ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Reminder: Biden Has 3,894 — or 99 Percent — of Pledged DNC Delegates By Philip Klein

Posted By on June 28th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/reminder-biden-has-3894-or-99-of-pledged-dnc-delegates/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

With full-blown panic setting in among Democrats following President Biden’s disastrous debate performance, the question of an open convention to replace him has been thrown around. But realistically, Biden won’t be replaced unless he can be convinced to withdraw.

The delegate math is this: There are 1,976 delegates required to win the Democratic nomination, and Biden has 3,894. Two other candidates have a combined seven with another 36 uncommitted. In other words, he controls about 99 percent of pledged delegates.

There are an additional 739 superdelegates, but they can only vote in a second ballot and even if every one of them wanted to oust Biden, it wouldn’t make a lick of difference.

Thus, if Biden is determined to keep running, Democrats won’t plausibly be able to replace him.

That is why, as I noted on our liveblog, First Lady Jill Biden is now the most important person in politics. If she can be convinced that her husband needs to step aside, then she is the only person who would be able to persuade him to do so. If she wants him to stay in the fight, Democrats are almost certainly stuck with him.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Biden Debate Debacle

Posted By on June 28th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/06/the-biden-debate-debacle/

Democrats cannot say they weren’t warned. Joe Biden’s age has never been a secret. He shows it every time he appears in public. We warned them ourselves. Back in February, we wrote that Biden should have withdrawn from the race last year — and still owed it to the country to do so. That reality ought to be clear even to his admirers after a debate in which his chief opponent was not Donald Trump but his own frailty.

Biden sounded weak, wheezy, decrepit, and overwhelmed. His best moments came when he got indignant, but even then, his mantra of “the idea!” got almost as old as he sounded.

It was an unspinnably bad performance. The people who claim that Biden is consistently sharp and vigorous behind the scenes always strained credulity. They should now be ignored or mocked.

If Biden’s performance had not been so halting and weak, Trump’s own ramblings and flights from reality — on tariffs, on January 6, on deficit spending — might have cost him. But Trump was himself more disciplined than he had been during the 2020 debates, making relatively focused defenses of his record and attacks on Biden’s. He drew blood from Biden on late-term abortion and on Afghanistan.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Showdown High noon in a CNN studio. Mark Tapson

Posted By on June 28th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/showdown/

On Thursday night, June 27, unpopular President Joe Biden faced off for a debate against challenger and former President Donald Trump, whose popularity is surging despite (or in many cases because of) him being labeled a “convicted felon.” The 90-minute showdown took place before heavily biased moderators Dana Bash and Jake Tapper in the Atlanta studios of CNN, the least trusted name in news.

To keep tight control over the debate process, Team Biden requested there be no live audience – because Trump knows how to work a crowd – and that Trump’s mic be muted when Biden is speaking and vice versa; this, according to the New York Times, is “intended to guard against Mr. Trump’s penchant for interrupting and speaking over debate opponents.”

In other words, Biden’s team and his media collaborators wanted to hamstring Trump’s successful pugilistic style. They couldn’t afford to allow him to fluster his senile opponent with the kind of devastating off-the-cuff remark like the one he used to skewer Hillary Clinton in their 2016 debate. Hillary had said it was a good thing “Trump is not in charge of the law in our country” and he shot back, “Because you would be in jail.” Disappointingly, the debate constraints left no room for that kind of spontaneous kill shot.

Biden’s handlers also refused to allow the aging President to be tested prior to the debate for performance-enhancing drugs, despite widespread speculation that he would need to be “jacked up,” as Trump put it, to maintain mental focus and to prevent Biden from reaching for nonexistent hands to shake or wandering offstage.

As it turned out, if Biden wasn’t on any performance-enhancing drugs for the debate, he should have been, because there was immediate widespread consensus among his fellow Democrat leaders and media supporters that the debate was a colossal failure for the aging President.

