WASHINGTON (MaceNews) – The following is Tuesday’s status check of developments in the U.S. that can influence economic, health and political outcomes.
· The presidential campaign at fever pitch with a week to go: FLOTUS delivered her one campaign speech Tuesday, in Atglen, Pennsylvania. The media painted a picture of “my husband that I don’t recognize.” The media focused on “palace intrigue.” The audience was enthused. “The media loved him,” a man “who sees potential in everyone he meets … with a big heart,” who loves “helping people.” Then he ran for president and the media turned on him, seeing him through “their own bias.” He husband was winging it from Lansing, Michigan where he mocked the governor again – and then to La Crosse, Wisc. and finally to Omaha, Nebraska. Joe Biden was in Georgia, which Democrats have not won in 28 years. “We can heal a suffering world. And yes, we can restore our soul and save our country.” Barack Obama was in Florida where the Biden campaign was still buying air time and the Trump campaign was pulling spots it could no longer afford. Obama’s quip about the president being jealous of all the media attention given Covid made all the evening newscasts. Trump in his third MAGA rally of the day, said he watched Obama. “He draws flies,” he said, saying there were no MAGA sized crowds.
· By Wednesday morning than 70 million people will have voted already. A Michigan judge decided people can carry guns near polling places. The deployment of the National Guard to Philadelphia after Monday night’s violence in the wake of a police shooting of an allegedly mentally disturbed black man with a knife was a reminder of the president’s law and order themes. Budget shortfalls prevented the availability of tasers in the day’s third police call to the location. Fox News had live coverage in Philly Tuesday night of looters, both black and white, calmly emptying a FootLocker and a Walmart, not hindered by police who had all they could handle elsewhere. And in Washington, the Supreme Court disqualified any late absentee ballots in Wisconsin, sending campaign workers into the field to urge the holders of nearly 360,000 ballots to get them to the polls in time.
· Amid all the accounts of record early voting, of millions of determined people standing in line for hours to case their vote in person, of the disappearance of voter apathy there will still be millions of eligible voters who won’t be voting. Some are disallusioned, others just aren’t plugged in. For many there are various barriers, some intentional, like fewer polling places in certain neighborhoods. At least an estimated 30% of the voter pool won’t be voting. For those there was a scary story worthy of Halloween except far more serious, not in some scurrilous fringe publication allied with either party’s extremists. No, this was in a publication not particularly a favorite of antifa, the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Bois and yet it summoned a vision as dark as any. If Trump wins, the author wrote, “Outright civil war may not occur, but it is perfectly plausible to imagine the mobbing and murder of political leaders by partisans of either side – all egged on by a triumphant Trump and his outraged and radicalized opponents.” If Trump wins, “The United States might as well be understood as a monument to the past. Not a failed state, but a failed vision, a vast power in decline whose time has come and gone.” Whew, who is this wild man, seeing doomsday, maybe because you didn’t vote? It’s Eliot A, Coehn, Dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins University, who once served in the State Department under Republican Condoleezza Rice. And where did this screed appear this week? In Foreign Affairs magazine.
· Speaking of Fox, the White House’s Kayleigh McEnany reminded the pool reporters traveling with the president during the day with handouts on their seats to watch Tucker Carlson, who Tuesday night once again tried to launch the story of Bidens’ “intimate involvement” with money laundering, tax evasion and fraud. He was helped by a reappearance of Tony Bobulinski, who said he once was a business partner with Hunter, and the Wall Street Journal opinion page’s Kimberly Strassel. Her “Potomac Watch” column on the same subject last week was contradicted by a story elsewhere in the newspaper generated by the news staff. Next up, Laura Ingraham warned of a far left alliance with, who?, big multinational business, to drive business back to China. Meanwhile, she said, Biden would do away with Thanksgiving, Easter and Christmas.
· Upcoming economic data includes the weekly MBA count of mortgage applications at 7a ET. Then at 8:30a the advance report on the trade deficit in goods. Last month the report showed the widest deficit since 2006. At 10:30a the EIA’s report on oil inventories. The morning’s report on consumer confidence from the Conference Board showed some slippage, as Kevin Kastner wrote about elsewhere on this macenews.com site.
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