Thursday, October 17, 2024
DJ Trump rips up the political script, and brings down house
Donald Trump’s town hall at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Centre, in the suburbs of Pennsylvania’s most populous city, became an impromptu concert on Monday night (Tuesday AEDT) when the former president ditched the political script and fired up the base, cranking out hits from Franz Schubert’s Ave Maria to gay anthem YMCA by Village People.
“Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music … Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” the likely future Republican president declared before launching into a nearly 40-minute DJ session – unprecedented in US presidential campaign history – from his personal playlist.
The 78-year-old bopped and jived onstage at his Oaks indoor campaign rally before thousands of adoring fans in his characteristic style. The episode infuriated Democrats, who seized on it as evidence of Trump’s supposed cognitive decline. “I hope he’s OK,” Kamala Harris’s campaign team sneered on social media.
But that wasn’t the full story. Two attendees had just fainted in the cramped hall. “Would anybody else like to faint?” Trump joked to laughter before launching his music session, which included Guns N’ Roses’ November Rain and Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U.
Even South Dakota Republican governor Kristi Noem, who was co-hosting the rally, appeared shocked that her leader had flicked the switch to vaudeville, literally.
Trump felt the moment demanded music after the two health episodes soured the mood. And he was right. “Nobody’s leaving,” Trump teased the crowd. “What’s going on?”
And he was OK, too, as evidenced less than 24 hours later when he sat down in Chicago with Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait for by far the most intellectually demanding one-hour interview on economics and geopolitics of the US campaign so far, to numerous standing ovations from an elite business audience.
That 24-hour period highlighted the contrasts of this campaign: the most unscripted and genuine, however flawed, candidate in US presidential politics up against the most scripted and fabricated.
By all means, support Democrats for policy or other reasons, but this is surely undeniable. Imagine being Trump’s political advisers in September after he declared women “won’t be thinking about abortion”, Democrats’ top campaign issue, if he’s elected.
While Trump dominated an exchange with one of the top English journalists, Harris sat down on Tuesday (Wednesday AEDT) with black youth podcaster Charlamagne Tha God, hot on the heels of her Call Her Daddy interview a week earlier.
“I say the same thing when I go to Detroit as I do in Philly,” Harris told him, when asked whether it was awkward that she repeated the same tired phrases: “opportunity economy”, “time to turn the page”, “middle-class background”.
And all this in the same week that even establishment left-wing media had to cover accusations the Vice-President had plagiarised numerous sections, including word for word from Wikipedia, of her 2009 book Smart on Crime.
This is surely why the Washington establishment loathes Trump so much. He will be far harder to manage than Joe Biden and certainly Harris should she succeed him. Trump, whatever you think of him, is what the founding fathers of the US envisaged, an independent leader who makes his own decisions, in charge of the executive branch rather than controlled by it.
Democrats must be hoping Trump self-sabotages as Harris’s slender polling advantage steadily erodes. When he announced his candidacy in late 2022 I had thought Trump was an appalling candidate, likely to lose, and hoped Florida Governor Ron DeSantis would thrash him. But I, like most of the media, was wrong. Trump 2.0 appears sharper, more disciplined than Trump 1.0.
His behaviour in July when he was almost killed was undeniably courageous and eerily fateful even for the unreligious. Who of us would have stood up under a hail of bullets, inquired about our shoes and later refused hospital care? Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, whose hopes of a Harris victory I’ve come to believe, must have been astonished. This was real – and, to be fair, unexpected from a perennial Vietnam draft dodger – courage.
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign rally in Douglas, Arizona.
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign rally in Douglas, Arizona.
The only presidential candidate to exhibit more bravery in similar circumstances was Theodore Roosevelt, who insisted on finishing his speech, bleeding, after being shot in 1912.
Even Trump’s vitality has surprised me. A gaunt and lethargic Bill Clinton, who is the same age as Trump, appeared on the Democrats’ campaign trail this week, the former political maestro delivering Republicans a golden video when he declared an illegal immigrant wouldn’t have been able to commit murder in the US had the border been properly vetted.
I don’t want this to read like hagiography. If Republicans lose this unlosable election, which is sure to be close, it will be because of Trump’s political baggage, a mix of forced and unforced errors from his time in the White House, prove insurmountable.
DeSantis or Nikki Haley would have trounced Biden or Harris by a far greater margin given the miserable record of the Biden administration, inflation, unconscionable illegal immigration and a host of unpopular cultural positions the Democrats insist on shoving down the throats of middle America come what may.
Trump is the betting market favourite three weeks out from polling day and a handful of points behind in national polls. Harris will appear on Fox News on Wednesday (Thursday AEDT), which could signal a lack of confidence in her prospects among campaign staff. The idea that Trump would go on MSNBC is laughable.
After near 40 minutes DJing, Trump left the stage as Memory, from the musical Cats, played. If Trump loses, no one is going to forget this campaign or the unlikeliest of political comebacks.
We should relish the contrast in style while it lasts; it’s unlikely to be repeated for generations.
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Disdain for Trump all we learned from angry Harris’s Fox interview
Few viewers would have emerged from watching Kamala Harris’s highly combative interview with Fox News having learned anything about her or her policies except her visceral disdain for Donald Trump.
During the 30 minute interview with Bret Baier, she became at times visibly furious with his lines of questioning. But it was Trump’s rhetoric and mental state that she repeatedly attacked throughout, adding that she would “support and enforce federal law” as president.
Baier and Harris talked over each other continually, and most of Harris’s answers tended toward verbiage - grammatically correct, but saying very little concrete.
“I am running on ‘turning the page’ from the last decade in which we have been burdened with the kind of rhetoric coming from Donald Trump,” she said at one stage, using two phrases about pages and burdens for which she’s often mocked.
