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Debt Rattle November 2 2024

Nov 022024
 
 November 2, 2024  Posted by at 9:40 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  47 Responses »


Otto Dix Ice drift 1940

 

• The GOP’s Closing Argument: ‘Kamala Broke It, Trump Will Fix It’ (Whedon)
• National Climate, Polling Points to a Trump Victory (Jim Lee)
• Actually, The Democratic Party is Hitler (Kunstler)
• Trump Victory Means MSM Is Dead In Current Form (ZH)
• Trump Promises ‘Influential Positions’ For Musk and Kennedy (RT)
• Trump’s Potential Treasury Pick Vows Spending Cuts in Partnership With Musk (NTD)
• Trump Is Suing CBS For $10 BILLION For Election Interference (MN)
• White House On the Rewriting of President Biden’s Garbage Comments (Turley)
• Vance-Rogan Interview (ZH/ET)
• Joe Rogan Says He Gave Harris Campaign “Open Invitation”, Still Stands (ZH)
• Portents of Chaos (Patrick Lawrence)
• Western Europeans Don’t Understand Russia – Orban (RT)
• Israel Wants Russia To Mediate Peace – Media (RT)
• Moscow Names Only Chance For Middle East Peace (RT)
• The Paradigm Shift Is Here (Jeffrey A. Tucker)

 

 

 

 

Rogan Vance


https://twitter.com/i/status/1852039026456285455

Jeffrey Sachs

RFK


https://twitter.com/i/status/1852306377504608646

Bolton

Putin
https://twitter.com/i/status/1851760343489405075

Alina
https://twitter.com/i/status/1852090630291493214

Tucker J6

Bannon Clark

 

 

 

 

“Trump is talking about solving problems for Americans while Kamala Harris is focused exclusively on attacking him..”

• The GOP’s Closing Argument: ‘Kamala Broke It, Trump Will Fix It’ (Whedon)

Former President Donald Trump and his supporters have sounded their closing refrain in the final week of the campaign, arguing that Harris is responsible for the current state of the nation and that the only remedy is the return of the 45th president. “Kamala broke it, but I will fix it,” Trump declared at his Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday evening. The line has become something of a secondary slogan for the campaign, with Trump himself and his surrogates alike repeating it at every opportunity. The campaign appears to be banking on most of the electorate deciding they were better off under Trump and aims to cast Harris as the one pulling the strings in the Oval Office. “Fixing it,” moreover, refers to his laundry list of policy items, in particular his border security and tax policies, but applies to initiatives across all the major issues.

“Trump is talking about solving problems for Americans while Kamala Harris is focused exclusively on attacking him,” one campaign official told Fox News. He is “asking people to vote for something, while she is asking for people to vote against something.” Other surrogates have embraced the messaging. In a recent op-ed for Fox Business, former Trump advisor Larry Kudlow highlighted inflation data and cost-of-living figures to show that the American people are worse off. He took the “riff” a measure further, however, by highlighting Trump’s allies, who would work in the administration to help repair the nation. “There are lots of other folks — both new and old allies — who are helping Mr. Trump, but this is an important representative group,” wrote Kudlow. “[T]he group, along with many others, shows that Donald Trump has the confidence and good judgment to get the very best people on his team, and that’s why he can say, with growing confidence: Kamala broke it, Trump will fix it. That’s the riff.”

Kudlow, in particular, highlighted former [presidential candidate] Vivek Ramaswamy, Elon Musk, JD Vance, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and a handful of others. Vance himself made the point during a Tuesday rally, saying “[t]hink about the big tent coalition that we’ve assembled. On the right, we’ve got people like Brian Kemp, Nikki Haley. On the left, we’ve got people like Tulsi Gabbard, Bobby Kennedy.” “This is the common sense coalition that’s ready to take the country in a more positive direction. But it’s very simple. Kamala Harris broke it. And Donald Trump will fix it,” he concluded. The campaign is not the first to embrace such messaging. On the world stage, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban made a similar point in March of this year, amid escalating conflicts in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. “President [Donald Trump] was a president of peace. He commanded respect in the world, and created the conditions for peace,” Orban said. “During his presidency there was peace in the Middle East and peace in Ukraine. We need him back more than ever!”

“It is up to Americans to make their own decision, and it is up to us Hungarians to frankly admit that it would be better for the world – and better for Hungary, too – if President Donald Trump were to return to power,” he added. Trump himself has repeatedly pointed to Orban’s comments and did so again at a rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, earlier this week. “Victor Orban, the powerful Prime Minister of Hungary said, ‘bring back Trump, and everything will stop. All these wars, everything will stop. They respected him.’ He actually said differently. He said they feared him, but I don’t care,” Trump said. “China was afraid. Russia was afraid. They’re all afraid. And you know what? I don’t want [them] to be afraid. I just want respect,” he added. “And they got to respect us again right now. They’re laughing at our country. They’re laughing at us. If we win, America will be feared and respected again and then on issue after issue, Kamala broke it, and I will fix it.”

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“..the national popular vote has favored Harris for months, but now has shifted in Trump’s favor..”

• National Climate, Polling Points to a Trump Victory (Jim Lee)

Currently, both the national climate and the polling seems to point to a Trump victory in November. For instance, according to polling averages , only 28% of Americans say the country is going in the right direction, compared to 61% who say it’s on the wrong track. Why is this important? Because wrong track voters are more apt to vote for the party out of power – i.e., the Trump campaign – than the party “in power.” Second, President Joe Biden’s average approval rating is still at a dismal 41% nationally, with a higher 56% of Americans saying they disapprove of his job performance. Why is this important? Because if Americans are unhappy with the president’s job performance, they theoretically should be less likely to vote for another four years of his administration with a vote for the Harris campaign.

