Republican News

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We actually have two questions that require answers in the wake of Sunday’s assassination attempt on Donald Trump by a (well-)”known wolf”. The first question: Why didn’t federal security and intel agencies take Ryan Wesley Routh seriously? He had a decades-long track record of criminal activity, and numerous people tried to warn the FBI, Homeland Security, and the State Department of his dangerous nature.

We may wait a long time for a satisfactory explanation for that question. Thanks to Tanya Lukyanova, however, we have a good answer to the second question: Why did American media outlets take Routh seriously? Lukyanova reported for Semafor a couple of years ago and interviewed Routh, and was hardly alone. Lots of news outlets — and Lukyanova brings receipts — treated Routh as a good source for their narratives on Ukraine, even while Routh himself clearly had some mental health and judgment issues:

Right around the time my story ran, The New York Times interviewed Routh for an article about American volunteers on the Ukrainian frontlines. Newsweek spoke to him, too. He reportedly met with elected officials on Capitol Hill, and had contacts inside Ukraine’s Defense Ministry. Journalists, activists, and policymakers saw him as a credible figure.

And that’s despite the fact that his criminal record was there for everyone to see. Journalists could have found it if they had thought to question his motives, or even his sanity. The guy moves to the capital of a nation at war, despite having no personal connection to it. He doesn’t speak Russian or Ukrainian. In retrospect, shouldn’t it have struck the reporters, including myself, as a little bit. . . odd?

The question is: Why didn’t it?

Lukyanova provides the honest, and frankly obvious answer, both for herself and others. They ignored all of the apparent issues with Routh because he allowed them to write the take they wanted in the first place. He was “the ‘right’ kind of crazy,” Lukyanova admits, so no one in the media questioned his motives or his credibility. 

And that has Lukyanova doing some very-much-needed introspection about the state of the media in general:

Over the past day I’ve been thinking a lot about what else—who else—gets the same kind of pass. These days, the right kind of crazy is there every time you turn on the TV, or scroll through your social media. “No ears were harmed. Carry on with your Sunday afternoon,” Rachel Vindman tweeted casually, referring to Trump’s previous assassination attempt a mere two months earlier. (She later deleted it.) 

Last week, MSNBC watchers could tune into Elie Mystal declaring: “Trump supporters are just as despicable as he is,” with the show’s host Joy Reid nodding in agreement. Trump supporters, Mystal said, are “just as ungenerous and have just as little compassion and empathy for others.” It was just another night on cable news. The fact that statements like these generate so little outrage is a clear sign of how degraded our public discourse has become.

That’s true to a point. The issue isn’t the opinion shows on cable news; everyone expects those to have a point of view and preferred narratives. One might hope that those wouldn’t be as bat**** crazy as Reid and Mystal, but much of that is just fan service. MSNBC caters to nuts on the Left, and one can argue that Fox’s opinion shows do the same on the Right. Nor is the main problem located on social media, where everyone seems inclined to let their better natures take a powder as users vent spleens almost exclusively (with the exception of Wordle results, and so on). 

No, the issue at hand that Lukyanova honestly and bravely confronts in this Free Press essay is on the reporting of news. Her examples above didn’t come from opinion columns, but what were supposed to be factual reporting on Ukraine. And it points to a pernicious trend in purportedly fact-based reporting, which is that media outlets look for sources that will only confirm their own biases and preferred narratives. Once found, these ‘journalists’ won’t bother looking gift horses in the mouth to ensure reliability and honest reporting. 

Joy Ann Reid and Elie Mystal aren’t really the problem. Rachel Vindman isn’t either. This problem comes from the New York Times, Newsweek, and other “news” organizations that have replaced honest journalism with advocacy. They hide behind their selected sources, too often hidden behind otherwise-unnecessary anonymity to disguise their own advocacy, to manipulate audiences with news that may not be entirely fake, but is too often merely an unbalanced political argument favored by the establishment elite. 

Lukyanova deserves credit for raising this issue at the Free Press, an outstanding independent voice in journalism these days. But the problem is deeper than she realizes. 

Plus, the latest episode of The Ed Morrissey Show podcast is now up! Today’s show features:

•  For the second time in as many months, a gunman got within range of Donald Trump. The FBI considers this another assassination attempt, and that raises the same questions as the first. 
• Andrew Malcolm and I discuss those ongoing failures, the reaction of the media, and what this says about our political environment. 
• We also talk about Andrew’s latest column on Kamala Harris, and I manage to squeeze in a joke at the end, too! 

The Ed Morrissey Show is now a fully downloadable and streamable show at  Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the TEMS Podcast YouTube channel, and on Rumble and our own in-house portal at the #TEMS page!

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Ed wrote about the news earlier today about Israel managing to pull off one of the most impressive covert attacks on a terrorist organization in history. 

Injuries from today’s Pager Attack on Hezbollah Members in Lebanon and Syria have now risen to just under 4,000.

— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) September 17, 2024

The Mossad–we assume, because nobody has taken credit–managed to literally neuter a large number of Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon, injuring or killing somewhere north of a thousand. The numbers are vague and all over the place; I have seen as few as 300 and as many as multiple thousands injured or killed. 