Baier began predictably with perhaps Democrats’ weakest policy area, illegal immigration, challenging Harris to state the number of illegal immigrants her administration had allowed to enter the US, which official estimates put to be at least six million.
Harris refused to acknowledge the unprecedented surge had anything to do with Biden administration, and wouldn’t apologise to the families who had lost loved ones after they were murdered by illegal immigrants, events even Bill Clinton conceded earlier in the week might not have happened had the border been more secure.
“Of course, to the extent our administration’s policies had anything to do with those tragic murders, we apologise, and my administration will do much better” was what she should have humbly said, rather than blaming Donald Trump whose border policies were immediately reversed by Joe Biden in early 2021.
At least she gave a stronger answer when asked how she would be different from Joe Biden as president, a question she flunked terribly last week in a soft-ball interview on The View, where she said she couldn’t think of anything she’d do differently.
“I will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency; like every new president I will bring my life experience, professional experience, fresh and new ideas, I’m a new generation of leadership,” she said.
“For example I have not spent the majority of my career in DC,” she added, quickly trying to talk about her policies to bring down the cost of housing.
Harris ‘lost it’ when Baier played a clip of Donald Trump, who was asked earlier on Fox what he’d meant by his controversial claim the US had “an enemy within”, claiming the clip played was unfair.
When Baier challenged on why and how she had changed her positions on public funding for sex change operations or decriminalisation of illegal immigration, she gave unclear answers.
For Harris critics, the interview will be rich fodder to claim she’s not up to the task of being president. Her performance was at least as much the result of the very bad hand she’s been dealt: trying to defend the Biden administration of which she’s been a central part, whose track record is so unpopular.
It’s difficult to find many positive let alone effusive comments on Harris’s performance on social media. It’s unlikely she’ll give another Fox interview before November 5, but she deserves credit for at least agreeing to it. And it would be great to see Trump in an interview on MSNBC, but given he believes he’s ahead, that’s unlikely.
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All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Trump Is Running A ‘Dudes Rock’ Campaign. It’s Actually Working Pretty Well
If you’re a politician and want to appeal to young men, you shouldn’t spend years belittling them and then, in the eleventh hour, send a Marxist Mr. Magoo candidate on a pheasant hunt only for him to fumble around with a shotgun.
You also shouldn’t hire paid actors and a Jimmy Kimmel writer to whip up a cringe ad about how masculine men aren’t afraid to support a woman like Kamala Harris. But that’s exactly what the Harris-Walz campaign is doing in the final stretches of the race to court all the young men they’ve spent years alienating. They are attempting to repair a brand that has been Bud-Lighted. (RELATED: Democrats Bud Lighted Their Entire Brand, And It’s Too Late To Save It)
Trump, on the other hand, appears to be running a “Dudes Rock” campaign.
What is a Dudes Rock campaign, you might ask? A Dudes Rock campaign is going on a male-centric podcast, instead of a sex advice podcast like “Call Her Daddy,” and chopping it up with a couple dudes about football.
It’s all the UFC appearances Trump has made in the past year. It’s inviting Elon Musk to a campaign rally. It’s the various podcast interviews with the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Logan Paul and Theo Von.
And it seems to be working. While Harris and Walz make flaccid, last-ditch efforts to win over men, mainly by doing and saying things that men will find fake and obnoxious, Trump is just being himself, on whatever platform is offered him, and building on his lead among young males between the ages of 18 and 29.
In late August, journalist Peter Hamby warned Bill Maher that a shift in young men toward Trump could blow up Kamala’s hopes of becoming the first female president.
“This is a real issue for Kamala Harris,” Hamby said. “This could be fatal for her campaign … Democrats need to win 60% of the youth vote to win the White House.”
“Hillary came up short; Obama did it; Biden did it. Kamala Harris is right now at, like, 55% of the youth vote,” he went on to say. “If she doesn’t get to 60, she could lose the election, and it’s because young men, Gen Z men, are breaking to Trump.”
This election might really come down to dudes who rock. We shall see.
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US Boots Hit Ground In Israel As Threat From Iran Looms
U.S. servicemembers arrived in Israel on Monday amid the country’s chaotic multifront war with various actors in the region, and more troops will arrive soon, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.
The Pentagon previously announced on Sunday that the troops would be deployed to the Middle East along with a Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile battery system, meant to help Israel defend itself against potential aerial attacks against missile attacks from Iran. The approximately 100 troops that arrived on Monday will help operate the THAAD system, though the Pentagon wouldn’t say when it would be operational, given the sensitive security nature of the situation.
“Over the coming days, additional U.S. military personnel and THAAD battery components will continue to arrive in Israel,” Pentagon spokesman Pat Ryder said on Tuesday. “The deployment of the THAAD battery to Israel underscores the United States’ commitment to the defense of Israel and to defend Americans in Israel from any ballistic missile attacks by Iran.”
Though U.S. forces are not permanently stationed in Israel — unlike other Arab states in the region — it isn’t untypical for troops to be temporarily deployed there for joint training exercises or operational activities. The U.S. also previously deployed a THAAD system to Israel in 2019 and 2023.
The THAAD system that’s been deployed to Israel now is to provide defenses against a possible Iranian ballistic missile attack. Iran launched hundreds of ballistic missiles against Israel in April, and again in late September; it is highly unusual for Iran to launch strikes from within its own orders, as it typically relies on its various terror networks throughout the Middle East to conduct attacks against Israel or U.S. forces in the region.
