Politics And The Markets 10/22/23

Keep yer' mouth shut and you's won't get cut

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Many Washington, DC, residents cannot walk their dog, enjoy a local park, or pick up groceries without fear of being stabbed, robbed, or gunned down in the District, a 68 square mile area that local residents described as a “war zone” to Breitbart News.

Just this week, five homicides occurred in 35 hours in three separate highly trafficked areas of the city: Benning neighborhood in Southeast, Capitol Hill in Northeast, and Brightwood in Northwest. One of them entailed a former Democrat staffer for a District council member. Another shocking incident occurred Monday when four men jumped out of a car in the well-to-do Wharf neighborhood with guns drawn to rob restaurantgoers, Metropolitan Police Department footage showed.

Crime soared in 2022 after U.S. Attorney for D.C. Matthew Graves refused to prosecute 67 percent of those arrested. In turn, 222 criminal homicides occurred in 2023, a 35 percent increase from the same period in 2022, according to police statistics. The District eclipsed 200 killings on August 12, the earliest point since the late 1990s.

LMAO! Voting 92% for Biden and Democrats has consequences.

In Israel’s ongoing effort to track down all those involved in the brutal terrorist attack that left more than 1,400 victims, the Shin Bet has established a new unit named Nili, an acronym in Hebrew that translates as “The Eternity of Israel Will Not Lie”.

This unit is dedicated to hunting down and eliminating every individual who played a role in the massacre in the western Negev settlements two weeks ago.

This force was specifically set up to target members of Nukhba (a special commando unit within Hamas’s military wing) who infiltrated Israel, executed mass killings in various villages and IDF outposts, and subsequently returned to the Gaza Strip.

Israel has carried out such operations before, notably in the effort to track and kill every Palestinian terrorist who participated in the kidnapping and murder of Israeli athletes at the Olympics in Munich, Germany, in 1972.

As the Jewish Virtual Library notes, “Nili” was also the name of a spy ring operated by Jewish settlers in Palestine during the Ottoman Empire that assisted the British in the First World War.

If you only paid attention to the fake mainstream press, you'd be inundated with a constant stream of articles ensuring you how great the economy is. "Look at the jobs market," the headlines have blared while promoting the supposed historic resiliency of our present moment. The full-court press has been so strong that the Biden administration has even taken to labeling it "Bidenomics," a marketing ploy that has proven less than ideal.

What looks good on paper, though, is often not representative of the real-world impact. Thus, Joe Biden's current economic malaise, for which Americans are assured they should be incredibly thankful, is hitting American families far harder than Paul Krugman's latest cherry-picked bar graph indicates.

Shockingly, if you ignore how much things actually cost across the board, you can spin a rosy picture in which a greatly delayed slowing of the rate of inflation is actually an incredible accomplishment. But back in the real world, this reality still remains.

If you go from January 20, 2021, when Biden took office, the aggregated inflation rate was at 2.749 percent. That means that the aggregated inflation rate has jumped 21.151 percent since he became the president.

Since Biden took office, the compounded or aggregated inflation rate, whichever term you prefer, is over 21 percent. That means that Americans are paying 21 percent more today to live the same way they were living just two and a half years ago. It's hard to express how much of a shock to the system that has been for many families. Despite claims of rising wages (which have not kept up with baseline inflation), the vast majority of people have not received a 21 percent raise over that time period.

This is where favored statistics run up against the cold, hard reality of real-world outcomes. Most wage growth that has occurred has come at the bottom end of the scale, with entry-level jobs seeing increases due to a lack of labor. What does that do for the average father working a middle-class job trying to provide for his wife and children, though? The answer is absolutely nothing.

The same is true for the supposedly strong jobs market. Again, because of a labor shortage largely caused by misguided COVID policies, there is an abundance of entry-level jobs available. Many of those are being filled by people who hold multiple jobs as a way to make ends meet. Is that a win for Americans? Is that what we should be striving for? It's not.

Perhaps the worst detriment to attaining the American dream, though, is the current interest rate situation. Not only has it made owning a vehicle, a requirement in most of the United States, more expensive, but it's also made buying a house nearly impossible. What has historically been the safest way for American families to grow their wealth? That would be the ownership of property. Under Biden, mortgage rates have topped eight percent. That translates to around $1000 more a month for a $400,000 house than just two years prior.

