Today’s theme: Two men succeeding in what they were trained to do in vastly different arenas through dint of training, perseverance and will.
First, President Donald Trump presented the Medal of Honor to Sergeant Major Thomas Payne, who helped rescue over 70 Kurdish prisoners held prisoner by the Islamic State in the Iraqi town of Hawija while under fire.
Payne’s team secured the area and prepared to free the trapped men. As they cut the lock on the prison door inside the building, Payne could see the expressions on the faces of the hostages turn from fear and desperation to excitement and joy once they realized they were being rescued.
As the hostages were being released, Payne received a call on his radio that the team in the second building needed help. The sound of the firefight just 30 yards away was intense, and Payne knew he needed to move quickly. “Let’s get into the fight,” he said to a teammate.
Payne and his teammates moved to the roof of the burning building where the second team had called for help. They continued to receive constant fire from the enemy, who had set up a position to their west, and from the enemy in the building directly below them.
The team attempted to enter from the roof using small arms and grenades, but were unsuccessful. As Payne heard screams of “Allahu akbar” below, followed by the explosions of suicide vests, he was able to move his team to the ground and look for another position to enter the building.
As his team attempted to breach the building’s fortified walls and windows, several of the Kurdish forces were wounded by enemy fire. Through the smoke and chaos, Payne looked into the building’s entryway and noticed the main prison door used the same type of lock he had seen in the first building. He knew he would be exposed to enemy fire if he attempted to cut the lock himself, but he also knew the hostages trapped inside the burning building would die if something wasn’t done.
Payne grabbed a set of bolt cutters and ran into the building to cut the first lock on the door. Smoke poured out of the entryway as Payne received enemy fire. After cutting the first lock, Payne moved back to a safer position to avoid incoming fire and recover from smoke inhalation, but there was still a second lock that needed to be cut. After the Kurdish forces tried unsuccessfully to cut the second lock, Payne again exposed himself to enemy fire and suffocating smoke to cut the lock and reach the hostages.
Once the second lock was cut, the combined force rushed into the burning building to reach the hostages and eliminate remaining threats. A call came over the radio that the building was beginning to collapse and the mandatory evacuation order was given. The hallways were thick with smoke and they were receiving enemy fire, but there were still hostages inside. Payne knew the team had to move quickly.
Many of the hostages were disoriented and unsure of what was happening. Payne directed the large group to safety, at one point grabbing a man and pulling him down the hallway, allowing the hostages to move out of the building. Still receiving fire, Payne went back in a second time, finding and dragging a large man out of the building to safety. Finally, after Payne entered and exited the building a third time to make sure everyone was out, he gave the “last man” call so the task force could prepare for extraction.
The combined force created a human wall so the hostages could be safely moved from the building as they continued to receive enemy fire. But when Payne and others returned fire, the hostages would stop running out of fear and confusion. Payne’s team held their fire and put themselves at risk to shield the hostages and safely get them out of the compound.
As the helicopters arrived, Payne was faced with another problem. With so many hostages rescued, they could not be sure they had enough seats on the helicopters. After some quick math, they were able to get everyone on board, but it was so cramped that Payne’s team would have to stand for the entire flight back.
The hostages, Payne’s task force and the partnered forces flew back to Erbil. They had just taken part in one of the largest hostage rescues in history, and for his actions that day, then-Sgt. 1st Class Thomas Payne would be recommended for the Medal of Honor.
🇺🇸 Delta Force soldier who helped save 70 ISIS hostages from execution in daring raid receives Medal of Honor from President Trump.
Sgt. Major Thomas Payne said he joined the military because of 9/11.
Rick Rescorla—born a Brit (in Cornwall) who became an American (and fought in Vietnam)—was worried about the safety of New York City’s World Trade Center. Ever since the 1993 terrorist attack, when a bomb blew-up in the building’s basement, Rescorla worried that it would happen again.
During the 1993 attack, Rescorla was upset that the building evacuation had gone so poorly. He vowed that such a muddled exodus would never happen again. Among the first to understand that a new kind of terrorism was targeting innocent office workers, he became the director of security for Dean Witter/Morgan Stanley in 1997.
Believing the Trade Center (where Morgan Stanley was headquartered) was a particularly vulnerable terrorist target, Rescorla recommended that his company find different space. Because of lease obligations, however, that alternative was not possible. Instead, Rick developed an emergency evacuation plan which he required the Morgan Stanley employees to practice over and over.
Rescorla could just not get out of his head that the Trade Center would be attacked again. When it happened, on September 11, he and his colleagues were ready.
When the Port Authority issued an announcement, via its PA system, that everyone in the South Tower of the World Trade Center should remain calm and stay at their desks, Rescorla couldn’t believe his ears. He immediately began an evacuation process.
With bullhorn in hand, he ordered the Morgan Stanley employees to evacuate the building. Before the second plane struck the South Tower, his colleagues were on their way down the stairs. Thousands of people—nearly 2700 to be precise— owe their lives to Rick Rescorla, and many are vocal about that fact…Because of Rick Rescorla’s foresight and belief that he knew what was right, nearly every Morgan Stanley employee made it safely out of the South Tower before it collapsed.
Rescorla died in the south tower collapse, and his body was never found.
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Nineteen years ago, radical Islamic terrorists carried out the deadliest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. Today not only is Osama bin Laden dead, but what’s left of al Qaeda has been relegated to minor players in a handful of regional conflicts (Yemen, Syria, etc.).
