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News recaps in digestible bites, mid week

1. From Barak Ravid, Axios: “U.S. demands Israel improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza or risk military aid”:

   The Biden administration sent a letter to Israeli leaders on Monday demanding Israel take steps within 30 days to improve the dire humanitarian conditions in Gaza or risk the supply of U.S. weapons to Israel being affected, according to a copy of the letter obtained by Axios.

   […] Israel is highly dependent on U.S. military aid as it fights a war on several fronts and has been under intense scrutiny as warnings emerge again about the humanitarian situation in northern Gaza.

   Quips Mike Newman on X:

   I have a genius idea.

   Build a dock in Gaza. It will only cost American taxpayers a few hundred million.

   This way the US and Iran can ship weapons directly to Hamas along with the other “ humanitarian” aid.

   With the US Presidential election three weeks away, the 30 day deadline, couched in stern-sounding language, seems rather curious — almost as if the Biden Administration is hoping to sway certain voters in Michigan with what amounts to a promise it may not be able to keep, or may not even wish to keep, should Harris win.

   But be that as it may. How Israel should interpret this letter is simple: they have 30 days to really ramp up their campaign against Hamas and Hezbollah — and they should do so. US foreign policy for too long has been to restrain Israel from defending itself in exchange for US support, which is something the US should not be demanding of one of its allies, except under very specific circumstances that redound to its own security interests.

   And Kamala Harris trying to regain lost Muslim votes in a few swing states is not one of those very specific redounding circumstances.

   

2. If you are a GOP pol, it’s a good idea, as David Harsanyi reminds us, “to record yourself when dealing with journalists.” Here’s why:

   

   Click the photo to listen to the video clip.

   If “60 Minutes” editing a Kamala Harris answer to beautify rambling, incoherent thoughts wasn’t enought to prove to you that the legacy press sees its role as protecting State power — but only when that State power is held by its ideological brethren — this latest instance of using editing to change the tone and tenor of an answer should leave you with no doubt.

   This is not what a free press does. This is what communist propagandists do. In a country designed as self-governing, this behavior by the media cannot be countenanced without doing grave damage to the necessary component an informed citizenry brings to the maintenance of our liberties.

3. Remember when an ABC News moderator corrected Trump on his crime numbers during his debate with Kamala Harris? And remember when Trump tried to explain to him how the FBI had massaged the numbers to help Harris and the Administration, leaving out large swathes of unreported crime to arrive at data significantly different than data the DOJ had?

   Yeah. About that.

   

   When the FBI originally released the “final” crime data for 2022 in September 2023, it reported that the nation’s violent crime rate fell by 2.1%. This quickly became, and remains, a Democratic Party talking point to counter Donald Trump’s claims of soaring crime.

   But the FBI has quietly revised those numbers, releasing new data that shows violent crime increased in 2022 by 4.5%. The new data includes thousands more murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults.

   The Bureau – which has been at the center of partisan storms – made no mention of these revisions in its September 2024 press release. 

   RCI discovered the change through a cryptic reference on the FBI website that states: “The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023.” But there is no mention that the numbers increased. One only sees the change by downloading the FBI’s new crime data and comparing it to the file released last year.

   After the FBI released its new crime data in September, a USA Today headline read: “Violent crime dropped for third straight year in 2023, including murder and rape.” 

   It’s been over three weeks since the FBI released the revised data. The Bureau’s lack of acknowledgment or explanation about the significant change concerns researchers.

   “I have checked the data on total violent crime from 2004 to 2022,” Carl Moody, a professor at the College of William & Mary who specializes in studying crime, told RealClearInvestigations. “There were no revisions from 2004 to 2015, and from 2016 to 2020, there were small changes of less than one percentage point. The huge changes in 2021 and 2022, especially without an explanation, make it difficult to trust the FBI data.”

   “It is up to the FBI to explain what they have done, and they haven’t explained these large changes,” Dr. Thomas Marvell, the president of Justec Research, a criminal justice statistical research organization, told RCI.

   The FBI did not respond to RCI’s repeated requests for comment.

   You don’t say!

   Here’s where I point you to what I wrote above about the legacy media and how its failure to fairly perform its stated function undermines the legitimacy of a self-governing nation. Or, if you prefer, ibid.

