Menu Icon

Debt Rattle Clean Sweep 2024

Nov 062024
 
 November 6, 2024  Posted by at 9:37 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  94 Responses »

At 1.43AM:

 

• Will America Survive the Election? (Paul Craig Roberts)
• With JD Vance and Elon Musk, Suddenly Ideas Are Back in this Campaign (Ron Paul)
• 77 Days of Transition (ET)
• WikiLeaks: 5 Questions For Donald Trump If He Wins (ZH)
• Celebrities Being Pressured To Publicly Back Harris – Musk (RT)
• Trump Calls Nancy Pelosi “An Evil, Sick, Crazy B…” (MN)
• Donald Trump ‘More Popular’ Than ‘Least Qualified’ Kamala Harris (Sp.)
• In the Midst of a Roid Rage Election, a Reason to Have Hope (Turley)
• Russian History As Therapy For Western Historians Who Just Want To Be Loved (JH)
• The General Staff’s Map And President Putin’s Map Are Different (Helmer)
• Novichok Was Not Detected – But There Was Cocaine (Helmer)
• Schiff w/ Mitchell: Fed Policy is Backfiring (SchiffGold)
• Ukraine Not Drafting Enough Troops – MP (RT)
• Ukrainian MP Calls For Mobilization Of Women (RT)
• Netanyahu Fires Israeli Defense Minister (RT)

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1853701886282526996

Rogan Elon
https://twitter.com/i/status/1853644366247768287


https://twitter.com/i/status/1853567754093416932s


https://twitter.com/i/status/1853601901948125683

Shanahan

 

 

 

 

“November 5 is the last chance of redeeming America..”

• Will America Survive the Election? (Paul Craig Roberts)

On November 3, I wrote about Meredith Furbish, a truth-suppressor for the Atlantic Council. She misrepresented my documentation of rulings by federal judges, state judges, Justice (sic) Department and Homeland Security (sic) officials, and state and local Democrat election officials, which legalized the vote theft mechanisms used illegally in the 2020 presidential election, as Russian-associated disinformation. The ubiquitous evidence that the Democrats were heavily into vote fraud was dismissed as a conspiracy theory. I assumed Meredith is a she, but perhaps “she” is an AI bot in an algorithm that connects information unfriendly with approved official narratives with Russian interference in US elections. It makes more sense that Meredith is an algorithm, because an algorithm, not being sentient. would not be aware of my completely documented case. The Democrats are determined that today’s election not be fair, and I am far from the only one who is aware of this.

Since I wrote, the US Supreme Court has had to intervene to prevent the Biden-Harris regime from preventing the state of Virginia from removing noncitizens, who do not have the right to vote, from the voter rolls. Of course, showing the totally partisan nature of all Democrats, the three female Democrat appointees to the Supreme Court dissented. It is perfectly OK with them that non-citizens have the same right to vote as citizens. This is the trouble with every Democrat appointee, whether to the courts or to the executive branch. They do not know the difference between a US citizen and someone who just illegally walked across the border. Despite court rulings against them, the Biden-Harris regime continues to hamper efforts to keep non-US citizens from illegally voting in the presidential election. The Daily Caller reports that “Several states say that the Biden-Harris administration has not cooperated with their efforts to prevent non-citizens from voting.”

The states have filed lawsuits against the corrupt Biden-Harris regime, the most corrupt regime in American history. “The Department of Justice (DOJ) sued Virginia in October and Alabama in September over their efforts to remove non-citizens.The excuse was it was too close to the election. Texas, Ohio and Florida filed their own lawsuits against the Biden-Harris regime this month for allegedly hampering their efforts to restore electoral integrity, while other states told the Daily Caller News Foundation the federal government has not supported attempts to identify non-citizen voters.” Note that for the Democrat totally corrupt Justice (sic) Department “closeness to an election” is more important than having a president elected with votes of illegal aliens. Will any person of integrity ever again consent to serve in a totally discredited US Department of Justice (sic)?

The Biden-Harris Justice (sic) Department and Homeland Security (sic) Department have steadfastly refused to cooperate with efforts to have voter rolls in which only American citizens are present. The Montana Secretary of State has complained of Homeland Security’s blockage of its efforts to ensure that American citizens determine our government, not immigrant-invaders. The Montana Secretary of State said: “Montanans deserve to know that our state’s voter rolls are accurate, and it’s imperative for election officials across the state and nation not to be stonewalled by our federal government to assist in our duties to ensure accurate voter rolls.” The Department of Homeland Security, a criminal agency in the hands of Democrats, has a Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program . It prevents states from identifying illegals on their voter rolls, because it uses a unique immigration identifier unavailable to the states.

The Biden-Harris regime refuses to provide the information necessary for states to remove illegals from their voter rolls. On October 24, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose said: “While the administration is blocking access to these records, the Department of Justice is suing or threatening to sue multiple states, including Ohio, who are trying to enforce their citizenship voting requirements.” “The Department of Justice (DOJ) sued Virginia in October and Alabama in September over their efforts to remove non-citizens. Texas, Ohio and Florida filed their own lawsuits against the administration this month for allegedly hampering their efforts, while other states told the Daily Caller News Foundation the federal government has not supported attempts to identify noncitizen voters.” Dear Readers, the Biden-Harris regime and the US Department of Justice (sic) are involved in an attempted coup to turn America into a one-party dictatorship. Americans who sit out this election or who vote Democrat are voting for tyranny. They are too stupid to know it, but they are so indoctrinated by the media and education that they have no realization of reality.

They think they are being compassionate toward suffering peoples from abroad. They are thinking that they need the household help that immigrant-invaders provide. They think that Trump sexualizes women, but endless women portray themselves online in porn videos for all the world to see. The United States of America and the entirety of the remains of the Western World are on the verge of total collapse. Only 13% of Americans believe the media. Even the editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal and the owner of the Washington Post have publicly stated that no one any longer believes what the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post report. Those Americans who give the Democrats enough votes to steal the election will have elected Tyranny in America. According to numerous reports, those with sufficient resources are already fleeing America. Astute Americans having watched the stupidity and incompetence of the American people for years have lost all confidence in the country, and they are departing. November 5 is the last chance of redeeming America.

Read more …

“While the last thing I am looking for is another job, I am encouraged by the outpouring of support and happy to help any effort to correct the wrong path we have been going down – a path toward total bankruptcy..”

• With JD Vance and Elon Musk, Suddenly Ideas Are Back in this Campaign (Ron Paul)

This presidential campaign season may be one of those turning points in history for reasons good and bad. Anyone watching the one debate between the Republican and Democratic Party candidates would not have come away with the view that this was a great battle of competing principles and visions for the future. It was a campaign of name-calling and bullets, where one candidate avoided discussing ideas at all costs – and even avoided the media at all costs. Where the other candidate dodged two attempted assassinations while throwing red meat rhetoric to an understandably angry population. It was a campaign where, more than ever, the mainstream media completely abandoned any idea of being a neutral source of information and instead jumped into the ring on the side of one candidate. In the one debate between presidential candidates, the mainstream media went so far as to “fact check” one candidate while giving the other a “pass.”

The “fact check” turned out to be misinformation – something the mainstream media excels in – but they have long figured out that by the time the actual facts are in, people have already absorbed the falsehood. According to the conservative Media Research Center, mainstream media coverage of the Trump campaign was 85 percent negative while its coverage of the Harris campaign was 78 percent positive. If accurate, it explains why the public holds the media in such contempt. What felt missing in the campaign was a discussion of the real issues we are facing. The destruction caused by interventionism in our economy, in our lives, and in the rest of the world. There was no talk about the Federal Reserve and how it hurts the middle class, helps the wealthy, and greases the war machine.

Then, at the tail end, things got interesting. Republican candidate for Vice President, JD Vance, mentioned last week that he had come to the view that the Federal Reserve was not the benevolent force for good that its supporters claim. He didn’t say it in those exact words, but that was his point. Then Trump surrogate campaigner Elon Musk made an announcement that no-doubt terrified the DC swamp: were he to get the government efficiency job Trump suggested, he’d start with a bang, cutting two trillion dollars from the Federal budget!

We even had a little fun with it. After I posted some encouragement on Musk’s Twitter/X, he responded that he would be happy to have me join him looking for places to cut! While the last thing I am looking for is another job, I am encouraged by the outpouring of support and happy to help any effort to correct the wrong path we have been going down – a path toward total bankruptcy. Perhaps the most encouraging development this election cycle is the well-earned decline in the influence of the corrupt mainstream media. When Elon posted a funny meme of the two of us cutting government on his Twitter/X platform, it garnered some 50 million views! Compare that to the steady decline of mainstream media viewership. An alternative way of reporting and analyzing the events of our time is emerging on the ruins of the legacy media and it’s driving them insane. Good.

Read more …

“..the Constitution, Article Two says, ‘Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors.’ This bill is Congress trying to intrude on the authority of the state legislatures to do that.”

• 77 Days of Transition (ET)

The 2024 presidential election will see the first application of a 2022 amendment to the laws governing the transfer of power between administrations. There are 77 days between the Nov. 5 election and the Jan. 20, 2025, inauguration of the next president, during which time the president-elect will ready his or her administration to take over from President Joe Biden. The handoffs between an outgoing administration and a government-in-waiting have been largely drama-free for decades, and they have been governed by the rules enumerated in the Presidential Transition Act of 1963. The Electoral Count Reform Act will take effect this year, ensuring that five days after the election, the team of the winning candidate (or both candidates if the winner is not yet identified), will begin readying for the White House.

Unless another authority is designated by state law, the act appoints governors as the principal officials responsible for filing certificates of state presidential electors. By providing expedited court review of matters pertaining to electors, it guarantees that Congress can establish a final slate of electors. The vice president’s involvement in the electoral vote count is defined by the new act as purely ceremonial, and he or she is not given any power to affect the count in any way. It also reduces the possibility of challenges by raising the threshold for congressional objections to one-fifth of each house. Previously, a single member of both chambers was needed to enter an objection to an elector or slate of electors. Additionally, the General Services Administration (GSA) is now required to provide money to both candidates in the event that a candidate does not withdraw their candidacy within five days following the election. This change affects the presidential transition process. The GSA will cut off financing to the unsuccessful campaign once the results are finalized.

The initial responsibility of the successful candidate is to acquire knowledge of the current agency missions, policies, and ongoing projects, as well as to commence the process of filling political positions in the executive branch, ranging from Cabinet secretaries to press assistants. The new team is provided guidance by career leaders and appointees from the outgoing administration to assist in the launch of its government. They also provide briefings on significant issues and facilitate inquiries. An orderly transition has long been dependent on the flow of resources. Delays occurred following the 2020 presidential election as President Donald Trump questioned the validity of the election results as they were being reported. Because Trump was contesting the results in court, there was a delay in the start of the transition from Election Day on Nov. 3, 2020, to Nov. 23.

Emily Murphy, then head of the GSA, reviewed the transition law from 1963 and concluded that she lacked the legal authority to determine a winner and commence funding and collaboration with the transition to a Biden administration. Weeks after the election, Murphy sent a Letter of Ascertainment to Biden and commenced the transition process after Trump’s efforts to contest the results had collapsed across key states. According to the GSA’s guidelines on the new rules, the amendment eliminates lengthy delays and states “an affirmative ‘ascertainment’ by GSA is no longer a prerequisite for obtaining transition support services.” However, the new law also effectively mandates federal support and cooperation for both candidates to initiate a transition. It is stated that such support should persist until “significant legal challenges” that could affect electoral outcomes have been “substantially resolved” or until electors from each state convene in December to formally select an Electoral College winner.

Under this mandate, Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris may find themselves forming rival administrations for weeks. The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement amendment to the Presidential Transition Act was passed in December 2022. During a committee hearing on the Electoral Count Act on Aug. 3 that year, Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) said, “We were all there on Jan. 6 … We have a duty [and] responsibility to make sure it never happens again.” Manchin was referring to the events on Jan. 6, 2021, when protesters breached the U.S. Capitol while Congress was counting electoral votes.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said in her testimony: “In four out of the past six presidential elections, the Electoral Count Act’s process for counting electoral votes has been abused with frivolous objections being raised by members of both parties. But it took the violent breach of the Capitol on Jan. 6 to really shine a spotlight on how urgent the need for reform was.” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) opposed the bill, stating in a press release: “This bill is a bad bill. … It’s bad policy and it’s bad for democracy. There are serious constitutional questions in the bill. The text of the Constitution, Article Two says, ‘Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors.’ This bill is Congress trying to intrude on the authority of the state legislatures to do that.”

Read more …

“Will “swamp” insiders flatter their way into influential roles and take control of your administration, reducing MAGA to mere rhetoric?”

• WikiLeaks: 5 Questions For Donald Trump If He Wins (ZH)

On Tuesday, as Americans head to the polls in a tight race to determine who will be the next president, WikiLeaks has issued five big questions for a potential future Trump administration. When in 2016 Trump defeated former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, many among Trump’s base and fiercest supporters had high hopes that he would truly “drain the swamp” while completely realigning US foreign policy in opposition to the neocons, including ending the ‘forever wars’ in the Middle East. After all, he was the first GOP nominee in history to trash Republican George Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003. And later as president he called the Iraq war “the single worst decision ever made.” But these high hopes turned to disappointment when Trump willingly brought into his administration some of the very neocons who have long been part of the problem, or arguably who are at the very heart of the swap, or the Washington blob. He put into powerful positions people like John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, William Barr, and Elliott Abrams.

Of course, as Trump himself now fully knows, these officials did much to sabotage any sincere efforts of the administration on things like getting US troops out of Syria, and ultimately turned on him. Trump’s supporters also back in 2016 had high hopes that he would pardon Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, and also declassify all records related to the sham ‘Russiagate’ drive concocted by the Clinton campaign alongside Hillary’s deep state allies. Sadly, none of that happened, as to a large degree ‘the swamp’ quickly became well-ensconced in the Trump White House. Many became the ‘enemy within’ the administration, and after leaving wrote books and went on speaking tours where the main topic became maligning Trump’s leadership and attacking him as a person. With all of this in mind, WikiLeaks has publicly issued the following questions for Trump, anticipating his possible return to the White House…

1. How will you handle the so-called deep state “wolves in MAGA hats” circling your transition team, posing as MAGA to obtain powerful positions in a prospective Trump administration? After all, personnel is policy.

2. In your previous administration, you appointed figures like Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, William Barr (former CIA), Robert O’Brien, Nikki Haley, and Elliott Abrams, who often opposed your “America First” rhetoric, especially on foreign policy and freedom of speech. If elected again, can you assure that these individuals, or others like Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio—both funded by arms companies—will not hold positions in your administration?

3. Many of these individuals have not only opposed your policies but have actively worked against you, even putting their weight behind your prosecution. For instance, Mike Pompeo accused you of keeping classified documents, suggesting that doing so endangered U.S. soldiers. He also directed the CIA to draw up plans to assassinate Julian Assange, suppressed the release of JFK files at the CIA’s request, and claimed, “There is no deep state at the CIA.” What is your stance toward those who merely feign support for MAGA?

4. Many of these former officials have now cashed in and make substantial profits from lobbying for arms companies, banks, and foreign corporations. For example, Pompeo founded American Global Strategies, which advises arms companies, joined the Israeli disinformation and censorship company Cyabra, and took positions with Japanese steel firm Nippon Steel (lobbying to increase foreign steel imports to the U.S.) and arms company DYNE Maritime (seeking AUKUS-related contracts). He even launched his own military-industrial investment bank, Impact Investments, and, like Hunter Biden, joined the board of a Ukrainian company, Kievstar, despite lacking relevant experience. While Pompeo’s case may be extreme, others have similarly lucrative roles. Will you ban appointments for those who have financial incentives to start wars, or increase mass surveillance and censorship?

5. A growing faction within the Republican Party and among independents advocates for a foreign policy less driven by CIA influence and arms industry profits. Figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard have called for increased oversight of the CIA and reduced foreign interventions.

However, personnel is policy. Will “swamp” insiders flatter their way into influential roles and take control of your administration, reducing MAGA to mere rhetoric?

Read more …

And now they look stupid.

• Celebrities Being Pressured To Publicly Back Harris – Musk (RT)

American celebrities are publicly endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris in the US presidential election race partly because their job security is on the line, tech billionaire Elon Musk claimed on Joe Rogan’s podcast on Monday. Multiple heavyweights in the US entertainment industry, including some who were previously apolitical, have backed the Democratic candidate for president. Hosting Musk on his show, Rogan called the rallying behind Harris “strange,” suggesting that celebrities “think it’s going to get them more movies or something.” Musk claimed that the opposite is true, and that “these celebrities, they get a call from someone powerful in Hollywood. That person says: ‘You know it would be really great if you endorsed Kamla.’”

There is an implicit threat that failure to do so would result in not receiving further opportunities in the industry, Musk said. They don’t make the threat. They don’t need to. But everyone knows what would happen if you don’t [back Harris]. The entrepreneur is a key supporter of former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, and intends to take a cabinet-level job in his potential administration. After his interview with Musk, Rogan publicly endorsed Trump, saying that the tech billionaire’s arguments had convinced him.

Hollywood, which has historically leaned left politically, has become highly intolerant to descent, Rogan said. As recently as during President Barack Obama’s term in office, a star of the magnitude of Clint Eastwood could be openly Republican without apparent repercussions, Rogan noted. A few decades ago, Ronald Reagan went from being a Hollywood actor into politics, ultimately being elected to the White House with the Republicans. “Once Trump got into office, he became this focal point, where all logic was thrown out the window,” Rogan suggested. “It’s just ‘Trump is bad, you have to attack Trump.’” Superstar singers Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, and Jennifer Lopez, as well as actor Harrison Ford, are some of the big names to have endorsed Harris.

Read more …

“I don’t use much [profanity], you know, every once in a while, and it’s never a real bad word, it’s never bad … but it is a little better when you use foul language..”

• Trump Calls Nancy Pelosi “An Evil, Sick, Crazy B…” (MN)

During his final rally in Michigan, president Trump gave a succinct description of exactly who his supporters are pitted against. During the two hour speech that started just after midnight, Trump referred to former speaker and Democrat kingpin Nancy Pelosi, noting “She’s a crooked person, she’s a bad person. Evil.” “She’s an evil, sick, crazy b—-” he said, stopping short of saying the word “bitch.” “It starts with a B, but I won’t say it. I wanna say it,” Trump boomed. “I don’t use much [profanity], you know, every once in a while, and it’s never a real bad word, it’s never bad … but it is a little better when you use foul language,” he continued, adding “These are bad people.”

Trump reiterated that his real opponent is not Kamala Harris but an “evil Democrat system”. “We will defeat the corrupt system in Washington. Because I’m not running against Kamala, I’m running against an evil Democrat system. These are evil people,” he asserted. “I wasn’t running against Biden either,” Trump further noted, adding “He was stuck in a basement. I didn’t even run against him. Now running against a very evil system, and we have to defeat that system, and America’s future will be an absolutely incredible one.”

Read more …

No-one will remember Kamala. Except her handler Obama.

• Donald Trump ‘More Popular’ Than ‘Least Qualified’ Kamala Harris (Sp.)

Though the presidential race in the US appears to be pretty close, Republican candidage Donald Trump is a “more popular candidate,” says retired US Air Force Lt.Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who is also a former analyst for the US Department of Defense. “He’s certainly the more energetic candidate. He’s the more dynamic candidate. And he gets a lot of news coverage, both good and bad,” Kwiatkowski remarks. Comparing Trump and his Democratic rival Kamala Harris, Kwiatkowski observes that the former appears more media-savvy. “He’s very out there in the media… You know, he makes news. So people are aware of him,” she explains. “And we have a lot of social media craziness around. And I see it more around the Trump side where they’re either promoting Trump, laughing with Trump, laughing at Trump.”

Meanwhile, Harris is “the least qualified presidential candidate that has ever made it this far in the race,” says Kwiatkowski, who also branded the Democrat as “the least qualified vice president” of the United States. “So having a very qualified guy running against a very unqualified person, that’s unusual,” she muses. The fact that Harris made it this far is “very concerning,” Kwiatkowski warns, arguing that “something has changed” in the United States. Kamala Harris winning the upcoming US presidential election would be a “miraculous” thing, says Kwiatkowski. She also described Trump surviving an attempt on his life by accidentally moving his head in the same fashion. While Trump’s rivals in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, respectively, were both career politicians who enjoyed strong support within the Democratic Party, Harris got zero primary votes from her fellow Democrats and performed “badly” both in her campaign and as vice president of the US, Kwiatkowski notes.

“I don’t know how Biden is to work for, but as vice president, she’s not done anything that she can really crow about,” Kwiatkowski observes. “And she has refused to separate her policies from the current administration, which is what people tend always.” Thus, Kwiatkowski points out, people who will vote against Harris are going to be voting “against the current administration and all of its policies and whatever is blamed on that administration.” “Certainly the economy in the United States, crime, immigration, war – the Ukraine war is not as popular as it once was. It’s very unpopular, in fact,” Kwiatkowski says, adding that the war Israel wages in Gaza and Lebanon “is not popular either” and that Trump supposedly already advised Netanyahu to end it.

Americans have come a long way since the 2020 election, becoming both “angrier” and “wiser” than before, Kwiatkowski says. “My prediction is that we will not have this giant breakdown in society no matter who wins. We will not have this new civil war if Trump wins or if Kamala Harris is named the winner,” she postulates. If Harris wins, Kwiatkowski suggests, the Republicans will be “enraged” and there may be “marches on Washington,” but these actions will be taken “in the context of understanding how the state, how DC, how the federal government will respond to them.”

Read more …

“He could not shut up, so he decided to become an American instead..”

• In the Midst of a Roid Rage Election, a Reason to Have Hope (Turley)

When President Joe Biden took the podium in his hometown of Scranton, Pa., to campaign for Vice President Kamala Harris, many expected a return to the “self-professed unifier” Biden from the 2020 election, particularly after his recent comments calling tens of millions of Trump supporters “garbage.” If so, they were disappointed when it turned out to be the “take him behind the Gym” Biden. Speaking through clenched teeth, Biden seethed that he wanted to “smack [Trump] in the ass.” Even with the Harris campaign alarmed over his costly gaffes, Biden clearly could not resist the rage. He is not alone. This entire election seems to be a type of political roid rage. In my book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I discuss how rage rhetoric and rage politics have long been part of our history. Politicians will often intentionally trigger rage to rally voters not in support of their policies but in opposition to their opponents.

However, Biden’s seeming inability to keep his rage in check is a common feature of this rage politics. As I wrote in the book, “rage is liberating, even addictive. It allows us to say and do things that we would ordinarily avoid, even denounce in others.” It is also contagious. Across the country, people are yelling at neighbors, tearing down signs, and even assaulting each other. What they are unwilling to admit is that they enjoy the rage. They like it. As someone who has written about rage rhetoric and covered presidential elections for over two decades for different networks, I should be accustomed to these scenes. I am not. From the scenes outside of the Trump trial in Manhattan to the scenes outside of political rallies in Virginia, I find the rage depressing and deflating.

However, in flying to New York this weekend to join the Fox election coverage, I had a moment of real hope. I was driven to the airport by a man who told me that he was just months from his citizenship and how he and his wife were so thankful to soon be U.S. citizens. He came from a Middle Eastern nation where he long admired the United States for its freedoms, particularly the freedom of speech. Indeed, in his home country, he constantly ran into trouble with his government and was warned by his imam that he had to stop acting “like an American” by speaking his mind. He could not shut up, so he decided to become an American instead. He then told me how confused he and his wife are by this election. They love the United States and cannot understand why people are so hateful and angry. “It is like they do not understand what they have here,” he noted.

Listening to him over the course of our ride, I started to feel something that I had not felt in a while: real hope. Sometimes, our truest citizens are found among our newest converts. As I discuss in my book, the problem with our democracy is that most citizens grew up in a nation where basic rights like the freedom of speech are guaranteed. They have never known the absence of such rights. This man and his wife have. They were not born here. They had to escape their country at great peril and cost to become U.S. citizens. They chose us and what we stand for. They follow other great Americans drawn to these shores by something unique about this country. One was Tom Paine. The man who was credited with rallying a nation behind a revolution only landed upon these shores two years before the Declaration of Independence. His rocketing to fame with the publication of Common Sense enraged some, like John Adams, who viewed him as an unkempt, unknown rabble-rouser.

Yet, it was precisely Paine’s immigration that gave his words such clarity and power. He saw this emerging nation as unique for all of humanity, a nation where citizens could live free without the calcified social, economic, and political limits of the Old World. His voice resonated with this nation because it was so genuine and authentic. I heard that same voice on my way to the airport. Sometimes, it takes the newest among us to remind us who we are to not only the rest of the world but also to each other. I do not know what is coming out of that gate on election night. I have been there before. However, half of this country is going to be very, very upset either way this goes. What we need to struggle to remember is that this election does not define us. The rage does not define us. We defined ourselves almost 250 years ago and do so every day that new citizens like my new friend come to these shores. There is hope in who we are . . . even if we forget sometimes.

Read more …

Helmer. Great title.

• Russian History As Therapy For Western Historians Who Just Want To Be Loved (JH)

It’s a pity when a 760-page history of the Russian leadership’s thinking during the Cold War period, 1945 to 2022, earns consignment to the waste bin within the first nineteen pages, and in just three sentences. This ratio of toxicity to prolixity – 1 to 40 — is exceptional, although the price asked for it by the publisher, Cambridge University Press — £30, $34.95 — isn’t so exorbitant as to exclude using the book as a doorstopper. This is Sergey Radchenko’s To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power. Just weeks following the book’s launch date, Amazon is already trying to clear its stock by offering a discount of 25% to $26. That’s as competitive as the price of an elite brand of door sausage (aka draft stopper). According to Michael McFaul, once the Obama Administration’s Russia-hater in chief in Moscow and Washington, the “brilliant writing” is the “go-to source for understanding Soviet behaviour during the Cold War. Fiona Hill, McFaul’s Russia-hating successor during the Trump Administration, claims the book is “magisterial [and] help[s] explain why Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine and confront the West”.

If you want to slam your door on those two, and block the winter winds starting again in the Ukraine, place Radchenko’s blockbuster between your bottom door rail and the sill. In that position, it will also do double-duty as warning from that piece of ancient Russian wisdom – it’s bad luck to shake hands over a threshold. As Anglo-American histories of Russian thinking go, Radchenko’s is the new one on the edge of an old, familiar black hole. He begins by announcing that “this book offers a radical new interpretation of the underlying motivations of Soviet foreign policy “. He follows with his three radical novelties:“what the Soviets saw as their ‘legitimate’ interests were often not seen as particularly ‘legitimate’ by anybody else., leading to a kind of ontological insecurity on the Soviet part that was compensated for by hubris and aggression”. “At the end of the Second World War Soviet policy makers surveyed the world… No one expected the Americans to stay in Europe”. “The infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact carved up Eastern Europe and led directly to the outbreak of the Second World War.”

Radchenko’s new facts to substantiate these three claims aren’t new at all so there’s no point in rehashing them – in the maxim familiar in the Baltimore and Washington think tanks, Hak mir nisht keyn tshaynik – that’s Yiddish for don’t keep banging your teapot at me. Radchenko brings this to conclusion at page 30: “The Cold War was inevitable because Stalin made it so…[his] responsibility [is] best summarized by Jeffrey Lewis: ‘there were three causes of the Cold War: Stalin, Stalin, and Stalin.” Lewis is an ex-Pentagon employee and currently a junior academic at a think tank employing American and British retirees from the Pentagon and Ministry of Defense. It keeps its funding sources secret, but at Lewis’s previous think tank the funders included Bill Gates, George Soros, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.

Because Stalin is to blame at the beginning of this history, Radchenko comes to his second teapot-banging conclusion at the end of his history, page 603, when — without the benefit of historical archives or interviews with sources — Radchenko says Putin is a repeat of Stalin’s psychopathological craving to be loved by the West, especially by Americans. In his February 2022 speeches launching the Special Military Operation in the Ukraine, Putin “raved”, according to Radchenko; The war, Radchenko adds now, “was mainly Russia’s failure: it proved unwilling or unable to overcome its toxic resentments and imperialist impulses. But there was another factor in play. Stalin’s belligerent foreign policy, whatever his motivations, helped forge the West on an anti-Soviet basis. Throughout the Cold War, the Soviets tried hard to undermine Western unity even as they craved Western recognition. They never managed.”

In this history, Radchenko diagnoses Stalin with a personal case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), who then inflicts his pathology on all the Russians, turning Soviet policy and now Putin’s, into Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD). For the outcome, if not the cure, Radchenko goes back to Yiddish: “Perhaps, with the right combination of chutzpah and good luck, Russia could one day recover its illusive greatness and its insatiable, self-destructive ambition to run the world.”

Read more …

“..the demilitarized zone (DMZ) stretching westward to a depth calculated as the range of US and NATO-supplied artillery, drones and missiles..”

• The General Staff’s Map And President Putin’s Map Are Different (Helmer)

For more than two months now, President Vladimir Putin’s orders to the General Staff have been to shorten the range of the electric war campaign to the area east of Kiev and the Dnieper River, and west of the advancing line of Russian forces. The General Staff have responded by limiting their strikes to electricity and other energy supplies for military repair and drone production plants, troop marshalling points, and logistic hubs supplying the Ukrainian forces in Kursk and along the front. This is the Putin Pause. The General Staff have understood it to allow strikes against energy infrastructure in Kharkov, Odessa, and the Sumy region. In recent days Boris Rozhin’s Colonel Cassad blog and the daily bulletins from the Ministry of Defense have also identified electric war raids at Kharkov and Odessa. How much of a territorial concession on the military map which Putin has directed Vladimir Medinsky to discuss in secret with the Ukrainians and Americans isn’t known.

What is known is the map of the General Staff’s targets since August 26. That was the date of the last Russian drone and missile attack on electricity production and distribution in the west of the country. Putin’s map, which he announced in his speech to the Foreign Ministry of June 14, lacked coordinates. On the one hand, Putin reiterated the objectives of the Special Military Operation he had announced on February 24, 2022, as “the protection of people in Donbass, the restoration of peace, and the demilitarisation and denazification of Ukraine. We did that to avert the threat to our state and to restore balance in the sphere of security in Europe.” On the other hand, the president said, “these conditions are simple. The Ukrainian troops must be completely withdrawn from the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics and Kherson and Zaporozhye regions. Let me note that they must be withdrawn from the entire territory of these regions within their administrative borders at the time of their being part of Ukraine.”