And remember, when Kamala Harris was asked on a national network television program just recently if she would have done anything different than Biden, she couldn’t answer. In other words, she seems to have unwittingly conceded that she represents another four years of a Biden presidency. Another reason the political climate seems to favor Republicans at the current time has to do with how Americans are self-identifying in polls. According to national polling, in October 2016, the country self-identified as Democrat by a 3-point margin over Republicans. In October 2020, the country self-identified as Democrat by a higher 6-point margin. But in September of this year, just last month, new polling showed Republicans with a 1-point lead over Democrats on party self-identification. This could prove important because it seems to suggest that more Americans are aligned with the GOP brand than the Democrats – another good sign for the Trump campaign.

Moreover, the current polling has shifted in Trump’s favor both nationally and in critical battleground states. For instance, the RCP average of national polls now shows Trump with a 48.4 to 48.3% lead – just one tenth of a percent difference, but still leaning Trump. This is a big deal because the national popular vote has favored Harris for months, but now has shifted in Trump’s favor. This could be a sign of which way the political winds are blowing. Plus, polling averages currently show that Trump leads in all seven battleground states, including Pennsylvania (.6 percent lead), Michigan (.2 points), Wisconsin (.2 points), Arizona (1.5 points), North Carolina (.8 points), Georgia (2.2 points) and Nevada (.7 points). These are RCP averages as of October 26.

In Pennsylvania, Trump’s lead is significant when you consider that on that day in 2020, Biden led in the RCP averages in Pennsylvania by 4.8%; Biden of course went on to eek out a narrow margin over Trump by only 1.2%. Back in 2016 at this time, Hillary Clinton led in the RCP averages by 4.3 points, only to lose to Trump by a razor-thin, 48.58 to 47.85 margin on Election Day (or 44,292 votes). So, are we on the cusp of a landslide (Electoral College) victory for Trump? No one knows for sure, but it could happen. In Pennsylvania, our latest poll shows a 46% to 45.8% statistical tie between Trump and Harris (Harris leading by .2 percentage points). This poll was conducted October 18-22 with a sample size of 500 likely voters. But there is plenty of good news for Trump in this poll.

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“..the SCOTUS is going to turn a flame thrower on Judge Merchan and Alvin Bragg and vacate the absurd case and every half-assed procedure that was used to arrive at it..”

• Actually, The Democratic Party is Hitler (Kunstler)

Along about now, you’re probably wondering what sort of mayhem the Party of Chaos is set to unleash on our democracy after their mighty ballot fraud operation fails to overcome the yet more powerful instinct of the voters to expel them from the seats of power they seized by fraud in 2020 and 2022. You can be sure they’ve gamed-out a playbook aimed at paralyzing the nation one way or another if the effort to install Kamala Harris in the White House face-plants, as it appears to be doing in these final days before the reckoning. Rioting, arson, and looting in the cities? Not so much. Probably some, but only because it’s an excuse for 100-percent-off sale “shopping,” plus the need for hordes of dopamine-deprived youth to seek a little dangerous excitement — in a society that gives them nothing meaningful or purposeful to do. It’d surely reflect poorly on the regime clinging to power in the months before January 20.

Anyway, “Joe Biden,” Kamala, and company would be blamed for letting the cities get wrecked again, and then double-blamed by their own partisans if they try to stop it with the national guard. It’s a no-win deal for them. More likely, the Party will hijack the nation’s legal machinery to cancel the election ex post facto. They’ve done a swell job in advance setting up conditions that make it difficult if not impossible to sort out legal ballots cast from the frauds. So, expect the Party’s chief lawfare ninja Marc Elias, and his zillion-dollar-funded cadre of pettifoggers, to contest the swing-state precincts where their ballot-harvest somehow fell short a few bushels. They’ll file enough lawsuits to gum up the courts until the sun becomes a red dwarf. If the actual numbers add up to a Trump victory, the Democrats will re-brand that as the new “Big Lie” and commence a strenuous campaign in the old media to gaslight the public into believing the vote-count isn’t what it looks like.

After all, numbers are math and math is racist. That will provide the rationale, and furnish the game-space, to stop Trump by other means. Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-MD) has already advertised his scheme to knock Mr. Trump off the game-board by using Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to declare him an “insurrectionist,” disqualified from holding office. Of course, Mr. Trump has not been charged, indicted, or convicted for insurrection, nor was anyone involved in the J-6 protest and riot. Insurrection was supposed to be established as fact by the House J-6 Committee, but it died of illegitimacy after destroying all its accumulated records last year, including documents in evidence and the videos of all the witnesses it deposed. Whoops. The Jack Smith prosecution in Judge Tanya Chutkan’s DC Federal District court was a backup plan for that, but the July SCOTUS decision on presidential immunity has, so far, gummed up that ploy.

Mr. Raskin would need a Democratic House majority to pass such a resolution, in any case, and it looks unlikely that he will have that. A rather desperate gambit to oust Mr. Trump with a military coup, first advanced by former Pentagon official Rosa Brooks in a February, 2017, op-ed in the high-toned journal Foreign Policy, and reiterated by Nancy Pelosi in January, 2021, has been resurrected now that Mr. Trump is firmly branded as Hitler by the Party of Chaos — meaning he can be eliminated by any means necessary. “Joe Biden’s” woked-up generals might be game for a coup, but they’d have to overcome a lot of counter-coup-minded, not-so-woked-up colonels to get there. Anyway you cut it, the hysteria in the body politic is running at a pitch — as Mr. Trump himself might say — that has never been seen before, at least not since Fort Sumter.