According to Agence France-Presse over 2,750 Hezbollah members have been injured, and 8 of them are dead in blasts all across Lebanon today as their special messaging pagers blew up in an unprecedented cyberattack. pic.twitter.com/C3mcUhHhiN

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) September 17, 2024

Who knows? We will eventually get a good accounting of the damage, but for now, all we know is that LOTS of Hezbollah a**holes are not able to walk around uninjured, and many likely lost their testicles. 

72 virgins pointing at your crotch, laughing. https://t.co/q8I7pbangR

— Dave Gordon 🇺🇸 🇮🇱 (@D_Gordzo) September 17, 2024

There are a lot of videos out there on the interwebs, so I won’t share many of the hundreds floating around. You can find them yourself with a simple search. Indeed, Israel is happy that the videos are out there since it must add to the fear that terrorists feel, knowing that not only can they be harmed or killed by seemingly safe technologies but that they can be humiliated in the bargain. 

Breaking News: Large numbers of “wireless devices” simultaneously exploded across Lebanon, according to the country’s health ministry, a day after Israeli leaders warned that they were considering stepping up their military campaign against Hezbollah. https://t.co/fN3ReVYKFm

— The New York Times (@nytimes) September 17, 2024

Getting your family jewels blown off must suck; knowing that your enemies are laughing at a video of it happening to you must hurt even more. And all those virgins will be secretly smiling, knowing that your capacity for raping them is much diminished. 

The more I think about this Israeli attack the more it seems to me it would be described as a terrorist attack if conducted by any other actor. The explosives are not lithium batteries. They are going off in markets, shops,supermarkets, buses, cars…

— Bruno Maçães (@MacaesBruno) September 17, 2024

Still, there are people on the interwebs quite angry that Israel pulled off this stunning feat, complaining that it shows Israel is indifferent to peace somehow. 

Have you not followed the news that Hezbollah has been using rockets against Israel and that the northern part of Israel has been evacuated for months? That is already war.

— David Strom (@DavidStrom) September 17, 2024

Cenk Uygur, late of MSNBC and now host of the “Young Turks,” is outraged that Israel committed an act of war against Hezbollah. 

That seems strange to me given that Hezbollah has been raining rockets down on Israelis and killing its citizens for months, forcing the Jewish state to evacuate much of the northern region of its country. 

The Bite of the Beeper

©Mossad 2024https://t.co/0ChTaEMCCc

— Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 (@MarinaMedvin) September 17, 2024

Killing Jews and Israeli Arabs is just another day ending in “y,” so no big deal. Israel striking back is unforgivable, apparently. 

We now live in a world where millions of leftists believe that Israelis and all Jews have a responsibility to get killed without defending themselves. Jews, you see, are “settler colonialists,” while antisemites are innocents whose job it is to harass and kill Jews. This is the just and natural order we are told, and it is appalling that Jews are not cooperating. 

Hezbollah thought it was smart, and switched from smartphones to communicating with old pagers and flip-phones. That didn’t work out so well, as Israel figured out how to cause the batteries to explode remotely, like a mini-Stuxnet. Amazing. pic.twitter.com/udEwRxOtEr

— David Reaboi, Late Republic Nonsense (@davereaboi) September 17, 2024

Ironically, I believe that for many Western leftists, this attitude is an expression of implicit racism. Jews are, not universally but for the most part, white or white-adjacent in their eyes, and antisemites are in large numbers browner than they. Leftists believe that violence and hatred are just part of their culture, while Jews should behave better than they do. 

I’ve been told this by a liberal to my face. “That’s just their culture. We should be better than that.”

It’s a weird form of racism in which uncivilized people are excused if they are not white, while white people are proving racist because they don’t tolerate getting robbed or killed. 

If violence is just “their culture,” then it is time to reject the culture. That doesn’t mean rejecting individuals of any race or creed, but I happen to believe that the color of one’s skin does NOT determine character or behavior. People of all races or religions can be good, bad, civilized, or uncivilized. 

So, I don’t see the terrorists of Hezbollah as victims. They are targets because they are terrorists. 

It’s pretty simple. Judge people by the content of their character, not their race. Terrorists should get what they deserve, regardless of race or religion. 

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This story has been making news for days with the local mayor putting blame on President Trump and JD Vance for dozens of bomb threats which shut down schools in Springfield, Ohio. Trump was asked about it and said he didn’t know anything about it.

The national media has been covering this the same way. Here’s an NBC News report from two days ago.

Springfield is a town on edge. It’s been five days since it was thrust into the national spotlight by baseless — and to many, racist — rumors of Haitian residents killing and eating wildlife and pets, and its economic comeback has been dramatically overshadowed by tensions that once rarely reached beyond city council meetings. The city has been forced to close schools, City Hall and other municipal buildings because of bomb threats and safety fears tied to the rumors, and Haitian immigrants are afraid to leave their homes because of anger directed at them.

On Saturday, nearby Wittenberg University canceled all on-campus activities for the following day after receiving a threat of a potential shooting targeting the Haitian community.

Mayor Rob Rue says the city of nearly 59,000 is being “torn apart” by hate and vitriol.

