We’re in the last stretch of the 2024 campaign, Joe Rogan did a great interview with J. D. Vance, all sorts of sketchy voting problems surface, IDF dirtnaps another Hamas terrorist scumbbag, Nvidia replaces Intel, and influencers prioritize selfies over survival. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Joe Rogan did a really great interview with J.D. Vance. The Trump interview was good, but Trump did his usual looping and weaving thing. Vance comes across as not only smart and confident, but seems (unlike Kamala Harris) extremely comfortable in his own skin.
A large number of suspicious voter registration applications were dropped off at the county elections office near Monday’s deadline, county officials said. An investigation by the district attorney’s office found incorrect addresses, false identification information, false names and names that did not match Social Security information.
Shenanigans: “Kentucky County Clerk Confirms Voting Booth ‘Glitch’ Shifted Trump Votes To Kamala.”
A victory. “Supreme Court Allows Virginia to Remove Noncitizens from Voter Rolls before Election.”
We’ve passed the peak of woke politics in the U.S., and the Harris for president campaign is the leading indicator.
Of all the things that Kamala Harris wants you to know about her — that she grew up in a middle-class family, that she’s not Joe Biden, that she has a “to-do list” for the American people — perhaps foremost among them is that she’s not woke.
She doesn’t have any rote line asserting this, but achieving distance from the fashionable left-wing politics that defined the Trump years and their immediate aftermath motivates much of what she says and does.
That Harris now feels compelled to disavow so many of the ideas that she once embraced is powerful testament to their political toxicity.
An idea has won or lost in American politics when both parties favor or oppose it, or simply don’t want to fight over it anymore. Ronald Regan’s economics truly prevailed when the Democratic Party, via Bill Clinton in the early 1990s, accepted his basic approach. Gay marriage won politically when Republicans decided to stop talking about the issue.
By this standard, woke attitudes and policies are in marked decline, and Kamala Harris is Exhibit A.
Except for her abortion radicalism, she’s turned her back on much of what she once professed to believe or sympathize with.
Defund the police? Absolutely not.
Abolish ICE? No way.
DEI? Haven’t heard of it.
Medicare for all? That was a long time ago.
The Green New Deal? Let’s not get carried away.
She has backed off her extravagant positions on the trans issue and the border. She now insists that rather than pushing the envelope on either, she simply wants to follow the law. You could be forgiven for thinking the only pronouns she knows are she/her and he/him.
Harris doesn’t bring up identity politics at all. Not only does she not talk about the once-ubiquitous concepts of white privilege or “equity,” she doesn’t even talk about breaking the glass ceiling or the history-making nature of her candidacy. Listening to her campaign, you’d have no idea that the twin -isms, racism and sexism, have been consuming obsessions of the Left for years now.
But if she gets elected, just like Obama, she’ll abandon all of her moderate positions and rush back to her radical roots.
Former President Donald Trump says that if reelected, he’ll create a government efficiency task force — and that Elon Musk has already agreed to lead it. During a speech in New York on Thursday, Trump said the new efficiency commission would conduct a “complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government” and make recommendations for “drastic reforms.”
I hope Musk gets out a big axe and that the Trump Administration actually balances the budget. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
The Green New Scam is dying. Color me skeptical as long as there’s graft to rake off…
Who watches the watchmen? “Eagle Pass Detective Sentenced to 10 Years for Hiding Illegal Aliens in Rental Properties. Hazel Eileen Diaz ran stash houses for a human smuggling organization.”
The IDF eliminated Hamas’s National Relations head Izz al-Din Kassab on Friday in Khan Yunis, Gaza, who was also one of the last remaining members of the terrorist organization’s political bureau still inside the Palestinian enclave.
The strike that killed Kassab was completed based on IDF and ISA intelligence. His assistant Ayman Ayesh was also killed in the strike.
He was also responsible for Hamas’s relations and cooperation, whether strategic or military, with other terrorist organizations within the Gaza Strip such as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
The rise and fall of China’s “mistress villages.” Bonus: The Hong Kong businessmen who used to keep mistresses in Shinjin are now evidently buying houses for a new generation of them in the Rowland Heights area of Los Angeles…
Rapper and big money Cook County Democratic Party donator Lil Durk, AKA Durk Devontay Banks, has been arrested in a murder-for-hire scheme against a fellow rapper. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Records show the investment arm of two major Texas universities bought shares in more than 50 Chinese companies.
On September 23, the American Accountability Foundation exposed how the University of Texas/Texas A&M Investment Management Company’s asset managers advanced leftist ideology through their shareholder resolutions.
On October 17, UTIMCO President and CEO Richard Hall told state senators that he was “not happy with those votes” and the firm “would do better.”
However, a deeper dive into the records AAF acquired also revealed concerning investments. According to records, UTIMCO has invested money in Chinese companies.
UTIMCO allocated some of its assets to the following entities: Connor, Clark & Lunn Investment Management, JP Morgan Asset Management, and Acadian Asset Management. The three asset managers participated in shareholder votes in China-based companies, revealing the UTIMCO investments in these businesses.
In October 2023, Connor, Clark & Lunn participated in a shareholder vote for Topsec Technologies Group, a China-based cyber security company. Reuters reported that Topsec provides “network security products, big data products, and cloud services to customers in various industries such as government, finance, operators, energy, health, education, transportation, and manufacturing.”
There were shareholder votes for Huaneng Power International, Inc., a power company that boasts of being “one of the largest listed power producers” in China. Their parent company is China Huaneng Group Co., Ltd., which owns more than 50 percent of HPI shares. According to their website, the company is “a key state-owned company established with the approval of the [China] State Council.”
In December 2023, the management company Connor, Clark & Lunn Investment Management voted 19 times for electing various individuals as directors or supervisors of the Chinese company.
Snip.
AAF records showed other investments into China by UTIMCO fund managers, including BOE Technology Group Co., Ltd., Haier Smart Home Co., Ltd., Opple Lighting Co., Ltd., and LONGi Green Energy Technology Co., Ltd.
A million-dollar cheating ring resulted in at least 210 unqualified teachers, including two sexual predators, receiving teacher certifications. The ring was exposed this week after the Harris County District Attorney’s Office filed charges against five individuals involved.
The alleged ringleader is Vincent Grayson, the head boys basketball coach at Houston’s Booker T. Washington High School.
Also charged are Tywana Gilford Mason, the teacher certification test proctor; Nicholas Newton, an assistant principal who served as the proxy test-taker; Darian Nikole Wilhite, another proctor; and LaShonda Roberts, an assistant principal at Yates High School who helped recruit would-be teachers.
All are charged with two counts of engaging in organized criminal activity.
Allegedly, candidates seeking certification would pay Grayson $2,500. He would then give a 20 percent portion to Gilford Mason, who would then allow Newton to sit for the test under the teacher’s name. The candidates would be given a testing time and location by Gilford Mason, then show up, sign in, and leave. Newton would then arrive and take the test for them.
And now the unqualified teachers who got in on this scheme are out there teaching children…
Sony shuts down studio that released disastrous $400 million woke shooter Concord.
Big news for your portfolio: “Nvidia To Replace Intel In The Dow Jones Industrial Average.” Nvidia has certainly been on a tear as of late, but if Intel hadn’t screwed up their sub 10nm process, this wouldn’t be happening.
It would take a heart of stone not to laugh. “These influencers refused to wear life jackets on a yacht because it would ruin their selfies. They drowned when their boat sank.”
Happy Friday the 13th! Harris continues to slip behind Trump despite (because?) of their debate on the network of her Best Friend Forever, Haitian immigrants in Ohio accused of eating roof rabbit, Texas blasts Biden Administration overreach (again), Conor McGregor steps into a different kind of ring, a worse than usual remake idea, and American cats meet a variety of grisly ends.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
You know that Harris bounce? Nate Silver says not so much. “I’d also note that Harris’s raw polling averages have DECLINED in most swing states since the start of the DNC. This data is NOT subject to the convention bounce adjustment. She’s had a run of pretty mediocre state polling.”
It’s not surprising that the snap polling, including by groups that conservatives trust, like Trafalgar, is showing that Harris “won” the debate. And I think that’s true. She was more polished, more prepared; she had her canned barbs. But there’s something strange going on here. While she won the debate, Democrats always come across in snap polling as winning the debates. I saw people sharing on X the history of snap polling after debates with Donald Trump, first with Hillary and then with Biden. In every one of those debates—six in total—clear majorities said that Trump lost the debate. I’m not sure what to read into that.
