Author Archive: Stephen Green

NEEDLESS TO SAY, THE ELITES AREN’T TAKING IT VERY WELL: ‘They Have No Compassion’: Victor Davis Hanson Breaks Down How Trump ‘Terrifies’ The ‘Out-Of-Touch Wealthy Elite.’ “Hanson argued that Trump has redefined the Republican Party by recasting it as a coalition of upper-middle and lower-middle class citizens, leaving both traditional Republicans and Democrats scrambling to respond. Hanson reflected on Trump’s ability to energize his base by shifting the GOP’s focus from the elite class to a broad cross-section of American workers.”

INDEED: The World Doesn’t Care About Your Partisan Politics.

American foreign policy is always something of a hostage to the domestic politics of the moment. While this might be the unavoidable byproduct of democracy, it can greatly distort our understanding of the world and the coherence of strategic planning.

The Israel-Iran-Ukraine-Russia linedance provides a steady stream of examples, but never has it brought as much clarity to the mismatch between U.S. partisan politics and American grand strategy as it has in recent days. Republicans tend to favor Israel but not Ukraine, and Democrats, the reverse. Our enemies, of course, see it very differently.

Just before the weekend, the Wall Street Journal broke the news that Russia has supplied the Houthis—the Iranian proxy in Yemen that has been shooting missiles at commercial shipping vessels in the Red Sea—with “targeting data” to help sink ships, kill civilians, and sabotage the supply chain. “The data,” the Journal explains, “was passed through members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who were embedded with the Houthis in Yemen.”

That sentence is a handy organizational chart. The Houthis aren’t merely supported by Iran, the Houthis are Iran. And the Russia-Iran alliance has become so tight that Vladimir Putin is helping the Iranians retaliate against the U.S. and Israel for having the temerity to counter Hamas’s invasion of Israel, and, more specifically, for America’s modest support for Ukraine’s existence against Russia’s eliminationist war machine.

Russia wants to bleed Western resources in the Middle East because Moscow is bleeding resources in trying to destroy part of Europe. Russia is angry that it is bad at war, so it is making more war.

Read the whole thing.

Previously: Nobody can say they weren’t warned.

IT’S SURPRISING HOW SURPRISED THE PENTAGON IS BY ANY OF THESE LAPSES: Pentagon Runs Low on Air-Defense Missiles as Demand Surges.

Interceptors are fast becoming the most sought-after ordnance during the widening crisis in the Middle East, as Israel and other U.S. allies face an increasing threat from missiles and drones fired by Iran and the militias it supports. The shortfall could become even more urgent after Israel’s Friday night strikes on Iran, which U.S. officials fear might spark another wave of attacks by Tehran.

Standard Missiles, which are usually ship-launched and come in various types, are among the most common interceptors the U.S. has used to defend Israeli territory from Iranian missile attacks, and are critical for stopping Houthi attacks on Western ships in the Red Sea. The U.S. has launched more than 100 Standard Missiles since Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel, the U.S. officials said.

The Defense Department says it doesn’t publicly disclose its stockpiles because the information is classified and could be leveraged by Iran and its proxies.

“Over the course of the last year, the Department of Defense has augmented our force posture in the region to protect U.S. forces and support the defense of Israel, while always taking into account U.S. readiness and stockpiles,” Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said.

The heavy use of the Pentagon’s limited stockpile of missile interceptors is raising concerns about the ability of the U.S. and its allies to keep pace with unexpected, high demand created by the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.

Nobody can say they weren’t warned.

Every war begins without enough stockpiles. But Ukraine is going on three years now, we don’t even have to fight there (nor should we), but the Biden-Harris administration can’t even make a show of procurement strength to bring the Russians to the negotiating table.

JEFF GOLSTEIN: Notes from a cluttered mind.

