In the era of the perpetual campaign, debates don’t move the polls like they used to. But Henry breaks down how, in a presidential race as tight as this, Kamala Harris’ victory on Tuesday night may move the needle one or two points in a race where one or two points makes all the difference.

Then, Kyle Kondik of Sabato’s Crystal Ball joins to give an update on the key House and Senate races. He and Henry play out hypothetical scenarios on how a narrow Trump or Harris win in toss-up districts might sway the chambers.

This week Dennis reviews the Tuesday night debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris and the “moderators” from ABC News. Plus the Cats in the Ladle in Springfield, Ohio. Yes, there are hilarious memes floating around the internet and many are dismissing the stories, but for the citizens of this town 26 miles northeast of Dayton, the changes in their town are very real.

“Why Trump Won the Debate” – A Counternarrative

 

Kaylee McGhee White argues that Trump won the debate in a Washington Examiner article. She says that Kacklin’ Kamala’s main task was to explain what she would do if she won the election. Half of Americans think she’s too liberal, 55% think she’s no different than Joe Biden, and 30% say they need to know more about her. White argues that Kamala did none of those things last night. She failed to define what she intended to do, and she intentionally remained vague about her policies. On the other hand, Trump’s behavior, while perhaps less than ideal, was nothing new; so it changed nothing about the perception of him. Since debates rarely make a difference in the polls, she argues that this debate will not make much difference and that, of the minor change that could be affected, it was Kamala who needed to make it.

I’m not sure I completely agree with White, but she does make an important point. Kamala missed an opportunity to define herself at the debate. Trump missed that chance too. But Trump still has an opening to define Kamala over the next two months — if he’ll just take it. The window is closing, so he has to move quickly.

This week on Homeschooling Journeys, Curious Mike talks with Daniella Moreci-Pack, an Arizona mom utilizing her state’s Education Savings Account (ESA) to homeschool her son with ADHD. Daniella shares how she spends ESA funds on special needs therapies, curriculum products, and in-person enrichment activities like karate and dance classes. She explores key themes, including the flexibility of homeschooling, the initial anxiety of leaving traditional schooling, and the common shift from structured schedules to more child-led learning. Daniella also discusses navigating ESA red tape, as new rules add bureaucratic hurdles. Tune in to hear highlights of Daniella’s approach and resilience in overcoming these challenges to give her child a personalized education.

When People Are So Good At Heart You Actually Cry

 

Yesterday afternoon, while sitting and teaching myself the program “Audacity,” I heard the air tankers in the skies above me.

I live a 5-minute walk from California’s largest freshwater lake, called Clear Lake. The lake is continually used as a resource for water needed to fill the bellies of air tankers and special helicopters used to put out fires. The aircraft swoop down to the lake and special equipment allows each of them to pump water that will then be dumped on fires.

This week on The Learning Curve, co-hosts Alisha Searcy of DFER and AFC’s Walter Blanks interview Senior Fellow at the American Federation for Children and Founder of Black Minds MatterDenisha Allen. Denisha shares her journey and the motivations behind founding Black Minds Matter, a national movement dedicated to celebrating Black excellence and promoting high-quality educational options for Black students. She delves into the politics of urban school reform, highlighting the challenges posed by race and class-based achievement gaps and the political influence of teachers’ unions. Mrs. Allen also reflects on the evolving landscape of charter school politics and how the pandemic has reshaped education by increasing interest in diverse school choice options like charters, homeschooling, and microschools. She discusses the implications of the “Year of School Choice” in 2021, marked by expanded voucher and ESA programs, and questions why, despite large federal education expenditures, national reading and math scores have been stagnant or declining. Finally, Denisha shares her vision for what policymakers and parents should do to dramatically improve academic outcomes for America’s students.

Losing Our Humanity By Collecting Women

 

We know that people do not value things that come easily. This is especially true when it comes to people — villains like Andrew Tate coldly manipulate women in order to pimp them out. To Tate, a woman is not an object of love. She is instead merely a potential source of revenue.

Tate is in good company in human history. The Torah tells us that a king should not acquire too many wives, because “it will remove his heart.” When we commoditize other people, we become heartless. Or as Gasset (channeling Balzac and Kierkegaard) is credited as saying: “He who loves one woman has known them all. He who loves many women has known none.”

Scott Adams returns to the program to catch up on everything that’s happened since he and Ann spoke in May.

(Recorded prior to this week’s presidential debate.)

Another Thing I Should Stop Doing

 

Talking to myself, aloud, in public. At least in South America, I do that mostly in English. Crossing downtown Florianópolis from my hotel to the bus terminal, I saw a girl walking in the opposite direction. She had a tattoo on her throat. I said, “Bad choice.” Then I passed an office of Banco do Brasil. I said, or rather intoned, “The full faith and credit of.” Luckily no one was there to hear that.