So, it was anger at the moderators, frustration that Trump wasn’t making a lot of the points I thought he could have made, but he was being Trump. And I’ve misjudged his appeal to voters and his electoral success so many times, so it is what it is.
But there’s something else I took away from this—and it’s showing on the screen just to the side of me here. One thing I really noticed throughout was the faces that Harris was making—very condescending, very mocking, very childish, actually. I think that’s the one thing I remember more than anything about the debate.
Now, I think Trump did a very good job, even though he didn’t make the points I thought he could have, like showing how she flip-flopped. He hit hard on the border and the economy, and I think that may have a lasting impact.
What’s showing up in the focus groups—ones I’ve seen not by right-wing groups, but CNN, Reuters, NBC—there seems to be a disconnect between who they think won the debate and how they’re reacting substantively.
Trafalgar was consistent with the others, showing a 15-point win for Harris in terms of who won the debate, but no movement in who people were going to vote for. CNN was interesting—they had an even larger, 20-plus-point win for Harris, but found that on the key issue—voters’ most important issue—the economy, Trump actually improved over pre-debate polling. Similar findings came from Reuters and NBC.
Dana Walden, a senior Disney executive whose portfolio includes ABC News, is one of Vice President Kamala Harris’ “extraordinary friends,” according to a report in the New York Times.
Walden and Harris have known each other since 1994, while their husbands, Matt Walden and Doug Emhoff, have known each other since the 1980s.
Dana Walden has donated to dozens of Democrats and contributed to Harris’ political campaigns since at least 2003, when she ran for district attorney in San Francisco.
While the legacy media has yet to find any evidence of pet consumption that it’s willing to accept, there are some much larger issues regarding the crisis that has been created in Springfield through the importation of nearly 20,000 Haitian illegals.
Former Ohio State Representative Kyle Koehler has sounded a warning regarding the consequences that have followed the Biden administration’s policy that gave temporary protected status to more than 100,000 Haitian migrants, including those relocated to Springfield.
🚨🚨 BREAKING:
Former Ohio State Rep. Kyle Koehler (@repkoehler) has made SHOCKING revelations about the illegal Haitian crisis in Springfield, Ohio during a recent speech.
1.) The Haitian illegals in Ohio are given $600-$1600 per month on Debit Cards through the Refugee Cash… pic.twitter.com/aWDyVcx7b3
Among the concerns raised by Koehler are the strain on the local school system with more than 1,600 non-English speaking students now enrolled and Haitian refugees who are 20 years old being placed Freshman High School classrooms with 13 year old kids.
Koehler also voiced concern over an individual who is renting his 63 homes to the relocated Haitians for as little as $250 per month, with 20-25 individuals living in each home.
Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) has also weighed in on the controversy, saying that he too has heard from Springfield residents complaining that pets and wildlife were being abducted and that health services are being severely strained by an influx of individuals with communicable diseases like TB and HIV.
The community of 60,000 residents is clearly facing serious issues related to the open border policies of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
When tales of Haitian immigrants eating cats emerged on social media this week, it suddenly focused attention on the city of Springfield, Ohio, but now we are learning there’s more to the story:
“Those 20,000 Haitians did not show up overnight or uninvited. Though flown in by the federal government, they were not forced on the city by the federal government. Elections have consequences. Springfield voted for this. They signaled their virtue, their signal was seen, and virtue arrived. This is what they wanted. This is what they got. They’ll have to deal with the consequences.”
(Hat-tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) Much commentary has focused on whether it’s true that pets are being killed and eaten by the Haitians, but that’s not really the point. The point is why Springfield became the destination for thousands of Haitians (who may or may not eat cats).
It’s a long story. First of all, you’ll find liberals insisting that these Haitians are not illegal immigrants. Research further, however, and you learn that most of them entered the country illegally, crossing the U.S.-Mexico border after making their way through Central America. After Haiti descended into its latest crisis, the Biden administration granted Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to all Haitians in the U.S., so you may say that they have been retroactively (but temporarily) “legalized.”
Now let’s talk about Springfield, which is a “blue” island of liberalism in a sea of Republican “red.” Ohio was once a battleground state, closely contested in every presidential election, and then Trump came along and the Buckeye State has now become a GOP stronghold. Springfield was a city of 58,662 residents before the Haitian influx, and the city sits in Clark County (population 136,000) which voted 61% for Trump in 2020.
You see that, if the Democrats can turn these Haitians into voters, they can make Clark County “blue,” and a similar calculus is being applied nationwide by the Biden administration’s immigration policy. Democrats insist that the “Great Replacement” is a right-wing conspiracy theory, but we can see them doing it — blatantly, deliberately, in front of our eyes — in places like Springfield. And this brings us to the late Warren Copeland.
For most of the past three decades, Copeland was the mayor of Springfield. He was a professor at Wittenberg University, a local institution affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Anyone who knows anything about the ELCA will tell you it is the pluperfect example of degenerate liberal Protestantism. “The ELCA has drifted so far into pagan goddess worship that to call it ‘Lutheranism’ is an insult to Luther; to call it ‘Christian’ is blasphemy,” as I wrote in 2016. Copeland was a radical obsessed with “social justice,” and the fact that Springfield repeatedly elected him as their mayor tells you something about the politics of the city. Indeed, Springfield eagerly welcomed the influx of Haitians. Read this article from December 2022:
A surge in the number of Springfield residents from Haiti has resulted in an outpouring of language assistance and additional forms of help from the Springfield City School District and others who are trying to meet their needs.
Social Justice destroys everything it touches.
Citizens have questions to City Council about vetting of Haitian refugees in Sylacauga, Alabama. City Council: “Meeting adjourned.”
For the first time in EU history, Germany is at the forefront of immigration suspension. Other EU countries will follow.
The Schengen Area…is an area encompassing 29 European countries that have officially abolished border controls at their mutual borders.
Reuters reports Germany Tightens Controls at All Borders in Immigration Crackdown.
Germany’s government announced plans to impose tighter controls at all of the country’s land borders in what it called an attempt to tackle irregular migration and protect the public from threats such as Islamist extremism.
The controls within what is normally a wide area of free movement – the European Schengen zone – will start on Sept. 16 and initially last for six months, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said on Monday.
The government has also designed a scheme enabling authorities to reject more migrants directly at German borders, Faeser said, without adding details on the controversial and legally fraught move.
The restrictions are part of a series of measures Germany has taken to toughen its stance on irregular migration in recent years following a surge in arrivals, in particular people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East.
Recent deadly knife attacks in which the suspects were asylum seekers have stoked concerns over immigration. The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for a knife attack in the western city of Solingen that killed three people in August.
Polls show it is also voters’ top concern in the state of Brandenburg, which is set to hold elections in two weeks.
Scholz and Faeser’s centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) are fighting to retain control of the government there, in a vote billed as a test of strength of the SPD ahead of next year’s federal election.
“The intention of the government seems to be to show symbolically to Germans and potential migrants that the latter are no longer wanted here,” said Marcus Engler at the German Centre for Integration and Migration Research.
Seems like Germans are getting tired of all that vibrant raping and stabbing diversity…
On Wednesday, a federal court ruled in favor of Elon Musk’s X Corp in its case challenging California’s content moderation laws, citing free speech violations. X Corp filed a lawsuit to block the controversial law, which took effect on January 1, 2024.
The legislation requires social media companies to disclose details of their content moderation policies to the state or face civil penalties.
The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco overturned a previous lower court’s decision that ruled against pausing enforcement of the state law. The panel of three judges decided the law facially violated the First Amendment, Reuters reported.
“X Corp. is likely to succeed in showing that the Content Category Report provisions facially violate the First Amendment,” Judge Milan D. Smith, Jr. wrote in his case opinion.
In the complaint filed in Sept. 2023, X Corporation argued that Assembly Bill 587 violates the company’s First Amendment rights because it pressures “companies such as X Corp. to remove, demonetize, or deprioritize constitutionally-protected speech that the State deems undesirable or harmful” which “interferes with the constitutionally-protected editorial judgments” of the company.
For free speech advocates, we often feel that other citizens have become passive observers as an anti-free speech movement grows around us, threatening our “indispensable right.”
One of the most infamous figures in this movement has been former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has long been the smiling face of censorship. As the head of the Labour Party, Blair pushed through some of the early crackdowns on free speech in the United Kingdom. He is now calling for global censorship to expand these efforts.
In an interview on LBC Radio, Blair declared:
“The world is going to have to come together and agree on some rules around social media platforms. It’s not just how people can provoke hostility and hatred but I think… the impact on young people particularly when they’ve got access to mobile phones very young and they are reading a whole lot of stuff and receiving a whole lot of stuff that I think is really messing with their minds in a big way.”
