The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

In The Mailbox: 08.09.24 (Afternoon Edition)

Posted on | August 9, 2024 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 08.09.24 (Afternoon Edition)

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Internet was down in Tonopah yesterday, and by the time it came up again it was too late for linkagery.
Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Good Guy With Gun Stops Rampaging SUV
EBL: Kamala Harris panders for the Black vote, also, PRESIDENT TRUMP: THIS IS THE WAY
Twitchy: Anita Dunn Claps Back At Pelosi, Gives Her Version Of Why Biden Was Ousted, Team Trump Posts 25 Minutes Of Kamala Explaining “Why They’re Hiding Her”, and Politifact Gets Nuked By Community Notes For Trying To Rewrite Kamala’s Extreme Gun Control History
Louder With Crowder: Woman Arrested As A “Stark Warning” Of What Happens When You Post “Inaccurate Information”, also, Bad Orange Woman Hallucinates “Tim Walz Is Who J.D. Vance Wants To Be”
Vox Popoli: Too Stupid to Survive, Into the Gammas’ Den, and Ukraine’s Battle of the Bulge
Upstream Reviews: Inkheart
Stoic Observations: Let The World Answer, Stoic Bites #8 – Olympics

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
CDR Salamander: Diversity Thursday
Don Surber: Ferguson speaks
STUMP: Public Pension Problems – Proposed Solutions, But Will They Fix Anything? 

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Second Manassas in Kursk Oblast?

Posted on | August 9, 2024 | Comments Off on Second Manassas in Kursk Oblast?

Oktyabr’skoe is a Russian village about five miles east of Rylsk, and about 25 miles north of the border with Ukraine. Thursday night, Ukraine hit a Russian truck convoy on the E38 highway in Oktyabr’skoe, possibly wiping out an entire battalion of reinforcements being sent to counter a Ukrainian incursion into the Kursk Oblast. Ukraine’s forces crossed the border Tuesday near the Russian town of Sudzha, and by Thursday were reportedly approaching Korenevo, about 20 miles to the northwest of Sudzha and 12 miles south of Oktyabr’skoe. While there is incomplete information about what happened at Oktyabr’skoe, it has been suggested that the Russian convoy was on its way to reinforce Korenevo, and was hit by rockets from a U.S.-supplied HIMARS battery. HIMARS has an extensive range, so it’s likely that the rocket salvo was fired from Ukrainian positions near Korenevo. Nevertheless, (a) this means the E38 east of Rylsk is effectively off-limits for Russia to send troops or supplies to the front, and (b) the Russians in Korevnevo are going to have to make do without that battalion the Ukrainians just wiped out.

Destroyed trucks in the Russian convoy

It has been elsewhere been reported that Ukrainian forces are also threatening Lgov, a crossroads town about 25 miles east of Rylsk, so that Russia is dealing with a multi-pronged attack in the region.

All in all, I’m reminded of how Stonewall Jackson opened the Second Manassas campaign by making a flank march and falling on Pope’s supply depot at Manassas Junction. This forced Pope to retreat from the Rappahannock, and to send forces to find Jackson and bring him to battle. Jackson proved elusive, however, and hid his corps near Sudley Springs on the road between Warrenton and Centreville. The next afternoon, when a Union brigade came marching past, Jackson stuck them hard and soon had Pope’s entire army converge on his front. What Pope didn’t know was that Lee had Longstreet’s corp en route to join Jackson, and when Longstreet was finally ready to attack, Pope army was wrecked and beat a hasty retreat back toward Washington.

Similary, the surprise Ukrainian attack into Russia’s weakly defended Kursk Oblast has thrown the Russians completely off-balance. The Ukrainians have so far encountered only light resistance from local defense forces, and when Russia tried to move regular army reinforcements into the region, they got hammered. The Russians have no idea of what the Ukrainians are planning to do next — will they make a lunge toward Kursk city or, perhaps, make a thrust eastward from Sudzha? Like Jackson after raiding Manassas Junction, the Ukrainian forces can sit and wait to see what the Russians send after them, and strike those reinforcements the way they did at Oktyabr’skoe.

