"The Senate is returning to Washington, D.C. with an end-of-the-month government funding deadline looming and talks over a fifth coronavirus package stalemated.

"Senators are back at the Capitol on Tuesday afternoon for the first time since early August. The House is out until next week, after extending their August recess until September 14.

"They have a matter of weeks to wrap up their work before they are expected to leave town again until after the November election, including preventing a government shutdown and trying to revive talks on another coronavirus relief package.

"Senate Republicans, after weeks of daily phone calls, are trying to finalize a smaller, second coronavirus bill that is expected to include a weekly federal unemployment payment, another round of Paycheck Protection Program funding, more money for testing and schools as well as liability protections against coronavirus-related lawsuits."

"'The devil made me do it!' That was how funnyman Flip Wilson explained away his rogue moves in 1970s comedy bits. In 2020, it is Joe Biden's rationalization of the Black Lives Matter revolution, with Baal taking on a decidedly orange cast. ...

"Black Lives Matter is not a reaction to Donald Trump. It is a subversive movement of loosely knit but lavishly funded chapters that exploded on the scene in the Obama years, amid the rioting over the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. Demagogues turned those horrific incidents into racial controversies, despite the lack of evidence that racial animus led to the fatal confrontations, and despite the abundant evidence that the decedents were culpable. The Obama-Biden strategy was to embrace BLM as an ally, exploiting BLM's agitation in order to suppress opposition to shared political goals.

"It still is."

"In recent months, the debate over mail-in balloting has evolved into a battle between Team Trump's worries about fraud and the claims of Democrats and their news media allies that such concerns are an unwarranted effort at disenfranchising voters.

"It wasn't always this way.

"Fifteen years ago this very month, a bipartisan panel of American statesmen and stateswomen -- from ex-President Jimmy Carter and ex-Senate leader Tom Daschle on the left to former Secretary of State James Baker and former House Minority Leader Bob Michel on the right -- studied the future of U.S. elections and issued strong words of caution that the expansion of mail-in voting that began a few years earlier in Oregon posed real fraud risks, especially in close elections.

"'To improve ballot integrity, we propose that federal, state, and local prosecutors issue public reports on their investigations of election fraud, and we recommend federal legislation to deter or prosecute systemic efforts to deceive or intimidate voters,' the Commission on Federal Election Reform urged in 2005. 'States should not discourage legal voter registration or get-out-the-vote activities, but they need to do more to prevent voter registration and absentee ballot fraud.'

"Moreover, the commission strongly urged that voter identification was a key to preventing cheating, something some liberals today claim provides xenophobic 'new barriers to the ballot box.'"

Read entire article here.

"Members of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) condemned rioting and violence across cities in the United States in a press conference Wednesday where they also denounced the 'defund the police' movement, and challenged attorney generals in other states to enforce the rule of law.

"'Over the last 100 days, we have seen brutal acts of violent crime and arson across the country. The defund the police movement has emboldened criminals across the nation, and anyone who does not condemn this movement is helping to turn America into a lawless society,' said Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr. ...

"'Protesters use words, rioters use violence. The first is protected by the First Amendment, and the other is outright lawlessness,' Carr said. 'You have to respect the rule of law. There is no way that we can protect the First Amendment rights, the fundamental rights of peaceful protesters, if we're also all being asked to look the other way, to turn a blind eye, or even worse, embrace when somebody is setting a police car on fire, or they're beating a police officer over the head with a skateboard, or somebody businesses being looted.'

"While the attorneys general all agreed that racial reconciliation is important and incidents like George Floyd shouldn't happen, they argued that the rioting in the name of justice is no excuse to ignore the law."

"American politics has become a contest between two competing caricatures of reality. The primary driver of this dynamic has been the media's -- particularly cable news' -- addiction to narrative journalism combined with the pernicious influence of social media. Twitter and Facebook make it all too easy to shine a spotlight on outlier events and present them as central to our lives. The focus on the ludicrous 'autonomous zone' in Seattle earlier this summer let the right claim the whole city was like a 'Mad Max' movie.

"Similarly, the statistically rare (I'm sorry, but it's true) examples of outrageously bad behavior by some cops captured on video give many on the left permission to push a narrative of wholesale racial oppression by police.

"Social media are like the wall in Plato's Cave. Selective facts cast shadows we mistake for reality. If you take all your cues about what's happening in America from partisan Twitter, as so many journalists do, you'd be a fool not to buy a gun and prepare for the coming apocalyptic helter-skelter.

