Political correctness

I have just changed the template for my "Skeptical Notes" blog.  It should now be clearer and easier to read. It can be found here:

https://westpsychol.blogspot.com/

It replaces my deleted "POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH" blog

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Nearly everything you assume about colonialism and slavery is wrong

Nigel Biggar’s book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning(2021) is a much needed corrective to the lies and misinformation being propagated in schools all over the world. For instance, after nearly 150 years of transporting slaves across the Atlantic Ocean, the British abolished the slave trade and spent the subsequent 150 years deploying the Royal Navy to stop the slave trade across the world. Not only was this the first time a major superpower abolished the ancient practice of slavery, but it was also the first instance of an empire suppressing it beyond its borders.

Up to 36 ships from the Royal Navy, over 13 per cent of the Empire’s total manpower, were stationed off the Coast of Africa, policing the Atlantic Ocean until the late 1800s. Britain was able to pressure countries like Brazil into passing legislation which outlawed the slave trade. Before his death in 1865, the twice-Prime Minister Lord Palmerston wrote that ‘the achievement which I look back on with the greatest and purest pleasure was forcing the Brazilians to give up their slave trade’. Ultimately, 2,000 British Sailors gave their life to stop the international slave trade.

But what most people have never been taught though, is that the anti-slavery movement actually began much earlier than 1833. In fact, in 1791, about 30 per cent of the adult male population of Britain signed anti-slavery petitions. Few people realise today that the largest department of the British Empire’s Foreign Office for two decades was the Slave Trade Department, which was set up to suppress slavery worldwide.

It is also a little-known fact today, that according to the historian David Eltis, it cost the British Empire more money to end the slave trade than it received in profits from it. It cost taxpayers nearly 2 billion pounds every year for half a century. For context, the British today spends 2 per cent of their GDP on national defence. In comparison, the British Empire nearly 2 per cent of its GDP every year for 50 years to end the slave trade. In fact, the British taxpayer only finished paying off the debt of ending slavery in 2015.

However, despite these astonishing facts about the British Empire, recent You Gov polling found that 60 per cent of Britons who were proud of the British Empire in 2014, had drastically halved to almost 30 per cent by 2020. Other polling has also shown that only one in five young people view Winston Churchill favourably.

Today, colonialism is routinely called essentially evil, genocidal, greedy, and racist. These attitudes have generated a wave of riots tearing down statues and rejecting anything that has been a product of European colonialism.

So how did attitudes about the British Empire change so quickly? Is the legacy of the British Empire good or bad? Was it built on slavery or cooperation? Did it expand through violence or trade? And was the British Empire essentially racist?

These are the questions at the heart of Cambridge academic Nigel Biggar’s new book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, and what follows is some his most important ideas which very people have been taught today.

Chapter 1: The Origins of the British Empire

Before asking whether the British Empire was evil, we first need to consider how a small European island at its peak controlled nearly a quarter of the world’s land mass.

So why did England choose to expand? Well, like many complex ideas, there was no single motivation that drove the British Empire. For example, the British Empire began expanding when the Kingdom of Wessex sought to secure its borders in response to Danish and Welsh invasions. Even the conquest of the North America was driven by the threat of Catholic Spain, which was committed to overthrowing protestant Europe.

Additionally, British privateers established colonial ports at key strategic locations in Africa and America in response to Spanish competition. For many young British officers of the East Indian trading company, they were driven by the intention to trade and the excitement of adventure, like John Malcolm, who joined the EIC because his father had gone bankrupt. Malcolm ended up learning and documenting the Persian language and history, eventually became the governor of Bombay. The governor, like many others in the British Empire, was motivated to escape poverty and earn a living.

In fact, British colonialism began and was supported by mutual cooperation with the local population. For example, the EIC secured trading ports in India, and after hiring and training Indian troops, developed small colonies. Many Indian rulers actually paid the British military to protect their kingdoms against other native rulers, who began giving land to the British as payment. As Tirthankar Roy, one of the leading Indian historians of the 21st Century states:

Turning the emergence of the empire into a battle between good and evil creates melodrama; it invites the reader to take sides in a fake holy war. But if good soap opera, it is bad history. The empire was not an invasion. Many Indians, because they did not trust other Indians, wanted the British to secure power. They preferred British rule over indigenous alternatives and helped the Company form a state. The empire emerged mainly from alliances. It emerged from lands ‘ceded’ to the Company by Indian friends, rather than lands it ‘conquered’. The Company came to rule India because many Indians wanted it to.

Interestingly, it was the British who were keener in documenting the culture and languages of Persian, Hindu, and Bengali people, than the locals. For example, the EIC officer Warren Hastings pioneered the revival of Indian Sanskrit.

Money and knowledge were not the only motivation for colonies, it was also agreed by officers like John Malcolm and James Abbott, that to leave India would be dangerous because it would cause a power struggle between warring states. So, if the British Empire expanded through cooperation with local Indian rulers, what about Africa? Again, the British were motivated not just by one goal, but many.

First, Britain wanted to stop the spread of Militant Islam to protect trade with Uganda and Nyasaland.

Second, Britain wanted to end inter-tribal warfare between kingdoms like the Zulu and Ndebele, which was a cause of human misery, slave trafficking, and trade disruptions.

Third, as Lord Salisbury argued in the 1890 Anglo-German Agreement Bill, acquisition of land would stop the escalation of European nations going to war over local conflicts.

Fourth, in places like Egypt, Britain were duty bound to protect their investments in the Egyptian government which was on the verge of bankruptcy. London’s aims in Cairo were not to directly govern, but to enact fiscal reform to the benefit of both countries which was the view of the British comptroller general in Egypt, Lord Cromer. In fact, the colonial office did not want to directly govern Egypt because of the financial responsibility and burden of administration, the exact reason it declined the offer of exclusive control over Gladstone by the Ottoman Sultan.

Fifth, as early as Sir Thomas Munro, the governor of Madras from 1819-27, Britain saw its role in many of its colonies as the precursor to self-government. This reality was made pertinent after the American war of Independence, which saw Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa granted the status of self-governing dominions.