Everything that Russia sends to deal with the incursion in Kursk will be subtracted from the forces available in the Donbas region and elsewhere, so that as a diversion, the Kursk campaign doesn’t need to make any major territorial conquests in order to succeed from a strategic perspective. Wisely, the Ukrainians have said nothing about what their intentions or objectives are, but some commentators have suggested that they may have 25,000 or so troops committed to this adventure, which would be plenty enough to wreak havoc in the Russian interior unless and until the Russians can bring sufficient forces into the theatre to force a Ukrainian retreat. And every time Russia tries to move troops along those roads, they risk another Oktyabr’skoe-style catastrophe.

Ukraine’s counter-offensive has taken the strategic initiative away from Russia. There’s no telling how long this Kursk incursion will continue, but Russia’s likely to suffer serious losses while it lasts.



 

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Category: Russia, Ukraine

Fictitious Candidate Kamala Harris and Her Imaginary ‘Presidential Campaign’

Posted on | August 9, 2024 | Comments Off on Fictitious Candidate Kamala Harris and Her Imaginary ‘Presidential Campaign’

Why is Kamala Harris now the Democratic presidential candidate? Perhaps you’ve forgotten, so let me remind you. After the June 27 debate debacle for Joe Biden, it took about three weeks for the party bosses to convince Joe he had to go, and why? Because his meltdown was so bad as to make it impossible for Democrats to have any hope of recapturing the House of Representatives, and put Chuck Schumer’s Senate majority in jeopardy. This prospect of down-ticket damage was the real reason that Joe got kicked off the ticket and replaced with Kamala who, in the 19 days since being anointed as Biden’s replacement, has yet to conduct a press conference or to do a major media interview — not even with such friendly outlets as CNN and MSNBC. It seems apparent that the game plan for Team Harris is to keep playing hide-the-candidate at least until the end of the convention next week, in order to minimize any risk that she’ll say something besides what’s written on the teleprompter.

Meanwhile, I sit here with my office TV tuned to CNN, which is endlessly hyping up Harris as enormously popular, her campaign “surging” with grassroots excitement. This cannot last, I keep telling myself. Sooner or later, the media-generated protective bubble around Kamala is going to be pierced, America will discover that she’s a complete airhead, and her (suspiciously high) poll numbers will collapse. Or maybe I’m wrong.

Maybe this whole thing is a scripted simulation. Maybe Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) think they can repeat the Biden basement campaign scenario of 2020, absent the excuse of a pandemic. Maybe there will never be any press conferences, no media interviews in which Kamala has to face questions that aren’t submitted in advance, so that she can rehearse her answers ahead of time. Could she actually win the White House with such a fake campaign? I doubt it, but the point is Kamala’s job as “candidate” doesn’t require her to win. All she has to do to “succeed,” by the standards of those who installed her as Biden’s replacement, is to avoid the kind of catastrophe that would drag down the Democrats in their House and Senate campaigns.

There are plenty of ambitious Democrats — governors and senators, especially — with their hungry eyes fixed on 2028, and having Harris actually win the White House this year would be bad for them. But they don’t want the kind of meltdown they were facing with feeble-minded Joe at the top of the ticket, so now they’ve got Kamala as a sort of puppet whose job is to not lose so bad that it hurts Democrats in the down-ballot races. Kamala is a fake candidate in a make-believe campaign.



 

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Category: Kamala Harris

My Patriotic Duty: Posting ‘Material Which Incites Violence or Hatred’

Posted on | August 9, 2024 | Comments Off on My Patriotic Duty: Posting ‘Material Which Incites Violence or Hatred’

The British Crown Prosecution Services posted a message warning to “THINK BEFORE YOU POST,” telling Brits that they could be prosecuted for “posting material online which incites violence or hatred.” This comes in the aftermath of rioting after three girls were stabbed to death, and eight others injured, in Southport, about 20 miles north of Liverpool.

Here’s the thing: This is all entirely the government’s fault.

After a 17-year-old suspect was arrested for the Southport stabbing attack, the police refused to publicly identify him. Given the pattern around such incidents in England, this led a lot of people to assume that the attacker must be a Muslim immigrant, and so some of the rioters targeted mosques or facilities for so-called “asylum seekers.”

Eventually, the situation was such that officials finally identified the attacker as Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, the son of immigrants from Rwanda. Rudakubana was reportedly born in Cardiff, Wales and, whatever his motive — other than Crazy People Are Dangerous — there is no apparent connection to Islamic radicalism. Therefore, the claim is being made, “misinformation” was to blame for the riots.

