ERICK ERICKSON: Ignoring Biden’s Hurricane Incompetence. ” Instead of prioritizing the response to stranded Americans in North Carolina, Biden and Harris were tweeting about the humanitarian crises in Lebanon and Ukraine.”

Plus: “If the victims of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina were black and the President was a Republican, national media reporters would be covering the government’s incompetent response with the epistemic vitriol they did following Katrina. Instead, we’re forced to rely on local reporters and updates from nonprofits like Samaritan’s Purse to understand what’s happening on the ground.”

Related:

MARK STEYN: An Act of War, One Year On.

Today is the first anniversary of the worst one-day slaughter of Jews since the Second World War, and the start of what John Derbyshire calls the Israel-Iran War, on multiplying fronts.

There will be many observances of October 7th today. You might think that, if one’s principal concern is the “disproportionate” nature of the Israeli reprisals, one might schedule the protest marches for the first anniversary of the Zionist Entity’s counter-attacks, its first strikes on Gaza. Instead, in almost every major city across the west, the big parades are happening on the anniversary of October 7th – which risks giving the unfortunate impression that what they’re really commemorating (indeed, celebrating) is the big pile of Jew corpses, plus the attendant hostage-taking, baby-burning, mutilations, decapitations and industrial-scale gang-rape.

Well, that’s because ultimately, that’s what they are celebrating, alas. Curious how silent the “punch a Nazi” crowd has become over these protests, isn’t it?

 

60 MINUTES HOST TELLS KAMALA HARRIS ‘WE’RE DEALING WITH THE REAL WORLD’ DURING GRILLING ON HOW SHE WILL GET A KEY POLICY THROUGH CONGRESS:

Kamala Harris appeared to struggle to explain her economic policies and how she will get them through Congress in an interview with CBS’ 60 Minutes.

The Vice President’s full interview will air at 8pm ET Monday as part of an election special, showing her repeatedly asked about her plans for the economy.

‘My plan is about saying that when you invest in small businesses, you invest in the middle class, and you strengthen America’s economy. Small businesses are part of the backbone of America’s economy,’ she said.

But when CBS’ Bill Whitaker continued to grill her what her plan does and how she would pay for it, Harris didn’t offer any specifics, just staying she knew unnamed lawmakers agreed with her.

‘I’m going to make sure that the richest among us who can afford it, pay their fair share in taxes. It is not right that teachers and nurses and firefighters are paying a higher tax rate than billionaires and the biggest corporations. And I plan on making that fair,’ she said.

‘But we’re dealing with the real world here,’ Whitaker told her, asking her how she would get it approved by Congress.

How bad is Kamala at the political basics, when she’s a Democrat being hamstrung by own party’s operatives with bylines a month before the election?

BRENDAN O’NEILL: Jewish Lives Matter.

The Battle of Cable Street is inconceivable in modern Britain. The ideas, the bravery, the plain decency required for such a street fight with fascism no longer exist. The atomising creed of identitarianism, the relentless rise of privilege policing, the cult of competitive grievance, the wariness of Zionism that so often crosses over into wariness of Jews – all of this has ensured that those 20th-century gatherings across religious lines, colour lines and identity lines to fight for a greater, human cause are unrepeatable in the modern era. These poisonous political strains have made the Battle of Cable Street feel like a distant, almost ancient event. One we can admire but not really imagine. One that the cultural establishment romanticises while being blissfully unaware that were something similar to happen today, they wouldn’t be on the side they think they would be on.

We don’t even need to use our imaginations. Since 7 October we have seen with our own eyes what would happen if there were a sequel to Cable Street. We have seen liberals and leftists march shoulder to shoulder with radical Islamists calling for further pogroms against Jews. We have seen self-styled progressives mingle with Islamists chanting about Muhammad’s violent vengeance against the Jews. We have seen bourgeois radicals chant ‘Zionist scum’ at a man in a kippah. We have seen left commentators make excuses for the bloodiest pogrom against the Jews since the Holocaust. And we have seen them say nothing when a man was given a paltry suspended sentence for threatening Jews with a knife in Golders Green in London. And when three men in the north of England were arrested on suspicion of plotting a gun attack on Jews. And when synagogues were attacked. And when Jewish schoolkids took off their blazers to dodge the attention of racists. And when anti-Semitic hate crimes in London rose by 1,350 per cent.

Is silence still violence, as they told us during the BLM protests of 2020? If so, their ‘violence’ against Jews has been deafening.

