Oh, the irony

USA Today joins the NYT and WaPo in disgrace, leaving just one reliable media giant

Professor Reynolds's weekly column for USA Today was spiked because it discusses the censoring of the Hunter Biden story. You can read the column on his own site, InstaPundit, and I highly recommend that you do.

One thing to come out of the past four years is the exposure of the media, social and conventional, as completely untrustworthy partisan hacks. Many of us have known that for decades, of course, but now it’s been made apparent to all.

UPDATE: 10/20/20. USA Today endorsed one of the candidates today. Guess which one? No cheating.

If they weren't so in the tank with Biden, they'd reverse the order of this

I’m getting tired now, so I yield my remaining time to the man from the White House

Debate Commission announces that it will mute the candidate’s mics while his opponent speaks uninterrupted for 15 minutes (will this also apply to the moderator? The last one interrupted Trump at every sentence). Hell, Ol’ Joe has already demonstrated that he can hold it together for 15 minutes — look how he stood up to that grilling about his favorite flavor milkshake today — the fun comes when he tries to extend beyond that.

The Commission would be doing Trump a huuuge favor if it muted his mic for the final hour, giving Biden the opportunity to show the public how he performs with a full hour to fill. When Donald calls me tomorrow for advice, I’m going to suggest the idea of just trying to remain silent for the entire show. It’d make for a memorable, historical evening.

Milkshake Joe and campaign strategy

Answered hard-hitting question about his milkshake, ran away when questioned on Hunter scandal

Robert Spencer compares the Biden non-campaign with that of William Henry Harrison’s in 1840: Tippecanoe and Biden too.

…. Rating America’s Presidents discusses at some length the strange and fabled election of 1840, an overlooked source of inspiration for the Biden campaign. The opposition party in those days, the Whigs, were determined to get their candidate William Henry Harrison into the White House not on the strength of his public positions, but rather upon the appeal of the persona they fashioned for him – just as Joe today is supposed to be the affable, kindly, back-to-normal alternative to four more years of what the Democrats characterize as the insane reign of the Cheeto Mussolini.

Like Biden, Harrison had the support of the Deep State. In those days that was the Bank of the United States, an unelected and unaccountable oligarchy that wielded enormous power without ever having to answer to the voters (sound familiar?). Nicholas Biddle, the longtime president of the Bank, directed that in order to avoid being pinned down on the issues and thereby alienating some portion of the electorate, Harrison should speak substantively as infrequently as possible: “Let him say nothing…Let no Committee, no Convention, no town meeting ever extract from him a single word about what he thinks now and will do hereafter. Let the use of pen and ink be wholly forbidden as if he were a mad poet in Bedlam.” Biddle could have been advising Biden’s handlers about how to deal with questions about packing the Supreme Court.

Instead of dealing with the issues, Harrison, who as a Major General in 1811 won the Battle of Tippecanoe against a force of Shawnee Indians, was portrayed as the humble war hero, “Old Tippecanoe.” His handlers trumpeted him as an ordinary man with simple tastes, content with a log cabin and a jug of hard cider. To this the Whigs contrasted a deeply unfair caricature of incumbent President Martin Van Buren as an out-of-touch, champagne-drinking, cosseted aristocrat who had spent public funds on lavish furnishings for the White House. The Whigs held rallies, passed out hard cider, staged marches, and generally made the 1840 election into a party celebrating “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” (John Tyler was Harrison’s running mate).

This was all great fun, but it was also the sum of the Whigs’ appeal to the American people. The Democrats were confounded. One Democrat editorialist vented his frustration: “In what grave and important discussion are the Whig journals engaged?…We speak of the divorce of bank and state; and the Whigs reply with a dissertation on the merits of hard cider. We defend the policy of the Administration; and the Whigs answer ‘log cabin,’ ‘big canoes,’ ‘go it, Tip! Come it, Ty.’ We urge the re-election of Van Buren because of his honesty, sagacity, statesmanship…and the Whigs answer that Harrison is a poor man and lives in a log cabin.”

No one was interested in appeals to reason. Old Tippecanoe ran the table, defeating Van Buren by 234 electoral votes to 60. Van Buren was justifiably appalled by the whole affair, writing in his memoirs fifteen years later: “No one…can now hesitate in believing that the scenes thro’ which the Country passed in that great political whirlwind were discreditable to our Institutions and could not fail, if often repeated, to lead to their subversion.”

Yet here we are now. The Democrats are asking us to vote for good old Joe. Why? Because look how much more polite, how much less mean, he is than Trump! Joe Biden, everybody! The happy man with the easy smile! Barack Obama’s friend! Influence peddling? Antifa riots? Come on, man! Look what kind of milkshake the man got! He’s one of us! Elect him, and then his people will tell you everything you ever wondered about where he stands!

What could possibly go wrong?

Upon reflection, I think this is a healthy development

Does this mask make me look stupid?