The media is filled with stories about how the Democrats are planning to refuse to accept Donald Trump’s impending victory, with speculation about cheating, lawsuits, and the odd military coup. Leaving aside the bizarre notion that our troops are eager to risk their lives to kill their friends and family for the benefit of the liberal establishment and the military-industrial complex – which the Democrats have suddenly embraced as something awesome – in order to impose that creepy old weirdo from the basement upon America, the challenges are real but they are also overblown.
Don’t panic. Prepare. Work to get out the patriotic American vote. If we’re ready maybe this won’t descend into the chaos I describe in my novel/unintended documentary People’s Republic.
Now, they will cheat. That’s baked in, and they are fully committed to it. That’s why they hate hate hate voter ID – it’s harder to cheat when you have to prove who you are. Voting-by-mail gets around that and offers all sorts of opportunities for mischief. They fully intend to try to leverage voting by mail to 1) get China virus paranoids and their usual lay-about voters to vote instead of just sitting home watching “Judge Judy,” and 2) manufacture the necessary votes to swing the election. The turnout issue is important to them because all the numbskulls driving their cars alone with masks on are all liberal. The Dems could have gone with explaining that going to vote for Biden confers immunity, just like rioting, but whatever. Now, the cheating aspect is another issue, but how great an impact cheating might have is open to question.
Mr. Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer don’t agree on everything, but on this specific issue they speak with one voice: the $10,000 cap on deductions for state and local tax (better known as the SALT deduction) must go.
The House of Representatives has already passed legislation removing the cap, allowing the amount of the deduction to rise. If the Senate turns blue in November, Democrats have promised to return to the issue. “I want to tell you this,” Senator Schumer said in July, “If I become majority leader, one of the first things I will do is we will eliminate” the SALT cap “forever.” It “will be dead, gone and buried.”
The cap was introduced as part of the 2017 Republican Tax Cuts and Jobs Act…Almost 60 percent of the benefit of removal would go to the top 1 percent of households (of which 90 percent are white).
Think on today’s Democratic Party, withered by the Clintons and then the Obamas and now Slow Joe Biden. Think about the obvious lies. Think about how loyalty uber alles has shaved off bits of their partisans’ souls, burned as offerings on the altar of someone else’s political ambitions. Think of the small death that takes place each day among those (supposedly) most fervent partisans.
It’s no wonder that the Democratic Party is being taken over by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Black Lives Matter, and Antifa rioters. The Iron Law says that they’re the ones who will rise to the top.
You see, all paths other than radical revolution are closed, at least for advancement. Who even talks about John Kerry anymore? And the media covers for all of these people so there is no possible correction.
The Trump Administration has cross-depotized Oregon State Police troopers “assigned to help the police in Portland have now been cross-deputize by the federal government. This means that the US Attorney’s Office can lodge charges against those arrested by deputized troopers,” bypassing antifa-friendly DAs. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Among those Portland arrestees:
For those in the back — arrested rioter is THE LEGISLATIVE DIRECTOR FOR THE OREGON SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE https://t.co/htH9su4630
But what is clear is that the “confirmation” which both MSNBC and CBS claimed it had obtained for the story was anything but: All that happened was that the same sources which anonymously whispered these unverified, false claims to CNN then went and repeated the same unverified, false claims to other outlets, which then claimed that they “independently confirmed” the story even though they had done nothing of the sort.
It seems the same misleading tactic is now driving the supremely dumb but all-consuming news cycle centered on whether President Trump, as first reported by the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, made disparaging comments about The Troops. Goldberg claims that “four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day” — whom the magazine refuses to name because they fear “angry tweets” — told him that Trump made these comments. Trump, as well as former aides who were present that day (including Sarah Huckabee Sanders and John Bolton), deny that the report is accurate.
So we have anonymous sources making claims on one side, and Trump and former aides (including Bolton, now a harsh Trump critic) insisting that the story is inaccurate. Beyond deciding whether or not to believe Goldberg’s story based on what best advances one’s political interests, how can one resolve the factual dispute? If other media outlets could confirm the original claims from Goldberg, that would obviously be a significant advancement of the story.
Other media outlets — including Associated Press and Fox News — now claim that they did exactly that: “confirmed” the Atlantic story. But if one looks at what they actually did, at what this “confirmation” consists of, it is the opposite of what that word would mean, or should mean, in any minimally responsible sense. AP, for instance, merely claims that “a senior Defense Department official with firsthand knowledge of events and a senior U.S. Marine Corps officer who was told about Trump’s comments confirmed some of the remarks to The Associated Press,” while Fox merely said “a former senior Trump administration official who was in France traveling with the president in November 2018 did confirm other details surrounding that trip.”
In other words, all that likely happened is that the same sources who claimed to Jeffrey Goldberg, with no evidence, that Trump said this went to other outlets and repeated the same claims — the same tactic that enabled MSNBC and CBS to claim they had “confirmed” the fundamentally false CNN story about Trump Jr. receiving advanced access to the WikiLeaks archive. Or perhaps it was different sources aligned with those original sources and sharing their agenda who repeated these claims. Given that none of the sources making these claims have the courage to identify themselves, due to their fear of mean tweets, it is impossible to know.
What was Mueller’s team hiding that they were willing to risk charges of felony government record destruction to make sure no one ever saw it? https://t.co/UhCJYQZAZZ
Al Sharpton comes out against defunding the police. Just think crazy far to the left you have to go for Al “Race Hustling Poverty Pimp” Sharpton to call you out for your bullshit?