Again, does that sound sustainable? Does that sound like what we should be striving for? Yes, the year-over-year inflation rate is down. Where else was it supposed to go after nearly hitting 10 percent? The cumulative effects of "Bidenomics" are here to stay, though, and they matter. Press outlets and politicians who ignore those effects are being disingenuous.

Here's the truth that most Americans are dealing with: They are simply treading water. Savings rates are down, the stock market is stagnant, and good job opportunities are few and far between. Those three things add up to an inability to grow wealth and plan for the future, locking people into menial jobs with little chance of advancement. In short, Biden has killed the American dream.

A new report shows China is moving six additional warships into the Middle East amid concerns the Israeli War could expand into a larger regional conflict. China is aligned with multiple interests; and cunning Panda also supports the Biden administration end goal of a two-state solution in Israel.

We need to keep watching these developments closely.

The U.S. has positioned two carrier battlegroups in the Mediterranean. One group contains the USS Carney, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer assigned to USS Ford Carrier Strike Group 12. The Carney traveled through the Suez Canal Wednesday and immediately intercepted 4 cruise missiles and 11 drones from an unknown origin with an unknown destination.

The original Pentagon statement has not changed in the past 48 hours. Unknown origin, unknown target. The missiles entered the protection zone of the strike group, so we shot them down.

All of the follow-up reporting about Yemen and Israel, as the origination and target respectively, has come from high level “U.S. government officials,” not the military. That approach indicates a sensitive political matter, with the Biden administration (State Dept, NSC and Intel) guiding and controlling public information very carefully.

If you just stick to the Pentagon as the source of information, there has not been a change since the original report to the media.

Something remains sketchy, not sure what it is, but something is not passing the sniff test.

China now moves six additional ships into the region.

What interests specifically is China planning on defending?

During a recent monologue on his FOX News show, Jesse Watters took a hard but fair look at the state of America and the world on Joe Biden’s watch.

Watters takes apart Biden’s Oval Office address and points out its many flaws, including the things Biden left out about the funding for all the wars breaking out, and the fact that Biden is trying to paint himself as a wartime president when his policies are responsible for almost all of this.

Finally, he notes that Biden’s speech included nothing about the border or our rising crime problem.

JESSE WATTERS: "Tonight, the world is on the brink and the White House is panicking because Joe Biden is president. The United States, now sponsoring a double proxy war against the Iranians and the Russians. China is eyeing Taiwan, and North Korean weapons were just discovered in Gaza. The State Department has just issued a worldwide travel warning to all countries.

When is the last time that’s happened? Americans aren’t even safe in France. Our enemies are being mobbed by angry Muslims. Our military bases are under attack in Iraq, and we just had to shoot down two Iranian made missiles. How was your week? While this right now breaks, Putin is in China meeting with Xi where they’re coordinating Mideast policy. Two American carrier strike groups are in the Mediterranean and Biden just tested one of our new nuclear weapons, detonating a massive bomb in Nevada.

We keep catching Middle Easterners sneaking across the secure southern border. Axios reports top officials say this has been the “heaviest, most chilling week since Biden took office.”"

The world is on the brink and Washington is living in fear.

No one can deny that America and the world were more stable and safer under President Trump.

Twitter owner Elon Musk has punished the far-left New York Times on his platform for pushing the fake news story about Israel bombing a hospital in Gaza.

They were certainly not the only outlet that pushed this falsehood but they’re one of the biggest. Perhaps Musk is trying to make an example out of them.

Musk removed their precious verification badge which must have them very upset.

The New York Times X, formerly known as Twitter, account is no longer verified after owner Elon Musk removed its gold verification badge.

On Friday morning, social media users noticed the verification badge was missing from the liberal outlet’s profile. Just hours later, the account for the New York Times was sporting a new, blue check mark— suggesting that the outlet paid for verification status to distinguish itself.

Musk has been a longtime critic of the New York Times, accusing them of spreading fake news. A recent spat between the outlet and Musk ignited after a hospital in Gaza was bombed earlier this week.

The New York Times ran a headline accusing Israel of the bombing that left hundreds dead and citing only Palestinian sources. However, evidence verified by Israel and U.S. intelligence arms indicated the deadly attack was caused by a misfired rocket launched by the terrorist group Hamas.

In response, the New York Times was forced to change its headline at least three times.

The New York Times completely deserves this punishment.

Other media outlets should take notice. They don’t run Twitter anymore.