Personally, I thought the claims about people eating dogs and cats was an own goal. The memes were funny but JD Vance has already admitted this could be seen as a fake but accurate argument to focus media attention on mass immigration, what the left would call “consciousness raising.”

The left makes those sorts of arguments all the time and I usually give them hell for it so I’m not inclined to give this one a pass just because I agree that the impact of migrants on US towns has largely been ignored by the national media.

Putting that aside, there’s another issue here that definitely deserves attention. The media loves to play the climate of hate game with Republican rhetoric. If any act of violence or any threat can be tied to GOP rhetoric, they run with it. The lie connecting Sarah Palin to the Tucson shooting is just one of the best known examples but the left/media has done this sort of thing many times. 

But as we’ve seen this week, when acts of violence implicate left-wing rhetoric, their standard suddenly changes. The media doesn’t rush to ask Biden and Harris if they feel responsible for the assassination attempts against Trump. On the contrary, the media blasts Trump for daring to make this same argument. Here’s how NBC News was reporting this yesterday.

Former President Donald Trump and his allies are fanning political flames after his Secret Service detail thwarted what is, according to the FBI, the apparent second attempt to assassinate him in less than 10 weeks.

In a message posted to multiple social media platforms Monday, Trump accused his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, and President Joe Biden of taking “politics in our Country to a whole new level of Hatred.” He said their rhetoric is responsible for threats and violence against him, even though they routinely denounce political violence and did so on Sunday.

So Trump is directly responsible for bomb threats in Springfield, Ohio, but it’s just crazy to connect progressives to assassination attempts against Trump. In both cases Trump is wrong. It’s is a heads I win, tails you lose game the media is playing. Indeed, many progressives spent yesterday trying to square this circle by arguing that Trump’s own rhetoric was somehow responsible for the attacks against him rather than the heated rhetoric of his opponents. 

Bottom line: The climate of hate argument always operates in only one direction.

Yesterday, Gov. Mike DeWine revealed some additional information about the threats Trump and Vance are being blamed for. It turns out most of those bomb threats have been coming from overseas. The Associated Press has a story out today which puts this news in the headline and the opening paragraph.

Ohio stationed state police at Springfield schools Tuesday in response to a rash of bomb threats — the vast majority that officials said came from overseas —- after former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance falsely said legal Haitian immigrants in the small city were eating dogs and cats…

“The vast majority of the bomb threats came from foreign countries. Not 100%, but it’s the vast majority,” Dan Tierney, DeWine’s spokesperson, said Tuesday…

“These are largely foreign actors, not folks in the community or another part of the United States,” he said. “We think it’s useful in part because it shows that it’s, you know, false, that it’s safe to send your kids to school. And we’re providing extra patrol support to make sure people feel safe at school.”

That’s certainly an interesting turn of events. It suggests that some of these threats, maybe most of them, are coming from people outside the country looking to mess with a US presidential election. No one has revealed which country is sending these but I think we all know who the usual suspects are.

But if you look at some of the stories published yesterday when Gov. DeWine made this announcement, the focus was still on blaming Trump. NBC News finally gets around to mentioning that the threats are coming from overseas in paragraph 10 of this story. But the NY Times‘ take is even worse. It’s not until paragraph 13 that you learn where the threats are coming from. Hopefully we’ll learn more over time, but for the moment it sounds like this is part of some foreign actor’s election interference budget. 

Meanwhile, the media would love to have it both ways but they need to make a choice here. If heated rhetoric leads to bomb threats in Springfield and that’s a worthy topic for multiple stories connecting the threats to Trump, then political rhetoric also leads to assassination attempts and we should see just as many stories confidently pinning what happened in Florida on Democratic rhetoric about Trump being a danger to democracy, etc. Where are those stories?

On the other hand, if the media won’t connect the assassination attempts to Democratic rhetoric, then they need to stop connecting fake bomb threats emailed from overseas to Trump and Vance who, after all, didn’t suggest that anyone should make bomb threats. 

The media needs to pick one standard and stick with it. Anything else is an in-kind donation to the Harris campaign. Here’s what Gov. DeWine said yesterday about the bomb threats coming from overseas. “We think that this is one more opportunity to mess with the United States and they’re continuing to do that,” he said.

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Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, is clearly a man of the people and he is quite concerned over the rights of women in his country. Putting sarcasm aside for the moment, that level of concern appears to have ramped up considerably this week after the United Nations issued a warning saying that women in Iran are still being violently punished for failing to properly adhere to the nation’s strict Islamic dress code for females. The UN warned that women were still being beaten in public and imprisoned. The warning was issued two years after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was beaten to death while in the custody of the nation’s “morality police.” But Pezeshkian insists that this is all nonsense and propaganda. His morality police would never do such a thing. (Perish the thought.) Under his leadership, the morality police will “no longer bother women” over their failure to adhere to the code. (BBC)

Iran’s new president has said that morality police will no longer “bother” women over the wearing of the mandatory hijab headscarf, days after the UN warned women were still being violently punished for breaking the strict dress code.