The Trump-brokered UAE-Israel peace deal is already paying dividends. Winners: Israeli airlines, and other Arab states moving to normalize relations. Losers: Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
More on the same subject:
In the past 24 hours
* The Arab League refused to condemn the Israel-UAE peace deal
* It was reported that Saudi Arabia and Bahrain will allow all flights to/from Israel to fly through their airspace
* Abu Dhabi directed all hotels to start offering kosher food
Survey shows that professional sports is in big trouble. “Of all the sectors measured in the survey, professional sports suffered the biggest drop in support, falling all the way to 23rd on the list and settling barely above The Federal Government. The negative impressions by Americans now see sports underwater by double digits, with a 30%-40% favorable/unfavorable ratio.”
Speaking of getting woke and going broke, the Oscars are now implementing racial quotas.
It’s come to my attention that one of my hashtags, #Bidentherapist could be misinterpreted to mean something totally different. I’ll use #BidenTherapist from now on. Sorry.
“Hollywood Elites Rush To Normalize Pedophilia Before They’re All Outed By Ghislaine Maxwell.” “Nowadays, we’ve got so many letters crammed into the whole ‘LGBTQETC+’ thing, nobody even notices if we slide a ‘P’ in there somewhere!”
Godfrey Elfwick: “Pretending to be black is a common side-effect of trauma, the official medical term being: Post Traumatic Ethnic Appropriation. I believe many white musicians in the early 90s suffered from it, no doubt due to the lack of trigger warnings on TV shows back then.”
Not to get all biblical on you, but have you checked out these scenes from the West Coast?
The Bidwell Bar Bridge is surrounded by fire in Lake Oroville during the Bear fire in Oroville, California, as dangerous wildfires rage across the state. https://t.co/M4BOsrBqY9pic.twitter.com/fxkevRHuMb
Kyle StClaire is moving his lawn off his home in south Molalla. He says he's likes to keep his yard nice, especially now in case "the lord decides to take it." @OPBpic.twitter.com/gZ2QUfc2S0
… far more timber grows than is harvested or burned. To reduce the yearly fire threat, more timber must be harvested or burned in a controlled fashion. It's the math of photosynthesis. Trees grow. And in California's climate, they're often dry. 2/2
#BrownOut is the result of bad energy policies#HousingCrisis is the result of bad development policies
Rampant #wildfires are the result of bad forestry management policies#Homeless explosion is the result of bad human services policies#Dems did this by design#California
the latest from that vast laboratory for policy failure known as california where 30 years of bad "green" policy have now ensured massively increased fire danger and size.
this is not climate change, it's bad forestry policy.
The current charter, which serves as the city’s constitution, requires Minneapolis to keep a police department with about three officers for every 5,000 residents.
Before the City Council can remake policing, they must amend the charter.
The City Council sought a charter amendment that would establish a Department of Community Safety and Violence Prevention, which may or may not include law enforcement officers.
Some members of the Charter Commission proposed their own amendment that would preserve the police department, but eliminate the current charter mandate to fund a specific number of officers. The commission rejected its own amendment while also extending their review of the City Council’s proposal.
Charter Commission Chairman Barry Clegg said the commission was not given enough time to study the City Council’s proposal before their deadline to get it on the ballot.
“The council came to us at the very last minute, and in fact, the council suspended its own rules to get in under the timeline,” Clegg said. “We said, ‘No, we’re going to do our job. Our job is to review this proposal, our job is to gather public input and that’s what we’re going to do.’”
(Wait, “we’re going to divert all that sweet police money into the palms of my far left cronies” doesn’t count as a plan? Imagine my shock.)
The city council at the epicenter of the national unrest over policing and the death of George Floyd once promised to lead other cities to a police-free Utopia. Three months later, without any plans to accomplish it and with residents and investors balking at the prospect, the Minneapolis City Council’s abolition movement has “lost momentum,” the Star Tribune reports:
The Minneapolis City Council’s resolve to end the city’s police department has lost momentum, the result of the failure to get the question before voters in November and council members’ diverging ideas on the role of sworn officers in the future.
In the three months since nine council members pledged to end the department following George Floyd’s killing, the city has experienced a surge in violent crime, another night of unrest and blowback from residents who felt they had been left out of the initial conversations about change.
Some council members have remained consistent in their statements about policing, while others have softened their rhetoric, saying now that they do envision officers as part of any revamping of public safety.
So the vote to defund the police won’t actual defund the police, making the Minneapolis City Council, in addition to being insane and incompetent, a bunch of damn liars.
Minneapolis was one of the cities hit with still more rioting after the Jacob Blake shooting, and parts of downtown remain boarded up:
Perhaps the voters in Minneapolis should be talking about getting rid of [City Council President Lisa] Bender and the rest of the city council. Even if some think abolishing the police is a good idea, Bender and her cohort are clearly incompetent at it. For the vast majority of the voters, however, the radical plan from Bender et al to leave them at the mercy of violent criminals without any hope of protection should be disqualifying.
If any of these council members get re-elected, then Minneapolis deserves the impoverishment and collapse that will follow.
Trump spoke to the family’s minister to see if he should meet with the family of Jacob Blake. His father, Jacob Blake Sr. insisted on having a lawyer present if Trump were to visit with the family. The President wasn’t interested in playing any of those games. Instead, he met with the people in Kenosha that were devastated by the rioting and damage, and law enforcement who calmed down the riot. His trip was not focused on politics but on getting the community what it needed.