The debate kicked off with a question about the economy, a topic that recurred throughout as both candidates blamed each other for soaring inflation, high taxes, and the decimation of the middle class. Biden accused Trump and corporate greed of causing families to struggle with rising prices, and declared that the road to prosperity lies in taxing the rich. Trump blasted Biden for turning us into a third-world country by allowing illegal immigration to cripple the economy.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Nation Finally Got To See The Real Biden — The One The Press Has Been Hiding All These Years

Posted By on June 28th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/06/28/the-nation-finally-got-to-see-the-real-biden-the-one-the-press-has-been-hiding-all-these-years/

Many if not most Americans tuning into the debate Thursday night were probably shocked at President Joe Biden’s performance.

He was confused and tired. He mumbled and bumbled through his answers. He looked at times despondent. He had trouble keeping focused. His closing statement was perhaps the worst in the history of presidential debates. And this was after spending a week at Camp David resting and preparing.

Anyone who was surprised by his performance should be asking themselves Why? Why didn’t they know how bad a state Biden is in? How did the White House keep this under wraps for so long?

The president is, after all, the most public of public figures. His every move is scrutinized. It is true that the White House minimized Biden’s public appearances, and kept them short and carefully scripted.

But the media are always around him taking notes. Reporters are in constant contact with the people who work for the president. They’re always talking to others in the president’s party.

And for three and half years, the press has been telling the public that Biden is doing fine. That all the talk of his age and infirmity was misinformation. Just last week, the media tried to convince voters that Biden’s incredibly odd behavior at recent events was all “cheap fakes” by Republicans.

They said Donald Trump made verbal mistakes and was old, too.

But the contrast between the two men last night could not have been more striking. Was Trump’s performance great? No. But it was standard Trump. His closing statement was a huge missed opportunity to paint a bright picture of America’s future. Instead, he rambled about his record. But next to Biden, he looked like he was a young man at the top of his game.

MEDIA Comments turned off

American Media’s Lethal, Self-Inflicted Wounds Roger Franklin

Posted By on June 27th, 2024

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/media/2024/06/american-medias-lethal-self-inflicted-wounds/

Perhaps it still does, but 40-odd years ago the US Information Agency would take reporters newly arrived from overseas on little junkets to show how America worked. The Wall had yet to fall, the Cold War continued and Washington wished to put the benefits of democracy and free enterprise on display. I went on only one such trip, in early 1980, which is some time ago, so if what I recall of our stop at the Los Angeles Times is fogged by the years, please forgive a memory perhaps a little blurred at the edges.

What I do recall is being herded, our troupe of international freeloaders — black faces, white and asian, the only genders then on offer, plus some colourful headgear and a robe or two — through a vast acreage of newsrooms until finally, having also inspected loading bays and presses, we were assembled before the vacant desk of the editor-in-chief. A tall, athletic man with a beaky countenance arrived, sat down, delivered some pro forma remarks on the First Amendment, Fourth Estate and the vital role his newspaper played in the lives of Los Angelos and, indeed, the nation and world. The chap with the kente cloth cap asked why Africa received so little attention, and there were questions about November’s presidential election, Carter vs Reagan, and how it would be covered. This is the bit that remains crystal sharp.

“Without fear or favour and in pursuit of the facts,” said the LA Times/Mirror group’s supreme editor, Otis Chandler, the fourth generation of the family that had owned and run the LA Times for more than a century. Like Katherine Graham at the Washington Post, his was a hands-on clan. After the rote boilerplate about the sacred duty of the press, the force of Chandler’s conviction in pledging a thorough, unbiased eye on the looming presidential contest was, well, memorable. The details escape me, except that he went on at some length about the dollar investment that would go into the election coverage, a sum I remember as being in the astonishing multi-millions. The LA Times‘ reputation and that of the Chandlers were as one and worth protecting. Indeed, it was also matter of redemption. Before Otis, the LA Times had been a nakedly biased, right-wing denouncer of all things Democrat, especially unions, which made it the target of a 1910 bombing that left almost two dozen dead.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

IRAN MOVES INTO SOMALIA : DANIEL GREENFIELD

Posted By on June 27th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20730/iran-moves-into-somalia

After six months of Iran using its Houthi Jihadis to impose a blockade near Yemen while defying Biden to do anything about it, the Islamic global terror state is moving on to a Somali blockade.