Remember, when the want to crackdown on “misinformation,” the sort of things they want to ban are opinions contrary to their social justice agenda. Such as “the Chinese coronavirus came from a lab” or “there are only two biological sexes.”
More of that voting fraud Democrats swear doesn’t exist. “Illegal Alien Charged With Stealing U.S. Citizen’s Identity to Vote in Elections. She voted in the 2016 and 2020 primaries and general elections.”
The Biden Administration wants Texas to cede Fronton Island to federal control. Texas Governor Greg Abbott told them to get stuffed.
I am in receipt of a letter from the U.S. section of the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) to the Texas General Land Office (GLO) … given that it concerns actions taken under Operation Lone Star to secure Texas’ southern border around Fronton Island against the ongoing invasion of Texas by transnational criminal cartels — a crisis created and incentivized by your Administration,” Abbott wrote.
Abbott added that the letter “alleges that GLO has altered the flow of the Rio Grande by engaging in activities on Fronton Island without USIBWC’s approval.”
“It also alleges that [the] GLO trespassed on federal land in the process of facilitating cleanup and security efforts on the Island … That agency responded in a letter … detailing that GLO has not engaged in construction activities at all, and, in any event, Fronton Island is state-owned land.”
Abbott then responded to the United States Section of the International Boundary and Water Commissioner Maria-Elena Giner’s request that Fronton Island be returned to its pre-construction conditions: “You are either unaware of, or indifferent to, what those ‘pre-construction conditions’ were.”
Before Texas secured Fronton Island, Abbott wrote, “[T]ransnational criminal cartels had assumed practical control of the densely vegetated Island and used it to terrorize Texas communities.”
He recounted occasions when authorities found the criminal cartels to be using the “thick vegetation” to “stash weapons, plant explosives, evade apprehension, and engage in open warfare against rival cartels and against state and federal officers.”
“Are you aware that your appointee is asking Texas to return grenades and rocket launchers along with IEDs to the Island?” he asked the Biden administration.
Abbott continued, “Your open-border policies have allowed an invasion at the southern border and incentivized criminal activity that threatens the lives of Texas law enforcement, soldiers, and citizens.”
“Yet … the federal government has refused to enforce federal laws — even in dangerous areas like Fronton Island.”
“I determined that Texas could not ignore an ongoing invasion of its sovereign territory,” Abbott said of his decision on October 5, 2023 to move a “heavily armed invasion force” onto Fronton Island.
He then addressed USIBWC’s complaint that Texas had built “two sediment bridges.”
“Your Administration’s letter betrays a basic misunderstanding of facts on the ground, and its claims are unsupported by either science or common sense.”
Dwight has been sending me tidbits on the ongoing meltdown among government officials in New York City following FBI raids. Like this: “Paranoid police officials meeting in parking lots as fed raids leave NYPD, City Hall in shock.” “Law enforcement sources telling The Post that they’re afraid NYPD headquarters is bugged and their words are being recorded.” Plus New York City Mayor Eric Adams evidently has several burner phones, which is both highly suspicious and probably justified. And since Adams is reportedly using the messaging app Signal, presumably they’re modern Android or iPhones, which are: A.) More expensive than classic burner phones, and B.) Probably not conducive to quick SIM card swaps, ala Stringer Bell on The Wire.
Anyway, NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban just resigned.
Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori dead at 86. Fujimori revived Peru’s economy and destroyed the Maoist Shining Path guerillas, but in the end he too fell prey to Peru’s long history of government abuse of power and corruption. In the end, he too was corrupt and committed human rights abuses…and was still arguably the most successful (and important) President in Peru’s troubled history.
“The head of the UN wants to create a fake bank that will circumvent EU and US sanctions against Russian banks.”
Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham pushed back against a Biden-Harris administration proposal to “lease nearly 150,000 offshore acres to an energy company (Hecate Energy) with no experience in wind projects.” But it’s easy to understand why the Biden Administration wants to hand the assignment to Hecate: They donate lots of money to Democrats.
Alan Dershowitz announces he’s leaving the Democratic Party over its “anti-Jewish, anti-Israel, anti-Zionist convention.” One wonders what took him so long.
Remember Taral Patel the Ft. Bend democrat who faked hate crimes against himself? Now he’s facing even more felony charges. “Last week a grand jury indicted him on four felony counts of Online Impersonation and four misdemeanor charges including Online Impersonation and Misrepresentation of Identity with intent to ‘harm.'”
Self-cleaning litter box has the unfortunate downside of killing your cat.
Rick Beato interviews bassist Tony Levin of Peter Gabriel and King Crimson fame. It’s an interesting interview, especially the part about how he sold all his stuff to go on tour with Buddy Rich, only to find out that Rich’s old bassist had agreed to come back, so he was out of a job…
“Optronic Technologies, Inc., better known to backyard astronomers as the parent company of both Orion Telescopes & Binoculars and Meade Instruments, has shut its offices and storefront in Watsonville, California.” Actual manufacturing was done in Tijuana, so I’m not sure how much California’s new minimum wage law had an effect.
There are rumors that Barbie director Greta Gerwig wants to make an all female Fight Club remake. That’s about as good an idea as an all-male reboot of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.
Comedian Kevin Hart’s chain of vegetarian restaurants in LA closed down. 1. How’s that minimum wage working out for you, California? 2. Vegetarian restaurants aren’t even profitable in LA. 3. Stick to comedy. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
More signs of the Biden Recession, the DOJ wants to put its thumb on the scale against Trump again, more Secret Service incompetence comes to light, more Kamala cringe, a bunch of lawsuit news, and a metric ton of Babylon Bee links. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
I keep thinking I’ll keep the LinkSwarms to shorter lengths, and the world continues not to cooperate.
The start of the third quarter saw a deterioration in business conditions at US manufacturers as new orders declined for the first time in three months, according to S&P Global.
This makes sense as we have seen ‘hard’ US macro data serially disappoint for three months.
S&P Global US Manufacturing PMI falls to 49.6 in July, dropping into contraction for the first time since Dec 2023.
ISM Manufacturing PMI plunged to 46.8 (48.8 exp) – weakest since Nov 2023 (near post-COVID lockdown lows)
The FBI is going to resume its coordination with social-media companies on content moderation ahead of the 2024 election, after the Supreme Court dealt a blow to free-speech advocates who argue the federal government’s close cooperation with Big Tech firms violates the First Amendment.
According to a Department of Justice memo drafted earlier this month, the FBI “will resume regular meetings in the coming weeks with social media companies to brief and discuss potential [Foreign Malign Influence] threats involving the companies’ platforms.”
By “Foreign Malign Influence,” what they mean, of course, is “the possibility of a Trump victory.”
The memo is featured in a report from DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz on the effectiveness of the department’s information-sharing system for monitoring foreign threats to U.S. elections. National Review has reached out to the FBI for comment on the memo.
Horowitz recommended the DOJ increase its transparency around the policies it put in place to ensure information sharing does not trample on the First Amendment, and to ensure the coordination strategy evolves to keep up with ever-changing foreign threats. The report’s appendix says both of the recommendations have been taken up by the DOJ, and requests documentation of the FBI’s outreach to social-media companies over the coming months.
The FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) and local offices will be tasked with building relationships with social-media companies in areas under the purview of various FBI field offices. As part of this outreach strategy, FBI officials are being instructed to make companies aware of the new standard operating procedure for monitoring suspected foreign influence operations online.
I’m so old that I remember when the primary duty of the FBi was to solve crimes, not to aid the Democratic Party…
Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe was directly involved in denying additional security resources and personnel, including counter snipers, to former President Trump’s rallies and events – despite repeated requests by the agents assigned to Trump’s detail in the two years leading up to his July 13 attempted assassination, according to several sources familiar with the decision-making.
Rowe succeeded former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, who resigned last week after bipartisan calls following her widely panned testimony before the House Oversight Committee. But both Rowe and Cheatle were directly involved in decisions denying requests for more magnetometers, additional agents, and other resources to help screen rallygoers at large, outdoor Trump campaign gatherings.
It was Rowe’s decision alone to deny counter sniper teams to any Trump event outside of driving distance from D.C., these sources asserted.