Masoud Pezeshkian’s comments came on the second anniversary of the death in police custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after she was arrested for allegedly not wearing the hijab properly, sparking nationwide protests.

The UN last week said Iran’s government had “intensified efforts” since that period to suppress women’s rights and crush any last vestiges of activism.

Internal politics in Iran can be hard for Westerners to follow so we may have to simply give this situation some time to play out. Pezeshkian was indeed portrayed as a more “moderate” voice than his predecessor, Ebrahim Raisi in Iran’s ruling regime, and he was already on record saying that the morality police needed to be reined in. But calling someone “more moderate than” Raisi is rather like saying that Elizabeth Warren is less of a socialist than Mao Zedong. It may technically be true to a certain extent, but you’re still coloring outside of the lines.

With all of that said, however, it’s still possible that Pezeshkian is being more sincere than I’m giving him credit for thus far. He is already safely in office with little chance of being forcibly removed any time soon. If this was entirely a work of propaganda he could have abandoned it by now with very little risk to his position. In fact, the reporter who asked him the question was wearing her head scarf loosely with some hair showing, much the same as Mahsa Amini was shortly before she was executed. When he asked the reporter if she had seen any of the Morality Police in the streets on her way to the press conference and she said yes, Pezeshkian vowed to look into it and said that wasn’t supposed to be happening.

During the campaign, Pezeshkian also promised to ease up on some of Iran’s long-standing clampdowns on internet content critical of the government’s policies. There doesn’t seem to be much happening regarding that promise, but these sorts of things take time. At the same time, however, it has been reported that a new “Hijab and Chastity” bill is in the final stages of approval before Iran’s Guardian Council. If passed, that would officially codify restrictions on women’s rights that are barely distinguishable from the rule in place under Raisi before he was “unexpectedly” blown up earlier this summer.

Change comes about slowly in that part of the world, assuming any changes take place at all. The people supporting reforms in women’s rights are battling forces that have been entrenched there for a very long time with only a few exceptions when the influence of the West grew considerably stronger. In this case, any positive change is better than nothing, I suppose. We’ll just need to give Pezeshkian a bit of time to see if his actions match up to his words.

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From rico suave to just plain RICO. That’s one hell of a journey.

Last night, federal officials took rap mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs into custody, apparently taking him by surprise. The FBI had raided several homes connected to Combs earlier in the year, reportedly as part of an investigation into sex trafficking that multiple lawsuits against Combs might have triggered. The New York Times reports that the US Attorney will charge him with racketeering, sex trafficking, and other charges:

Sean Combs, the embattled music mogul, has been indicted on three counts of sex trafficking, racketeering and transportation to engage in prostitution.

In the indictment, which was unsealed on Tuesday, prosecutors in the Southern District of New York accused Mr. Combs of running a “criminal enterprise” that for years threatened, abused and coerced women, and included accusations of forced labor, kidnapping, arson, bribery and obstruction of justice. To commit these acts, the prosecutors said, Mr. Combs relied on the help of the employees of his business.

Initial reports claimed that Combs got surprised by the arrest; perhaps he expected the DoJ to arrange a surrender accompanied by his attorney. The Times goes on to report that Combs knew something was coming, though:

In anticipation of an indictment, Mr. Combs recently traveled to New York to make himself available to law enforcement. For days he had been staying at the Park Hyatt New York hotel on West 57th Street, largely hunkering down while awaiting any news but also drawing some attention on social media with a visit to Harlem, where he grew up.

Combs’ attorney told reporters that he would plead not guilty to the charges, and confirmed the nature of the still-sealed indictment:

Combs’s lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, told reporters he already knows what the charges are going to be.

“It’s going to be racketeering. It’s going to be sex trafficking,” he said. “And he’s not guilty. He’s innocent of these charges.”

Agnifilo added that the music mogul’s “spirits are good.”

“He’s going to fight this with all of his energy and all of his might,” he said.

Rolling Stone had a look at the indictment, and Combs’ attorneys will have their hands full. The indictment shows that the DoJ will allege a vast criminal organization under Combs’ control, aimed at sex crimes. It alleges that the “Combs Enterprise” used illegal drugs to subdue their victims. And there are firearm violations, too:

Combs allegedly then “used force, threats of force and coercion, to cause victims to engage in extended sex acts with male commercial sex workers that Combs referred to as, among other things, ‘Freak Offs.’” Combs allegedly “arranged, directed, and masturbated” during these “elaborate and produced sex performances,” which were often filmed as well. 

On top of allegedly transporting commercial sex workers “across state lines and internationally,” Combs allegedly “distributed a variety of controlled substances to victims” during these Freak Offs, “in part to keep the victims obedient and compliant.” 

Others in the Combs enterprise, per the indictment, facilitated all this by booking hotel rooms and travel for victims, as well as obtaining supplies, including drugs. The indictment says that during the raids of Combs’ homes in Miami and Los Angeles earlier this year, cops seized “various Freak Off supplies, including narcotics and more than 1,000 bottles of baby oil and lubricant.” Authorities also reportedly seized firearms and ammunition, including three AR-15s with defaced serial numbers, as well as a drum magazine. 