The current situation in the Middle East is fraught, however, and is quickly escalating. Israel went to war against Hamas in Gaza on Oct. 7, after the terrorist group invaded Israel and killed roughly 1,200 people, and now the current war is turning toward Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iran.
The Biden-Harris administration has urged for caution and de-escalation in the region for months, though the conflict has shown no signs of slowing down. Various ceasefire deals have been discussed though none have come to fruition, as neither Israel, Hamas or Hezbollah seems interested.
U.S. forces have fallen under the crossfire in the conflict in Iraq, Syria and Jordan over the last year; three U.S. servicemembers were killed in a terrorist attack against a coalition base in Jordan in January.
https://dailycaller.com/2024/10/15/us-boots-hit-ground-in-israel-as-threat-from-iran-looms/
********************************************************Leading German Political Journalist Says Banning anti-immigrant party is “Overdue” and Insists Political Repression is Perfectly Fine When Exercised by a “Constitutional State”
The German elite are getting ants in their pants over the rise in popularity of Germany's AfD -- a real conservative party
This man is named Marco Wanderwitz. He is a member of the nominally centre-Right Christian Democratic Union, and he’s been in the German Bundestag – our federal Parliament – since 2002. He reached perhaps the apex of his career late in the era of Angela Merkel, when he was made Parliamentary State Secretary for East Germany. Wanderwitz has been complaining about Alternative für Deutschland for years, and his screeching only gained in volume and shrillness after he lost his direct mandate in the last federal election to Mike Moncsek, his AfD rival. Above all, Wanderwitz wants to ban the AfD, and he has finally gathered enough support to bring the whole question before the Bundestag. Thus we will be treated to eminently democratic debate about how we must defend democracy by prohibiting the second-strongest-polling party in the Federal Republic.
Now, I try not to do unnecessary drama here at the plague chronicle, so I must tell you straightaway that this won’t go anywhere. Even were the Bundestag to approve a ban, which it won’t, the whole matter would end up before the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, where I suspect it would fail in any case. Basically, the AfD is accumulating popular support faster than our ruling cartel parties can summon their collective will for overtly authoritarian interventions, and as long as this dynamic continues, the AfD will scrape by.
A great many influential people nevertheless really, really want to outlaw the opposition and effectively disenfranchise 20% of the German electorate. Our journalistic luminaries in particular have become deeply radicalised over the past three years. They got everything they ever wanted in the form of our present Social Democrat- and Green-dominated Government, only to have their political dream turn into an enormous steaming pile of shit. Because the establishment parties, including the CDU, have no answers to the crises besetting Germany, they have had to watch popular support for the AfD grow and grow. All their carefully curated talk-show tut-tutting, all their artfully coordinated diatribes about “Right wing extremism”, all their transparently hostile reporting, has done nothing to reverse the trend. If establishment journalists were running the show, the AfD would have long been banned and many of their politicians would be in prison.
Today, Germany’s largest newsweekly, Die Zeit, has published a long piece by Political Editor Eva Ricarda Lautsch, in which she explains to 1.95 millions readers exactly why “banning the AfD is overdue”. The views she expresses are absolutely commonplace among elite German urbanites, and for this reason alone the article is sobering.
Let’s read it together.
Lautsch is disquieted that many in the Bundestag fear banning the AfD is “too risky”, “too soon” and “simply undemocratic”, and that “the necessary political momentum is not materialising”.
The problem… is not the lack of occasions for banning the AfD. Sayings like “We will hunt them down”, Sturmabteilung slogans, deportation fantasies: we have long since become accustomed to their constant rabble-rousing. And this is to say nothing of the most recent and particularly shocking occasion – the disastrous opening session of the Thuringian state parliament a week ago, in which an AfD Senior President was able to effectively suspend parliamentary business for hours. Those with enough power to generate momentum don’t have to wait for it; what is missing across the parties is political courage.
What really distinguishes Lautsch’s article (and mainstream discussion about the AfD in general) is the constant grasping after reasons that the party is bad and unconstitutional, and the failure ever to deliver anything convincing. That “we will hunt them down” line comes from a speech the AfD politician Alexander Gauland gave in 2017, after his party entered the Bundestag with 12.6% of the vote for the first time. As even BILD reported, he meant that the AfD would take a hard, confrontational line against the establishment. He was not promising that AfD representatives would literally hunt down Angela Merkel, although the quote immediately entered the canonical list of evil AfD statements and has been repeated thousands of times by hack journalists ever since. As for the “Sturmabteilung slogans,” the “deportation fantasies” and the “opening session of the Thuringian state parliament” – I’ve covered all of that here at the plague chronicle. They are lies and frivolities, and what’s more, they are so obviously lies and frivolities that it is impossible to believe even Lautsch thinks very much of them. These are things that low-information readers of Die Zeit are supposed to find convincing; they aren’t real reasons.
Perhaps this is why Lautsch backtracks, deciding suddenly that the case for banning the AfD may not be all that obvious after all. She admits that it is “legally risky” because, for a ban to succeed, somebody would have “to prove… that [the AfD] is working to destroy the free democratic order”. This is very hard to do because “it is part of the AfD’s strategy to present itself as the party of true democrats and defenders of the constitution” even though “its representatives have long been working to dismantle the institutions of our Basic Law from within”. Thus, as always, the absence of evidence for anything untoward about the AfD becomes evidence for its malicious, underhanded, democracy-undermining strategies.
Lautsch, desperate to climb out of this circular argument, first seizes upon the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution – the domestic intelligence agency that has been spying on the AfD for years. She insists that it has “already collected extensive material… which in itself could be used to justify a ban”. Lautsch’s “could” is doing a great deal of work here. The problem is that nobody, least of all Lautsch, has any idea what material the constitutional protectors have compiled. We can, however, try to learn from similar cases where we know more. Back in February, for example, I took a very close look at the information the constitutional protectors had amassed on Hans-Georg Maaßen. It was far from encouraging, and the truth is that if our political goons had anything that could really do in the AfD, we would’ve heard about it long ago.