Criminal negligence all the way down:
🚨🚨🚨 EXCLUSIVE: A Secret Service counter sniper sent an email Monday night to the entire Uniformed Division (not agents) saying he will not stop speaking out until "5 high-level supervisors (1 down) are either fired or removed from their current positions." The counter sniper… pic.twitter.com/0dg99EESQk
The Democratic Party ruling class’s bloodless coup of their own democratically elected presidential nominee, who also happens to be the nominal sitting president of the United States, is one of the most astonishing political developments of my lifetime. Joe Biden, though clearly physically and mentally impaired, has sought the presidency for quite literally longer than I have been alive. Biden had been defiant ever since the June 27 presidential debate debacle that he was not going anywhere, despite overwhelming pressure from party elites and sycophantic media lapdogs demanding he do precisely that. He has a Lady Macbeth-like wife who craves power, and he has a felonious son in desperate need of a presidential pardon.
Yet the coup succeeded. Biden became the first incumbent president to not seek reelection after his first term since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. Biden made the much-anticipated announcement—not with a solemn Oval Office address—three days later, and he didn’t even explain his decision. Rather, he issued a bedridden tweet from a personal, not even official, account. It’s the equivalent of divorcing your wife over text message. As if that weren’t crazy enough, the announcement came smack in the middle of a five-day period in which Biden was not publicly seen and during which he apparently experienced an unspecified medical emergency. Suspicious much?
The Democrats’ decision to coup their own president is a curious one, on the political merits.
Hold aside the galling hypocrisy of the purported party of “democracy” trying to remove former President Donald Trump from the ballot under an outlandish constitutional theory while simultaneously attempting to bankrupt, prosecute and incarcerate him on equally spurious grounds. Hold aside the self-proclaimed party of “democracy,” feigning ignorance over how its overheated rhetoric laid the seeds for their political opponent’s recent near-assassination and its continuing to depict that opponent as an existential threat to the American constitutional order. And hold aside that purportedly “democratic” party deposing its own presumptive elected nominee—a stark reversal from its presidential primary, when party poobahs worked hard to shut out all viable competition. Somewhere in Minnesota, Dean Phillips would like a word.
Hold all that aside. Because even on its own terms, the coup of Biden for cackler-in-chief Kamala Harris is going to spectacularly backfire on the Democrats.
Already, Democrats and the corporate media have been working hard to “define” Harris for the American people. At times, this has included some rather dubious retconning, such as magically pretending she wasn’t the Biden administration’s appointed “border czar.” (She was.) But the even bigger problem for Democrats is that Harris is not an unknown commodity. On the contrary, she is a very well-known commodity—one who just happens to be about as popular with the American public as venereal disease.
Harris’ current average approval rating is under 38%, and an NBC News poll last June found her to be the single least popular vice president in American history—only 32% of Americans had a positive view of her, putting her 17 points underwater. Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign was an absolute dud, self-imploding well before the first primary votes were cast. And as recently as a month or two ago, Democratic elites were openly discussing whether she could still be dropped as Biden’s 2024 running mate. Funny how quickly one can go from the weakest link to the great savior of “Our Democracy.”
Practically, the path to winning 270 Electoral College votes still runs through the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. It is frankly bizarre for Democrats to swap out the man who talks ceaselessly about his hardscrabble Scranton upbringing for a Californian who boasts the most left-wing voting record of any presidential nominee in modern history. Do Democrats really think Harris’ support for the Green New Deal and a national fracking ban will play well in the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania or in the auto factories of Detroit? Will white working- and middle-class voters concerned about skyrocketing crime look favorably upon Harris’ enthusiastic support for the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, which racked up $2 billion worth of property damage?
Tucson-based World View, cofounded by now-U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly in 2012, received venture capital from Tencent — among the largest tech companies in China — both in 2013 and 2016. Tencent, like most Chinese tech giants, has close ties to the Chinese Communist Party….
Spy balloons partially funded by ChiComm ties? Like, how is this considered a totally normal business for a Senator to be in?
Not sure how much you can trust Seymour Hersh, but he says that Obama is the one who finally pushed Slow Joe out, threatening to invoke the 25th Amendment on him. He also says Obama is pulling Kamala’s strings. So there’s that.
Early in the morning, the FBI raided the home of Linda Sun, a former official for Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration. Sun served as Hochul’s deputy chief of staff for a year. Before that, she was the deputy superintendent for intergovernmental affairs and chief diversity officer under disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo. The federal officers searched the $3.5 million home, which resides in the exclusive neighborhood of North Shore.
That’s on top of a raid aimed at Winnie Greco, a top aide to New York Mayor Eric Adams.
While the left is trying it’s hardest to recast Kamala Harris as a moderate Democrat – quietly scrubbing her public record over the past 5 years – her actual positions have always been radical.
For starters, she’s on record wanting to abolish ICE (which she compared to the KKK), letting criminals like the Boston Marathon bomber and rapists vote, ban fracking and offshore drilling, defund the police, provide US taxpayer subsidized healthcare to illegals, and ban private health insurance.
Meanwhile, during 2020 Democratic primary debate Harris said that if elected president, she would “ban by executive order the importation of assault weapons.”
She also said she would reinstate Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status and DACA protection for illegal immigrants, and end other Trump-era immigration policies.
And in multiple speeches and interviews, Harris insisted America needed racial ‘equity’ as well as ‘equality.’ In other words, she endorses ‘equality of outcomes’ over ‘equality of opportunity.’
As The Federalist pointed out on Tuesday:
She Supported Bailing Out 2020 Rioters
Accused rapists, repeat offenders, and rioters alike benefitted in June 2020 when Harris encouraged her social media followers to donate to a bail fund dedicated to those arrested for their months-long, $2 billion siege of cities like Minneapolis. The vice president later lied about her involvement in the money-raising scheme.
She Put Other Countries’ Borders Before Her Own
Harris traveled thousands of miles away from the U.S. border invasion she was tasked with handling to deliver “peace and security” to the borders of Ukraine, which “is a country.”
She Proudly Enabled the Jussie Smollett Race Hoax
Harris called the staged hate crime an “attempted modern-day lynching.” She did not apologize even after Smollett was found guilty of felony disorderly conduct and making false police reports.
She Sponsored Legislation That Would Codify Abortion Through All Nine Months
As a senator, Harris was a proud co-sponsor of the original version of the “Women’s Health Protection Act,” which sought to codify abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.
She’s Openly Anti-Catholic
As a senator in 2018, Harris smeared Brian Buescher, a nominee for the U.S. District Court in Nebraska, for his affiliation with the famous Catholic fraternal organization Knights of Columbus and its historically pro-life views.
Flip, meet flop, as Kamala Harris tries to walk back all her radical positions.
In 2019, Kamala Harris was rated the ‘most liberal’ Senator in a now-scrubbed rating from GovTrack. She’s on record wanting to abolish ICE (which she compared to the KKK), letting criminals like the Boston Marathon bomber and rapists vote, banning fracking and offshore drilling, defunding the police, providing US taxpayer subsidized healthcare to illegals, and banning private health insurance.
According to the NY Times, “video clips of her old statements and interviews are being weaponized as Republicans aim to define her as a left-wing radical who is out of step with swing voters.”
“The archive is deep,” said Brad Todd, a Republican strategist and ad maker who is working with David McCormick, the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, among other campaigns. “We will run out of time before we run out of video clips of Kamala Harris saying wacky California liberal things. I’m just not sure that the rest of this campaign includes much besides that.”
To that end, McCormick’s campaign has produced one of the first TV ads to attack Harris on her longstanding positions.
Yet, according to the Times, nevermind all that- Harris is now a reformed moderate – and has suddenly reversed course on virtually all of her most radical views.
On Friday, the Harris campaign announced that she no longer wants to ban fracking – a ‘significant shift’ from where she stood four years ago. She’s also reversed course on funding for border enforcement, no longer supports a single-payer health insurance program, and has walked back liberal fever dreams of a mandatory gun buyback.
She is no longer pushing for a single-payer health care system, and on Friday her campaign said she would maintain Mr. Biden’s pledge not to raise income taxes on people making less than $400,000 per year. -NYT
Packing the Court? Nah…
On Monday, as Mr. Biden prepared a speech in Texas calling for term limits and ethics guidelines for Supreme Court justices, the Trump campaign resurfaced statements Ms. Harris made in 2019 saying she was “open to this conversation” about expanding the Supreme Court. Ms. Harris, in a statement released by her campaign, endorsed Mr. Biden’s proposal, which does not call for adding additional justices to the court.
According to Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a moderate Democratic think tank, Harris has ‘evolved’ into a Biden style centrist (if centrism is defined as letting 20+ million illegals into the country and cooking Americans with inflation).
“There’s a tremendous difference in changing one’s policy ideas and changing one’s principles,” said Bennett. “She has not changed her principles. She still thinks climate change is an existential threat — she just doesn’t think the Green New Deal is the way to address it.”