I usually try to keep Monday’s “Notes” posts lighthearted, but today I’m a bit under the weather and, as a result, I’m surly. And what follows needs saying: with 9 days left before election day, the Democratic Party has fine-tuned and now fully committed to its closing message for the 2024 Presidential race. And that message is this: people who vote for Kamala Harris — citizens and undocumented migrants alike — are Good and Righteous. They alone, among earthly creatures, walk with the angels, and they alone serve as protectors of our Constitutional order, guardians of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, (amen!); they are the beneficent, the charitable, the sympathetic to those less fortunate and oppressed — and they in their beatitude forestall a tide of cold brackish corruption sure to be unleashed by the “far right,” a pestilential deluge certain to drown the country in a maelstrom of suffocating fascist rule.

Alternately, the benighted and ugly cretins who vote for Donald Trump — degraded in their genetics and inferior in their cultural fashioning — are filthy, vulgar, and unreconstructed in their myriad hatreds. They are dumb animals. Vile. Evil. They are racist to the core. Nazis in their hearts. And as Nazis, they exist in their extremism unthinkingly and programmatically, glutted with darkness, their souls black and grubby. And they must be rejected, these Nazis — thoroughly and completely — by anyone who lays claim to a soul or a conscience.

This closing Democratic Party message is as clear and as plainly articulated as I’ve ever heard it in the fifteen presidential election cycles I’ve lived through. Democrats — or rather, the progressive left who has taken over the old Democratic party and galvanized behind Kamala Harris — absolutely and unapologetically despise their political opponents, whom they largely view as subhuman. Their hatred is literal and visceral. It is palpable.

It’s also meant to provoke violence and provide justification for cheating. There are no holds barred fighting Nazis.

And do read the whole thing.

METAPHOR ALERT:

There’s something rotten in Moscow.

A MUCH DEEPER DIVE INTO THOSE CALIFORNIA REFINERY CLOSURES: When Climate Cult Madness and National Security Collide.

Climate cultists and green grifters have never been very practical in implementing their schemes and driving these homegrown, home-production oil firms out of CA will be the most beautiful, expensive, and potentially disastrous illustration of their ignorance and hypocrisy.

Where will the fuel now come from when a state has no inbound pipelines and no plans to build any refineries to replace the ones they drove off?

Why, fuel tankers, of course.

But, see, there’s a problem. We have very few domestic tankers, none being built, and those already in service work mostly out of the Gulf of Mexico and up the East Coast. They’re booked and busy – no time to go the opposite way, through the Panama Canal and then up the coast to deliver oil to CA.

So the climate activists shrieking about carbon footprints who could have continued to have gasoline from right near the CA Coast or the interior of the state will now be paying the freight for boatloads – literally – of it to travel all the way from Asia.

Much more at the link, including this gem: “Our Navy NOW is going to have to fight the Chinese in the Pacific dependent on fuel FROM THE PACIFIC – perhaps even from the Chinese themselves.”

WARGAMING THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE: The Penultimate Edition. “We’ll start this second-to-last Wargaming column by going back to basics with a look at RCP’s poll-averaged base map — complete with tossups, leaners, and likelies. Then we’ll get down to business.”

PRIORITIES:

RandoLand is a great follow if you’re looking for the very latest in government waste and corruption.

A HUNDRED THOUSAND HERE AND A HUNDRED THOUSAND THERE AND PRETTY SOON YOU’RE TALKING REAL LOSSES: Over 200,000 subscribers flee ‘Washington Post’ after Bezos blocks Harris endorsement.

More than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions by midday Monday, according to two people at the paper with knowledge of internal matters. Not all cancellations take effect immediately. Still, the figure represents about 8% of the paper’s paid circulation of 2.5 million subscribers, which includes print as well. The number of cancellations continued to grow Monday afternoon.

A corporate spokesperson declined to comment, citing The Washington Post Co.’s status as a privately held company.

“It’s a colossal number,” former Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli told NPR. “The problem is, people don’t know why the decision was made. We basically know the decision was made but we don’t know what led to it.”

The Washington Post spent years cultivating a particularly insular audience by playing up to their vanities and biases, but mostly their vanities. They aren’t taking lightly to having their bubble popped.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Let the Election 2024 ‘Anomalies’ Begin! “What stinks here is that we ever got to the point where the powers that be thought it was OK to treat ballots with the same level of concern that we treat used clothing deposits. Actually, the clothing donation boxes that were all over my old neighborhood in Los Angeles were probably more secure than the ballot drop boxes.”

