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Casey DeSantis, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R., Fla.), First Lady Jill Biden, and President Joe Biden in Fort Myers, Florida, on Wednesday.
Photo:
olivier douliery/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Some media reports suggested that the president’s Wednesday visit to Southwest Florida would be all about recovery efforts, but it didn’t take long for politics to intrude. Speaking in an area ravaged by Hurricane Ian, the president mentioned recent natural disasters in the country and then said:
I think the one thing this has finally ended is the discussion about whether or not there’s climate change and we should do something about it.
But a number of scientists in Mr. Biden’s government think the question of whether human-induced climate change is influencing hurricanes remains unanswered. And what kind of scientist would be for ending discussions about such phenomena, anyway? Closing off debate is more popular among politicians who lack confidence in their positions.
Some leftists on social media are cheering the president for raising the climate issue while Gov.
Ron DeSantis
(R., Fla.), who also dissents from Mr. Biden’s beliefs, was stuck standing behind him. But this kind of sandbagging embarrasses only the president.
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Speaking of the governor, the Journal’s Mene Ukueberuwa wrote about Mr. DeSantis and his “Florida model” last week:
To a national audience that knows him mostly as a provocateur, the governor may seem to have been sobered by the storm… Yet many Floridians and out-of-state supporters have long recognized Mr. DeSantis’s disciplined focus on practical matters…
Chatter about Mr. DeSantis’s presidential prospects will intensify as the hurricane passes. The state’s recovery, and his role in it, will define his credibility as a potential candidate. Weather disasters are a challenge that any Florida governor accepts in advance, and Mr. DeSantis appears to have done so with gusto. If he gets it right, he’ll be much harder to write off as a mere provocateur.
Marc Caputo reports for NBC today:
Ahead in fundraising and advertising, Florida Gov Ron DeSantis has a large 11-percentage-point lead over Democratic challenger
Charlie Crist,
according to a new poll of likely voters.
DeSantis’s 52% to 41% advantage in the Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy survey comes as Floridians began receiving vote-by-mail ballots across the state as it recovers from the ravages of Hurricane Ian, which made landfall in the southwest of the peninsula and exited its northeast quadrant last week.
The poll was completed Sept. 28, just as the storm struck and after DeSantis received wall-to-wall media coverage ahead of the hurricane’s landfall.
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Washington Cuts Pay of Most U.S. Workers
Following a July news story in the Journal, economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas have published a report on inflation’s impact on American paychecks. The results aren’t pretty. In July the Journal’s Jon Hilsenrath and Rachel Wolfe reported:
Even though jobs are plentiful and unemployment very low, vast numbers of Americans find their cost of living is rising faster than the income they’re bringing home.
At the Dallas Fed, Robert Rich, Joseph Tracy and Mason Krohn now report:
How prevalent is this situation and how much is the shortfall? We find that a majority of employed workers’ real (inflation-adjusted) wages have failed to keep up with inflation in the past year. For these workers, the median decline in real wages is a little more than 8.5 percent. Taken together, these outcomes appear to be the most severe faced by employed workers over the past 25 years.
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After 2024, Upper House May Not Have Any Manchins
The wheels of political justice can turn slowly. But it may not take West Virginia voters all that long to render a verdict on Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin’s decision to join with Senate Majority Leader
Chuck Schumer
(D., N.Y.) in enacting the Biden spending splurge. Politico’s Burgess Everett notes that Senate Democrats face a challenging map in 2024 and reports:
After cutting a huge deal on climate, health care and taxes with Schumer, Manchin is now watching the 2022 elections before making a decision. Early polls show a tough slog in West Virginia, and the centrist is still seeking to finish the energy permitting bill he pushed for this year. Of his future, Manchin said: “What I do in 2024 has nothing to do with what I do right now.”
***
Two Papers in One!
This week
New York Times
readers may be struggling to understand what the paper’s editors are trying to tell them about an election software company.
In a story originally published Monday and since updated, Stuart Thompson reported for the Times:
At an invitation-only conference in August at a secret location southeast of Phoenix, a group of election deniers unspooled a new conspiracy theory about the 2020 presidential outcome.
Using threadbare evidence, or none at all, the group suggested that a small American election software company, Konnech, had secret ties to the Chinese Communist Party and had given the Chinese government backdoor access to personal data about two million poll workers in the United States, according to online accounts from several people at the conference.
In the ensuing weeks, the conspiracy theory grew as it shot around the internet.
Well, you know how unfounded rumors can spread on the Internet. But wait, there’s more from the Times. On Tuesday Mr. Thompson reported:
The top executive of an elections technology company that has been the focus of attention among election deniers was arrested by Los Angeles County officials in connection with an investigation into the possible theft of personal information about poll workers, the county said on Tuesday.
Eugene Yu, the founder and chief executive of Konnech, the technology company, was taken into custody on suspicion of theft, the Los Angeles County district attorney, George Gascón, said in a statement…
Mr. Gascón’s office said its investigators had found data stored in China. Holding the data there would violate Konnech’s contract with the county.
Mr. Yu deserves the presumption of innocence just like everybody else. It’s always possible that a defendant can be victimized by an overzealous prosecutor, although that’s usually not the first description that comes to mind when one thinks of Mr. Gascón. In any case, Mr. Thompson reports:
In a statement, a spokesman for Konnech said that the company was trying to learn the details “of what we believe to be Mr. Yu’s wrongful detention,” and that it stood by statements it made in a lawsuit against election deniers who had accused the company of wrongdoing.
“Any L.A. County poll worker data that Konnech may have possessed was provided to it by L.A. County and therefore could not have been ‘stolen’ as suggested,” the spokesman said.
What are readers now to presume about the Times?
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James Freeman is the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival.”
***
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(Teresa Vozzo helps compile Best of the Web.)
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