Sure Matt.
The Times also hints that Harris is essentially an idiot who didn’t really understand her own positions while running for president in 2020.
…during that race, Ms. Harris also often appeared as if she were not sure what she believed. In a CNN town-hall event the day after what was widely viewed as a successful campaign rollout in Oakland, Calif., she appeared tentative while discussing health care policy, eventually saying she would eliminate private health insurance and institute a single-payer health care program.
She would go on to propose an array of policies popular with progressives. She sought to increase pay for public-school teachers by an average of $13,500 through a bump in the estate tax.
She also called for an assault weapons ban and said she would sign an executive order mandating background checks for customers of any dealer who sold more than five guns in a year.
Minnesota governor Tim Walz is on the short list to be Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate. This is almost laughable when you look at Walz’s record running the state government, which somehow manages to combine the honesty of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, the competence of former Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco, and the sharp-eyed ethical-watchdog instincts of soon-to-be-former New Jersey senator Bob Menendez. A whole lot of shady and unethical people in Minnesota see the state government as a giant pile of money just waiting to be taken, with a sleepy guard in the form of the governor.
“J. D. Vance is weird.” Yeah, the modern Democratic Party is the last set of people who should be accusing others of weirdness…
“Did the Israelis just take out two key leaders in Iran’s proxy armies? Just hours after announcing that a strike in Beirut killed Hezbollah’s top military commander, the Iranian state media announced that Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh had been “martyred” in Tehran. Haniyeh had just arrived there to meet the newly elected president.” Reports say he stayed in the same room in the same complex every time he visited, so Israel managed to sneak a bomb under his bed several months ago…
“Canada’s standard of living is on track for its worst decline in 40 years, according to a new study by Canada’s Fraser Institute. The study compared the three worst periods of decline in Canada in the last 40 years – the 1989 recession, the 2008 global financial crisis, and this post-pandemic era. They found that, unlike the previous recessions, Canada is not recovering this time. Something broke. In fact, according to the Financial Post, since 2019 Canada’s had the worst growth out of 50 developed economies. Inflation-adjusted Canadian wages have been flat since 2016.” That’s what happens when you elect socialist asshats like Justin Trudeau.
Like the electoral blowout feared by national Democrats with Biden at the top of the ticket, Phelan’s abysmal record of the Texas House under his mismanagement resulted in a political disaster; more incumbent Republicans lost their primary re-election campaigns than any time in modern history.
Phelan himself is damaged goods, politically. He outspent his primary opponent by a 5-to-1 margin yet garnered a “win” of less than 700 votes in a race that saw a couple of thousand Democrats flip primaries, clearly to “help” him.
Everyone in the House knows that their defeated colleagues earned challengers because Phelan made them vulnerable… and then left them to go down in defeat.
But he is, for now, still the speaker… in name, anyway.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick was publicly done with Phelan more than a year ago after the speaker and his cronies sent a deeply flawed, legally problematic, and factually vacuous “impeachment” of Attorney General Ken Paxton to be sorted out by the Senate.
The Democratic Party’s social justice agenda in action: “At least eleven transgender-identifying male felons are currently housed at a formerly women-only prison in Washington State. Many of them committed violent crimes against women and children before they entered the Washington Corrections Center for Women (WCCW), colloquially known as ‘Purdy.'”
Speaking of which, the NFL’s $4.7 billion antitrust judgement was just overturned. “The jury’s damages verdict was otherwise unsupported by the evidence.”
“A Bakersfield College professor who was investigated and disciplined after he questioned the use of grant money to fund social justice initiatives at his school has agreed to a $2.4 million settlement to resolve his lawsuit.” Keep hitting them in the pocketbook…
Bungie games, of Destiny and Halo fame, just laid off a bunch of staff. Official line says 17% of the company, but elsewhere I’m hearing the true total is closer to 40%. Microsoft bought then spun out Bungie, and Sony bought them in 2022.
There’s so much Trump news this week that I need to do a separate roundup or the LinkSwarm will end being bigger than Hunter’s coke habit.
A whole lot of things about how would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks came so close to succeeding don’t seem to be adding up. Like cops knowing about Crooks nearly half an hour before he tried to assassinate President Trump.
A team of snipers were inside the building where Donald Trump’s would-be assassin climbed onto the roof and opened fire after being spotted 26 minutes earlier, bombshell new reports claim.
Cops at the scene noticed Crooks, 20, clambering into place in plain sight just 130 yards away from the rally stage and took two photos of him because he was acting suspiciously, sources told WPXI.
Meanwhile a counter-sniper team was inside the building that was being used as a ‘watch post’ during the event when Crooks pulled the trigger, The New York Post reported.
It’s not clear if he had the AR-style rifle on him when he was first seen scaling the AGR International Inc. factory or if he stayed on the roof for the whole time.
The shocking new allegations surfaced as authorities and the U.S. Secret Service face mounting questions over how Crooks was able to shoot the former president and kill a member of the rally crowd.
A horrifying video shows witnesses pointing at the roof and shouting at officers trying to warn them. MAGA fans also say they alerted law enforcement to Crooks as he crawled to his shooting position, but he was still able to shoot.
5:10 p.m. Crooks was first identified as a person of interest
5:30 p.m. Crooks was spotted with a rangefinder
5:52 p.m. Crooks was spotted on the roof by Secret Service
6:02 p.m. Trump takes the stage
6:12 p.m. Crooks fires first shots
From the time Crooks fired his first shot to the gunman being killed was just 26 seconds, according to law enforcement officials. Eleven seconds after the first shot, Secret Service counter snipers acquired their target — and 15 seconds after that, Crooks was shot dead.
So the early summaries were wrong, and the Secret Service response was orders of magnitude worse than we initially believed. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
An officer even alerted people on a blanket tactical channel. Did the Secret Service have access to it? Were they just not listening?
A bold assertion: “Biden’s Team Deliberately Kneecapped Trump’s Security To Allow An Assassination Attempt.”
Nobody wants to hear this because of the implications, but oh well, because it needs to be said: Joe Biden’s security regime deliberately and with malice aforethought created the conditions that led to an attempted assassin shooting Donald Trump in the head. It is by the grace of God that he lived and our nation is not currently in the midst of a violent civil war.
They deliberately starved Trump’s security team of the resources it needed. And they did it repeatedly, over many weeks and months.
With Trump’s security detail understaffed, under-resourced, and stretched to its limits, Biden’s security regime reportedly diverted even more resources to a hastily planned Jill Biden event that just happened to be in the area.
Biden’s security regime then ordered the most obvious assassination perch in the entire area to remain outside the main security perimeter.
Furthermore, Biden’s Secret Service director ordered law enforcement and counter-snipers OFF the roof the assassin used.
If that weren’t enough, Biden’s security regime also refused to block the line of sight from the assassin’s perch to Trump’s location. When law enforcement radioed in a suspicious person using a laser range finder at the building and even took photos of him, nothing was done to detain the assassin.
The assassin was so obviously a threat that bystanders at the event begged law enforcement to stop him, but nothing happened. And even as snipers on the roof near Trump saw a gunman on the other roof, Biden’s security regime refused to have agents immediately surround Trump or remove him from the stage to protect him from being shot.
Given the lies and nonsense from both Biden’s Department of Homeland Security secretary and his Secret Service director, it’s increasingly difficult to believe this was just a series of independent mistakes (Secret Service director Kim Cheatle at one point this week claimed snipers couldn’t be on the roof because it was sloped and they might fall and hurt themselves). In contrast, when you look at the entire picture, what you see better resembles a deliberate plan to make Trump vulnerable but to appear at first glance to be just a couple of innocent mistakes.
And when you add in how little information we’ve been given about the shooter — apparently the only person on Earth not on the internet — you begin to wonder if maybe a group of people at a different three-letter agency might have been working on a parallel track to find and encourage people to take action against Trump at the very same time he was kept vulnerable by Biden’s regime.
We know this happens because the FBI did it with Gretchen Whitmer: It recruited and urged disturbed individuals to buy weapons and put together a plan to kidnap her. In that case, the FBI wanted a story it could use to slime right-wingers. So it created the story itself.
What happens when an agency like that, or maybe even another three-letter agency, decides instead that it’s had enough of Trump? Some former FBI employees might even call it an “insurance policy.”
Did the Biden Administration want Trump assassinated? That may be a bridge too far, but I think it’s fair to say that the Biden Administration didn’t go out of their way to ensure Trump’s safety. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Incompetence or malice?