On the General Staff map, the difference between Putin’s second statement of terms and his first statement is the width of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) stretching westward to a depth calculated as the range of US and NATO-supplied artillery, drones and missiles for striking the new Russian regions and the Russian hinterland. Because the range of drones in current use against Russia has been extended to 800 kilometres, and applying this to the direct flight distance westward from Donetsk, the DMZ to assure Russian military security should stretch to a north-south line running through Rivne and Khmelnitsky (lead image). From Donetsk to Kiev, however, is a flight distance of 600 kms; from Donetsk to Odessa, 560 kms; to Kharkov, just 250 kms. This range of drone and missile lethality threatening Russian territory puts the future of Kiev, Odessa, and Kharkov squarely in the General Staff’s sights.

How the General Staff is drawing the DMZ map to achieve demilitarization of the Ukraine in military terms is one thing. How the objective of demilitarization is being mapped in the Kremlin is quite another. According to a well-informed military source, “the General Staff’s priority is defensibility. This is based on terrain, control of highways, bridges and railways, establishment of a land corridor to Transdnistria, and control of the South Ukraine Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), known as the Pivdennoukrainsk NPP in the Nikoalev region near Pervomaisk. The DMZ line then runs roughly northeast/southwest along the Kodyma River and highway connecting Balta on the Moldovan border with Pervomaisk. This would give Russian force deployment a defensible position with control over the major highways leading to the bridges across the Dnieper at Dniepropetrovsk and Kremenchuk. There will be no more reliance on the vulnerable bridges at Kherson and Kakhovka to ensure sound Russian logistics. Communication with Transdnistria will be ensured by control of the E58/581 highway which runs between Kherson and Tiraspol.”

Read more …

Speaks for itself.

• Novichok Was Not Detected – But There Was Cocaine (Helmer)

The British Government’s narrative that Russian military agents, on orders from President Vladimir Putin, used Novichok in Salisbury in March 2018 continues to collapse. A secret chemical warfare agent revealed last week that two tests for Novichok, using special machines provided by the Porton Down chemical warfare laboratory, failed to confirm an organophosphate poison in either Dawn Sturgess or her boyfriend, Charles Rowley. The agent described himself in his witness statement and in a guarded appearance at the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry last week as a qualified medical doctor and pharmacology expert. “I currently work at Dstl [Defence Science and Technology Laboratory] Porton Down within the Chemical, Biological and Radiological (CBR) Division, and provide medical advice to the Ministry of Defence and other government Departments on CBR related threats… I was Chemical and Biological (CB) Medical Advisor to Dstl and the Operational teams in support of the investigations into the attack on the Skripals (Operation WEDANA) and the investigation into the poisoning of Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley (Operation READ).”

The agent’s name was ordered to be kept secret by the Inquiry chairman and commercial consultant, Anthony Hughes (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley). This is despite Hughes’s ruling that he would not keep the names secret of “those who were already sufficiently identified publicly in connection with the events of 2018.” FT49 is the cipher used for the Porton Down agent, although sources claim he has advertised his engagement in the Skripal, Sturgess and Rowley cases in several academic publications accessible on the internet. In his witness statement dated September 16, 2024, the Porton Down agent revealed that he had organized with doctors at the Salisbury District Hospital (SDH) to test the blood of Sturgess and Rowley, after their admission to the hospital on June 30, 2018, using special biochemical assay machines provided by Porton Down. One of the machines had been installed at SDH during the hospitalisation of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in March of 2018. A second Porton Down machine was in operation at a Birmingham toxicology laboratory.

Agent FT49 reported these machines had failed to detect evidence of the Novichok organophosphate in blood samples of Sturgess and Rowley. Government officials then ordered Porton Down itself to take over the blood testing to confirm the presence of Novichok. This is the first leak from an official source that Porton Down may have rigged the blood testing in order to fabricate the existence of Novichok and of the Russian attack. According to FT49, after “an unexpected failure to identify the organophosphate compounds by Birmingham’s analytical laboratory I suggested to Dr Jukes [Stephen Jukes, SDH doctor in charge of treating Sergei Skripal] that Dstl [Porton Down] should also receive a blood sample. Late morning of 2nd July 2018 I was made aware via a phone call from the ITU [Intensive Treatment Unit at SDH] that the Birmingham results were back; there was no evidence of a pesticide, despite cholinesterase inhibition, and the two patients [Sturgess and Rowley] did not have the same non-prescribed drugs in their blood other than a trace of cocaine.”

What this reveals is that both Sturgess and Rowley had been taking cocaine before their collapse. FT49 is also revealing – without expressly saying so — that on the day of their hospitalisation, Rowley had taken the heroin substitute methadone on prescription; Sturgess had not.

Read more …

“The CPI is a lie. The unemployment rate is a lie. All these government numbers are designed to create a false picture of prosperity that does not exist.”

• Schiff w/ Mitchell: Fed Policy is Backfiring (SchiffGold)

Earlier this week, Peter joined Mark Mitchell on his podcast for a conversation on economics and monetary policy. They dive into the economic challenges facing the United States, focusing on structural issues like inflation, debt, and currency devaluation. Peter draws attention to the overlooked surge in gold prices, contrasting it with Bitcoin’s media spotlight, and discusses unrealistic promises by politicians on both sides regarding tariffs, tax cuts, and economic growth. To start, Peter and Mark point out the Fed’s plan to reduce long-term interest rates has backfired, leading said rates to rise even higher: “I thought that the catalyst for the next move up in long-term rates would be the Fed reducing short-term rates.

Part of the reason for this reduction in short-term rates was to try to bring down longer-term rates, particularly mortgage rates, because people are having a hard time paying these inflated home prices with normal mortgage rates. … But it backfired. As we’re talking this morning, the yield on a 10-year treasury is now at 4.3%, which is 60 basis points higher than it was when the Fed cut rates by 50 basis points.” Even 4.3% isn’t high enough to flush out decades of malinvestment. Just like a fever burns out a virus, the economy needs high interest rates to properly allocate investment: “Artificially low interest rates are part of the problem underlying the economy, and they are having very negative effects on the allocation of resources– malinvestments.

This is doing damage. We’re not saving enough; we’re borrowing and spending too much. Part of the solution to fixing what’s broken in the economy is to let interest rates go up. They actually need to be higher than they are right now. But the problem is, we have so much debt that we can’t afford it.” Recent jobs numbers are not optimistic, even though most government statistics probably understate the problems facing the economy. Peter explains that he looks at the year-over-year increase to the national debt, a metric he finds more reliable than headline statistics: “The CPI is a lie. The unemployment rate is a lie. All these government numbers are designed to create a false picture of prosperity that does not exist. They understate inflation, overstate growth, understate unemployment, understate the deficits. You can’t believe the information that comes out of the government.”

The government ignores bad data, and the media ignores gold’s record-setting year, choosing instead to focus on Bitcoin’s mediocre performance: “They completely ignore it [gold]. Maybe because it’s making a record high almost every day, so there’s nothing new about it. But when gold is doing this, it’s very significant. It’s sending a clear signal that the Fed is making a mistake, that the rate cuts are a mistake, that inflation is going to be a lot higher. … I’ll be watching financial news as gold hits a new high, and not only will they not discuss gold’s significant new high, they’ll go on and on about Bitcoin making a one-month high.” Peter hopes Donald Trump wins the rapidly approaching election, but urges realistic expectations about his policies, especially because of the incentives politicians face on the campaign trail:

“That’s what he’s promising. ‘Just elect me, and everything’s going to be great. Immediately, we’re all going to be so rich; it’s going to be crazy. And I’m going to collect trillions from the Chinese, and, you know, it’s all going to be great.’ But it’s not all going to be great—that’s the problem. And that’s going to be a problem for the administration because they set the bar so high, the expectations are so high. You kind of want to under-promise and over-deliver, but it’s hard to do that when you’re running for office.” How would we really make America great again? Start by slashing wasteful spending, then abolish the income tax: “We can’t go back to the system we had before the income tax unless we dismantle all the programs that we now have because of the income tax, which I’m all for. Get rid of Social Security, get rid of Medicare, get rid of Obamacare, shrink the government back down to its pre-1913 size. And that would really make America great again!”

Read more …

Two female MPS want more troops.

• Ukraine Not Drafting Enough Troops – MP (RT)

Kiev’s military is not meeting its draft quotas amid high casualty numbers in the fight against Russia, Ukrainian MP Solomia Bobrovskaya has said in an interview. ”We have been lagging behind since September,” the lawmaker from the opposition Golos party told Great Lviv, a news outlet. “The mobilization rate has been on the decline since August, while in May we were meeting the target set by the general staff.” If current recruitment rates persist, the draft plan through December will not be fulfilled, Bobrovskaya warned. She blamed the senior Ukrainian leadership, including commander-in-chief Aleksandr Syrsky, for the situation. Their decisions have led to heavy losses at the front and the subsequent drop in enrollment, the MP claimed.

In August, Kiev launched an incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, diverting some of its best-equipped and most trained units for the operation. The force failed to make it very far.Russian troops are currently pushing the Ukrainians in Kursk Region back, having inflicted some 29,600 casualties in the process, according to Moscow. They are also reportedly making significant progress along other parts of the front. Earlier this year, Kiev overhauled its military service system. Ukrainian officials hoped that the simplification of mandatory conscription and heavier punishments for avoidance would help the army replenish its strength after its failed “counteroffensive” last year.

Ukraine needs to draft 500,000 people, as former military chief Valery Zaluzhny proposed, before being removed from office by Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky, MP Roman Kostenko argued last week. Meanwhile, lawmaker Mariana Bezuglaya urged this week for a mandatory draft of women to address the manpower shortage. Moscow has described the ongoing conflict as a US-triggered proxy war against Russia, which Washington intends to wage “to the last Ukrainian.” Multiple US officials and politicians have hailed military aid sent to Kiev as a relatively small cost for harming Russia without costing American lives.

Read more …

“..expanding conscription to both sexes in the name of equity..”

• Ukrainian MP Calls For Mobilization Of Women (RT)

A Ukrainian lawmaker has called for the conscription of women into the country’s struggling mobilization campaign. MP Mariana Bezuglaya has insisited that it is high time to start targeting women to meet quotas, as Kiev’s military resources dwindle amid ongoing territorial loss on the frontline of the conflict with Russia. Ukraine currently allows for drafting men over the age of 25 and accepts female volunteers. Bezuglaya, however, has repeatedly advocated for expanding conscription to both sexes in the name of equity. “We currently have illegal discrimination against men,” Bezuglaya wrote on her Telegram channel on Monday. “Moreover, if women get mobilized, fewer men will get mobilized – this is one of the reasons for men to support the mobilization of their fellow [female] citizens.”

According to the lawmaker, mobilized women should get assigned to duties in the rear, such as clerks, personnel officers and in the security units, freeing up men to be moved to frontline duties and combat brigades. Others could be sent to military factories to boost the pace of production. “War cannot be an affair of the chosen ones, especially when it is not just about territories or spheres of influence, but about a nation’s existence and the right to life,” Bezuglaya wrote, adding that without the kind of mobilization she advocates, Ukraine is “doomed to lose” the conflict with Russia and its statehood as well. Bezuglaya noted that she has repeatedly submitted this proposal to the defense committee of the Verkhovna Rada, only to have the government and the generals shoot it down. “It’s a paradox,” she wrote.

“The Defense Ministry has failed in the mobilization policy, the generals are literally destroying their soldiers with ill-considered decisions, but this topic is not raised – it is too delicate, you see. Perhaps mobilized women would bring order to this chaos.” Bezuglaya’s comments come after another MP, Roman Kostenko, claimed that Kiev would need to draft another 500,000 men to replenish combat losses and rotate the battle-worn units along the front. Kostenko, himself a veteran, revealed that mobilization has been falling behind over the last two months. A member of Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky’s ‘Servant of the People’ party, Bezuglaya has frequently clashed with the military due to her hardline policies on the conflict against Russia. At one point she was added to Kiev’s Mirotvorets ‘kill list’ and in September, she survived a vote to oust her from the defense committee. Her jurisdiction was previously represented by Andrey Biletsky, founder of the neo-Nazi ‘Azov’ militia.

Read more …

“These issues even reached the public in an unacceptable manner, and, worse, became known to our enemies..”

• Netanyahu Fires Israeli Defense Minister (RT)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has fired Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, citing “significant gaps” in their position on the war against Hamas and Hezbollah. Foreign Minister Israel Katz has been offered the defense job, while Gideon Saar has been tapped to take his position if he leaves, according to Israeli media. “Serious differences arose between Gallant and me regarding the campaign’s management, with these disagreements accompanied by statements and actions that contradicted both government and cabinet decisions,” Netanyahu said in a statement on Tuesday, explaining his move. According to Netanyahu, wartime requires “complete trust” between the head of government and the defense minister and that trust “has eroded” between him and Gallant in recent months.

“I made repeated efforts to bridge these gaps, but they only widened. These issues even reached the public in an unacceptable manner, and, worse, became known to our enemies, who took pleasure and found advantage in it,” the prime minister added. Netanyahu praised Gallant’s replacement as a “bulldozer with quiet strength and responsible determination,” noting that Katz had headed the finance and intelligence ministries before taking on his current role. This is the second time Netanyahu has fired Gallant. The first time was in March 2023, when the defense minister openly criticized the government’s judicial reforms, which he said divided Israeli society and threatened the military. Following widespread street protests, Netanyahu reversed his decision in early April.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Bureaucracy

 

 

Gotcha

 

 

Spin
https://twitter.com/i/status/1853769745461354845

 

 

Polychaetes

 

 

Sheep dog

 

 

Tucker Stella

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in wartime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle November 2 2024

Nov 022024
 
 November 2, 2024  Posted by at 9:40 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  47 Responses »


Otto Dix Ice drift 1940

 

• The GOP’s Closing Argument: ‘Kamala Broke It, Trump Will Fix It’ (Whedon)
• National Climate, Polling Points to a Trump Victory (Jim Lee)
• Actually, The Democratic Party is Hitler (Kunstler)
• Trump Victory Means MSM Is Dead In Current Form (ZH)
• Trump Promises ‘Influential Positions’ For Musk and Kennedy (RT)
• Trump’s Potential Treasury Pick Vows Spending Cuts in Partnership With Musk (NTD)
• Trump Is Suing CBS For $10 BILLION For Election Interference (MN)
• White House On the Rewriting of President Biden’s Garbage Comments (Turley)
• Vance-Rogan Interview (ZH/ET)
• Joe Rogan Says He Gave Harris Campaign “Open Invitation”, Still Stands (ZH)
• Portents of Chaos (Patrick Lawrence)
• Western Europeans Don’t Understand Russia – Orban (RT)
• Israel Wants Russia To Mediate Peace – Media (RT)
• Moscow Names Only Chance For Middle East Peace (RT)
• The Paradigm Shift Is Here (Jeffrey A. Tucker)

 

 

 

 

Rogan Vance


https://twitter.com/i/status/1852039026456285455

Jeffrey Sachs

RFK


https://twitter.com/i/status/1852306377504608646

Bolton

Putin
https://twitter.com/i/status/1851760343489405075

Alina
https://twitter.com/i/status/1852090630291493214

Tucker J6

Bannon Clark

 

 

 

 

“Trump is talking about solving problems for Americans while Kamala Harris is focused exclusively on attacking him..”

• The GOP’s Closing Argument: ‘Kamala Broke It, Trump Will Fix It’ (Whedon)

Former President Donald Trump and his supporters have sounded their closing refrain in the final week of the campaign, arguing that Harris is responsible for the current state of the nation and that the only remedy is the return of the 45th president. “Kamala broke it, but I will fix it,” Trump declared at his Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday evening. The line has become something of a secondary slogan for the campaign, with Trump himself and his surrogates alike repeating it at every opportunity. The campaign appears to be banking on most of the electorate deciding they were better off under Trump and aims to cast Harris as the one pulling the strings in the Oval Office. “Fixing it,” moreover, refers to his laundry list of policy items, in particular his border security and tax policies, but applies to initiatives across all the major issues.

“Trump is talking about solving problems for Americans while Kamala Harris is focused exclusively on attacking him,” one campaign official told Fox News. He is “asking people to vote for something, while she is asking for people to vote against something.” Other surrogates have embraced the messaging. In a recent op-ed for Fox Business, former Trump advisor Larry Kudlow highlighted inflation data and cost-of-living figures to show that the American people are worse off. He took the “riff” a measure further, however, by highlighting Trump’s allies, who would work in the administration to help repair the nation. “There are lots of other folks — both new and old allies — who are helping Mr. Trump, but this is an important representative group,” wrote Kudlow. “[T]he group, along with many others, shows that Donald Trump has the confidence and good judgment to get the very best people on his team, and that’s why he can say, with growing confidence: Kamala broke it, Trump will fix it. That’s the riff.”

Kudlow, in particular, highlighted former [presidential candidate] Vivek Ramaswamy, Elon Musk, JD Vance, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and a handful of others. Vance himself made the point during a Tuesday rally, saying “[t]hink about the big tent coalition that we’ve assembled. On the right, we’ve got people like Brian Kemp, Nikki Haley. On the left, we’ve got people like Tulsi Gabbard, Bobby Kennedy.” “This is the common sense coalition that’s ready to take the country in a more positive direction. But it’s very simple. Kamala Harris broke it. And Donald Trump will fix it,” he concluded. The campaign is not the first to embrace such messaging. On the world stage, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban made a similar point in March of this year, amid escalating conflicts in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. “President [Donald Trump] was a president of peace. He commanded respect in the world, and created the conditions for peace,” Orban said. “During his presidency there was peace in the Middle East and peace in Ukraine. We need him back more than ever!”

“It is up to Americans to make their own decision, and it is up to us Hungarians to frankly admit that it would be better for the world – and better for Hungary, too – if President Donald Trump were to return to power,” he added. Trump himself has repeatedly pointed to Orban’s comments and did so again at a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, earlier this week. “Victor Orban, the powerful Prime Minister of Hungary said, ‘bring back Trump, and everything will stop. All these wars, everything will stop. They respected him.’ He actually said differently. He said they feared him, but I don’t care,” Trump said. “China was afraid. Russia was afraid. They’re all afraid. And you know what? I don’t want [them] to be afraid. I just want respect,” he added. “And they got to respect us again right now. They’re laughing at our country. They’re laughing at us. If we win, America will be feared and respected again and then on issue after issue, Kamala broke it, and I will fix it.”

Read more …

“..the national popular vote has favored Harris for months, but now has shifted in Trump’s favor..”

• National Climate, Polling Points to a Trump Victory (Jim Lee)

Currently, both the national climate and the polling seems to point to a Trump victory in November. For instance, according to polling averages , only 28% of Americans say the country is going in the right direction, compared to 61% who say it’s on the wrong track. Why is this important? Because wrong track voters are more apt to vote for the party out of power – i.e., the Trump campaign – than the party “in power.” Second, President Joe Biden’s average approval rating is still at a dismal 41% nationally, with a higher 56% of Americans saying they disapprove of his job performance. Why is this important? Because if Americans are unhappy with the president’s job performance, they theoretically should be less likely to vote for another four years of his administration with a vote for the Harris campaign.

And remember, when Kamala Harris was asked on a national network television program just recently if she would have done anything different than Biden, she couldn’t answer. In other words, she seems to have unwittingly conceded that she represents another four years of a Biden presidency. Another reason the political climate seems to favor Republicans at the current time has to do with how Americans are self-identifying in polls. According to national polling, in October 2016, the country self-identified as Democrat by a 3-point margin over Republicans. In October 2020, the country self-identified as Democrat by a higher 6-point margin. But in September of this year, just last month, new polling showed Republicans with a 1-point lead over Democrats on party self-identification. This could prove important because it seems to suggest that more Americans are aligned with the GOP brand than the Democrats – another good sign for the Trump campaign.

Moreover, the current polling has shifted in Trump’s favor both nationally and in critical battleground states. For instance, the RCP average of national polls now shows Trump with a 48.4 to 48.3% lead – just one tenth of a percent difference, but still leaning Trump. This is a big deal because the national popular vote has favored Harris for months, but now has shifted in Trump’s favor. This could be a sign of which way the political winds are blowing. Plus, polling averages currently show that Trump leads in all seven battleground states, including Pennsylvania (.6 percent lead), Michigan (.2 points), Wisconsin (.2 points), Arizona (1.5 points), North Carolina (.8 points), Georgia (2.2 points) and Nevada (.7 points). These are RCP averages as of October 26.

In Pennsylvania, Trump’s lead is significant when you consider that on that day in 2020, Biden led in the RCP averages in Pennsylvania by 4.8%; Biden of course went on to eek out a narrow margin over Trump by only 1.2%. Back in 2016 at this time, Hillary Clinton led in the RCP averages by 4.3 points, only to lose to Trump by a razor-thin, 48.58 to 47.85 margin on Election Day (or 44,292 votes). So, are we on the cusp of a landslide (Electoral College) victory for Trump? No one knows for sure, but it could happen. In Pennsylvania, our latest poll shows a 46% to 45.8% statistical tie between Trump and Harris (Harris leading by .2 percentage points). This poll was conducted October 18-22 with a sample size of 500 likely voters. But there is plenty of good news for Trump in this poll.

Read more …

“..the SCOTUS is going to turn a flame thrower on Judge Merchan and Alvin Bragg and vacate the absurd case and every half-assed procedure that was used to arrive at it..”

• Actually, The Democratic Party is Hitler (Kunstler)

Along about now, you’re probably wondering what sort of mayhem the Party of Chaos is set to unleash on our democracy after their mighty ballot fraud operation fails to overcome the yet more powerful instinct of the voters to expel them from the seats of power they seized by fraud in 2020 and 2022. You can be sure they’ve gamed-out a playbook aimed at paralyzing the nation one way or another if the effort to install Kamala Harris in the White House face-plants, as it appears to be doing in these final days before the reckoning. Rioting, arson, and looting in the cities? Not so much. Probably some, but only because it’s an excuse for 100-percent-off sale “shopping,” plus the need for hordes of dopamine-deprived youth to seek a little dangerous excitement — in a society that gives them nothing meaningful or purposeful to do. It’d surely reflect poorly on the regime clinging to power in the months before January 20.

Anyway, “Joe Biden,” Kamala, and company would be blamed for letting the cities get wrecked again, and then double-blamed by their own partisans if they try to stop it with the national guard. It’s a no-win deal for them. More likely, the Party will hijack the nation’s legal machinery to cancel the election ex post facto. They’ve done a swell job in advance setting up conditions that make it difficult if not impossible to sort out legal ballots cast from the frauds. So, expect the Party’s chief lawfare ninja Marc Elias, and his zillion-dollar-funded cadre of pettifoggers, to contest the swing-state precincts where their ballot-harvest somehow fell short a few bushels. They’ll file enough lawsuits to gum up the courts until the sun becomes a red dwarf. If the actual numbers add up to a Trump victory, the Democrats will re-brand that as the new “Big Lie” and commence a strenuous campaign in the old media to gaslight the public into believing the vote-count isn’t what it looks like.

After all, numbers are math and math is racist. That will provide the rationale, and furnish the game-space, to stop Trump by other means. Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-MD) has already advertised his scheme to knock Mr. Trump off the game-board by using Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to declare him an “insurrectionist,” disqualified from holding office. Of course, Mr. Trump has not been charged, indicted, or convicted for insurrection, nor was anyone involved in the J-6 protest and riot. Insurrection was supposed to be established as fact by the House J-6 Committee, but it died of illegitimacy after destroying all its accumulated records last year, including documents in evidence and the videos of all the witnesses it deposed. Whoops. The Jack Smith prosecution in Judge Tanya Chutkan’s DC Federal District court was a backup plan for that, but the July SCOTUS decision on presidential immunity has, so far, gummed up that ploy.

Mr. Raskin would need a Democratic House majority to pass such a resolution, in any case, and it looks unlikely that he will have that. A rather desperate gambit to oust Mr. Trump with a military coup, first advanced by former Pentagon official Rosa Brooks in a February, 2017, op-ed in the high-toned journal Foreign Policy, and reiterated by Nancy Pelosi in January, 2021, has been resurrected now that Mr. Trump is firmly branded as Hitler by the Party of Chaos — meaning he can be eliminated by any means necessary. “Joe Biden’s” woked-up generals might be game for a coup, but they’d have to overcome a lot of counter-coup-minded, not-so-woked-up colonels to get there. Anyway you cut it, the hysteria in the body politic is running at a pitch — as Mr. Trump himself might say — that has never been seen before, at least not since Fort Sumter.

The Democrats complain that a Trump victory means the Department of Justice will be weaponized against them. Is that rich, or what? It actually tells the whole story since you know the Party always accuses its opponents of exactly what it is already doing. Speaking of which, we must look forward to Judge Juan Merchan’s November 26th sentencing of Mr. Trump in DA Alvin Bragg’s “Stormy Daniels hush money” case. It’s out there, looming, and it ain’t going away. Judge Merchan is going to have to do. . . something! The jury has pronounced Mr. Trump guilty of those 34 “felonies” (based on 34 book-keeping entries, originally misdemeanors, and beyond the applicable statute of limitations).

I’d like to see the Judge stash the president-elect in the Rikers Island lockup for a few hours. It’ll be a better stunt than Mr. Trump’s shift serving fries at McDonald’s, or riding the garbage truck after “Joe Biden” called more than half the country that supports him “garbage.” Because a few hours after Mr. Trump settles into his Rikers cell and enjoys his first boloney sandwich, the SCOTUS is going to turn a flame thrower on Judge Merchan and Alvin Bragg and vacate the absurd case and every half-assed procedure that was used to arrive at it, and refer Merchan and Bragg for disbarment for professional misconduct, malicious prosecution, and failure to uphold the law.

Read more …

“Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.”

• Trump Victory Means MSM Is Dead In Current Form (ZH)

CNN chief media analyst Brian Stelter shared a comment from an anonymous television executive on X, “If half the country has decided that Trump is qualified to be president, that means they’re not reading any of this media, and we’ve lost this audience completely. A Trump victory means mainstream media is dead in its current form.” The anonymous TV exec’s comment to Stelter nailed it. Trust in corporate media has been sliding for decades but has imploded to record-low levels in the last several years. History might show that the 2020s was the decade when the curtain was lifted on the censorship blob, a combination of MSM, government, big tech, nonprofits (fake fact-checkers), and globalist billionaires that work overtime to sow division across the nation, trick the American people into endless foreign wars, and artificially create a news flow environment favorable to far-left policies.

At the start of the year, Wall Street Journal EIC Emma Tucker told fellow elites at Davos: “We owned the news. We were the gatekeepers, and we very much owned the facts as well. Nowadays, people can go to all sorts of different sources for the news. And they’re much more questioning about what we’re saying.” Fast-forward to recent months, and some of those far-left globalist elites, including Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, sounded the alarm about free speech as their control over information waned with the rise of Elon Musk’s ‘free speech’ platform X. A combination of alternative media outlets, Musk and his platform X, helped to shape this election cycle with news flow that shifted ‘Overton Window’ from unthinkable and radical leftist propaganda to the center of common sense. This allowed for narratives such as ‘Bidenflation’ and ‘migrant invasion’ to dominate news cycles instead of the leftist propaganda of wokeism.

This, of course, has infuriated the Deep State’s censorship blob, which this week launched an attack on alternative media via the NYTimes And Media Matters. Perhaps one of the biggest wake-up calls for MSM was their full-blown hate-speech propaganda blitzkrieg of calling Trump a ‘Nazi’ and ‘Hitler’ – only finding out that most Americans have given up on CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, and MSNBC – and could care less about the misinformation and disinformation pushed by those muppets. Another big wake-up call for MSM was some of their own allies defecting from the liberal cause, including The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and USA Today, which the three papers did not endorse Harris-Walz nor any other candidate. This is out of the norm for these papers.

WaPo’s owner, Jeff Bezos, wrote in an explainer about his decision, indicating, “Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.” If Trump wins, David Sacks on X offered some views of what could be next for MSM…

Read more …

“He thinks he can cut $2 trillion without affecting anybody, and I think he can do it..”

• Trump Promises ‘Influential Positions’ For Musk and Kennedy (RT)

Donald Trump has confirmed that he will give Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “influential” positions in his government if he wins the upcoming presidential election. During an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson at a campaign event in Arizona on Thursday, Trump was asked whether Kennedy or Musk would become key figures in his administration, should he be reelected on November 5. “Yeah, I do. I think so,” the former president responded. He noted, however, that Musk has indicated that he “doesn’t want to become a secretary of something” and instead wants to focus on finding ways to reduce waste in government spending. “He thinks he can cut $2 trillion without affecting anybody, and I think he can do it,” Trump said. “He wants to cut costs, he wants to save the country.”

Despite initially proclaiming political neutrality, Musk officially endorsed Trump earlier this year and has become a major supporter of the former president in his bid to secure a second term in office. Trump has promised the Tesla CEO that he would establish a special “government efficiency” commission, dubbed DOGE, which would be headed by the billionaire if he wins the election. Speaking at a Trump campaign event in New York last week, Musk suggested that he could reduce the annual federal budget by “at least $2 trillion,” claiming that American taxpayers’ money was “being wasted.” Regarding Kennedy, Trump told Carlson that he wanted the former Democrat – who ran as an independent in this year’s presidential race before dropping out and backing Trump – to “work on health” and “take care” of the US population.

“He’s right with so much of the things he’s talking about, because you know, we’re not a healthy country,” Trump said. Earlier this week, Kennedy himself confirmed that Trump had promised him a role in his administration, noting that while he would not be leading any government agencies, he would likely play a part in choosing who does as a senior adviser of some sort. Trump transition team co-chair Howard Lutnic also said on Wednesday that Kennedy would not head the Health and Human Services department if Trump is reelected. Trump had previously also applauded Kennedy’s decades of work as an advocate for the health of American families and children, and had indicated that he would establish a “panel of top experts” that would work with him to investigate “what is causing the decades-long increase in chronic health problems and childhood diseases” in the US.

Read more …

“Paulson said that if nominated, he would not anticipate pushback from the Senate.”

• Trump’s Potential Treasury Pick Vows Spending Cuts in Partnership With Musk (NTD)

Billionaire John Paulson said he would work with Elon Musk to cut federal spending, particularly by reducing green energy subsidies, if appointed Treasury Secretary under Trump’s administration. Paulson shared these comments during a Tuesday interview with The Wall Street Journal. “All of these tax subsidies for solar, for wind, inefficient, uneconomic energy sources. Eliminate that. That brings down spending,” he told the media outlet. He specifically mentioned targeting green energy subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act, which he referred to as the “Green New Deal.” A staunch Trump ally and major donor to his 2016, 2020, and 2024 campaigns, Paulson is also a trustee of the conservative Manhattan Institute, chaired by fellow Wall Street executive Paul Singer. Trump has named Paulson a possible Treasury Secretary if he wins the 2024 election.