The truth is that there have been mini Cable Streets in Britain and elsewhere almost every week since 7 October*. Outbreaks of anti-Semitism, the mobbing of ‘Zionist scum’, the chanting for pogroms, the racist harassment of Jews on campus. And the left that loves what happened on Cable Street 88 years ago has either turned a blind eye or taken the side of the persecutors. This is the inhumanity of identity politics. This is where that post-class, hyper- racial, privilege-obsessed ideology of the cultural establishment ends up: with a low-level war on Jews, in broad daylight.

Read the whole thing.

*Similarly, it’s Charlottesvilles all the way down in Kamala and Joe’s America:

QED:

PHOTOSHOP: THE (VERY) EARLY YEARS: The 1912 War on Fake Photos.

Concern about deceptively edited photos feels like a very modern anxiety, yet a century ago similar worries were being litigated…

Portrait photography gave rise to an industry of photo ‘retouching’ – analog ‘beauty filters’ – to flatter subjects in a way portrait painters once did. This trend lead to questions about technology distorting our perceptions of beauty, reality and truth:

An 1897 issue of the New-York Tribune would declare the assumption “Photographs Do Not Lie” an “exploded notion”, saying:

“…at the present time photographs may be and are made to lie with great frequency and facility.”

Other commercial applications of photo retouching emerged: in 1911 tourists visiting Washington D.C. could acquire fake photographs of themselves posing with then President of the United States William Taft. This troubled Government officials. Upon discovering the practice in 1911, a United States Attorney ordered it stopped:

Read to the end; the coda of the story is a hoot.

DISPATCHES FROM THE “SOME PEOPLE DID SOMETHING” SCHOOL OF REMEMBERING 10/7:

(Classical reference in headline.)

MEGALOPOLIS: Making Sense of Francis Ford Coppola’s Fever Dreams.

My latest, over at Ed Driscoll.com, after taking one for the team, and seeing Coppola’s new movie in an otherwise empty theater. Shorter version: I can’t say it’s a good film, but I’m glad the Maestro, now 85, is still making movies, and movies that are about ideas, rather than sequels, spaceships and superheroes.

SO SOME PEOPLE — INCLUDING ME — HAD QUESTIONS ABOUT STARLINK ACTIVATING DIRECT-TO-CELL TECHNOLOGY FOR HURRICANE VICTIMS. Some phones, such as later model iPhones, have a limited “emergency” satellite capability already. But this T-mobile announcement and this Starlink page indicate that the new capability will work with any phone with LTE capabilities, which nowadays is nearly all of them, I believe. The Starlink page says: “Direct to Cell works with existing LTE phones wherever you can see the sky. No changes to hardware, firmware, or special apps are required, providing seamless access to text, voice, and data.”

Rolling out text this week, voice and data were scheduled for 2025, though that pace may be accelerated now. Impressive stuff.

BARI WEISS: A Year of Revelations.

In October 2023—just in that first month—George Washington University students projected the words “Glory to Our Martyrs” and “Free Palestine from the River to the Sea” in giant letters on campus buildings. At Cooper Union in Manhattan, Jewish students had to hide in the library from a mob pounding on the door. At Columbia, Professor Joseph Massad called the slaughter “awesome.” At Cornell, Professor Russell Rickford said it was “energizing” and “exhilarating.” At Princeton, hundreds of students chanted “globalize the intifada,” which can only mean: open season on Jews worldwide. At NYU, students held posters that read “keep the world clean,” with drawings of Jewish stars in garbage cans.

Over the weeks that followed, posters with the faces of the hostages were put up on lampposts and bulletin boards in campuses and cities across North America and Europe. And young people—and sometimes not so young—started tearing them down.

At first, we rationalized this by assuming that the people tearing them down were abnormal. But there were more than a few of them, including college professors. And they were gleeful.

Posters of lost cats aren’t systematically torn down by Broadway producers and graduate students, and yet these were human beings stolen from their beds. The only sane conclusion was that our times are not normal. To pretend that they are is as delusional as insisting that the supreme leader of Iran was merely speaking metaphorically when he said over the weekend, at his first public sermon in almost five years: Israel is a “malicious regime” that “will not last long.”

“A total derailment from civilization” is how the Nobel Prize–winning German writer Herta Müller described the Hamas massacre in her extraordinary speech delivered this past May. But the phrase included derailments closer to home.