As Lautsch continues, she strays ever further from making any kind of rational case. The last concrete complaint she raises is her claim that “the AfD is shifting the boundaries [of discourse] ever further in the direction of an ethnic conception” of Germanness, and that at the notorious “secret Potsdam meeting” the AfD politician Ulrich Siegmund said some untoward things about foreign restaurants. She rushes past these points, sensing their weakness, and spends the rest of this section on bizarre and irrelevant matters:
There is also the AfD’s self-representation as the representative of the true will of the people. That in itself has little to do with parliamentary democracy. Anyone who claims to already know the will of the people is unlikely to engage in parliamentary debate. The AfD therefore uses parliament primarily as a stage for staging the inflammatory speeches of its representatives and then distributing them on YouTube and TikTok. These are addressed directly to the “people” – and thus removed from parliamentary discussion.
Literally all politicians claim to represent the popular will and to act in popular interests. None of this is illegal or even remotely wrong. The AfD is an opposition party, excluded by the reigning cartel system from participation in government, and so of course it uses parliamentary debate to criticise the lunatics in charge and use social media to distribute its speeches to supporters. What kind of complaints are these? Does Lautsch really want to ban the AfD because it’s good at TikTok?
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All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Tuesday, October 15, 2024
Iran's very limited options
Iran has been on the brink of possessing nukes for years now. How come that they have failed to take the final step? Easy. There is no way they could use them. They know very well that Iran would be obliterated if it fired nukes at Israel. Safest not to have them
A year after the Hamas atrocities, put to one side the street theatre of protests and Labor’s confused talking points and ask: what really is happening in the Middle East?
On October 7 last year Israel suffered the worst intelligence and defence failure since the country was founded. But now it has overcome internal political divisions to re-emerge as the strongest military power in the region.
Jerusalem has re-established deterrence dominance because of intelligence, targeting and force projection capabilities that its enemies can’t match. Now it is pushing hard to deliver a victory over Iran and its proxies that no one expected. The country has rallied because Israelis know their survival is at risk. The louder the “progressive” assault against Israel in Western democracies, the harder Israel will fight for its security.
By contrast, Iran is failing. Hezbollah, the jewel in the crown of Tehran’s foreign policy, has been blinded, its leadership killed or, literally, crippled. Israel may have started with the aim of pushing terrorist rocket launchers away from its northern border, now Benjamin Netanyahu has a shot to help the Lebanese rise up against the Iranian forces ruining the once-prosperous country.
Hamas and much of Gaza is destroyed. What emerges from the rubble will never commit atrocities again on their Jewish neighbours. War is cruel, but it is better to win than lose.
Tehran’s mullahs know many, probably most, of their people hate them. They rule by fear alone. They see the hollowness of their goosestepping military and dread Mossad’s proven ability to hit them any time they choose.
The Arab countries – Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and others – have never had less interest in supporting the fiction of a Palestinian state. They all hope Israel dismantles Iran’s proxies because these groups destabilise Arab governments.
President Joe Biden’s Middle East policy is in tatters. In October 2022, the centrepiece of his national security strategy was to “pursue diplomacy to ensure that Iran can never acquire a nuclear weapon”.
Last week CIA head Bill Burns said of Iran that “now it’s probably more like a week or a little more to produce one bomb’s worth of weapons-grade material”. Burns claimed: “I think we are reasonably confident that – working with our friends and allies – we will be able to see it relatively early on.”
So the CIA may know on Tuesday that Iran will have a nuclear weapon by Friday. If Iran is allowed to reach that point it will have more than one bomb. The Iranians must refine a large stockpile of enriched uranium to weapons-grade capability. There is enough for a dozen or more nuclear weapons.
This is as devastating an American intelligence failure as Israel missing the October 7 attacks – classic examples of not seeing the obvious while obsessing about details. Biden urged Netanyahu to “take the win” last April – meaning Israel shouldn’t retaliate against Iran’s first direct missile strikes.
Thankfully, Israel ignored the advice. Hitting back, the Israel Defence Forces showed they could disable Iranian air defence to hit any targets they wanted. That gave Tehran pause, but too late to wind back its support for Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and other proxies. Tehran’s mistake – obvious in hindsight – is that it is one thing to train, fund, equip and motivate jihadist extremists obsessed with the “end of days” and wiping Israel off the map. It’s much harder to keep the crazies on a leash.
What happens next?
A compelling strategic logic drives Israel’s choice: it can do its best (which will be pretty good) to destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure or wait for Tehran to declare it has working bombs by Christmas.
Given that choice, what would you advise Netanyahu to do? Pause for a ceasefire maybe, so the proxies can rearm and start firing huge numbers of missiles at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv?
Or perhaps one would advise Israel to embrace a two-state solution, the effect of which would be to give Iran’s proxy Hamas or Fatah in the West Bank a seat in the UN. A pause gives Tehran time to reprocess the uranium it needs for nuclear weapons. No doubt the international community would firmly ask for inspectors to get access to the factories, allowing the CIA to shave a day or two off its week-long estimate for how long it takes to make a bomb.
This is the effect, if not the intent, of Albanese government policy. Australia lacks the courage, perhaps even the capability, to send a navy ship to the Red Sea to protect ships bringing goods and oil to Asia. But with no real stake in the outcome, we are urging Israel to halt combat operations so Iran has more time to build nuclear weapons.
