#Trump cleaned Biden’s clock and other commentary

Conservative: Trump Cleaned Biden’s Clock

Thursday’s debate may have seemed like a draw, but a closer look, argues Marc Thiessen at The Washington Post, shows that President Trump “cleaned [Joe] Biden’s clock.” Trump was the only candidate to damage his opponent with a key constituency: black voters. He “successfully reminded” them of “Biden’s role in the mass incarceration of African Americans — and how Biden failed, and Trump succeeded, in passing criminal-justice reform to end it.” Biden’s “feeble” excuse: He had a Republican Congress. “Sorry,” says Thiessen, but when Biden and President Obama took office, “Democrats controlled both houses of Congress” and had “a 60-vote-filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate for parts of 2009 and 2010.” That exchange in the debate “could have a lasting impact on Election Day.”

Legal beat: Joe’s Latest Court-Packing Dodge

After weeks of hedging on court-packing, “the single most radical and destructive proposal on the table this election,” Joe Biden finally gave . . . another “non-answer,” complains National Review’s Dan McLaughlin: He promises a bipartisan commission “to kick the can down the road for the first six months of his term,” doing whatever it takes to avoid taking a stand before the election. Some hope this “signals a retreat, given that bipartisan commissions rarely result” in radical proposals becoming law. But with Kamala Harris as vice president, nothing is off the table. “The best way for conservatives to stop court-packing, even if the Democrats take the White House, is to hold the Senate — and begin building public support for a permanent constitutional safeguard.”

From the right: Wake-Up Call for Oil States

At the end of the 90-minute debate, when “whatever pharmaceutical additives he’d been given had begun to wear off,” Joe Biden admitted he that wants to destroy the oil and gas industry, Scott McKay points out at The American Spectator. That officially ends Biden’s “awkward dance” around the question, and voters in “oil- and gas-producing states” will notice. They’ll now have to ask themselves: “Are you willing to literally throw away your economic future so that Joe Biden’s Chinese pals can come and install solar panels out in the desert?” McKay predicts “every oil company doing business in swing states” will be on the air “outing Biden for declaring war on them” and on the “hundreds of thousands” of jobs they produce.

Urban desk: A Failed No-Police Experiment

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, Minneapolis worked to replace its police force with “alternative ways of preventing crime” — but violence has surged, reports Paddy Hannam at Spiked, and eight residents have now sued the city council for “failing to provide adequate policing.” While the “privileged” push to defund the police, “society’s worst-off are the most likely to suffer.” City lawyers say the suit “lacks footing” because none of the residents has been personally shot. So the city will continue to cut police resources despite “an increase in violent crime.” Upshot: “In a post-police world, the wealthy will still be able to hire private security to keep them safe,” while “others will have no such recourse.”

Big Tech watch: The ‘Good Censor’ Delusion

Big Tech likes to think of itself as a good censor, able “to limit” users’ “behaving badly,” notes Niall Ferguson at Bloomberg Opinion. Yet “network platforms are now the public sphere.” And even though “fake news and extreme views” have become a real threat to national discourse, “half-hearted and ill-considered attempts by the companies to regulate themselves better have led to legitimate complaints that they are restricting free speech.” The only solution: make network platforms “legally liable for the content they host” and “impose the equivalent of First Amendment obligations.” In a reference to Rudyard Kipling’s comment about a harlot’s “power without responsibility,” Ferguson looks at the “overmighty role that Big Tech” plays and doesn’t “see good censors” but “big, bad harlots.”

— Compiled by Ashley Allen & Adam Brodsky