Paulson’s stance mirrors Musk’s, who claimed he could slash at least $2 trillion from the federal budget. “Your money is being wasted,” Musk said at a Trump rally on Oct. 27 at New York’s Madison Square Garden. “We’re going to get the government off your back and out of your pocketbook.” The $2 trillion target amounts to nearly a third of current spending, with the federal government spending $6.75 trillion in fiscal year 2024, according to the Treasury Department. Trump mentioned that he asked Musk to lead the newly proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) aimed at auditing U.S. federal agencies. Musk replied on X, saying, “I can’t wait. There is a lot of waste and needless regulation in government that needs to go.” Neither Trump nor Musk has provided details on the specific programs they would cut.

Musk, like Paulson, is a prominent Trump supporter, campaigning with him, donating nearly $120 million to a pro-Trump super PAC, and pledging $1 million to voters who support free speech and gun rights. On Monday, Philadelphia’s district attorney asked a state judge to block Musk’s $1 million giveaway, calling it an “illegal lottery scheme. The Treasury Secretary manages federal finances and tax laws, often engaging with Wall Street, business leaders, and foreign dignitaries. Paulson is among several candidates being considered for the role, alongside Scott Bessent, founder of Key Square Group and a Trump ally on Wall Street, former trade ambassador Robert Lighthizer, and former SEC Chairman Jay Clayton.

Paulson said that if nominated, he would not anticipate pushback from the Senate. “I have good relationships with senators on both sides of the aisle. The review process is a rigorous process. That’s a hurdle that would have to be crossed before we get to the Senate. I think once we cross that review process, I wouldn’t expect opposition.” he told The Wall Street Journal. The economy stands as the top issue for voters in the 2024 presidential election. A Gallup poll found it is the only topic over 50 percent of registered voters rated as “extremely important” in shaping their decision.

Read more …

“The only people this will work on is low IQ morons, which tells you something about how the Harris campaign views American voters.”

• Trump Is Suing CBS For $10 BILLION For Election Interference (MN)

President Trump has filed a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS news over its deceptive editing of Kamala Harris’ 60 Minutes interview. Trump is accusing CBS of election interference to help Harris, with his attorneys stating “CBS’ partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference through malicious, deceptive, and substantial news distortion calculated to confuse, deceive, and mislead the public.” Trump further charges that CBS was blatantly attempting “to tip the scales in favor of the Democratic Party as the heated 2024 Presidential Election — which President Trump is leading — approaches its conclusion.” “President Trump brings this action to redress the immense harm caused to him, to his campaign, and to tens of millions of citizens in Texas and across America by CBS’s deceptive broadcasting conduct,” the lawsuit further states.

60 Minutes was caught editing Kamala’s answers in an attempt to make her sound somewhat coherent. They left her word salad answer to a question about Israel on the cutting room floor, replacing it with a completely different sentence that she said earlier in the interview. CBS News has also refused to release the full transcript of the interview. Trump should also file a lawsuit against Harris’ campaign for deceptively editing footage of him speaking at rallies and during interviews. Yet again Thursday, the Kamala HQ X account posted an out of context clip of Trump talking about Liz Cheney, with a caption insinuating that he’d like to see her shot in the face. If you watch the full clip, Trump is talking about how hawkish Cheney is, and how such politicians will eagerly send young Americans to die in pointless wars while they sit in their DC offices.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1852213972281270565

They do the same thing daily with out of context clips of Trump, because it’s all they’ve got. With the example above from yesterday, where Trump wasn’t even talking about abortion or women’s rights, Harris repeated the lie and CBS made it headline news: The only people this will work on is low IQ morons, which tells you something about how the Harris campaign views American voters.

Read more …

“Now, the White House Press office is being criticized from a new quarter for the clean up on aisle three: the Director of White House Stenography, Amy Sands..”

• White House On the Rewriting of President Biden’s Garbage Comments (Turley)

Since the “Let’s Go, Brandon” incident, the media has been repeatedly accused of reframing news or rewriting words to benefit the President or the Biden-Harris Administration. This week, the White House Press Office and various media outlets like Politico and MSNBC have been ridiculed for denying that President Joe Biden called Trump supporters “garbage.” It has created a weird dissonance as Democratic politicians denounced what the White House and many in the press denied was said. Now, the White House Press office is being criticized from a new quarter for the clean up on aisle three: the Director of White House Stenography, Amy Sands. The White House stenographers objected to the rewriting of the transcript by the Biden White House staff to suggest that the President was condemning Trump’s rhetoric, not his supporters.

The President’s attack on Trump supporters was nothing new. Leaders like Hillary Clinton called them “deplorables,” and Biden himself has described their views as a return of the confederacy and the rise of fascism. Democrats have called the movement a modern form of Nazism and an effort to destroy democracy, round up homosexuals, and create internment camps. The problem was the timing. As Harris was denouncing Trump for name-calling and insisting that Democrats are bringing the country together (while condemning Trump as a modern version of Hitler), Biden was literally behind her in the White House, calling tens of millions of Trump supporters “garbage.” Fox News reportedly obtained an email in which the supervisor sounded the alarm on the White House press office’s “breach of protocol and spoilation of transcript integrity between the Stenography and Press Offices.”

Sands went on to say that “if there is a difference in interpretation, the Press Office may choose to withhold the transcript but cannot edit it independently. Our Stenography Office transcript — released to our distro, which includes the National Archives — is now different than the version edited and released to the public by Press Office staff…After last night’s process, our team would like to reiterate that rush drafts/excerpts the Stenography Office sends to assist the Press Office are not intended for public distribution or as the final version of the transcript. Please avoid sharing rush drafts/excerpts, which are subject to review and might create confusion among staff, media, and the public while our Stenography Office completes a thorough review process.”

The White House was criticized for adding an apostrophe to the President’s comments to change the meaning of the key line. After the statement, there was an immediate clean-up effort by Politico White House bureau chief and MSNBC host Jonathan Lemire, who was accused of changing the language by saying that “Biden, in a Zoom call with the organization Voto Latino, said ‘the only garbage’ was the ‘hatred’ of Trump supporters who said such things about American citizens.” Lemire was widely ridiculed. For many, it sounded like another “Let’s Go Brandon” moment. He later turned to the apostrophe spin: “The full Biden quote from the Zoom tonight, which is being taken out of context.”

Accompanying the text is a screenshot of a transcript that has Biden saying: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.” The spin would have been more convincing if many of these pundits were not at the same time insisting that a line from a comedian delivered at a Trump event should be attributed to Trump (despite his later condemnation of any such view). It would also be more credible if Biden had not spent much of the last four years portraying the Trump movement as a new confederacy (before it was reframed as the new Third Reich).

Read more …

“The whole conduit of money into politics is fundamentally broken, we have to fix that.”

• Vance-Rogan Interview (ZH/ET)

Near the start of the interview, Vance discussed how he was selected to be Trump’s running mate—and how it’s changed his and his family’s life. Vance said he didn’t learn that Trump had picked him until July 15, the first day of the Republican National Convention. That day, he said he missed Trump’s first effort to call him as he was playing with his children. A few minutes later, he realized that he had missed the call and called Trump back. “Hey, sir, what’s going on?” Vance recalled saying. He said Trump replied: “JD, you’ve just missed a very important phone call. I’m gonna have to pick someone else.” Vance said he began to panic, only for Trump to say: “No, I’m just kidding. Obviously, I want you to be my vice president.” Vance said the call wasn’t a total surprise; by that point, he believed he had about a 60 percent chance of being picked for the No. 2 job.

Though Vance has been a U.S. Senator since 2023, he said he was able to remain somewhat anonymous most of the time—people often had no idea who he was. “It’s definitely weird just not being anonymous at all anymore,” Vance said. He noted the many changes that have occurred for his family since he became a candidate: his child’s schoolmates have started a game called “boss man” where they pretend to be Secret Service agents; Vance can’t drive his family around anymore; and he receives both praise and condemnation from people in public. “There are a lot of benefits to it. There’s a lot of downsides to it,” Vance said. “It’s what I asked for. I don’t have to think too much about it or complain too much about it. I just try to accept it.”

Vance described how the Republican Party was changing under Trump—particularly in relation to its attitude toward corporations and money in politics. Vance and Rogan discussed a variety of controversial social issues—transgenderism, environmentalism, Big Tech, and the pharmaceutical industry—that Vance said are all influenced by money. Vance has often outlined a unique position on economic issues that aligns more closely with populism than with 20th-century Republican positions. He’s expressed support for unions in principle; he’s often critical of corporate and elite institutions; he’s pushed for state policies to incentivize the creation of families. Once, Vance said, Republicans were openly the party of corporations. Since Trump’s entry into the party in 2016, however, Vance said that Republicans are now more willing to ask “Is this corporation’s interest in the American people’s interest?”

When evaluating other social movements, Vance said that people need to apply more scrutiny to their potential hidden motives. For instance, he noted that transgender drugs and operations are profitable to the pharmaceutical industry, as were COVID-19 vaccines—particularly because pharmaceutical companies are given broad immunity from liability for adverse reactions. “We should just ask ourselves, ‘Who’s getting rich from this stuff?’ Maybe we should be skeptical of people getting rich from this stuff,” Vance said. “The whole conduit of money into politics is fundamentally broken, we have to fix that.”

[..] The two also discussed abortion. Vance said he and Trump want to make it a state issue—so California can make its own laws while Alabama can do the same. Trump recently said he would veto a national abortion ban if Congress sent one to his desk. Vice President Kamala Harris has accused Trump of lying and has used the 2022 Supreme Court Dobbs decision to mobilize women voters. Rogan said he worries that some states with strict bans could put women in “very vulnerable positions” if they seek care across state lines, and face potential legal consequences when they return home. The host also said the “life begins at conception” position is rooted in religion, and is concerned about that dictating “whether or not a person can legally travel to another state.” Vance said he is not aware of laws that could do that, but nonetheless disagrees with arresting women seeking abortions. “I think I’m trying to be fair to both sides here [and] balance the interest in life against the interest in autonomy,” Vance said, adding that “pro-life” people need to be “pro-family” beyond just being “pro-birth.”

Read more …

“My sincere wish is to just have a nice conversation and get to know her as a human being. I really hope we can make it happen.”

• Joe Rogan Says He Gave Harris Campaign “Open Invitation”, Still Stands (ZH)

Podcaster Joe Rogan said in an Oct. 30 episode of his show that he gave Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign an “open invitation” to sit down for an interview at any time. “I said anytime. I said if she’s done at 10, we’ll come back here at 10. I’ll do it at 9 in the morning, I’ll do it at 10 p.m. I’ll do it at midnight if she’s up, if she wants to, you know, drink a Red Bull,” he said, recalling what he told the campaign. Rogan’s show features around 14 million subscribers on Spotify, making it the top show on the platform, but it also generates significant traffic and engagement on YouTube. His interview with former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, released late last week, has garnered more than 41 million views on YouTube so far.

While speaking to comedians Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster during episode 2220 of The Joe Rogan Experience….Rogan said that Harris “actually reached out when she found out that [Trump] was coming on.” “So their camp reached out to me,” he said. “So I said, ‘Great, I would love to talk to her.’ But it was very difficult to tie it down. They wanted [me] to travel, and see, the thing is, if I go somewhere, then there’s going to be other people in the room. And they want to control a lot of things, I’m sure.” As The Epoch Times’ Jack Phillips reported, Harris was in Houston last week and held a rally there featuring an endorsement and speech from pop singer Beyoncé. In a social media post earlier this week, Rogan said that the Harris campaign had conditions for the Democratic presidential nominee to do the interview. The Epoch Times previously reached out to the campaign, which has not responded to Rogan’s remarks, for comment.

“For the record, the Harris campaign has not passed on doing the podcast,” Rogan wrote in a social media post on Tuesday. “They offered a date for Tuesday, but I would have had to travel to her, and they only wanted to do an hour. I strongly feel the best way to do it is in the studio in Austin. My sincere wish is to just have a nice conversation and get to know her as a human being. I really hope we can make it happen.” During the episode with Kisin and Foster, Rogan also addressed speculation that he might be a covert Trump supporter. “Just because of my appearance, there’s always been this assumption that I’m some right-wing MAGA guy,” he said, referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. “I’m a politically homeless person for sure. You know, I always considered myself a left-wing person. I never thought I would ever vote right-wing, but then the tides of culture shifted in a very bizarre way. And it just made me, over time, much more aware of what this stuff is really all about.”

Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), will also air on Rogan’s show after being interviewed at Rogan’s Austin studio on Wednesday. Both Trump and Harris have engaged in a flurry of campaigning as the race draws to a close. Both candidates have taken part in several podcasts ahead of the 2024 General Election as they attempt to reach new audiences. More than 60 million people have cast early ballots so far ahead of the Nov. 5 contest, according to data released by the University of Florida’s Election Lab.

Read more …

“If this election is about anything — apart from the price of groceries, of course — it is about the national-security state’s place in American politics..”

• Portents of Chaos (Patrick Lawrence)

I have long detected that American liberalism has at its core a vein of illiberalism that is essential to its character. America is simply not, to put this point another way, a tolerant nation. It does not encourage its people to think: It requires them to conform. Alexis de Tocqueville saw this coming two centuries ago in the two volumes of Democracy in America. We are now, post–Clinton, treated to the spectacle of full-dress liberal authoritarianism, and if you do not like the term there are others. De Tocqueville, prescient man, called it “soft despotism.” I’ve always favored “apple-pie authoritarianism.” There is a feature of this awful manifestation among NPR–addicted, kale-eating liberals that distinguishes our time as especially discouraging as to the future. This is their wanton corruption of some of the institutions without which even a semblance of democratic government is impossible. I am thinking particularly of three that figure in the pre-election picture.

One is the judiciary — federal, state, county, local. Beginning with the Mueller investigation, the in-plain-sight corruption of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the ridiculous court cases brought against Donald Trump, Attorney–General Merrick Garland’s subversion of the Justice Department to protect President Joe Biden as his son’s influence-mongering schemes came to light — all this in behalf of the Democrats: Well, as I learned during my days as a correspondent abroad, when the judicial system goes down, the path to failed-state status opens. Two is the intelligence apparatus and the military. Intel, from the days of James Clapper and John Brennan, has lined up unequivocally behind the Democrats ever since the brash real-estate man from New York foolishly assumed he could “drain the swamp” — his declaration that he would take on the Deep State.

As to the military, the generals thought nothing of declaring eight years ago, at the Democrats’ convention in Philadelphia and in open letters published in the Times, that they would refuse the commander-in-chief’s orders were Trump to win and attempt a new détente with Russia and an end to “the forever wars.” Yes, you’ve got John Kelly, who served in Trump’s cabinet and then as his chief of staff, suddenly calling Trump a fascist — the Democrats’ favorite epithet these past weeks. Doesn’t anyone want to know why Kelly worked closely with a man he considered a fascist? Doesn’t it occur to anyone — it must, surely — that Kelly, a retired Marine general, says these things to serve the party he trusts to keep the wars going and the tax dollars flowing? A paradox here, more apparent than real: John Kelly, H.R. McMaster, James Mattis, Mark Esper, and various others like them did not wear uniforms when they served in the Trump administration, but they never took them off.

If this election is about anything — apart from the price of groceries, of course — it is about the national-security state’s place in American politics. In our post–2016 era, intel and the military are perfectly welcome to operate openly, unabashedly, in the American political process — this because the Democratic Party gives them a wide berth to do so.

Read more …

“The EU, however, insists on ignoring reality and keeps talking about a “victory” for Ukraine..”

• Western Europeans Don’t Understand Russia – Orban (RT)

Most EU politicians misunderstand Russia and project their own policies and priorities on Moscow instead, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said. Orban is a long-time critic of the EU policy on the Russia-Ukraine conflict. He spoke at an event with former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in Vienna, organized by the Swiss newspaper Die Weltwoche. “It is a Christian country and part of Europe, but it is different from us,” Orban told the audience at the Sophiensale in the Austrian capital on Thursday. “Their politics revolves around a different question than ours.” In the West, Orban explained, the focus is on maximizing individual freedom and material prosperity. Russia’s oft-misunderstood priority is keeping the multi-ethnic state of 140 million people together and preventing adversaries from “chewing away” some territories, he said.

This inability to adequately understand Russia is a major “intellectual problem” for Western leaders, Orban said. Instead, people like European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen speak about some kind of military victory over Russia in Ukraine, which the Hungarian prime minister described as the stuff of fantasy. Russia cannot be defeated on the battlefield and will in fact win the war, both Schroeder and Orban agreed. They advocated a ceasefire as soon as possible, arguing that time is working against Vladimir Zelensky. The EU, however, insists on ignoring reality and keeps talking about a “victory” for Ukraine. “This war is lost for Ukraine, which is increasingly in ruins!” Orban told the Vienna audience, pointing out that it is important to face reality.

Asked about his “peace mission” to Kiev, Moscow, Beijing, and Mar-a-Lago earlier this year, Orban said he tried to use Hungary’s presidency of the EU Council to bring about a ceasefire and stop the killing, rather than get “pats on the back from Brussels bureaucrats.” Orban has accused the EU, specifically Von der Leyen and another prominent German politician, of seeking to oust him and replace him with a “Jawohl government” that would take orders from Brussels and Berlin. He has pointed to public statements by EU officials to that effect, including the claim that they already did this in Poland last year. Hungary was long the sole dissenter with the EU policy of unconditional support for Kiev, until last year’s election of Robert Fico in Slovakia. Earlier this year, Fico barely survived an assassination attempt by a pro-Ukrainian activist.

Soros

Read more …

They want Russia to sign on to some American deal.

• Israel Wants Russia To Mediate Peace – Media (RT)

Israel wants Russia to take part in peace efforts aimed at ending the Jewish state’s conflict with the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, Ynet news and several other local outlets have reported, citing officials involved in negotiations. According to the reports, West Jerusalem expects that Moscow’s involvement could add stability to any future deal and reduce dependence on the US. “The Russians will have a special role in implementing the agreement and preventing further escalation,” a source told Ynet. Commenting on the reports, Orna Mizrahi, a former Israeli deputy national security adviser, told Newsweek that while Israel “prefers the Americans,” it understands that Russia’s “good relations” with Iran could contribute to the stability of any deal on Lebanon reached in the future.

“Another point is the fact that they are part of the UN Security Council five and if we get to the point that we have some kind of a new resolution about the ceasefire in the UN Security Council, we would like the Russians to approve it,” she said. Israeli media reports claimed this week that negotiations on a ceasefire deal in Lebanon have already reached “advanced stages.” US President Joe Biden’s envoy, Amos Hochstein, who is mediating between Israel and Lebanon, reportedly reached preliminary agreements on the deal during a visit to Beirut earlier this week. The deal involves a wider implementation of the UN Security Council Resolution 1701, passed in 2006, which demands the withdrawal of Hezbollah forces from the Lebanese-Israeli border. It introduces an international mechanism to supervise the region and deal with violations claims by either Israel or Lebanon and reportedly prevents Hezbollah from rearming, which effectively means the group would be banned from acquiring military means.

Israeli officials told Ynet that the deal, if signed, would start with a 60-day cease-fire, during which time the new mechanism to supervise the region would be set up. Hochstein is reportedly expected to arrive in Israel before the US presidential election scheduled for November 5 to finalize the deal. The reports claim that Moscow has already discussed the situation with Iran, which is said to be encouraging Hezbollah to agree to the terms. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Friday neither confirmed nor denied Russia’s involvement in the peace process, but said Moscow “maintains contacts with all parties of the conflict.” “And, of course, if our assistance is needed, Russia is ready to play its part,” he stated.

Read more …

“..an independent Palestinian state..”

but

“..Netanyahu has repeatedly vowed not to allow the creation of a fully functional Palestinian state..”

• Moscow Names Only Chance For Middle East Peace (RT)

The conflict in the Middle East can only be resolved by stopping the violence and creating the conditions for establishment an independent Palestinian state, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated on Friday. “There will be no winners” in the ongoing war, he added. In an interview with the Turkish daily Hurriyet, Lavrov said we are seeing a deepening spiral of violence in the Middle East and that an increasing number of countries are being drawn into the “whirlpool of confrontation.” Israel and Lebanon-based Hezbollah have exchanged fire over the past year as the latter has supported the Palestinian cause in light of West Jerusalem’s military operation against Hamas. Israel has escalated its campaign against the Shiite militant group, launching attacks on Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon.

Tensions between Tehran and West Jerusalem have also escalated since Israel conducted a series of strikes against targets in Iran last week. The attack was in response to a barrage of missiles fired by Iran at the Jewish state in October – which itself was in retaliation for the killing of Hezbollah and Iranian commanders. The Russian minister has urged the sides to stop further escalation before the situation gets out of hand. Tens of thousands of “innocent Palestinians” have been killed in Gaza since the outbreak of the conflict with Israel, while in Lebanon the number of victims is in the thousands, he said. Lavrov noted that Russia has condemned the assassination of Hamas and Hezbollah political leaders, warning that it could worsen the already tense situation in the region and undermine attempts to end the war in Gaza. The top diplomat noted that Moscow had earlier proposed that the UN Security Council give an assessment of the killings, however, “due to resistance from Western members of the Security Council, this was not possible.”

Moscow calls for an immediate cessation of hostilities and is undertaking diplomatic efforts to de-escalate the situation, according to Lavrov. However, long-lasting peace in the region can only be established “though the creation of an independent Palestinian state within the borders of 1967,” the minister stressed. Russian President Vladimir Putin said during a meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas earlier this year that the roots of the Gaza conflict are that UN resolutions regarding the creation of an independent Palestinian state have been ignored. Currently the state of Palestine is recognized by 146 UN members and half of the G20, including China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, and Türkiye. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly vowed not to allow the creation of a fully functional Palestinian state.

Read more …

Progress, change comes not smoothly in a linear way, but in bursts and spurts.

• The Paradigm Shift Is Here (Jeffrey A. Tucker)

Some wild shifts are taking place in our time. The low-tariff global trade order is falling apart. Nationalist movements are gaining strength in every Western nation, not just the United States. The major media is under serious financial strain to the point that the owner of the Washington Post has penned an editorial decrying the tendency to speak only to elites. A presidential candidate is talking about scrapping the income tax. The Supreme Court earlier this year ruled that 40 years of regulatory jurisprudence is essentially contrary to the Constitution. The list goes on and on with the rise of homeschooling, the reliance on alternative media, the dramatic shift in partisan affiliations over healthy food, the unpredictable alliances over the U.S. role in the world, and so much more. People are asking fundamental questions about issues that only a few years ago seemed fully settled. What was stable is unstable and what was believed by nearly everyone is now widely doubted.

It’s enough to make one’s head spin. What is happening and why is it happening? The short answer is that we are living through a class paradigm shift. One is going away and another is coming. We are in pre-paradigmatic times, which are surely the most exciting times to be alive.

The word paradigm entered into the mainstream of thought with an important book by Thomas Kuhn. His “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” appeared in 1962, and it completely upended the dominated assumptions about how science works. More than that, it implicitly shook how people came to understand how progress takes place. He said it is not a linear process with every generation absorbing the best from the last but rather that progress is episodic, a shift from success to failure and back again, through titanic movements of large paradigms. Kuhn arrived at this conclusion by looking at the long history of science and noticing the tendency toward complacency around an orthodoxy of some sort. This is the period he calls “normal science.” The practitioners have all been schooled in a certain way, deferring to teachers and dominant institutions that have captured government and the public mind. It’s a way of understanding the world and within that the main practitioners focus on problem-solving and applications.

This period of normal science can last a month or decades or centuries, rarely questioned. And then something happens. Kuhn writes that this orthodoxy comes to be challenged by certain features of reality that are not explained by normal science. Once these are more closely investigated, the anomalies start to pile up and then overwhelm the explanatory power of the settled paradigm. The longer this goes on, the more the paradigm comes under strain, as a new generation seizes on the failures and highlights the incapacity of the orthodoxy to account for the reality all around us. That’s when the settled science breaks down. It can happen slowly or quickly, and sometimes paradigms overlap both in their popularity and their collapse. That collapse does not mean that every mind is changed. Kuhn observes that the practitioners of the old science continue on their merry way through retirement and final expiration, while the younger people work on cobbling together a new way of thinking that gradually emerges as the dominant paradigm.

Kuhn was writing about science and the profession thereof but his insight has broad application to sociological, cultural, and political ideas too. They do not evolve in a linear fashion, piling victory upon victory, as a Whiggish perspective of the 19th century would have it. Instead, change occurs episodically. One generation is as likely to forget the wisdom of the past as it is to overthrow the orthodoxies of the present. We are in a forever state of cobbling together truth rather than progressively unfolding it. We’ve seen this happen in the postwar world, as planners built structures that were supposed to govern the world forever. But in a few short years, the world came to be divided rather than united by the Western perception of the new threat of Russian imperialism. That created the Cold War which lasted for 40 years until a new “end of history” was born, which put freedom, democracy, and U.S. hegemony on the commanding heights. That turn has been challenged by the rise of China and huge industrial shifts in the 21st century.

If we were to name one dominant factor that has provoked the big change in our time, it would have to be the global response to the lab-created virus of SARS-CoV-2, which was met with Chinese Communist Party-style universal quarantines all over the world, and followed by shot mandates on most public institutions and many private businesses. These policies were extreme beyond which had been practiced in any period of history but also, and in many ways, merely an extension of the “normal science” of times. The media, large corporations, and nearly all governments got behind the pandemic response and jeered the non-compliers. This was a huge error because it gave rise to a full generation of the incredulous who lost trust in elites at all levels: medical, academic, media, and government. It has all fallen apart in our time, leaving people scrambling in all directions for explanations of what could have gone so wrong and what should be done about it.

What fascinates me about our election year is not so much the issues on the table but the underlying template that everyone knows is there but no one dares mention; namely the utter discrediting of elite opinion over the last four years. The claims of the experts simply became too implausible to compel public assent. And this time it was personal. People’s schools and churches were closed, loved ones forced on ventilators to die alone, and whole communities were shattered when public spaces were blocked. In other words, the “normal science” became a threat to people’s lives, especially once the vaccine mandates came along that most people did not want or need and which ended up being far less effective and far more dangerous than advertised. That was the turning point, the mark at which the anomalies overwhelmed the orthodoxies and the expert classes fell into disrepute.

Nothing about any of this would shock Thomas Kuhn, who gave us a map of understanding back in 1962. Finding that new way of thinking is the essence of our times, which is why everything seems to be in question. The other day, Elon Musk suggested cutting $2 trillion next year from the federal budget. It barely made the headlines, even though it is a highly credible promise. That’s the new world in which we live. It is being built on the embers of the old. To be sure, this shift will not happen all at once. It will happen in fits and starts and be accompanied by a great deal of alarm and even pain along the way. But one way or another, it is going to happen, and for one simple reason. As Jeff Bezos explained in the Washington Post, reality is an undisputed champion.

Read more …

 

 

 

Elon

 

 

Tuna

 

 

Shoes

 

 

Sign
https://twitter.com/i/status/1852028051946618938

 

 

Barry Young

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in wartime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle October 3 2024

Oct 032024
 
 October 3, 2024  Posted by at 8:48 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  78 Responses »


Winslow Homer Cloud shadows 1890

 

• 2nd Gentleman Doug Emhoff Slapped Ex-Girlfriend So Hard ‘She Spun Around’ (ZH)
• American Empire is Over – Charles Nenner (USAW)
• Prosecutors Seek Indefinite Delay In Trial Of Alleged Trump Assassin (ZH)
• 30 Million Immigrant-Invaders To Vote Against Trump (PCR)
• JD Vance ‘Made Viewers Feel Safe,’ Walz Had Brain Freeze – Psychiatrist (Sp.)
• Israel Free To Choose How It Retaliates Against Iran – Vance (RT)
• Harris A Threat To US Democracy – Vance (RT)
• Democrats Bringing World Closer To ‘Catastrophe’ – Trump (RT)
• US ‘Helpless’ As Middle East Burns – Moscow (RT)
• Netanyahu Seeks to Drag US Into War With Iran – Ex-Italian Diplomat (Sp.)
• Weakening Iran and Hezbollah Part of Broader Israeli-US Project – Analyst (Sp.)
• Putin, Medinsky, Istanbul-II and “Betrayal Of Russia’s State Interests” (Doctorow)
• Trump May Be More Of An Enemy To Zelensky Than Even Putin (Jay)
• The War on Terror 23 Years Later (Greenberg)
• Guilty (CJ Hopkins)
• 10 Principles for Perpetual Peace in the 21st Century (Jeffrey Sachs)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Censorship

 

 

Ritter

 

 

 

 

24 minutes

 

 

 

 

Just the kind of guy you want in the White House. No, seriously, you can’t do that.

“There’s a special place in hell for men who put hands on women.”

They’ve been hoping for a story just like this one for ten years. About Trump.

• 2nd Gentleman Doug Emhoff Slapped Ex-Girlfriend So Hard ‘She Spun Around’ (ZH)

Kamala Harris’ husband Doug Emhoff reportedly assaulted his ex-girlfriend by hitting her in the face so hard “she spun around”, according to a bombshell new exclusive by the Daily Mail. Emhoff allegedly struck the woman, referred to as “Jane,” in the face while waiting in a valet line after a 2012 Cannes Film Festival event, according to the DailyMail.com. Jane, a New York attorney, reportedly called a friend sobbing in a cab after the incident and told others about the alleged assault at the time. Friends provided photos and documents from 2012 to support parts of the story but chose to remain anonymous, citing fear of retaliation. Jane’s friends said she received tickets from wealthy connections to attend the exclusive amfAR Gala Dinner at Hotel du Cap in Antibes, France, on May 24, 2012. The alleged assault occurred after the event, where celebrities like Heidi Klum and Harvey Weinstein were present. Jane, who brought Emhoff as her guest, later called a friend sobbing, saying her date had hit her.

The friend recalled Jane describing how Emhoff slapped her after she offered a valet money to skip a taxi line, which he misinterpreted as flirting. ‘She slapped him back. My impression is that he had a lot to drink. She was sobbing [on the phone afterwards], but she wasn’t slurring her words. She told me that she broke up with him that night,’ one friend told the Daily Mail. A second friend, also a New York attorney, said Jane recounted the incident, describing how Emhoff slapped her out of nowhere around 2-3 a.m. after a pleasant evening. Jane said she was talking to a valet when Emhoff suddenly turned her around and slapped her hard, causing her to spin. Shocked, she slapped him back twice. ‘She said she wanted to go back to the hotel without him. But while she was shutting the door, he forced himself into the car, which she did not want.’ the friend said.