As Biggar points out, there was no single ‘set of motives that drove the British Empire’. It was a collection of reasons which differed between ‘trader, migrant, soldier, missionary, entrepreneur, financier, government official, and statesmen’. These ranged from:

‘The aversion to poverty and persecution, the yearning for a better life, the desire to make one’s way in the world, the duty to satisfy shareholders, the lure of adventure, cultural curiosity, the need to make peace and keep it, the concomitant need to maintain martial prestige, the imperative of gaining military or political advantage over enemies and rivals, and the vocation to lift oppression and establish stable self-government.’

But what about slavery? Wasn’t the British motivated by the benefits of buying, working, and selling slaves?

Chapter 2: The British Empire and Slavery

Before we unpack colonial slavery, we first have to understand its history. Slavery was not unique to the British Empire; rather it is both ancient and universal.

In Asia, for instance, slavery could be found as early as 7th Century AD in China. In North and South America, the Comanche, Aztecs, and Incas all ‘ran a slave economy from the 18th Century. Since Muhammad, the Islamic world has utilised slavery, even receiving white European slaves from Viking traders in the 8th and 9th Centuries.

It is a little-known fact today, but the word slave actually comes from the European group of people ‘Slav’. One historian estimates over 1.25 million Europeans were enslaved in the North African trade before the end of the 18th Century. By comparison, it is estimated that while Europeans transported 11 million slaves from Africa, another 17 million were shipped by the Islamic slave trade. Similarly, African tribes have been enslaving each other for centuries. Many of these slaves was used as human sacrifices. Biggar quotes one report from 1797 which recorded between 1400-1500 people being sacrificed at a royal funeral in Asante Africa.

The British were not even the first or largest slave trader in Africa. The Portuguese Empire was the first European nation to seek slaves from West Africa from 1440. By 1866, the Portuguese had almost shipped 5.9 million slaves, which is 46.7 per cent of the total African slave trade by Europeans, compared to the 26.1 per cent of the British.

So why does the criticism for slavery often rest on Britain, if it was part such an ancient and universal practice? One of the critics to popularise British Slavery in particular was the historian Eric Williams, in his seminal work Capitalism and Slavery (1944), where he argued slavery made ‘an enormous contribution to Britain’s industrial development’.

Unfortunately for Williams, his thesis has since been widely discredited by academics familiar with British Economic history. In the 1960s, Roger Anstey calculated the profits of slavery to be far below the revenue needed to finance the Industrial Revolution. This view was confirmed by David Robertson Richardson who estimated the total profits of the slave trade to be around 1 per cent of Britain’s total domestic investment around 1790. More recently, David Brion Davis, an expert in 20th Century slavery pronounced the death of William’s thesis, declaring that it ‘has now been wholly discredited by other scholars’.

Chapter 3: An Empire of Stolen Land?

What about countries like Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, where native tribes did not always negotiate formal treaties with the British government?

In 1768, Captain Cook was instructed that he was to ‘endeavour by all proper means to cultivate a friendship and alliance with [the native peoples]’ and ‘with [their] consent to take possession of convenient situations in the country in the name of the King of Great Britain’.

So why didn’t the British build an alliance like it did with local groups in India?

First, most of the local tribal groups had shifting borders due to conflict and migration. The Canadian historian Tom Flanagan argues, it is hard to do justice:

‘…to the war of extermination waged by the Iroquois against the Huron, or to the ferocious struggles between the Cree and the Blackfoot over access to the buffalo herds. The historical record clearly shows that, while aboriginal peoples exercised a kind of collective control over territories, the boundaries were neither long-lasting nor well defined and communities must have been repeatedly formed, dissolved, and reconstituted with different identities.’

In America, the Comanches launched ‘an explosive expansion’, which obliterated ‘the Apache civilisation from the Great Plains’ and carved out ‘a vast territory’. From 1750 to 1850 their empire dominated the region, building ‘the largest slave economy in the colonial Southwest’.

In Australia, the historian Geoffrey Blainey points out the rate of violent deaths in some areas between Aboriginal tribal groups was greater than the rate of violent deaths in almost every European country during the second world war. There are several documented accounts of early Aboriginal tribes wiping out other tribes in what is now known as northern Victoria.

In New Zealand, Polynesian explorers began what has been called ‘the Maori colonial era’, which by the 15th Century gave rise to inter-tribal warfare, enslavement, generational vendettas, and sometimes cannibalism. As Biggar points out, ‘The bloodshed ended thanks in part to the influence of Christianity, which forbade cannibalism and slavery, and whose influence was spread by Maori evangelists, many of them former slaves.’ According to a leading New Zealand historian:

‘By 1850 the balance sheet of benefits and disadvantages of British administration might well have appeared favourable to many Maori. There appeared to be a place for Maori people in a variety of colonial activities. They profited from the increased pace of development as settlement expanded. Through government employment on road and other public works, as well as through private contracts, Maori earned considerable amounts in cash. The new authority in the land also gradually overcame some of the old tribal antagonisms and made it possible for tribes to mix and communicate more freely. Under [Governor George] Grey’s administration, some of the long-promised welfare benefits were provided: hospitals were opened and the Education Ordinance provided for Maori education.’

Nevertheless, there were many instances of hostile conflict between natives and settlers, which were often one-sided, brutal and devastating for the local populations. Unfortunately, most of it happened outside of government control, which could not stop the individual expansion of enterprise. As Biggar writes:

‘Sometimes native peoples lost territory to colonists because the latter mistook land that was unoccupied or uncultivated for land that was unowned. Sometimes the natives lost it because they were conquered by ungoverned settlers in war that easily flared up on lawless frontiers, where fear was abundant and trust rare. However, where British imperial authorities succeeded in asserting their ‘sovereignty’ over territory, native title to land was recognised and its transfer to settlers regulated – in principle and sometimes in practice – for the sake of justice and of peace.’

Chapter 4: Conclusion

So why are these reasonable and balanced accounts of the British Empire covered up and rarely discussed? As Biggar points out, ‘The controversy over empire is not really a controversy about history at all. It is about the present, not the past.’

Some of the most important debates in Australia today, in changing the Constitution to have an enshrined Voice to Parliament for Aboriginal people, and the international push for reparations, are justified by a one-sided view of colonial history.

