MISSING FROM THIS STORY: INFORMATION ON WHO THE PERPETRATORS ARE. Black Americans 20 times more likely to have gun injuries than White Americans. “Black persons made up only 12.6% of the U.S. population in 2020, but suffered 61.5% of all firearm assaults.”
Archive for 2024
July 31, 2024
BREAKING: Senior Hamas Leader Ismail Haniyeh Assassinated on Iranian Soil.
Related:
US pressed Israel not to strike in Beirut. So Israel decided to eliminate a top terrorist on US most wanted list, in Beirut. Choice of target likely made it difficult for Washington to object. https://t.co/SZHxtMnsdO
— Israel Radar (@IsraelRadar_com) July 30, 2024
LIGHTS OUT: Terrorists Getting EMP Weapons.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Suicides rising among kids ages 8 to 12, especially in girls.
RANDOM THOUGHT: Some of the same atheist leftists who go nuts when they hear that Oklahoma wants to put the ten commandments on the wall of public schools, claiming it’s the first step in creeping theocracy, go out and wave the flags of Islamic *actual* theocracies Hezbollah and Hamas, without an ounce of self-awareness.
JD VANCE IS WEIRD:
The Harris campaign held a Zoom "Women for Kamala" fundraiser event featuring Charlotte Clymer, who appeared in a heavily filtered image.
Clymer was previously known as Charles Clymer, a male feminist activist who was kicked out of the movement after being accused of being… pic.twitter.com/l4S7FWtuJi
— Andy Ngô 🏳️🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) July 30, 2024
Cheap fake, genuinely weird.
U.S. MILITARY IN DECLINE: America’s Airpower Is at Risk
In July 2014, I wrote a column that included this troubling paragraph: “With a few teeth-clenching exceptions (the Korean War’s MiG Alley battles), since 1944, American land, sea and air forces have enjoyed the military and diplomatic benefits of U.S. air superiority. Unfortunately, in 2014 there are strong indications that America’s air advantage is diminishing.”
On July 29, 2024 (10 years later), Air & Space Forces Magazine online interviewed U.S. Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James C. Slife. This Ukraine war-informed quote struck home: “We used to make the claim that since 1953 no American has been killed by air attack. We can’t make that claim anymore,” Slife said. “It calls into question, ‘What does air superiority actually look like?’ [Does] it look like 30,000 feet over the Yalu River (Korea) in 1953 or does it look like below 3,000 feet with quadcopters with a hand grenade slung to the bottom of them? I think the answer is: It’s all of the above.”
Check it out.
FROM LAST WEEK: Biden’s ‘Different Picture’ Ploy Put Freedom at Risk Did it ever. The direct quote from Joe that describes the entire Biden Administration: “And there’s a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.”
DISPATCHES FROM THE MOS EISLEY CANTINA: What I Saw at ‘White Dudes for Harris.’
Imagine if Republicans put on a celebrity-studded event called “White Dudes for Trump” that raised $4 million. Imagine the endless op-eds. Consider the B-roll that outlets like NPR or MSNBC might use: Klan rallies, January 6, clips from The Handmaid’s Tale, perhaps.
The Democrats get to do segregation because they’re doing it ironically. They’re slightly poking fun at the left-wing orthodoxy that everyone gets to do identity politics except white guys. Of course, they wouldn’t want people to think they were poking too much fun at the idea, in which you ask a black guy to open your white guy event, where almost no speakers actually talk about making life better for white men.
But is “Haha, don’t worry, we’re the good ones” a winning strategy for appealing to white men who haven’t decided to vote for Kamala yet? Probably not.
More on a similarly headlined piece by Declan Leary at the Spectator:
I did not expect a three-hour Zoom call to awaken my sense of racial solidarity. It was, admittedly, an impressive showing: nearly 200,000 virtual attendees racked up more than $4 million in small-dollar, blood-money donations. (Every so often, a cartoon rendition of the vice president in blue pantsuit pops up over the bar tracking contributions, lifting her arms robotically. A big gold star flashes behind her with giant script: KAMALA.) I had only been to one other rally this size before — and that one didn’t end too well.
The organizer is something of a surprise. The internet is awash with photos of a Democrat apparatchik named Ross Morales Rocketto, a great hulking mass of progressive energy, but he is not the man I see before me. Ozempic works miracles. The man bun is another story.
Morales Rocketto seems aware of the discomfort with which many will approach a whites-only boys’ club devoted to electing the first Jamaican-Indian female president. He laments the fact that “throughout American history, when white men have organized, it was often with pointy hats on.” He is evidently unaware that he is raising money for a descendant of slave owners.
Also at the virtual cantina, Luke Skywalker himself:
Hamill was campaigning hard for Biden as recently as May, happy to pretend that Biden was healthy enough and mentally fit to run for a second term, until the party told him to drop the pretense and seamlessly pivot to Harris, unburdened by what has been, to coin a phrase.