Jane was embarrassed and described it as a “trailer trash moment,” realizing it revealed his true character. A third friend said Jane told her the story in 2018, telling the Daily Mail: ‘She had never been hit in her life. [Jane] is a gorgeous, strong woman and you would never expect somebody to hit her.’ Recall, just days ago Jen Psaki swooned over Emhoff on MSNBC in a sit-down interview, stating he was reshaping masculinity and calling him a ‘supportive spouse’. “There is also an important, interesting part about how people have talked about your role is how your role has reshaped the perception of masculinity,” Psaki said to Emhoff. “I’m not sure you planned on that, but you are an incredibly supportive spouse. Has that been an evolution for you? Do you think that’s part of the role you might play as First Gentleman?”

Emhoff responded: “It’s funny. I’ve started to think a lot about this. I’ve always been like this. My dad’s always been like this. To me, it’s the right thing to do, support women. It is mutual with Kamala and I. We support each other, we have each other’s back,” He continued: “I’ve said many times when we lift up women, we support women whether it’s pay equity, childcare, family leave, and all of these issues in this post-Dobbs hellscape. Women should not be less than. Women should not have less rights and be treated differently. That’s not the American way.” Ironically, Emhoff also said days ago about Trump: “Make no mistake, where he says I will be the protector of women, that is yet more lies and more gaslighting.”

Or said another way…

Emhoff

Read more …

“..can Trump still be the winter coat America needs to survive? Nenner says, “I don’t think he can. It’s too late.”

• American Empire is Over – Charles Nenner (USAW)

Renowned geopolitical and financial cycle expert Charles Nenner has been warning of a huge war cycle. The Iran missile attack in Israel that rained down 180 missiles on the Holy land, “is just the beginning,” according to Nenner. Of course, America and everybody else will be involved in this war, and Nenner says don’t expect America to come out on top. Nenner says, “I don’t know how big this war is going to be because everybody is going to be involved. Israel is not going to sit on its hands like last time because this cannot continue. I guess Israel will go for the enrichment of the uranium places and attack Iran whenever they are ready. . . . I don’t vote in the United States because I am Dutch, but if Trump were in, this would be over in an hour.”

When it comes to the 2024 November election, Nenner says, “I think the media is doing a great job. So, I am not sure that Trump is going to win. I really have no mercy for America anymore if they vote for Kamala. It’s just the end of an empire already. Even if Trump wins, I don’t think he can fix what needs to be fixed because the Biden government put all kinds of people in positions that are going to be there for a while. I watch Congress and see who the Biden Administration brings forward for new judges, and I have no words for it. It’s ridiculous. I don’t even know how to fix the United States anymore. . . . According to the cycles the United States is finished. This war now will probably turn into a world war, and the problem is they (US) will have to fight Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, and they have no chance to win. . . .

Nobody will have to invade the United States. They will just finish them off with rockets from the air. It is a hopeless situation.” Nenner famously said several months ago, “If you know winter is coming, you can buy a winter coat. Trump is the winter coat.” So, can Trump still be the winter coat America needs to survive? Nenner says, “I don’t think he can. It’s too late.” On the markets, Nenner thinks there is going to be a stock market crash that will be equal to or greater than the Great Depression market crash in 1929. Nenner says, “We are telling our clients to get out of stocks. . . . We have zero stocks.”

Nenner also thinks gold is the place to be for the next three years. Nenner thinks gold is going much higher. On interest rates, Nenner says they are going higher too, and real estate and bonds are going lower. This is the longer term trend in Nenner’s cycle. When will this market crash come? Nenner says, “It’s still going to take half a year or a year until everybody realizes how bad the situation is compared to the BRIC countries. The dollar is not going to be the major currency. Nixon stopped backing it by gold, and Saudia Arabia stopped backing it by oil. It is not backed by anything. So, why would you trust the dollar?

Read more …

We won’t know his handlers before the election, and likely never.

• Prosecutors Seek Indefinite Delay In Trial Of Alleged Trump Assassin (ZH)

Federal prosecutors on Wednesday requested an indefinite delay in the upcoming trial of Ryan Routh, the man accused of attempting to assassinate former President Donald Trump, claiming that a massive trove of evidence has emerged in recent weeks rendering the case “complex,” ABC News reports. According to a Wednesday filing with Florida District Judge Aileen Cannon, prosecutors have gathered too much evidence to proceed to trial – including hundreds of witness interviews, 13 search warrants, and the seizure of “multiple electronic devices” from locations in Florida, Hawaii, and North Carolina. The overwhelming amount of digital data to review – around 4,000 terabytes – allegedly led to the request.

“The FBI also continues to conduct forensic tests on other evidence, including “ballistics testing, and fingerprint and DNA comparisons,” which will likely require them to prepare several expert witnesses to testify about in advance of Routh’s eventual trial. The filing states Routh’s defense attorneys did not oppose the government’s request to indefinitely delay his trial date. Routh, 58, appeared in federal court in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Monday for his arraignment on attempted assassination charges. Routh’s lawyers entered a not guilty plea on his behalf.” -ABC News.

The delay request came just one day after Judge Cannon had set a tentative trial date of November 18. But with prosecutors still awaiting over 100 subpoena responses and conducting forensic analysis, including ballistics and DNA testing, the government says their case is far from ready to proceed. Routh allegedly staked out the Trump International Golf Course in Florida for 12 hours on September 15, waiting for the former president to arrive. According to prosecutors, his attempt was thwarted when Secret Service agents spotted a rifle poking through the golf course fence. Routh was later apprehended on I-95. The incident echoes a previous attempt on Trump’s life just two months prior, when gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Crooks’ attack injured Trump and left one attendee dead.

Read more …

“White people are history. They have placed their fate in the hands of their enemies. Perhaps a few will be kept in zoos.”

• 30 Million Immigrant-Invaders To Vote Against Trump (PCR)

Democrats are passing laws to make sure that a non-citizen who just walked across the border has a vote equal to a United States native-born citizen. Immigrant-invaders are given federal IDs which entitle them to drivers’ licenses. Many jurisdictions automatically enroll driver license recipients on the voting list. Two days ago California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill preventing local governments from requiring voters to present identification at the polls. The Democrat California government has made it a felony to prevent election fraud. The Democrats call it Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. DEI is not for us racist white supremacy citizens, the American majority. It is for the immigrant-invaders who just walked across the border. The Democrats are the party of the immigrant-invaders, and tens of millions of dumbshit white Americans will vote for the party of immigrant-invaders.

It is even worse than that. The Biden/Kamala Regime are using our taxpayers dollars to finance NGOs to recruit from 150 countries immigrant invaders and to provide them with transportation, to Latin America and with food, water, medical care, and sleeping quarters as they march to our border. When Washington’s recruits of immigrant-invaders reach the border, federal and local authorities are required to let them in. Nothing is being done about it. The Republican House and Senate Democrats have not cut off the funding that is flooding America with crime and people unable to support themselves. How do uneducated people who do not speak the language become a work force? How do tens of millions of people who do not speak the language and do not have a first world education become a work force in a first world country? Why is this happening? Why is discussion of the dissolution of the United States into a Tower of Babel blocked by the media and authorities with police power to silence?

Why does the Democrat Party describe native-born Americans who are opposed to their country being overrun by immigrant-invaders as white supremacists, while Democrats focus on saving Ukraine’s borders? Why are Ukraine’s borders more important than America’s? Is there a Democrat anywhere who cares about America’s borders? Apparently not. Is there any politician, other than Donald Trump, who speaks for Americans? Yesterday the Democrats in Minneopolis made a non-citizen a police officer. So now the Democrats have made it possible for a non-citizen to arrest an American citizen. The Democrats call this “inclusion.” Do you look forward to being arrested by a non-citizen? This is your consequence for being so totally stupid that you voted Democrat. The dumbshit American voters have destroyed themselves and all of their prospects.

The Democrats have established a regime in which American citizens have lost their Constitutional protections and are considered to be evil racists and enemies of democracy who must be replaced by third world immigrant-invaders. This is happening before our eyes. If it hasn’t happened to your community yet, it won’t be long. It is the same throughout the Western world. The European Council on Foreign Relations published a report a few days ago on September 25 by Pawel Zerka, obviously not a Western European name. The report published by the European Council concluded that Europe is too white and too European. So here we have Europeans turning Europe’s fate over to someone who intends to bring upon them the Camp of the Saints. Perhaps people this stupid deserve their destruction.

To underline the point, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the largest French political party that is kept out of political office by conspiracy of the ruling elite, has been placed on trial. The false charges are that she and her party embezzled EU funds. This is such a nonsensical charge as to be mind blowing. The EU is not going to give any funds to a French NATIONALIST political party. And even if it mysteriously happened, Le Pen is not sufficiently stupid, having target written all over her, to embezzle them. But in the Western world today truth is of zero consequence. Law is nothing else but a weapon to destroy those in the way of the Woke Agenda. White people are history. They have placed their fate in the hands of their enemies. Perhaps a few will be kept in zoos.

Read more …

“..his body language showed a lot of telltale signs of lying, such as fidgeting, touching his face and breathing rapidly.”

• JD Vance ‘Made Viewers Feel Safe,’ Walz Had Brain Freeze – Psychiatrist (Sp.)

Dr. Carole Lieberman, a board-certified psychiatrist and best-selling author based in Beverly Hills, California, told Sputnik that Republican Senator JD Vance had prevailed over Democratic Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota in the vice-presidential debate. “I found this debate fascinating because the two had only 90 minutes to show the voters what they could do for America,” Lieberman said, arguing that Vance “projected a steady, self-assured persona that made viewers feel safe.” Walz’s “discordant words and body movements made viewers feel uncomfortable,” she argued. He was “clearly nervous and his body language showed a lot of telltale signs of lying, such as fidgeting, touching his face and breathing rapidly.” The debate began with both candidates fielding a question on a possible pre-emptive strike by Israel on Iran. “Tim Walz stuttered and stumbled over his answer.

He gave misinformation about Trump and a deal with Iran, but never answered the question. JD Vance, on the other hand, answered with, ‘It is up to Israel,’ which is the best answer,” the psychiatrist said. Vance answered a question about hurricanes and climate change “in a straightforward manner, whereas Tim Walz started grimacing, making jarring movements and having pauses that seemed like brain freeze or senior moments,” she noted. On immigration, which Walz knew was a weak spot because Kamala Harris “as the Border Czar that had let everyone in,” he again started blaming former president Donald Trump. “It was obvious that his preparation for the debate focused on trying to blame Trump for everything,” Lieberman said.Vance won “because he was authentic throughout and his words matched his body language,” the psychiatrist concluded.

Read more …

Is Iran also free to choose?

• Israel Free To Choose How It Retaliates Against Iran – Vance (RT)

The US should support Israel in its retaliation against Iran, even if it includes a preemptive strike, Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, said during a televised debate on CBS News on Tuesday. Vance, a Republican senator from Ohio, faced his Democratic opponent, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz on live TV only hours after Iran fired nearly 200 missiles at Israel, marking a significant escalation in Middle East tensions. Asked by a moderator if he would back an preemptive Israeli strike on Iran, Vance reaffirmed Washington’s long-standing support for the Jewish state. “Look, it is up to Israel what they think they need to do to keep their country safe, and we should support our allies wherever they are when they’re fighting the bad guys. That’s the right approach to the Israel question,” Vance replied.

He went on to argue that Trump had kept America’s adversaries in check when he was president. “Trump actually delivered stability in the world, and he did it by establishing effective deterrence. People were afraid of stepping out of line,” Vance said. Walz avoided answering directly if he would back an Israeli preemptive strike. He said, however, that “Israel’s ability to be able to defend itself is absolutely fundamental.” The Democrat accused Trump of damaging the US standing in the world and criticized him for tearing up the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Iran is “closer to a nuclear weapon than it was before – because of Donald Trump’s fickle leadership,” Walz said.

Iran has claimed that the missile attacks were a response to the “genocide” committed by the IDF in Gaza and Lebanon. The IDF launched a cross-border ground operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon on Tuesday. Israeli jets previously bombed Lebanon, killing several senior Hezbollah members, including the armed group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. The IDF said the goal of the operation is to prevent Hezbollah from firing rockets and mortars at Israeli cities in the northern part of the country.

Read more …

“Limits on free speech have become the biggest threat to US democracy..”

• Harris A Threat To US Democracy – Vance (RT)

Limits on free speech have become the biggest threat to US democracy, Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance claimed during a televised debate on Tuesday. Donald Trump’s running mate for the November election faced off with his Democratic opponent, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, on CBS News. Vance claimed that “rather than debating and persuading fellow Americans,” Democratic nominee Kamala Harris “would like to censor people who engage in misinformation.” “Harris is engaged in censorship on an industrial scale. She has done it over a number of issues. That’s a bigger threat to democracy than what Donald Trump said when he said protesters should peacefully protest on January 6.” Vance was referring to the January 6, 2021 storming of the US Capitol building in Washington by Trump supporters following his election defeat.

Trump, whose public statements are alleged to have incited the Capitol riots, faces four federal felony charges in the case. He is accused of acting unlawfully after the 2020 election, by trying to overturn the result. The former president has repeatedly denied wrongdoing and denounced the case as an attempt to prevent him from returning to the White House. In a series of posts on his Truth Social platform in August he called it “a direct assault on democracy” and a “resurrection of a dead witch hunt.” In the TV debate, Vance argued: “I believe we actually do have a threat to democracy in this country. Unfortunately, it’s not the threat to democracy that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz want to talk about. It is the threat of censorship.” He went on to accuse major technology companies of “silencing their fellow citizens.”

In August, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said senior Biden administration officials had pressured Facebook to “censor” some Covid-19 content during the pandemic. He also admitted that Facebook suppressed a New York Post story about Hunter Biden after an FBI warning in the lead-up to the 2020 election. “A president’s words matter. January 6 was not Facebook ads,” Walz responded, on the issue of the January 2021 Capitol riots. He asked Vance directly if Trump lost the 2020 election. Vance replied that Trump is “focused on the future.”

Read more …

”War or the threat of war is raging everywhere, and the two incompetents running this country are leading us to the brink of World War III..”

• Democrats Bringing World Closer To ‘Catastrophe’ – Trump (RT)

Former US President Donald Trump has blamed his successor, Joe Biden, and his rival in next month’s presidential election, Vice President Kamala Harris, for a retaliatory strike by Iran on Israel on Tuesday night. The Republican nominee discussed the latest escalation in the Middle East crisis during a campaign rally in Waunakee, Wisconsin, and posted a similar statement on his Truth Social platform. He accused the Biden administration of failing to keep Iran in check, and claimed that he would have done a better job. Trump claimed that, under his presidency, Tehran was “starved for cash, fully contained, and desperate to make a deal.” “Kamala flooded them with American cash and, ever since, they’ve been exporting terror all over,” he added. ”War or the threat of war is raging everywhere, and the two incompetents running this country are leading us to the brink of World War III,” said Trump.

If Democrats win next month’s election, “the world goes up in smoke,” he warned. Tehran described its attack as retaliation for Israel’s assassination of senior figures in the militant movements Hamas and Hezbollah on Iranian and Lebanese soil. The two regional rivals have made opposing claims about the effectiveness of the ballistic missile strike. Israel has promised a response, which the media predict will come within days.

Both main US political parties are offering what appears to be unconditional support for Israel’s actions. This position appears to have become something of a liability for the Democrats, as a notable portion of their supporters have protested against continued shipments of weapons to Israel as it conducted a military siege of the Palestinian enclave of Gaza. The “uncommitted” movement has threatened to withhold their votes unless Biden applies pressure on Israel to secure a ceasefire in the conflict. With their demands unsatisfied, they stopped short last month of publicly urging people not to vote for Harris, but did say people should vote against Trump. The ongoing escalation was triggered by a deadly Hamas incursion into southern Israel almost a year ago. In recent weeks, Israel refocused its attention from Gaza to Lebanon, reportedly with the blessing of the Biden administration.

Read more …

“Without the comprehensive support you provide to Israel, the conflict could be ended quickly and effectively.”

• US ‘Helpless’ As Middle East Burns – Moscow (RT)

The surge in violence in the Middle East signifies the “complete failure” of US policy in the region under President Joe Biden, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said, shortly after Iran launched a significant retaliatory missile barrage against Israel on Tuesday evening. According to Israel, Tehran fired 181 ballistic missiles at targets in the Jewish state, although the Israeli military said that most were repelled by its air defenses. Sources in Iran, however, have claimed that Israeli military infrastructure suffered significant damage. Iranian officials described the strike as its long-expected response to the July assassination in Tehran of Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, and last week’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut.

Israel has pledged to retaliate against Iran for the attack, and is continuing a bombing campaign and a “limited incursion” in Lebanon. Commenting on the escalating violence, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zakharova pointed the finger at US policy. “This bloody drama is just ramping up. Incoherent statements by the White House demonstrate its total helplessness in resolving crises. Efforts by [Secretary of State Antony] Blinken have led to tens of thousands of casualties and into a dead end,” the spokeswoman said. The current hostilities erupted last October, when Hamas launched a deadly raid into southern Israel from the Palestinian enclave of Gaza. Israel responded with a massive military campaign, seeking to “eliminate” the movement. The Lebanon-based Hezbollah, which supports Hamas, has been conducting regular rocket attacks across the border, forcing tens of thousands of people to evacuate from northern Israel.

The US has publicly called on Israel to defuse the tensions and seek a ceasefire in Gaza, although the Israeli government has maintained its military pressure. The number of Palestinian deaths has exceeded 41,000, according to local health authorities. Some observers have accused West Jerusalem of trying to make Gaza uninhabitable so that its population has no option but to flee. “The Middle East has once again found itself on the brink of a big war, which, it appears, someone is eager to see break out,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned last week at a UN Security Council session on the unfolding crisis. Lavrov went on to call out the US over its rejection of proposals to demand a ceasefire backed by the authority of the UNSC. The Russian diplomat stressed: “Without the comprehensive support you provide to Israel, the conflict could be ended quickly and effectively.”

Read more …

Netanyahu IS not Israel, anymore than Zelensky IS Ukraine. Just stop supporting them.

• Netanyahu Seeks to Drag US Into War With Iran – Ex-Italian Diplomat (Sp.)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a provocative address to the people of Iran a day before Tehran’s ballistic missile attack in Israel, claiming the nation would be “finally free” and that “that moment will come a lot sooner than people think.” Netanyahu is “probably provoking the Iranian leadership to react to have a further justification to hit the country and, ideally, to draw the US to join Israel in attacking Iran,” Dr. Marco Carnelos, former Italian diplomat and Middle East adviser to Prime Ministers Prodi and Berlusconi, told Sputnik. In the wake of Tuesday’s missile strikes, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian stressed that Iran exercised “legitimate self-defense rights” in response to Israel’s aggression. The missile attack followed Israel’s ground invasion of Lebanon and air raids against Yemen and Syria.

Together with Iran, those countries form the so-called Axis of Resistance which has opposed Israel’s war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since October 2023.Netanyahu claimed that “Iran made a big mistake” on October 1 and “will pay for it.” “There is no doubt that Israel is leveraging Washington against Iran,” Carnelos said, but it was “far from certain if the Biden Administration will decide to join Israel in attacking Iran unleashing a regional war.” The former Italian diplomat said the Biden administration wants to avoid a direct confrontation with Iran before November’s presidential election. Voters have no interest in starting “another potential endless war in the Middle East,” the pundit stressed.

Read more …

“..all the Israeli operations on the ground are influencing the balance of power in Lebanon, and trying to change the equation of power there..”

• Weakening Iran and Hezbollah Part of Broader Israeli-US Project – Analyst (Sp.)

Tel Aviv earlier described the Israeli military’s incursion into southern Lebanon as limited in scope, claiming that there will be “no long-term occupation.”Commenting on Israel’s recently announced start of its “targeted raids” in southern Lebanon, Dr Lorenzo Trombetta, Rome-based senior analyst and UN consultant on the Middle East, told Sputnik that those attacks are just preparatory measures before a broader military offensive on the ground.”In this sense, Israel is serving US purposes. That’s why all the Israeli operations on the ground are influencing the balance of power in Lebanon, and trying to change the equation of power there. Weakening not only Iran, but Hezbollah mainly, is part of the broader Israeli-US project,” Trombetta pointed out. The White House National Security Council earlier said that President Joe Biden had directed the US military to help Israel shoot down Iranian missiles targeting the Jewish state.

“The US military presence increased in the Middle East, mainly towards Iran, in order to threaten it and send a clear message to Tehran and its allies,” the analyst said. He suggested that the US won’t change their Middle Eastern policy and will continue “to manage the balance of power from their side, by being on the backseat and clearly supporting Israel and their other allies.” The Israeli military has meanwhile resumed air strikes on Hezbollah in Lebanon, hours after Iran launched a massive missile attack on Israel in response to its “aggressive acts” against Tehran’s allies, including the assassination of Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah. While Tel Aviv argued that most of the missiles were intercepted by Israeli air defenses, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps maintained that 90% of projectiles had hit their targets.

Read more …

Part 3 in the Putin Surrender saga. After Helmer and PCR, here’s Gilbert Doctorow.

• Putin, Medinsky, Istanbul-II and “Betrayal Of Russia’s State Interests” (Doctorow)

As a rule, on these pages I do not write critiques or responses to the writings of others, but today will be an exception. A colleague in Germany sent me the link below to a remarkable essay by John Helmer which is too important to ignore. Then one reader of my essays spontaneously asked me to comment on the points Helmer makes in the article in question. I now will do just that. For those who are unfamiliar with him, John Helmer is an Australian born, Harvard educated journalist who has been living in Moscow since 1989 and who is best known for his web platform Dances with Bears. His long residence in Moscow, his broad contacts with political elites there and his diligence at investigative reporting all mean that Helmer fills his articles like this one with invaluable insider’s talk. However, the question is whether his assembly of the facts at his disposal and his overall interpretation are as good as his skills at bringing to our attention little known connections between state actors. I have my doubts, which I will set out here.

In the given case, Helmer focuses attention on a certain Vladimir Medinsky, the man most widely known in the West as Putin’s chief negotiator in the March 2022 Russia-Ukraine peace talks in Istanbul that produced a lengthy draft treaty that was initialed by both sides but subsequently was rejected by Zelensky at the urging of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Helmer intimates that Medinsky was working on the side of the oligarchs back in March 2022 for a settlement that would end the conflict with minimal loss to the oligarchs’ interests and at the cost of Russia’s national interests. Moreover, he sees the same likelihood should Medinsky now be reappointed by Putin to lead the next round of peace talks, which appears probable given his recent reappearance at top state meetings relating to the Ukraine war.

Helmer airs the attacks that some high military officers have made on the political leadership of Putin going into peace talks. The suggestion is that Putin has been aligned with the oligarchs in Round One of the peace talks and cannot be trusted now. As for Medinsky, Helmer somewhat gratuitously tells us that he was born in Ukraine. He talks about Medinsky’s dubious merits during his term as Culture Minister which ended in the fall of 2019 when Putin reassigned him to be a presidential adviser. That was his title when, out of nowhere, Medinsky was made chief negotiator.

I take a personal interest in the discussion of Medinsky because he is someone whom I actually met back in the autumn of 2019 when he was still Culture Minister and visited various seminars within the St Petersburg Cultural Forum that Helmer mentions at the start of his essay. Medinsky spent perhaps 20 or 30 minutes with the dozen of us sitting around a seminar table. This was enough time to understand that he was a shallow chap. Subsequently I looked closely at the whole series of Russian history books that were published over Medinsky’s name for use in Russian secondary schools. None of them was impressive from an academic point of view, though they all were strongly patriotic. Indeed, Medinsky’s chief goal as Culture Minister was to restore patriotism to the school curricula. I also became acquainted back then with the allegations over possible plagiarism by Medinsky in his dissertation. These charges eventually were dropped but certainly tarnished his name.

[..] Would Medinsky have negotiated a treaty with Kiev that betrayed Russia’s state interests? I think that has to be excluded. After all, he did not go into the talks as sole negotiator, only as the lead. At his side there was Leonid Slutsky, who was present in his capacity as Chairman of the Duma Committee for International Affairs. Slutsky was/is the successor to the arch nationalist founder of the LDPR party Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who, we were recently reminded by Russian state television, was saying back in 2014 that Ukraine is not a country but a collection of beggars who should not be given one ruble (this when Putin was offering them $15 billion to keep them on Russia’s side and out of the clutches of the EU). Accordingly, Slutsky’s complicity in a sell-out of Russian interests, of a capitulation to satisfy oligarchs, is unthinkable.

Read more …

“Putin might end up being someone to turn to in the storm as Zelensky will want to avoid a Ceausescu finale to his term in office..”

• Trump May Be More Of An Enemy To Zelensky Than Even Putin (Jay)

It was frosty, awkward and the kind of media moment that President Zelensky of Ukraine would have preferred to have avoided. Trump offered an opportunity to rise to the mention of the word “Putin”. He could have said “we’re ready to work with him on a solution” or something similarly non-committal. But Zelensky, who is gambling with his own presidency by not having western media advisers – or at least not listening to them if they exist – did not prepare for the media moment. He believes he is bigger than that and it showed. Thrown, he mumbled something which pundits are still trying to decipher even now, which didn’t impress Trump who replied “it takes two to tango”. Trump’s point is that Zelensky has to come down from the clouds and look at the reality facing him. The war is lost for Ukraine regardless of who wins the White House. And yet, the media gaffe showed the world what the author has been predicting for some time: Zelensky’s real enemy is not Putin. It’s Trump.

If Trump comes to the conclusion early on that Zelensky is really the core of the problem in Ukraine, then he will very quickly show him in a matter of hours, if he wins the U.S. presidency, just which part of this U.S.-Ukraine relationship is the dog and which part is the tail. It beggars belief that Zelensky, at this late stage in the game, is still clinging on to the preposterous if not deluded idea that he is in a position to negotiate anything. If he chose to work with Trump however, he would have some wiggle room. If not, it will be a matter of days into the Trump presidency where we will see the implosion of Zelensky and his cabal as the Donald will hang him out to dry. It might well turn out that Putin might end up being someone to turn to in the storm as Zelensky will want to avoid a Ceausescu finale to his term in office. In reality he will flee in the dead of night on a private jet with one or two of his closest friends and live in Florida.

In many ways, a Harris win might appear to Zelensky as an even slower death, given that the aid packages and arms procurement are declining making a Ukrainian win harder to pull off. Not enough arms and what is sent is too little too late. And the infantry problem which never goes away. Nowhere near enough men to give Russian forces a run for their money.And yet, facing a baptism of failure, Zelensky continues to kid himself. This is the consequence of destroying all media, shutting down opposition parties and silencing any dissidents who cry out common sense. When you create exactly the scenario that Hitler did in the 30s, particularly with what was called “propaganda” then and what we commonly call “fake news” today, inevitably you start to believe it yourself. It’s the same venal, perverse relationship that Zelensky has with the West. It’s an echo chamber and in such circumstances we should not be surprised that Zelensky has become so deluded with such a jarred view of his own circumstances and that of his own military.

With the on camera moment with Trump going so badly, one can only hope that backchannel talks with Zelensky’s people and those of Trump’s are going on to fix the gulf of what could at best be called miscommunication or at worst an ideological malaise. Zelensky needs to listen to the Trump camp and show more respect to Trump as the quickest way to become an enemy of the Donald is to show irreverence and not take him seriously. Was that awkward moment a breaking point? We will probably know in the coming days as it’s only a matter time before someone squeals to a social media influencer or pseudo journalist. The problem for him is that no scenarios are good. All roads take him to a place he doesn’t want to go. But this is the price he must pay for being bullied into tearing up a peace treaty he signed with Putin in Istanbul which by now must be a sore wound that he constantly licks. He messed up. How he reacts to his grave errors of judgement will decide how history writes his political eulogy. The word ‘hero’ is probably not going to make it in there.

Read more …

“Judge Brinkema reversed her decision following a 2019 U.S. Supreme Court decision that found the term “crime of violence” to be “unconstitutionally vague.”

• The War on Terror 23 Years Later (Greenberg)

September marked the 23rd anniversary of al-Qaeda’s 2001 attacks on the United States, which left nearly 3,000 people dead. For the two decades since then, I’ve been writing, often for TomDispatch, about the ways the American response to 9/11, which quickly came to be known as the Global War on Terror, or GWOT, changed this country. As I’ve explored in several books, in the name of that war, we transformed our institutions, privileged secrecy over transparency and accountability, side-stepped and even violated longstanding laws and constitutional principles, and basically tossed aside many of the norms that had guided us as a nation for two centuries-plus, opening the way for a country now in Trumpian-style difficulty at home. Even today, more than two decades later, the question remains: Will the war on terror ever end?

Certainly, one might be inclined to answer in the affirmative following the recent unexpected endorsement of presidential candidate Kamala Harris by two leading members of the George W. Bush administration which, in response to those attacks, launched the GWOT. First, Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, who, after September 11th, sought to take the country down the path to what he called “the dark side” and was a chief instigator of the misguided and fraudulently justified invasion of Iraq in 2003, endorsed Vice President Harris. Then, so did Alberto Gonzales who, while serving as White House counsel to George W. Bush and then as his attorney general, was intricately involved in crafting that administration’s grim torture policy. (You remember, of course, those “enhanced interrogation techniques.”) He was similarly involved in creating the overreaching surveillance policy designed and implemented during the first years of the war on terror.

Consider those surprising endorsements by former Bush war hawks a possible coda for the war on terror as a major factor in American politics. In fact, for almost a decade and a half now, there have been signs suggesting that the denouement of that war might be at hand (though it never quite was). Those markers included the May 2011 lethal raid on the hideout of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden; President Barack Obama’s December 2011 authorization for the “final” withdrawal of American troops from Iraq (though a cadre of 2,500 military personnel are stationed there presently and another 900 are in neighboring Syria). In August 2021, 10 years after the killing of bin Laden, the U.S. did finally exit, however disastrously, from its lost war in Afghanistan. And in 2022, a U.S. drone strike killed bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The counterterrorism measures have had an impact on the American threat environment.