"The problem is intensified by the tendency of the hyper-politically engaged left and right to listen only to people in their own echo chamber and to mistake Twitter outrage for sentiment on the ground. So despite the fact that a majority of black and Latino people want the same amount or more police in their communities, we spent weeks listening to 'experts' claim that 'abolish the police' is a reasonable, mainstream position."

"There is one political side rioting. There is one political side looting. There is one political side committing what is unquestionably murder. There is one political side equivocating about who is responsible. And there is one political party refusing to call it out by name, still hoping to benefit from the energy of the violent mob.

"These are the BLM-ANTIFA riots, but more, they are the Joe Biden riots. Personally, Biden can't order his goon squad to stop, but he can put public pressure on the local Democrat mayors to do it.

"Rather than call on local fellow travelers like Ted Wheeler in Portland or Jenny Durkan in Seattle to allow the police to make mass arrests and prosecutors to make examples of the violent goons they arrest, as President Trump has, Joe's sitting in his basement having video chats with talentless musicians and liberal activists."

"A top Democratic operative says voter fraud, especially with mail-in ballots, is no myth. And he knows this because he's been doing it, on a grand scale, for decades.

"Mail-in ballots have become the latest flashpoint in the 2020 elections. While President Trump and the GOP warn of widespread manipulation of the absentee vote that will swell with COVID polling restrictions, many Democrats and their media allies have dismissed such concerns as unfounded.

"But the political insider, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he fears prosecution, said fraud is more the rule than the exception. His dirty work has taken him through the weeds of municipal and federal elections in Paterson, Atlantic City, Camden, Newark, Hoboken and Hudson County and his fingerprints can be found in local legislative, mayoral and congressional races across the Garden State. Some of the biggest names and highest office holders in New Jersey have benefited from his tricks, according to campaign records The Post reviewed.

"'An election that is swayed by 500 votes, 1,000 votes -- it can make a difference,' the tipster said. 'It could be enough to flip states.'

"The whisteblower -- whose identity, rap sheet and long history working as a consultant to various campaigns were confirmed by The Post says he not only changed ballots himself over the years, but led teams of fraudsters and mentored at least 20 operatives in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania -- a critical 2020 swing state."

Read entire article here.

"I don't pretend to know what will happen in November. No one who lived through 2016 should be confident in their predictions. I have a profound fear of what is happening to my country, however. All of a sudden, legitimate concerns about racial equity and social justice are transmuted into justifications for vandalism, theft, violence, cancellation, and ostracization. Random communities -- Kenosha, Wis., diners in Washington -- become sites of revolution, rebuke, and disorder. This cannot last. What Trump offers isn't so much the end of the chaos -- federalism and prudence circumscribe his sphere of action -- but at least a rhetorical and gestural rebuke of the idea that my country was originally, and fatally, diseased.

"It was not. I love my country, and the Constitution, and the principles that animated its Founders. And I don't think I'm alone. The Republican convention did a good job of demonstrating that white, black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans agree. What Donald Trump has done is reframe the 2020 election as a referendum on the American idea. And Joe Biden might not know how to answer."

"Dems made what I believe to be a historic error in failing to say a single word -- a single word -- about the national urban crisis during their convention last week. They said nothing about the violence and the tent cities of homeless popping up everywhere, yet embraced the Black Lives Matter movement, frequently criticized the police and romanced protestors as a new wave of selfless heroes.

"But what the nation is witnessing is not protest and it is certainly not heroic. It is a generational assault on America's founding principles and our modern way of life. Murder and arson do not bring about social justice.

"The country has noticed. Slowly but surely, the nation is awakening to the horror unfolding on television screens night after night and the fact that the Dems have been MIA in the battle for safety. ...

"The president has staked out a position as the defender of America, while Biden and his party appear to be on the side of the attackers. The result is a kind of fusion of Trump with the nation and the Dems with those who are hostile to it."

"Unemployed workers may soon get a bump of $300 or more in their weekly jobless benefits.

"What's more, it seems they won't have to apply for that extra pay -- it will come automatically.

"More than half the states have received federal approval to offer 'lost wages assistance,' created by an executive measure that President Donald Trump signed Aug. 8.

"The program directs federal disaster-relief funds to unemployed workers, following the lapse of a $600-a-week federal supplement to unemployment benefits at the end of July. That prior subsidy had been enacted by the CARES Act in March.

"Workers eligible for the aid will get an extra $300 a week on top of their current benefits. Some states, like Kentucky and Montana, are kicking in an extra $100 a week from a federal coronavirus relief fund, for a total $400."