Two days later, Biden visited Kenosha as well. But his was a trip to please his radical handlers. It was made only because the President’s trip was successful.
Unlike Trump, he met with Jacob’s anti-Semitic father. But that makes sense for Joe, after all, the Democratic Party’s far-left base is filled with anti-Semites. The media made a big deal about Jacob’s father speaking to Biden, but not talking to Trump. They ignored the fact that Blake Sr. is a Jew-hating Bigot.
Jacob’s father is a Farrakhan-supporting, raging bigot. And he’s Joe Biden’s new BFF. If he was a Trump supporter, his hate-mongering would be fodder for the news. But he’s part of the Democrats and their BLM offensive so there’s silence.
Nate Silver, the popular statistician and data geek who publishes his predictions for political outcomes throughout the country has released some new findings for the November Presidential Election and the news for Team Biden isn’t great. In fact, they are downright bad.
You'll sometimes see people say stuff like "Biden MUST with the popular vote by 3 points or he's toast". Not true; at 2-3 points, the Electoral College is a tossup, not necessarily a Trump win.
OTOH, the Electoral College is not really *safe* for Biden unless he wins by 5+.
In 2016, Clinton won the national popular vote by just over 2.8 million votes or 2.1%. Her enthusiasm rating was just 12 points behind Trump at this same time in the election (early September) in 2016. Polls found that of Trump’s base, 58% were enthusiastic about voting for the now-current-President versus just 46% of the same voters for the now-defeated Clinton. In other words, despite the majority of her voters being less-than-enthusiastic about showing up to vote for her, she still won the national popular vote by 2.1%.
This is where the bad news for Biden comes in. Currently, Biden’s enthusiasm score trails that of the President by 17 points. Of the President’s supporters, 65% are enthusiastic about voting for him, a seven-point increase from his 58% at the same time in the race in 2016. Biden, on the other hand, enjoys a 48% enthusiasm rate, up just 2% from his 2016 predecessor.
This simply means that Trump enjoys a much stronger support from his base than does Biden his. If history is any indicator, Trump will likely do better against Biden in 2020 than Clinton did in 2016, at a 2.1% margin of national vote victory. If we apply that to Nate Silver’s data, Biden would only have about a 22% chance of victory against Trump come election day.
Interviews with more than two dozen Democratic Party officials and strategists in the suburbs reflect confidence in Biden’s ability to compete with Trump on issues surrounding this summer’s civil unrest, but also widespread concerns about the political volatility — and potential allure — of the president’s law-and-order message.
In Pinal County, Ariz., where “Thin Blue Line” flags have proliferated outside Phoenix and Tucson, Holly Lyon, chair of the local Democratic Party, said, “There is that little sort of unsettled feeling in people because we can tell that [Trump’s messaging] is grabbing hold, and it’s working.”
Snip.
Two Democratic strategists who recently viewed focus groups of suburban voters described high-propensity voters increasingly concerned about unrest in urban centers, though both strategists said it was unclear whether that concern would push them to Biden or to Trump.
One of the strategists described a focus group in which white, college-educated women reacted to the protests by discussing their own property values and, in one woman’s case, her family’s mortgage.
“White women who have college degrees are starting to really get sick of this,” the strategist said.
Some state polls are showing signs of it. In Pennsylvania, a critical swing state, a Monmouth University poll released last week found that Biden’s lead over Trump had narrowed statewide, and that Trump was leading Biden by 2 percentage points in 10 swing counties, including some Philadelphia suburbs, erasing a large advantage Biden had built there earlier this year.
If civil unrest persists, said Robert Tatterson, secretary of the Democratic Party in Ozaukee County, outside Milwaukee, Trump “will be able to be the strong man, only-I-can-save-you leader, and that’s playing out just like I had feared.”
Note that the word “antifa” is completely missing from the article. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse, who notes “People always say Trump is ‘talking the wrong way.’ He was talking the wrong way in 2016, and then he won. Talking the wrong way is Trump’s super power.”)
President Trump’s approval hits 52%…and 45% among black Americans.
Why did Joe Biden leave his Delaware basement and fly all the way to Pittsburgh to give a speech Monday with no crowd — no supporters in attendance — and not even answer press questions? He could have given the same speech from Delaware, but he flew to Pittsburgh. Why? Paul Kengor’s article today in The American Spectator explains that support for Trump has surged in Pennsylvania over the last month, in large part because of Biden’s “highly ill-advised pick of Kamala Harris, who folk in this area see as a West Coast leftist whose ‘progressive’ bona fides include an unwavering opposition to fracking.”
Kengor explains that, in Pennsylvania, fracking means jobs — lots of good-paying blue-collar jobs — and by choosing Harris as his running mate, Biden is effectively threatening to kill those jobs.
The Real Clear Politics average in top battleground states confirms the momentum shift. During July, Biden’s lead was about 6 points, but since the conventions, Trump has cut that lead in half — and that’s just the public polls. Everybody knows there is a “shy Trump voter” factor, where people are afraid tell pollsters who they support, but are likely to choose Trump on Election Day. That factor may be as large as 5% and Biden’s slippage in Pennsylvania, where the latest Monmouth poll shows him with just a 3-point lead, obviously set the alarm bells ringing at Biden campaign HQ.