California won’t allow virus vaccines without state approval. Governor Newsom, following the lead of Cuomo, is setting up a panel of “experts” to review any vaccine that’s ultimately approved by the CDC, with the power to forbid its distribution to their state’s citizens. As California goes, so goes the nation, and the distribution of whatever vaccine is finally approved by the CDC will be delayed by battles, state-by-state, for months and even, trial lawyers and “concerned citizens” being who they are, years.

Both Newsom and Cuomo deny that this has anything to do with Trump. I believe it does, but that doesn’t matter: if it convinces people to distrust the federal government and public health authorities, that’s all to the good. That silly trope of the Left, “Trust the science” will be debunked, and citizens freed to use their own minds.

Of course, what neither Newsom or Cuomo seems to understand is that, having told their citizens that the federal government will lie to them for political purposes or, at best, does sloppy work and distributes unsafe medicines, those same citizens will surely wonder why they should trust their state’s own public health experts. Next thing you know, they might start asking if public health officials are the only government workers who’ve been lying to and deceiving them, and who knows what that will lead to? At the very least, the credibility and trust of public health authorities will sink to the same level of loathing that the media’s earned. And, best scenario, the politicians will follow them down.

One unintended consequence of this will be the strengthening of the anti-vaccine movement in general. That won’t be a good thing, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking kneecaps, eh?

Related.

Cuomo “not that confident” in FDA or the CDC, then adds that “Americans are very skeptical” about COVID vaccine.

Skeptical? After every democrat politician: Pelosi, Newsom, Cuomo, Kamallawalla Harris, have all claimed that the FDA and CDC are tools of Trump and will approve an unsafe vaccine at Trump’s bidding? How can that happen”

Yet Leftists claim conservatives are heartless, and have no compassion

Maybe Jeffrey Toobin should have claimed he was just self-empowering, rather than saying he'd misheard the request that he show his subpoena

This is not Jeffrey Toobin

Ashley Grahm Strips Down for Empowering Nudie Selfie

It still might not have worked, however: the NY Post now reports that Toobin was doing a bit more than displaying his horn, he was tooting it.

There are many acceptable things one can do during a Zoom call, including sipping coffee, perhaps, or munching on a Danish. Self-abuse isn’t one of them, at least not at The New Yorker. Now he’s the Talk of the Town.

UPDATE:

Quick contract in mid-country

88 Birch Lane, $2.450, 30 days to contract.I like the street more than I like this house, but what do you expect for just two and a half million bucks?

Good news for Joe: he can get at least one vote

(Actual Biden Ad)

Having Dementia Doesn’t Mean You Can’t Vote

Two, if they’ll give Tulip Rover a day pass.

From vaping to global warming to COVID — when science goes left

MIT weighs in

Paul Mirengoff:

“Last year, the Journal of the American Heart Association published a study finding that vaping posed as great a heart risk as smoking does. According to Wesley Smith, that study fueled public policies that stifled the industry, damaging or destroying many small businesses and denying smokers the leading alternative to cigarettes.

But now, the study in question has been been retracted. The editors are “concerned that the study conclusion is unreliable” due to what appears to have been an uncompleted peer review process.

….

Yet, the study was published anyway. 

Anyone can make a mistake. However, publishing an article even though the questions of reviewers have not been addressed seems like more than just a mistake.

. . .[S]cience journals have grown increasingly ideological. Nature has endorsed Joe Biden for president and promised to publish more political science — which isn’t “science” at all. The New England Journal of Medicineshould change its name to the New Ideology Journal of Medicine. Science has endorsed “nature rights.” The list goes on and on.

It’s enough to make you wonder whether establishment science follows the data wherever it leads or, instead, is often influenced by political and social agendas. And once you wonder about that, you really shouldn’t blindly “follow the science” — or at least “science” produced after the left’s march through our institutions reached the scientific establishment.”

From CNBC, of all places

Why millions of freelancers fear that Biden will put them out of work

• With 59 million Americans freelancing, the future of freelance work is a key concern for these workers as the presidential election approaches.

• Biden has expressed support for the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act on his campaign website.

• The PRO Act would use the same three-pronged ABC test as California’s AB-5 law to decide who is a freelancer nationwide.

• AB-5 classifies contractors as employees and makes it hard for freelancers to work for businesses in their industry.

Some freelancers are so fearful of what would happen if the PRO Act were enacted with the ABC test that this is affecting their choice of candidates. “My vote is 100% on this issue because we are talking about 100% of my income,” says Kim Kavin, a freelancer writer from Long Valley, New Jersey. She co-founded a Facebook group called Fight for Freelancers NJ to oppose a law similar to AB-5 that was proposed in New Jersey but did not make it to a vote. “Especially in the current economic situation we face, I want to keep earning a living.

Related? Instapundit comments on the shift from Democrat to Republican.

If the electorate is really R+1, it’s a Trump landslide. Here’s the Gallup report. At the very least, this suggests that the polls this year are in uncertain territory. But don’t get cocky.