There are basically four competing narratives or theories about what led to the assassination attempt against Donald Trump:
1) Through a combination of incompetence and innocent mistakes and garden-variety bureaucratic ineptitude, a gunman was able to penetrate security and take…
Sometimes the obvious answer is the answer: Evidently the shooter hated Trump.
A former classmate of the man who attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump recounted a heated political discussion with the shooter, according to Fox News.
Vincent Taormina told Fox News Digital in an interview posted Wednesday that the shooter, Thomas Michael Crooks, considered him “stupid” for supporting Trump. Trump was slightly wounded Saturday during the attempted assassination at a Butler County, Pennsylvania, rally, which left former volunteer fire chief Corey Comperatore dead and two other attendees wounded. (RELATED: Liberal Media Outlets Claim Trump Contributed To ‘Violent Rhetoric’ After Assassination Attempt)
“I brought up the fact that I’m Hispanic and, you know, I’m for Trump. And he said, ‘Well, you’re Hispanic, so shouldn’t you hate Trump?,’” Taormina recounted. “No. He’s great. He was a great president. He called me stupid – or insinuated that I was stupid.”
“He said, ‘Well, that’s kind of stupid.’ He was a know-it-all,” Taormina continued. “So, like, once again, if he was passionate about something, he would just talk, talk, talk and acted like he knew everything, especially politics-related. He would say it in a tone that was, like, ‘I’m better than you,’ in a type of way, and meanwhile, it’s like, dude, we’re in the same classes.”
So he was the living embodiment of those WE BELIEVE IN SCIENCE signs…with a gun.
After years and years of uncivilized behavior, celebrating the attempted assassination of a presidential candidate is finally far enough over the line that leftists are finally getting pink slips. More good work by Libs of TikTok.
He “unequivocally” denounced the attempt. “Not funny.”
“Whoever did this has done so much damage to the left.”
“They lost a lot of moral high ground in the ‘You’re the violent people.'” (The left hasn’t had that “high ground” for quite some time, as Steve Scalise and Rand Paul can attest.)
“I’ve got to say this: Trump is the luckiest motherfucker ever to walk the face of the earth.”
“Biden can’t get through a debate and a bullet can’t stop Trump.”
US District Court Judge Aileen Cannon has dismissed Donald Trump’s classified documents case, ruling that the appointment of Special Counsel Jack Smith was unconstitutional.
“The Special Counsel’s position effectively usurps that important legislative authority, transferring it to a Head of Department, and in the process threatening the structural liberty inherent in the separation of powers,” Cannon wrote in her decision. “He can be appointed and confirmed through the default method prescribed in the Appointments Clause, as Congress has directed for United States Attorneys throughout American history.”
“Dismissal of this action is the only appropriate solution for the Appointments Clause violation.”
The Democratic Media Complex’s push to derail Trump by any means necessary has all but ensured his election.
I’ve barely touched on the Republican National Convention going on now, but this roundup is already pretty lengthy…
After lengthy deliberation and thought, and considering the tremendous talents of many others, I have decided that the person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States is Senator J.D. Vance of the Great State of Ohio,” Trump said. The former president highlighted Mr. Vance’s record as a Marine, a graduate of Yale Law School, and a bestselling author.
Mr. Vance, at just 39 years old, will be the youngest vice presidential nominee of a major political party since President Nixon ran with President Eisenhower in 1952. The Ohio senator was elected in just 2022, making him a candidate with some of the least experience in modern history.
He has made his mark as an “anti-woke” warrior in the upper chamber, and has made it clear that American foreign policy must be geared much more toward the interests of the American middle class rather than the more obscure goals of protecting democracy and upholding international defense obligations.
Mr. Vance’s stances on foreign policy issues — including saying that America should play a small, if not nonexistent, role in helping Ukraine in their war with Russia — does not frighten some of the more establishment members of his party.
Senator Cornyn, the number two Republican in the upper chamber, tells the Sun that the GOP has been having thoughtful foreign policy debates within the party for more than 100 years.
“These discussions on how active the United States ought to be around the world have been long-standing disputes, going back to at least World War I,” Mr. Cornyn said, adding that he was happy to see “a new generation of people” taking the helm of the Republican Party.
A senior advisor to Trump who was granted anonymity to speak freely tells the Sun that choosing Mr. Vance as the veep candidate is a sign that the GOP is playing offense between now and November.
“J.D. [Vance] is going to do well with veterans. Huge veteran population in New Hampshire … Hug veteran population in Virginia,” the source says. “It’s gonna be a battle to the end. Why was Vance the best pick for that? Because he’s young, because he’s a Marine. … There are alot of people who said: ‘Leave him in the U.S. Senate’, and there are a lot of people who said that because he may have been the president’s best advocate in the Senate.”
Speaker McCarthy, who spoke briefly to the Sun after the announcement, says Mr. Vance will held the party do well in the typical “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
Of the various possibilities floated as a possible Trump VP pick, Vance is a better choice than Nikki Haley (duh), Marco Rubio (a lightweight I never understood the appeal of), better than Doug Burgum for age-balancing the ticket (though not on executive governance experience), and possibly not as electorally savvy as Tim Scott. Maybe the blue collar Hillbilly Elegy author will help Trump further crack the “blue wall,” though I think Trump scooped all the votes in rural white demographics he’s going to, especially with the Biden Recession still raging. Trump leads in Ohio by 10+ points, so winning Vance’s home state (a traditional VP pick criteria) isn’t a concern. Also, Vance himself only won the state by six points in his 2022 Senate race.
I’m enthusiastically behind Vance’s anti-woke crusade, though Trump should already have all the anti-woke votes locked up.
Once of the biggest drivers behind the Vance pick may simply be loyalty, an area Trump obviously felt previous Vice President Mike Pence was lacking in.
Trump seems to have a deeper innate understanding of the American electorate than anyone in my lifetime save Ronald Reagan, and frequently decisions that seem puzzling at first (even to me) have a way of working out. There’s an extremely high chance the Vance VP pick will work out as well.
Speculation as to Trump’s 2024 is in full swing, and Sean Trende has an entry in the genre that’s half obvious and half “What are you smoking?”
10. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.
No way in hell. There’s a palpable lack of enthusiasm for Haley among the GOP base, and her primary backers are a tiny cadre of bitter NeverTrumpers. Trump will win South Carolina going away, and the only people likely to back Trump who wouldn’t otherwise would be those Haley campaign staffers hired on for the big show.
9. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Maybe. A safe choice and part of a play to bring middle and upper class white women back into the GOP fold. But not much wow factor, and Arkansas is another state Trump will win running away.
8. Sen. J.D. Vance, Ohio.
Vance won his senate race, but he didn’t knock it out of the park. Trump won Ohio in 2020 so there’s no reason to think he won’t win it this time around. Don’t see it.
2. Former Hawai’i Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.
A good bit more exciting than Haley, and maybe it would play well with young voters, but a pretty long shot. Would give Democrats a bit of the vapors, but Hawaii is too blue a state for this pick to make it competitive. Plus the last Veep nominee to be successfully elected from the House was John Nance Garner, and he was Speaker of the House (and a very powerful and effective one) and the runner-up to FDR in the 1932 Democratic race, not an obscure back-bencher from the other party with all of one losing Presidential run under her belt.
South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott.
Right now, this would be my odds-on favorite for Trump to select, and is probably the pick that has Democrats most worried. The Democratic Party is already losing black voters to Trump, and another 10% loss thanks to a Scott pick might put Pennsylvania and Michigan beyond the margin of fraud.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
This would be a safe pick in the Pence mode, the base won’t object to him (the way they might over, say, Gabbard or Haley), but Texas is another state Trump wins going away.
4. Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds.
If you’re going to pick a white, female governor, Reynolds is a better pick than Haley, Kay Ivey is too old for a ticket balance pick, and Noem has managed to take herself out of the picture (🐕 🔫), but Reynolds is squishy on a wide range of culture war issues, and isn’t even as well-liked as Sanders. And Iowa is another state Trump won handily.
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum.
Beloved by election wonks but unknown nationally, and another state Trump will win handily. Don’t see it.
2. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
A credible pick who’s on the right side of the culture wars that would be popular with the base and put Virginia in play. But, by that standard, Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears might be an even better pick, with additional appeal to blacks voters. She would be higher on my list than most of Trende’s picks.
1. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
The irrational enthusiasm for Rubio among certain segments of the punditry remind me of the similar irrational enthusiasm for Jeb!
This meme still cracks me up.