“Biden-Harris ClusterFrack – First They Were For Fracking Ban, Then Polls Shifted, Now They Are Against Ban.”
Memory and some polling data that suggests Joe Biden’s media-assisted campaign is headed for an eerily similar crash landing to the one that happened in 2016. The media has once again sealed itself in a suffocating bubble, within which the impossible Trump victory can’t happen. The Democrats find themselves strapped to a low-energy candidate who is a bystander as social upheaval scorches battleground states. It has the look and feel of fall 2016. Democrats, start panicking now.
First, Joe Biden’s poll numbers are starting to tighten. Biden has enjoyed a comfortable lead throughout both the primary polling against Trump, and post nomination. But there are concerning trends for Biden that mirror those of Hillary Clinton’s position in August 2016. In fact, Biden is doing worse in the polls than Hillary was at this time — but you wouldn’t know this based on media coverage of course.
Pollster Frank Luntz breaks it down. On August 25, 2016, Hillary held a +9.2 advantage over Trump in the RealClearPolitics average for Pennsylvania, a state she lost. Currently Joe Biden holds a +5.7 average lead. In Michigan, Hillary held a +9 advantage in polling, a state she also lost. Biden is at +6.7. In Wisconsin, the state Hillary lost and infamously did not visit once for the duration of the general election, Hillary held a lead of +11.5. Biden sits at +6.5. The only state of the crucial swing stats where Biden’s polling outperforms Hillary’s is Florida, where Biden holds a +4.8 average lead. Hillary’s lead was +2.9. She of course lost Florida as well, all but sealing the presidency for Trump and the unthinkable for the media. Biden still holds about an +8.5 lead nationally, but for a candidate who is perceived to have less professional baggage and considered more likable than Hillary, these numbers should be putting the Biden campaign on alert.
Biden also received no post-convention bump, as most candidates do when more voters start paying attention to the election. Biden was of course at a historical disadvantage with COVID-19 canceling out the possibility of a large-scale convention, but the trappings were all there: video presentations, major endorsements, candidate speeches. Yet still nothing.
Then consider the fact that Trump’s base support has not eroded. Trump’s popularity with voters, as measured by FiveThirtyEight, shows his support has more or less remained between 40-44 percent throughout his presidency. While he currently trails Biden in the crucial swing states, Trump enjoys a rock of support, even after three years of Russiagate, Robert Mueller, sustained negative media and entertainment coverage, sports team boycotts, impeachment and of course the pandemic. Roughly 40 percent of the country, we can assume, has simply tuned out the media.
Plus Biden’s wimpy response to the antifa/#BlackLivesMatter rioting,
The weirdness of Slow Joe’s Speech. “The speech itself was a mind-numbing collection of platitudes, cliches, and lies. To that extent it was a conventional political speech. Listening to it, however, is painful. Biden has become a deeply contrived figure. Thus the artificiality of the staging.”
More on that subject:
From all appearances, Biden can't go off script or disobey aides or staff to keep talking or even respond to people going off the script. I've never seen anything like this.
A text from a friend watching the press conference: “Who are asking Biden these questions?? It's like watching someone make sure a 3 year old wins CandyLand.”
Ann Althouse watches a Biden-Harris chat so you don’t have to. Actually, that’s not true: she only makes it 20 seconds in, then switches to reading the transcript. Also dings Harris for lying about her imaginary hard-scrabble background. “Her mother was a medical researcher at prestigious institutions, and her father was an economics professor at Stanford. They didn’t have any financial struggles, did they?”
That always-fake Biden lead in Texas blows away like the fog it always was. “Trump is now leading Biden among likely voters, 48 to 46 percent, according to the poll from The Dallas Morning News and the University of Texas at Tyler.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Poll has Trump up by ten points in Missouri. If so, Trump should be worried, since he clobbered Hillary by about 18 points in 2016.
See if you can count how many ways this New York Times piece on competing Biden and Trump ads talking about the antifa/#BlackLivesMatter riots tries to spin the issue for Biden.
“Secret Service Inadvertently Confirms Gateway Pundit Story About Biden Sexually Assaulting Agent’s Girlfriend.” The 2009 file on the incident was destroyed due to “retention standards.” More: “We had to cancel the VP Christmas get together at the Vice President’s house because Biden would grope all of our wives and girlfriend’s asses.”
Slow Joe gonna Slow Joe:
The fact that this sad man is even considered a candidate for leader of the free world embarrasses me as an American. pic.twitter.com/2qqEYznEYM
[T]he Democrats have no intention of accepting defeat at the ballot box. If you think that they were sore losers in 2016, you ain’t seen anything yet.
And what they’re doing is effectively threatening violence if Biden does not win, and it’s just a variation on the theme that Biden talked to [in] Pittsburgh, during the week, when he said if you don’t vote for him, ‘ya ain’t safe.’
ox 9 News in Minneapolis did the research for us. Here are a few of the criminals they found Harris did a solid for.
Among those bailed out by the Minnesota Freedom Fund (MFF) is a suspect who shot at police, a woman accused of killing a friend, and a twice convicted sex offender, according to court records reviewed by the FOX 9 Investigators.
According to attempted murder charges, Jaleel Stallings shot at members of a SWAT Team during the riots in May. Police recovered a modified pistol that looks like an AK-47. MFF paid $75,000 in cash to get Stallings out of jail.
Darnika Floyd is charged with second degree murder, for stabbing a friend to death. MFF paid $100,000 cash for her release.