IT ISN’T THE MONEY: Teach the children well: From rural Oregon to Houston, students are learning more.

Third-graders at Adrian Elementary School, in the poorest county in Oregon, have the highest reading proficiency scores in the state, reports Steven Mitchell of The Enterprise. Test scores were low before the pandemic in rural Malheur County. But four years ago, the district hired a reading specialist and began teaching students the sounds that go with letters, also known as phonics, he writes.

Last school year, 81.3% of Adrian third graders were proficient readers, compared to 39% of third graders statewide.

This year’s third graders are the best prepared she’s ever taught, says Kelsey Zimmerman. On the walls of her classroom are posters showing how to use punctuation marks, reminders on skills such as comparing and contrasting and cause and effect, and “big idea words,” such as “loyal” sovereignty,” democracy,” and “civic.”

Phonics works. Huge budgets for layers of unnecessary administrators pushing untested experiments don’t.

ONCE UNLEASHED, INFLATION IS A DIFFICULT BEAST TO TAME: Economists Warn of New Inflation Hazards After Election.

Inflation has fallen thanks to higher interest rates and big assists from healed supply chains and an influx of workers. But whether borrowing costs and price growth continue to ease next year could turn heavily on policy choices by Donald Trump or Kamala Harris.

Both candidates support policies to boost growth that might keep inflation from falling any farther. But economists and even conservative-leaning advisers worry that the ideas backed by Trump, in particular, risk stoking the embers of inflation. Those include his proposals to slap across-the-board tariffs on imported goods, to deport workers, and to lean on the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates.

“Put them all together, these levers are moving more in an inflationary direction. I’m legitimately worried about inflation worsening in 2025,” said Brian Riedl, a former Republican Senate aide now at the conservative Manhattan Institute.

I don’t know who Riedl is but I’m thinking the guy in this video has a better sense of what Trump wants to do:

Q: What do you call ripping $2 trillion out of the federal budget?

A: A good start.

But without cuts, Jeffrey Carter is right: All Roads Lead to Inflation. There Is No Way Out.

IT CAN TAKE TIME TO CONJURE ENOUGH OF CORRECT BALLOTS:

HMM: Astronauts on the ISS are braced for an urgent evacuation – as NASA uncovers 50 ‘areas of concern’ including leaks and cracks on the 25-year-old space station.

The US space agency and its Russian counterpart, Roscomos, are tracking 50 ‘areas of concern’ related to a growing leak aboard the station.

NASA is now calling the cracks in a Russian service module a ‘top safety risk’ – escalating the threat rating to five out of five.

Astronauts have been warned to stay in the American section when the module is open so they can be close to their spacecraft in case of an emergency evacuation.

Although officials have been aware of the issue since 2019, the exact source of the leak is still unknown.

All potential cracks have been covered with ‘a combination of sealant and patches’ but NASA warned that the leak reached its fastest rate yet in April this year.

Concerns over the station’s safety are now so high that NASA has negotiated with Roscomos to only open the hatch when absolutely necessary and to keep it sealed in the evenings.

This is from the Daily Mail so I’m not sure how much credence to give it but the leaks in the Russian module are well-known.

THE AMERICAN PRESS SEEMS TO BE DOWNPLAYING THIS STORY: Chicago Jewish man on way to synagogue shot by attacker shouting ‘Allahu Akhbar.’

The man, 39, was shot by a 23 year old gunman, in the 2,600 block of North Washtenaw Avenue, which is home to many Orthodox Jewish families.

The gunman, who has yet to be identified, was heard on a ring camera screaming “Allahu Akbar” before engaging in a two and a half minute shootout with police.

The Chicago Police Department told JNS that the incident is under investigation, but did not directly confirm that the victim was Jewish.

However, when asked if the victim was wearing anything that identified him as an Orthodox Jew during a press conference, Deputy Police chief Kevin Bruno said that “the victim is from the community.”

I eagerly wait various deranged Twitter randos explaining how this is Trump’s fault.