Look, I get it: Biden put Democrats in a bad spot. He could have — and should have — announced in early 2023 that he would not seek a second term, thereby making it possible for Democrats to have a primary to choose their 2024 presidential candidate. Unfortunately for Democrats, while senile dementia diminishes many cognitive functions, it does not diminish egotism, and therefore Joe insisted that at age 81, he was still perfectly capable of enduring the rigors of a reelection campaign.
Biden did the wrong thing (“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up,” as Obama famously said) and the consequences are that now Democrats are stuck with Kamala Harris as the nominee. She has never been popular, doesn’t have a record of accomplishment, and the Biden administration’s policies are unpopular, so the whole basis of the Democratic campaign is demonizing Trump: “ORANGE MAN BAD!”
During a press briefing on Tuesday, Fox News senior White House correspondent Peter Doocy asked Jean-Pierre, “How many more assassination attempts on Donald Trump until the president and vice president and you pick a different word to describe Trump, other than ‘threat’?”
Jean-Pierre told Doocy she completely disagreed with the premise of his question, calling the way he asked it “incredibly dangerous” because Americans are watching.
This is disgraceful and bordering on conspiracy at this point.
If it is your misfortune to reside in one of the “battleground” states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, etc. — you can’t turn on your TV without being bombarded by Democratic ads portraying Trump as a menace. Meanwhile, the news media let Kamala Harris go unquestioned as she blabbers word-salad nonsense, and almost no one in the media mentions the real truth: Kamala is underperforming.
We are now 47 days away from Election Day. Early voting has already started in Pennsylvania. God willing, we only have to put up with this for another seven weeks. Try not to let it drive you crazy.
The day after thousands of Hezbollah terror suspects were injured, and reportedly a dozen people killed, by their pagers almost simultaneously exploding, Lebanese and Iranian media reported a second wave of radio device detonations.
The second wave appears to involve two-way radio devices, such as walkie-talkies.
At least one of these explosions was reported near the funeral of a Hezbollah operative killed by the Tuesday pager explosions.
“We came out to try and find out what the sound was and people were running. People were covered in blood,” said Sky News correspondent Alex Crawford, who was in attendance at the funeral.
“There was blood on a car. One young man was running and he was very stressed. He said a walkie-talkie – which the Hezbollah security people around here are using for the funeral – exploded,” she said.
“The Hezbollah people then gathered up all the walkie-talkies and have been taking the batteries out of them. Our cameraman was surrounded by very tense and angry Hezbollah security, who told him to stop filming,” she reported.
Crawford said the funeral was “still going ahead” despite the explosions, but the crowd was “extremely tense,” and Hezbollah operatives were “furious.”
Hezbollah’s Al Manar TV news reported three new fatalities and dozens of injuries in the Bekaa region. The Lebanese health ministry reported more than a hundred injuries across southern Beirut and its suburbs. Most of the patients were treated for injuries in their hands or abdomen.
Lebanese Red Cross reported 30 of its ambulance teams are on “high alert” and responding to “multiple explosions in different areas.”
Lebanese state media also claimed some of the explosions were due not to radio devices, but home solar energy systems exploding.
Apparently, Mossad agents penetrated the supply chain by which Hezbollah was obtaining its electronic communications devices, but there’s a lot of finger-point between the Taiwanese manufacturer and the Hungarian middleman about how this could have happened. At any rate, the Mossad reportedly inserted pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN), “a highly explosive material,” inside the batteries of the devices, which “were then detonated by an external signal that caused the batteries inside to overheat.” That was Tuesday’s pager attack. The second wave of explosions on Wednesday were reportedly a result of the Mossad fearing that Hezbollah would figure out that their Japanese-made walkie-talkies were also rigged, so they faced a “use-it-or-lose it” choice and BOOM!
A witness who was at a Hezbollah funeral in the southern suburbs of Beirut has described to CNN the chaos as walkie-talkies appeared to explode at around 5 p.m. local time (10 a.m. ET).
The witness, who cannot be named for security reasons, told CNN that a loud bang went off, followed by screaming.
They said that the man whose wireless device exploded was covered in blood and his hands had been blown off.
Chris Lutz, a humanitarian aid worker in Kyiv, told the BBC that Routh was known locally as a “recruitment cheerleader” but had no rights or powers to recruit for Ukraine’s international legion. “I wouldn’t call him crazy. He was just hyper-focused. He was trying his best to help Ukraine. But it was getting to an unhealthy level,” Mr Lutz said.