The Democrats complain that a Trump victory means the Department of Justice will be weaponized against them. Is that rich, or what? It actually tells the whole story since you know the Party always accuses its opponents of exactly what it is already doing. Speaking of which, we must look forward to Judge Juan Merchan’s November 26th sentencing of Mr. Trump in DA Alvin Bragg’s “Stormy Daniels hush money” case. It’s out there, looming, and it ain’t going away. Judge Merchan is going to have to do. . . something! The jury has pronounced Mr. Trump guilty of those 34 “felonies” (based on 34 book-keeping entries, originally misdemeanors, and beyond the applicable statute of limitations).

I’d like to see the Judge stash the president-elect in the Rikers Island lockup for a few hours. It’ll be a better stunt than Mr. Trump’s shift serving fries at McDonald’s, or riding the garbage truck after “Joe Biden” called more than half the country that supports him “garbage.” Because a few hours after Mr. Trump settles into his Rikers cell and enjoys his first boloney sandwich, the SCOTUS is going to turn a flame thrower on Judge Merchan and Alvin Bragg and vacate the absurd case and every half-assed procedure that was used to arrive at it, and refer Merchan and Bragg for disbarment for professional misconduct, malicious prosecution, and failure to uphold the law.

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“Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.”

• Trump Victory Means MSM Is Dead In Current Form (ZH)

CNN chief media analyst Brian Stelter shared a comment from an anonymous television executive on X, “If half the country has decided that Trump is qualified to be president, that means they’re not reading any of this media, and we’ve lost this audience completely. A Trump victory means mainstream media is dead in its current form.” The anonymous TV exec’s comment to Stelter nailed it. Trust in corporate media has been sliding for decades but has imploded to record-low levels in the last several years. History might show that the 2020s was the decade when the curtain was lifted on the censorship blob, a combination of MSM, government, big tech, nonprofits (fake fact-checkers), and globalist billionaires that work overtime to sow division across the nation, trick the American people into endless foreign wars, and artificially create a news flow environment favorable to far-left policies.

At the start of the year, Wall Street Journal EIC Emma Tucker told fellow elites at Davos: “We owned the news. We were the gatekeepers, and we very much owned the facts as well. Nowadays, people can go to all sorts of different sources for the news. And they’re much more questioning about what we’re saying.” Fast-forward to recent months, and some of those far-left globalist elites, including Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, sounded the alarm about free speech as their control over information waned with the rise of Elon Musk’s ‘free speech’ platform X. A combination of alternative media outlets, Musk and his platform X, helped to shape this election cycle with news flow that shifted ‘Overton Window’ from unthinkable and radical leftist propaganda to the center of common sense. This allowed for narratives such as ‘Bidenflation’ and ‘migrant invasion’ to dominate news cycles instead of the leftist propaganda of wokeism.

This, of course, has infuriated the Deep State’s censorship blob, which this week launched an attack on alternative media via the NYTimes And Media Matters. Perhaps one of the biggest wake-up calls for MSM was their full-blown hate-speech propaganda blitzkrieg of calling Trump a ‘Nazi’ and ‘Hitler’ – only finding out that most Americans have given up on CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, and MSNBC – and could care less about the misinformation and disinformation pushed by those muppets. Another big wake-up call for MSM was some of their own allies defecting from the liberal cause, including The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and USA Today, which the three papers did not endorse Harris-Walz nor any other candidate. This is out of the norm for these papers.

WaPo’s owner, Jeff Bezos, wrote in an explainer about his decision, indicating, “Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.” If Trump wins, David Sacks on X offered some views of what could be next for MSM…

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“He thinks he can cut $2 trillion without affecting anybody, and I think he can do it..”

• Trump Promises ‘Influential Positions’ For Musk and Kennedy (RT)

Donald Trump has confirmed that he will give Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “influential” positions in his government if he wins the upcoming presidential election. During an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson at a campaign event in Arizona on Thursday, Trump was asked whether Kennedy or Musk would become key figures in his administration, should he be reelected on November 5. “Yeah, I do. I think so,” the former president responded. He noted, however, that Musk has indicated that he “doesn’t want to become a secretary of something” and instead wants to focus on finding ways to reduce waste in government spending. “He thinks he can cut $2 trillion without affecting anybody, and I think he can do it,” Trump said. “He wants to cut costs, he wants to save the country.”

Despite initially proclaiming political neutrality, Musk officially endorsed Trump earlier this year and has become a major supporter of the former president in his bid to secure a second term in office. Trump has promised the Tesla CEO that he would establish a special “government efficiency” commission, dubbed DOGE, which would be headed by the billionaire if he wins the election. Speaking at a Trump campaign event in New York last week, Musk suggested that he could reduce the annual federal budget by “at least $2 trillion,” claiming that American taxpayers’ money was “being wasted.” Regarding Kennedy, Trump told Carlson that he wanted the former Democrat – who ran as an independent in this year’s presidential race before dropping out and backing Trump – to “work on health” and “take care” of the US population.

“He’s right with so much of the things he’s talking about, because you know, we’re not a healthy country,” Trump said. Earlier this week, Kennedy himself confirmed that Trump had promised him a role in his administration, noting that while he would not be leading any government agencies, he would likely play a part in choosing who does as a senior adviser of some sort. Trump transition team co-chair Howard Lutnic also said on Wednesday that Kennedy would not head the Health and Human Services department if Trump is reelected. Trump had previously also applauded Kennedy’s decades of work as an advocate for the health of American families and children, and had indicated that he would establish a “panel of top experts” that would work with him to investigate “what is causing the decades-long increase in chronic health problems and childhood diseases” in the US.

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“Paulson said that if nominated, he would not anticipate pushback from the Senate.”