The anger towards the British Empire is so strong that Biggar’s book was pulled by Bloomsbury publishing right before its release because ‘public feeling’ was ‘not currently favourable’. The book had already gone through rigorous peer review from some of the world’s most prominent academics on the subject. Biggar’s book was not cancelled by its publishers for a lack of research, but rather a fear of backlash from anti-colonial activists.

Today, academic papers like From Colonisation to the Holocaust, The Erotics of Resistance, and Colonisations impact on climate change and the queer community pass as serious research. The truth is, all of the most prosperous nations in the world are heirs of the British Empire, its institutions, laws, customs, and language.

If anyone wants to understand where we are today, and where are going, we must have a better and more balanced understanding of our history, which includes the good, the bad, and everything in between.

Without a proper appreciation for history, we may never improve on the prosperity and peace laid down by the foundations of the British Empire.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/nearly-everything-you-assume-about-colonialism-and-slavery-is-wrong/

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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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Biden lets his inner Fascist show

President Joe Biden sparked fury Tuesday night by suggesting Donald Trump should be in jail just 14 days out from the presidential election.

'We gotta lock him up', the 81-year-old president said at event in New Hampshire.

Biden appeared to realize what he said, and tried to correct himself by saying 'we need to politically lock him up. Lock him out. That's what we have to do.'

It comes after Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris takes care to try to shut down 'lock him up' chants that have popped up at her campaign rallies.

She routinely says to leave the matter up to the courts.

The chants clash with her campaign based in part on preserving democracy and long and order from what she calls the Trump threat – and is similar to the 'lock her up' chants at Trump's 2016 rallies that Democrats continue to call out.

Trump has long centered his own campaign around contesting the criminal cases against him, and accuses rivals of practicing 'lawfare' against him.

He faces sentencing in September after his conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records, which could technically land him in jail, although many experts say the first-time white collar offender is likely to avoid doing jail time.

His son, Donald Trump Jr., teed off on Biden's comments.

'They're not even hiding it. The lawfare against my dad was always about election interference!' he posted on X.

Trump's own campaign rhetoric has included multiple threats to go after people he calls the 'enemy from within,' including Senate candidate Adam Schiff.

He experienced a poll and campaign donation bump during his New York hush money trial, and has railed against 'deranged' special counsel Jack Smith bringing charges against him related to his January 6 election overturn effort.

Biden, who only occasionally jumps on the campaign trail after committing a string of gaffes, made the comment after saying Trump was talking about abolishing the Education Department.

'This is a guy who also wants to replace every civil servant. Every single one. Things he has a right under the Supreme Court ruling on immunity to be able to if need be ... to actually eliminate, physically eliminate, shoot, kill someone he believes to be a threat to him. I know this sounds bizarre. [If]I said this five years ago you'd lock me up - you gotta lock him up,' he said.

'Politically lock him up,' he added.

Although Trump has repeatedly railed against his political opponents and threatened to use the machinery to government to go after them, he hasn't spoken about being able to kill people who are a threat to him.

He continues to try to turn the Democrats' own rhetoric against them.

'If we lose this election, we may not have a country anymore,' he said at his Doral golf club on Monday. 'They say we may never have an election again in this country. This is where we’re going,' he said.

Democrats have raised increasing concern about whether Trump will once again declare victory and refuse to accept the results of the election, as he did in 2020.

He was coy once again when asked at a suburban area McDonald's drive-thru Saturday whether he would accept the election results no matter the outcome.

'Yeah, sure, if it’s a fair election,' Trump said. 'I would always accept it. It's got to be a fair election,' he said.

He continue to call for a win that is 'too big to rid' – implying his rivals will cheat without offering evidence.

'We gotta lock Joe up,' a former Biden aide quipped to Axios, noting that the statement was politically unhelpful.

Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt called on the Harris campaign to condemn Biden's 'disgraceful' remark.

'Joe Biden just admitted the truth: he and Kamala’s plan all along has been to politically persecute their opponent President Trump because they can’t beat him fair and square. The Harris-Biden Admin is the real threat to democracy,' she said.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13989643/Joe-biden-kamala-harris-donald-trump-lock-up.html

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Tulsi Gabbard announces she is joining the Republican Party and stuns Trump

Former Hawaii Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard announced she is joining the Republican party Tuesday night.

Taking the stage before thousands in Greensboro, North Carolina, Gabbard cemented her conversion from Democrat to Republican.

'It is because of my love for our country and specifically because of the leadership that President Trump has brought to transform the Republican Party that I'm proud to stand here with you today and announce that I'm joining the Republican Party,' she proudly declared.

She continued: 'I'm joining the party of the people, the party of equality, the party that was founded to fight against and end slavery in this country.'

Gabbard said that the GOP and Trump were 'the party of common sense and the party that is led by a president who has the courage and strength to fight for peace.'

The two then embraced on stage in front of a screaming audience.
Former Hawaii Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard announced she is joining the Republican party Tuesday night. The gesture surprised Trump who embraced her on stage shortly after she made the announcement

In 2022, she announced she was leaving the Democratic party to become an Independent.

She then announced in August that she was endorsing former President Donald Trump and promised to do everything she could to secure his election.

Regaining control of the mic after Gabbard's announcement, Trump said he was stunned by the announcement, which he had not known was coming.

'Thank you very much, Tulsi, that's great wow,' Trump said seemingly stunned.

'That was a surprise,' he continued, calling the gesture a 'great honor' and a 'beautiful speech.

The former president called her a 'woman that everybody loves' who has 'so much common sense'.

'Boy you are popular' he told her in front of the crowd as she brought her on stage.

Gabbard said the Democratic Party is now 'completely unrecognizable'. She was a member for more than 20 years.

She ran for president as a Democrat in 2020 and ended up endorsing Joe Biden when she dropped out.

The former congresswoman called Kamala Harris 'anti-freedom' and 'pro-censorship' and slammed her recent foreign policy moves.

'She is anti-freedom, she is pro-censorship, she is pro-open borders, and she is pro-war,' Gabbard said of Harris.

'Without even pretending to care about peace, as President Trump talked about, she has shamelessly embraced the endorsement and support of warmongers like Dick Cheney, and Liz Cheney,' she added.