Christopher Boswell, a twice convicted rapist, is currently charged with kidnapping, assault, and sexual assault in two separate cases. MFF paid $350,00 [sic] in cash for his release.
Kamala Harris and her friends in the corporate media, otherwise known as the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party, will pretend this never happened and they are counting on voters to be too ignorant to know that it did. Harris was so eager to be on the rioters’ team that she literally raised money for them in the hopes that they could be released and foster further mayhem.
You might have forgotten the first time you heard the name Kamala Harris. It was probably 16 years ago, when Harris found Democrats, along with decent people of all political persuasions, united against her.
At the time, the story of a murdered California policeman had become national news amid widespread indignation over Harris’s role in the case. Her actions revealed her true nature as a ruthless partisan committed über alles to the causes embraced by far-left ideologues — even when that commitment meant denying justice to a fallen officer and inflicting injustice on his family and law-enforcement colleagues.
On the night of April 10, 2004, San Francisco police officer Isaac Espinoza and his partner, Barry Parker, were patrolling the city’s Bayview District. Despite Bayview’s being a notoriously high-crime neighborhood filled with danger, a selfless sense of duty had led Officer Espinoza to request it as his assignment “because he felt he made the most impact as a cop there.”
As the officers drove the streets, they noticed a man in a long, dark coat who appeared to be acting in a suspicious manner, walking with only one of his arms swinging naturally, as if he were trying to conceal something. They decided they should pull over to stop and talk to him. Officer Espinoza exited the patrol car and followed the man on foot, calling out an order to halt and identifying himself as law enforcement. The man — later identified as David Hill — first sped up before eventually slowing and stopping. He turned around, lifted the AK-47 rifle he had been hiding, and opened fire, murdering Officer Espinoza, who had never even unholstered his service weapon.
Hill was a member of the West Mob, a criminal street gang that terrorized those who lived and worked within its geographic “territory” by committing rapes, homicides, assaults with firearms, narcotic sales, car thefts, burglaries, and robberies. As an expert testified at trial, “Retaliation against a [rival] gang member sends a message to other gang members, but the murder of a police officer sends a message to the community: ‘Hey, even your protectors can be touched.’”
That was Officer Espinoza: a protector of the community, a devoted husband to his wife, and a doting father to his three-year-old daughter, cut down in cold blood.
Just three days after Espinoza’s murder, before he had been laid to rest and without caring to call his widow, Harris, who was then the San Francisco district attorney, invited reporters and camera crews to a news conference to announce that she would not seek a death sentence in the case. Per the New York Times, she argued that doing so would “send the wrong message” and be “a poor use of money.” But California assemblyman Joseph Canciamilla, a fellow Democrat, explained it better: “This is clearly a case where local politics took precedence over the facts of the case and a deliberative review of the circumstances.”
“The United States welcomes the emergence of a prosperous, integrated China on the global stage, because we expect this is going to be a China that plays by the rules,” Mr. Biden told Mr. Jiang, recalled Frank Jannuzi, the Senate aide who organized the trip and took notes at Mr. Biden’s side.
Snip.
Two decades later, China has emerged as a great power — and, in the eyes of many Americans, a dangerous rival. Republicans and Democrats say it has exploited the global integration that Mr. Biden and many other officials supported.
The 2020 election has been partly defined by what much of Washington sees as a kind of new Cold War. And as Mr. Biden faces fierce campaign attacks from President Trump, his language on China points to a drastic shift in thinking.
Mr. Biden calls Xi Jinping, the authoritarian Chinese leader, a “thug.” He has threatened, if elected, to impose “swift economic sanctions” if China tries to silence American citizens and companies. “The United States does need to get tough on China,” he wrote this winter in an essay in Foreign Affairs. Mr. Biden now sees the country as a top strategic challenge, according to interviews with more than a dozen of his advisers and foreign policy associates, and his own words.
Completely missing from this article: any mention of Hunter Biden.
You may be aware of the lock-picking lawyer, the anonymous attorney with a very active YouTube channel where he demonstrates his extensive lock-picking skills. Very rare is the lock he can’t defeat in under three minutes.
In the videos below, the lock-picking layer and mentor Bosnianbill go out to the firing range to bring sheer firepower to bear on two very sturdy locks.
First they went after the Squire SS80CS, a five-pound hardened steel lock, with everything from .223 to 7.62 NATO armor-piercing. (Plus .300 Blackout, which I’m not sure I’ve seen anyone shoot before.)
Then the go after that lock’s big brother, the SS100CS, which weights twice as much, with a .50 BMG.
It lasts a surprisingly long time.
They didn’t go after with a Roufuss round, but at $65 a round, that would hardly be a cost-effective solution anyway.
At the direction of President Trump, the White House Office of Management and Budget will move to identify and eliminate any trace of “critical race theory” in the federal government.
Critical race theory is the leftist, racist doctrine that forms the intellectual underpinnings of Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and other radical organizations currently engaged in unrest on America’s streets.
It alleges, among other things, that the United States is a white supremacist country, and that all white people are guilty of racism, whether they intend it or not.
President Trump has brought the issue of far-left indoctrination to the forefront of the national conversation in recent months. It was a major theme of the President’s Independence Day speech at Mt. Rushmore, in which he condemned far-left theories that “defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children.”