As reported in the Department of Homeland Security’s 2024 Homeland Threat Assessment, in 2022, “Only one attack in the United States was conducted by an individual inspired by a foreign terrorist organization” such as al-Qaeda or ISIS. Notably, prosecutions of alleged international terrorists have declined precipitously since the Bush administration years (and some of the convictions then have been reversed or altered). In a 2009 report, the Justice Department stated that, “since September 11, 2001, the Department has charged 512 individuals with terrorism or terrorism-related crimes and convicted or obtained guilty pleas in 319 terrorism-related and anti-terrorism cases.” Soon after that, however, the decline began. TRAC, a database that monitors such cases, reported that, in October 2014, “[t]here were no prosecutions recorded that involved international terrorism.”

By 2022, TRAC was reporting that the number of domestic terrorism prosecutions far outnumbered international terrorism cases, due in large part to the charges leveled against those involved in the January 6th insurrection. And that trend has only continued. This year, as TRAC indicated, “Overall, the data show that convictions of this type are down 28.6 percent from levels reported in 2019.” And when it comes to terrorism prosecutions, something unthinkable not so long ago has now happened. Several judges have recently given early release or simply overturned cases involving individuals convicted and sentenced in jihadi-inspired terrorism cases during the first decade of the war on terror. In July 2024, Eastern District of Virginia Judge Leonie Brinkema threw out three of 10 charges against and overturned a conviction carrying a life sentence for Ali Al-Timimi, a U.S.-born computational biology scholar sentenced in 2004 for soliciting treason by inspiring his followers to commit acts of violence abroad to defend Islam.

Judge Brinkema reversed her decision following a 2019 U.S. Supreme Court decision that found the term “crime of violence” to be “unconstitutionally vague.” Al-Timimi’s fate on the other counts is now on appeal. Having been released to home confinement after the onset of the Covid pandemic, he now no longer faces a life sentence, though, as the Associated Press reports, he could potentially see “decades of prison time beyond the 15 years he already served.” Nor was this Brinkema’s first reversal in a terrorism case. In 2018, she ordered the release of two prisoners convicted in what was known as the Virginia “Paintball Jihad” case following two Supreme Court rulings that held the charges in those cases to be similarly unconstitutionally vague.

Read more …

Never ending. The pic tells the story.

• Guilty (CJ Hopkins)

So, the Berlin Appellate Court overturned my acquittal today. I am now, officially, at least according to the New Normal German authorities, a “hate-speech” criminal. I’m officially a “hate-speech” criminal because I compared New Normal Germany to Nazi Germany, and I challenged the official Covid narrative, and I used the cover art of my book to do it. The New Normal German authorities didn’t like that, and were determined to punish me for doing that, and to make an example of me, in order to discourage other people from doing that. It took them two tries, but they pulled it off. The judge in my original trial screwed up and acquitted me, but the Berlin Public Prosecutor’s office didn’t give up. They appealed the verdict — yes, they can do that in Germany — and this morning the Appellate Court overturned the verdict and declared me guilty.

I’ll report on all the ugly details of my day in court in a proper column sometime later this week, when I’ve sufficiently recovered from the hangover I am currently about to start working on. I’ll also be resurrecting my legal defense fund and telling you about that in my next column, because the only recourse my attorney and I have left at this point is to try to get the German Constitutional Court (i.e., Germany’s supreme court) to hear the case. In the meantime, I wanted to share my Statement to the Appellate Court. Here it is.

Statement to the Berlin Appellate Court, September 30, 2024

Ladies and Gentlemen, my name is CJ Hopkins. I am an award-winning playwright, author, and political satirist. My work is read by hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. For over thirty years, I have written and spoken out against fascism, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and so on. Anyone can do an Internet search, find my books, reviews of my plays, my essays, and learn who I am and what my political views are in five minutes. And yet, I am accused by the German authorities of spreading pro-Nazi propaganda. I’m accused of doing this because I posted two Tweets challenging the official Covid narrative and comparing the new, nascent form of totalitarianism it has brought into being — the so-called “New Normal” — to Nazi Germany.

Let me be clear. I did that. In August 2022, as Germany was debating whether to end its Covid mask mandates, I tweeted those two Tweets. I challenged the official Covid narrative. I compared the New Normal to Nazi Germany. I did that with the cover art of one of my books. I did what anyone is allowed to do according to German law. I did what Karl Lauterbach has done. I did what German celebrities like Jessica Berlin have done. I did what major German newspapers and magazines have done. A few months ago, Stern and Der Spiegel published covers of their magazines featuring swastikas. Der Spiegel’s cover featured exactly the same artistic concept as my book cover and my Tweets. The only difference is, the swastika on Der Spiegel’s cover is behind a German flag, whereas the swastika on my book cover and in my Tweets is behind a medical mask. That’s it. That is the only difference.

Stern and Der Spiegel displayed swastikas on their covers in order to warn the public of the rise of a new form of totalitarianism, and that is precisely what I did. I compared the New Normal — i.e., the new nascent form of totalitarianism that came into being in 2020 — to Nazi Germany. Stern and Der Spiegel compared the AfD to Nazi Germany. That is the only difference. I’m not a fan of the AfD. I’m not a fan of Stern and Der Spiegel. That doesn’t matter. Stern and Der Spiegel have the right to do what they did, and so do I. That right is guaranteed to us in the German constitution. We all have the right, if we see a new form of totalitarianism taking shape, to oppose it, and to compare it to historical forms of totalitarianism, including Nazi Germany. I don’t follow German electoral politics very closely, so I don’t know exactly what the AfD has done that prompted Stern and Der Spiegel to compare them to the Nazis. But I know exactly what the German authorities did during 2020 to 2023.

Read more …

Kant. 230 years ago.

• 10 Principles for Perpetual Peace in the 21st Century (Jeffrey Sachs)

Next year will mark the 230th anniversary of Immanuel Kant’s celebrated essay on “Perpetual Peace” (1795). The great German philosopher put forward a set of guiding principles to achieve perpetual peace among the nations of his day. As we grapple with a world at war, and indeed at dire risk of nuclear Armageddon, we should build on Kant’s approach for our own time. An updated set of principles should be considered at the United Nations Summit of the Future in September. Kant was fully aware that his proposals would face the skepticism of “practical” politicians: “The practical politician assumes the attitude of looking down with great self-satisfaction on the political theorist as a pedant whose empty ideas in no way threaten the security of the state, inasmuch as the state must proceed on empirical principles; so the theorist is allowed to play his game without interference from the worldly-wise statesman.”

Nonetheless, as historian Mark Mazower noted in his magisterial account of global governance, Kant’s was a “text that would intermittently influence generations of thinkers about world government down to our own day,” helping to lay the groundwork for the United Nations and international law on human rights, the conduct of war, and arms control. Kant’s core proposals centered on three ideas. First, he rejected standing armies. Standing armies “incessantly menace other states by their readiness to appear at all times prepared for war.” In this, Kant anticipated by a century and a half the famous warning by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower of the dangers of a military-industrial complex. Second, Kant called for non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations. In this, Kant inveighed against the kind of covert operations that the US has used relentlessly to topple foreign governments.

Third, Kant called for a “federation of free states,” which in our time became the United Nations, a “federation” of 193 states pledged to operate under the UN Charter. Kant put great hopes on republicanism as opposed to one-person rule as a check on war-making. Kant reasoned that a single ruler would readily succumb to the temptation of war: “…a declaration of war is the easiest thing in the world to decide upon, because war does not require of the ruler, who is the proprietor and not a member of the state, the least sacrifice of the pleasures of his table, the chase, his country houses, his court functions, and the like. He may, therefore, resolve on war as on a pleasure party for the most trivial reasons, and with perfect indifference leave the justification which decency requires to the diplomatic corps who are ever ready to provide it.”

By contrast, according to Kant: “…if the consent of the citizens is required in order to decide that war should be declared (and in this [republican] constitution it cannot but be the case), nothing is more natural than that they would be very cautious in commencing such a poor game, decreeing for themselves all the calamities of war. Kant was far too optimistic about the ability of public opinion to constrain war-making. Both the Athenian and Roman republics were notoriously belligerent. Britain was the 19th century’s leading democracy, but perhaps its most belligerent power. For decades, the US has engaged in non-stop wars of choice and violent overthrows of foreign governments.”

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Chemicals

 

 

Frameless Rembrandt

 

 

Sunlight
https://twitter.com/i/status/1841354818037645715

 

 

Bears
https://twitter.com/i/status/1841458135610855707

 

 

Dolphin

 

 

Free concert wren

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in wartime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle July 31 2024

Jul 312024
 
 July 31, 2024  Posted by at 9:00 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  55 Responses »


Gustave Caillebotte Young man by his window 1875

 

• No Primaries, No Alternatives, No Scrutiny: Anti-Democracy Reigns In US (Sp.)
• Trump’s VP Pick Is a Climate Sceptic, and the Knives Are Out (RCE)
• Biden Abandons the Court . . . and His Last Inviolate Principle (Turley)
• Kamala Harris Suddenly Rejects All Of Her Radical Positions (ZH)
• Trump Shooter Was ‘Step Ahead Of Secret Service’ – NYT (RT)
• The Man Who Could Get to the Bottom of the Trump Shooting (Julie Kelly)
• Trump Will Talk To FBI, Debate Harris (Sp.)
• Media Shills Have Received Their New Script: “Conservatives Are Weird” (ZH)
• The Paris Olympics Are The Most French Thing Ever (Marsden)
• Maduro Declares Musk ‘Archenemy’ (RT)
• Hamas Politburo Chief Killed in Tehran (Sp.)
• Haniyeh Murder ‘May Have Been Crossing a Red Line’ – Larry Johnson (Sp.)
• Leaked Emails Reveal ‘Civil War’ At CIA Regime Change Cut-out (RT)

 

 

 

 

Melania

 

 

Wow

 

 

Vote

 

 

Kamala

 

 

Trump ad

 

 

10 million new voters.

 

 

Trump Congress

 

 

My people
https://twitter.com/i/status/1818269133298950253

 

 

 

 

“This is just a very slick PR process that, again, has been engineered by the same elements that got rid of Joe Biden.”

• No Primaries, No Alternatives, No Scrutiny: Anti-Democracy Reigns In US (Sp.)

On July 21, US President Joe Biden announced he would not seek reelection. The announcement came after Democratic primary voting had completed, leaving Democratic voters with no say in the party’s nominee. Meanwhile, third-party candidates are being stonewalled at every turn and the media pretends this is all normal. The American electoral process has degraded into a shambling shell of its former self, propped up with vapid, slick and committee-tested PR campaigns rather than debate. Over the past week, with the tickets of the two major parties all but finalized, the media can not bring themselves to ask a substantive question of either person likely to sit in the White House in less than six months.

“My question is,” YouTube personality and WWE United States Champion Logan Paul asked former US President and Republican nominee Donald Trump, “for other young people in this country who are looking to get ahead, cause for a lot of them, times are tough right now. What would you say to them, kids who want to pursue their own version of the American dream and try to achieve their wildest dreams?” Trump answered that young people should vote for him. Meanwhile, Harris sat down for a non-televised interview with People, which asked her about her relationship with her husband, how much sleep she gets and her favorite nickname (“Momala” as it turns out) but not any policy positions on the economy, immigration, Ukraine or Gaza. Even Paul and his “Impaulsive” co-host Mike Majlak had the good sense to ask Trump about those topics, even if they didn’t challenge him on them.

This is what passes for scrutiny in American politics. Worse, the incumbent president’s party all but refused to hold a primary. Then Biden suddenly resigned from the campaign after weeks of refusing to and his vice president was anointed the new nominee without receiving a single vote. On Saturday, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh reported that Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Barack Obama threatened to invoke the 25th amendment and force Biden out of office if he did not drop his reelection campaign. “The lords of capital decided that he had to go and, in fact, they made it quite clear he had to go because they said that not only would they stop contributing to his campaign, but they told the DNC get rid of Joe Biden or don’t expect any financial support for any Democrat candidate down ballot,” argued political activist and the 2016 Green Party Vice Presidential nominee Ajamu Sibeko Baraka on Sputnik’s Political Misfits. “This is clear elite extortion.”

“So, this was, in fact, a coup. A coup by the donors and we need to deal with that in that way because it exposes the true nature of this anti-democratic process we have in this country. So, people [who] are committed to democracy, [who] would like to see something that approximates democracy. You can’t continue to support these two anti-democratic parties. That’s a very important point,” he added. To shore up the perception of support, the Harris campaign hosted a series of Zoom calls, bizarrely segregated by race and gender. Black Men for Harris came first, then Black Women for Harris. Then White Women for Harris and finally, White Dudes for Harris. “It is sort of a silly Zoom call,” said Baraka. “But it does reflect the kind of identity reductionist policies we have in this country.” “I mean, why are people supporting Harris? Based on what? What policies? There’s no serious political conversation taking place. This is just a very slick PR process that, again, has been engineered by the same elements that got rid of Joe Biden.”

Read more …

If you don’t “believe” that fossil fuels will kill us all -tomorrow morning, preferably- then they must get rid of you. For the planet’s sake…

• Trump’s VP Pick Is a Climate Sceptic, and the Knives Are Out (RCE)

Within a day of ex-President Trump’s announcement of “climate denier” Mr. J. D. Vance as the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, the climate industrial complex and supportive mainstream media had the knives out. A few headlines of the past 24 hours are an indication. The New York Times: “JD Vance Is an Oil Booster and Doubter of Human-Caused Climate Change”. The Independent: JD Vance: “Climate activists alarmed by Trump’s ‘dangerous’ pick for vice president”. The Guardian: “Climate advocates fear picking JD Vance for VP is ‘a dangerous step backward’”. The umbrage taken by media commentators is familiar. CNBC laments that “the former venture capitalist though is a known critic of climate change and renewable energy [italics added].” UK’s The Independent newspaper reports that “[c]ampaigners are responding with alarm to the selection of climate denier and Ohio senator JD Vance as Donald Trump’s vice presidential nominee, with activists warning he represents a “dangerous” voice for the US.”

Mr. Vance’s “eagerness to please Donald Trump” adds to the image of the vice-presidential nominee as an unprincipled politician seeking office. Climate advocacy group Fossil Free Media spokesperson Cassidy DiPaola asserted that “This [VP] choice signals that a potential Trump-Vance administration would likely double down on fossil fuel expansion at a time when we desperately need to transition to clean energy.” Communications director Stevie O’Hanlon of Sunrise Movement, a climate activist organization, said that “Like Donald Trump, JD Vance has proven that he will make it a top priority to roll back climate protections while answering to the demands of oil and gas CEOs.” Does Mr. Vance have a principled stand and is his stance on climate and energy policy worthy of consideration? As the highly polarized debate over climate change over the past few decades has amply demonstrated, the discourse often descends into ad hominem attacks and name calling.

“Climate denier” is a charge that is often used by proponents of climate alarm to shut down critical debate and to deplatform climate sceptics. Lena Moffitt, executive director of the environmental advocacy group Evergreen Action, said this of Mr. Vance: “Donald Trump has chosen an avowed climate denier as his running mate who has used his time in Congress to vote against the environment and shill for fossil fuel corporations at every opportunity.” The “denier” accusation is among the more pernicious if popular epithets used to denigrate sceptics of the so-called “consensus science.” It invokes a comparison to those who engage in Holocaust denial. To be sure, most observers would consider it ludicrous to suggest that questioning the accuracy and predictive power of scientific models is like questioning the historical fact of the genocide of Jews in Europe.

Putting aside epithets and journalistic hit-pieces, it seems a fair question to ask just what do politicians skeptical of the climate alarmist narrative believe? And what are their policy positions regarding the Paris Agreement’s “net zero by 2050” target. This policy target is an imperative, at least nominally, for most current governments in North America and Western Europe? Mr. Vance – lawyer, businessman, former Marine and writer of the bestselling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy”, arisen from the humblest working class background – places himself firmly in the populist right movement. It now looks very likely that Mr. Trump will be the next US president. The assassination attempt on Saturday, his miraculous split-second turn of the head which saved him and the iconic picture of his raised fist with the US flag in the background seconds after being injured make him almost irresistible. Thus Mr. Vance will likely join the Donald Trump next year as his VP in an administration that will seek to rapidly unwind the myriad policy and regulatory constraints that the Biden administration has imposed to shackle the US oil and gas industry at every turn.

Vance has also criticized the “green energy fantasy” of the Biden administration, pointing out that “solar panels can’t power a modern manufacturing economy” and “that’s why the Chinese are building coal power plants.” He has similarly called out wind power turbines. At the Turning Point Action conference last year, he said “they’re hideously ugly. They kill all the birds. And they’re mostly made in China.” The Biden administration’s all-out support for EVs comes in for the same critique. In a July 2022 radio interview, he said: “The whole EV thing is a scam. If you plug it into your wall, do these people think there are Keebler elves back there making electricity in the wall? It comes, of course, from fossil fuels.”

Read more …

“..That will only increase pressure to convert the Court into an alternative avenue for social and political reform..”

• Biden Abandons the Court . . . and His Last Inviolate Principle (Turley)

President (and Supreme Court Chief Justice) William Howard Taft once said “presidents come and go, but the Supreme Court goes on forever.” But not if Joe Biden has his way. Indeed, both the president and Court as we know it could be gone. In a failed attempt to save his nomination, Biden offered to “reform” the Court by imposing an 18-year term limit that would jettison the three most senior conservative justices. With only six months left in his presidency, Biden’s efforts are likely to fail, but, unfortunately, could set the stage for activists under a Harris Administration in seeking to change the Court forever. For more than 50 years, Biden staunchly refused to play politics with the Supreme Court and support calls for “reforms” from the left of his party. For a politician who has long been criticized for changing positions with the polls on issues from abortion to criminal justice to gun rights, the Court was one of the few areas of true principle for Biden.

Even though he refused to answer questions on packing the Court in the 2020 election, he ultimately rejected the call as president. Yet Biden’s final principle fell this month when facing the premature and involuntary end of his candidacy. Faced with being a one-term president, the Supreme Court would have to be sacrificed. Biden opted for the least of the evils in pushing for term limits rather than court packing. It was the more popular option for Biden to yield on. Voters have always loved term limits. The AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found 67% of Americans, including 82% of Democrats and 57% of Republicans, support a proposal to set finite terms for justices. But there were few law professors and even fewer Democratic members clamoring for term limits until conservatives secured a stable majority on the Court. Then, suddenly, the Court had to be “reformed” without delay. It is no accident that the first three justices who would term limited off the Court are conservatives: Clarence Thomas (after 33 years on the Court), Chief Justice John Roberts (after 19 years), and Justice Samuel Alito (after 18 years).

Think, however, about the iconic decisions we would have lost with term limits in place. Liberal Justice Williams Douglas’s 36 years on the Court would have literally been cut in half. He would have been kicked off in 1957. His famous opinions like Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), striking down bans on contraceptives, would not have been written — an ironic result for those seeking limits after the Court’s ruling in Dobbs. Likewise, liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s tenure would have ended in 2011 before she wrote her famous dissent Shelby County v. Holder (2013), defending voting rights. Anthony Kennedy’s term would have ended in 2011 rather than 2018, before he wrote opinions such as United States v. Windsor, striking down the Defense of Marriage Act. Obviously, other justices could have written opinions in these cases, but the point is that many justices wrote their best opinions after 18 years on the Court. Moreover, the Framers clearly wanted these positions as lifetime appointments as an added protection against political pressure or influence.

For more than two centuries, presidents have struggled with the Supreme Court, but none (until now) have attempted to end life tenure on the Court. Presidents have served as the firewall for the anger and radicalism that has periodically engulfed the Court. Now President Biden is leading the mob for changing this institution for the first time since its founding. It is a testament to what I call “an age of rage” in my new book. After years of supporting the Court when it was setting aside conservative precedent, liberals now want the Court changed to dump or dilute the majority. It is unlikely to end there. After sending Thomas, Roberts, and Alito packing, many want to go further and pack the Court itself.

Democratic leaders such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) have called for outright court packing — a proposal that Vice President Kamala Harris has suggested that she might support. Where Biden is a political opportunist in belatedly joining this movement, Harris is a true believer from the far left. If she is elected, the Congress is still likely to be closely divided. That will only increase pressure to convert the Court into an alternative avenue for social and political reform.

Read more …

“..when Harris says “I’m open to that conversation,” it means she has no idea what she’s talking about. And she says that a lot.”

• Kamala Harris Suddenly Rejects All Of Her Radical Positions (ZH)

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. And she sought to close the gender pay gap by requiring large companies to certify that men and women were paid equally.” As an obvious aside, when Harris says “I’m open to that conversation,” it means she has no idea what she’s talking about. And she says that a lot.

Read more …

Building the narrative…

• Trump Shooter Was ‘Step Ahead Of Secret Service’ – NYT (RT)

The man who tried to assassinate Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at a Butler, Pennsylvania rally had prepared better than the protection detail and was able to slip through the cracks in security, the New York Times has reported. The shooter opened fire at 6:11pm that Saturday, nicking Trump’s ear as the former US president turned away. He was later identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, from a nearby town. Text messages and after-action reports provided to the Times by Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, revealed that local police had noticed Crooks almost more than 90 minutes before he fired, but kept losing sight of him. Crooks had visited the fairgrounds in Butler on July 7. The Secret Service did not show up until a day later, which is when they decided not to include the AGR warehouse complex in the security perimeter, according to the Times.

On July 13, the day of the rally, the Secret Service did not attend the 9am security briefing for local law enforcement. By 10am, Crooks had bought a ladder and driven to the rally site. He stayed around for over an hour, observing the local police. He then drove back to his hometown, bought 50 rounds of ammunition, and drove back, arriving around 3:35pm, “according to geolocation information from one of his cellphones,” the outlet noted. The Secret Service had not bothered to survey the area with drones, but Crooks did. Around 3:50pm that Saturday, he flew a drone over the site for about 11 minutes, before putting it back into his car and returning to the nearby picnic tables. It was at this point that a local counter-sniper first spotted him, as he finished his shift. The officer warned his colleagues at 4:26pm that someone had “snuck in” and “knows you guys are up there.”

Nothing happened until 5:14pm, Crooks was spotted using a range finder. One of the county counter-snipers took a photo of Crooks. It was shared in the group chat of the local police department at 5:38pm, and then relayed to the Secret Service. One of the two remaining counter-snipers ran out of the AGR building to keep an eye on Crooks until backup arrived, according to Butler County district attorney Richard Goldinger. Crooks had already run off, however, and the sniper returned to post. Four Butler Township officers were pulled from directing traffic to help locate him. One officer texted at 6pm, suggesting that Crooks had moved “away from the event.” In reality, the Times noted, he had climbed onto the roof about 120 meters away from the stage. “There is still confusion about which agency was supposed to oversee the roof,” the Times reported. The Secret Service had left it empty. Beaver County “struggled to find enough volunteers to cover the 12-hour shift,” according to text messages.

Trump took the stage at 6:03pm. Six minutes later, the audience at the rally began pointing to someone on the roof of the warehouse. “Either through luck or preparation,” Crooks had found a spot that let him have a clear shot at Trump, but kept him “somewhat hidden” from the Secret Service, according to the Times. At 6:11pm, Crooks fired at Trump. The Secret Service snipers reacted and fatally shot him. At least eight spent cartridges were found next to his lifeless body. Police who eventually showed up on the roof could not figure out how Crooks had got there. Kimberly Cheatle resigned as the Secret Service director ten days later, after insisting she would not. No one at the agency was reprimanded, fired or otherwise held accountable for the near-fatal incident.

Read more …

They’ll silence him.

• The Man Who Could Get to the Bottom of the Trump Shooting (Julie Kelly)

After the evasive House testimony of now-former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle and FBI Director Christopher Wray’s shortlived suggestion that Donald Trump may not have been hit by a bullet, one man alone may help allay Republican fears that the Biden administration will not conduct a forthright investigation into the attempted assassination of Trump last month: Joseph Cuffari. The Trump-appointed inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security has already opened two investigations into the U.S. Secret Service, which is under the purview of the DHS, related to the agency’s handling of the July 13 shooting. But some Republicans are concerned because, they say, Cuffari has been stonewalled by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on other internal examinations – including one that might have revealed Secret Service lapses that might have prevented the attempt on Trump’s life.

Specifically, congressional sources tell RCI that Cuffari’s report, “USSS Preparation for and Response to the Events of January 6, 2021,” has been on Mayorkas’ desk since at least April. The report, according to Politico, will “cast light on a series of embarrassing security lapses for the agency.” And given some comparisons between Jan. 6 and July 13, the report might shed light on systemic issues that impacted both events. For example, unanswered questions remain as to why the Secret Service allowed Trump to take the stage at The Ellipse outside the White House around noon on Jan. 6 amid reports of individuals with weapons in the vicinity – a question many Americans have about the July 13 assassination attempt. Law enforcement and spectators noted the presence of a suspicious individual, later identified as the gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, at least a half hour before Trump took the stage in Butler, Pennsylvania.

In addition, no one has explained how the Secret Service failed to notice an alleged pipe bomb found outside the Democrat National Committee DC office on Jan. 6 – while then Vice President-elect Harris was inside the building. Previous reporting by RCI shows multiple law enforcement officers, including one with a bomb-sniffing dog, walking past the bench where the device was found. Rep. Barry Loudermilk, chairman of a House subcommittee tasked with a separate investigation into Jan. 6 as well as the now-defunct J6 committee, recently accused Mayorkas of intentionally holding the release of the report. The Georgia Republican told Mayorkas in a letter that “the failure to provide an in-depth review of the department’s security planning and operational failures related to January 6 not only raises concerns about the department’s botched planning for former president Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024, but it is quite possible that such reports could have prevented the security breakdown that resulted in the near assassination of a former president and presidential candidate.”

Top Democrats have long sought to remove Cuffari – a former investigator for the Air Force and Department of Justice whom Trump appointed in 2019 in 2019 – from office. The coordinated effort began when the IG notified Congress that a trove of Secret Service texts from January 5 and 6, 2021 had been deleted in late January 2021 under the Biden administration. The purge occurred weeks after every federal agency received a directive from Congress to preserve all evidence related to January 6. Cuffari said messages belonging to at least 24 Secret Service officials including then director James Murray and Cheatle, who was an assistant director of the agency on January 6, were gone. So, too, were the texts of then acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and acting deputy secretary Ken Cuccinelli, both Trump appointees. His office subsequently opened a criminal investigation into the matter.

“The USSS erased those text messages after OIG [Office of Inspector General] requested records of electronic communications from the USSS, as part of our evaluation of events at the Capitol on January 6,” the inspector general wrote in a July 2022 letter to chairmen of both the Senate and House Homeland Security committees, including Rep. Bennie Thompson, who also chaired the Jan. 6 committee at the same time. Cuffari further flagged the DHS’s lack of cooperation with his inquiry, something he had already pointed out in an earlier report to the committees. “DHS personnel have repeatedly told OIG inspectors that they were not permitted to provide records directly to OIG and that such records had to first undergo review by DHS attorneys,” Cuffari continued in the letter.

Not true, responded Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi. He claimed the texts had been deleted when cell phones were reset to factory settings as part of a device replacement program. “The insinuation that the Secret Service maliciously deleted text messages following a request is false.” (Guglielmi’s truthfulness was brought into question recently when he claimed it was “absolutely false” that the Secret Service rejected the Trump campaign’s multiple requests for additional security prior to the Pennsylvania rally. The Washington Post later confirmed that top Secret Service officials “repeatedly denied” requests for more manpower and equipment to protect the former president at large events.)

Read more …

“The answer is yes. I’ll probably end up debating. The answer is yes, but I can also make a case for not doing it,”

• Trump Will Talk To FBI, Debate Harris (Sp.)

Former US President Donald Trump said in an interview that he would talk to the FBI on Thursday about the attempt on his life at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, earlier this month. “[The FBI are] coming in on Thursday to see me,” Trump told Fox News on Monday. Trump further said that he believed there should have been security officers on the roof of the building where the gunman had been positioned during the shooting. Moreover, the Republican presidential nominee said that the US Secret Service should have been communicating with the local police, which it wasn’t. On July 13, Trump suffered a gunshot wound to his right ear and was briefly hospitalized following an assassination attempt at his rally in Butler. Thomas Crooks, 20, killed a member of the audience and injured two others in the crowd before the Secret Service neutralized him. The FBI continues to investigate the assassination attempt.

The incident prompted US Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle to resign following criticism of the agency for not preventing the assassination attempt. Trump also commented on the possibility of him debating the presumptive Democratic nominee for President, Vice President Kamala Harris. “The answer is yes. I’ll probably end up debating. The answer is yes, but I can also make a case for not doing it,” Trump said in the interview. Trump and Harris are currently set to participate in a ABC-hosted debate on September 10. Trump explained that he could decide to cancel a debate because he did not want to reward “fake news,” adding that ABC could end up making tens of millions of dollars off the debate. He also described the ABC network as a “terrible outfit.”

Read more …

It all sounds weird.

• Media Shills Have Received Their New Script: “Conservatives Are Weird” (ZH)

As August approaches and the campaign season enters the final stretch, there have been some not-so-surprising developments in the behavior of Big Tech search engines, social media and the narratives being spread by establishment news organizations. Search terms for Donald Trump have been suspiciously absent on Google. Trump’s speeches are being consistently edited out of context. And, media platforms are blatantly parroting the same scripted talking points in a way that would make Joseph Goebbels blush. As he once stated: “Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.” This mantra has never been more obvious than it is today. The new narrative that every progressive shill is reciting on nearly every major news platform? Donald Trump and JD Vance are ‘just plain weird’, and conservatives are all weird by extension…

It’s hard to say who this talking point is meant to appeal to, but Democrats are clearly very proud of it. No doubt they paid an obscure think-tank a lot of money to develop it. However, the slogan slinging tactics of the elections of yesteryear are not very impressive to most of the voting public today. In the midst of stagflationary crisis, cultural sabotage, national instability and a Democratic Party seemingly intent on starting WWIII, Americans are not interested in slogans, Americans want solutions. If you repeat a lie loud enough and often enough, it just annoys the public even more. Perhaps the shift of Gen Z men towards more conservatives ideals has got the progressives scrambling to come up with relatable slogans. They are already referring to Kamala Harris as the “Gen Z meme queen.” Of course, as everyone knows, the political left does not know how to meme. It feels like desperation because this is their candidate going into November…

One could guess that labeling conservatives as “weird” is meant to marginalize the undeniable momentum away from woke demagoguery. Notice that Pride Month was barely a blip on the radar in 2024, Biden just got booted from his own campaign, the Trump assassin missed and the Olympics is losing sponsorships after going woke in their opening ceremonies. Leftists are not having a good year. The pedulum is swinging back and they know it. While we wait for Kamala Harris to say or do anything to deserve the avalanche of praise she has been receiving from the media since replacing Biden as the Democratic candidate, the “memes” are certain to flow with each new narrative being more cringe inducing than the last. None of it will be useful in papering over the fact that Kamala Harris is one of the weirdest and most unsettling presidential hopefuls of all time.