Gabbard, a National Guard veteran, ran for president in 2019. She clashed memorably with Harris as they fought for the Democratic nomination, eventually won by Joe Biden.

She campaigned on a platform that decried U.S. involvement in the Middle East, saying it made the nation less safe, and directed blame at both Republicans and Democrats.

In 2019, she was the only lawmaker to vote 'present' during the highly partisan first impeachment of Trump.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13990183/tulsi-gabbard-donald-trump-north-carolina-rally.html

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In markets, bets are on a Trump victory

With less than two weeks to the US election, financial markets are flagging a victory for Donald Trump.

From betting markets to Trump Media shares and cryptocurrencies, the “Trump trades” have kicked up a gear.

That’s despite Vice President Kamala Harris having a narrow lead over Republican nominee Trump in national polling, although reports of early voting in swing states expected to decide the presidency suggest Trump and his fellow Republicans are faring better than at the same stage of previous elections.

In the betting markets, PredictIt has Trump clearly leading Harris. His price (which equates to the odds of winning the presidency) is US58¢ against her US45¢. Polymarket shows an even bigger margin, with Trump’s odds of winning 63.7 per cent and Harris’ 36.4 per cent, although four big wagers totalling $US30 million ($45 million) might have something to do with that.

Trump’s agenda is more radical than Harris’ and would have a bigger impact on financial markets, making his prospects easier to track from an investor point of view.

His trade policies – baseline tariffs of up to 20 per cent on all imports, a 60 per cent tariff on imports from China and threats of a tariff of up to 200 per cent on imports of cars from Mexico – would reverberate through global markets and the world economy.

Most of the bets being made by investors seem to be reasonably conservative. Broadly, however, they do predict a Trump win.

Trump would maintain his 2017 tax cuts, set to expire next year. They favoured companies and wealthy households, and Trump has indicated he wants to reduce their tax rates even further.

He has promised to cut regulation, free up the energy sector, slash government spending and detain and deport millions of illegal immigrants. He’s also said he wants influence over the Federal Reserve Board’s decision-making, or at least some input.

Beneficiaries from his policies would, at face value, include executives and shareholders across corporate America, the energy sector, pharmaceutical companies, big tech, private prison operators (someone has to oversee the detention of the immigrants), and cryptocurrencies, where the Trump family recently launched a venture.

The prospects of a Trump win, at the macro level, would most likely show up in currency, bond and share markets. His policies are likely to generate a big increase in government debt and a spike in US inflation that would drive up longer-term interest rates and the US dollar, while the tax cuts would be enthusiastically greeted by sharemarket investors.

The US dollar has strengthened more than 3.5 per cent this month against America’s major trading partners’ currencies. The yield on 10-year US Treasury bonds has increased from 3.7 per cent to 4.2 per cent, the term premium (the extra yield required to compensate for holding longer duration bonds) has blown out significantly, and the US sharemarket has risen 2.5 per cent over the same period.

The sharemarket’s response is interesting. Trump’s tax cuts and his deregulatory agenda would be positive for companies and their investors. But most economists agree that his trade and immigration policies would be inflationary and hit consumers hard, particularly low-income households, and have a materially adverse impact on the US economy.

Yet maybe those are viewed as potential longer-term threats when set against the near-term benefits of his tax cuts.

At a more granular level, energy stocks are up almost 3 per cent so far this month, while shares in the two biggest private prison operators – Geo Group and CoreCivic – are up 21 per cent and 11.2 per cent, respectively.

https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/in-markets-bets-are-on-a-trump-victory-20241023-p5kkj3.html

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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 goes all in on his tariffs

Trump is undoubtedly well outside the simple thinking of economic orthodoxy. Most economists think his policies would drive Americans into poverty. Economic development is however complex and they fail to note that, far from Trump being economically illiterate, Trump's degree is in fact in economics and comes from a prestige economics school. They particularly seem to overlook the economic growth that would result from a largely uniform 10% tariff.

They also overlook that history is on his side. There are at least two clear examples of high tariffs being economically beneficial. The first is that America prospered mightily in the 19th century behind a high tariff wall. That is normally attributed to an "infant industry" effect and is therefore not now relevant but it IS relevant. Major American industries have now laggged so far behind Asian industries that they could be said to have reverted to infant status

The second example isn't well known but Australia under R.G. Menzies in the '60s was also very comfortable behind a high tariff wall. For details of that, see:

http://jonjayray.com/trumpism.html

So Trump seems likely to get good economic results next time around too

It seems like every time Donald Trump makes a public appearance, he promises yet another tax cut. Now he’s doing something similar with his cherished tariffs.

Interviewed by Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief John Micklethwait at the Economic Club of Chicago this week, Trump not only defended his plan to impose a 10 per cent baseline tariff on all imports to the US and a punitive 60 per cent tariff on imports from China, but doubled down.

Arguing that tariffs would not only raise hundreds of billions of dollars in deficit-reducing revenue from the exporting countries, but also provide an incentive to foreign companies to shift their plants to the US, he claimed that the higher the tariff, the more likely it was that companies would build their factories in the US to avoid it.

“In fact, I’ll tell you, there’s another theory, [it] is that the tariff, you make it so high, so horrible, so obnoxious that they’ll come right away,” he said.

“There’s two ways of looking at a tariff. You can do it as a money-making instrument, or you can do it as something to get the companies. Now, if you want the companies to come in, the tariff has to be a lot higher than 10 per cent, because 10 per cent is not enough. They’re not going to do it for 10 per cent.

“But you make a 50 per cent tariff, they’re going to come in.”

“All you have to do is build your plant in the United States, and you don’t have any tariffs,” he said, while threatening to apply high tariffs to imports of European cars, including Mercedes-Benz, to force them to build cars in the US.

He also threatened tariff rates of “100, 200, 2000 per cent” on cars from Mexico, which has a free trade agreement with the US and therefore could provide a back door to the US market.

“They’re not going to sell one car into the United States,” he said.

Trump rejects the consensus view of economists – and the actual experience of his 2018 tariffs on imports from China – that it will be US companies and consumers that pay the price, making them a form of consumption tax.