• Trump’s Potential Treasury Pick Vows Spending Cuts in Partnership With Musk (NTD)

Billionaire John Paulson said he would work with Elon Musk to cut federal spending, particularly by reducing green energy subsidies, if appointed Treasury Secretary under Trump’s administration. Paulson shared these comments during a Tuesday interview with The Wall Street Journal. “All of these tax subsidies for solar, for wind, inefficient, uneconomic energy sources. Eliminate that. That brings down spending,” he told the media outlet. He specifically mentioned targeting green energy subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act, which he referred to as the “Green New Deal.” A staunch Trump ally and major donor to his 2016, 2020, and 2024 campaigns, Paulson is also a trustee of the conservative Manhattan Institute, chaired by fellow Wall Street executive Paul Singer. Trump has named Paulson a possible Treasury Secretary if he wins the 2024 election.

Paulson’s stance mirrors Musk’s, who claimed he could slash at least $2 trillion from the federal budget. “Your money is being wasted,” Musk said at a Trump rally on Oct. 27 at New York’s Madison Square Garden. “We’re going to get the government off your back and out of your pocketbook.” The $2 trillion target amounts to nearly a third of current spending, with the federal government spending $6.75 trillion in fiscal year 2024, according to the Treasury Department. Trump mentioned that he asked Musk to lead the newly proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) aimed at auditing U.S. federal agencies. Musk replied on X, saying, “I can’t wait. There is a lot of waste and needless regulation in government that needs to go.” Neither Trump nor Musk has provided details on the specific programs they would cut.

Musk, like Paulson, is a prominent Trump supporter, campaigning with him, donating nearly $120 million to a pro-Trump super PAC, and pledging $1 million to voters who support free speech and gun rights. On Monday, Philadelphia’s district attorney asked a state judge to block Musk’s $1 million giveaway, calling it an “illegal lottery scheme. The Treasury Secretary manages federal finances and tax laws, often engaging with Wall Street, business leaders, and foreign dignitaries. Paulson is among several candidates being considered for the role, alongside Scott Bessent, founder of Key Square Group and a Trump ally on Wall Street, former trade ambassador Robert Lighthizer, and former SEC Chairman Jay Clayton.

Paulson said that if nominated, he would not anticipate pushback from the Senate. “I have good relationships with senators on both sides of the aisle. The review process is a rigorous process. That’s a hurdle that would have to be crossed before we get to the Senate. I think once we cross that review process, I wouldn’t expect opposition.” he told The Wall Street Journal. The economy stands as the top issue for voters in the 2024 presidential election. A Gallup poll found it is the only topic over 50 percent of registered voters rated as “extremely important” in shaping their decision.

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“The only people this will work on is low IQ morons, which tells you something about how the Harris campaign views American voters.”

• Trump Is Suing CBS For $10 BILLION For Election Interference (MN)

President Trump has filed a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS news over its deceptive editing of Kamala Harris’ 60 Minutes interview. Trump is accusing CBS of election interference to help Harris, with his attorneys stating “CBS’ partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference through malicious, deceptive, and substantial news distortion calculated to confuse, deceive, and mislead the public.” Trump further charges that CBS was blatantly attempting “to tip the scales in favor of the Democratic Party as the heated 2024 Presidential Election — which President Trump is leading — approaches its conclusion.” “President Trump brings this action to redress the immense harm caused to him, to his campaign, and to tens of millions of citizens in Texas and across America by CBS’s deceptive broadcasting conduct,” the lawsuit further states.

60 Minutes was caught editing Kamala’s answers in an attempt to make her sound somewhat coherent. They left her word salad answer to a question about Israel on the cutting room floor, replacing it with a completely different sentence that she said earlier in the interview. CBS News has also refused to release the full transcript of the interview. Trump should also file a lawsuit against Harris’ campaign for deceptively editing footage of him speaking at rallies and during interviews. Yet again Thursday, the Kamala HQ X account posted an out of context clip of Trump talking about Liz Cheney, with a caption insinuating that he’d like to see her shot in the face. If you watch the full clip, Trump is talking about how hawkish Cheney is, and how such politicians will eagerly send young Americans to die in pointless wars while they sit in their DC offices.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1852213972281270565

They do the same thing daily with out of context clips of Trump, because it’s all they’ve got. With the example above from yesterday, where Trump wasn’t even talking about abortion or women’s rights, Harris repeated the lie and CBS made it headline news: The only people this will work on is low IQ morons, which tells you something about how the Harris campaign views American voters.

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“Now, the White House Press office is being criticized from a new quarter for the clean up on aisle three: the Director of White House Stenography, Amy Sands..”

• White House On the Rewriting of President Biden’s Garbage Comments (Turley)

Since the “Let’s Go, Brandon” incident, the media has been repeatedly accused of reframing news or rewriting words to benefit the President or the Biden-Harris Administration. This week, the White House Press Office and various media outlets like Politico and MSNBC have been ridiculed for denying that President Joe Biden called Trump supporters “garbage.” It has created a weird dissonance as Democratic politicians denounced what the White House and many in the press denied was said. Now, the White House Press office is being criticized from a new quarter for the clean up on aisle three: the Director of White House Stenography, Amy Sands. The White House stenographers objected to the rewriting of the transcript by the Biden White House staff to suggest that the President was condemning Trump’s rhetoric, not his supporters.

The President’s attack on Trump supporters was nothing new. Leaders like Hillary Clinton called them “deplorables,” and Biden himself has described their views as a return of the confederacy and the rise of fascism. Democrats have called the movement a modern form of Nazism and an effort to destroy democracy, round up homosexuals, and create internment camps. The problem was the timing. As Harris was denouncing Trump for name-calling and insisting that Democrats are bringing the country together (while condemning Trump as a modern version of Hitler), Biden was literally behind her in the White House, calling tens of millions of Trump supporters “garbage.” Fox News reportedly obtained an email in which the supervisor sounded the alarm on the White House press office’s “breach of protocol and spoilation of transcript integrity between the Stenography and Press Offices.”