Employees across the Executive Branch have been required to attend trainings where they are told that “virtually all White people contribute to racism” or where they are required to say that they “benefit from racism.” According to press reports, in some cases these training have further claimed that there is racism embedded in the belief that America is the land of opportunity or the belief that the most qualified person should receive a job.
These types of “trainings” not only run counter to the fundamental beliefs for which our Nation has stood since its inception, but they also engender division and resentment within the Federal workforce. We can be proud that as an employer, the Federal government has employees of all races, ethnicities, and religions. We can be proud that Americans from all over the country seek to join our workforce and dedicate themselves to public service. We can be proud of our continued efforts to welcome all individuals who seek to serve their fellow Americans as Federal employees. However, we cannot accept our employees receiving training that seeks to undercut our core values as Americans and drive division within our workforce.
The President has directed me to ensure that Federal agencies cease and desist from using taxpayer dollars to fund these divisive, un-American propaganda training sessions. Accordingly, to that end, the Office of Management and Budget will shortly issue more detailed guidance on implementing the President’s directive. In the meantime, all agencies are directed to begin to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any training on “critical race theory,” “white privilege,” or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil. In addition, all agencies should begin to identify all available avenues within the law to cancel any such contracts and/or to divert Federal dollars away from these un-American propaganda training sessions.
This move is long overdue, but it’s only a start. To really counter the threat of Critical Race Theory, it need to be purged from all of America’s educational institutions be denying federal dollars to to any institutions that teach such poison.
But just naming the enemy is a huge first step. Just forcing all those “moderate” Democrats to take a stand on the issue will be hugely clarifying…
Greetings, and welcome to the Friday LinkSwarm! President Trump’s approval rises among black people, more antifa behaving badly, and a look at just how badly Lebanon is screwed.
“President Trump’s approval rating among Black voters jumped by 60% during the Republican National Committee even as Democrats and progressives sought to brand the Republican president as racist. A HarrisX-Hill poll released Friday showed Mr. Trump’s net approval with Black voters from Aug. 22-25, which included the first two days of the RNC, rose to 24%, up from 15% in the pollster’s Aug. 8-11 survey.” If those numbers are accurate, and hold, all by themselves they could put Pennsylvania out of reach for Democrats, since they lost by 50,000 votes in 2016, and have to rack up huge black totals in Philadelphia to balance out their disadvantage in the rest of the state. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Dirtbag dirtnapped: “Michael Forest Reinoehl, 48, died in Lacey, Washington, where federal agents were attempting to take him into custody for the shooting — the same night his interview on the shooting aired on Vice News.”
President Trump is ordering the federal government to begin the process of defunding New York City and three other cities where officials allowed “lawless” protests and cut police budgets amid rising violent crime, The Post can exclusively reveal.
Trump on Wednesday signed a five-page memo ordering all federal agencies to send reports to the White House Office of Management and Budget that detail funds that can be redirected.
New York City, Washington, DC, Seattle and Portland are initial targets as Trump makes “law and order” a centerpiece of his re-election campaign after months of unrest and violence following the May killing of George Floyd by Minnesota police.
“My Administration will not allow Federal tax dollars to fund cities that allow themselves to deteriorate into lawless zones,” Trump says in the memo, which twice mentions New York Mayor Bill de Blasio by name.
“To ensure that Federal funds are neither unduly wasted nor spent in a manner that directly violates our Government’s promise to protect life, liberty, and property, it is imperative that the Federal Government review the use of Federal funds by jurisdictions that permit anarchy, violence, and destruction in America’s cities.”
The course of the nightly action against the PPB followed a fairly predictable pattern: a contingent of notional BLM protesters rendezvoused with a group of antifa black bloc at a public park close to their objective. As they moved towards the police building which was their target, “corkers” -a sort of bicycle-mounted blocking force- closed off side streets and the scouting line -typically on mopeds- moved ahead and on the flanks. Behind them came the main contingent of black bloc. Upon arrival at the PPB the streets were blocked with vehicles and burning dumpsters, with the “corkers” stationed to direct traffic away from the action and the scouts setting up a picket line extending out several blocks, watching for police reinforcements and creating the strong impression of antifa control of territory.
The black bloc then engaged in an steadily-escalating level of vandalism and property damage directed at their target, including unguarded police vehicles parked nearby. If uninterrupted, this quickly escalated to arson and serious destruction to the facilities.
By this point the scouting line often detected the flanking lines of riot police and a riot was formally been declared. Blocs armed with shields deployed defensively to allow time for the rest of the rioters to disengage. These “shield walls” provided a tempting target for a police “bull rush”, video of which can then be used for propaganda purposes. Behind the shield wall other bloc members threw commercial fireworks, frozen water bottles, and paint-filled balloons. The paint balloons are often mixed with sand or abrasive material that scratches clear shields and visors when cleaning is attempted damaging expensive riot suppression equipment. Meanwhile the main element of the antifa black bloc continued to retreat into bordering residential areas.
Antifa chooses the residential areas for specific reasons. As the police deploy flashbangs, tear gas, and assorted non-lethal munitions in order to control the ongoing riot, the disruptive effects are experienced by the local residents. Additionally, as the action moved further into the poorly-lit neighborhoods, small groups of rioters and black bloc would break off to either escape, or engage in vandalism against the original PPB target (if left unguarded) or other nearby targets of opportunity.
The action concluded at some point in the early morning hours, usually 4-5 hours after the assembly in the designated park. The location was almost always shifted to a different location every night, very rarely going to the same location on successive nights. This means it’s rare for the same location to be targeted more than twice in one week.