Listen to the words being shouted on our streets.

Just this weekend, thousands of people in Toronto gathered to declare, “We don’t want two states, take us back to ’48,” the kind of call for the elimination of Israel that has been heard in cities across the West over the last year. At a rally in Philadelphia, one speaker recalled: “On October 7 when I was watching those resistance fighters flying into Palestine on paragliders, I was cheering.” In Berlin, protesters shouted in Arabic: “Anyone have a bullet; either you kill a Jew with it or give it to Hamas.”

There is no political argument consistent with the values of a free society that justifies this behavior. There is no moral universe that explains how two visibly Jewish students at the University of Pittsburgh were recently struck with a bottle; or how a literary festival in New York cancelled a panel because the moderator was a Zionist; or why a (now former) member of Congress downplayed the sexual violence Jewish women suffered on October 7; or why medical students and doctors in San Francisco shouted “intifada, intifada, long live intifada!”

This is not to say that the majority of Americans aren’t horrified by these examples and hundreds of others—or that they are without precedent. In 1939, after Kristallnacht, more than 20,000 Americans flooded Madison Square Garden to cheer for Adolf Hitler. Today, with the distance of almost a century, that shames us. We owe it to ourselves and to our country to be no less horrified when today, in New York City, Hamas’s allies “Flood New York City,” an allusion to the group’s October 7 massacre, which it called Al-Aqsa Flood.

Jim Geraghty writes that on college campuses, “The Antisemitism Is the Point:”

Have you seen any college protests against the Houthis’ “partial and limited reintroduction” of slavery and child marriages?

There are ongoing “atrocities against Black African ethnic groups in Sudan — wrenchingly similar to the Darfur genocide here two decades ago.” Nicholas Kristof reports:

After two military factions started a civil war in 2023, one of them — a descendant of the janjaweed called the Rapid Support Forces, armed and supported by the United Arab Emirates — tried once again to drive Black Africans from Darfur. Naima recounted the same pattern I heard from so many people: The militia surrounded her village, lined up men and boys, then shot them one by one.

“We’re going to get rid of this Black trash,” she quoted the Arab gunmen saying.

Then the gunmen went house to house to kill, plunder and rape. Mostly, those they raped were girls and women, she said, but they also raped at least one man.

Do these black lives matter? Apparently not, judging from the lack of reaction of the overwhelming majority of America’s college students.

Any activists even notice new claims of the mass killing of the Rohingya by the Arakan Army in Myanmar?

Nope, the only “genocide” that seems to interest the angry young leftists on America’s college campuses is the Israeli use of military force against Hamas in retaliation for the massacre perpetrated by the terror group.

If your lone measuring stick of geopolitical events was the reaction of American college students, you would think that (a) the October 7 massacre and mass rapes were a minor provocation, not even worth much discussion, and (b) the Israeli military response to that massacre is a greater outrage than the Rwandan genocide, the Islamic State’s brutality, the “ethnic cleansing” of the Balkan wars, or the millions killed or displaced in Congo.

Maybe, if you look hard enough, you can find a sparsely attended, largely ignored, on-campus effort against these other moral abominations, one that garnered little or no media coverage and minimal student interest.

But only Israel gets American college students’ blood pumping, propelling them up off the dorm bed and out to march, protest, occupy buildings, and assault their classmates. (From an Anti-Defamation League report released last month, summarizing the 2023–24 academic year: “Twenty-eight assaults were recorded on approximately 20 campuses across the country in the following states: California (10), Massachusetts (4), New York (4), New Jersey (2), North Carolina (2) and one assault each in Georgia, Louisiana, Michigan, Tennessee, Washington and Wisconsin.”)

John Podhoretz writes: that Kamala and Doug Emhoff will be planting a tree today: Kamala Harris’s October 7th Tree.

I just pulled up the New York Times‘s list of stories on that day. You can find it here by clicking on this sentence. There is not a single article listed here commemorating the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. Not one. December 7, 1942 was not a day for chin-scratching, soul-searching, wound-dressing commemoration. Men were fighting and dying on that day, as they would every day for another two and a half years. It was a time for action. It was a time to kill the enemy and save your friends and take and hold territory and raise the flag, and at home, to write letters to loved ones in uniform and worry yourself sick about them and accept your rations and collect scraps of tin and metal that might be useful for the war effort.