“We got hundreds of billions of dollars from China alone, and I haven’t even started yet,” he said.

He also thinks his tariffs will raise trillions of dollars to pay for his proposed tax cuts for companies and wealthy households, along with the abolition of taxes on tips, overtime, social security benefits, interest on car loans and credits for state taxes, despite estimates from credible authorities like the Peterson Institute for International Economics that the tariffs would raise only about $US200 billion ($300 billion) a year. The US government’s revenue base is close to $US5 trillion a year.

Most experts in trade policies believe Trump’s tariffs would damage the US economy and its relationships with the rest of the world, including America’s allies.

They also expect that, should Trump do what he has threatened, its trading partners will retaliate with tariffs of their own. The European Union has already drawn up a list of US goods to target.

Because he doesn’t understand how tariffs work, Trump thinks they are marvellous, a type of magic pudding that he can use to finance his ever-expanding list of tax cuts.

“The most beautiful word in the dictionary is ‘tariff’, and it’s my favourite word,” he said. “It needs a public relations firm to help it but, to me, it’s the most beautiful word in the dictionary.”

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget recently estimated that the Trump policy platform would add $US7.5 trillion to US deficits and debt over a decade, and potentially as much as $US15 trillion, but Trump is adamant that his mix of tariffs and tax cuts will generate growth and reduce the deficit.

“I was always very good at mathematics,” he said.

Most of the economic think tanks that have analysed Trump’s tax, trade and immigration policies have concluded they will shrink the US economy, potentially substantially, reduce employment, ignite a new wave of inflation and result in increased deficits and debt.

During his last term as president, Trump claimed his tax cuts and deregulation would generate economic growth of as much as 6 per cent a year. It peaked at only half that level and his policies, even if the impact of spending in response to the pandemic is excluded, resulted in a massive increase in government debt.

For Trump, however, facts and expert knowledge don’t matter. His gut instincts, genius and business experience give him superior insights.

If Trump does regain the presidency and can implement his policies, they will damage the US economy. The regressive nature of his tax and trade policies and the plan to detain and deport illegal immigrants means they will probably damage US society, too.

And the damage wouldn’t be confined to the US. Indeed, even though the policies would do material long-term harm to the US economy and households, it is likely his trade policies would be even worse for US trade partners’ economies and consumers, particularly (but not exclusively) China and the EU.

Last time he was in office, Trump threatened to sack Federal Reserve Board chair Jerome Powell for keeping US interest rates too high for too long (although it is doubtful he had that authority).

This time, he says he just wants to be able to have the ability to influence, rather than direct, monetary policy, although some of his former White House staff have been looking at options for more direct influence over the Fed.

“As a very good businessman and somebody that uses a lot of, uh, sense [...] I think I have the right to say, you know, I think I’m better than [Powell] would be. I think I’m better than most people would be in that position. I think I have the right to say ‘I think you should go up or down a little bit’,” Trump said.

“I don’t think I should be allowed to order it, but I think I have the right to put in comments as to whether or not interest rates should go up or down.”

It’s not surprising Trump thinks he could do a better job than Powell, given his apparently deep insight into the role and its demands.

“It’s the greatest job in government. You show up to the office once a month, and you say ‘let’s flip a coin’ and everybody talks about you like you’re a god,” he said.

That’s not a perspective on central banking that central bankers or monetary economists anywhere would share as they try to make sense of reams of economic and financial data to protect growth and the stability of their financial systems.

https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/i-was-always-very-good-at-mathematics-trump-goes-all-in-on-his-tariffs-20241017-p5kj0y.html

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The Real-World Consequences of Soft-on-Crime Prosecutors, Brought to You by George Soros

A first-of-its-kind documentary for The Heritage Foundation is the culmination of years of work, scholarship, live events, and debates, highlighting the radical nature of the George Soros-inspired rogue prosecutors movement—and the dire consequences to the safety and security of the residents and businesses in the communities overseen by so-called progressive prosecutors.

Told through the eyes of real prosecutors, real victims, and the radicals themselves who support this pro-criminal, anti-victim movement, “Rogue Prosecutors: The Full Story” paints a vivid portrait of how and why crime has risen in cities presided over by rogue prosecutors—and what you can do about it.

We coined the term “rogue prosecutors” in 2020 when we first exposed this toxic and dangerous social experiment. We started with a Daily Signal blog series on individual rogue prosecutors, among them George Gascon in San Francisco and Los Angeles, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Kim Foxx in Chicago and others.

We published research papers on how they sabotage the rule of law, implement policies that lead to rising crime rates, and ignore victims. We exposed the fact that there is a blue city murder problem. We published our book, “Rogue Prosecutors: How Radical Soros Lawyers Are Destroying America’s Communities,” and created an audio version of it on Audible.

We debunked the notion that the United States incarcerates “too many” people in our paper “The Myth of Mass Incarceration” by pointing out that most criminals, especially violent criminals, never get caught, much less spend any time in jail or prison.

Over the years, we hosted numerous events, including an event featuring U.S. attorneys who served in cities with rogue prosecutors; an event in Los Angeles featuring women whose children were slain and how Los Angeles D.A. Gascon’s policies helped the criminals and not them; an event at the University of California at Berkeley Law School with former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, where we debated and exposed radicals who advocated for abolishing all prisons and defunding the police; and created a video series in San Francisco and Oakland, California, called “Societal Rot,” where we showed the consequences of rampant drug use and the soft-on-crime policies of Boudin—who was voted out of office because of it—and Oakland District Attorney Pamela Price.

We produced a mini-movie called “An Avoidable Tragedy,” featuring the murder of Wicomico County Deputy Sheriff Glenn Hilliard by a career criminal who then-Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby refused to hold accountable for his repeated parole violations after his armed robbery conviction.

The new documentary stitches together the full story of the rogue prosecutor movement and features crime policy experts Heather MacDonald and Rafael Mangual, elected district attorneys, and victims of crime.

There are approximately 2,300 elected district attorneys across this great country. Who your district attorney is directly affects public safety, which is the bedrock of a civil society.

We hope this documentary opens the public’s eyes to what’s at stake and the real-life consequences of the rogue prosecutor movement.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/10/21/documentary-exposes-real-life-consequences-rogue-prosecutors/

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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 hatred divorced from reality

Lily Steiner

Mea culpa. I used to be one of Oprah’s biggest fans – recorded and watched every single show, bought her 25th Anniversary CD as soon as I could get my hands on it… The woman was my hero.

She was smart, likeable, honest, and open. You felt that she understood you, without ever having met her. Oprah imparted so much common sense and even opened a school for girls in Africa to make sure they received a full education. How could audiences not feel good about her? She was a regular person who had grown up with a challenging childhood and realised her dreams.

As a fan, I could forgive her idolisation of Michelle and Barack Obama. I understood her excitement for the Obama presidency, being a black woman. But her backing of the Democratic Party at their 2024 convention and filling of the audience with celebrities to celebrate Kamala Harris, is where I had to draw the line.

Her speech at the convention shocked me. She started by accusing Trump of wanting to divide and create an ‘us’ against ‘them’ society.

‘There are people who want you to see our country as a nation of us against them. People who want to scare you, who want to rule you. People who’d have you believe that books are dangerous and assault rifles are safe. That there’s a right way to worship and a wrong way to love. People who seek first to divide and then to conquer. But here’s the thing: when we stand together, it is impossible to conquer us.’

She then continues, suggesting Trump is the one wanting to scare Americans. This claim is made after the constant rhetoric of the Democrats about the death of Democracy if Trump is elected for a second time. America should remember that the Democrats are the ones who flooded the country with millions of illegal migrants from all over the world. It was the Democrats who ignored violent rioters from Black Lives Matter and Antifa, even as buildings were being burnt down.

How on earth could an intelligent woman who lived through Trump’s first term accuse Trump of being a fear-monger and who wanted to ban books…? This was my question upon hearing the speech. Is she unaware of the amazing assistance Trump gave to the black community by increasing funding to black schools and universities along with creating funding for black businesses and encouraging entrepreneurship? I wonder if she has heard the testimonies of regular black communities who are standing strong behind Trump…

Oprah, who has interviewed Trump many times and known him for many years, has previously referred to him as a bully. One may make that accusation of the Democrats after they attempted to impeach Trump not once but twice over nonsense accusations. Is Trump the bully in this scenario? As a long-time fan, I am left to wonder if is the same woman who had her own television show for over 25 years that I thought was an independent thinker. Where is that Oprah Winfrey, my hero?

The world has watched for almost four years as the Biden administration wrought destruction on America, bringing it to the brink of collapse. We have been bombarded by the incompetent Kamala Harris who cackles her way through media appearances.

Donald Trump has a proven track record of accomplishments in office, despite being hampered at every turn by the Democrats. Trump speaks for three or four hours at every rally, generally without a teleprompter, and covers both his policies and vision for making America great again. He has a recovery plan to salvage the nation after four years of Biden.

I do not understand how Oprah put her name behind Kamala Harris, along with so many other celebrities. Have our heroes become followers rather than leaders? I feel shame for what I once admired.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/oh-no-oprah/

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Did Trump Propose Deep Medicare Cuts?

In a recent report, “The Trump-Vance ‘Concept’ on Health Care,” Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign claims that former President Donald Trump proposed “deep cuts to Medicare and Medicaid” in his budgets submitted during his term as President, including cuts that would “undermine Medicare’s fiscal position and cut benefits for seniors.”

When it comes to Medicare, these claims are largely false, misleading, and counterproductive.

President Trump’s budgets included proposals to reduce the cost of Medicare through changes to provider payments and drug pricing reforms that have generally received bipartisan support. Specifically, his final budget proposal for Fiscal Year (FY) 2021 included proposed Medicare changes that we find would have:

* Modestly slowed Medicare cost growth – with costs rising by 89 percent over a decade rather than 104 percent and proposed savings representing one-twentieth of projected costs.

* Improved rather than cut benefits by lowering premiums and cost-sharing without reducing covered benefits or meaningfully changing access to care.

* Strengthened rather than undermined the program’s fiscal position, including by extending the solvency of the Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund by at least 25 years.

Health care spending is the largest area of the federal budget and is experiencing rapid growth that threatens to widen deficits and drive the Medicare HI trust fund to insolvency in just 12 years. Lawmakers will need to consider meaningful savings to lower the cost of Medicare and Medicaid, along with other parts of the budget and tax code.

This presidential campaign has been damaging and unhelpful toward efforts to thoughtfully reform Medicare, with both candidates attacking their opponents for cutting benefits while shying away from offering their own comprehensive plans to address these issues.

This ‘Medi-scare’ tactic only increases the difficulty of implementing urgently needed reforms, thereby making it harder to restore solvency to Medicare HI, lower health care costs for seniors, and reign in deficits.

In their recent report, the Harris campaign claims “Trump will Slash Medicare and Medicaid” and says that “Trump proposed deep cuts to Medicare and Medicaid” in the past.

While some of President Trump’s budgets did propose large reductions to federal Medicaid spending, and there will be reasonable disagreements about this approach to health care savings, none of President Trump’s budgets slashed Medicare or proposed deep cuts to the Medicare program.

Under President Trump’s FY 2021 budget, which the Harris campaign specifically cites, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected Medicare costs would have still grown by 89 percent between FY 2020 and 2030 compared to 104 percent under then-current law.

The total Medicare savings proposed in President Trump’s budget were about 5 percent of total Medicare costs from FY 2020 through 2030 – $500 to $600 billion out of more than $10 trillion. For perspective, prescription drugs savings in the Inflation Reduction Act are projected to reduce Medicare costs by 3 percent by FY 2031 compared to current law, and the insolvency of the Medicare HI trust fund is projected to lead to an abrupt 11 percent cut in benefits.

Trump Administration Medicare Policies Would Have Cut Costs, Not Benefits

The Harris campaign claims that “independent analysts have noted that in every single one of his budgets as president, Trump sought to make significant cuts to both Medicare and Medicaid,” and that these cuts “are plainly intended to… cut benefits for seniors.”

This paints a misleading picture, since President Trump’s proposals generally focused on lowering provider payments and drug costs in a way that would have also reduced premiums and cost-sharing paid by seniors, rather than cutting their benefits.