No, actually, government secrecy was to blame. If the police had merely released the name and mugshot of the suspect, at least the public would have known that he wasn’t named “Mohammed” or “Abdul,” which was a conclusion many people quickly leapt to, based on recent history of such stabbings not only in England, but all across Europe. And just because it appears the attacker was a deranged teenager — apparently motivated by mental illness, rather than radical ideology — does not mean that complaints about immigration policy are irrelevant or misguided. The cultural dislocations involved in relocating Third World migrants to England (or France, Belgium, Canada, America, etc.) often result in situations like this, where the children of immigrants become alienated or hostile. Even if the immigrants themselves are grateful toward their host country, and eager to have their children take advantage of the available opportunities, the younger generation may not share that attitude, and may not be able to handle the pressure to adapt and assimilate.

It’s not “racist” or “anti-immigrant” to mention this phenomenon, which is widely acknowledged by social workers who deal with immigrant populations, and equally known to advocates of immigration. From a conservative perspective, of course, this problem points toward a simple conclusion about immigration: NUMBERS MATTER.

Assimilation is easier when immigrant populations are relatively small, and the larger the immigrant population, the greater the likelihood of violent conflict. If you have a town of 10,000 people, the arrival of one family of immigrants from Guatemala or Ghana is not going to have much impact on the social fabric; whereas the arrival of 500 or 1,000 immigrants is a whole ’nother thing. When you have mass immigration — which is what England has been dealing with for decades — the potential for trouble rises to a near certainty. Government officials don’t want to tell the truth about the results of their policies, and so a culture of secrecy arises, eroding public trust and leading to exactly the kind of situation that produced riots in the wake of the Southport stabbings.

“UK Authorities Monitoring Social Media, Arresting People for Misinformation,” was Mary Chastain’s headline at Legal Insurrection, which immediately caused me to wonder, “How can I get myself arrested?” Or at least, get me banned in Britain.



 

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Category: Crime, Great Britain, Immigration

Worst VP Pick Since Tom Eagleton?

Posted on | August 8, 2024 | Comments Off on Worst VP Pick Since Tom Eagleton?

Kamala Harris has been the designated Democratic candidate for barely two weeks, and she’s already screwed the pooch with her first major campaign decision, the choice of Tim Walz as her running mate. I’m sitting here with my office TV tuned to CNN, and everything right now is all about Walz’s disputed military service record.

THIS IS NOT A GOOD MESSAGE DAY FOR KAMALA.

Far be it from me to pretend any expertise in what does or does not constitute “stolen valor,” but it seems clear that at times, Walz has misrepresented or embellished his record, which is unfortunate, because his actual record is nothing to be ashamed of. He did 24 years in the National Guard, rising to the rank of Master Sergeant (E8) and, at one point, served temporarily as Command Sergeant Major (E9), although he did not complete the training necessary to obtain E9 status.

Then there’s the thing about him retiring from the Guard just weeks before his unit deployed to Iraq and the fact that, whether or not Walz himself claimed to be a “combat veteran,” he didn’t make a point to deny that misleading portrayal of his service. There will be lots of back-and-forth over all this, and CNN is currently running with the idea that Republicans are “attacking” Walz’s service, which is itself misleading. Nobody is denying that Walz served honorably; the issue is whether he misled the public about his service. That may not seem like a big deal to most civilians, but let me give you an example of why it matters.

As regular readers know, my son is in the Army, and has twice completed the Best Ranger Competition. He spent years training Rangers at Camp Merrill (“Mountain Phase”). Despite that, my son doesn’t call himself a “Ranger” (and corrects anyone who erroneously refers to him as such), because that title is reserved to members of the 75th Ranger Regiment.

Earning the Ranger tab is a worthy achievement, but there have been instances where former soldiers seeking political office have made the mistake of calling themselves “Rangers” (because they finished Ranger School) when they never served in the 75th — and that’s deeply offensive to veterans of the 75th. So while we civilians may think the difference between E8 and E9 is insignificant, and as for Walz’s . . . Well, his indifference to whether he was perceived as a combat veteran, some civilians may not understand why that’s problematic, but it is.

CNN is trying to defend Walz on this, but the thing about politics is, if you’re playing defense, you’re losing, and the Democrats are losing this week, whether they are willing to admit or not.