(And I do mean that was lucky. Brazil’s national banks – this one, Itaú, Bradesco, Caixa Econômica – all have the magic Soviet power to cause citizens to stand in very long lines for very long times. Even before they actually open in the morning.)

A Sad Case of a Bass

 

In my chorus, there is a young guy who thinks he’s a gal. He’s a Second Bass.

Last night he came to first rehearsal for the Christmas concert.  He was wearing a pleated skirt and wore his hair below shoulder length and dyed bright blue. He had little breasts showing beneath his shirt or sweater, or perhaps the appearance of breasts created by a padded bra.

The Trabuco Canyon Airport Fire

 

This fire was touched off yesterday from sparks when an Orange County Public Works crew were using heavy equipment to move large boulders. Efforts to put out the flare-up failed, and the fire quickly began to consume hundreds of acres along the hillsides of the Trabuco Canyon area near the City of Rancho Santa Margarita. At about 5 pm yesterday (Monday), the fire had consumed about 700 acres. By this morning the fire had consumed some 9,300 acres and is still 0% contained.

Today isn’t just the day after the debate

 

Other than tiny blurbs on what the current candidates are doing to mark the date, I have found very little to commemorate or solemnify the date. Even on Ricochet, there is one post that mostly just states our lack of progress in defeating Islamist terrorism.

Today is the anniversary of one of the worst attacks on US soil. Civilians were killed in an attack that forever changed the political landscape and our daily lives.

Join Robert Chernin and Ericka Redic as they welcome Israel Appreciation Day 2024 speaker Samantha Ettus. They’ll discuss IAD 2024, her impressive career, and why Israel advocacy is vital for America.

Get Your IAD 2024 Tickets Here: https://tix.israelappreciationday.com/israel-appreciation-day-2024-27124819580

9/11: We are Still Losing

 

We lost the war to transform Afghanistan and the Arab world.  Our leadership class still refuses to accept the truth that the Islamist ideologues continue to make material and ideological war upon us and our allies. We cannot bear to fully accept that Iran is making war in Yemen, Lebanon, Gaza, Ukraine, and Syria with plans to attack other targets–including us.

We are not permitted to notice, much less discuss, the fundamental problems of trying to integrate Muslim populations into secular Western culture.

She Won; He Lost

 

You can analyze the presidential debate as much as you like, but the data isn’t relevant when you look at how both candidates were perceived by the viewers. And it wasn’t good for those of us rooting for Trump.

Trump came off as a curmudgeon (is his age finally catching up to him?), bitter and whiny; unable to stay on track to make the arguments that would have effectively dismantled Harris. He was stuck in past disappointments (as she pointed out), and he wasn’t able to demonstrate dignity and presence. And his bragging (an old habit that raised its ugly head) was annoying and ineffective. Viktor Orban?

The Squirrels’ Tale

 

In early May of this year, I was taking out my garbage cans to the front curb the day before they are picked up, just like my neighbors do in the late afternoon with their garbage cans. When I turned to head back into the house, I heard a faint chirping sound and looked up and noticed this little guy clinging to the trunk of my tall palm tree. (right)

He was clinging to the tree at about seven feet off the ground and stared at me intently. He didn’t look sick or in distress (though I’m not a certified squirrel whisperer), and I wondered where his mom might be. After some time had passed, I assumed that perhaps a predator like an owl or a hawk had snatched his mom and flown away. The other predatory birds that keep an eye on the critters in our neighborhood are turkey vultures. A few years back, a turkey vulture snatched a rabbit that had been frequenting my backyard, then flew over the house with it and set it down in the middle of the street in front of my house, and within seconds had torn it apart…while momma and baby turkey vulture watched from a nearby tree across the street. So, it’s certainly possible that the little squirrel’s mom had been met with a similar fate.

As I stood talking to this little guy, it was starting to get late, and I had to check on my son and think about turning in for the night. I phoned my local Animal Control office and was instructed by the woman answering to leave the squirrel alone and that he would find a way to survive. Well, while I wasn’t convinced that she was correct, I also wasn’t really inclined to handle the little squirrel or bring it in the house, and thought that if a bird had spotted him, he would likely burrow further into the palm tree’s bark for protection…at least I hoped he would.

Jeff is joined by Drs. Chris Burkett and Rob Wyllie, professors of Political Science and Political Economy, respectively, in this recording of a special live episode of The American Idea. Is there a connection between free enterprise and national prosperity? What is free enterprise, anyway? What kind of economy did the Founders envision for America, and how would that shape Americans and our public life and politics? Consider these questions and others that sit at the foundation of America and our experiment in free association and self-government.