Israel’s choice is clear – of course it will go after Iran nuclear weapons-building capabilities.
The plants reprocessing uranium into weapons-grade material aren’t mobile like the bombs will be. These targets can be “hardened” only to some extent and Israel has shown it has weapons that will dig deep into fortified underground spaces. Once the plan is made, the target set defines itself. Beyond the nuclear facilities, Israel must go after Iran’s air, missile and submarine capabilities, things that deliver nuclear warheads.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has said a strike will be “lethal, precise and especially surprising”, which indicates more things will be in the air than bunker-busting bombs. No one in Tehran will be answering their phones right now.
We will owe Israel a debt if it destroys Iran’s nuclear potential. If Tehran gets nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia will do the same, followed quickly by Egypt and others. Fundamentally, we are all better off if Israel and the US dominate the Middle East military balance. The only thing that may prevent an Israeli strike is if Biden reverses course, pressuring Tehran into a backdown on attacking Israel, bringing the proxies to heel and walking away from nuclear weapons. I can’t see Biden, much less Kamala Harris, taking that tough course of action.
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As Trump closes on victory, Harris Dems will take desperate measures
Assuming he doesn’t get assassinated before election day, it’s looking likely that Donald Trump will be the next US president. That leads me to believe Democrats will spring both an October surprise and an election day surprise in desperate last-minute efforts to keep Trump out of office.
Vice-President Kamala Harris got a very small polling bump after her TV debate with Trump. The election is so close even a small bump is important. The vice-presidential debate, where Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, clearly beat Democrat Tim Walz, stopped the Harris momentum. Vance put the case about the Biden-Harris policy failures much more strongly and clearly than Trump himself had done.
The next momentum definer was Harris finally doing a series of unscripted interviews with 60 Minutes, The View, Howard Stern and others.
The incident comes on the heels of two assassination attempts - one in Pennsylvania in which a bullet grazed Trump’s ear, and a second, aborted attempt at his Florida golf course.
These were all favourable, pro-Harris settings. Yet she was woeful. Even the friendliest question seemed to produce a stammering, hesitant, agonised retreat to her few rote phrases: “I come from a middle-class background, I’ve been a prosecutor, I’ve locked up people traffickers …”
Some of these interviews she didn’t even do live. They were meant to be “as live”. But in some cases her answers were so awful and the media outlet so sympathetic that when it finally broadcast the interview it cut out all the stammering, incoherent stuttering at the start of answers.
On The View she was asked what she would have done differently to Joe Biden. This presents a very minor challenge for a politician who doesn’t want to appear disloyal to the President but who is marketing herself as the change candidate. The obvious reply is: Biden has been a great president but one area where I think we could have done even better was … Then put in anything you like on the border, inner-city crime, etc. Instead Harris said she couldn’t think of a single thing.
All these Harris moments have become internet memes. Now, you might rightly say that 20 per cent of everything Trump says continues to be offensive, wrong or slightly nuts. That’s true. But Trump is on the media every day, doing countless interviews, speaking at countless rallies. So is Vance. Their views on key policy and values issues are pretty clear.
It may be that neither the debates nor the interviews are having a big effect, but marginal differences are crucial. The RealClearPolitics poll average now has Harris leading by 1.7 per cent nationally. That’s a narrower lead than she had a couple of weeks ago. At this stage in 2020 Biden was ahead of Trump by 10 per cent in the polls. At this point in 2016 Hillary Clinton was leading Trump by 7 per cent.
In both elections the polls seriously underestimated Trump’s vote and both results finally were extremely tight in the battleground states. If the polls are underestimating Trump by anything like those margins this time, the election is already effectively over and Trump’s a handsome winner.
But, and this is a huge but, politics is not the common law. It’s not bound by precedent. Given that there are only seven battleground states where this election will be decided, the state-based polls are particularly important. And the state-based polls have a poor record of reliability. But they all will try to correct for their anti-Trump bias last time.
However, even on the published polls, Trump, right now, is leading in the battleground states. This lead overall is tiny, just 0.4 per cent. RCP’s poll average at this stage gives Trump six of the battleground states – Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Arizona and Nevada. And it gives only one to Harris, Wisconsin.
So, with no toss-up states, that gives Trump what his former aide, Kellyanne Conway, describes as a “narrow landslide” in the electoral college, where he wins 302 to 236. However the RCP no toss-up map has changed back and forth between Trump winning and Harris winning several times.
The Economist magazine this week reports that its model gives Harris a 51 per cent chance of victory, which means essentially it’s even. The betting markets, which have a pretty good record, now substantially favour Trump.
Harris is doing better in the polls than Biden did with one important demographic, white college graduates. But she is doing substantially worse than Biden did with working-class voters, with Hispanics, with blacks, with men and with Catholics. Some of those constituencies she will still win, but she’ll win them by smaller margins than Biden did. That hurts her chances overall.
Hispanics are now supporting Trump at about 40 per cent, more in battleground states. That suggests they’ve become a wholly competitive demographic, which is good for American democracy. The Democrats’ woke cultural hostility to religion is hurting them with Hispanics, and with Catholics, whom Harris will lose.
Nonetheless, Trump could still lose the election. A New York Times/Siena College poll of Pennsylvania, with a respectable sample size and solid methodology, puts Harris ahead in Pennsylvania. Assuming Harris wins one electoral college vote from Nebraska – which, with Maine, is one of only two states to allocate electoral college votes by congressional districts – then Trump must win one of Wisconsin, Michigan or Pennsylvania.
Harris will win if she holds on to the three rust-belt states. No polls really give Wisconsin to Trump, he has been mostly behind in Michigan, so just as the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore came down to Florida, this election may come down to Pennsylvania.