* * * * * * * *

It is another day in the war that must be won for the Jewish people to be safe, the Jewish state to reestablish its deterrence against its genocidal enemies, and the West to prevail against the anti-Western Muslim ideologues who made their anti-human intentions known 45 years ago when they took 52 American embassy employees hostage and held them for 451 days. The 101 hostages held by Hamas have been in captivity for 365 days. For them, too, this is just another day, a day of horror. It’s unlikely they even know what day it is, as they have not seen the light of the sun in a year.

And yet here we are in America, commemorating as though this were some kind of…what? Holiday? It’s also just another day—a day when I walked by my bank on the Upper West Side to see it defaced by red-paint graffiti that read “CITIBANK GENOCIDE,” which is a new one for me, and I thought I’d seen it all. A day when people aligned with the monsters who want to see my children dead and my people wiped off the earth are marching in support of those goals. Just another day in the world after October 7.

Oh, and I’m delighted to announce that on this day, the vice president of the United States, who is also leading in the polls for president in the election that will conclude in 29 days, will be planting a tree in commemoration of—again, what?—next to her house as her husband stands next to her, possibly sated by some leftover brisket from lunchtime cooked by the Veep. Yes, the brisket that, he informed us, helped bring him back to his religion. Together, as I said, they will be planting a tree.

A tree, people.

A tree.

It’s a tick-the-box gesture that does something to commemorate the anniversary of 10/7, without accomplishing anything, as Harris attempts to thread the needle between the 21st century equivalent of FDR’s coalition.

And possibly without saying very much, in the hopes of not offending any of her disparate constituencies. Exit question: Why Does Nobody Talk About the American Hostages in Gaza?

KAROL MARKOWICZ: One year after 10/7 attacks and Democrat-run states have let antisemitism fester: Antisemitism is a big problem for blue states where protesters celebrate ‘death to Israel.’ “October 7th was the worst attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Hamas invaded Israel, murdering people at random, raping, destroying homes and kidnapping people back to Gaza. There are more than 100 still held hostage, including four Americans. Raw and hurting, American Jews watched the streets of U.S. cities fill up with crowds. The people in the streets weren’t marching to stand with the slaughtered and the raped. They were gleeful, exuberant and there were many of them.”

Plus:

The ADL is a left-leaning Jewish organization, and yet they admit, “On a per capita basis, the states with the highest concentration of antisemitic incidents were New Jersey – with 8.93 incidents per 100,000 residents – followed by Vermont (6.64), Massachusetts (6.28), New York (6.23), Maryland (5.49) and Connecticut (5.09). On the city level, two cities – Manhattan (26.84 per 100,000) and Washington, D.C. (25.75 per 100,000) – stood out with far and away the highest levels of incidents per capita. Brookyln [sic], NY, stood out specifically in terms of physical assault incidents, with 1.16 assaults per 100,000 residents.” Again, all deep blue states and cities.

Why is Blue America such a cesspit of hatred and violence?

Related: “We expected Hamas to kill Jews. We didn’t expect Americans to celebrate it.”

DONALD TRUMP: THE SALENA ZITO INTERVIEW. Trump on not letting anything get in the way of unfinished business.

Former President Donald Trump set the tone for the final stretch of the presidential race when he took to the stage here in Butler, turning away from the crowd for the briefest of seconds, just as he did 12 weeks ago, and said, “As I was saying.”

Starting where he left off on July 13 before he was shot.

Those four words told everyone, perhaps even more so than when he raised his fist toward the crowd shouting, “Fight, Fight, Fight,” that he was a man who was not going to be knocked down, and was willing to leave everything on the field to take care of unfinished business in the White House.

In an interview with the Washington Examiner before the rally, Trump was somber in explaining how important it was to him to honor the family of Corey Comperatore, the former volunteer fire chief who was killed during the shooting in July. . . .

Like East Palestine, Ohio, just 30 miles as the crow flies west, the people who live here in Butler are often anywhere from fourth to ninth-generation residents who would not care to live anywhere else. They are also often forgotten by the people in the national media, corporations, government, and academia, who view their sense of place as the “middle of nowhere.”

Trump says it is important to him to show up in places like Butler, but also in East Palestine, as he did a couple of weeks after a Norfolk Southern train carrying toxic chemicals derailed, causing an environmental disaster.

The former president showed up that day, walking through the entire village through pounding sleet and mud, bringing crates of water bottles and buying hamburgers from the local McDonalds for the workers.

Read the whole thing.

CHANGE:

UPDATE: