Government & Politics

• Are the pollsters pollagandizing for Harris? Betting markets have swung toward Donald Trump recently after having been in Harris’s favor for the previous month or so. But the RealClearPolitics national polling average, which has also favored Harris for weeks, has shifted only two-tenths of a point toward Trump, even as states — and especially the battleground states — show a stronger shift toward him. Does anyone, for example, believe the latest Morning Consult poll, which has Harris five points ahead of Trump nationally, thereby skewing the RCP average toward Harris? As Just the News reports, “Polling averages currently show Trump poised to take Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Arizona. Harris, for her part, holds narrow leads in Minnesota and Nevada. Should such results hold, Trump would handily carry the Electoral College, barring major upsets.” Why might the disparity exist? Polls are lagging indicators, of course, but this seems odd. It’s almost as if these left-leaning polling organizations are using the polls to propagandize on behalf of Harris. If only there were a term to describe this biased behavior.

• Harris rakes in $1 billion: Vice President Kamala Harris reached a political milestone this week, but it may act as more of a political millstone. The Harris campaign has raised more than $1 billion since entering the presidential race, and yet she’s only narrowly leading Donald Trump in the national polls. All that money, and a mainstream media thoroughly in the tank for her, and yet Harris is still struggling to win voters. All that cash, and she’s still trailing in some must-win states. As CBS News reports, “The Harris campaign’s money will continue to be ‘heavily spent’ on battleground-state advertising and operations, including field offices and staffing up during the next four weeks.” So, if you’re not yet sick of Harris ads, you most certainly will be by the time November 5 rolls around.

• Ex-CBS staffers call for outside probe of “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris amid editing scandal (NY Post)

• Obama warns “brothers” who won’t vote for Kamala that sexism could cost her election (Daily Mail)

• Humor: 10 differences between Kamala Harris and Joe Biden (Babylon Bee)

• Christians are planning to not vote: A recently released survey from the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University found that 51% of “people of faith” said they will likely not vote in the upcoming election. The study’s designation of “people of faith” encompasses roughly 104 million individuals, including 41 million who identify as Christians, of which 32 million regularly attend church. ACU President Len Munsil responded with “two huge take-aways”: “First, that Christians could be the deciding factor in a bunch of federal and state races — and are choosing not to be. And second, that they are longing for their local church to instruct them on how to think biblically about policy and politics.” The study noted reasons given for why Christians are not planning to vote: 68% are not interested in politics, 57% don’t like either major party’s candidates, 52% believe their vote won’t make a difference, and 48% think the election results will be manipulated. Dr. George Barna, the study’s lead researcher, observed that the number represents “a far larger margin than the combined number of votes that decided the 2020 election in key battleground states.” Roughly 258 million Americans are eligible to vote.

• Michigan’s governor is both gross and sacrilegious: It looked both slightly religious and slightly pornographic, and that was no doubt the intent. That’s just the way today’s culturally rotten Democrats roll. We’re speaking of a video posted to Instagram yesterday in which Michigan Governor and 2028 presidential hopeful Gretchen “Big Gretch” Whitmer is seen feeding a Doritos chip, communion style, to feminist author Liz Plank, who is suggestively on her knees. Plank captioned the video, “if he won’t, big gretch will.” She soon edited it, however: “If he won’t, Gretchen Whitmer will. Chips aren’t just delicious, the CHIPS Act is a game-changer for U.S. tech and manufacturing, boosting domestic production of semiconductors to reduce reliance on foreign suppliers! Donald Trump would put that at risk.” Such sacrilege shouldn’t surprise us, as it comes from a political party that regular folks are describing as “weird,” “disgraceful,” and “disgusting.”

• Climate change on military recruitment: Historically, the military has existed to defend our nation from foreign military threats. However, the expansive mission creep that has become a featured hallmark of Washington’s bureaucracy has, unfortunately, also significantly impacted the U.S. military. As Sherri Goodman, former deputy secretary of defense for environmental security and current secretary general of the International Military Council on Climate and Security, recently stated, “The Department of Defense now sees combating climate change as central to its mission.” Underlining this ridiculous mission creep was Goodman’s touting of her record in helping develop an emissions-reduction plan so the military could meet its “clean-energy targets.” What about bettering the military’s ability to hit and destroy enemy targets? The truth is that this focus on “climate change” is actually hamstringing the military’s ability to fight. And we wonder why recruitment is down.

Security

• Election Day terror suspect employed by CIA: This story, which we covered Wednesday, got really weird really fast. Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, 27, an Afghan who entered the U.S. on September 9, 2021, just weeks after our forces hastily and disastrously pulled out of Afghanistan, was taken into custody on Monday after having obtained weapons and ammo with which to carry out a suicidal terrorist attack on Election Day, November 5, on behalf of ISIS. But now we’re learning that Tawhedi was employed by the CIA as a security guard in Afghanistan prior to coming to the U.S. It’s unclear how long the would-be terrorist had worked for the CIA, or whether he was suspected of having ties to radical Islam before being granted entry. Regardless, Tawhedi should have been thoroughly screened beforehand. And judging from the unwillingness of the Biden-Harris administration to talk about it, we’d surmise they have something to hide. House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green, for one, wants some answers.

• Mayorkas dodges reporter’s questions about Afghan arrested over Election Day terror plot (Daily Caller)

• 600K Russian casualties: The number of Russian casualties from Vladimir Putin’s war with Ukraine has topped 600,000, more than Russian military casualties in all Russian/Soviet Union conflicts combined since World War II. This past September has been one of the bloodiest — Russian forces suffered a daily average casualty count of 1,271. Nevertheless, there’s no sign that Moscow is looking to throw in the towel anytime soon. As one U.S. military official put it, “It’s kind of the Russian way of war where they continue to throw mass into the problem, and I think we’ll continue to see high losses.” As the war nears its third year, Putin has been able to avoid mass mobilization by significantly increasing the pay of voluntary soldiers. The question is how long he can keep this up with such a high casualty rate.

• Iran’s warning to U.S. allies: Don’t help Israel, or you’re next (WSJ)

Culture

• Star Wars to introduce gender-confused stormtrooper: The systematic destruction of George Lucas’s Star Wars universe has become par for the course for woke Disney. The latest example of this comes with the news that Disney plans to introduce into the Star Wars franchise a “trans woman” stormtrooper (a.k.a. a man who identifies as a woman) who will be named “Sister” and will be sporting armor painted with blue and pink stripes. This character is said to be one of the clone stormtroopers, which, of course, for Star Wars lore raises a significant consistency issue. The whole point of the clone stormtrooper army is that they all exhibit the same identity traits because they are all effectively the same. Of course, one could argue that since Disney blew up this one-clone notion with its introduction of Finn in the first sequel movie, what does it matter to inject another stormtrooper with an individual identity? Well, this lack of consistency to the original Star Wars universe has many old diehard Star Wars fans rejecting Disney’s desecration of the franchise and dubbing it Disney Wars.

Misc.

• Ethel Kennedy, the widow of Robert F. Kennedy, dies at 96 after suffering stroke (Just the News)

• Court strikes down part of New York’s restrictive gun law in win for Second Amendment (Daily Caller)

• Humor: What a jerk! Kamala wants to help with hurricane relief but DeSantis refuses to tell her where Florida is (Babylon Bee)

For the Executive Summary archive, click here.