Democrats are desperate to stop Trump, so I expect from them an October surprise, possibly some extravagant legal move against Trump, and an election day surprise, some new alleged revelation about him that he has no time to counter. These tactics haven’t worked well for Democrats so far, but if the election is indeed tight, and such “surprises” could scare off even 100,000 Trump voters out of perhaps 160 million votes overall, they just may make the difference.
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All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Monday, October 14, 2024
Latest News on RFK Jr Landmark Censorship Case
The 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals late Tuesday heard oral arguments in the landmark censorship case, Kennedy et al. v. Biden et al.
The hearing focused on two points, Kim Mack Rosenberg, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) general counsel, told The Defender. First, the 5th Circuit is considering whether to uphold a lower court’s August decision that two of the three plaintiffs — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and CHD — have legal standing to bring the suit.
Second, it’s considering whether to uphold the Lousiana court’s injunction, which would prohibit the Biden administration from coordinating with social media companies to censor Kennedy and CHD’s social media posts until the lawsuit is settled.
The case — brought by Kennedy, CHD and news consumer Connie Sampognaro — alleges that President Joe Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci and other top administration officials and federal agencies “waged a systematic, concerted campaign” to compel the nation’s three largest social media companies to censor constitutionally protected speech.
During Tuesday’s hearing, Jed Rubenfeld — Yale law professor and attorney for the plaintiffs — told judges, “District court called this the most massive attack on free speech in this nation’s history, and it would be shocking if no plaintiff in the country had standing to challenge it.”
Standing is the legal doctrine that requires plaintiffs to be able to show they have suffered direct and concrete injuries and that those injuries could be resolved in court.
The issue of standing shut down another related government censorship case, Murthy v. Missouri. The plaintiffs in Murthy v. Missouri — the states of Missouri and Arkansas, Drs. Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff and Aaron Kheriaty, The Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft and health activist Jill Hines — argued that the censorship they experienced on social media could be tied to government action and that they were likely to be censored in the future. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the plaintiffs didn’t have standing to bring their case.
The Murthy — originally Missouri et al. v. Biden et al. — and Kennedy v. Biden cases were consolidated because they shared common legal and factual issues. This allowed them to share processes, such as discovery of evidence. However, they continued to be heard and ruled on separately.
The plaintiffs in Kennedy v. Biden are much more likely to be able to prove standing than the Murthy v. Missouri plaintiffs, Mack Rosenberg said:
“With the Supreme Court’s decision in Murthy v. Missouri in the forefront on the issue of standing, we believe that the plaintiffs in our action have clearly demonstrated standing more than sufficient to meet the requirements the Supreme Court described in Murthy in June.”
Mack Rosenberg said there is clear evidence that plaintiffs Kennedy and CHD were specific targets of censorship and that they continue to be censored. “CHD in particular continues to be deplatformed from major social media sites with no end in sight.”
She said the facts “demonstrate that the injunction issued by Judge Doughty was appropriate given the circumstances and the government’s continued actions.”
Collage of Rally and Events
Legal battle has dragged on for over a year
Tuesday’s hearing was the latest development in a class action lawsuit brought by Kennedy, CHD and Sampognaro on behalf of more than 80% of U.S. adults who access news from online news aggregators and social media companies, primarily Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
The suit was filed on March 24, 2023, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana.
The case alleged that key officials and federal agencies in the Biden administration violated the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights by censoring online speech disfavored by the government.
According to the complaint, “the federal government’s censorship campaign has repeatedly, systematically, and very successfully targeted constitutionally protected speech on the basis of its content and viewpoint.”
Nearly a year later, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting key Biden administration officials and agencies from coercing or significantly encouraging social media platforms to suppress or censor online content containing protected free speech.
However, Doughty stayed the injunction until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on a similar injunction in the Murthy v. Missouri case.
After the Supreme Court on June 26 ruled in favor of the Biden administration in Murthy v. Missouri, Doughty on July 9 denied two motions by lawyers for the Biden administration seeking to overturn the preliminary injunction, which was set to take effect July 7.
Less than 24 hours later, Biden administration lawyers filed an emergency motion with the 5th Circuit, seeking to block the injunction.
The 5th Circuit on July 25 sent the case back to the Louisiana District Court to decide if Kennedy, CHD and Sampognaro have standing to bring the suit. The 5th Circuit also stayed the injunction while the case was being revisited by the District Court.
The District Court on Aug. 20 gave the plaintiffs the green light to bring their suit, ruling that Kennedy and CHD had standing. Doughty concluded that plaintiff Sampognaro does not have standing.
Lawyers disagree on whether plaintiffs have standing
In Tuesday’s hearing, U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney Daniel Tenny argued on behalf of the defendants, saying that the Murthy v. Missouri decision “foreclosed” the plaintiffs’ theories on why the plaintiffs have standing.
Rubenfeld disagreed, saying that Kennedy v. Biden plaintiffs differ in key ways from the Murthy plaintiffs. First, unlike the Murthy plaintiffs, the Kennedy v. Biden plaintiffs have a “specific causation finding,” meaning there is clear evidence that “government defendants, through threats, caused the deplatforming and censorship that they suffered.”
Second, the Kennedy v. Biden plaintiffs have evidence of ongoing injury, not just past injury:
“CHD’s deplatforming — which happened a couple of years ago — is exactly the same right now, unchanged in status as it was then. In other words, the government defendants are directly responsible for the injury that CHD is currently suffering.”
“Number three,” Rubenfeld said, “we have specific evidence of, in the event of a favorable ruling from this court, a significant increase in the likelihood of our plaintiffs receiving relief.”