Included in the FY 2021 budget were proposals to reduce bad debt reimbursements, lower excessive post-acute care payments, and adopt site-neutral payments that avoid paying hospitals and hospital-owned clinics more than private doctors’ offices for the same services. These reforms all resemble policies proposed by President Obama. The budget would have also reformed Medicare payments to hospitals for graduate medical education and uncompensated care, and effectively embraced the bipartisan Drug Pricing Act, which was sponsored by Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) and ultimately became the basis for some parts of the drug savings provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act. Prior budgets included similar proposals, with few if any changes to Medicare benefits.

We have previously described these policies as smart health savings, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities – cited in the Harris campaign’s report – has written favorably about them. They would all increase the value of Medicare to beneficiaries and make the program more efficient, not cut benefits for seniors.

It is worth noting that, while the Trump Administration’s budgets included bipartisan savings proposals that would have improved the overall financial health of the HI trust fund and lowered costs for taxpayers and Medicare beneficiaries, President Trump has not embraced any of these proposals as part of his 2024 campaign platform.

Trump Administration Medicare Policies Would Have Strengthened the Program’s Fiscal Position

The Harris campaign has claimed that President Trump’s “proposed budgets identify numerous cuts that are plainly intended to undermine Medicare’s fiscal position...”. However, the savings in President Trump’s budgets would have improved Medicare’s fiscal position.

Under current law, the Medicare Trustees project the HI trust fund will run out of reserves in 2036, while CBO estimates the overall cost of Medicare will rise from 3.2 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in FY 2024 to 5.4 percent by 2054.

According to his FY 2021 budget, President Trump’s Medicare proposals would have “extend[ed] the solvency of the Medicare program by at least 25 years” by reducing the cost of some parts of the Medicare HI program and moving funding for medical residents outside of Medicare.

Furthermore, while the overall Medicare savings in the FY 2021 budget were relatively modest, they would have slowed the average annual growth rate of Medicare spending from 7.4 percent per year to 6.6 percent through FY 2030. If Medicare growth were to slow by 0.8 percentage points annually for the next 30 years, costs would rise to 4.3 percent of GDP by FY 2054 instead of the 5.4 percent projected in the baseline – a meaningful improvement.

“Medi-scare” Tactics Are Harmful and Counterproductive

Accusing opponents of trying to slash Medicare and conflating reductions in Medicare spending with cuts to benefits is an all too common tactic employed by both political parties. Sometimes described as “Medi-scare,” this approach has not only been used against former President Trump, but also against GOP presidential candidates Bob Dole and John McCain, Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and even against Vice President Kamala Harris. And time and again, these claims have been debunked.

With health care costs continuing to grow and the Medicare HI trust fund less than 12 years from insolvency, there is an urgent need for policymakers to find ways to shore up the program and avoid large automatic cuts to hospitals and other providers, which would lead to a shortage of care.

There are numerous ways to lower health care costs and restore solvency to Medicare – many with bipartisan support.

Ultimately, the efforts of both 2024 presidential candidates to gain political advantage by describing reasonable Medicare cost savings as “deep cuts” only serve to take needed solutions for dealing with the unsustainable growth of Medicare and other government programs off the table.

https://www.crfb.org/blogs/did-trump-propose-deep-medicare-cuts

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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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Elite still in thrall to Marxist Propaganda

WWII was largely a titanic struggle between two great authoritarian regimes, the Nazis and the Soviets. For postwar American "progressives" a big problem with that was that it was the most Leftist of those two regimes which survived. Progressivism and Communism were very similar in what they preached: "All men are equal" was the lodestar for both. So could Progressivism be seen as in danger of moving farther Left and developing into an authoritarian regime like the Soviets? It was an obvious concern. The similarity between Soviet doctrines and progressive doctrines had to be seen as a warning of what could come.

American Progressives were somewhat sheltered from that perception by the fact that the progressive FDR had recently taken part in defeating one of the two great authoritarian regimes, Nazism. But that was not enough. The progressive era came to an end with the election in 1953 of the centrist "Ike".

But it was an uncomfortable situation for the Left so Leftist intellectuals greeted with a gladsome heart the work of a group of neo-Marxist psychologists who used a chain of devious reasoning to "prove" that all was not as it seemed and conservatives were the "real" authoritarians, thus exonerating the Left from any authoritarian tendencies.

http://jonjayray.com/concis2.html

That claim flew in the face of the great Soviet horror looming over everyone's heads but it was reality enough for Leftist intellectuals. Denying reality is a Leftist talent.

And for Marxists to claim that authoritarianism is conservative is perhaps the biggest laugh of all. Who said this:

"Revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon"

They are of course the well-known words of Friedrich Engels -- from his controversy with the anarchists. Yes: THAT Engels, the collaborator of Karl Marx. So Engels was quite frank about the authoritarian nature of Leftism but such frankness did not suit latter-day Marxists at all.

That conservatives are the real authoritarians was in any case a very tough sell. It was the Left who wanted to impose their ideas upon society through all sorts of changes. The conservatives simply wanted to stop them doing that. Leftism is intrinsically authoritarian. If making people do things that they do not want to do and making them stop doing things that they want to do is not authoritarian what else would be?

Nonetheless, the gross fiction that Leftism is not authoritarian has survived largely untroubled in the minds of psychologists and Leftists generally. As an idea, it is just too pleasing to abandon. In recent years, however,there does seem to have been some unshackling in some minds from that idea. So we have on some occasions had books and articles appearing that try to face reality. Below is a precis of a recent such book


Liberal Bullies: Inside the Mind of the Authoritarian Left

Luke Conway

The political left has an urgent and rising problem with authoritarianism. An alarmingly high percentage of self-identified progressives are punitive, bullying, and intolerant of disagreement – and the problem is getting worse.

Using his own cutting-edge research, leading psychologist Luke Conway shows that it’s not just right-wing extremists who long for an authority figure to crush their enemies, silence opponents and restore order; it’ s also those who preach ‘be kind’ and celebrate their ‘inclusivity.’ A persistent proportion of left-wingers demonstrate authoritarian tendencies, and they’re becoming more emboldened as they gain cultural and political power. On a range of scientific and social issues, they are increasingly advocating censorship over free debate, disregarding the rule of law, and dehumanising their opponents. These tendencies are part of an accelerating ‘threat circle’ of mutual hatred and fear between left and right that could tear apart our basic democratic norms.