#freeenterprise #liberty #jefferson #hamilton #americanfounding

That Debate Thing

 

If you lived it, this was a somewhat similar morning to this on 23 years ago. The sky was clear like it is today. Temperature is cool but comfortable. For those who went to work in Manhattan or over at the Pentagon or in that field in Pennsylvania- we have been to all three locations, one of them that morning, it was a bracing and refreshing day of the new season. Until it wasn’t.

About this time on a bright morning in 2001, nearly 3,000 innocent people were brutally murdered. Two of them were shipmates from other places. Things changed.

Quote of the Day: Politics Everywhere

 

A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion.
C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

One of the most annoying things about the left is how it has infected every aspect of our lives with politics. Ask yourself: “Compared to 20 years ago, how many ‘politics-free’ spaces do I enjoy now?”

Donald Trump has debated President Joe Biden this cycle – and Tuesday night had the task of debating Vice President Kamala Harris and David Muir and Linsey Davis of ABC News.

Ann and her guest Ryan Girdusky break it down.

Pool Night’s Been Postponed

 

This is the text that my husband got today.  It seems the “debate” of all debates managed to move that sacred evening to tomorrow night.  Several of the male neighbors get together to play, but the proper name is Billiards, Bourbon and Beer with a few dark pretzels thrown in.  Everyone wants to tune in, since it seems the only time Harris will talk to Trump.  In fact, they supposedly have never met.  I heard they like to play-act in California, so someone dressed as a Trump has been her practice partner.

Newsom play-acted as governor and ordered the massive tent cities to be cleaned up and dismantled when Harris, their Senator from California, won—I mean, was positioned—the Democratic nomination for President in 2024.  He spiffed up the place just at that moment.  The drugs, homelessness, mass illegal border crossings, and lawlessness are all still there, but there isn’t a big enough rug to sweep these problems under that she has ignored as a senator.  It looks better, though.

Haitians Taking Nine Lives from Harris Campaign?

 

Fifty-one present and former intelligence officials have signed a report that stories of disturbing behavior by illegal aliens in Springfield, OH and Aurora, CO are consistent with Russian disinformation.  Bill Kristol has suggested that these towns may not even exist.

The Aurora, Colorado story of local officials surrendering buildings to Venezuelan gangs has been given professional MSM treatment–mandatory silence until it goes away. However, the story of Haitians eating cats has been much harder to suppress from social media and has sparked enormous pushback from the Harris-Walz campaign and its media surrogates.  I suspect this is because their internal polling has confirmed Sen. Vance’s observation that their core constituency really is the single cat lady demographic.  Additionally, liberals actually care about whales, cats and puppies rather than the poor and minorities they only pretend to like.

Trump and His Bulletproof Wall

 

How did we reach this point? Why does a President, who is failed terribly by the people who are supposed to protect him, consigned to speak behind bulletproof glass? Is the glass a legitimate solution to the pathetic performance of the Secret Service?

I don’t have the desire or strength to list all the errors and oversights that resulted in the assassination attempt against Trump. There are far too many details to be confident that it was only carelessness and not taking the situation seriously for us to be reassured that only ineptitude was at fault.

Joe Selvaggi talks with Travis Fisher from the Cato Institute about the rising costs and increasing fragility of the New England power grid, as green capacity incentives distract from neglected infrastructure.

Guest:

Washington’s Weak Excuses For Restraining Israel

 

We are less than a month away from the first anniversary of Hamas’s bloody breach of a cease-fire, which launched war in Gaza. This war should have ended months ago with a decisive win by Israel, and would have done so if not for the interventions of the Biden-Harris administration. By putting all the pressure on Israel to reach a cease-fire on just about any terms, so long as they are acceptable to Hamas, the Democrats have strengthened Hamas’s bargaining position while delaying an end to the conflict.

Representative of the administration’s mindset is the latest apologia for the Biden-Harris regime, written by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, grandly titled “How Netanyahu Is Trying to Save Himself, Elect Trump, and Defeat Harris.” This hit piece begins by accusing Benjamin Netanyahu of dragging out negotiations with Hamas over the release of the hostages, and purports to hold him accountable for the death of six Israeli hostages (one with dual American citizenship) who were shot in the head by Hamas leaders. Later in his essay, Friedman does briefly refer to the real villain of the situation, Yahya Sinwar, as a “murderous Islamo-Fascist leader” to make the point that it is “also” (along with Netanyahu) in Sinwar’s interest to prolong the war for two ends: first, to create massive strains in the now fragile US-Israel alliance, and second, to provoke internal discord in Israel.