Conservative law professor William Jacobson is the publisher of the Legal Insurrection blog. As one of the few openly conservative faculty members in the Ivy League, Jacobson is in a unique position to observe campus culture and the radical drift higher education has taken in recent years.

Jacobson was recently interviewed by Breitbart News to offer his analysis of what we’re seeing unfold on college campuses right now with left wing rallies in support of the terror group Hamas.

According to Jacobson, we are witnessing the ‘collapse’ phase of higher ed.

Cornell Law School professor William Jacobson explained to Breitbart News Daily host Mike Slater how the far-left took over academia to the point where the U.S. has “a very radicalized faculty at almost every college” in the country, adding, “We’re in a collapse phase.”

“There’s that saying that collapse happens slowly, then suddenly. We’re in the ‘suddenly’ phase,” Jacobson told Slater.

“But it happened slowly,” Jacobson continued. “I’ve witnessed it — I graduated college in 1981. I went to Hamilton College in upstate New York. It was a fairly conservative, traditional college. It’s now indistinguishable from Oberlin College.”

“The radical professors were hired, they had a plan,” Jacobson explained. “They slowly took over the committees and the hiring committees, and they only hired their own, and over 30+ years, you got to a situation where you have a very radicalized faculty at almost every college in the U.S.”

The Cornell professor, who is also a blogger for the website Legal Insurrection, said “the far-left targeted education,” adding that “It’s no coincidence that Obama’s mentor, Bill Ayers, the former Weather Underground terrorist member, went into academia.”

“I look at the people I graduated law school with in 1984, and the most radical students went into academia. The rest of us went and got a real job,” he said. “We woke up 30, 40 years later, and it’s, holy cow, they’re controlling everything.”

“They’ve only hired their own for two generations. That’s how we got here,” Jacobson affirmed. “We got here slowly, but I’d say – certainly in the last decade, but particularly the last four to five years – we’re in a collapse phase, and people are just waking up to that.”

“They all understood that education was where they could have the biggest impact, because they get to shape young minds,” the professor said. “They understood that that was a weakness of society and a place where they could essentially be activists.”

Jacobson also touched upon the topic of academic freedom with regards to Cornell professor Russell Rickford, who recently went on a pro-Hamas tirade, proclaiming that he was “exhilarated” by the terror group’s terrorist attack against Jews in Israel.

“We’ve experienced this from the right, I mean, traditionally it’s been the right who’s been attacked, not people like this guy,” Jacobson said in response to those who are now calling for Rickford to be fired over his remarks.

The professor explained his position:

"People want to say, “Well, you can’t allow Nazis to speak on campus.” And nobody wants to defend Nazis, so people say, “Okay,” and then all of the sudden, you say, “I’m against Obamacare,” and they start calling you a Nazi. And then they say you can’t speak because you’re a Nazi. And that’s the problem. When you give the people in power the power to decide who gets to speak, they will figure out a way that you don’t get to speak.

So I think the remedy for this professor who was exhilarated by the Hamas attack, I think the answer is not to fire him, the answer is to educate the entire campus as to why he’s wrong. The answer is to invite Israelis to speak on campus. The answer is to expand cooperation with Israel."

Jacobson went on to say that professor Rickford “is a symptom of a problem,” not necessarily the actual problem.

“I tend to be fairly lenient on these things,” he said. “I certainly understand why people get upset about this sort of stuff, but having been on the receiving end for saying really mainstream conservative things — I’m very hesitant to open that door.”

“But it’s a guy like that who really puts us to the test,” Jacobson said.

We don’t need to spend too much time digging into the granules of this recent New York Times article about how Christina Pushaw organized an online “influencer campaign” for Ron DeSantis that has failed miserably. However, it’s still funny to see the confirmation, and the people from inside the operation telling the NYT the group gets daily email instructions.

As the DeSantis operation collapses into a parody of itself, some of the recruited influencers are now speaking about how the astroturf operation was organized. Everyone who watched it unfold, knows it was the stup!dity of Pushaw who tried to fake the support system, built the operation on fraud and then sold it to a bunch of billionaires who now -according to the Times reporting- have major regrets.

(New York Times) – "In early May, as Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida prepared to run for president, about a dozen right-wing social media influencers gathered at his pollster’s home for cocktails and a poolside buffet.