Concluding with an eloquent call for firm but rational resistance to this rising tide of liberal bullying, Conway presents a way forward for our hyper-partisan era.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Liberal-Bullies-Left-Authoritarianism-Problem/dp/1800752059

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US election has been flipped upside down as Donald Trump takes swing state polling lead

Donald Trump is on track to win the 2024 US election, according to the latest polling. The former US President has made a stunning comeback with just 19 days until election day.

His Democrat opponent Kamala Harris, who had been leading, has been losing ground in the key battleground states that will decide the election.

Recently, Ms Harris mantained a lead in the popular vote of about +2 points, but that has since slipped to +1.4.

However, the election is not determined by the popular vote. It is decided by the US electoral college system.

Under the system, each US state is apportioned a number of presidential electors, to a total of 538, with a majority of 270 or more needed required to elect the president.

While most of the states lean either heavily blue or red, the swing states can be decided by razor-thin margins.

The latest RealClear Polling numbers bode well for Mr Trump, and are a worrying sign for Ms Harris. The site aggregates the results of numerous polls into averages.

Mr Trump holds a narrow lead +0.3 point lead in Pennsylvania, which has 19 electoral votes. He’s also ahead in North Carolina by +1.4 points. Mr Trump is also poised to flip Georgia and is leading there by +0.7 points.

Ms Harris has maintained a slight lead of +0.3 in Wisconsin.

Mr Trump is leading by +1.0 in Michigan, a state with a second-largest Arab population in the country, and where the Israel-Hamas war could play a role.

Ms Harris looks set to win Minnesota and is leading by +4.7.

Mr Trump is likely to flip Arizona and is leading by +1.1.

He is also slightly in front in Nevada, with a +0.5 margin.

New Hampshire is set to stay blue, with Ms Harris up +7.4 as is Virginia where she leads by j+6.4.

Texas, which some thought may be competitive, is in fact not — as Mr Trump leads by +5.8.

If Mr Trump does indeed win every state that he’s currently ahead in, that would give him 302 electoral college votes.

However, Ms Harris is doing better according to the numbers published by polling site FiveThirtyEight, where she has a 54 per cent chance of being elected president.

The betting markets have also swung in favour of Mr Trump, with Sportsbet now paying $1.67 for a Trump win and $2.25 for a Harris victory.

The election remains incredibly close and even slight voting changes can have significant impacts on the final result.

The election campaign took a bizarre turn as Mr Trump swayed to music for about 30 minutes on stage at a televised town hall event on Monday (local time).

Initially, the event in Oaks near Philadelphia was standard fare ahead of the November 5 election, as Mr Trump took friendly questions from supporters on the economy and cost of living.

With the session moderated by a loyal right-wing ally, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, Mr Trump was on cruise control — although he got the election date wrong by two months, urging supporters to vote “on January 5.”

After the town hall paused for two audience members who required medical attention, Mr Trump then switched focus.

Jokingly asking whether “anybody else would like to faint,” Mr Trump declared: “Let’s not do any more questions.”

“Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” Mr Trump said.

And so they did: for more than half an hour, the Mr Trump playlist blasted while the candidate mostly stood on stage listening and slowly dancing.

Mr Trump has made a brief, jerky dance his signature at the end of rallies for years, nearly always to his exit song — the Village People’s 1978 disco anthem YMCA.

This time, he stayed on stage for nine songs, ranging from opera to a series of his favorites, including Guns N’ Roses’ November Rain, Rufus Wainwright’s rendition of Hallelujah, Elvis and of course YMCA.

And his dance routine expanded from the familiar jerky motion to a slow swaying. Often, however, he did not dance but stood in place and stared out into the crowd and sometimes pointed at people.

Later on Tuesday, Mr Trump later got into a heated exchange with Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait.

Discussing Mr Trump’s plan to enact tariffs, Mr Micklethwait repeatedly asked how Mr Trump would enact high tariffs on foreign companies without getting an economic blowback on the American consumer in exchange.

Mr Trump responded his policy would have a positive effect, and later slammed the journalist saying: “You’ve been wrong all your life”.

Playing the health card

Ms Harris, meanwhile, has tried to pivot the conversation to Mr Trump’s health after a medical report was published showing she is in “excellent health”.

She has since challenged Mr Trump to publish his own health records.

“Vice President Harris remains in excellent health,” her physician Joshua Simmons said in the report, adding that she “possesses the physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.”

Speaking to reporters on Saturday ahead of a trip to North Carolina, Ms Harris called Mr Trump’s unwillingness to publish his records “a further example of his lack of transparency.”

“It’s obvious that his team at least, does not want the American people to see everything about who he is … and whether or not he is actually fit to do the job of being president of the United States,” she said.

https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/leaders/us-election-has-been-flipped-upside-down-as-donald-trump-takes-swing-state-polling-lead/news-story/ee3a9fdf7d95646468019d49c8cbbafa

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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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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.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/dj-trump-rips-up-the-political-script-and-brings-down-house/news-story/88614359cd417534a98ee162342ca94e

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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.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/kamala-harriss-interview-with-foxs-brett-baier-was-strikingly-adversarial-and-angry/news-story/6fe4a02ce088e08ab010da513105d9c0

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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.

https://dailycaller.com/2024/10/15/donald-trump-dudes-rock-campaign-young-men-males-gen-z-millennials-podcasts/

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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/

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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?

https://dailysceptic.org/2024/10/15/leading-political-journalist-says-banning-the-afd-is-overdue-and-insists-political-repression-is-perfectly-fine-when-exercised-by-a-constitutional-state/

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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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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.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/what-is-it-albanese-and-wong-dont-get-about-irans-threat-to-israel/news-story/691c788cf9c2a11a33324a32cfd230a9

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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.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/can-harris-stop-trump-get-ready-for-some-big-democrat-suprises/news-story/4a524db68e1f5663657cf7fb03300b5a

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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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