Read more …

“If their surveillance-industrial complex pals were going to stuff their pockets under the pretext of Games security, then couldn’t they just spy on us in peace without all the added bureaucratic nonsense?”

• The Paris Olympics Are The Most French Thing Ever (Marsden)

French culture isn’t just about masked balls at Versailles anymore. As the Paris Olympic Games have proven, it’s now also debating whether drag queens’ balls were adequately masked. Looks like Thomas Jolly, the Games’ Opening Ceremony director, is just now coming to the realization that the entire world doesn’t function like Paris Left Bank intellectuals. He bit off more than he could chew by transmitting a French art house vibe to every country around the globe, some of which – from Morocco and Algeria to China and the US – straight up censored parts of the show that perhaps should have come with a disclaimer in the same way that risqué French films do. Because it turns out that kids – and even some adults – weren’t quite ready to witness a giant Smurf rolling around in a fruit bowl in front of a bunch of drag queens re-enacting what appeared to be the Last Supper.

And the fact that French blasphemy laws were abolished two years after the French Revolution, enshrining a right that became a cornerstone of French free speech, didn’t matter to those who felt offended, which included everyone from religious figures to left-wing France Unbowed leader Jean-Luc Melenchon. France has defended religious satire as free expression, even when cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed led to a terrorist massacre in January 2015 at the Parisian headquarters of the magazine Charlie Hebdo, which published them. So this is just France being France, which wasn’t very well received, including by some of the most progressive-minded French officials. One US-based advertiser – the wireless company C Spire – has already said it was yanking their Olympic advertising. Guess there’s a dice roll with the risk that your product might end up somewhere in the vicinity if a clip or screencap of a bunch of drag queens, or a saucy Papa Smurf, and that wasn’t quite the vibe that you were going for when you signed up for high-level sports sponsorship.

There was also an onslaught of reports of X (former Twitter) social media users being hit with copyright takedown notices for posting some of the controversial scenes from the opening show for debate and discussion. Not surprising that the International Olympic Committee, guardian of the Olympic brand, might not want the images etched into history of these Games, to be dominated by things like closeups of drag queens’ crotches for the purpose of debating whether the world actually witnessed some fruit tumbling out of a pair of plum smugglers in a wardrobe malfunction – or whether it was just an everyday pantyhose rip. You know, the kind of thing that could happen to any dude in an average day at the office. The Games have really showcased that world-famous French rigor.

[..] The trains stopped running last week around France due to sabotaged lines. Israel has already blamed that on Iran. The average French person’s mind just went straight to everyday, garden variety French incompetence – the kind that would also would explain all the heavy-handed “security theatre” during the Games. The government required everyone to apply online for QR Codes if they wanted to even cross the downtown core, which was turned into a maze of 44,000 barricades days before the opening ceremony. And the excuse had to be a good one – like you lived there or had an appointment. And the Interior Ministry had already used the Games as a pretext for loading up on new high-tech surveillance systems, from surveillance drones and anti-drone systems to crowd scanners coupled with Minority Report style artificial intelligence algorithms. If all of it actually worked, then why give people the run-around? If their surveillance-industrial complex pals were going to stuff their pockets under the pretext of Games security, then couldn’t they just spy on us in peace without all the added bureaucratic nonsense?

Speaking of national security, a bunch of hackers leaked the military background of Israeli athletes, a country with mandatory service and currently involved in an active conflict criticized by the UN’s International Court of Justice and accused of apartheid – an offense that the IOC explicitly cites as justification for Games exclusion. Meanwhile Russian athletes who have never even been in the army can’t even compete in their country’s name. So what happens if a Russian wins a gold medal? The IOC created a special flag just for them, which looks like someone’s kid whipped it up in about five minutes on an app. They also made a new anthem with no lyrics for Russian athletes that sounds like the opening soundtrack for a make-believe fantasy movie. Which is really what all this is: one big Hollywood-grade fantasy that one of the top Olympic nations since forever doesn’t even exist now at the Olympics.

Read more …

A conversation neither should be involved in. Remember Juan Guiado and the CIA?

• Maduro Declares Musk ‘Archenemy’ (RT)

Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro has accused SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk of trying to disrupt peace and stability in the South American country. The National Electoral Council (CNE) of Venezuela on Sunday declared Maduro the winner of the country’s presidential election, announcing that with 80% of ballots counted, he had secured more than 51% of the vote, compared to 44% for his main rival, Edmundo Gonzales. Supporters of Western-backed Gonzalez have taken to the streets following the release of the official results, claiming that the vote was rigged. Musk, who owns social media platform X (formerly Twitter), took to it on Monday to accuse Maduro of “major election fraud.” The Venezuelan president responded to the claims by challenging the billionaire to a fight, during an address he made on national television.

“Social media creates a virtual reality, and who controls the virtual reality? Our new archenemy, the famous Elon Musk,” Maduro stated, pointing to a cellphone. He then accused Musk of seeking to come “with his rockets and an army to invade Venezuela” but did not elaborate on the claim. “At least you showed your face, because we knew that you were behind everything,” Maduro claimed. “With your money, with your satellites. It is the representation of fascist ideology in the world.” The Venezuelan president went on, challenging Musk “Do you want to fight? Let’s do it … I’m ready. I’m not afraid of you, Elon Musk. Let’s fight, wherever you want.”

Musk, in response, shared the video of Maduro’s speech on X, with a caption in Spanish that translates as “The donkey knows more than Maduro.” It’s not the first case of Musk’s confrontation with senior foreign officials. In April, the businessman clashed with a Supreme Court justice in Brazil over free speech, as well as far-right accounts and misinformation on X. Maduro will be serving a third consecutive six-year term, having first taken office in 2013 following the death of President Hugo Chavez. In his victory speech, Maduro mocked the opposition, which, he said, “cries fraud” at every election. The Venezuelan president said his reelection would bring peace and stability.

Sachs

Read more …

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov: “This is all very wrong. This is an absolutely unacceptable political assassination, and it will lead to further escalation of tensions..”

• Hamas Politburo Chief Killed in Tehran (Sp.)

Hamas politburo chief Ismail Haniyeh was killed in the Iranian capital of Tehran, the Palestinian militant group said in a statement on Wednesday. The agency said Haniyeh and one of his bodyguards were “martyred” after their residence in Tehran was targeted. “With condolences to the heroic nation of Palestine, the Islamic nation, the combatants of the Resistance Front, and the noble nation of Iran. This morning (Wednesday), the residence of Mr. Dr. Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the political office of the Islamic Resistance of Hamas, was hit in Tehran; and following this incident, he and one of his bodyguards were martyred,” a statement from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) read. Iran is investigating the causes of the killing of Hamas politburo chief, Ismail Haniyeh, and his bodyguard in Tehran, with the results to be announced soon, the Tasnim news agency reported on Wednesday, citing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Earlier on Wednesday, the Palestinian movement, Hamas, said that Haniyeh was killed in an Israeli attack on his residence in Tehran after he took part in the inauguration of Iran’s newly elected president. The Palestinian movement, Hamas, said on Wednesday that the movement’s politburo chief, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed in an Israeli attack on his residence in the Iranian capital of Tehran. “The Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas expresses condolences to the sons of our great Palestinian people … Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the movement … was killed as a result of a treacherous Zionist attack on his residence in Tehran after he participated in the inauguration ceremony of the new president of Iran,” the movement said on Telegram. Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, was sworn in on Tuesday. Israeli army declines to comment on the situation, saying that they “do not respond to reports in the foreign media”, CNN says.

A representative of the US government has confirmed to the media that Washington is aware of the situation. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas strongly condemned the killing of Hamas politburo chief, Ismail Haniyeh, the WAFA news agency reported on Wednesday. Abbas also called the killing a cowardly act and a dangerous escalation, the report read. At the same time, Abbas called on Palestinians to be united and patient in the face of the Israeli occupation. The Iranian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that the incident will strengthen the ties between Tehran and Palestine. The Turkish Foreign Ministry stressed that Israel is not seeking peace, and should be stopped before conflict escalates. The killing of Hamas politburo chief Ismail Haniyeh is a cowardly act that will not go unanswered, Hamas political office deputy head Musa Abu Marzouk said on Wednesday.

Moscow considers the death of Hamas politburo chief Ismail Haniyeh to be an example of absolutely unacceptable political assassination, which threatens further escalation in the region, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov told Sputnik on Wednesday. “This is all very wrong. This is an absolutely unacceptable political assassination, and it will lead to further escalation of tensions,” Bogdanov said.

Read more …

“This attack [on Haniyeh] was so blatant that I don’t think there will be any restraint on the part of Iran or Hezbollah..”

• Haniyeh Murder ‘May Have Been Crossing a Red Line’ – Larry Johnson (Sp.)

Hamas has already pledged to take revenge after the Palestinian militant group’s political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran. The assassination of Ismail Haniyeh “clearly had the support and foreknowledge of the United States and the United Kingdom,” retired CIA intelligence officer and State Department official Larry Johnson insisted in an interview with Sputnik. “I say that because we also have news reports now coming in that the US and UK warships are headed into the Mediterranean. On one of the US ships is probably a Marine Expeditionary Unit,” Johnson said. So the situation “has now escalated tensions in the region beyond what they were, even after the attack on the Iranian consul in April in Beirut,” according to him.

Responding to that attack, Iran “sent a very clear message to Israel that in the future, any further provocations like this would be met with force, and now both Hezbollah and Iran have been incited to respond and Israel is calculating that it can withstand the blows,” the former CIA intelligence officer added. “This is extremely dangerous. […] This attack [on Haniyeh] was so blatant that I don’t think there will be any restraint on the part of Iran or Hezbollah. I think that this may in fact have been crossing a red line. It is extremely worrisome because this has the hallmarks of being able to spin out of control. And it is, we’re now in a situation of wait and see,” Johnson stressed.

Read more …

$200 million a year: “..Bednarz had berated him for not using pronouns on his business cards and email signature..”

• Leaked Emails Reveal ‘Civil War’ At CIA Regime Change Cut-out (RT)

The biggest public relations fiasco in the history of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has resulted in two senior officials ending up fired and a “civil war” of sorts between the old neoconservative cadres and the new “woke” management, according to documents obtained by The Grayzone. The fiasco in question was the phone call between the NED vice-president for communications Leslie Aun and the Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Alex Rubinstein, which the independent outlet published in May 2023. Aun initiated the call to address Rubinstein’s description of the Endowment as a “CIA cutout,” but ended up saying “I don’t know” a lot instead. On Tuesday, the Grayzone published several emails between Michael Allen – who used to be the editor of the NED’s ‘Democracy Digest’ blog – and the Endowment’s founding president Carl Gershman, revealing that the fallout from the call’s publication may have cost Aun and Allen their jobs.

“Amateur hour – hugely embarrassing!” Allen emailed Gershman and NED VP for government relations, David Lowe, a day after the recording was posted on YouTube. “I specifically counseled against her talking to these people.” Lowe described Aun’s performance as “breathtakingly ignorant” and “too painful to listen to.” Both he and Gershman, who retired in 2021, appeared to disparage the new NED president Damon Wilson for hiring her. Gershman described the call as a “disastrous screwup” and described Aun as “obviously clueless,” a “moron,” and a “clueless wonder” whose hiring was an “egregious error” reflecting Wilson’s focus on media and image. In messages to Gershman and Lowe, Allen blamed NED communications director, Christine Bednarz, who reportedly encouraged Aun to talk to the Grayzone. Allen also blamed Bednarz for instituting mandatory “diversity, equity and inclusion” training and berating him about his “white male privilege.”

In one email, Allen complained about the DEI training agenda including “microaggressions” and the “ideological, not historical” 1619 Project, noting that Bednarz had berated him for not using pronouns on his business cards and email signature. In a June 5, 2023 email to Gershman, Allen complained about the communications team focusing on the “more urgent matter of NED’s LGBTQIA+ agenda” rather than the Grayzone fallout. Another point of conflict arose after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, with Allen complaining that several NED staffers “promoted and attended the pro-Palestinian march organized by ANSWER” and that the NED president still backed Black Lives Matter on Facebook even after they “enthusiastically celebrated the Hamas massacres.”At one point, Gershman asked if Bednarz harbored some kind of personal resentment for her Israeli ex-husband, or if she was “just a woke flake,” to which Allen replied: “The latter, combined with a certain megalomania and defensive resentment over the Grayzone fiasco.”

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Ehrlich

 

 

Dogs&food
https://twitter.com/i/status/1818204396041154600

 

 

Legend

 

 

Anaconda

 

 

Whale shark

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in wartime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

 

 

 

 

In Defense Of JD Vance As Trump’s VP

Jul 182024
 
 July 18, 2024  Posted by at 4:55 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  4 Responses »


John French Sloan Spring rain 1912

 

It’s been a while since we saw Andrew Korybko here. But there he is.

 

 

Andrew Korybko:

 

In Defense Of JD Vance As Trump’s VP

Addressing The Top-Three Criticisms Head-On

Trump’s decision to pick freshman Ohio Senator JD Vance as his Vice President (VP) has riled some members of the Alt-Media Community (AMC), who claim that it represents a step backwards for the MAGA movement. They point to his history as a US Marine in Iraq, as a venture capitalist after that, and then finally as a former Never Trumper to claim that he’s a neocon, which his hawkish positions on China and Iran confirm in their minds.

The reality though is that Vance isn’t someone whose worldview can easily be pigeonholed. His history as a US Marine in Iraq taught him, in his own words, that “I had been lied to – that the promises of the foreign policy establishment were a complete joke.” As for his time as a venture capitalist, it led to close friendships with leading elites like Peter Thiel, who’ve been instrumental in turning some Silicon Valley power players against the Democrats. This could ultimately prove to be a game-changer in the election.

Likewise, the same can be said about him formerly being a Never Trumper, which can appeal to millions of on-the-fence voters who used to despise Trump until they were “red pilled” like he admits he was and are thus now seriously considering supporting him. He argued that “I said some bad things about Donald Trump 10 years ago. I can make a good case to the American people, people who may have been skeptical of the president back in 2016, who could be skeptical now, that we’ve seen the results.”

Vance’s hawkish positions on China and Iran are to be expected. The first is the US’ systemic rival while the second threatens its regional hegemony. Nevertheless, what he’s said about Russia and Ukraine proves that he’s not an ideologically driven warmonger, which suggests that he’ll pragmatically manage the US’ competition with them. He’s no doubt a hegemonist, but that comes with the territory, and he’ll never forget what he learned about the establishment during his time with the US Marines in Iraq.

Clarifying China & Russia’s Roles In The MAGA Worldview

His worldview is that the US should be selective with its engagements abroad, both militarily and in terms of foreign aid, and he’s a proponent of Trump’s reported plan for NATO. This would see the bloc become “dormant” as its European members are coerced to step up their involvement in containing Russia while the US “Pivots (back) to Asia” to contain China. Members of the AMC claim that this makes him a “sell-out”, but it’s unrealistic to expect a leading member of MAGA to not be hawkish on China.

After all, Trump was extremely tough on the People’s Republic, which he justified on the grounds of rebalancing their astronomical trade deficit that reached several hundred billion dollars a year before his election. His problem though was that he was too influenced by his son-in-law Jared Kushner during his first term and fell under the sway of neocons, but he’s since learned his lesson judging by how he reportedly took his son Don Jr’s, Steven Bannon’s, and Tucker Carlson’s advice to pick Vance as his VP.

Trump and Vance share the vision of redirecting the US’ containment focus away from Russia and towards China, with a view towards preventing the first’s potentially disproportionate dependence on the second that could turbocharge its superpower trajectory and thus seriously challenge the US. The resultant system of Sino-US bi-multipolarity would comparatively favor China since it would amount to them practically being equals on the world stage, hence why those two want to avoid this if possible.

The means to that end is to relieve some pressure upon Russia so that it can rely more on India and other Global South states, particularly those from its “Ummah Pivot”, as export markets for its natural resources instead of being forced by circumstances into funneling most of them towards China’s rise. From Russia’s perspective, any reduction of pressure would be welcome, especially if it results in some of its national security interests in Europe finally being respected through a compromise in Ukraine.

Russia’s Grand Strategic Interests

Preemptively averting potentially disproportionate dependence on China is also important, not for any politically Sinophobic reasons, but for simple pragmatism since no strategically autonomous country like Russia wants to be reliant on a single partner for the bulk of its foreign export earnings. This explains why it’s recently recalibrated its Asian balancing act from its hitherto Sino-centricity through Putin’s trips to North Korea and Vietnam as well as his hosting of Indian Prime Minister Modi.

The preceding five hyperlinked analyses explain this strategy in detail, the gist of which was just reflected in Valdai Club Program Director Timofei Bordachev’s article about how “Russia has redefined its Asia strategy”, which was released after those pieces and then republished by RT on their front page. This insight is relevant with regards to Trump’s decision to pick Vance as his VP since it strongly suggests that Russia would be receptive to those two’s envisaged endgame of swiftly resolving the Ukrainian Conflict.

Alt-Media’s Activist Problem

Despite recognizing how easily that proxy war could spiral out of control into World War III, and thus appreciating the need to bring about a diplomatic end to it as soon as possible exactly as Vance has promised that he’ll seek to do, some in the AMC are still displeased with him. A lot of these disgruntled folks are activists at heart, which makes them ideologues for the causes that they support, which in this case are world peace in general and less US pressure on China and Iran in particular.

They therefore can’t approve of Vance as VP because of his hawkish positions towards those two, hence why they’re now agitating against him by fearmongering that he’ll risk sparking World War III with them instead of with Russia like Biden and his team are dangerously flirting with by miscalculation. They’re entitled to their views, but observers should remember that they’re being shared by ideologues, no matter how well-intentioned they may be.

These people are purposely being hyperbolic for political reasons related to the causes that they passionately support. They’re also naïve if they truly thought that Trump wouldn’t pick someone who shares his worldview, which is pragmatic towards Russia but adversarial towards China and Iran. It’s possible to raise awareness of the risks that a theoretical Vance presidency could bring if something happens to Trump without going overboard by fearmongering about him and discrediting him.  

Exposing The Frauds

Some of these folks aren’t being sincere with their concerns, however, since they have ulterior motives. There are those who have a unique interpretation of what MAGA is, which is at variance with what it objectively is, and are thus very angry that Trump’s pick of Vance as VP shattered their expectations. The resultant cognitive dissonance explains some of their furious posts on social media after having previously supported the movement.

Then there are those who never truly supported MAGA, but sought to establish “alliances of convenience” on certain causes like those related to China and Iran, and are deliberately trying to discredit MAGA as revenge since it’s clear that Trump 2.0’s policies wouldn’t align with their views. This is especially true for hitherto seemingly MAGA-friendly foreigners who are now trying to manipulate voters’ perceptions about emotive issues like the ones that they support after Vance’s pick as VP.

These people can’t vote in US elections, yet they’re exploiting social media to have an outsized role in influencing those who can, with the common narrative being that they imply one way or another that this decision supposedly proves that Trump has betrayed MAGA. The truth though is that Trump is paving the way for a successor who’ll carry on what MAGA has always been about on the foreign policy front, and that’s being tough on the US’ top rivals in order to decelerate its declining unipolar hegemony.

MAGA’s Role In The Global Systemic Transition

To be sure, the way in which Trump and Vance envisage doing this is by first alleviating the risk of World War III with Russia, which is a net positive for peace and would bring humanity back from the brink if it’s successful. The global systemic transition to multipolarity has also unprecedentedly accelerated so much since the start of Russia’s special operation that restoring the 1990s-era unipolar system is now impossible, thus meaning that MAGA’s foreign policy is really about responsibly managing this moment.

The best that the US can now hope to achieve is to preserve its privileged position as long as possible through creative – and ideally peaceful – means. It’ll never enjoy the unparalleled dominance from the post-Old Cold War period, but it also won’t become a so-called “normal country” anytime soon either, let alone collapse in the near future like many in the AMC have predicted. A Trump-Vance presidency would be all about slowing the pace of its decline and regaining some ground wherever possible.  

The difference between them and Biden-Harris is that MAGA wants to improve socio-economic living standards at home while keeping World War III at bay abroad while the Democrats care less about Americans and more about their fellow liberal–globalist elite even at the expense of risking World War III. Few activists will ever be fully pleased with any presidential ticket, but comparatively speaking, the Trump-Vance one is much better for world peace as a whole than the Biden-Harris one.

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in wartime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle July 17 2024

Jul 172024
 
 July 17, 2024  Posted by at 8:46 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  81 Responses »


Salvador Dali The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory 1954

 

• This One Thing About Trump Shooting Is Very Suspicious (Pochuev)
• Further Thoughts on the Near Assassination (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Rep. Cory Mills Vows ‘J13 Committee’ To Investigate Trump Shooting (ZH)
• The Surrender (Matt Taibbi)
• RFK Jr. Apologizes For Trump Leak (RT)
• Biden Says No To Extra Debate With Trump (RT)
• Elon Musk Pledges $45 Million Monthly To Pro-Trump Super PAC (ZH)
• Elon Musk Abandons California Over Trans Law (RT)
• Pulte Family Takes “Activist Position” in BuzzFeed, Joins Vivek Ramaswamy (ZH)
• JD Vance Promises ‘Rapid Close’ To Ukraine Conflict (RT)
• ‘Root Causes’ Of Ukraine Conflict Should Be Eliminated – Lavrov (RT)
• ‘No Mercy’ For Ukrainian neo-Nazi POW Murderers – Medvedev (RT)
• MEPs Want Hungary Stripped Of Voting Rights – Politico (RT)
• Orban Asks EU To Talk With Russia – Bild (RT)
• “This is How Republics Collapse” (Turley)

 

 


“It blows my mind how narrowly Trump escaped death. He turned his head 0.3 seconds before impact.”


“It gets even crazier. There was a 7mph crosswind at Trump’s rally – enough to push a 5.56 round two inches to the left of its target, at 150 yards. If there hadn’t been a slight crosswind, that bullet would’ve gone straight through Trump’s skull.”

 

 

Alex jones

 

 

Landslide

 

 

 

 

Alexander Pochuev, Vice President of the Long Range Shooting Federation of Russia.

It’s not just this one thing, though. There’s tons.

• This One Thing About Trump Shooting Is Very Suspicious (Pochuev)

On Saturday, 20-year-old Pennsylvanian Thomas Crooks fired three shots from a rifle and was almost immediately hit by return fire from US Secret Service snipers. The country’s former President Donald Trump suffered a minor wound to his right ear, but literally looked death in the face. Apparently, Trump was saved by turning his head to the right, in the direction of the would-be assassin. He had already made this move when Crooks pulled the trigger and the bullet flew towards him at an initial velocity of more than 1,100 meters per second. According to a ballistic calculator, the bullet took 0.14 of a second to reach Trump’s ear. There was no way the shooter could have calculated the movement of his intended victim. Trump was only millimeters away from being fatally wounded.

Even if he had turned at a slightly different angle and the bullet had travelled 10-20 mm to the right, the former US president would have been seriously wounded and out of the running for power in the US for a long time, if not forever. The next two shots were automatic and missed, indicating poor shooting skills and an inability to control himself under stress. The presidential candidate himself heard the shots half a second later, apparently at the same time as he felt the pain of the wound. The speed of a bullet is three times the speed of sound. By this time, a projectile had already hit the next victim. We can assume that the shooter was able to hit several targets with one shot. But that’s not because of any ability on Crooks’ part, it’s the result of the large crowd at the rally.

What was striking, however, was the lightning response of the secret service snipers. They opened fire with at least two rifles in just over three seconds. This is an excellent result. And it would be even in a shooting competition where the target and distances are known, and the command ‘fire’ is given. So, it’s clear that Special Forces snipers had Crooks in their crosshairs by the time the shots were fired. So why didn’t they open fire sooner? And why did they let the shooter get so close and not respond to eyewitness reports of a strange man with a gun?

Read more …

“It is very unusual that an intended assassin would expect to be able to appear with a rifle in a protected area and not be accosted. In other words, it reeks of the smell of a stand down.”

“Trump has to root out the evil, to extinguish the evil. He has to find and appoint and get confirmed a government that will support him in this battle. Anything less and he is a failure.”

• Further Thoughts on the Near Assassination (Paul Craig Roberts)

“The fact that [the Secret Service] allowed a rifle armed shooter within 150 yds to a preplanned event is either malice or massive incompetence.” — Security expert Erik Prince, Navy Seal and founder of Blackwater. One of the most puzzling aspects of the near assassination of Donald Trump on the Secret Service’s watch is the shooter’s expectation to find the buildings within the protected area unoccupied by Secret Service and no agents guarding the sniper positions on the buildings. It is very unusual that an intended assassin would expect to be able to appear with a rifle in a protected area and not be accosted. In other words, it reeks of the smell of a stand down. Here is the Russian state news agency RIA-Novosti’s comment:

“The assassination attempt on Donald Trump is surprising only because it happened on July 13, and not earlier — a year, three or eight years ago. The upstart, who challenged not only most of the American establishment, but also the ‘Washington swamp’ as such, has risked his head very much all these years… It is clear that now the ‘swamp denizens’ are biting their elbows because they did not think to kill Trump before November 2016: they underestimated the threat, did not believe in the reality of his victory.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the atmosphere of hatred created around Trump by the Biden regime has led to the near assassination of Donald Trump. “After numerous attempts to remove Trump from the political arena with the help of legal tools, courts, the prosecution, attempts to politically discredit and compromise the candidate, it was clear to all outside observers that his life was in danger.”

“We will FEAR NOT, but instead remain resilient in our Faith and Defiant in the face of Wickedness.” — Donald Trump. Trump understands that the real fight is against the evil that has in its grasp the Democrat Party, the media, the liberal-left intellectuals who control the educational system, and the financial system that enslaves the population to debt service. It is extraordinary that former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama along with Biden and Trump himself have issued statements thanking the Secret Service for their “swift intervention.” Swift intervention? After an assassin in plain view of the Secret Service fires a series of shots that kill one person and dangerously injures two others standing behind Trump and misses killing Trump by a quarter of an inch? Only when the assassin finishes firing does the Secret Service intervene. How does a Secret Service that totally fails in its responsibility to protect a presidential candidate get congratulations for preventing an assassination?

Trump’s assassination failed because Trump turned his head when the assassin shot, thus throwing the bullet off mark. The Secret Service did nothing to prevent Trump’s assassination. Is it the case that once the Secret Service saw Trump was down, Trump was believed to be mortally injured and it was the time to eliminate, like happened to Oswald, the shooter before he could talk? I don’t say this is the case. It is a question that needs investigation. The question of the unsecured buildings from which the intended assassin fired has produced a dispute between the Secret Service and local police. The Secret Service claims the neglected shooting positions were the responsibility of the local police. The local police say they are merely the ordered around adjuncts of the Secret Service, who are in charge. Let’s assume the local police were responsible for the security of the nearby sites. Why did not the Secret Service check if the police performed their alleged duty?

The greatest puzzle is the near assassin’s unencumbered access to perfect spots for a successful assassination. To those few Americans still capable of thought, the outpouring of former presidents clearing the Secret Service with praise of its non-performance suggests it was an establishment attack on Donald Trump’s life. Trump’s response to the attack on his life is not promising. Indeed, he is already moving off-task. He says he is going to reunite the country. This assumes that America has no internal enemies intent on destroying her, her values, and her liberties, and in her place erecting a Sodom & Gomorrah Tower of Babel.

How can Trump reunite a country when the Democrat half is dedicated to the country’s destruction via open borders and the legitimization of all forms of sexual perversion? Is Trump going to compromise with his enemies and give them, in the false name of unity, part of their agenda? What is the point of a raised fist with blood running down your face shouting “fight, fight, fight” if you are going to compromise? Trump has to root out the evil, to extinguish the evil. He has to find and appoint and get confirmed a government that will support him in this battle. Anything less and he is a failure.

Read more …

‘How could this have gone so wrong?’

• Rep. Cory Mills Vows ‘J13 Committee’ To Investigate Trump Shooting (ZH)

Former sniper and defense contractor Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL) triggered a CNN host on Tuesday after suggesting that “intentional” failures may have resulted in the assassination attempt on Donald Trump on Saturday. “The amount of negligence, the amount of mistakes that was made here, I have a very difficult time not leaning myself towards this was intentional, as opposed to fecklessness,” Mills told anchor Kate Bolduan. “If I have a building 160 yards perfectly adjacent to the stage, that’s an obvious threat,” he continued. “Especially with an elevated position that has overwatch? That’s a sniper’s paradise.” Mills, an Iraq war veteran and former DynCorp security specialist, co-founded private security company Pacem Defense, and says he’s overseen security for thousands of events.

After a stunned Boulduan pressed Mills, he replied: “I sit here and scratch my head. You don’t want to be the conspiracist. That’s the issue. You walk this fine balance, but you look at it and think ‘How could this have gone so wrong?’.” Meanwhile, journalist Laura Loomer spoke with Mills outside the Republican National Convention, where he told her that he plans to create a ‘J13 committee’ that’s ‘bigger than the J6 committee,’ and that he will push to be in charge of it.

Read more …

“.. they quoted a “senior House Democrat” at the bottom, saying, “We’ve all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency.”

• The Surrender (Matt Taibbi)

The decision was announced at a White House briefing Monday morning. “In light of this weekend’s events, the president has directed me to work with the Secret Service to provide protection to Robert Kennedy Jr.,” was the quote from Homeland Security Director Alejandro Mayorkas. It’s difficult to read the line “in light of this weekend’s events” and not see an admission on the part of the White House that Secret Service protection was previously being denied to Kennedy, Jr. for political reasons, or out of spite, if those are even two different things in this era. Whatever the original prerogative was for pushing the envelope with that denial, it seems to have been removed by series of paradigm-shattering news events, leading to a flurry of real and symbolic surrenders.

MSNBC likewise made an extraordinary decision Sunday night to pull Morning Joe, with CNN saying the network wanted to “to avoid a scenario in which one of the show’s stable of two dozen-plus guests might make an inappropriate comment on live television.” As with the Secret Service decision, MSNBC was making a major admission, essentially telling audiences its lead morning news show is either not really a news show, or that its format only holds up under something less than maximum scrutiny. I can’t recall a similar act of self-sabotage in media. Meanwhile, in a move that went mostly unnoticed, Meta announced Friday that it was lifting restrictions on Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, with CNN citing company sources saying this was done “to ensure that Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, would have equal standing with Democrat President Joe Biden.”