“That’s the established test for redressability,” he said. Redressability means that the plaintiffs’ alleged injuries are likely to be redressed if the court grants the relief the plaintiffs are seeking.
Right now there is zero likelihood that CHD will get relief, Rubenfeld said. “CHD has been litigating against Facebook for years. They have not reinstated them.”
If the 5th Circuit issues a ruling that Facebook’s actions were likely unconstitutional and that will likely be unconstitutional if Facebook keeps on doing it, “that changes [Facebook’s] incentive and that increases the likelihood that [CHD] will be reinstated.”
In their brief, plaintiffs’ attorneys also argued that Sampognaro, who is potentially immunocompromised, has what’s called “right-to-listen standing” because she needs access to accurate information about COVID-19 and possible treatments, and the censorship has obstructed that access.
Tenny urged the court to continue blocking the District Court’s injunction. Rubenfeld argued the injunction is needed because U.S. governmental agencies are “still today” trying to influence social media platforms “to suppress speech that they deem, they call misinformation.”
He added, “But we have seen over and over again that what they call misinformation often doesn’t turn out to be misinformation and turns out to be protected speech.”
The DOJ declined The Defender’s request for comment on Tuesday’s arguments.
https://principia-scientific.com/latest-news-on-rfk-jr-landmark-censorship-case/
***************************************All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Sunday, October 13, 2024
Iran’s toxic foreign policy: A deluge of terrorism, drugs and refugees
In 1985 when Soviet diplomats were kidnapped by Islamist extremists, the KGB resolved the misunderstanding by castrating a relative of the Lebanese Shia Muslim leader, sending him the severed organs and then shooting the relative in the head. It is rumoured the KGB then informed Iran’s Supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, that while the USSR had many nuclear weapons, accidents can happen. The hostages were released and no Russian officials have been kidnapped in the Middle East since.
Similarly, United States President Trump had his own unique way of communicating with Islamists. US Congressman Wesley Hunt explains how in a meeting with Taliban leaders, Trump declared, ‘I want to leave Afghanistan, but it’s going to be a conditions-based withdrawal,’ before issuing a stark warning. ‘If you harm a hair on a single American, I’m going to kill you.’ The translator conveyed this exact message. Trump then ‘reached in his pocket, pulled out a satellite photo of the leader of the Taliban’s home, handed it to him, got up and walked out the room.’ It was one of the quietest periods of US troop deployment to Afghanistan, until the botched withdrawal in 2021.
In today’s alt-post-modern world with Western leaders including those in Australia hyper-active to mean tweets, and victim-based sensitivities, these anecdotes may offend. Yet, many of us are not interested in offending our enemies, as much as we are communicating with them in a language they understand. When you don’t, eventually its our young men and women in uniform who end up paying the ultimate price.
Not so with how the West has been dealing with Iran today. Australia and the Biden administration have a strange fascination with appeasing Iran and its proxies. This is despite the fact its foreign policy is based on terrorism, drugs, refugees and kidnapping for geo-political ransom. During a 2018 counter-terrorism conference in Tehran, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani threated the US with a ‘deluge of drugs, refugees and terrorism in the West’. Consider where we will be if Iran obtains a nuclear weapon.
As Hamas and Hezbollah flags fly and Allahu Akbar is heard on our streets, according to the Iranian Ambassador to Australia, Ahmad Sadeghi, the gates of heaven are open to international terrorists. Ambassador Sadeghi, has been publicly honouring the life of Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, killed in an Israel missile strike, as a ‘prominent standard-bearer’ with a designated path to heaven. Sadeghi’s statement reveals a toxic foreign policy that has no place in Australia.
The boldness of Sadeghi’s statement is not that it is pitched to his masters in Tehran, it’s that he knows empathy for Islamist extremism is growing across Western communities as well as many institutions we used to trust. Why else would so many of our political leaders, academics, and commentators, seek to mainstream Hamas and Hezbollah, if there wasn’t a change occurring within the fabric of our country? One that is irreversible.
We paid dearly for appeasing extremists last century. In Tim Bouverie’s work on how Britain fell for a delusion with Hitler, Lord Hugh Cecil stated, ‘It was like stroking a crocodile and expecting it to purr’. The lesson from Israel’s fight against terrorism, but lost on many in the West, is simple – you cannot befriend a terrorist. Just ask former US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. Under Clinton the US thought it clever to arm and train Islamist militias against Isis. Instead, it turned Syria-Iraq into a thriving arms bazaar for head-cutting extremists. It never pays to let snakes live in your sleeve. In Australia, they are granted tourist visas.
An Arab proverb says, a fool may be known by six things: anger without cause, speech without profit, change without progress, inquiry without object, putting trust in a stranger, and mistaking foes for friends. Iran is not a friend.
Australia is not alone in this Western trend to appease jihadists, and Iran knows it. The killing of British Conservative MP Sir David Amess in 2021, at the hand of suspect Ali Harbi Ali, should have been called out for what it was – a tactic of Islamist extremism. Instead, limp-wristed British politicians called for ‘a kinder, gentler dialogue’. People who seek the intimacy of death, fed on a mind-diet of graphic violence with a licence to kill from God, are not looking for a hug. And neither is Iran.
Iran funds and supports some of the most effective terrorist organisations in the world such as Hamas, Hezbollah as well as the Houthis in Yemen. Abducting hostages for geo-political ransom is a tactic Iran has been using since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
These terrorist networks are some of the best armed non-state actors on the planet. Thanks to Iran, Hezbollah has amassed weapons systems such as the Fateh-110/M-600 short-range ballistic missile, Shahab short-range ballistic missiles, Toophan antitank guided missiles, M113 armoured personnel carriers and T-72 main battle tanks. They are better equipped than New Zealand.