 

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In The Mailbox: 08.07.24

Posted on | August 8, 2024 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 08.07.24

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Pete’s 1969 league (the one I’m in) is looking for someone to take over the Atlanta team.
Obligatory seriousness about SGMMSG Walz, ARNG (Ret)
Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: What If You Bought An $800 CPU And It Self-Destructed?
EBL: J.D. Vance in Michigan: Kamala Harris policy failures and Tim Walz cowardice, USA Figure Skaters get gold in Paris Summer Olympics, and Stolen Valor: Tim Walz Lied About Serving In Combat
Twitchy: Check Out The Bizarre, Kinda Violent Post From A Harris/Walz Stan (Who Tried To Delete It), Social Media Influencers Got Paid Up To $10K For Scripted Anti-Trump Videos, and Rashida Tlaib Retweets Altered Image With Disgusting Claim About IDF Soldiers
Louder With Crowder: UK Authorities To Start Charging Citizens With Thought Crimes For Retweeting “Hate”
Vox Popoli: Harris-Walz 2024, SJW Reason, and Iran Has Allies Too
Upstream Reviews: The Book of Feasts & Seasons
Ammo.com: America’s Stolen Guns

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: Why Wasn’t ‘Scranton Joe’ at the Harris-Walz Launch Rally?
American Greatness: Ultra-Liberal Kamala Harris Is Anti-Black, Anti-American, & Anti-You, Tulsi Gabbard On Terrorist Watch List? The Regime Is Getting Jumpy, California Adopts Six Million Children, and Kamala Harris Campaign Website Still Has No Platform or Policy Positions
American Power: Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian
American Thinker: Greenhouse Gases Are a Scientific Myth, also, Trump Assassination Attempt: What’s with the Crime Scene?
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Babalu Blog: Venezuela’s army vows ‘absolute loyalty’ to Maduro after opposition appeal, Unlike Pope Francis, Venezuela’s two Cardinals denounce electoral fraud, deny legitimacy to Maduro, and As governor, Tim “One man’s socialism is another’s neighborliness” Walz set up a snitch hotline in Minnesota
BattleSwarm: Has Marvel Purged The Woke?
Behind The Black: China launches first 18 satellites in a new Starlink-type internet constellation, Lufthansa signs deal with Airbus to train its astronauts for the Starlab space station, European aerospace company Safran to open production facility in U.S., A supernova overpowers a spiral galaxy, NASA has decided to consider bringing Starliner down unmanned, and Students win settlement against college for censoring their speech illegally
CDR Salamander: What Do You Mean We’re An 11-Carrier Navy In A 15-Carrier World?
Don Surber: Walz closing in
First Street Journal: Cori Bush Merritts continually trashed Israel, but she thinks it’s wholly unfair that she gets called to account for it
Gates Of Vienna: Lefties Love Kids, Edwin Wagensveld: “I Do Not Care Whether I Am Convicted or Not”, The Great Jihad Targets Taylor Swift in Vienna, and Bread and Circuses for Criminals
The Geller Report: Speaker Johnson Calls on Biden/Harris to Lift Israeli Arms Embargo and Release Weapons to Israel Following Rocket Attack on US Soldiers
Glenn Reynolds: Our Crisis Of Institutional Incompetence
Hollywood In Toto: Jack Black Isn’t a Cancel Culture Victim
The Lid: Ohio Judge Clears Way for State Ban on Dangerous Transgender Procedures on Children
Legal Insurrection: Penn State Student Facing Federal Charges Over Alleged Ties to ISIS, Tim Walz’s ‘Mind Your Own Business’ Jab at GOP at Odds With His Draconian COVID Stances, Harvard Student Who Glitter-Bombed School President Faces Felony Charges, Taylor Swift Concerts in Austria Canceled After Alleged ISIS Terror Plot, Cori Bush: ‘AIPAC, I’m Coming to Tear Your Kingdom Down’, Democrats Use Dark Money to Pay Influencers $10,000 to Prop Up Harris-Walz Campaign, and Will Tim Walz Make It To Convention As ‘Stolen Valor’ Scandal Grows? (Reader FLASH POLL)
Nebraska Energy Observer: Civil War in the UK and Walzing to Defeat
Outkick: No Megan Rapinoe, No Problem: USWNT Reaches Gold Medal Game At Olympics, NCAA Gives Jim Harbaugh A Four-Year Show-Cause Penalty For ‘Unethical Conduct’, Recruiting Violations, NFL Star’s Wife Slams Tim Walz With Simple Message, Chiefs Owner’s Daughter Suffers Serious ‘Deep Wound,’ Receives Emergency Surgery, WNBA Rookie Spent The Olympic Break With Her Rumored College Girlfriend, Colorado Buffaloes Must Win Or Deion Sanders’ Message Will Ring Hollow, and Denise Richards Encourages Tori Spelling To Go Topless Behind A Paywall, Tori Wants A Third Boob Job First
Power Line: Freedom, Walz style, Vance Trolls Harris, and China’s Candidate
Shark Tank: FL House Hopeful Steve Shives Receives GOA Endorsement
Shot In The Dark: Under Advisement, also, Just To Be Clear
The Political Hat: Subsidizing Poverty via Free Money From The Government
This Ain’t Hell: Texas Ranger rehired post Uvalde firing, Cori Bush, second ‘squad member’ to lose primary, Tim Walz against free speech, JD Vance trolls Kamala Harris in front of her airplane, and VP Candidate Tim Walz – Stolen Valor Stories
Victory Girls: Tim Walz Has A Blue Falcon Problem
Volokh Conspiracy: Scooby Dooby Doo, Whose Are You?
Watts Up With That: Major Solar Company Files for Bankruptcy After California Strips Subsidies, State of Alaska’s “Priority Climate Plan” (EPA bribe = trouble), Right, Washington Post, Rural Areas Are Significantly Cooler Than Cities, But Please Learn How to Convert Celsius to Fahrenheit, and Carbon Dioxide Pipeline Battle—Seize Land for Green Energy
The Federalist: After Walz Pick, Kamala Can No Longer Deny She’s A Radical Leftist, Courts Stall Georgia Election Official’s Case Months After Dems Threatened Her For Refusing Certification, Watchdog Demands DHS Inspector General Investigate New Abuses Of Surveillance State, Lawsuit Alleges Maricopa County’s Election Chief Is Unlawfully Refusing To Undertake Proper Voter List Maintenance, The Riots In Britain Represent The Total Failure Of Britain’s Governing Class, Simone Biles’ Life Proves Exactly Why ‘Suffering’ Should Never Decide If A Baby Lives Or Dies, and Cori Bush Becomes Second ‘Squad’ Member To Lose Reelection This Year
Mark Steyn: The Fires of August, also, Live Around the Planet: Waltzing Kamala