The next day, after the attempt on Trump’s life that left firefighter Corey Comperatore dead, Axios ran a story about Democratic reaction. Burying the lede, they quoted a “senior House Democrat” at the bottom, saying, “We’ve all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency.” There’s a longer story to be written about the sudden collapse of many of the core premises of the last eight years of American politics, in particular the notion that Trump is such a unique “existential” threat that the system would not bear treating him like any other politician. In conjunction with Trump’s documents case collapsing and a list of other retreats on the lawfare/prosecution front, we appear headed for a new world, though what that will look like remains very unclear. The two obvious options are retreat from the “at all costs” mindset and a double-down, the double-down being the pattern in the Trump era. Who knows yet, but it’s remarkable to watch.

Read more …

A president calls you who’s been shot just hours before. And you don’t stop the video that’s running, or find a private place to take the call?

• RFK Jr. Apologizes For Trump Leak (RT)

US presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has apologized after his son posted a video recording of a recent phone call with his Republican challenger, Donald Trump. During the call, Trump sought RFK Jr.’s endorsement and said that he shared the independent’s concerns about vaccinating children. An excerpt of the call, which took place on Sunday, was posted to X on Tuesday by Bobby Kennedy III, before it was deleted shortly afterwards. According to screenshots of the post, the younger Kennedy posted the video as he felt “these sorts of conversations should be had in public.” In the video, Trump told the elder Kennedy that “clearly something’s wrong” with the US’ childhood vaccination program.

“I said I want to do small doses,” Trump told Kennedy Jr., who was listening on his phone’s speaker. Trump complained that children are given a “vaccination that’s like 38 different vaccines, and it looks like it’s meant for a horse, not a ten-pound or twenty-pound baby. And then you see the baby all of a sudden starting to change…and then you hear that doesn’t have an impact.” “You and I talked about that a long time ago,” Trump added.

Kennedy Jr. has railed against vaccinating children since before the Covid-19 pandemic, and Trump – whose administration funded the development of Covid vaccines – at one point publicly shared his views. “My theory,” he told reporters in 2007, “is the shots” are responsible for causing autism. “We’re giving these massive injections at one time, and I really think it does something to the children.” Within hours of the video being posted, Kennedy Jr apologized for the leak. “When President Trump called me I was taping with an in-house videographer,” he explained in a post on X. “I should have ordered the videographer to stop recording immediately. I am mortified that this was posted. I apologize to the president.”

Kennedy Jr. did not speak during the section of the call posted online. After laying out his views on vaccines, Trump appeared to ask for the independent candidate’s endorsement, telling him “it would be so good for you.” Trump met with Kennedy Jr. the day after the phone call to discuss his possibly suspending his bid for the White House and joining the Republican’s campaign, Politico reported on Monday. The Kennedy campaign acknowledged that the meeting took place but said that the two discussed “national unity,” and that Kennedy Jr. would remain in the race. Recent polls show Kennedy Jr. winning around 10% of the national vote in a hypothetical race that includes the Green Party’s Jill Stein and the Justice for All Party’s Cornel West. These same polls show Trump leading President Joe Biden by between one and six points.

Read more …

“I have done 22 major events, met thousands of people, overwhelming crowds.”

Let’s see the footage.

• Biden Says No To Extra Debate With Trump (RT)

US President Joe Biden has turned down Donald Trump’s proposal for him to “redeem himself” after his disastrous performance in their first televised debate last month by holding another unscheduled face-off. Biden has faced increasing calls to withdraw from the presidential race after he appeared frail and confused during the June 27 debate against Trump. According to the New York Times, Democratic donors have been withholding some $90 million in donations in order to persuade the party to replace the 81-year-old president on the ticket. Biden, however, has insisted he is staying in the race. Last week, speaking at a rally in Miami, Trump offered Biden a “chance to redeem himself.”

“Let us do another debate this week so that sleepy Joe Biden can prove to everyone all over the world that he has what it takes to be president,” he said, adding that the unscheduled face-off should have no moderators and be “man-to-man.” Asked about the proposal during an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt on Tuesday, Biden said he will debate Trump only at the previously agreed time. “I’m gonna debate him when we agreed to debate. And I agreed to debate him in September,” Biden said. The second face-off between the two is scheduled to take place on September 10, with ABC News hosting. Biden snapped back when Holt suggested a snap debate in the coming weeks would be a chance for him to “get back on the horse.”

“I am on the horse. Where have you been? I have done 22 major events, met thousands of people, overwhelming crowds. A lot has been happening. I am on the horse,” he said, insisting that he does not need notes or a teleprompter. “I can go out and answer any questions at all,” he said. Multiple US news outlets have reported in recent weeks that Democratic donors and officials have been plotting to force Biden out of the race and replace him with another candidate. Axios reported last week that an “anti-Biden network” that includes veterans of the Obama and Clinton administrations are seeking to oust Biden and field a candidate they believe has a better chance of winning the November election. Biden told Holt on Tuesday that he would not repeat his poor performance at the next debate. “I don’t plan on having another performance on that level,” he said.

Read more …

To counter Zuckerberg millions?!

• Elon Musk Pledges $45 Million Monthly To Pro-Trump Super PAC (ZH)

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, a source familiar with the situation has revealed Elon Musk’s latest power move: a $45 million a month commitment to a new super political-action committee to support former President Donald Trump. This new super PAC will deploy large sums of money and other resources in critical swing states to counter ‘get out the vote’ campaigns by Democrats. Called ‘America PAC,’ the group is reportedly focused on registering voters and convincing constituents to vote early and request mail-in ballots across swing states, according to the people. The group will counter get out the vote campaigns by Democrats in swing states. Besides Musk, America PAC is supported by Palantir Technologies co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and former US ambassador to Canada Kelly Craft and her husband, Joe, the chief executive of coal producer Alliance Resource Partners.

According to a Monday filing, America PAC received $8.75 million in contributions for the quarter ending June 30, as reported by the WSJ. Musk is rumored to begin his donations this month. A recent Bloomberg News report indicated Musk had donated to the new super PAC last week, although the donation size was not mentioned. Following the failed assassination attempt on Trump, Musk wrote on X on Saturday evening, “I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery,” adding, “Last time America had a candidate this tough was Theodore Roosevelt.” X user End Wokenes wrote, “Elon Musk went from being an Obama voter to pledging $180 million to elect DJT. The woke left really f*cked up. Badly.” Musk responded with a “Yeah”…

Perhaps the Democrats miscalculated their assault on Musk. Musk also praised Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance as his vice-presidential nominee, calling it an “excellent” choice. Vance has ties with Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantir Technologies. In recent weeks, David Sacks has backed Trump, even hosting a fundraiser at his San Francisco mansion. Whether it’s Thiel, Sacks, or Musk, they were all once part of a group dubbed the ‘PayPal Mafia.’

Read more …

“Have had enough of dodging gangs of violent drug addicts just to get in and out of the building..”

• Elon Musk Abandons California Over Trans Law (RT)

SpaceX CEO and X owner Elon Musk has said that he will relocate the headquarters of both companies from California to Texas in response to a new law forbidding teachers in the Golden State from telling parents if their children identify as transgender. California Governor Gavin Newsom signed the SAFETY Act into law on Tuesday. Hailed by activists as a safeguard against the “forced outing” of gay or transgender kids, the law forbids school staff from informing parents if their children identify as gay in the classroom, or use names or pronouns that differ from those on their birth certificates. Critics slammed the bill as an infringement on parental rights. “This is the final straw,” Musk wrote on X. “Because of this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas.”

Musk explained that he made it “clear to Governor Newsom about a year ago that laws of this nature would force families and companies to leave California to protect their children.” In a follow-up post, Musk said that he would relocate X’ HQ from San Francisco to Austin, Texas. “Have had enough of dodging gangs of violent drug addicts just to get in and out of the building,” he said, referring to San Francisco’s well-documented homelessness, drug abuse, and street-crime problems. Musk previously described the “once beautiful and thriving” downtown area of San Francisco as “a derelict zombie apocalypse,” blaming the decline on decades of Democrat rule. Last August, the billionaire vowed to go to “war” with a law firm that was suing city authorities for clearing vagrants from the area.

Musk already moved Tesla’s HQ from the tech hub of Palo Alto in California to Austin in 2021, and moved his personal residence from California to Texas in 2020. Aside from distancing himself from coastal liberalism – which he has described as “the woke mind-virus,” the move allowed Musk to avoid tax on his personal income. In 2023, Musk told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that he blamed his transgender daughter’s liberal Los Angeles school for encouraging her to become “a full communist” and to sever all ties with her father the year before. “She went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil,” Musk said of his now 20-year-old child. “I’ve made many overtures, but she doesn’t want to spend time with me.” Musk has also spoken out repeatedly against child sex changes, stating last year that he “will be actively lobbying to criminalize making severe, irreversible changes to children below the age of consent.”

Read more …

Buzzfeed looks dead to me.

• Pulte Family Takes “Activist Position” in BuzzFeed, Joins Vivek Ramaswamy (ZH)

Shares of Buzzfeed jumped 26% moments ago after the Pulte Family revealed an “activist position” in BuzzFeed, supporting the changes Vivek Ramaswamy, a former Republican presidential candidate, has proposed for the media company. “In our opinion, the Current BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti is driving the company into the ground, and when Vivek Ramaswamy gave him a lifeboat to save his sinking ship, Peretti told him thanks anyway,” William J. Pulte, CEO of Pulte Capital and a former Director of PulteGroup, wrote in a statement released on X. Pulte said, “This is exactly the type of hubris that needs to end in corporate America; at every turn, CEO Peretti has delivered unacceptable financial and operational performance, quarter after quarter. If CEO Peretti isn’t up to modernize BuzzFeed, then he should bring in someone who is or he should buy the company back from its shareholders.”

He added, “We support the changes Vivek Ramaswamy has proposed and that which he thinks are necessary.” Axios reported on June 24 that Ramaswamy and two of his proposed directors spoke with CEO Peretti via conference call to discuss his activist campaign against the media company. In May, Ramaswamy announced his BuzzFeed stake with a letter to the company’s board, saying the media company has “lost its way.” Ramaswamy holds approximately a 7.7% stake in BuzzFeed, while the size of the Pulte Family’s stake has not been disclosed. Pulte concluded, “For the avoidance of doubt, we are not working in concert with and are not working in a group with Mr. Ramaswamy. To that end, we did not inform Mr. Ramaswamy before we purchased shares in BuzzFeed.”

Read more …

“Is there a risk of escalation into a nuclear war? Because there is, when you have a buffoon running foreign policy, and we have got a lot of them right now in Washington, DC..”

• JD Vance Promises ‘Rapid Close’ To Ukraine Conflict (RT)

Donald Trump will bring about a “rapid close” to the Ukraine conflict if reelected as US president in November, the Republican’s newly announced running mate, JD Vance, has said. Vance argued that Washington should shift its focus to China, describing Beijing as the “biggest threat” to the US. Trump announced Vance as his running mate on Monday at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The Ohio senator’s candidacy was approved later the same day. If Trump returns as president after the November 5 election, his policy on Ukraine will be “very simple,” Vance told Fox News shortly after being officially nominated. “Russia would not have invaded Ukraine if Donald Trump had been president. Everybody agrees with it. Even a lot of my Democratic colleagues privately agree with that,” he said.

Vance again accused the administration of US President Joe Biden of lacking a coherent policy on the conflict. “We have now spent $200 billion [on aiding Ukraine]. What is the goal? What are we trying to accomplish? Is there a risk of escalation into a nuclear war? Because there is, when you have a buffoon running foreign policy, and we have got a lot of them right now in Washington, DC,” he said. “I think what President Trump has promised to do is go in there, negotiate with the Russians and Ukrainians and bring this thing to a rapid close, so that America could focus on the real issue, which is China. That’s the biggest threat,” Vance stressed. Since the outbreak of the fighting between Moscow and Kiev in February 2022, Trump has repeatedly claimed that the conflict wouldn’t have happened if he had retained the presidency in 2020. He has also vowed to resolve the crisis within 24 hours if he returns to the White House.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said earlier this month that Moscow takes the former US president’s comments “quite seriously.” “I certainly do not know what, exactly, his proposal would be [to end the conflict] and how he plans to achieve that. And that is the key question. But I do not doubt his sincerity and we welcome” the sentiment, Putin stated. In early June, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky demanded that Trump reveal the details of his peace plan. “I would like to know what it would mean to finish a war fast,” Zelensky told Bloomberg. “If Trump knows how to end this war, he should tell us today, because if there are risks to Ukraine’s independence, and there are risks that we will lose our statehood, we want to be prepared for this,” he argued.

Read more …

“Russia and the West need mutual “guarantees and agreements..”

• ‘Root Causes’ Of Ukraine Conflict Should Be Eliminated – Lavrov (RT)

The world should address the “root causes” that led to the “crisis” in Europe and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a ministerial summit at the UN Security Council on Tuesday. Ending the standoff between Moscow and Kiev should be accompanied by the removal of the threat posed by the West to Russia’s security, he said. Conditions for a “sustainable peace” between Russia and Ukraine had already been presented by Russian President Vladimir Putin, the top diplomat noted. In June, Putin outlined Moscow’s terms for initiating a ceasefire. They involved a full withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from all Russian territories, including the republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, and the regions of Kherson and Zaporozhye, as well as a legal commitment from Kiev never to join NATO. Any final deal should be recognized in Western capitals and pave the way to lift sanctions against Russia, Putin added. Both Kiev and its Western backers dismissed the offer.

Any “political and diplomatic settlement [of the Ukraine conflict] should be accompanied by specific steps aimed at removing the threats to the Russian Federation posed by the [West],” Lavrov told the UNSC as he listed the measures needed to “restore trust and stabilize the situation” on the international arena. “The root causes of the crisis that has broken out in Europe should be dealt with once and for all.” Russia and the West need mutual “guarantees and agreements,” the minister stated, adding that “new geostrategic realities on the Eurasian continent” should be taken into account as well. According to Lavrov, a new “pan continental architecture of truly equal and indivisible security” was being formed on the continent. “The global and regional balance of power should be restored as well, along with repairing injustices in the world economy,” he said. A multipolar world should not have any monopolies in the financial or currency regulation, trade or technologies, he said, calling on the World Trade Organization to be reformed to reflect the “real weight” of non-Western centers of growth and development.

Moscow has long blamed the hegemonic aspirations of Washington and its allies for various crises in recent decades. In June, Putin said the world had missed an opportunity to create a better, more just and secure international order in the 1990s. The US and other Western nations believed they had “won the Cold War and refused to respect the interests of others,” he said at that time. That approach manifested itself in NATO’s policy of resolving conflicts that came down to “accusing the party they dislike of all sins and crushing it,” Putin stated. Such an approach proved to be a disaster, according to the Russian president. He also denied that Russia was the main threat to Europe, arguing that the greatest danger to European nations comes from their massive dependence on the US.

Read more …

Fully ignored in the west.

“Fascists are fascists,” he told reporters. “We must treat them this way and they must be destroyed..”

• ‘No Mercy’ For Ukrainian neo-Nazi POW Murderers – Medvedev (RT)

No mercy must be shown towards Ukrainian neo-Nazis who murdered an unarmed Russian soldier, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has said. The only response that should follow is across-the-board executions, he added. Medvedev, who currently serves as deputy chair of the Russian Security Council, was commenting on a video depicting the brutal execution of a Russian serviceman that was published by the Azov Brigade on its Telegram channel on Monday. The helmet-camera video shows an unarmed soldier asking a purported Azov militant not to shoot him, before he gets shot several times in the face at point-blank range. The commander of Russia’s Akhmat Special Forces unit Apty Alaudinov said the incident violated the Geneva Conventions. Under the provisions of the 1949 treaties, “members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, or detention” should be treated humanely.

Medvedev said, however, that reference to the Geneva Conventions is pointless, as there should be “no mercy” to perpetrators of war crimes. The politician quoted the Soviet WWII-era war poet Konstantin Simonov’s verse “Kill him” and called for the expedited execution of those who murdered the captured serviceman. “There is no place for good here. Just kill! Like Simonov, to whom I have referred many times!” he wrote on his Telegram channel on Tuesday. “Only total executions. No choice. There are no words about mercy. No humanity. No pardon. They have no right to life,” Medvedev insisted. Echoing his remarks, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated on Tuesday that Ukrainian Neo-Nazis should be “destroyed.” “Fascists are fascists,” he told reporters. “We must treat them this way and they must be destroyed,” Peskov added.

Earlier this month, the New York Times revealed, citing a German battlefield medic, multiple atrocities allegedly committed by members of the so-called ‘Chosen Company,’ an international mercenary group fighting on behalf of Ukraine. In one reported incident described by the NYT, members of the Chosen Company murdered a seriously injured Russian serviceman who, it’s claimed, was surrendering and pleading for help. Russia’s Investigative Committee has said it will probe alleged war crimes committed by mercenary units fighting for Ukraine. Moscow will also demand that international organizations verify data on alleged Russian POW executions, which, if confirmed, would qualify “as a violation of key norms and principles of humanitarian law, amounting to war crimes,” according to ambassador-at-large for Ukraine’s crimes, Rodion Miroshnik.

Read more …

93 MPs who don’t want peace.

• MEPs Want Hungary Stripped Of Voting Rights – Politico (RT)

Scores of European Parliament members have called on Brussels to punish Hungary after its prime minister, Viktor Orban, allegedly abused the bloc’s rotating presidency by launching his Ukraine “peace mission,” Politico reported on Tuesday. The outlet published a letter signed by 93 MEPs and addressed to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, European Council President Charles Michel, and European Parliament chief Roberta Metsola. The signatories accused Orban of causing “significant damage by exploiting and abusing the role of the [EU] Council Presidency,” which Hungary assumed earlier this month. The focus of their ire was Orban’s “peace mission” which involved recent visits to Ukraine, Russia, China, and the US.

“Orban deliberately left the impression that he was acting on behalf of the entire European Union,” the letter claimed, despite the leader stressing that he was acting in his capacity as head of the Hungarian government before flying to Moscow earlier this month. MEPs said their assertion was “clearly evidenced” by the fact that senior EU officials had stressed that Orban did not represent the bloc “in any form” during his trips. The Hungarian leader “is actively pursuing a policy agenda which is contrary to common EU positions,” and “this cannot be allowed to continue,” the MEPs said. They have urged the EU leadership to launch so-called Article 7 proceedings against Hungary. Widely considered a “nuclear option,” the article allows suspension of voting rights of a member state. The punishment is necessary “since practice has shown that mere verbal condemnations of this situation have no effect,” the letter said.

Hungary has criticized EU policy since hostilities between Ukraine and Russia broke out in February 2022. According to Budapest, Western economic sanctions imposed against Moscow have seriously damaged European economies, while the supply of weapons to Kiev has led to the continuation of hostilities instead of their end. Orban has urged a ceasefire and a negotiated resolution of the crisis, which his critics call a pro-Russian stance. Orban has detailed his vision of resolving the conflict in a letter to Michel, the European Council president, his office confirmed on Monday. His plan reportedly includes making concessions to Russia in terms of NATO’s expansion in Europe, which Moscow has called one of the key triggers of the confrontation.

Read more …

What a crazy idea!

• Orban Asks EU To Talk With Russia – Bild (RT)

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has written to Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, urging him to resume dialogue with Russia and involve China in the effort to resolve the Ukraine conflict, Bild reported on Monday. The plea comes after Orban went on a “peace mission” to Ukraine, Russia, China, and the US. According to the letter cited by the German tabloid, Orban provided Michel with a summary of his talks with the Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese, and Turkish leaders, as well as Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump. It also reportedly contained “some suggestions for [Michel’s] consideration.” Warning Michel that “the intensity of the military conflict [in Ukraine] will radically intensify in the near future,” Orban urged the EU official to hold talks with China on a ‘peace conference’ as well as reestablish diplomatic relations with Russia, according to the letter.

He further called for a “political offensive” in the Global South, arguing that the region is disillusioned with the EU’s stance on the Ukraine conflict. Orban also reportedly suggested that US President Joe Biden is “not in a position to change the current [US] pro-war policy.” However, he is said to have written that if Trump is reelected, he will “immediately be ready to act as a peace mediator.” Trump also “has detailed and well-founded plans” for ending the conflict, the letter reportedly said. Trump, who survived an assassination attempt at the weekend, has promised to end the hostilities between Moscow and Kiev within 24 hours if elected.

A Politico report earlier this month suggested that the presumptive Republican candidate could strike a deal under which “NATO commits to no further eastward expansion,” specifically into Ukraine and Georgia, while holding talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin “over how much Ukrainian territory Moscow can keep.” Orban’s recent ‘peace mission’ sparked a fierce backlash in the West. Michel himself declared that the Hungarian leader “has no mandate to engage with Russia on behalf of the EU” and stressed that “no discussions about Ukraine can take place without Ukraine.” Orban urged Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky to agree to a ceasefire during their meeting, although the latter rejected the proposal, insisting that the Hungarian prime minister lacked the clout to negotiate an end to the conflict.

Read more …

“How do republics collapse? When judges are pressured or removed for ruling against favored parties.”

• “This is How Republics Collapse” (Turley)

“This is how republics collapse.” Those ominous words captured the hand-wringing, hair-pulling reaction to the dismissal of the Florida case against Donald Trump by Judge Aileen Cannon. It was not just that she reached a conclusion long supported by some conservative lawyers and a Supreme Court justice. To rule in favor of Trump in such a dismissal is, once again, the end of Democracy as we know it. The 93-page order methodically goes through the governing cases and statutes for the appointment of prosecutors. There has long been a debate over how an attorney general like Merrick Garland can circumvent the constitutional process for the appointment of a U.S. Attorney and unilaterally elevate a citizen to wield even greater power. With the expiration of the Independent Counsel Act in 1999, attorneys general have long relied upon their inherent authority to appoint “inferior officers” to special counsel investigations.

The issue has never been conclusively ruled upon by the Supreme Court, even though lower courts have rejected this challenge. The Trump ruling is certainly an outlier and the odds favor prosecutor Jack Smith on appeal. Many point to a challenge in 2019 in the D.C. Circuit to the appointment of Robert Mueller. The court found that “binding precedent establishes that Congress has ‘by law’ vested authority in the Attorney General to appoint the Special Counsel as an inferior officer.” That is the view of many lawyers and judges. However, Judge Cannon disagreed and found a lack of clear authority for both the appointment and the appropriations used for Smith. Nevertheless, legal experts were incredulous and irate. Jed Shugerman, a Boston University Law professor, is quoted as expressing shock that Judge Cannon is essentially saying, “I’m not bound by the DC Circuit, and I think they misinterpret this.” He added that it showed an “astonishing level of dismissiveness.”

However, in point of fact, Judge Cannon is not bound by the D.C. Circuit. As a federal judge in Florida, she is bound by the 11th Circuit and, of course, the Supreme Court. She is allowed to reach a different conclusion on a matter of law. Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard University, declared that “Judge Cannon just did the unthinkable,” He added, “This finally gives Jack Smith an opportunity to seek her removal from the case. I think the case for doing so is very strong.” (Tribe previously declared that he was certain “without any doubt, beyond a reasonable doubt, beyond any doubt” that Trump could be charged with the attempted murder of former Vice President Michael Pence). It does not matter to these critics that other lawyers and judges agree with Judge Cannon.

Justice Clarence Thomas recently expressed the same view in the Trump immunity decision in his concurrence. He did not view this as a settled question and wrote “if this unprecedented prosecution is to proceed, it must be conducted by someone duly authorized to do so by the American people. The lower courts should thus answer these essential questions concerning the special counsel’s appointment before proceeding.” Yet these experts believe that a judge without a direct controlling case on the question should be removed for reaching the same conclusion as a member of the Supreme Court and at least two former U.S. Attorneys General. Of course, these experts would be aghast at any suggestion that D.C. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan should be removed after being reversed by the Supreme Court in the recent immunity opinion. Such experts are not raising questions of bias over Chutkin’s rulings in favor of Smith or the similar pattern of Manhattan Judge Juan Merchan. Yet Cannon is viewed as not simply wrong, but partisan in ruling for Trump. How do republics collapse? When judges are pressured or removed for ruling against favored parties.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Lion
https://twitter.com/i/status/1813042360386781389

 

 

Croc

 

 

Antelope

 

 

Flirting

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in wartime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle July 16 2024

Jul 162024
 
 July 16, 2024  Posted by at 9:09 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  133 Responses »


René Magritte The false mirror 1928

 

• “I’m Supposed To Be Dead” (ZH)
• Trump Makes First Public Appearance Since Assassination Attempt (RT)
• Trump Picks J.D. Vance As Running Mate (ZH)
• Trump’s Would-Be Assassin Did Not Act ‘on His Own’ – Ex-CIA Officer (Sp.)
• I Know A Hero When I See One (David Sacks)
• Shocks to the System (Kunstler)
• Biden Defends His ‘Put Trump In Bullseye’ Remark (RT)
• Biden Orders Security For Kennedy (RT)
• Bobby Kennedy III Slams US Secret Service (RT)
• Russian Reaction To The Trump Assassination Attempt Is Biblical (Helmer)
• Trump Classified Docs Case Dismissed, Jack Smith Unconstitutional (ZH)
• MSNBC Yanks Morning Joe On Fears Of Inappropriate Trump Shooting Comments (ZH)
• There’s Another Culprit In The Trump Murder Attempt (Bridge)
• Orban Delivers Ukraine Peace Proposals To EU (RT)
• Ex-US NATO Ambassador Tells Ukraine To Conscript Teenagers (RT)
• Elon Musk is Right: End the Online Censorship Racket (Turley)

 

 

Fight

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I want to try to unite our country… but I do not know if that is possible. People are very divided.”

• “I’m Supposed To Be Dead” (ZH)

Donald Trump says he’s “supposed to be dead,” and that Saturday’s attempted assassination was a “very surreal experience.” Speaking with the NY Post aboard his private plane en route to Milwaukee for the GOP National Convention, the former president said the doctor called it a ‘miracle.’ “The doctor at the hospital said he never saw anything like this, he called it a miracle,” said Trump, whose ear was covered by a loose white bandage. His staff insisted on no pictures. “I’m not supposed to be here, I’m supposed to be dead,” said Trump. “I’m supposed to be dead.” Trump said that had he not turned his head slightly to the right to read a chart on illegal immigration, it would have been a kill shot instead of having a small piece of his ear torn off, spattering blood on his forehead and cheek.


© AP Photo / Gene J. Puskar

Trump said that as Secret Service agents led him off stage, he still wanted to continue speaking to supporters, but the agents told him it wasn’t safe and they had to get him to a hospital. He marveled at how the agents came flying in like “linebackers” as soon as the shooting started, and he unbuttoned his long-sleeve white shirt to show a large bruise on his right forearm. -NY Post Trump explained that “The agents hit me so hard that my shoes fell off, and my shoes are tight.” He then commended the Secret Service for their heroic actions, and praised them for gunning down the shooter – who had fired from around 130 yards away. Trump also reacted to the iconic photo of him raising his fist as agents tried to get him off the stage. “A lot of people say it’s the most iconic photo they’ve ever seen,” he told the Post. “They’re right and I didn’t die. Usually you have to die to have an iconic picture.” “I just wanted to keep speaking, but I just got shot,” he continued.

Read more …

“He stood flanked by his new running mate JD Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson on the left, and Florida Rep. Byron Donalds and journalist Tucker Carlson on the right.”

• Trump Makes First Public Appearance Since Assassination Attempt (RT)

Former US President Donald Trump was greeted with thunderous applause on the opening night of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The four-day convention began just two days after a failed assassination attempt against Trump, who was officially nominated on Monday as the party’s presidential nominee for the November election. The crowd cheered wildly when Trump, with a white bandage on his right ear, appeared on the big screen, walking from backstage to the convention floor to a live version of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.” After greeting his supporters, who were chanting “USA! USA!” and “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Trump climbed the stairs to the VIP section. He stood flanked by his new running mate JD Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson on the left, and Florida Rep. Byron Donalds and journalist Tucker Carlson on the right.

Trump tapped JD Vance as vice presidential candidate but did not address the convention on Monday. He is expected to deliver a speech, which he revised in the wake of the shooting, on the final day of the gathering on Thursday. A bullet grazed Trump’s right ear when a gunman fired at least five rounds from a semi-automatic rifle in his direction during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday. One spectator was killed and two others severely wounded before the shooter was fatally shot by US Secret Service officers. ”I am not supposed to be here; I am supposed to be dead,” Trump said in an interview with the New York Post on Sunday. The former president said he had prepared “an extremely tough speech… all about the corrupt, horrible administration” for the event in Milwaukee, but “threw it away” after the assassination attempt. ”I want to try to unite our country… but I do not know if that is possible. People are very divided,” he added.

Read more …

Tucker likes him a lot.

• Trump Picks J.D. Vance As Running Mate (ZH)

48 hours after being shot through the ear at a campaign event, Donald Trump has announced J.D. Vance as his running mate. “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 posted on Truth Social. Full statement:

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. J.D. honorably served our Country in the Marine Corps, graduated from Ohio State University in two years, Summa Cum Laude, and is a Yale Law School Graduate, where he was Editor of The Yale Law Journal, and President of the Yale Law Veterans Association. J.D.’s book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” became a Major Best Seller and Movie, as it championed the hardworking men and women of our Country. J.D. has had a very successful business career in Technology and Finance, and now, during the Campaign, will be strongly focused on the people he fought so brilliantly for, the American Workers and Farmers in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, and far beyond….

Vance, 39, had emerged as the front-runner earlier in the day after sources said that Marco Rubio and Gov. Doug Burgum had been finalists. Both were told on Monday that they were out of the running.Following Saturday’s attempted assassination Vance jumped into action – suggesting on X that President Biden bore responsibility. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination,” wrote Vance, who went from harsh Trump critic to ardent supporter. Donald Trump Jr. has repeatedly advocated for Vance – who in 2016 privately texted a former Yale roommate that he feared Trump could be “America’s Hitler.” By 2018, however, Vance had softened his tone – viewing Trump as speaking to the frustrations of the very Americans he had written about in his book. Of note, the Ohio Senator is pro-crypto…

Tucker JD
https://twitter.com/i/status/1812954934909849746

Read more …

“I don’t know what the network is, I don’t know which organizations he is tied to, but he didn’t do this on his own..”