If the feds have the firearms with defaced serial numbers in Combs’ possession, that’s enough to look at a significant stretch in federal prison on its own. Films of sex acts may not be as instantly actionable, but if the participants tell feds they were coerced into those performances, then keeping those around will be another big problem for Combs. Rolling Stone also reports that several witnesses to these claims have spent the summer talking to the federal grand jury that issued the indictment. And, of course, we have a number of women now suing Combs for doing what the indictment apparently alleges too, and that’s more potential testimony to the nature of the racketeering. 

One has to wonder how much this might parallel another high-profile sex-trafficking operation. Did Combs allegedly create this “enterprise” merely for his own pleasure and those of his alleged co-conspirators? Or was he running an operation like Jeffrey Epstein’s? We’ll see soon enough during the trial, especially when those tapes and testimonies emerge. Combs is a powerful player in the entertainment and business world, with plenty of contacts. Keep an eye on whether others start lawyering up. In the meantime, of course, Combs is presumed innocent in a legal sense until the government proves its case to the satisfaction of 12 jurors. 

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As I pointed out yesterday, PM Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party was facing a special election in Montreal where they were at risk of losing a once-safe seat. As expected, the Liberals lost the seat though not to the NDP but to a candidate from the Bloq Quebecois. The pressure on Trudeau to step aside will only increase after this loss, the second loss for the Liberal Party in just a few months

The defeat will raise the pressure on the 52-year-old leader to step aside before the next election, which is scheduled for October 2025 but may happen earlier than that.

It’s the second significant defeat at the ballot box in just a few months for his party. In June, voters elected a Conservative Party candidate to represent an area of Toronto that had previously been a Liberal stronghold. Now they’ve rejected the Liberals again in the electoral district of LaSalle-Emard-Verdun in Montreal, Trudeau’s hometown — though they lost by only a narrow margin.

The special election was won by Louis-Philippe Sauve of the Bloc Quebecois, a political party that advocates for Quebec’s interests in Ottawa and runs candidates only in that province.

It was a close race with Sauve beating the Liberal candidate by just 248 votes. Trudeau brushed off the loss and reaffirmed that he has no intention of stepping aside.

Mr. Trudeau told reporters in Ottawa on Tuesday morning that “there’s all sorts of reflections to take’’ on the election outcome.

“Obviously, it would have been nicer to be able to win,’’ Mr. Trudeau said. “But there’s more work to do and we’re going to stay focused on doing it.”

But one political analyst suggested in advance that a loss would be another nail in Trudeau’s coffin.

“A loss is another nail in the coffin,” Lori Turnbull, a respected Canadian political analyst and professor at Dalhousie University, told POLITICO ahead of the vote. “It’s going to be really hard for them to get around the narrative that the government is basically done.”…

“I don’t know that we have an equivalent of a Nancy Pelosi here, somebody who would bend his ear and have that tough conversation in a way that would really be impactful on him,” Turnbull said. “Not necessarily to quit, but [to say], ‘We need to change gears. We need to do something colossally different.”

The NDP, which recently tried to distance itself from Trudeau, came in third in the contest. Polls had indicated the NDP had a chance to win the seat but some observers think those chances were squandered by a last minute error of judgment.

The NDP had a very good candidate in Craig Sauvé, a hard-working and well-liked Montreal city councillor. His campaign had been going extremely well and he had every chance of winning the byelection.

In the final week, the NDP decided that their best move to close the deal with voters was to put out an election pamphlet containing anti-Israel rhetoric and a Palestinian flag along with Sauvé’s picture. It left many NDP voters scratching their heads.

This was a political blunder of epic proportions — scuppering a winning campaign because someone, somewhere in the NDP world decided to push anti-Israel positions that, unfortunately, are becoming commonplace in the party.

The NDP is a progressive party and, just like progressives here in the US, they have become increasingly vocal about their anti-Israel positions recently.

Meanwhile, Trudeau’s biggest problem is not the challenge coming from his left but the one coming from his right. Polls continue to show the conservatives lead the Liberals by around 20 points. Parliament resumed yesterday after a summer break and conservative leader Pierre Poilievre went after Trudeau, repeating his central message of cutting taxes on fuel as Trudeau stumbled a bit repeating his own message about climate change.

A majority of Canadians have had enough of this sort of thing after also being hit with high inflation and a sputtering economy in the past few years. Trudeau is holding on, hoping a gradually improving economy will restore his fortunes, but I think at this point the die has been cast. After 9 years of this, people are just tired of his act. I’ll wrap this up with the reaction from a columnist for the Calgary Herald. He predicts Trudeau’s obstinance could be the end of the Liberal Party.

Under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, this party is on the verge of electoral obliteration. The Liberals prove they can lose not just anywhere, but everywhere…

Worried Liberals now recall the 2011 election, when they won only 34 seats. No, it’s worse than that. The Liberals are about to become the woolly mammoths of politics; memorable, but extinct…

And what of Trudeau? His resistance to the obvious is almost pathological. He seems to think he can win again as the champion of the carbon tax, the only leader who cares about climate change.

It’s not working. Sooner or later members of the Liberal Party will panic and do to Trudeau what Democrats just did to Joe Biden. 