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In The Mailbox: 08.06.24

Posted on | August 7, 2024 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 08.06.24

— compiled by Wombat-socho

I would like to think the defeat of Cori Bush is a sign that Reichskanzler Bismarck is still right about the U.S., and that God’s not ready to stick the enema hose in quite yet. Don’t @ me about this; I have to find my happiness where I can this election season.
Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Caroline Marks of Team USA wins gold in surfing, Kamala Harris Dumps Josh Shapiro for Tim Walz, Kamala Harris: Stay Woke, and Kamala Harris’ Prosecutors Sent This Innocent Man to Prison
Twitchy: Occasional Cortex Tries Dunking On J.D. Vance – But Twitter Showed Up With ALL The Receipts, Forbes Digs #TamponTim Out Of His Red States Are Mostly “Cows & Rocks” Statement, and Here’s #TamponTim “Fixing” The Minnesota Flag
Louder With Crowder: “One man’s socialism”: Five things to know about Kamala Harris VP finalist #TamponTim (Updated)
Vox Popoli: The End Game, A Distinct Lack of Support, Evil Redefines, The Markets Sink, Amanda Palmer Speaks, Clown World is Getting Desperate, and The UK Government Hates the British
Upstream Reviews: Music Review – Angus McSix & The Sword of Power
Stoic Observations: Zombie Biographies
Defending The Wood Perilous: The Devil Appears In The Guise Of An Angel Of Light