MARK HEMINGWAY: The Media Won’t Tell You Political Corruption Defined Kamala Harris’ Affair With Willie Brown.
Brown, who was repeatedly investigated by the FBI for corruption, was far more involved in Harris’ career ascent than appointing her to two board positions. He was a kingmaker in California, and he was heavily involved in helping Harris get elected as San Francisco district attorney. Brown didn’t do this entirely out of the goodness of his heart. Harris was working for the previous district attorney, Terence Hallinan, and quit when she got passed over for the No. 2 position in the DA’s office.
Hallinan found himself as the subject of criticism from other city officials, but others suggested the controversy was manufactured. “This whole thing is about Kamala Harris,” a source close to Brown told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Cross one of Willie’s friends and there will be hell to pay.” Eventually, Harris ran for DA with Brown’s powerful backing — a former Brown aide managed her campaign, and Brown played a key role in her fundraising, which was incredibly successful. After starting the race polling a distant third, she won the election.
Once in office, Harris then dropped or pled out corruption charges against friends of Willie Brown that Hallinan had been pursuing. There were a number of Brown’s friends let off the hook, but most notably this included a sweetheart plea deal for a notorious city contractor caught defrauding the city by using inferior recycled concrete in sensitive projects such as parking garages and the Bay Bridge. This compromised the structural integrity of those projects and endangered lives. But Harris dropped all the fraud charges and accepted a guilty plea on a single count involving an environmental violation.
“Harris’ office had no explanation for why it dropped the concrete case,” reported the Chronicle. A better explanation is that the contractor in question was generous with campaign donations and had previously been popped for making an illegal $2,000 donation to, yup, Willie Brown.
Read the whole thing.
OUCH: Microsoft stock drops over 6% after results fall short in latest AI disappointment.
DOUBLE OUCH: Nvidia could be on the verge of a massive technical sell-off, chart analyst warns.
AI is looking more and more like the dotcom bubble. There will be a few big winners but the sorting out is going to hurt.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Sorry, But Kamala Harris Is Not ‘Weirdly Unpopular.’ “As you’re probably already aware, James O’Keefe claimed another Lefty scalp this week, with secret video of DNC compliance manager Joyce DeCerce calling Vice President Kamala Harris ‘weirdly unpopular’ and that he doesn’t think she ‘would win this year.’ Damning stuff — or is it?”
READER FAVORITE: From J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. #CommissionEarned
TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE: Mark Kelly: Astronaut, senator, VP short-lister … ex-vitamin huckster.
As Jim Geraghty writes in the WaPo:
In 2015, former astronaut Mark Kelly rode a motorcycle onto a stage in China, with an American flag on one handlebar and the flag of the People’s Republic of China on the other. After dismounting, he told the audience before him how terrific Shaklee vitamins were, and how he took Shaklee Vitalizer on the space shuttle Endeavour in 2011, an out-of-this-world event honored on the Shaklee Facebook page.
* * * * * * * *
Nice gig, Senator. It makes your $55,000 speech in 2018 for Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, then the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, look respectable. (Kelly returned the money amid his 2019 Senate candidacy; the United Arab Emirates’ human rights record at that time and since is … bad. Lots of politicians equivocate about U.S. alliances with dubious Middle Eastern allies. But it’s unclear how many have accepted five-figure checks from them.)
No doubt, some Kelly fan is scoffing and insisting this is no big deal, and that surely Donald Trump — the guy behind Trump University — is the last person who could criticize Kelly for making a quick buck on an unsavory endorsement deal. Then again, the whole point of the Democratic ticket is to be a clearly better option than Trump, not just a different flavor of the same willingness to smile for a quick buck from chumps.
If Harris chooses Kelly, the Trump campaign would likely try to tie Kelly’s vitamin-pushing days to the Chinese investors in Kelly’s balloon company. The campaign ad labeling Kelly a “Mark-churian candidate” practically writes itself. But there would be no need to gild the lily; the absurd image of Kelly on the motorcycle, touting Shaklee vitamins and the Shaklee rehydration drink, is thoroughly cringe-inducing.
Since the whole point of Kamala’s “JD Vance is weird” campaign is to reflect away from her and the left’s myriad quirks (and to begin the demonization process that all Republican candidates are subjected to by the left), it could be a nice form of turnabout for the Trump campaign to play up Kelly’s brand of hucksterism. “There’s no getting around it,” Geraghty concludes. “For a stretch, Kelly’s name, image and reputation — largely built at NASA — was for sale. Choose carefully, Madam Vice President.”