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Elon Musk has been called many things since his meteoric rise to fame and fortune in the late 1990s. Tech mogul, entrepreneur, investor, philanthropist, and innovator would all fit comfortably on his business card. But when you look at Elon Musk today, would the phrase “national security risk” jump to mind? That was the case with Andrew Couts at Wired Magazine this week, but Couts isn’t suggesting that Musk is selling our government’s high-tech secrets to the Chinese or the Russians. Nor is he exporting weapons to our adversaries. Instead, Couts is declaring that Elon presents a risk to national security because of a joke that he made in the wake of the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life in Florida. He wasn’t making fun of Trump for being at risk, however. Someone on Twitter posed the question of why someone would want to kill Trump. Musk responded in a (now deleted) post by pointing out that nobody seems to be trying to kill Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. After being called out on his comment, Musk responded by describing it simply as a “joke that fell flat.” That doesn’t seem to be satisfying anyone thus far.

Shortly following reports of an apparent second assassination attempt against former US president and 2024 Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, Elon Musk decided to speak up.

“And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala 🤔,” Musk, X’s owner, wrote in a now deleted post, in response to another person asking, “Why they want to kill Donald Trump?”

After deleting the post—which could be interpreted as a call to murder President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s Democratic opponent in the US presidential election—Musk indicated that it was merely a joke that fell flat given the context. “Well, one lesson I’ve learned is that just because I say something to a group and they laugh doesn’t mean it’s going to be all that hilarious as a post on 𝕏,” he wrote, adding, “Turns out that jokes are WAY less funny if people don’t know the context and the delivery is plain text.”

Even I will admit that the timing of Musk’s “joke” (if you want to call it that) was dubious at best. Shortly after someone attempts to murder a leading presidential candidate (for the second time in barely two months) is probably not an appropriate time for that sort of humor. But with that said, Musk’s choice to completely backpedal simply strikes me as wrong as well. Most of us have fired off a comment that might be seen as being in poor taste from time to time and simply saying, “Oh, I was just kidding” rarely does anything to clear the air.

Musk probably could have done himself a favor by admitting that the timing was off, but also noting that he was making a valid point. When was the last time you recall someone making any sort of serious attempt on the life of either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris? I certainly can’t think of one, at least not during this election cycle. It’s true that both Biden and Harris have better, more fully staffed Secret Service details than Donald Trump (an issue that still requires immediate attention) but they both show up in very public venues where such an attempt could reasonably be made. Why doesn’t it happen?

That question opens up a valid and potentially important topic heading into this election and it’s one that Musk could have sunk his teeth into. The reality is that the conservative movement in this country is tremendously worried about the negative impacts that Joe Biden’s policies have had on the country and remains alarmed at the possibility that we could see four more years of those policies under Harris. Conversely, the progressive left movement currently supporting Harris has simply lost its ever-loving mind and its members have allowed themselves to wallow in a pit of burning hatred for the Bad Orange Man. One of those governing philosophies is currently breeding a thankfully tiny subset of homicidal maniacs.

Even if we leave all of that aside, however, how can someone translate Musk’s poorly timed joke into an opportunity to label him a national security threat? Elon Musk is producing some of the cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence tools that are growing increasingly pervasive in the Pentagon and our nation’s intelligence organizations. His rockets carry some of our most sensitive, top-secret satellites into orbit. Musk’s companies have been made privy to secrets that many career Intelligence Community officials have never seen. If we’re really handing over that sort of data to someone who could in any way be perceived as a true national security threat, we have bigger problems than Elon Musk that need to be wrestled to the ground.

But that’s not what’s going on over at Wired as far as I’m concerned. As long as Elon Musk “stayed in his lane” and cranked out engineering marvels that advanced our national efforts in multiple scientific arenas and kept ladling out cash by the bucket-loads, everyone loved him. But as soon as he stuck his nose into the political arena and appeared to be ready to sign on with Donald Trump and the MAGA agenda, he had a target on his back. His progressive critics aren’t even bothering to pretend otherwise. 

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The Washington Post economics columnist has an interesting piece on Kamala Harris’ economic proposals, and I find it very revealing, not just about the bias of the mainstream media but also the left’s belief that words are reality while reality itself is an illusion. 

Heather Long tries to do something Harris has not: define her economic philosophy and has come up with an interesting and, I think, persuasive phrase: middle-class capitalism. While Long emphasizes Harris’ middle-class friendly proposals and ignores her damaging capital gains increases (merely calling the unrealized capital gains tax smaller than Biden’s), she pretends that Harris can actually do what she promises. 

Full column here: “Kamala Harris wants to try something new: ‘Middle-class capitalism’”

The vice president is creating a vision that moves beyond neoliberalism.https://t.co/Ujovn9rynE

— Heather Long (@byHeatherLong) September 17, 2024

One of Harris’s biggest promises is building 3 million new homes, which to me is hilarious. Not because America doesn’t need a building boom–if you let over 10 million migrants into the country, the housing stock will obviously be strained–but because the Biden administration has made a zillion promises to do things that have turned out to be all talk and zero action. 