Tehran-backed Shia terror groups also use targeted assassinations. In 2019 the EU slapped sanctions on Iran after The Netherlands, Denmark and France revealed Tehran was behind the assassination of two dissidents, in 2015 and 2017. In 2018, French security services determined Tehran was behind the plot to bomb a rally of the People’s Mujahedeen of Iran opposition group in a Paris suburb. In 2011 the FBI revealed a Quds Force plot in which a Mexican drug cartel was paid $US1.5 million to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington.
Hezbollah’s reach also extends to Australia beyond flag-waving fanatics. In 2017 it was revealed a Sydney-based money launderer and crime figure, identified as a ‘Hezbollah functionary’, had brokered an arms deal between China, Iran and Hezbollah in 2011. The shipment was discovered as part of an international investigation into Hezbollah’s links with narcotics traffickers in Latin American, the Middle East and China.
Then there is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC). The IRGC is the clenched fist at the end of Iran’s foreign and domestic defence arm. Prior to his elimination in a drone strike outside Baghdad Airport under US President Trump, IRGC’s commander, Major General Hossein Salami, declared, ‘This sinister regime (Israel) must be wiped off the map and this is no longer… a dream (but) it is an achievable goal’. Waiting until Iran has a nuclear weapon would be a grave dereliction of duty on behalf of the international community.
Yet Joe Biden is warning Israel not to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities as Australia pleads for Israel to take it easy on these extremists. To be sure, the Biden administration has displayed weakness and appeasement with Iran all along. Four weeks prior to the 7 October atrocities, Biden handed the biggest sponsor of global terrorism $US6 billion in exchange for five hostages held in Tehran and left an open door to renew negotiations on a revised nuclear agreement. That’s right, a nuclear agreement with the nation planning to wipe Israel off the map.
All these weaknesses bring us to where we are today. Modern nation states don’t traffic drugs and weapons, and terrorism as their foreign policy. Responsible modern Western nations, wanting to be free, cannot continue to accommodate the wicked to appease the virtuous. Even if there is no wider war in a conventional sense with Iran, perhaps Sadeghi recognises what our leaders are failing to see; that Australia has been irreparably changed. We now risk losing what was a generous, compassionate and down-to-earth nation. Once gone you can bet none of these pro-Islamist protestors will fight to get it back.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/irans-toxic-foreign-policy/
******************************************************Black Clergy Stand With Israel Against Terrorists
Star Parker
My organization, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, co-hosted a press conference Monday with Michigan Lighthouse Ministries. Over 50 pastors from across Michigan noted the atrocities committed a year ago to the day by Hamas terrorists against Israeli citizens. They expressed solidarity with Israel.
We chose a church in Michigan for this program because the state is home to the largest Arab-American population in the country.
Michigan is also home to Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat who is the only Palestinian-American representative in the U.S. House of Representatives and one of the nation’s most strident voices against Israel.
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Were these clergy, mostly black, expressing opposition to Arab Americans? Certainly not. On the contrary, their support of the Jewish state, and the values it embodies and expresses, is an expression of support for the welfare and betterment of all mankind.
Of great concern to these Christian evangelicals is the cloud of darkness spreading and enveloping so much of our world today.
The miraculous return of the Jewish people to their historical homeland after 2,000 years in dispersion and their transformation of desert and swamp into a thriving modern state, with per capita income higher than most European countries, shines laser-like light into the thick dark cloud of evil around us.
Hamas terrorists noted the first anniversary of their Oct. 7 attack by firing missiles into Israel, saying that, given the opportunity, they would commit the same atrocities again and again.
By atrocities, we’re talking about murder, rape, beheadings, burning of babies, mutilation of corpses.
How is it that there is sympathy for this depravity?
Iran, which provides the billions financing Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terrorist organizations, had a gross domestic product of just $5,740 per capita in 2023, according to tradingeconomics.com. This is only 13.5% of Israel’s $42,674 per capita GD, despite Iran having the fourth-largest holdings of oil reserves in the world.
The difference is that Israel is about choosing life and personal responsibility and creativity, and Iran is about a government stealing the wealth of its citizens to finance a hateful, destructive ideology.
Similarly, the Hamas terrorists. The billions infused into Gaza over the years from Iran, but also from European countries and America, was used to fund terror rather than build a country and create wealth.
When I first visited Israel, I saw the similarities of the culture of blame and denial of personal responsibility among the Palestinians that have caused so much destruction in America’s own inner cities. We see a corrupt political leadership exploiting the worst tendencies in people by attributing their suffering to others, fostering a culture of blame, rather than taking personal responsibility for their own lives.
The black clergy that gathered in Michigan on Monday, Oct. 7, did so to stand for truth and to stand for a better world.
Inscribed on America’s Liberty Bell in Philadelphia are these words from the book of Leviticus in the Hebrew Bible: “Proclaim Liberty throughout all the land unto all the Inhabitants thereof.”
The bell was commissioned in Pennsylvania in 1751 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of William Penn’s first constitution for the future state in 1701. Penn observed, “If we will not be governed by God, we must be governed by tyrants.”
This is the message our pastors convey to a world swimming in darkness.
When our own country was attacked by Muslim terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001, evangelical pastors pleaded that the nation do its own soul-searching for its sins. They were chastised for saying this.
But we see, over the 23 years since then, that those sins continue to weaken our nation.
The appeal of our pastors is unwavering support for the one Jewish state, for the Bible we have received from the Jewish nation, and to end, everywhere, the sick and evil culture of blame.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/10/09/why-black-clergy-speak-out-for-israel/
***************************************All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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