BOONDOGGLE OR GRIFT? YES! Austin Electric Busses Busted. “In many ways, busses are a better fit for electrification than cars: Regular routes plus nighttime storage at a bus yard than can be equipped with industrial strength chargers should theoretically eliminate the range and recharging anxiety still common for many electric car owners. But poor range and lousy quality show that electric busses (at least the ones Austin bought) aren’t ready for prime time.”
Lower TCO was supposed to be a big advantage of EVs over ICE vehicles but that hasn’t panned out.
FIGHT HATE AND BIGOTRY: Indiana University hit with civil rights complaint over NINETEEN race-based scholarships.
USING FACTS AND LOGIC IS A MOST UNCOUTH WAY TO ARGUE: Pete Buttigieg dared Americans to look up crime data. I did and it’s not pretty for Democrats.
Leveraging the COVID pandemic as a pretext, Democrats either stopped booking criminals or released them early, claiming they’d face imminent death from COVID if they were to stay locked up. For example, Cornelius Haney was released from prison early over COVID when he was arrested for the murder of a 21-year-old woman in Denver. Two days after Jerry Crawford was released from prison to reduce the spread of COVID, he was arrested for shooting an 18-year-old man to death.
While Buttigieg and other Democrats try to memory-hole reality, we saw a terrifying rise of left-wing political violence perpetrated by activists, including Antifa, with criminals taking advantage of soft-on-crime legislation, such as a ban on police vehicular pursuits in Washington state and downgrading serious felonies by George Soros-backed prosecutors in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York.
When Biden took office, cities like Philadelphia and Indianapolis broke all-time records with 561 homicides and 271 homicides respectively. Portland, Oregon, meanwhile, hit its all-time homicide high in 2022.
It wasn’t just homicides that soared.
Read the whole thing.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: J.VER Men’s Cotton Linen Short Sleeve Shirts. #CommissionEarned
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Whiplash Narrative — Kamala’s Tough but Don’t Pick on Her! “Per the latest leftist fairy tale, Donald Trump is quaking in his dress shoes now that he’s facing off against Madame Veep. However, he isn’t supposed to challenge her on anything she has ever said or done in her political career.”
DON SURBER ON Being Called Weird by a Weirdo. “Calling someone weird only works if you are not weird. . . . Seriously, Walz needs to sit this one out. The Tennessee Star reported, ‘Minnesota Taxpayer-Funded Pride Event to Be Hosted by Satanist Incest Pornographer.'”
UPDATE: From a friend.
MORE: The pervasiveness of “weird” in the mind of Tim Walz. “Anyway, it seems that “normal” is a very high standard this time around. But it’s strange for Democrats to call the whole group of Republican candidates ‘weird’ when, for so long, they’ve been stressing the singular weirdness of Trump. I’m very susceptible to the argument that we need a President who’s at least normal, but there’s something abnormal — perverse — about generating the feeling that all the candidates are weird.”
Biden was sold as normal but wasn’t. Kamala isn’t normal. J.D. Vance is the most normal person on the menu for this election, and they’re going out of their way to call him weird.
SHE’LL HAVE A PEN AND A PHONE:
These are the thoughts and words of an AUTHORITARIAN.
Take 20 seconds to listen and learn. pic.twitter.com/bzR8kB4QTQ
— L A R R Y (@LarryOConnor) July 30, 2024
Harris didn’t come right out and say, “I am the Senate!” but give her time.
AND WORSE RULERS: Socialists make terrible neighbors.
In today’s episode of “Democrats defend unadulterated evil,” vice presidential hopeful and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz told liberals, “Don’t ever shy away from our progressive values. One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.” . . .
All that aside, let’s consider how neighborly socialism has historically been. Socialist and communist governments murdered an estimated 168,759,000 people from 1900-1987, by far the largest genocide in human history. The Marxists killed six times as many innocent people as the fascists and three times as many people as Genghis Khan’s Golden Horde. The Chinese communists murdered around 90 million people, and Joseph Stalin’s 43 million kills brought the USSR’s death toll to around 70 million, hardly neighborly. Ask a modern-day Ukrainian how it feels to be the neighbors of a post-socialist oligarchic state.
Walz, Harris, and even Marx-loving, Soviet Union-honeymooning Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) are no Stalin or Chairman Mao, or at least our constitutional order has thus far successfully prevented them from becoming those dictators. But to pretend that their deranged and oppressive policies are neighborly is as nonsensical as it is malicious.
During the George Floyd race riots of 2020, Walz allowed masked bands of street communists to burn Minneapolis to the ground, causing half a billion in damage to over 1,500 locations as then-Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA raised money to bail out the rioters. Her post on X promoting the fundraiser is still active.
If you start with the presumption that socialists are garbage people, you won’t go far wrong.
IT DOES LOOK THAT WAY: Members of Congress: The Secret Service Was Set Up to Fail.