Let’s take two promises in particular: the promise to connect rural homes to the internet at high speeds and the commitment to build 500,000 EV chargers. On the first promise, Biden/Harris have connected precisely ZERO homes in three years, and on the second, the administration has managed to build SEVEN out of the 500,000 they promised. 

more than two years after Congress allocated $7.5 billion to help build out those stations, only 7 EV charging stations are operational across four states. And as the Biden administration rolls out its new rules for emissions from cars and trucks — which will require a lot more electric cars and hybrids on the road — the sluggish build-out could slow the transition to electric cars.

“I think a lot of people who are watching this are getting concerned about the timeline,” said Alexander Laska, deputy director for transportation and innovation at the center-left think tank Third Way.

ZERO. SEVEN. 

Our government is corrupt and stealing our money.

United airlines just put Starlink on 1,000+ planes, but the FCC claims we need to spend 5-10k per rural home for wired connections?!?

These homes are putting starlink in on their nickel while they wait for a cable modem in 10… https://t.co/vy4lpUGHH5

— @jason (@Jason) September 13, 2024

Promises mean nothing to those who depend on the promises to pan out. 

The EV charger fiasco likely has more to do with ensuring that friends of the administration get a large cut of the largesse, and the home internet promise has resulted in no progress because the Biden/Harris administration hates Elon Musk so much that they kicked Starlink out of the program to connect homes. 

Starlink could provide the service immediately and at lower costs, but using it would be an acknowledgment that Elon Musk is not a threat to democracy. They want to hurt, not help Musk, so the political hacks are wasting money, harming consumers, and being determined to spread money around to people they prefer. 

Helping Americans is irrelevant. Helping their political allies and donors is all they care about. 

So when you write an article with the premise that Kamala Harris will accomplish anything she promises for the middle class you are denying the obvious reality that the Democrats believe that promises are the only “real” thing, while following through in a way that helps actual ordinary people is beside the point. 

This is how liberals think about everything. Playing with words not just to manipulate people, but insisting that words are the only reality. 

Call a man a woman and it becomes real. Change some pronouns and a new reality is created. 

Most people, though, live in a more concrete reality where words are words and actions are actions. 

Actions matter. Reality matters. Words are just breath. 

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In the early days of the pandemic when the government was busy shutting everything down and crashing the economy in the process, some companies which were able to move toward new models of work began offering employees the option of working from home. One of the early adopters of this model was Amazon, where workers rapidly shifted to a remote work model for nearly all positions. It’s difficult to say when this shift became “the new normal,” but the change was dramatic. Amazon saw a very large surge in online shopping during that time, driving up profits at a time when many other companies were withering on the vine. In 2023 after the pandemic had largely receded, Amazon decided on a compromise and offered workers the option of working three days per week in the office and two days from home. (Some workers protested the change even then.) But now the company has determined that the experiment isn’t viable over the long run. Beginning on January 2, 2025, all Amazon employees will be told to return to full-time work at the office, but not all of their workers are happy about it. (Associated Press)

Amazon is reverting to its pre-pandemic policy and will require corporate employees to be in the office five days a week starting next year, CEO Andy Jassy said Monday.

Jassy said in a message shared with employees that the company’s leadership had been thinking in recent months about how to better “invent, collaborate and be connected enough to each other” to deliver the best results for customers and the business.

The company decided that bringing employees back into Amazon offices five days a week instead of the three currently required was a way to address that issue, the CEO said.

CEO Andy Jassy is clearly aware that there is still something of a new corporate culture that has taken root at the company. Many supervisors are overseeing teams where the employees do not want to return to the office full-time. Jassy issued a less-than-subtle threat to these objectors, saying that things are “probably not going to work out” for those who refuse to comply. 

In the early days of the pandemic, most of us simply accepted the idea that working from home would have to be an option because we didn’t know any better at the time. After all, keeping your job and drawing a paycheck in that fashion was still preferable to having the entire operation shut down. But as remote work slowly became the new normal, some of us could already see problems coming like the headlamp of an oncoming train. Remote work obviously brings with it potential advantages, particularly for those experiencing mobility or childcare issues. What’s not to like, right?

The problem is that remote work isn’t equally advantageous – particularly for employers – for all jobs, nor is it an equally good fit for all workers. Personally, I’ve been working from home exclusively for the past fifteen years and even did a few stints on such assignments before that. Our entire team here at Hot Air works remotely from locations across the country and it’s a great work model for this sort of collaborative team. We have a home office located outside of Washington but I’ve only been there a handful of times and I haven’t visited once since the pandemic began. 

Some jobs requiring physical interaction obviously can’t be done remotely, but even those where such collaboration is possible won’t be the best fit for the employer in all cases. Workers can list many advantages to working from home full time, but that requires a particular personality type, specifically people who are self-motivated and can organize their own schedules without anyone physically supervising their efforts. Where it works, it’s a wonderful option. But the point is that it doesn’t work everywhere. As noted above, Amazon saw a large surge in business during the early, work-from-home days of the pandemic, but that’s because most of the nation was suddenly thrust into a situation where home delivery of goods and services ordered online was the new way of meeting people’s daily needs. Now, with more people heading back out to shop locally, that advantage for Amazon has disappeared. 