Sands went on to say that “if there is a difference in interpretation, the Press Office may choose to withhold the transcript but cannot edit it independently. Our Stenography Office transcript — released to our distro, which includes the National Archives — is now different than the version edited and released to the public by Press Office staff…After last night’s process, our team would like to reiterate that rush drafts/excerpts the Stenography Office sends to assist the Press Office are not intended for public distribution or as the final version of the transcript. Please avoid sharing rush drafts/excerpts, which are subject to review and might create confusion among staff, media, and the public while our Stenography Office completes a thorough review process.”

The White House was criticized for adding an apostrophe to the President’s comments to change the meaning of the key line. After the statement, there was an immediate clean-up effort by Politico White House bureau chief and MSNBC host Jonathan Lemire, who was accused of changing the language by saying that “Biden, in a Zoom call with the organization Voto Latino, said ‘the only garbage’ was the ‘hatred’ of Trump supporters who said such things about American citizens.” Lemire was widely ridiculed. For many, it sounded like another “Let’s Go Brandon” moment. He later turned to the apostrophe spin: “The full Biden quote from the Zoom tonight, which is being taken out of context.”

Accompanying the text is a screenshot of a transcript that has Biden saying: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.” The spin would have been more convincing if many of these pundits were not at the same time insisting that a line from a comedian delivered at a Trump event should be attributed to Trump (despite his later condemnation of any such view). It would also be more credible if Biden had not spent much of the last four years portraying the Trump movement as a new confederacy (before it was reframed as the new Third Reich).

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“The whole conduit of money into politics is fundamentally broken, we have to fix that.”

• Vance-Rogan Interview (ZH/ET)

Near the start of the interview, Vance discussed how he was selected to be Trump’s running mate—and how it’s changed his and his family’s life. Vance said he didn’t learn that Trump had picked him until July 15, the first day of the Republican National Convention. That day, he said he missed Trump’s first effort to call him as he was playing with his children. A few minutes later, he realized that he had missed the call and called Trump back. “Hey, sir, what’s going on?” Vance recalled saying. He said Trump replied: “JD, you’ve just missed a very important phone call. I’m gonna have to pick someone else.” Vance said he began to panic, only for Trump to say: “No, I’m just kidding. Obviously, I want you to be my vice president.” Vance said the call wasn’t a total surprise; by that point, he believed he had about a 60 percent chance of being picked for the No. 2 job.

Though Vance has been a U.S. Senator since 2023, he said he was able to remain somewhat anonymous most of the time—people often had no idea who he was. “It’s definitely weird just not being anonymous at all anymore,” Vance said. He noted the many changes that have occurred for his family since he became a candidate: his child’s schoolmates have started a game called “boss man” where they pretend to be Secret Service agents; Vance can’t drive his family around anymore; and he receives both praise and condemnation from people in public. “There are a lot of benefits to it. There’s a lot of downsides to it,” Vance said. “It’s what I asked for. I don’t have to think too much about it or complain too much about it. I just try to accept it.”

Vance described how the Republican Party was changing under Trump—particularly in relation to its attitude toward corporations and money in politics. Vance and Rogan discussed a variety of controversial social issues—transgenderism, environmentalism, Big Tech, and the pharmaceutical industry—that Vance said are all influenced by money. Vance has often outlined a unique position on economic issues that aligns more closely with populism than with 20th-century Republican positions. He’s expressed support for unions in principle; he’s often critical of corporate and elite institutions; he’s pushed for state policies to incentivize the creation of families. Once, Vance said, Republicans were openly the party of corporations. Since Trump’s entry into the party in 2016, however, Vance said that Republicans are now more willing to ask “Is this corporation’s interest in the American people’s interest?”

When evaluating other social movements, Vance said that people need to apply more scrutiny to their potential hidden motives. For instance, he noted that transgender drugs and operations are profitable to the pharmaceutical industry, as were COVID-19 vaccines—particularly because pharmaceutical companies are given broad immunity from liability for adverse reactions. “We should just ask ourselves, ‘Who’s getting rich from this stuff?’ Maybe we should be skeptical of people getting rich from this stuff,” Vance said. “The whole conduit of money into politics is fundamentally broken, we have to fix that.”

[..] The two also discussed abortion. Vance said he and Trump want to make it a state issue—so California can make its own laws while Alabama can do the same. Trump recently said he would veto a national abortion ban if Congress sent one to his desk. Vice President Kamala Harris has accused Trump of lying and has used the 2022 Supreme Court Dobbs decision to mobilize women voters. Rogan said he worries that some states with strict bans could put women in “very vulnerable positions” if they seek care across state lines, and face potential legal consequences when they return home. The host also said the “life begins at conception” position is rooted in religion, and is concerned about that dictating “whether or not a person can legally travel to another state.” Vance said he is not aware of laws that could do that, but nonetheless disagrees with arresting women seeking abortions. “I think I’m trying to be fair to both sides here [and] balance the interest in life against the interest in autonomy,” Vance said, adding that “pro-life” people need to be “pro-family” beyond just being “pro-birth.”

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“My sincere wish is to just have a nice conversation and get to know her as a human being. I really hope we can make it happen.”

