Election Update

• Last-minute election giveaway: With Election Day just weeks away, the Biden-Harris administration appears to be pulling out all the stops in a flailing effort to shore up Kamala Harris’s sinking campaign. On Wednesday, Joe Biden announced another massive government giveaway — $4.7 billion in student loan debt transfer from roughly 60,000 borrowers to taxpayers. Of course, that’s not the way Biden put it. “For too long,” he said, “the government failed to live up to its commitments, and only 7,000 people had ever received forgiveness under Public Service Loan Forgiveness before Vice President Kamala Harris and I took office. Now, over 1 million public service workers have gotten the relief they are entitled to under the law.” His total handout is now $175 billion for nearly five million people. As the Republican National Committee observed earlier this year, “Over 60 percent of Americans don’t have a college degree, but Joe Biden wants hardworking taxpayers to foot higher education bills for the elite few. In Biden’s desperate attempt to use your money to buy votes, American families are left behind.” Yep.

• Trump leads Harris 50-48 in weird Fox poll: Things have been trending Donald Trump’s way lately, but we’re not sure what to make of the latest Fox News poll, which has Trump ahead of Kamala Harris 50-48. Yes, Trump reaching the 50 threshold for the first time against Harris is big news, especially given that the same poll previously had Harris ahead by the same 50-48 margin. But the poll says he’s trailing in the battleground states by six points. This seems like a bizarre outlier unless Trump is somehow hemorrhaging votes in the swing states while making massive inroads everywhere else. As Fox News reports: “A majority remember his time in office positively: 53% approve of the job he did as president. That is 4 points higher than he ever received while in office. Fully 93% of Republicans approve, as do 74% of non-MAGA Republicans and 45% of independents.” We can perhaps chalk some of Trump’s apparent leakage in the swing states to Harris’s overwhelming cash advantage and ad-buying, but six points? When the RealClearPolitics average has Trump ahead in the battlegrounds by nearly a point? We’d like a second opinion.

• Georgia judge strikes down seven new election rules (Washington Examiner)

• Fani Willis seeks to revive criminal charges against Trump (Washington Examiner)

• Harris flip-flops on oil (for now): Back in 2019, during her failed run for the Democrat presidential nomination, Kamala Harris warned oil companies she was coming for them. She promised to take these oil companies to court and force them to pay for their contribution to climate change. Harris was also a big proponent of the Green New Deal, even pledging to eliminate the filibuster to get it passed. But a funny thing has happened since her undemocratic installation as the Democrat presidential nominee: Harris is no longer so anti-oil. Indeed, now she sounds like J.R. Ewing running around praising “the country’s record oil and gas production.” Gone is her previous rhetoric of wanting to get oil drilling companies “not only in the pocketbook but let’s make sure there are severe and serious penalties for their behaviors.” So which is it? Does Harris want to punish or promote Big Oil?

• Supreme Court clears way for Biden’s plan to cut power plant emissions (Washington Post)

• Why are docs now so concerned with presidential fitness? Donald Trump is 78 years old, but he’s a young 78 by all accounts. He can still stripe his drives down the fairway, and he can still engage an astute audience for more than 100 minutes with no notes and no teleprompters. But it’s clearly a sign of the times that “more than 230 doctors, nurses and health care professionals, most of whom are backing Vice President Kamala Harris, are calling on … Trump to release his medical records, arguing that he should be transparent about his health ‘given his advancing age.’” Ah, transparency. Where have these paragons of transparency been for the past four years while we’ve been beating the drum that Joe Biden was cognitively unfit for the presidency, and that he was being propped up by a political party hell-bent on nothing more than power? The aforementioned letter was organized by the group “Doctors for Harris,” which, CBS News tells us, ostensibly with a straight face, “is unaffiliated with Harris’ campaign.”

Meanwhile, in Texas

• Venezuelan gang takes over in Texas: What ABC News’s Martha Raddatz shrugged off as only “a handful of apartment complexes” having been taken over by the violent Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TdA) is proving to be a much bigger problem. TdA is infamous for drug running and human trafficking, but it’s apparently also keen on expanding its criminal interest into real estate. Apartment complexes in Aurora, Colorado, aren’t the only residences that have been taken over by TdA. The Venezuelan gang has similarly taken over at least four apartment complexes in San Antonio, Texas. According to local law enforcement, TdA has been taking over and controlling these apartment units for the past five to six months and has been using them to rent out to migrants, drug-dealing bases, and prostitution dens where women and children are being sex-trafficked. TdA’s method in San Antonio mirrored the way it took over the Aurora complex — a bunch of armed gang members suddenly stormed apartments and took them over.

• Ted Cruz mops the floor with Colin Allred: Texas Senator Ted Cruz is in a tough reelection fight with a chameleon challenger, a former NFL linebacker with a fetish for men competing against women in sports. But the two-term senator will likely get some separation due to his debate performance on Tuesday night — a performance whose key moment was a devastating takedown of Colin Allred on that very topic. “Four times,” said Cruz, “he has come out for men playing in women’s sports and boys playing in girl’s sports. … There was a bill, it was a very simple bill, it was narrowly defined. It was protecting women and girl’s sports. He voted no. … Congressman Allred was an NFL linebacker. … And just two weeks ago, [he] joined a hundred radical Democrats in demanding that our military allow drag shows on military bases, pay for soldiers to have sex changes using taxpayer money, and pay for children to be sterilized and have sex changes on military bases.” Cruz, Princeton University’s debate “Speaker of the Year” in 1992, currently leads in the RealClearPolitics average by four points, but none of that polling reflects Tuesday’s debate.

Culture

• Trump eyes flipping fries: It’s been more than a month since we learned that Kamala Harris, she of that middle-class household, was likely lying about having worked at McDonald’s. We weren’t surprised, given how increasingly out of touch Democrats have become and how desperate they are to identify with regular folks. Donald Trump, on the other hand, never worked at McDonald’s, nor did he ever claim to have done so. At least until this weekend. In a first-class troll job, the former president has announced that he’ll be flipping fries in Pennsylvania on Sunday, all to call attention to his opponent’s lie. “I’m going to a McDonald’s to work,” Trump said, “because if I work there for 10 minutes, I will have worked there longer than her.”

• Pro-Israel prof barred from Columbia: Columbia University has temporarily barred assistant professor Shai Davidai from campus. Columbia accused Davidai of repeatedly harassing and intimidating school employees. According to spokesman Ben Chang, the school has “consistently and continually” upheld Davidai’s right to free speech, but this ban is a “direct result” of his conduct on the one-year anniversary of the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel. Chang insisted that Columbia “does not tolerate threats of intimidation, harassment, or other threatening behavior by its employees.” Just its students. Davidai, who is an Israeli, believes this decision is retaliation for his confrontation with university officials during a pro-Palestinian campus demonstration that was caught on video and shared on social media. Davidai also posted on X: “I don’t care about my future. It’s never been about me.” Instead, he said, “I care about what this acceptance of anti-Jewish, anti-Israeli, and anti-American terrorism means for the students on campus.” Columbia has not suspended Davidai, but he will be required to complete an employee conduct training program before he’s allowed back on campus.

Misc.

• Hillary’s latest book bombs (Daily Fetched)

• Amazon and Google have plans for fueling their data centers: Nuclear power (CBS News)

• NASA spent millions on “environmental justice” and “equity” grants despite budget woes (Daily Signal)

• Biden announces new $425M aid to Ukraine (Washington Examiner)

• Biden-Harris administration blocks Israeli plan to defeat Hamas (Washington Free Beacon)

• ‘Chances are very high’: Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar killed in Gaza (Jerusalem Post)

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