• Trump’s Would-Be Assassin Did Not Act ‘on His Own’ – Ex-CIA Officer (Sp.)

On July 13 Donald Trump narrowly survived an attempt on his life when a gunman opened fire at him during a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania. One bystander was killed and two sustained serious injuries while Trump himself was shot in the ear. The recent attempt on Donald Trump’s life has, among other things, effectively “destroyed the ability of the Democrats going forward to demonize Donald Trump,” says retired CIA intelligence officer and State Department official Larry Johnson. As the US Democrats consistently sought to brand Trump as an “existential threat… their very language encouraged violence, encouraged killing Trump.” “Now they can’t do that without being accused of inciting violence. And, so now they have to argue on just issues. And when they are supposed to argue on issues, that means, they’re going to fail,” Johnson argued.

Currently, Trump’s political opponents can do little to curb the surge of his popularity in the wake of the assassination attempt, in no small part due to the fact that “they can’t argue the issues,” the ex-CIA officer notes. “What are the issues? Illegal immigration? Well, the Democrats have been enabling that. Inflation? Well, the economy is still plagued with inflation, but people are feeling that at the grocery store and at the gas pump,” Johnson elaborates. “So, their efforts to try to shift to issues, it’s going to be difficult for them, because they’ve been so accustomed to describing Trump as, you know, the personification of Satan.” While the FBI has already announced that the man who is suspected of trying to kill Trump, one Thomas Matthew Crooks, was acting alone, Johnson argues that it is “highly likely” that the gunman “had additional support.” “I don’t know what the network is, I don’t know which organizations he is tied to, but he didn’t do this on his own,” Johnson says.

Read more …

“There is no way to fake courage like that..”

• I Know A Hero When I See One (David Sacks)

I KNOW A HERO WHEN I SEE ONE. The Washington Post names me, along with as one of several businessmen, who are using their “megaphones” to spread “narratives” about the assassination attempt on President Trump. I’m not sure what “narratives” they’re referring to, but I know what I saw, and I know what the crowd in Butler witnessed live. At it turns out, my father-in-law lives in Pennsylvania and he was at the rally on Saturday. When the shots rang out and Trump went down, he said pandemonium broke out around him. Everyone feared the worst. But then Trump rose. Covered in his own blood, resisting the secret service’s efforts to whisk him away to safety, Trump raised his fist defiantly, and the crowd could see him say: “Fight. Fight. Fight.”

Immediately the fear of the crowd dissipated, the chaotic uncertainty lifted, and it was replaced with steely resolve. The crowd responded back as one: “USA, USA, USA!” This is not a “narrative.” It is the truth. Trump stood defiant in the face of an assassin’s bullet. There is no way to fake courage like that. It was more important for Trump to let the crowd know that he was unbowed and unbroken than to be taken to safety. Donald Trump has already been in the fight of his life for months, as vindictive Democrats seek to imprison him, but on this day he came within inches of losing it. He has risked everything for this country. It is now up to us, the American people, to show him that he does not stand alone. Let us reject the lies, the hoaxes, the hate and the division that the media has spread about this brave man, and support his resounding victory in November.

Sacks

Read more …

“..if you come at the king, you better not miss.”

• Shocks to the System (Kunstler)

[..] following the election of 2016, scores of government officials from Barack Obama and Joe Biden on down set out to wreck Mr. Trump’s turn in office, and ran one hoax after another to disable and dislodge him, and each hoax was a battery of lies begetting more lies. The style of thinking behind all that is called unprincipled. Many of these lies entailed crimes, some of them gigantic frauds perpetrated on the citizenry such as the ballot-stuffing operation that jammed “Joe Biden” into office — and which you were not permitted to speak of on penalty of cancellation and prosecution.

By 2020, “Joe Biden” had racked up enough bribes from foreign lands that he was susceptible to blackmail and thus to manipulation. That his mind was failing through his entire term only made that easier. Both “Joe Biden” and the Neocon gang at State and the CIA were implicated in a web of crimes in Ukraine, and war there was one way to cover all of it up, so they made sure that war happened. The lies and hoaxes continued to multiply, accompanied by huge, destructive pranks — the George Floyd riots, the drag queens in the kiddie classrooms, the wide-open border, the FBI-instigated J-6 riot — and the Democratic Party was embroidered in that whole tapestry of degenerate politics along with the Deep State blob.

In short, the Democratic Party appears to be guilty of programmatic treason against the people of the United States. They know that a reckoning awaits if Mr. Trump manages to return to office. They’ve known it for years. But two recent Supreme Court decisions really amped up their fears: 1) Trump v. the United States establishes presidential immunity from prosecution for acts involving his core constitutional duties; and 2) Loper Bright v. Raimondo establishes that the federal bureaucracy can no longer rule over citizens unchecked by the courts. Both of these would make it much easier for a President Trump to disassemble the Deep State. And of course, that may lead to the investigation and prosecution of Deep State personae who abused their positions — possibly even prison. . . a discomfiting prospect.

The Democratic Party’s cover got blown on June 27th when Joe Biden had to go live in a debate and displayed his mental incompetency for all to see. That shock to the system forced a scramble to replace “JB” pretty late in the election cycle, since now just enough voters may be indisposed to re-electing an obvious human wreck. But the switcheroo effort seems to have lost traction. And the party may have muffed its blackmail leverage over “Joe Biden.” After all, his briberies are all well-cataloged by the House Oversight Committee, including the vast bank records of the many shell companies set up to receive the bribe money.

Is it possible, though, that “Joe Biden” holds blackmail material over his party confederates? After all, he’s still President. He has access to things you’d never dream of and, demented as he is, he has plenty of help close at hand from Hunter, Dr. Jill, and the Lawfare posse for sorting it out. He probably knows a thing or two about his old pard Barack Obama, too, that would make some folks uncomfortable. So, looks like “JB” is fixing to hang in there as his party’s nominee, and whoever doesn’t like it can go suck an egg.

After the stunning events of Saturday evening, it also looks like candidate “Joe Biden” would go down in flames against Donald Trump on November 5, stuffed drop-boxes and all. Not a few Democratic Party bigshots have already made noises about leaving the country if that happens, possibly to nations lacking extradition treaties with the USA. Many others must be gobbling Xanax like Tic Tacs now that Donald Trump has survived the ultimate affront to his existence. You know the old nugget of wisdom: if you come at the king, you better not miss. Ooops.

Read more …

He knows very well what he said. And why.

• Biden Defends His ‘Put Trump In Bullseye’ Remark (RT)

US President Joe Biden has dismissed any notion that his rhetoric might incite violence, claiming that by calling for a “bullseye” on Donald Trump he was merely trying to shift the “focus” from his poor debate performance to his Republican rival’s actions and policies. The incumbent has repeatedly called his rival a threat to democracy and the nation and told donors earlier this month, “We’re done talking about the debate; it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.” Following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, multiple commentators argued that the violence was incited by exactly this kind of reckless remark. In an interview on Monday, Biden insisted it was a “mistake” and merely a figure of speech when NBC News anchor Lester Holt asked him about using the term “bullseye.”

“I didn’t say ‘crosshairs.’ I meant ‘bullseye,’” Biden clarified. “I meant focus on him. Focus on what he’s doing, focus on his policies, focus on the number of lies he told in the debate. Focus on… I mean there is a whole range of things that… Look, I am not the guy that said I want to be a dictator on day one. I am not the guy that refused to accept the outcome of the election.” Asked whether the shooting prompted him to do “some soul searching” and reflect on comments “that could incite people who are not balanced,” the incumbent deflected, arguing that it was Trump, not him, who has routinely used incendiary rhetoric for years.

”How do you talk about the threat to democracy, which is real, when a president says things like he says? Do you just not say something because it may incite somebody?” Biden wondered, recalling Trump’s pledge to become a “dictator” for just one day and his warning about a potential “bloodbath” if he loses. “I have not engaged in that rhetoric… My opponent has engaged in that rhetoric.” On Saturday, a gunman later identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks fired several shots at Trump while he was giving a speech on an open-air stage in Butler, Pennsylvania. A bullet grazed the former president’s right ear, but he was otherwise unharmed. One spectator was killed, and two more were wounded before the attacker was neutralized by Secret Service agents. Although the attack was widely condemned by both Republicans and Democrats, Trump supporters have argued that the Democrats and the media were guilty of inciting hatred against Trump.

Read more …

Oh puhleeze. 3 years too late?!

• Biden Orders Security For Kennedy (RT)

Independent US presidential candidate Robert Francis Kennedy Jr., whose father was killed on the campaign trail, had long requested Secret Service protection to no avail, despite multiple security incidents. US Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced on Monday that “in light of this weekend’s events, the president has directed me to work with the Secret Service to provide protection to Robert Kennedy Jr.” “Thank you, President Biden, for extending me Secret Service protection,” Kennedy said in a statement, also expressing gratitude to the security firm Gavin de Becker & Associates for “keeping me safe for the past 15 months of my presidential campaign.” The announcement comes shortly after Trump demanded that Kennedy receive protection. “In light of what is going on in the world today, I believe it is imperative that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. receive Secret Service protection – immediately,” the former president wrote on Truth Social. “Given the history of the Kennedy family, this is the obvious right thing to do!”

Kennedy met with Trump earlier on Monday to discuss “national unity,” and said he hoped to meet with “Democratic leaders about that as well,” dismissing rumors that he was planning to drop out of the race. Trump survived an assassination attempt during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday when a gunman fired at least five rounds from an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle in his direction, with one bullet grazing his right ear. A Trump supporter was killed, and two others were severely wounded in the attack. The assailant was shot dead on site by Secret Service officers. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose uncle, former U.S. President John F. Kennedy, and father, New York senator and presidential candidate, were both assassinated over half a century ago, filed an application for Secret Service protection last year. Despite several follow-ups, his requests were rejected by the White House.

Kennedy, who initially challenged Biden for the Democratic nomination before launching an independent bid last year, suffered multiple security incidents on his campaign trail. Last September, an armed man impersonating a federal officer was detained at his campaign event, while in October, a man was arrested for trespassing at his Los Angeles home.

Read more …

“Take your secret service and shove it up your ass.”

• Bobby Kennedy III Slams US Secret Service (RT)

Bobby Kennedy III, a member of the famous American political dynasty that has experienced the ‘Kennedy curse’ of assassinations, deaths, and accidents, has slammed the US Secret Service’s failure to detect Donald Trump’s attacker before he fired shots at the former president. According to eyewitnesses who spoke to the media, the suspect was seen on the rooftop of a manufacturing plant shortly before he targeted Trump during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday. “Unsecured rooftop 150 yards away. Multiple witnesses saying they were screaming at secret service and cops for 3-4 minutes as they watched the guy with the rifle crawl to the spot and line up his shot, Kennedy III wrote on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday. “Take your secret service and shove it up your ass.” Kennedy III is the son of current presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – whose uncle, former US President John F. Kennedy, and father, a New York senator and presidential candidate, were both assassinated in the 1960s.

Regarding the attempt on Trump’s life, eyewitnesses and video footage have depicted a chaotic scene as shots rang out at the event. Concerns have mounted about the level of security in the aftermath of the shooting, after multiple witnesses said police did not respond to warnings about the presence of the would-be assassin. The suspect, later identified as 20-year-old local Thomas Matthew Crooks, was killed on the spot by Secret Service snipers. One bystander told the BBC that minutes before the attack, he and other people had seen a man crawling up on the roof carrying a rifle, and had tried to alert the police. “He had a rifle, we could clearly see a rifle,” Greg Smith told the broadcaster. “We’re like, ‘Hey man, there’s a guy on the roof with a rifle’… and the police did not know what was going on.”

In another report, law enforcement officials told the AP that a local policeman had spotted the shooter on the roof moments before he tried to kill Trump. However, the officer reportedly failed to stop the gunman after he pointed his AR-style rifle at him. “The fact that we’re hearing that people knew that there was a man on this roof with a gun, and were trying to get police attention while the president was up at the podium is just incredibly cause for concern and, I think, very frustrating for everyone,” Mike Turner, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN on Sunday. Trump narrowly escaped death after his attacker fired at least five shots. The presidential candidate was grazed by one of the bullets, sustaining a wound to his right ear. At least one rallygoer was killed in the attack by stray bullets, with two others sustaining gunshot wounds.

Read more …

“After numerous attempts to eliminate the Trump candidate from the political arena using first legal tools, attempts to politically discredit and compromise the candidate, it was obvious for his life to be in danger.”

• Russian Reaction To The Trump Assassination Attempt Is Biblical (Helmer)

The Russian reaction to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump is a combination – idol, whirlwind, sin, destruction, God, payoff — plus deep suspicion that either President Joseph Biden or Trump’s organization, or both of them, had a hand in fabricating what happened, plus conviction that they are now capitalizing on the outcome for all they are worth. The official line was given by the Foreign Ministry’s spokesman on sowing the whirlwind. The Kremlin spokesman followed with the calf of Samaria. “Yesterday,” wrote Maria Zakharova of the Foreign Ministry on Telegram, “one of the leaders of the Kiev regime, [Kirill] Budanov, openly admitted that Ukrainian intelligence was preparing attempts on the President of Russia. So this attempt was being prepared, again, for American money, without which there would have been no malicious activity of the GUR, the SBU and, in general, Bankova [the presidential office ].

With massive financing and uncontrolled supply of weapons, Washington has created a terrorist structure in Ukraine – the Kiev regime. It is a machine of murders, bombings, exterminations, and terrorist attacks against both political figures and civilians…TheUnited States of America should take stock of its policy of inciting hatred against political opponents, countries and people, and sponsoring terrorism. The bell is already ringing for Washington!” Dmitry Peskov for President Vladimir Putin said there is “no plan” for the latter to telephone Trump. He then implied the Biden plot by making a qualified denial. “We do not think and do not believe that the attempt to eliminate the presidential candidate Trump was organized by the current authorities, but the atmosphere that was created by this administration in the course of the political struggle, the atmosphere around the candidate Trump, it was that which provoked what today faced with America.”

Peskov then tipped the Kremlin in Trump’s direction: “After numerous attempts to eliminate the Trump candidate from the political arena using first legal tools, attempts to politically discredit and compromise the candidate, it was obvious for his life to be in danger.” The state news agency RIA-Novosti tipped even further for Trump. “The assassination attempt on Donald Trump is surprising only because it happened on July 13, and not earlier — a year, three or eight years ago. The upstart, who challenged not only most of the American establishment, but also the ‘Washington swamp’ as such, has risked his head very much all these years… It is clear that now the ‘swamp denizens’ are biting their elbows because they did not think to kill Trump before November 2016: they underestimated the threat, did not believe in the reality of his victory.”

Tsargrad, an internet platform of Russian exceptionalism and Orthodoxy, treats Trump as a Russian ally in the war against Biden. “A bullet in Trump’s head is a blow to Russia: What remains behind the scenes of the assassination attempt on the ex-president of the United States — a real assassination attempt or a staging? The question, in fact, is not idle, especially in relation to Russia. After the appearance of an increasing number of details in the case of the attempted assassination of former US President Donald Trump, a lot of interesting things come up behind the scenes of the assassination attempt… This is the true face of hegemony and the unipolar world: anyone who is against globalism, who stands in its way, is first subject to demonization (through the tools of the abolition culture), then physical elimination…Globalists don’t care about the United States, just like everyone else. They need planetary power, the absolute power of supernational capital. And all countries, including America and Europe itself, are just tools in creating a World Government. Trump is for America and against the World Government. As Putin is for Russia, Xi Jinping is for China, Modi is for India, and Orban, Fico, Marine Le Pen and AfD are for Europe,”

Read more …

Can he try again? Perhaps not as Special Counsel?

• Trump Classified Docs Case Dismissed, Jack Smith Unconstitutional (ZH)

US District Court Judge Eileen 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 ruling comes after Judge Cannon had indefinitely postponed the trial, and followed a May hearing in which Trump and co-defendant Walt Nauta argued that the Justice Department’s Special Counsel’s Office decision to prosecute the valet was “both selective and vindictive.”

The ruling marks another blockbuster legal victory for Trump, following the Supreme Court’s July 1 ruling that the former president has immunity from prosecution for many of his actions in office. According to Reuters, prosecutors are likely to appeal the ruling, as courts in other cases have repeatedly upheld the ability of the DOJ to appoint special counsels for politically sensitive investigations. But Cannon’s ruling throws the future of the case, which once posed serious legal peril for Trump, into doubt. Smith is also prosecuting Trump in federal court in Washington over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, but his lawyers have not made a similar challenge to the special counsel in that case.

In the documents case, Trump was indicted on charges that he willfully retained sensitive national security documents at his Mar-a-Lago social club after leaving office and obstructed government efforts to retrieve the material. Trump’s attorneys challenged the legal authority of Biden AG Merrick Garland’s 2022 decision to appoint Smith – arguing that the appointment violated the Constitution because his office was not created by Congress, nor was Smith confirmed by the Senate.

Meanwhile, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas also boosted Trump’s challenge – directly questioning the constitutionality of Smith’s appointment. Thomas used similar arguments to those made by Trump’s legal team.

Read more …

Ha! They pull their no. 1 show just “to provide coverage via a single news feed..”

• MSNBC Yanks Morning Joe On Fears Of Inappropriate Trump Shooting Comments (ZH)

MSNBC has taken its celebrated “Morning Joe” off-air on Monday reportedly on fears that their well-known leftist hosts could say the wrong thing or something deeply insensitive about the Saturday Trump assassination attempt which could leave the network in a bind. The show is missing in action on this crucial day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. “The progressive news network confirmed the decision to preempt its influential and top-rated morning show after a CNN inquiry Sunday evening,” CNN confirms. “The network said the show will resume airing Tuesday.” As speculation abounds, and as some try to dubiously claim that it’s ‘normal’ for Morning Joe to not air during a major political news event, NBC issued the following statement: “Given the gravity and complexity of this unfolding story, NBC News, NBC News NOW and MSNBC have remained in rolling breaking news coverage since Saturday evening,” a spokesperson said.

The press release followed with: “As we continue to cover this story into the week, the networks will continue to cross simulcast, alternating between NBC News, NBC News NOW and ‘MSNBC Reports,’ so there is one news feed covering this developing situation.” CNN then admitted the following based on one of its sources: “A person familiar with the matter told CNN that the decision was made to avoid a scenario in which one of the show’s stable of two dozen-plus guests might make an inappropriate comment on live television that could be used to assail the program and network as a whole.” Indeed there is a long history of show hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski making astounding and highly incendiary claims which leave network executives facing scrutiny and having to field difficult questions. At the very least, the decision to pull the program on Monday displays lack of trust in the long-running program and hosts by top network leadership.

Conservative pundit Laura Loomer sounded off in wake of the decision, pointing out the following: “MSNBC has pulled Morning Joe off air this week because they don’t think their leftist hosts can control themselves from celebrating the attempted assassination of President Trump. Let’s be honest. The rhetoric from MSDNC, CNN, WAPO, NY TIMES and Joe Biden is a contributing factor to why Donald Trump almost had a bullet in his skull this week. They have been inciting violence against Trump for years, calling him Hitler, saying he’s a dictator and a “threat to democracy”. The shooter was probably even a Morning Joe viewer. I’d be willing to take that bet.”

Ironically some on the Left are miffed at the display of obvious lack of trust, with Liberal journalist Jeff Jarvis questioning on X, “What the f—, MSNBC? You preempted your excellent weekend programming… and now you’ve silenced [Morning Joe] in favor of your anodyne streaming news cos-play called Now?” “This is when we need the analysis and conversation these shows bring us (yes, with controversy; that is how public discourse works through it: with discussion),” he continued. “It is shocking that NBC/Comcast do not understand their own company’s programs and raison d’etre.” But again, MSNBC has not alluded to any deeper reasons behind temporarily pulling the program other than to say it wishes to provide coverage via a single news feed.

Read more …

Media.

• There’s Another Culprit In The Trump Murder Attempt (Bridge)

Americans from across the political spectrum were treated to yet more evidence that Donald Trump is an invincible force that cannot be easily reckoned with. But this perception will do little to mitigate the media hostility that poisons the US political scene. Everyone knew it was just a matter of time. Trump, who was addressing a crowd of supporters in Butler, Pennsylvania, was grazed by an assassin’s bullet during a campaign speech (how the would-be killer managed to get so close to the Republican frontrunner amid an army of Secret Service agents is a question for another day). What must concern Americans now is what exactly triggered this latest display of political violence. Several commentators pointed to reckless remarks Joe Biden made on a call with donors earlier this month, when the incumbent leader reportedly said: “I have one job, and that’s to beat Donald Trump… So, we’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”

JD Vance, the senator from Ohio and a top contender to be Trump’s running mate, said in a statement on X (formerly Twitter): “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” While that is true, it is the media that happily promulgates such dangerous messages and which must be held at least partially responsible for the atmosphere of hate that now permeates the US political scene. While we constantly hear reports about unhinged individuals being ‘politically motivated,’ how about we give more attention to those who have been ‘media motivated’?

For starters, consider last month’s issue of the New Republic, a left-leaning political journal that featured on its cover a portrait of Trump made to resemble Adolf Hitler along with the inscription, “American fascism, what it would look like.” One month later and on the day of the shooting, the journal was whistling a different tune. “As I write these words, we don’t know what motivated 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks to try to assassinate Trump,” wrote the TNR columnist Michael Tomasky, feigning ignorance and disbelief. “But whatever his motivation turns out to be, his act not isolated (sic)… I’d write that we’re about to enter a very dark period, but in fact we entered it long ago, and there’s no end in sight.”

You don’t say, Michael? As to be expected, there was no sign of Trump sporting the Hitler moustache to accompany the article. After reading literally hundreds of such hypocritical pieces that totally lack self-awareness, it becomes more obvious that the entire political field is rigged in favor of one team, namely the Democrats, over those of the Republicans. While the two factions enjoy roughly 50% support of the electorate, it’s no secret (although a great mystery) that the liberal left enjoys far greater public reach due to its overwhelming control of the national media. Thus, Democrats have much greater trust in the media since it generally reflects their own values.

Read more …

“..based on a realistic assessment of the situation” and on setting “realistic goals..”

• Orban Delivers Ukraine Peace Proposals To EU (RT)

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has sent proposals to EU leaders on ways to resolve the Ukrainian conflict, newspaper Magyar Nemzet reported on Monday, citing the PM’s political adviser Balazs Orban. The proposals are said to be based on the results of the premier’s controversial peace mission earlier this month, during which he visited Ukraine, Russia, and China. Orban provided EU leaders with a detailed account of his visits, and delivered Budapest’s action plan to their desks, Balazs Orban (no relation) told the newspaper. The adviser described Budapest’s proposals as being “based on a realistic assessment of the situation” and on setting “realistic goals,” without elaborating further. Balazs Orban claimed that there are “pro-war” political forces in the EU, and that the bloc is following the lead of the current US administration, which, he said, wants the conflict to continue.

”If Europe wants peace and wants to have a decisive say in the settlement of the war [in Ukraine] and the end of the bloodshed, then the change of course must be worked out and implemented now,” the adviser said. Hungary is one of the few member states to criticize the bloc’s stance on the conflict. Budapest has refused to go along with Brussels and send weapons to Kiev. It has also stalled financial aid to Ukraine. Viktor Orban’s recent visit to Moscow was condemned by senior EU figures, with Brussels seeking to distance itself from Orban’s efforts. According to the prime minister’s adviser, external mediators, such as China and Türkiye, could be vital to helping negotiate peace.

Hungary plans to use the six months of its rotating presidency of the, which began in July, to create conditions for peace talks. “If the union does not act now, it may not be able to act later,” Balazs Orban warned. During his visit to Kiev, the Hungarian leader called on Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky to agree to a ceasefire with Russia, a proposal the latter rejected. President Putin has repeatedly insisted that the hostilities can only end if Ukraine fulfills several of Russia’s demands – including legally binding guarantees that Kiev will not seek NATO membership, and the withdrawal of troops from the whole of Donbass, as well as the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions. Kiev, along with its Western backers, have rejected the proposal, calling it an unacceptable ultimatum.

Read more …

They want NO FUTURE. None.

• Ex-US NATO Ambassador Tells Ukraine To Conscript Teenagers (RT)

Kiev should send 18-year-olds to fight Russia to increase the likelihood of victory, former US ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder has argued. Earlier this year, Ukraine lowered the draft threshold from 27 to 25 years as part of a major overhaul of the military service system, aimed at boosting mobilization rates. “This is a war being fought by 40-year-olds,” Daalder told Euronews on the sidelines of last week’s NATO summit in the US. “No other war in history has been fought by 40-year-olds.” “You need to get 18-year-olds, and you need to get 20-year-olds, and you need to get 21-year-olds, which is what every army in the rest of the world relies on,” he added. Both Russia and Ukraine have a system of mandatory conscription of young adult males, but 18-years-olds are not deployed to the frontline by either country.

Moscow has said it fully relies on contracted volunteers rather than mobilized reservists in the conflict with its NATO-backed neighbor, with roughly 1,000 people recruited per day, according to senior Russian officials. Daalder served as the US ambassador under President Barack Obama. He currently heads the Chicago Council of Global Affairs, a prominent corporate-funded think tank known for a hawkish foreign policy. Kiev has reformed its military since suffering significant casualties during last year’s failed attempt to push back Russian forces using Western-donated weapons. Draft avoidance emerged as a major problem, with many Ukrainian men risking their lives trying to cross the western border illegally. Weeks before Vladimir Zelensky signed into law the lowering of the draft age, US Senator Lindsey Graham urged him to do so during a trip to Kiev.

He said: “I would hope that those eligible to serve in the Ukrainian military would join. I can’t believe it’s at 27. You’re in a fight for your life, so you should be serving – not at 25 or 27.” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged Ukrainian citizens to embrace the new rules, after they took effect in May. “Your recent mobilization was a difficult decision, but a necessary one,” he said in a speech at a prestigious Ukrainian university. Joining the military will “allow you to harden your defenses, to build more units, to take the fight to Russian aggressors.” Ukrainian lawmaker Roman Lozinsky said last month that a further reduction of the draft age was possible “if we are still fighting for our existence.” His political party Golos is widely considered to be aligned with US interests in the country.

Read more …

“The Global Alliance for Responsible Media is too sophisticated to simply bullhorn groups into silence. Instead, it strangles them financially.”

• Elon Musk is Right: End the Online Censorship Racket (Turley)

Few Americans have ever heard of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, let alone understand how it shapes what they read and hear in news and commentary. That may soon change. An alarming new report of the House Judiciary Committee details this organization’s work to censor conservative and opposing viewpoints in the media by targeting figures such as Joe Rogan and entire social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter). It is part of a massive censorship system that a federal court recently described as “Orwellian.” The sophistication of this system makes authoritarian regimes like China’s and Iran’s look like mere amateurs in censorship and blacklisting. In my new book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in the Age of Rage,” I discuss our history of speech crackdowns and how this is arguably the most dangerous anti-free speech period that we have faced as a nation. The reason is an unprecedented alliance of government, corporate, academic and media institutions supporting censorship and the targeting of largely conservative viewpoints.

As discussed in the book, there is a crushing irony to the current anti-free speech movement. During the Red Scare and the McCarthy period, it was the left that was targeted with blacklisting, censorship and arrests. It is now the left that has constructed a global censorship system that exceeds anything that Joe McCarthy even dreamt of in the control of news and commentary. Through the years, I have testified repeatedly in Congress on this system supported enthusiastically by President Biden and his administration. It has proven to be a frustrating game of whack-a-mole for civil libertarians. The Democrats in Congress have uniformly opposed any investigation or action on censorship while denying for years that there was a coordinated effort between government and corporations. When we were successful in uncovering components of this system, they were often quickly shut down as the work shifted to other components and assets.

One of the most insidious efforts has been to strangle the financial life out of conservative or libertarian sites by targeting their donors and advertisers. This is where the left has excelled beyond anything that has come before in speech crackdowns. Years ago, I wrote about the Biden administration supporting efforts like the Global Disinformation Index to discourage advertisers from supporting certain sites. All of the 10 riskiest sites targeted by the index were popular with conservatives, libertarians and independents. That included Reason.org and a group of libertarian and conservative law professors who simply write about cases and legal controversies. The Global Disinformation Index warned advertisers against “financially supporting disinformation online.” At the same time, HuffPost, a far-left media outlet, was included among the 10 sites at lowest risk of spreading disinformation.

Once that index’s work and bias was disclosed, government officials quickly disavowed the funding. It was a familiar pattern. Within a few years, we found that the work had been shifted instead to groups like the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, which is the same thing on steroids. It is the creation of a powerful and largely unknown group called the World Federation of Advertisers, which has huge sway over the advertising industry and was quickly used by liberal activists to silence opposing views and sites by cutting off their revenue streams. These censorship groups typically proclaim that they are merely trying to promote “brand safety” when they target for suppression the same sites that challenge the political and media establishment. The group states that it “unites marketers, media agencies, media platforms, industry associations, and advertising technology solutions providers to safeguard the potential of digital media by reducing the availability and monetization of harmful content online.”

That “harmful content” seems to be the very same sites long targeted by the Biden administration and its allies in business, the media and academia. The internal communications of these censorship groups demonstrate their contributors’ underlying agenda. In one conversation between Global Alliance for Responsible Media co-founder Rob Rakowitz and individuals with an associated “GroupM,” two executives explained to Rakowitz how they identified sites that they did not like and simply monitored them until they could find something that crossed the line. An example is the Daily Wire, a site hated by liberals for its conservative viewpoints and critiques of mainstream media.

In describing how they work to bag such sites, John Montgomery, executive vice president of Global Brand Safety, explained: “There is an interesting parallel here with Breitbart. Before Breitbart crossed the line and started spouting blatant misinformation, we had long discussions about whether we should include them on our exclusion lists. As much as we hated their ideology and bulls–t, we couldn’t really justify blocking them for misguided opinion. We watched them very carefully and it didn’t take long for them to cross the line.” In other words, they preselected the sites and then followed their every move like a patrol unit following a car to wait for them to go one mile per hour over the limit. This is called “deplatforming,” a favorite term from higher education, whereby liberal groups organize to shout down and block speakers with opposing views. The Global Alliance for Responsible Media is too sophisticated to simply bullhorn groups into silence. Instead, it strangles them financially.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Pepsi

 

 

Meonk


https://twitter.com/i/status/1812845098469908600

 

 

Pigeon cat

 

 

Elephant
https://twitter.com/i/status/1812727308475683222

 

 

Orca

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in wartime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.