• Joe Rogan Says He Gave Harris Campaign “Open Invitation”, Still Stands (ZH)

Podcaster Joe Rogan said in an Oct. 30 episode of his show that he gave Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign an “open invitation” to sit down for an interview at any time. “I said anytime. I said if she’s done at 10, we’ll come back here at 10. I’ll do it at 9 in the morning, I’ll do it at 10 p.m. I’ll do it at midnight if she’s up, if she wants to, you know, drink a Red Bull,” he said, recalling what he told the campaign. Rogan’s show features around 14 million subscribers on Spotify, making it the top show on the platform, but it also generates significant traffic and engagement on YouTube. His interview with former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, released late last week, has garnered more than 41 million views on YouTube so far.

While speaking to comedians Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster during episode 2220 of The Joe Rogan Experience….Rogan said that Harris “actually reached out when she found out that [Trump] was coming on.” “So their camp reached out to me,” he said. “So I said, ‘Great, I would love to talk to her.’ But it was very difficult to tie it down. They wanted [me] to travel, and see, the thing is, if I go somewhere, then there’s going to be other people in the room. And they want to control a lot of things, I’m sure.” As The Epoch Times’ Jack Phillips reported, Harris was in Houston last week and held a rally there featuring an endorsement and speech from pop singer Beyoncé. In a social media post earlier this week, Rogan said that the Harris campaign had conditions for the Democratic presidential nominee to do the interview. The Epoch Times previously reached out to the campaign, which has not responded to Rogan’s remarks, for comment.

“For the record, the Harris campaign has not passed on doing the podcast,” Rogan wrote in a social media post on Tuesday. “They offered a date for Tuesday, but I would have had to travel to her, and they only wanted to do an hour. I strongly feel the best way to do it is in the studio in Austin. My sincere wish is to just have a nice conversation and get to know her as a human being. I really hope we can make it happen.” During the episode with Kisin and Foster, Rogan also addressed speculation that he might be a covert Trump supporter. “Just because of my appearance, there’s always been this assumption that I’m some right-wing MAGA guy,” he said, referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. “I’m a politically homeless person for sure. You know, I always considered myself a left-wing person. I never thought I would ever vote right-wing, but then the tides of culture shifted in a very bizarre way. And it just made me, over time, much more aware of what this stuff is really all about.”

Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), will also air on Rogan’s show after being interviewed at Rogan’s Austin studio on Wednesday. Both Trump and Harris have engaged in a flurry of campaigning as the race draws to a close. Both candidates have taken part in several podcasts ahead of the 2024 General Election as they attempt to reach new audiences. More than 60 million people have cast early ballots so far ahead of the Nov. 5 contest, according to data released by the University of Florida’s Election Lab.

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“If this election is about anything — apart from the price of groceries, of course — it is about the national-security state’s place in American politics..”

• Portents of Chaos (Patrick Lawrence)

I have long detected that American liberalism has at its core a vein of illiberalism that is essential to its character. America is simply not, to put this point another way, a tolerant nation. It does not encourage its people to think: It requires them to conform. Alexis de Tocqueville saw this coming two centuries ago in the two volumes of Democracy in America. We are now, post–Clinton, treated to the spectacle of full-dress liberal authoritarianism, and if you do not like the term there are others. De Tocqueville, prescient man, called it “soft despotism.” I’ve always favored “apple-pie authoritarianism.” There is a feature of this awful manifestation among NPR–addicted, kale-eating liberals that distinguishes our time as especially discouraging as to the future. This is their wanton corruption of some of the institutions without which even a semblance of democratic government is impossible. I am thinking particularly of three that figure in the pre-election picture.

One is the judiciary — federal, state, county, local. Beginning with the Mueller investigation, the in-plain-sight corruption of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the ridiculous court cases brought against Donald Trump, Attorney–General Merrick Garland’s subversion of the Justice Department to protect President Joe Biden as his son’s influence-mongering schemes came to light — all this in behalf of the Democrats: Well, as I learned during my days as a correspondent abroad, when the judicial system goes down, the path to failed-state status opens. Two is the intelligence apparatus and the military. Intel, from the days of James Clapper and John Brennan, has lined up unequivocally behind the Democrats ever since the brash real-estate man from New York foolishly assumed he could “drain the swamp” — his declaration that he would take on the Deep State.

As to the military, the generals thought nothing of declaring eight years ago, at the Democrats’ convention in Philadelphia and in open letters published in the Times, that they would refuse the commander-in-chief’s orders were Trump to win and attempt a new détente with Russia and an end to “the forever wars.” Yes, you’ve got John Kelly, who served in Trump’s cabinet and then as his chief of staff, suddenly calling Trump a fascist — the Democrats’ favorite epithet these past weeks. Doesn’t anyone want to know why Kelly worked closely with a man he considered a fascist? Doesn’t it occur to anyone — it must, surely — that Kelly, a retired Marine general, says these things to serve the party he trusts to keep the wars going and the tax dollars flowing? A paradox here, more apparent than real: John Kelly, H.R. McMaster, James Mattis, Mark Esper, and various others like them did not wear uniforms when they served in the Trump administration, but they never took them off.

If this election is about anything — apart from the price of groceries, of course — it is about the national-security state’s place in American politics. In our post–2016 era, intel and the military are perfectly welcome to operate openly, unabashedly, in the American political process — this because the Democratic Party gives them a wide berth to do so.

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“The EU, however, insists on ignoring reality and keeps talking about a “victory” for Ukraine..”

• Western Europeans Don’t Understand Russia – Orban (RT)

Most EU politicians misunderstand Russia and project their own policies and priorities on Moscow instead, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said. Orban is a long-time critic of the EU policy on the Russia-Ukraine conflict. He spoke at an event with former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in Vienna, organized by the Swiss newspaper Die Weltwoche. “It is a Christian country and part of Europe, but it is different from us,” Orban told the audience at the Sophiensale in the Austrian capital on Thursday. “Their politics revolves around a different question than ours.” In the West, Orban explained, the focus is on maximizing individual freedom and material prosperity. Russia’s oft-misunderstood priority is keeping the multi-ethnic state of 140 million people together and preventing adversaries from “chewing away” some territories, he said.