4. On Tucker Carlson’s show yesterday, Morning Meeting host (along with Sean Spicer and Dan Turrentine) Mark Halperin explains to Carlson how a Trump victory in a few weeks would create what he calls “the greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country.” Here’s a bit of that exchange:

   I think tens of millions of people will question their connection to the nation, their connection to other human beings, their connection to their vision of what their future for them and their children could be like. And I think that it will require an enormous amount of access to mental health professionals. I think it’ll lead to trauma in the workplace. I think there’ll be some degree of — 100% serious? 100% serious. I think there’ll be alcoholism. There’ll be broken marriages. Yeah, they think he’s the worst person possible to be president. And having won by the hand of Jim Comey and fluke in 2016 and then performed in office for four years and denied who won the election last time and Jan. 6, the fact that under a fair election, America chose, by the rules pre-agreed to, Donald Trump again, I think it will cause the biggest mental health crisis in the history of America. And I don’t think it will be kind of a passing thing, that by the inauguration will be fine. I think it will be sustained and unprecedented and hideous. And I don’t think the country is ready for it.

   Carlson: So, mental health crises often manifest in violence.

   Halperin: Yeah, I think there’ll be some violence. I think there’ll be workplace fights. There’ll be fights at kids’ birthday parties. I think there’ll be protests that will turn violent. I hope they’re not, but I think there will be some. But I think it will be more — it’ll be less anger and more a failure to understand how it could happen. You know, like the death of a child, or your spouse announcing that, you know, your wife announcing she’s a lesbian and she’s leaving you for your best friend. Like something that’s so traumatic that it is impossible for even the most mentally healthy person to truly process and incorporate into their daily life. I hope I’m wrong, but I think that’s what’s going to happen for tens of millions of people because they think that their fellow citizens supporting Trump is a sign of fundamental evil at the heart of their fellow citizens and of the nation. That’s how they view it.

   Carlson: Well, that’s very heavy.

   Well, maybe not so much heavy as sad and, ultimately, predictable.

   When your insulated bubble of the media eco-sphere has you convinced that your fellow Americans are trying to elect literally Hitler!, it follows that you may not be so disposed to show much grace to those fellow Americans — the deplorables, the indecent, the filthy, the mostly-unvaccinated, the racist, sexist, homophobic xenophobes out to force you into an Applebee’s where they’ll hold you down, force you to eat corn pudding, and then rob you of your precious bodily fluids!

   Where Halperin gets his diagnosis wrong, I think, is evinced through his implied faith in mental health professionals. Who, if recent history is any indication, may be some of the most unstable, mean-spirited, hateful leftist partisans this side of Pyongyang.

5. Yesterday, Donald Trump debated the Bloomberg NAFTA crowd at the Economic Club of the University of Chicago, clashing with Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait over the use and effect of tariffs, which Micklethwait posited as a kind of national sales tax on US consumers — and a position likely to start a trade war — but that Trump countered offers leverage over foreign import markets interested in fair trade agreements with the US.

   In short, Trump sees tariffs as a bargaining tool in the interest of American jobs and American companies, as current international trade practices — tariffs on US exports, most specifically — hamper the trade of US-made goods to foreign markets.

6. Whether you agree with Trump or not — there’s a case to be made for his policy in instances where the US is forced to compete against countries employing slave labor, for instance (and here’s an excellent summary of Trump’s position from Howard Ludnick on CNBC) — what stands out is that Trump is able to appear in such a forum and hold his own quite well, such is his practical experience as a businessman of some renown and success.

   — whereas Kamala Harris? Spent yesterday doing a taped podcast interview with a dimwitted racialist who goes by “Charlamagne Tha God” in which the two noodled over how much — if any — money, in the way of “reparations” payout, is due blacks in the US. Because, as Charlamagne informs us (and Harris chose not to correct him), the US was “built on the backs of free black labor.”

   Which is revisionist nonsense. Obviously.

   I shouldn’t have to say this, but one candidate for President has a decent chance of arresting run away inflation, and of helping ordinary Americans finally come through what has been 6 years (counting COVID) of economic hardship and uncertainty; while the other is at best most likely to create a new national holiday for Tupac’s birthday, or maybe rename a mountain range after some marginal Native chieftain.

   How Harris is even within spitting distance of being elected President is the single greatest indictment possible of this country’s rotted-out media and perverse educational institutions.

7. For some really detailed polling insights, you should check out Rich Baris, who’s been doing some excellent work. Not only is his honest, but his polling has been very reliable — and he’s not afraid to call out the filler, fluff, and copious amounts of bullshit within the polling mafia, as he calls it. Worth checking out if you aren’t already doing so.

   ****

   Buy me a cup of coffee? Lunch? A sports car? Or buy me some beer. I avoid prescription opioids.