Current reports suggest that the Houthis, an Iranian Shiite terror group, is negotiating to provide weapons to Yemen’s Al-Shabaab, a Sunni Jihadist group allied with Al Qaeda, to expand Iran’s control over shipping. While Al-Shabaab has operated using the conventional Al Qaeda playbook of rifles and IEDs, the Houthis can offer upgraded drones and missile technology.

And best of all, the Houthis can claim that the weapons were battle-tested on the US Navy.

When the Houthis began their naval blockade, the Biden administration had the opportunity to shut it down. Instead, a US Navy carrier group has been tied up for months with no results. The AP headlined its recent coverage as “US Navy faces its most intense combat since World War II against Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels”. But as Front Page Magazine already reported, the only reason the war keeps dragging on is that Biden has restricted the US Navy to responding to incoming attacks and only the occasional light bombing raids against the sources of the attacks.

The Houthis, whose motto, like that of their Iranian backers, includes, “Death to America”, have been able to claim that they held off the world’s greatest military for half a year, while imposing control over regional shipping and international trade. And now Iran is moving into Somalia.

One of the side-effects of Biden’s refusal to go on the offensive against the Houthis was that the Somali pirates, who had been lying low during the Trump administration, decided to make a comeback. With Western naval operations diverted to the Yemeni blockade, it has fallen to the Indian Navy to protect shipping against the Somali pirates. But if the Yemen-Somali deal goes through, Al-Shabaab may displace the pirate gangs and impose its own naval blockade.

And with hundreds of US troops deployed in Somalia, the Al Qaeda affiliate armed by Iran would also have the opportunity to directly attack Americans with their new firepower. Previous local reports had already described a flow of weapons from Yemen to Somalia and pirates deploying anti-aircraft weapons aboard a hijacked vessel. So the arrangement may already be here.

ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Australia is turning a blind eye to anti-Israel extremism Protesters are spraying anti-Semitic graffiti, vandalising property and intimidating politicians with impunity. Hugo Timms

Posted By on June 27th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/06/27/australia-is-turning-a-blind-eye-to-anti-israel-extremism/

In Australia, anti-Israel activists have targeted yet another MP’s office, this time in Melbourne. Like previous acts of ‘pro-Palestinian’ vandalism, last week’s featured sinister red spray paint, the vapid but now omnipresent ‘Zionism is fascism’ tag, smashed windows and attempted arson.

Something else distinguished this particular attack, however. The office belonged to the Jewish Labor MP Josh Burns. He has been one of the few members of his party to publicly support and visit Israel in the wake of the 7 October pogrom.

Disturbingly, the vandals – police said there were six – appear to have spray-painted horns on top of an image of Burns’s face, while rendering his eyes as bright red orbs. So many lines have been crossed since 7 October that it is almost impossible to say where the bounds of civility now sit. But depicting a Jewish MP as the devil seems an ominous new low.

Before the attack on Burns’s office, anti-Israel activists also targeted the constituency offices of several other Labor politicians, including MP Peter Khalil, government-services minister Bill Shorten, attorney general Mark Dreyfus and defence minister Richard Marles. There was also an attack on the office of Liberal James Paterson, among others.

Incredibly, the western Sydney constituency office of prime minister Anthony Albanese has been closed since January due to repeated attacks. It’s even been defaced by the inverted red triangle – a Hamas propaganda symbol originally used to mark Israeli soldiers and tanks for attack.

The police response to what has now amounted to tens of thousands of dollars of damage has bordered on indifference. No charges have been issued so far. During the Covid lockdowns, Victoria Police arrested a pregnant woman in her own home for creating an anti-lockdown Facebook group, and spent significant state resources prosecuting people for exercising and shopping. Yet they look the other way when Israelophobes threaten our elected representatives.

ELECTIONS, MEDIA Comments turned off

Amazing New Feats in Shameless Hackery Noah Rothman

Posted By on June 27th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/amazing-new-feats-in-shameless-hackery/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=third

We’ve reached the point in the electoral calendar when the “experts” join forces to provide Joe Biden with a dubious talking point timed for maximum political effect.