This inability to adequately understand Russia is a major “intellectual problem” for Western leaders, Orban said. Instead, people like European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen speak about some kind of military victory over Russia in Ukraine, which the Hungarian prime minister described as the stuff of fantasy. Russia cannot be defeated on the battlefield and will in fact win the war, both Schroeder and Orban agreed. They advocated a ceasefire as soon as possible, arguing that time is working against Vladimir Zelensky. The EU, however, insists on ignoring reality and keeps talking about a “victory” for Ukraine. “This war is lost for Ukraine, which is increasingly in ruins!” Orban told the Vienna audience, pointing out that it is important to face reality.

Asked about his “peace mission” to Kiev, Moscow, Beijing, and Mar-a-Lago earlier this year, Orban said he tried to use Hungary’s presidency of the EU Council to bring about a ceasefire and stop the killing, rather than get “pats on the back from Brussels bureaucrats.” Orban has accused the EU, specifically Von der Leyen and another prominent German politician, of seeking to oust him and replace him with a “Jawohl government” that would take orders from Brussels and Berlin. He has pointed to public statements by EU officials to that effect, including the claim that they already did this in Poland last year. Hungary was long the sole dissenter with the EU policy of unconditional support for Kiev, until last year’s election of Robert Fico in Slovakia. Earlier this year, Fico barely survived an assassination attempt by a pro-Ukrainian activist.

Soros

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They want Russia to sign on to some American deal.

• Israel Wants Russia To Mediate Peace – Media (RT)

Israel wants Russia to take part in peace efforts aimed at ending the Jewish state’s conflict with the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, Ynet news and several other local outlets have reported, citing officials involved in negotiations. According to the reports, West Jerusalem expects that Moscow’s involvement could add stability to any future deal and reduce dependence on the US. “The Russians will have a special role in implementing the agreement and preventing further escalation,” a source told Ynet. Commenting on the reports, Orna Mizrahi, a former Israeli deputy national security adviser, told Newsweek that while Israel “prefers the Americans,” it understands that Russia’s “good relations” with Iran could contribute to the stability of any deal on Lebanon reached in the future.

“Another point is the fact that they are part of the UN Security Council five and if we get to the point that we have some kind of a new resolution about the ceasefire in the UN Security Council, we would like the Russians to approve it,” she said. Israeli media reports claimed this week that negotiations on a ceasefire deal in Lebanon have already reached “advanced stages.” US President Joe Biden’s envoy, Amos Hochstein, who is mediating between Israel and Lebanon, reportedly reached preliminary agreements on the deal during a visit to Beirut earlier this week. The deal involves a wider implementation of the UN Security Council Resolution 1701, passed in 2006, which demands the withdrawal of Hezbollah forces from the Lebanese-Israeli border. It introduces an international mechanism to supervise the region and deal with violations claims by either Israel or Lebanon and reportedly prevents Hezbollah from rearming, which effectively means the group would be banned from acquiring military means.

Israeli officials told Ynet that the deal, if signed, would start with a 60-day cease-fire, during which time the new mechanism to supervise the region would be set up. Hochstein is reportedly expected to arrive in Israel before the US presidential election scheduled for November 5 to finalize the deal. The reports claim that Moscow has already discussed the situation with Iran, which is said to be encouraging Hezbollah to agree to the terms. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Friday neither confirmed nor denied Russia’s involvement in the peace process, but said Moscow “maintains contacts with all parties of the conflict.” “And, of course, if our assistance is needed, Russia is ready to play its part,” he stated.

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“..an independent Palestinian state..”

but

“..Netanyahu has repeatedly vowed not to allow the creation of a fully functional Palestinian state..”

• Moscow Names Only Chance For Middle East Peace (RT)

The conflict in the Middle East can only be resolved by stopping the violence and creating the conditions for establishment an independent Palestinian state, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated on Friday. “There will be no winners” in the ongoing war, he added. In an interview with the Turkish daily Hurriyet, Lavrov said we are seeing a deepening spiral of violence in the Middle East and that an increasing number of countries are being drawn into the “whirlpool of confrontation.” Israel and Lebanon-based Hezbollah have exchanged fire over the past year as the latter has supported the Palestinian cause in light of West Jerusalem’s military operation against Hamas. Israel has escalated its campaign against the Shiite militant group, launching attacks on Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon.

Tensions between Tehran and West Jerusalem have also escalated since Israel conducted a series of strikes against targets in Iran last week. The attack was in response to a barrage of missiles fired by Iran at the Jewish state in October – which itself was in retaliation for the killing of Hezbollah and Iranian commanders. The Russian minister has urged the sides to stop further escalation before the situation gets out of hand. Tens of thousands of “innocent Palestinians” have been killed in Gaza since the outbreak of the conflict with Israel, while in Lebanon the number of victims is in the thousands, he said. Lavrov noted that Russia has condemned the assassination of Hamas and Hezbollah political leaders, warning that it could worsen the already tense situation in the region and undermine attempts to end the war in Gaza. The top diplomat noted that Moscow had earlier proposed that the UN Security Council give an assessment of the killings, however, “due to resistance from Western members of the Security Council, this was not possible.”

Moscow calls for an immediate cessation of hostilities and is undertaking diplomatic efforts to de-escalate the situation, according to Lavrov. However, long-lasting peace in the region can only be established “though the creation of an independent Palestinian state within the borders of 1967,” the minister stressed. Russian President Vladimir Putin said during a meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas earlier this year that the roots of the Gaza conflict are that UN resolutions regarding the creation of an independent Palestinian state have been ignored. Currently the state of Palestine is recognized by 146 UN members and half of the G20, including China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, and Türkiye. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly vowed not to allow the creation of a fully functional Palestinian state.

