either read off his handlers’ prompts or go blank or confused for about a five-second mind-out.

The interviewers will try to carry Biden across the finish line by finishing his half-completed sentences, rewording and translating his garble, or abruptly changing the subject when Biden goes into screensaver mode.

What can we conclude of these desperate efforts to derail Donald Trump?

One, Biden really should have stayed permanently in the basement but now cannot.

Two, internal pollsters have frightened Democrats not so much because they believe Biden is behind, but because they advise Biden not to trust the media’s smiley polls, and don’t offer any strategy of how to stop Trump’s insidious trajectory.

Three, the issues of May and June have evaporated and now bleed Biden more than they do Trump. The virus itself slowly wanes. Better treatment ameliorates its effects. And the vaccine looms larger.

The lockdown was more or less discredited by the exemption given thousands of violent protesters and the issue is now recalibrated as keeping 50 million children out of school.

The economy did not go into depression but seems to be climbing out of recession. And George Floyd’s death increasingly has nothing to do with nightly looting and arson, as the rioters turn unapologetically Marxist, nihilist — and increasingly venomously racist.

Given all that, and given the dearth of fresh scandal material, expect more ossified scandals, Kindergarten interviews, improving favorability ratings for the president, and desperate efforts to prove COVID-19 is resurging, quarantines must be extended, rioting and burning are acts of love, and we are in a Great Depression. And the more this does not work, the more vehemently it will be repeated.
------------------------
Victor Davis Hanson (@VDHanson) is a senior fellow, classicist and historian and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution where many of his articles are found; his focus is classics and military history. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. H/T American Greatness.

---

Tags: Victor Davis Hanson, Desperately Derailing Donald To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!