Plus suggested tactics on countering it.
“Flamethrower-Packing Antifa ‘Entered Fetal Position And Began Crying’ After Unsuccessful Escape From Cops.” This was in Green Bay, Wisconsin. I can’t believe I didn’t have a “flamethrower” tag until now.
Goya CEO Bob Unamue, tells Democrats that “the ‘hatred and destruction’ are moving Latinos to Trump.” Plus a comparison to communist enforcement mobs. (Hat tip: @txpoliticjunkie.)
Like a lot of observers at the time, I thought Trump had no real policy agenda to define his campaign beyond a vague pro-America sentiment and a withering disdain for the political establishments of both major parties. I thought his political inexperience was a liability, that his penchant for insulting his opponents would turn voters off, and that the GOP had missed an opportunity to defeat Hillary Clinton by nominating someone else—anyone, really, besides Trump.
But it turned out Trump was the best candidate to beat Clinton because Clinton embodied nearly everything voters had come to hate about America’s political class: the falsity, the naked hypocrisy, the barely disguised disdain for ordinary people. For all his obvious faults, Trump wasn’t a professional politician, had no record to defend, and was unconstrained by the conventions of ordinary political rhetoric. He was uniquely positioned to call out and exploit Clinton’s faults and shortcomings, and expose the contradictions at the heart of the Democratic Party.
For Republican voters, Trump offered the promise of something different from the seemingly endless pattern of politicians who promised one thing and did another, especially on immigration and free trade. For decades, incessant Republican boasting about “securing the border” never actually secured the border as mass illegal immigration continued apace. Expressions of sympathy for the American working class never produced policies that might actually help the working class. Trump zeroed in on these things, and his message resonated because it was true (and still is).
Joseph P. Kennedy III loses his senate primary to incumbent Ed Markey, who seemed to run to Kennedy’s left.
Speaking of members of the Kennedy clan running for office, NJ Democratic congressional candidate Amy Kennedy calls for lifting sanctions on Chinese companies. In one of those amazing coincidences, she also owns substantial amounts of Chinese stock. What are the odds? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The Media Lynching of Kyle Rittenhouse. A liberal journalism professor not only omits the fact that Rittenhouse was attacked, but also thinks that the Kenosha riots will hurt Trump.
The effects of the explosion of nearly 3,000 tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer in the port of Beirut, Lebanon on August 4th was not restricted to 170+ deaths and 3,000+ injuries. The explosion’s metaphorical shockwaves may prove to be the death knell of Lebanon’s domestic politics and economy. Both were already collapsing from extreme corruption even before COVID struck. Add an explosion that caused billions of dollars of damage to an already bankrupt country, and the result is a failed state in the making.
Lebanon is failing in no small part because the Shia terror group Hezbollah, which translates as “Army of God,” makes its home there. Hezbollah’s continued residency and effective Lebanese governance seem to be mutually exclusive propositions.
Except calling Hezbollah merely a terror group is too simplistic, and nothing in Lebanon is ever simple or easy to explain.
Hezbollah is responsible for countless murders, kidnappings, and terror attacks, including the 1983 suicide bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 Marines. But Hezbollah is also a charity operating in refugee camps. It’s a social service provider for Shia Lebanese, operating clinics, hospitals, and schools (which teach wildly anti-Semitic propaganda). It operates a satellite TV channel. It smuggles guns, sells drugs, and launders money. It has a finger in almost every pie in Lebanon, and influence in Syria, Iran, Iraq, the Northern Triangle countries of Central America (Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador), and Venezuela. (Click to see the Washington Institute’s regularly updated interactive map of Hezbollah’s globe-spanning activities, and the actions taken to counter them.)
Beyond all that, Hezbollah is also a powerful paramilitary group with 30,000+ fighters, armed with tens of thousands of rockets, as well as precision munitions like guided ballistic missiles. Hezbollah fought Israel’s last incursion in Lebanon in 2006 to a standstill, and Hezbollah is often considered the winner of the clash, despite Israel’s access to the latest weapons tech.
Yet, like every other organization in Lebanon, Hezbollah is in very deep shit.
Lebanon’s current chaos is due to decades of previous chaos spawned of ongoing demographic and power shifts in the post-WWII era among Lebanon’s Maronite Christians, Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims, and the Druze (a splinter Shia sect). The brutal Lebanese civil war fought by sectarian militias from 1975 to 1990 ended with a peace deal splitting political power along explicit sectarian lines. By law, the Shia nominate the Speaker of the Parliament, the Sunni get the Prime Minister’s Office, and the Christians select the Lebanese President. The sectarian structure of the government mandated by the peace deal effectively embedded political corruption into law. Each sect controls a piece of the Lebanese government and economy, and each has installed a patronage system dispensing favors and money to their upper echelons, with little of the wealth trickling down to the sects’ underclasses.
Enlightening, and depressing. Read the whole thing.
“Iowa Judge Voids 50,000 Absentee Ballot Requests.” “The Trump campaign argued the forms should have been blank except for the election date and type, per the Iowa secretary of state’s directions. Local officials in Linn County, which is home to Cedar Rapids, ignored those directions and sent out the applications with more information anyway.”
MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL: Wisconsin woman launches effort to recall Gov. Tony Evers (D) over unrest in Kenosha, says "We're not willing to stand by and watch our cities burn."