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Progress, change comes not smoothly in a linear way, but in bursts and spurts.

• The Paradigm Shift Is Here (Jeffrey A. Tucker)

Some wild shifts are taking place in our time. The low-tariff global trade order is falling apart. Nationalist movements are gaining strength in every Western nation, not just the United States. The major media is under serious financial strain to the point that the owner of the Washington Post has penned an editorial decrying the tendency to speak only to elites. A presidential candidate is talking about scrapping the income tax. The Supreme Court earlier this year ruled that 40 years of regulatory jurisprudence is essentially contrary to the Constitution. The list goes on and on with the rise of homeschooling, the reliance on alternative media, the dramatic shift in partisan affiliations over healthy food, the unpredictable alliances over the U.S. role in the world, and so much more. People are asking fundamental questions about issues that only a few years ago seemed fully settled. What was stable is unstable and what was believed by nearly everyone is now widely doubted.

It’s enough to make one’s head spin. What is happening and why is it happening? The short answer is that we are living through a class paradigm shift. One is going away and another is coming. We are in pre-paradigmatic times, which are surely the most exciting times to be alive.

The word paradigm entered into the mainstream of thought with an important book by Thomas Kuhn. His “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” appeared in 1962, and it completely upended the dominated assumptions about how science works. More than that, it implicitly shook how people came to understand how progress takes place. He said it is not a linear process with every generation absorbing the best from the last but rather that progress is episodic, a shift from success to failure and back again, through titanic movements of large paradigms. Kuhn arrived at this conclusion by looking at the long history of science and noticing the tendency toward complacency around an orthodoxy of some sort. This is the period he calls “normal science.” The practitioners have all been schooled in a certain way, deferring to teachers and dominant institutions that have captured government and the public mind. It’s a way of understanding the world and within that the main practitioners focus on problem-solving and applications.

This period of normal science can last a month or decades or centuries, rarely questioned. And then something happens. Kuhn writes that this orthodoxy comes to be challenged by certain features of reality that are not explained by normal science. Once these are more closely investigated, the anomalies start to pile up and then overwhelm the explanatory power of the settled paradigm. The longer this goes on, the more the paradigm comes under strain, as a new generation seizes on the failures and highlights the incapacity of the orthodoxy to account for the reality all around us. That’s when the settled science breaks down. It can happen slowly or quickly, and sometimes paradigms overlap both in their popularity and their collapse. That collapse does not mean that every mind is changed. Kuhn observes that the practitioners of the old science continue on their merry way through retirement and final expiration, while the younger people work on cobbling together a new way of thinking that gradually emerges as the dominant paradigm.

Kuhn was writing about science and the profession thereof but his insight has broad application to sociological, cultural, and political ideas too. They do not evolve in a linear fashion, piling victory upon victory, as a Whiggish perspective of the 19th century would have it. Instead, change occurs episodically. One generation is as likely to forget the wisdom of the past as it is to overthrow the orthodoxies of the present. We are in a forever state of cobbling together truth rather than progressively unfolding it. We’ve seen this happen in the postwar world, as planners built structures that were supposed to govern the world forever. But in a few short years, the world came to be divided rather than united by the Western perception of the new threat of Russian imperialism. That created the Cold War which lasted for 40 years until a new “end of history” was born, which put freedom, democracy, and U.S. hegemony on the commanding heights. That turn has been challenged by the rise of China and huge industrial shifts in the 21st century.

If we were to name one dominant factor that has provoked the big change in our time, it would have to be the global response to the lab-created virus of SARS-CoV-2, which was met with Chinese Communist Party-style universal quarantines all over the world, and followed by shot mandates on most public institutions and many private businesses. These policies were extreme beyond which had been practiced in any period of history but also, and in many ways, merely an extension of the “normal science” of times. The media, large corporations, and nearly all governments got behind the pandemic response and jeered the non-compliers. This was a huge error because it gave rise to a full generation of the incredulous who lost trust in elites at all levels: medical, academic, media, and government. It has all fallen apart in our time, leaving people scrambling in all directions for explanations of what could have gone so wrong and what should be done about it.

What fascinates me about our election year is not so much the issues on the table but the underlying template that everyone knows is there but no one dares mention; namely the utter discrediting of elite opinion over the last four years. The claims of the experts simply became too implausible to compel public assent. And this time it was personal. People’s schools and churches were closed, loved ones forced on ventilators to die alone, and whole communities were shattered when public spaces were blocked. In other words, the “normal science” became a threat to people’s lives, especially once the vaccine mandates came along that most people did not want or need and which ended up being far less effective and far more dangerous than advertised. That was the turning point, the mark at which the anomalies overwhelmed the orthodoxies and the expert classes fell into disrepute.

Nothing about any of this would shock Thomas Kuhn, who gave us a map of understanding back in 1962. Finding that new way of thinking is the essence of our times, which is why everything seems to be in question. The other day, Elon Musk suggested cutting $2 trillion next year from the federal budget. It barely made the headlines, even though it is a highly credible promise. That’s the new world in which we live. It is being built on the embers of the old. To be sure, this shift will not happen all at once. It will happen in fits and starts and be accompanied by a great deal of alarm and even pain along the way. But one way or another, it is going to happen, and for one simple reason. As Jeff Bezos explained in the Washington Post, reality is an undisputed champion.

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Elon

 

 

Tuna

 

 

Shoes

 

 

Sign
https://twitter.com/i/status/1852028051946618938

 

 

Barry Young

 

 

 

 

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