Last time around, the “experts” were some of the nation’s most distinguished intelligence officials who assured the voting public that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a fabrication cooked up as part of an unusually sophisticated Russian disinformation operation. Today, the “experts” are economists — indeed, Nobel Prize winners — all of whom insist that Donald Trump’s proposed economic policies risk exacerbating inflation. That wouldn’t be such a galling assertion if this brain trust hadn’t also assured Americans that Joe Biden’s economic-policy preferences are entirely unimpeachable.

An open letter signed by 16 accomplished economists begins with the authors confessing how “deeply concerned” they are by Trump’s economic prescriptions and the “vagaries of his actions” on the world stage. In particular, the letter’s signatories expressed their fear that Trump’s “irresponsible budgets” will “reignite” inflation.

It’s unclear what “irresponsible budgets” the authors are describing. If they’re referring to the statements of principle that presidents send to Congress under the guise that they are budgetary proposals, these economic mavens need not worry so much. Presidential budgets are political documents, not economic blueprints, and Congress tends to regard them as such.

If, however, these economists were referring implicitly to Trump’s reliance on tariffs as the answer to any and every economic challenge, these economists would be on surer footing. Some forecasters have gamed out the effect of Trump’s sweeping tariff proposals, and they anticipate that the higher cost of imports and the prospect of Chinese retaliation would boost consumer prices.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Biden Administration in Landmark Social-Media Censorship Case By James Lynch

Posted By on June 27th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/supreme-court-rules-in-favor-of-biden-administration-in-landmark-social-media-censorship-case/?

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of the Biden administration in a landmark case dealing with government involvement in social-media censorship, finding that the plaintiffs lacked the standing to sue.

Justice Barrett wrote the majority opinion asserting that two states and five social-media users do not have standing to contest the level of coordination between government agencies, nonprofits, and tech platforms in restricting content on social media.

“We begin—and end—with standing. At this stage, neither the individual nor the state plaintiffs have established standing to seek an injunction against any defendant. We therefore lack jurisdiction to reach the merits of the dispute,” the majority opinion reads.

The landmark Murthy v. Missouri content-moderation case came about from a lawsuit by Missouri and Louisiana against the Biden administration over federal agencies working with social-media platforms and third-party nonprofits to censor conservatives online.

Last July, a district court ruled that federal agencies could not communicate with social-media companies or nonprofits with the purpose of coercing them into restricting speech. The Fifth Circuit partially upheld the injunction last fall and found multiple federal agencies violated the First Amendment.

“This evidence indicates that the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment. To be sure, the record reflects that the Government defendants played a role in at least some of the platforms’ moderation choices. But the Fifth Circuit, by attributing every platform decision at least in part to the defendants, glossed over complexities in the evidence,” Barrett said of the Fifth Circuit’s ruling.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Is Equality of Opportunity Even Realistic in a Free Society? It’s time to rethink the concept. by Jason D. Hill

Posted By on June 27th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/is-equality-of-opportunity-even-realistic-in-a-free-society/

There is a popular rejoinder in our society to the ideal of equity: equal results from unequal causes, and equal rewards for unequal performance.

A popular canard that has become constitutive of equality dialogue is that the United States was built not on equality of outcomes or even economic equality. It is devoted to equality of opportunity. But we should begin to re-think the concept of equality of opportunity. I would submit that even equality of opportunity is a politically untenable goal in a free society.

Equality of opportunity sounds like a beautiful thing to most people and, in an ideal utopia in which all persons were blessed with equal abilities and exercised their choices and judgments in a consistently rational and productive manner, one could imagine such an ideal being approximated. But what is an opportunity?

An opportunity is a set of circumstances that makes it possible to do something and achieve a goal. When I say that I have an opportunity to do something, I am describing a state of affairs in which the execution of action directed towards a phenomenon (some tangible thing in the world) will result in the realization of a goal I have set for myself.

When people speak of equality of opportunity they are speaking of those tangible things (a job, an education, a meeting with someone important who can advance their cause etc.—the material conditions that are required for the realization of a goal) that must avail themselves to each person equally. To put it another way, it is believed that a society or state must ensure that the circumstances and the conditions conducive to achieving goals are equally available to all persons. And for this project to be successful, we have to be committed to the idea that equality of opportunity is predicated on equalizing all chances of success.