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: Britain’s Hard Hat Riots
American Greatness: How Trump Can Win—or Lose—the Election, Pelosi Bizarrely Suggests Adding Biden to Mount Rushmore, After Cocaine Was Found in White House, Former USSS Director Cheatle Reportedly Pressured Forensics Team to Destroy the Evidence, New American Greatness Poll Shows Battlegrounds Are a Dead Heat, Rep. Jamie Raskin Says Congress Will Have to Disqualify Trump if He Wins the Election; Civil War Could Ensue, Trump 2.0 Must Expose and Prosecute America’s Enemies—Foreign and Domestic, and Harris Is Recycling the 2020 Democrat Campaign
American Power: Marybeth Hicks, Don’t Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid
American Thinker: The ‘Crime’ Harris Was Toughest on was Journalism, also, To Reach Non-Traditional Republican Voters, We Must Speak In Non-Traditional Ways
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Black Monday News
Babalu Blog: As Maduro intensifies repression, opposition leaders call on Venezuelan police and military to side with the people, Russia sends scientists to Cuba to ‘strengthen knowledge’ of Oropouche and Dengue epidemic, Gulp! Filthy ‘drinking water’ flows from taps in Santiago de Cuba, and Nicaraguan Ortega-Murillo dictatorship arrests more Catholic priests
BattleSwarm: Waltzes With Wokeness
CDR Salamander: Another Carrier Enters The Indo-Pacific
Da Tech Guy: Oakland, Gaza and Southport, all self inflicted
Dana Loesch: Meet Tim Walz
Don Surber: Obama finally reveals his agenda
First Street Journal: Dead man walking: Hamas declares Yahya Sinwar as their new political leader
Gates Of Vienna: Covid-19: All Lies. All Crime. — Chapter 15, Targeting Anne Frank, 34 Culture-Enriching Crimes, Bacha Bazi Comes to Trieste, The Rise of the Fourth Reich, A Culture-Enriching Family Business, and Vehicular Jihad in Cologne
The Geller Report: Democrat Congressman Jamie Raskin says IF TRUMP WINS Democrats will disqualify him on January 6th, 2025, Calls for Civil War
Hollywood In Toto: Box Office Winners & Losers of Summer 2024, Anchorman Star Pummeled for Comics for Kamala Fundraiser, The Kamala Harris Sketch You’d Never See Today, and Will Late Night Apologize for Sharing Cassidy Hutchinson’s Hoax?
The Lid: More than a Million Fewer Americans Have Jobs Thanks to Failed Biden-Harris Economy
Legal Insurrection: Penn State Trustee Suing School to Gain Access to $5 Billion Endowment Records, Anti-Israel Squad Member Rep. Cori Bush Loses Her Primary, Anti-Israel Student Protesters Preparing to Start Again in the Fall, ‘Traitor’: Guardsman Lashes Out at Walz Again Over Leaving Before Iraq Deployment, Harris-Walz Reactions: ‘He Let BLM Rioters’ Burn Minnesota and She ‘Encouraged Donations’ to Bail Out Those Arrested, Court Allows Antisemitism Case Against Harvard to Proceed, and Van Jones: Harris Appeases ‘Anti-Jewish’ Democrats by Picking Walz
Nebraska Energy Observer: It should come as no surprise
Outkick: Silver Medalist Claims Athletes Have Found Worms In Their Food At Olympic Village, Rips Plant-Based Items, Pitbull Stadium Is Now The Home Of FIU Football Thanks To Historic Deal With ‘Mr. 305’ Himself, Charles Barkley Is Reportedly Not Retiring From Television, Just As Everyone Paying Attention Was Predicting, Serena Williams Shamed By X Community Note, Clarifying Her Story About Bad Treatment At Hotel, Team USA Basketball’s LeBron James Required Stitches After Taking Elbow to the Face Against Brazil, Chicago White Sox Are On Verge Of Wrong Kind Of History, and Olympic Pole Vaulter With Big Penis Gets Big Offer From Adult Site
Power Line: Justice Gorsuch on the Administrative State, The Daily Chart: Food Maps, and It’s Walz!
Shark Tank: GOP Legislators Blast Administration After 99 Terrorists Reportedly Enter Country
Shot In The Dark: Pouncing On Gov. Klink, also, De-Origin Story
STUMP: Chicago Is My Kind Of Town To Beat Up On -2015 Edition, also, Taxing Tuesday
The Political Hat: The True Nature Of The Uniparty: Grift
This Ain’t Hell: Veterans’ service dog provider accused of SV, Kam’s VEEP, Assistant DA, who worked on child endangerment cases, busted in pedophile sting, and Five Tim Waltz controversies
Transterrestrial Musings: An Ongoing Foreign-Policy DIsaster, Joe Rogan Goes Live On Netflix, Kamala Harris And The Masque Of Magical Thinking, Safe Is Not An Option, and On The Plane again
Victory Girls: Tim Walz Is The VEEP Who Let Minneapolis Burn
Volokh Conspiracy: Lawsuit Over Alleged Discriminatory Refusal to Let Church Lease School Property on Weekends Can Go Forward
Watts Up With That: Grauniad Frets “Climate Deniers” make up Nearly a Quarter of US Congress, New EPA Rules Could Dangerously Close Baseload Power Plants, and Is the Future of Nuclear Power in the Wilds of Wyoming?
The Federalist: Cowardly Josh Shapiro Was Right About The Palestinians, The Same Media Who Call Lizzo ‘Healthy’ And Vance ‘Weird’ Are Calling Tim Walz ‘All-American’, No Surprise, David French Completely Botches J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings, More States Reject College Board’s Politicized Dual-Credit Classes, X Sues Global Advertising Giants For Coordinating ‘Illegal’ Boycott Designed To Punish Free Speech, and Walz Let Rioters Burn Minneapolis While Harris Fundraised To Bail Them Out Of Jail
Mark Steyn: “A Global System Change”