Rubio is an intellectual lightweight who did poorly in the 2016 Presidential race, would make the ticket constitutionally ineligible to receive Florida’s votes (something Trende unconvincingly tap dances around), and I see no signs that Rubio would draw Hispanics to the ticket in places like Nevada and Arizona, despite Trende’s assertions, which seem more like wishcasting than analysis.
Of Trende’s list, Scott, Youngkin, Sanders, and Abbott strike me as credible choices. I’d also add Earle-Sears, Alabama Senator Katie Britt (age/sex balancing the ticket), Rand Paul (libertarian/youth appeal), and former New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez (play for that state), all of which strike me as more likely picks than Rubio.
But Trump has a long history of doing the unexpected…
Always keeping in mind Instapundit’s “Don’t get cocky!” warning, there are a whole lot of signs that this year’s midterm is going to be another Republican wave election along the lines of 2010 or 2014.
Here are some signposts for the impending Red Tsunami:
Remember how Democrats crowed how Roe vs. Wade was going to doom Republican electoral chances? Yeah, not so much.
Republicans made massive gains with independent women in recent weeks as Democrats ramped up their messaging on abortion ahead of the midterm elections.
Forty-nine percent of voters plan to vote for the Republican nominee to represent their House district while 45 percent said they’d back their Democratic opponent, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll released Monday. Of particular note was a 32 point swing among independent women toward the GOP. In September’s iteration of the poll, Democrats boasted a 14 point lead among that demographic, but by October, Republicans held an 18 point advantage.
While Democratic officials and progressive commentators had suggested that the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade might lessen the expected electoral blow of the midterms, the swing toward the GOP among independent women — the group most heavily targeted by Democratic strategists — suggests that their focus on abortion might be to their own detriment.
In a TV segment last month, Republican operative Matt Gorman was rebuked by his fellow panelists for suggesting that abortion “is not in the top four of issues.”
Yamiche Alcindor of PBS and NBC insisted that on the campaign trail “abortion comes up 90 percent of the time” when she speaks with voters. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat and former senator who lost her re-election bid in 2016, shouted over other guests to declare “I hope Matt keeps saying that everywhere he goes — that abortion isn’t really an issue here in this election. I think it is exactly what infuriates women when they hear that.”
According to a study conducted by AdImpact, Democrats spent 73 million on messaging ads about abortion in September, which is “about a third of all Democratic television ad spending,” per NPR.
Twenty-six percent of voters in the Times/Siena poll identified the economy as the most important issue facing the country today. That was followed by inflation (18 percent), other (9 percent), the state of democracy (8 percent), immigration and abortion (five percent apiece), and then political division (four percent).
Only 24 percent of voters said the country was on the right track, while 64 percent indicated the opposite. Democrats presently hold the White House and majorities in both chambers of Congress, and President Joe Biden’s approval rating is nearly 20 points underwater.
So how do you explain a 32 point swing between two polls? A few possible answers: A.) Democrat’s loud, radical position on abortion is actually alienating independent women, B.) The crappy Biden economy is really starting to bite, or C.) Pollsters running biased polls to help Democrats simply stopped lying in order for their final electoral predictions to more closely match reality. Much as I’d like to believe A is the cause, I think C is the more likely culprit. Caveat: The sample was “792 likely voters nationwide,” which is a pretty damn small sample.
Democrats have no solutions to today’s crime surge.
Here’s how they shrug off the mayhem.
First: Deep denial.
Through Sept. 27, New Orleans suffered 208 homicides, up 44% versus that period in 2021 and 141% in 2019. The Crescent City has become America’s Murder Capital.
“I do not embrace that at all,” said Democratic Mayor La Toya Cantrell. “It isn’t based on what’s happening on the ground.” She later said that “our city is safer than it’s been in a long time.”
Crime books can be cooked: Curbing arrests can “erase” lawlessness by leaving it unrecorded. But there’s no faking a cadaver. Regardless, Cantrell scoffs at humiliating police data.
Then there’s the revolving door for violent criminals Soros-backed Democrat DAs have instituted:
100% gun control would not have stopped David Jakubonis who, last July 21, confronted Zeldin on the hustings, shoved a sharp keychain weapon beside the candidate’s neck, and said: “You’re done.”
Jakubonis was armed and threatened a congressman.
Regardless, he was free the next day before being arrested on federal charges.
Vincent Buccino savored pizza outside a Hell’s Kitchen eatery on Sept. 9.
An unprovoked attacker smashed a chair over his head and broke his arm.
The unidentified criminal remains at large.
Michael Palacios terrorized a Manhattan McDonald’s on Sept. 16. After harassing patrons, he yanked an ax from his backpack, menaced diners, and chopped up a table, chairs, and glass wall. He, too, was arrested and swiftly sprung without bail.
Palacios was arrested again on Oct. 11, for alleged graffiti and bicycle theft.
Once more, Palacios was freed without bail.
And if you dare to notice this, Democrats will call you a racist. “Democrats shout, ‘Racism!’ as often as people exhale.”
In July 2021, House Bill 1054 took effect in the Evergreen State after being passed by the Democratic state legislature and signed by the Democratic governor over the objections of [Chelan County sheriff Brian Burnett] and state law-enforcement associations.
Before they can pursue a vehicle, the new law requires that officers ensure that four conditions have been met: (1) An officer must have either a reasonable suspicion a driver is impaired due to drugs or alcohol, or probable cause to believe that he has committed certain kinds of violent crimes or sex crimes; (2) pursuit must be necessary to identify or apprehend the suspect; (3) the driver must be an imminent threat to the safety of others such that the risks of not pursuing him outweigh the risks of pursuit; and (4) a supervisor has authorized pursuit.
Burnett told National Review that these restrictions represent a threat to public safety. Anecdotally, that’s evidenced by Spitzer’s sojourn across the region and, statistically, it’s backed up by the data. Prior to HB 1054’s taking effect, the state recorded, on average, around 2,000 stolen vehicles per month. Since its passage, that figure has soared, reaching heights in excess of 4,000 per month.
“What we’re seeing on an average daily basis — whether it’s our jurisdiction or one of our neighboring jurisdictions — is there’s people that don’t stop for us all day long,” said Burnett. “It can be anything from a stolen vehicle, to somebody that we have probable cause on, or just a basic traffic stop, and, you know, next thing on it’s pedal to the metal and they’re off and running,” he continued.
Burnett and his fellow law-enforcement officials had foreseen these issues and lobbied against the bill, but he said lawmakers refused to take their concerns seriously.
“The response early on — because we have a Democratic-controlled Senate and House, and it’s a fairly large margin there — it was almost to the point of, I’ll call it arrogance,” remembered Burnett. The message the legislature sent to the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs was: “We don’t need you, we don’t need your opinion,” he added. “We were begging them and telling them and giving them reasons why: ‘Please don’t do this, it’s bad, bad policy,’” he said, but they ignored the pleas, because their majorities (57–41 in the House and 28–21 in the Senate) empower them to impose their will without compromise. But public opinion will probably assert itself eventually, given that crime is surging in the state: Washington set records for homicides in 2020 and then again 2021.
Democrats have a long history, stretching back at least into the 1970s, of soft-on-crime policies costing them elections. And Soros DAs intent on “bail reform” have made them even softer on crime than they were in the nadir of the 1970s.
The 40,000-foot view is bad enough, but it’s the steady drumbeat of discouraging race-by-race poll results that now has Democrats bracing for a punishing midterm.
In the battle to break the 50-50 tie in the Senate, Republicans have taken small leads in Wisconsin and Nevada, and Herschel Walker is still hanging around despite the October-surprise claims about his ex-girlfriend’s abortion. RealClearPolitics now puts Dr. Oz in the lead in Pennsylvania, after adjusting for historical polling errors, and projects a 52-48 GOP Senate majority.
In the House, counting “safe,” “likely” and “leans,” RealClearPolitics gives Republicans a 221-176 lead, with 38 more races considered toss-ups. In June, that outlet projected the GOP would gain 24.5 seats; now it forecasts a 27-seat pickup.
In reliably blue Oregon, a Republican is poised to take the governorship for the first time in 35 years. Michigan governor and lockdown enthusiast Gretchen Whitmer is up only now leading by just 5 points in the latest poll. Even the New York governor race has tightened up, with Quinnipiac putting Democrat Kathy Hochul up only 4 points — and independents breaking toward challenger Lee Zeldin 57% to 37%.
“I think we had three really good weeks in August that everybody patted themselves on the back,” an anonymous Democratic advisor to major donors tells Politico. “We were like, ‘Yeah, that should be enough to overcome two years of shitty everything’.” Now, he says, “It’s not looking great. The best we can hope for right now is a 50-50 Senate, but the House is long gone.”