“He asked me for advice on how to get Afghans into Ukraine. However, I had no experience of the Ukrainian legal system, so I declined the request. When he said he could bring over thousands of Afghan fighters, I started to get suspicious.”
Well, maybe you wouldn’t call him crazy, but I would. The guy who tried to assassinate Donald Trump was a middle-age misfit with an extensive criminal history who, in 2022, became so obsessed with the war in Ukraine that he went to Kyiv and bothered the locals with a lot of wild talk about recruiting Afghans to fight against Russia:
A former volunteer for Ukraine’s International Legion has branded Ryan Wesley Routh, the suspect in a second assassination attempt on Donald Trump, as “delusional” and a “liar” over his claims that he recruited for the Ukrainian organization.
Routh, 58, is in custody after an attempt was made on the life of Trump, 78, at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, where shots were fired on Sunday.
Trump survived “what appears to be an assassination attempt” the FBI said. The former president was “safe following gunshots in his vicinity” at his golf club, the Trump campaign said. . . .
The suspected gunman claimed in a June 2022 interview with Newsweek Romania that he recruited volunteers for the International Legion Defense of Ukraine, a unit of Ukraine’s Ground Forces.
He also spoke with The New York Times in 2023, claiming to have attempted to recruit Afghan soldiers who fled the Taliban to the Ukrainian army. …
But the International Legion for the Defense of Ukraine said in a statement that Routh, a former construction worker from Greensboro, North Carolina, had “never been part of, associated with, or linked” to it “in any capacity.”
Evelyn Aschenbrenner, a U.S. citizen from Detroit, Michigan, who worked with the International Legion beginning in March 2022—first in administration, and then as a recruiter—for a total of two years, also told Newsweek on Monday from Kyiv that they had been in contact with Routh since 2022, and that he is “delusional and a liar.”
Aschenbrenner, who left the International Legion in mid-June of this year, had warned on social media since June that Routh is “not, and never has been, associated with the International Legion or the Ukrainian Armed Forces at all.”
Routh messaged Aschenbrenner between March 2022 and March 2024, sending details of potential recruits, including a list of some 6,000 Afghani citizens. He would then become “hostile” and “manipulative” when told to refrain from doing so. “He said, ‘Oh you don’t really want to help Ukraine’. He was very emotionally, like, twisting like that, where if you refused to help or pushed back against him, he was very accusatory. He never listened to anything that I said, he didn’t register,” Aschenbrenner said.
“He sent me a PDF of, like, 6,000 Afghani citizens. They can’t legally enter Europe. He was combative. He was argumentative. He refused repeatedly to understand basic army policy,” Aschenbrenner said.
An encounter with Routh on August 24, 2022, Ukraine’s independence day, is when Aschenbrenner “first really realized [Routh] was not firing with all pistons up there.”
“There was an increased security alert [due to] strikes from Russia, and because of that, there was curfew. I think it was 6 p.m. or 7 p.m. in Kharkiv, and [he wanted] to get a foreign person over the border to join Legion. And I’m like, not today, dude,” Aschenbrenner said.
“I do think he seemed to be a little delusional, I don’t think he thought he was a real recruiter, but I thought he really he believed that he was helping Ukraine, and he was the only one who could help Ukraine doing what he did.”
Aschenbrenner was angered when Routh in February 2023 posted their personal details online, promising individuals the chance to fight in Ukraine.
“[He] started giving out my phone number, another person’s phone number, and after getting phone calls from soldiers from Uganda…I had several arguments with him on Signal to say, this is not a service that anyone wants or needs.”
“I don’t know if he’s ever been in Ukraine, but he seemed to have this…like he was the only one who could help save Ukraine — if you didn’t do exactly what he wanted when he wanted, somehow you were helping Russia win. I was like, that’s dramatic,” Aschenbrenner said.
Aschenbrenner added: “There seems to be a lot going on. There was delusions of grandeur and [he was] very disconnected from reality.”
Routh was bonkers, berserk, daft, demented, deranged, wacky, off his rocker, non compos mentis, nuttier than squirrel farts, a few fries short of a Happy Meal and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Which is to say, he was a typical Joe Biden voter. “Stochastic terrorism,” they call it, when hateful rhetoric is used to incite crazy people to violence. Somehow, the media have decided that Trump is to blame because (a) the media are utterly lacking in self-awareness and (b) they blame Trump for everything.