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Republicans Dodged a Bullet Today — and Van Jones Tells the Truth About Why!

Posted on | August 6, 2024 | Comments Off on Republicans Dodged a Bullet Today — and Van Jones Tells the Truth About Why!

Folks, if Donald Trump wins in November, today will be remembered as the day that the 2024 election shifted decisively in his favor. While vice-presidential picks rarely affect the outcome of an election (Thomas Eagleton being perhaps the most egregious exception to that rule), Kamala Harris could have made the Electoral College (EC) arithmetic very difficult for Trump if she had chosen Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate. Pennsylvania has 19 EC votes (tied with Illinois as the fifth-largest state) and Shapiro is so popular in the state, it would have made it effectively impossible for Trump to compete there. But snubbing Shapiro, Harris automatically puts those 19 EC votes in play. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz adds no such obvious advantage for the Democrats; in theory, his Midwestern appeal might help Harris in Wisconsin (10 EC votes) and Michigan (15 EC votes), but that’s not nearly as clear-cut as what the Shapiro/Pennsylvania play would have added.

And, of course, there’s the Jewish thing. A week or so ago, when the “short list” of VP contenders was much longer, my brother Kirby more or less predicted that Harris would not pick Shapiro, simply because such a choice would alienate the anti-Semitic segment of the Democratic Party’s coalition. I thought North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper might have a shot but, again, Kirby correctly predicted that wouldn’t happen, because Harris looks likely to lose, and Cooper doesn’t want that stain on his resumé. When the name of Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly was floated as one of the finalists, I was skeptical — really, a bald 60-year-old? — but then Walz was mentioned, and I was like, are you kidding me with this?

However much Harris might want to pander to the pro-Hamas college kids, and the “uncommitted” voters in Dearborn, surely, I thought, the advantages of picking Shapiro were obvious enough.

Hello, Jewish money? Not to play into any stereotypes here, but the Democratic Party collects many millions of dollars in contributions from Jewish donors every year, and with the current situation in the Middle East, one might think that Harris would wish to reassure those donors that the party was still pro-Israel. Because guess what? Trump was arguably the most pro-Israel president ever, and there’s no guarantee that all that money’s going to keep going to Democrats if Democrats are going to be sucking up to the anti-Jewish mobs we’ve seen at Columbia, Harvard and other elite universities. As much as losing Pennsylvania in one election would hurt Democrats, how much worse would they be hurt by alienating Jews permanently? So I was honestly startled this morning when it was announced that Harris had picked Walz and, of all people, CNN’s Van Jones shared my feelings:

Look, Josh Shapiro is a class act from beginning to end. He’s a rising star in this party. He’s done an extraordinary job. . . .
Republicans, they were chewing their fingernails down to the knuckle because they were afraid of a Josh Shapiro, they were afraid of a Mark Kelly, they’re not as afraid of [Walz] . . . [H]ere’s the challenge you’ve got in this party, and you know, people don’t want to talk about it — we got to talk about it.
On the one hand, you have a lot of young people who are concerned about Gaza. You have a lot of Muslims and Arabs and others, they have not felt seen by the Biden administration. You started hearing that genocide joke, that was building that was building and so those folks needed to have a candidate that they could feel comfortable with. This helps him in that regard. But you also have anti-Semitism that has gotten marbled into this party. You can be for the Palestinians without being an anti-Jewish bigot. But there are some anti-Jewish bigots out there and there’s some disquiet now and there has to be. How much of what just happened is caving into some of these darker parts in the party? So that’s going to have to get worked out. It’s going to have to get talked through.

Republicans are, of course, worried about the election, but we now have a lot less to worry about, thanks to Harris picking Walz.



 

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Category: Election, Kamala Harris, Minnesota, Pennsylvania
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