It will be interesting to see how Andy Jassy navigates this particular maze. He’s going to need to return to an in-office work model to keep his company’s profits as high as possible. The protesting employees will eventually need to accept the fact that working from home will no longer be an option or they will have to seek new employment. The transition back to the “old normal” likely will not be easy or rapid.

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Ask not for whom the pager tolls. It tolls for thee, Hezbollah.

Yesterday, Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant warned the US that time had all but run out on a diplomatic solution to the conflict with Hezbollah. Today, the Israelis alerted dozens hundreds of Hezbollah members in Beirut, too. The Israelis had apparently rigged their pagers with explosives, and set them off earlier this morning:

Dozens of members of the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah were seriously wounded on Tuesday in Lebanon’s south and the southern suburbs of Beirut when the pagers they use to communicate exploded, security sources told Reuters.

A Reuters journalist saw 10 Hezbollah members bleeding from wounds in the southern suburb of Beirut known as Dahiyeh.

“Dozens” was the initial report, but the full scope of this operation is already looking larger. Now it’s being reported as “hundreds,” and one report puts the number at 1200. At least one video of the explosions has emerged too:

BREAKING via Reuters

“Hundreds of members of the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, including fighters and medics, were seriously wounded on Tuesday when the pagers they use to communicate exploded.”

Here is one video of one of the pager explosions. pic.twitter.com/GIv39T26Ki

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) September 17, 2024

That’s ingenious. It’s enough to wound and potentially kill a specific enemy target while doing no collateral damage. One has to wonder how the Israelis pulled this off. You can bet that Hezbollah will spend a lot of time trying to find that out … at least those who didn’t get paged this morning. 

One thing is for sure — Hezbollah not only lost many key personnel for a while (even if they all survive), but they also now have to rethink their internal communications. The use of older-tech pagers may have been an attempt to get around Israeli surveillance and protect communications with higher-ranking terrorists. Two months ago, Reuters reported that Hezbollah had banned cell phones in the battlefield for that very purpose:

Coded messages. Landline phones. Pagers. Following the killing of senior commanders in targeted Israeli airstrikes, the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group, Hezbollah, has been using some low-tech strategies to try to evade its foe’s sophisticated surveillance technology, informed sources told Reuters.

It has also been using its own tech – drones – to study and attack Israel’s intelligence gathering capabilities in what Hezbollah’s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, has described as a strategy of “blinding” Israel. …

Hezbollah has learned from its losses and adapted its tactics in response, six sources familiar with the group’s operations told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security matters.

Cell phones, which can be used to track a user’s location, have been banned from the battlefield in favour of more old-fashioned communication means, including pagers and couriers who deliver verbal messages in person, two of the sources said.

Now that entire infrastructure has been destroyed. Or does anyone think that Hezbollah commanders will power up their existing devices after this? 

And that may be an opening strategy for a full-scale offensive from Israel. As I mentioned above, Gallant warned the US yesterday that time had run out. The only way to restore northern Israel, Gallant told Biden adviser Amos Hochstein, was through military action to destroy the threat of Hezbollah and its rockets. 

Not coincidentally, the Israeli government announced that the restoration of population centers in northern Israel was now a top goal in the war triggered by Hamas on October 7:

The security cabinet has updated its official goals for the ongoing war with Hamas in Gaza to include the objective of allowing residents of the north to return safely to their homes after being displaced by attacks by the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, the Prime Minister’s Office announced Tuesday.

“The safe return of the residents of the north to their homes” has now been added as a fourth objective to the war, the PMO said in a statement.

“Israel will continue to act to achieve this goal,” the statement said following a late-night meeting of the security cabinet in Tel Aviv.

The timing of this operation makes it look like that moment has arrived. Israel would not have triggered this attack unless it wanted to blind and disable Hezbollah in the immediate opening sequences of a full-scale war. And the timing is also key in the broader strategic sense, Yonah Jeremy Bob points out:

Sources have told the Post that if more than 4-6 weeks pass without an operation, it may be impossible – or much harder – to carry out such an operation until Spring 2025.

This would mean condemning the northern residents to another 6 months outside of their homes, something becoming increasingly untenable domestically in Israel.

Pressed that the IDF managed a successful invasion of Khan Yunis and defeated Hamas in Shejaia in northern Gaza in the middle of this past winter, sources said that the winter in mountainous Lebanon is far more fierce and difficult to manage than in the Gazan deserts.

The success of the pre-emptive strike last month has bolstered Netanyahu’s confidence in the military to succeed in a war against Hezbollah. Today’s pager operation probably gives the IDF their best opening to commence offensive operations — or to force Hezbollah into shutting down theirs. Either way, the moment is upon them both. 

Update: David will have more on this coming up later, but the updated casualty numbers are stunning:

The death toll in the pager explosions in Lebanon has risen to nine, according to Lebanese media outlets.

Another 2,800 were wounded, Lebanon’s health minister said earlier.

Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon is reportedly one of the injured, although his wounds are said to be “superficial.” Why would he be carrying a pager, though?