Of the many strange aspects of Ryan Routh’s history, none is stranger than this: In 2002, Routh barricaded himself inside a roofing business and had a three-hour armed standoff with police in Guilford County, North Carolina. Routh was charged with possession of a fully automatic machine gun in connection with that incident and yet, for some reason, received only probation. What the hell is going on in Guilford County? If you can’t send somebody to prison for that, exactly what can you imprison them for? Instead you turn him loose and, two decades later, he tries to assassinate a former president because . . . Ukraine?
“I prefer my women smiling and running toward me, not screaming and running away.” – Maj. Kaltin Gruder, from David Drake & S.M. Stirling’s The Steel.
I daresay all of us would agree with Major Gruder, no? This willing young lass comes to us courtesy of kbdabear on X. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.
I’m trying to figure out what a miracle meant.
What an awful week. We were hoping to sweep the A’s and Dodgers, or at least take two out of three from them, but they both beat us like the family mule (especially embarrassing because the Dodgers have no hitting but still managed to score 11 runs off us in three games) so we’re in last place again at 65-89, four games behind the A’s. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.
Keep that word in mind — “underperforming” — as you contemplate the fact that Kamala Harris is campaigning in Pennsylvania, a state that Joe Biden (allegedly) won by more than 80,000 votes in 2020.
Let’s compare Kamala’s polls to Biden’s polls four years ago. On this date in 2020, the Real Clear Politics average showed Biden with a 4.3-point lead over Trump in Pennsylvania, and some polls (i.e., NBC News/Marist and Quinnipiac) had Biden leading by as many eight or nine points. In the end, Biden won by a margin of 1.2%, so we can say that the September RCP average in 2020 had D+3 bias. Now look at the current RCP average for Pennsylvania — Harris is up by one-10th of a percentage point, three of the four most recent polls show a tie, and the biggest lead she’s ever had (the most recent Bloomberg poll and an NYT/Siena poll in early August) was 4 points. Most importantly, no polls are showing Harris +8 or +9 in Pennsylvania, as there were for Biden four years ago.
Nate Silver has suggested that one reason Harris is underperforming in Pennsylvania is because she picked Tim Walz as her running mate, snubbing Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro — and, let’s not kid ourselves, we know why she snubbed Shapiro. She was pandering to the Jew-hating pro-Hamas voters of Dearbornistan, and why? Because 100,000 Michigan voters in the Democratic primary voted “uncommitted” as a protest against the Biden administration’s support for Israel. In 2020, Biden (allegedly) won Michigan by a margin of more than 150,000 votes. In other words, the pro-Hamas vote probably isn’t enough, by itself, to swing Michigan’s 15 Electoral College votes into Trump’s column. However, by snubbing Shapiro to pander to her party’s Jew-haters, Harris may lose Pennsylvania’s 19 Electoral College votes. Oops.
If Trump wins Pennsylvania — and with Arizona now leaning toward Trump — Harris’s path to 270 Electoral College votes is narrow. And it’s not just a couple of battleground states where Harris is underperforming. The RCP average of national polls has her at +1.7, but at this point in 2020, the RCP average had Biden +7.1 — meaning that Harris is underperforming Biden by more than five points and guess what? Biden’s final margin in 2020 was 4.5 points, meaning that if the Democrat-leaning bias of polls hasn’t changed, Harris is likely to lose the national popular vote. But, but, but . . . Yes, I know: We don’t have much polling data since Tuesday’s debate, and Harris is likely to get a poll “bounce” from that. So let’s look at one of the post-debate polls that is most favorable to Harris. Reuters has Harris +5 — 47% to Trump’s 42% — and guess what? At this point in 2020, Reuters had Biden +9.
Despite everything, in other words, Harris is still underperforming Biden by at least four points. We are still more than seven weeks away from Election Day, and a lot of things could change between now and then, but as matters stand today, Harris is on track to lose this election.
Kamala: "For example, thinking about developing and creating an opportunity economy where it's about investing in areas that really need a lot of work and maybe focusing on again the aspirations and the dreams but also just recognizing that at this moment in time some of this… pic.twitter.com/imSwSCbEHw