Oddsmakers have similarly flipped red when it comes to the GOP’s chances of retaking the Senate, joining a longstanding bet that they’ll win control of the House.
Yes, Democrats “peaked” on election night in 2020 when they used massive voting fraud in a handful of districts to steal the election for Biden (along with a senate race or two) and then acted like they had a blowout mandate to impose social justice on the country.
The Democrat label is now toxic, and every time voters see Democrats speak, they seem to turn against them.
The Republican surge is animated by decisive debate victories on Friday in three key races: Georgia (Senate), Michigan (Governor), and Wisconsin (Governor). Georgia had been trending Democrat before the debate under the weight of Hershel Walker’s scandals, but likely no more.
Tudor Dixon, the Republican candidate for Governor of Michigan, seemed like a hopeless case, but now, on the strength of a decisive win in her debate with incumbent Democrat Gretchen Whitmer the race seems winnable. The Republican Governor’s Association, after waiting to commit, now is pumping millions into her campaign. Responding to Dixon’s surge, former president Obama has announced plans to campaign against her in Michigan.
And, in Wisconsin, Republican Tim Michaels clearly defeated a largely passive and obviously aging Democratic governor Tony Evers.
Walker was supposed to lose the debate because, as a football hero, he’s not necessarily very articulate. Coming up against an experienced pastor, Senator Raphael Warnock’s chances seemed dim. But Walker surprised everyone with a strong performance. Whatever the issue he pivoted to bring it back to inflation and Joe Biden. Surprisingly, on abortion he indicated new flexibility and backed it in cases of rape or a danger to the life of the mother. But, above all he seemed to have mastered his new trade of politics and was able to spar with the best of them.
The most important debate will come next week in Pennsylvania Senate race between Dr. Oz and stroke-impaired John Fetterman on October 25th. Fetterman won’t release his medical records and recent on camera interviews indicate that he mispronounces words and cannot easily understand what he hears unless it is printed out in front of him.
Whatever his medical prognosis, he cannot recover from his radical positions on pardoning and releasing one in three Pennsylvania prison inmates and on defunding the police.
Other than the Oz-Fetterman race, we now lead in all contests for seats currently held by the Republicans. North Carolina is close but Ted Budd holds a consistent lead. And, despite a less than stellar debate performance, JD Vance is ahead in Ohio.
“Every debate has tanked the Democrat in the polls.”
Things are so bad that Democrats are shifting money from safe seats to really safe seats.
Some “safe seats” aren’t very safe anymore for suddenly vulnerable Democrats, and that has panicked PACs moving campaign dollars to protect previously invulnerable seats.
We’re down to the wire in Election 2022, and stuff just got real.
Today’s news takes us to deep blue Oregon, where onetime shoo-in Kurt Schrader just got the rug pulled out from under him by his own Democrat Party as he fights off Republican Amy Ryan Courser. According to AdImpact (as spotted by Josh Kraushaar), party ad spending for Schrader in the 5th district was shifted to the 6th to boost Andrea Salinas against Republican Mike Erickson. [As noted in the comments below, Jamie McLeod-Skinner defeated Rep. Kurt Schrader in the Democratic Primary. -LP]
Maybe you’re thinking this kind of thing happens all the time, and it does.
But it doesn’t often happen that Democrats appear to be writing off a district that Presidentish Joe Biden won in 2020 by nine points, to shore up a district that Biden won by 13 points.
If 10-and-up is the Democrats’ new firewall, they’re in bigger trouble than even I imagined. Complicating things even more for Oregon Democrats, gubernatorial candidate Tina Kotek (looking to replace the outgoing and execrable Kate Brown) regularly polls behind Republican Christine Drazan.
Stephen Green notes that Oregon may be a special case because “Portland has served as Ground Zero for some of the craziest progressive ideas being put into terrible practice.” Wait, turning your city over to Antifa for endless riots isn’t popular with voters? Who knew?
You know who else thinks Democrats have gone to far pushing social justice? Would you believe the Lightbringer himself?
Former President Barack Obama slammed Democrats in a recent podcast, calling them “buzzkills” whose identity politics and cancel culture rhetoric force people to “walk on eggshells.”
Speaking with four of his former employees on the Pod Save America podcast, the former prez said that his fellow Democrats need to tone it down and understand that everyone makes mistakes, the Daily Mail reports.
“Sometimes Democrats are [buzzkills]. Sometimes people just want to not feel as if they are walking on eggshells, and they want some acknowledgment that life is messy and that all of us, at any given moment, can say things the wrong way, make mistakes,” he said, adding that Democrats should learn from he felt were his mistakes as president.
What does it say when the biggest beneficiary of white guilt and victimhood identity politics in political history says that Democrats have gone too far in that direction?
A sane party might be inclined to listen to him.
But the Democratic Party hasn’t been sane in a long, long time…
California is (still) broke, Stacey Abrams is (still) not very bright, Joe Biden tried to deal gas to the commies, and the FBI can’t be bothered to investigate such trivia as “sex crimes involving children.” It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Remember how the State of Texas came in with record revenues and a $27 billion surplus? Well, the flip side is California, which just saw 11% personal income tax revenue drop. Funny how chasing away productive taxpayers through punitive taxation and insane over-regulation isn’t a recipe for success…
Republicans on the House Oversight and Reform Committee have obtained bombshell documents proving that Joe Biden was deeply involved in the family business of selling American natural gas to the Chinese–while he was planning to run for President. According to multiple whistleblowers, the Biden family made promises to those who worked with them in 2017 and onward that they would “reap the rewards in a future Biden administration.” These explosive revelations “pose national security concerns,” Oversight Republicans proclaimed Tuesday night.
The Biden clan enriched itself by selling the natural resources to a Chinese firm closely affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—just a few years before the cost of gas in the United States hit record highs, the Oversight Republicans stated.
In a letter to United States Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the ranking Republican on the Oversight Committee, alleged that according to whistleblowers, Joe Biden was heavily involved in this treachery.
“This comes to light at a time when the cost of natural gas is at a 14-year high and Americans struggle to pay their energy bills,” Comer wrote in the letter to Yellen. “The President has not only misled the American public about his past foreign business transactions, but he also failed to disclose that he played a critical role in arranging a business deal to sell American natural resources to the Chinese while planning to run for President.”
Comer sent a letter to Yellen in July complaining that the Treasury Department was restricting access to over 150 Suspicious Activity reports (SARs) on Hunter Biden, amid explosive revelations that came out from Biden’s “laptop from Hell,” and iPhone.
On Sept. 2, 2022, the Treasury Department stated in a letter to Committee Republicans, that the SARs may be provided “upon a written request stating the particular information desired, the criminal, tax or regulatory purpose for which the information is sought, and the official need for the information.”
In response, Comer said that “based on the documents provided in this letter, we request all SARs from Biden family transactions, including those involving President Biden, related to transactions with Chinese entities. We are concerned that the President may have compromised national security in his dealings with the country most adverse to U.S. interests—China. These SARs will inform our analysis of this matter.”
Comer said Oversight Republicans have obtained a “presentation” emailed to Hunter Biden’s firm Hudson West III LLC (Hudson West) on December 13, 2017. The document, translated from Mandarin Chinese, is titled, “Overview of the U.S. Natural Gas Industry Chain, and is concerned with selling American natural resources to China.”
“Jiaqi Bao, who created the presentation, was previously an employee of the CCP, and worked for Hunter Biden’s corporate entity Hudson West,” the letter states.
Comer provided Yellen with two maps that were part of a presentation emailed to Hunter Biden. The maps include sophisticated analysis written in Chinese, and show the United States carved up based on natural gas reserves “with particular emphasis on Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming.”
“The emails that accompany the transmitted maps reveal a plan to sell natural gas reserves to China via the same corporate entity branded on the presentation-Hudson West III LLC (Hudson West)–set up by Hunter Biden with officials from the Chinese company CEFC, at the time, one of the largest oil companies in China,” the letter stated.
I have only skimmed this dog's breakfast of a complaint, but what popped out at me for the parts I looked are were the lack of damages allegations, much less ones against NY, the plaintiff. You cannot sue if you did not suffer a loss. None are pleaded in the parts I looked at. 3/
So, the initial motion to dismiss will not be heard before the midterm – the real mission was accomplished by filing suit in time to influence the election, but not so early that this garbage case could be tossed out before the election.
FBI investigations of child sex abuse claims are no longer a priority with all these conservatives and Trump supporters they need to prosecute for WrongThink…