The guests all had large followings or successful podcasts and were already fans of the governor. But Mr. DeSantis’ team wanted to turn them into a battalion of on-message surrogates who could tangle with Donald J. Trump and his supporters online.

[…] Four months later, those worries seem more than justified. Mr. DeSantis’ hyper-online strategy, once viewed as a potential strength, quickly became a glaring weakness on the presidential trail, with a series of gaffes, unforced errors and blown opportunities, according to former staff members, influencers with ties to the campaign and right-wing commentators.

Even after a recent concerted effort to reboot, the campaign has had trouble shaking off a reputation for being thin-skinned and meanspirited online, repeatedly insulting Trump supporters and alienating potential allies.

[…] Ms. Peck exercised little oversight of the campaign’s online operations, which were anchored by a team known internally as the “war room,” according to the three former aides. The team consisted of high-energy, young staffers — many just out of college — who spent their days scanning the internet for noteworthy story lines, composing posts and dreaming up memes and videos they hoped would go viral. At the helm was Christina Pushaw, Mr. DeSantis’ rapid response director.

[…] In early August, the aerospace tycoon Robert Bigelow, who had been by far the largest contributor to Never Back Down, the pro-DeSantis super PAC, said he would halt donations, saying “extremism isn’t going to get you elected.” Money from many other key supporters of Mr. DeSantis has also dried up, including from the billionaire hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin.

Terry Sullivan, a Republican political consultant who was Senator Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign manager in 2016, said the bizarre videos amounted to a warning sign for donors that Mr. DeSantis’s campaign was chaotic, undisciplined and chasing fringe voters.

[…] The existing network of DeSantis influencers has presented challenges for the campaign. Online surrogates for Mr. DeSantis have repeatedly parroted, word for word, the talking points emailed to them each day by the campaign, undermining the effort to project an image of widespread — and organic — support.

Last month, for example, three different accounts almost simultaneously posted about Mr. Trump getting booed at a college football game in Iowa. Bill Mitchell, a DeSantis supporter with a large following on X, said the identical posts were coincidental.

“I talk with all of the team members when necessary but other than the daily emails get no specific direction,” he said."

The pathetic nature of the failure is ironically apropos for Ron DeSantis.

Everything about the DeSantis operation was/is fabricated, fake, constructed to give appearances, inauthentic and astroturf. Voters are not stup!d; they can see it and feel it in the construct as delivered. The effort of the DeSantis operation, from Sea Island to Christina Pushaw, highlights how little they think of the American electorate. They actually believed this con would work.

Pushaw thought she could mold DeSantis into the next Zelenskyy by using the same operation in the USA that was used in Ukraine. It didn’t work.

Thursday’s ruling by U.S. District Judge Roger T. Benitez which struck down California’s ban on so-called “assault weapons” should have a direct impact on a similar ban in Washington, because both states are in the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court, the Second Amendment Foundation says.

“If a gun ban in California is unconstitutional,” Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb observed, “it is just as unconstitutional in Washington. We are eager to see this case through to what may become a Supreme Court confrontation, because we are confident that we will prevail. People who support gun bans, like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson, are wrong on this important constitutional issue.”

The case is known as Miller v. Bonta, filed by SAF, the San Diego County Gun Owners Political Action Committee, California Gun Rights Foundation, Firearms Policy Coalition and four private citizens, including James Miller, for whom the case is named. They are represented by attorneys George M. Lee at Seiler Epstein, LLP and John W. Dillon at the Dillon Law Group, APC.

In his 79-page ruling, Judge Benitez wrote, “While criminals already have these modern semiautomatics, the state prohibits its citizens from buying and possessing the same guns for self-defense. At the same time these firearms are commonly possessed by law-abiding gun owners elsewhere across the country. Guns for self-defense are needed a lot because crime happens a lot.

A recent large-scale survey estimates that guns are needed defensively approximately 1,670,000 times a year. Another report, originally commissioned and long cited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that there are between 500,000 and 3,000,000 defensive gun uses in the United States each year.”

“Judge Benitez’ ruling is a stinging rebuff to the gun prohibition movement,” said SAF Executive Director Adam Kraut. “His detailed discussion of the history of firearms regulation, along with his dismantling of the state’s arguments and assertions of its experts sends a signal that the days when gun banners could simply attack the Second Amendment without challenge are finished. We will take this challenge to the Supreme Court if necessary, as part of our commitment to restore firearms freedom, one lawsuit a time.”