Quite the reaction

National Public Radio’s Rachel Treisman followed MSNBC and CNN in equating Trump running mate Sen. J.D. Vance’s claim, that Kamala Harris’s running mate Gov. Tim Walz was guilty of “stolen valor,” to the 2004 controversy over the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. That group credibly attacked the brief Vietnam War record of Sen. John Kerry when he ran against George W. Bush for president in 2004. The headline to Treisman’s written report gives the game away: Vance’s attacks on Walz’s service mirror 'swift boating' of 2004.” You may recall how the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were tarred by the press for questioning the Vietnam medals and wartime recollections of Sen. John Kerry. Kerry tried to exploit his Vietnam service during his campaign against Bush (whose own military record in the Texas National Guard became a liberal obsession, which backfired infamously on CBS anchor Dan Rather, who set his reputation alight in the journalistic carnage now known as “Rathergate”). Treisman went even further than the other liberal networks on Saturday morning: In questioning Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz’s military record, Republicans are dusting off a political playbook they last used successfully exactly 20 years ago. There’s even a name for it: swift boating. The term -- which has since made its way into dictionaries -- refers to an unfair or untrue political attack. It gets its name from a Vietnam War veterans’ group’s smear campaign against John Kerry during his 2004 presidential bid. Long before Kerry represented Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate, he served as a Naval officer during the Vietnam War. He spent four months of 1969 in Vietnam in charge of a type of patrol craft called a swift boat, leaving with multiple combat medals including three Purple Hearts. Back home, as the war dragged on, Kerry emerged as a leading anti-war activist. In 1971, as the spokesperson for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, he spoke critically and graphically about the war in now-famous testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “He was an anti-war activist as well as a veteran, and that combination was a big deal,” says Derek Buckaloo, a professor of American history at Coe College in Iowa who specializes in the Vietnam War and its aftereffects. Buckaloo was Treisman’s sole source, and a strong anti-Republican voice. The Swift Boat Veterans claimed Kerry lied about his record and wrote a book, Unfit for Command, accusing Kerry of exaggerating injuries, writing false journal entries and filing phony reports of his heroism to secure medals. Most media simply attacked the group or dismissed the findings as “unsubstantiated,” rarely bothering to actually test the claims for veracity, even after the Swift Boat Vets proved Kerry false on his claim of having spent Christmas 1968 on a secret mission in Cambodia. Treisman did no investigation, simply forwarding old conventional wisdom. Their accusations are widely understood to be false. Military records (released by Kerry’s campaign) backed up his combat claims. And while most of the swift boat veterans who spoke out against Kerry did not serve with him directly, the ones who did publicly supported his version of events. In a 2018 Fresh Air interview, Kerry said his critics “just made things up … left, right and center,” and that the proof his campaign offered was no match for their “alternative facts.” Treisman finally got around to Vance’s own credible accusations against Walz’s veracity. After Walz spoke about carrying “weapons of war” in a speech calling for gun control, Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance publicly questioned whether his newly-minted opponent -- a 24-year veteran of the National Guard -- ever went to war. She noted “Walz has faced questions over the years about the timing of his retirement, months before his unit mobilized to Iraq.” But through Buckaloo, she assured readers that Democrats were not “likely to ignore Vance’s attacks,” quoting the professor: “They realize that you can't just let these things lie, that you've got to respond to them and say: ‘This is unfair, this is scurrilous. This is, to use a word that Tim Walz uses, weird.' ” Perhaps Treisman underestimated the import of Walz’s self-serving exaggerations: The Harris campaign felt obliged to admit Walz “misspoke” in his 2018 claim about carrying weapons in war. Walz also claimed to have retired at the rank of command sergeant, but quit his unit before it was sent to Iraq, and before completing the requirements to retire with that rank. That error has been scrubbed from the Harris campaign website.

NEW: In 2021 9/11 Speech, Tim Walz References 'Being on the Tarmac at Bagram' During a Ramp Ceremony

Boom! There it is. President Trump just took to Truth Social to confirm what we reported on earlier: that Kamala’s crowds are FAKE. If you missed that article, here it is: BUSTED! Can You Spot THE PROOF…

Kamala Harris just stole a Trump campaign promise: to end taxes on tips. Axios reported: Vice President Kamala Harris in Nevada on Saturday promised to eliminate taxes on tips, two months after former…

What the hell is going on in Britain? Well, the answer is in that sentence I just wrote, and I’ll boldface it for you. As protestors and rioters take to the streets as gangs of Muslims continue to commit…

A cracking debut. The post Why did Josh Homme self-finance the first Queens of the Stone Age album? first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Since Vice President Kamala Harris replaced President Biden at the top of the Democratic Party’s 2024 ticket, most national and swing state polls have produced predictable results. Before Harris was installed as the new nominee, most surveys portended a victory by former President Donald Trump in November. Now his national lead has ostensibly evaporated and it appears plausible that Harris could win. There is, however, a noticeable pattern in the latest polls that suggests otherwise. Most surveys, including those which show a tied race or even a slim Harris lead, indicate that voters don’t trust her on the economy any more than they trusted Biden on the same issue. CNBC’s latest All-America Economic Survey, for example, found the following: “On the economy, by 2-to-1, Americans think they will be better off financially under Trump.” The latest CBS News poll shows similar results: “On having policies that will improve peoples’ finances: Harris opens in the same position as Mr. Biden was in July, trailing Trump substantially.” Specifically, 45 percent of voters say the former president will ease their financial plight while only 25 percent say the same about Harris. A recent Wall Street Journal poll found that, among persuadable voters, “Only 12 percent say Harris is better able to handle the economy than Trump, while 61 percent say Trump is the better economic steward.” It’s clear that the Harris campaign understands the political peril such sentiments present, but their response has been none too creative. As the Washington Post reports, she has purloined one of Trump’s signature proposals: “Vice President Kamala Harris is echoing an idea first proposed by her opponent, Donald Trump, by pledging that she would push to eliminate taxes on tips.” Her epiphany on this issue is unlikely to impress many, considering that Trump first proposed getting rid of the tax last June and the plan was subsequently included in the 2024 GOP platform. But this is worse than merely pilfering a policy proposal from her Republican opponent, it is hypocritical. As Fox Business’ Elizabeth MacDonald points out: Kamala Harris’s first big policy idea is to steal Trump’s “no taxes on tips,” when she backed Democrats’ $80b for more IRS audits including on tip income. The Biden-Harris Admin also launched a novel new IRS crackdown on tips, getting the IRS inside the door at bars & restaurants to directly monitor tips at the cash register, “at point-of-sale.” She also backed the $1.7T spending legislation expecting taxpayers to report their $600 phone app transactions to the IRS without she and the Senate reading the bill (later dropped as untenable). Harris didn’t merely support this weaponization of the IRS, she played a crucial role in getting it passed in the Senate and sending it to President Biden’s desk for signature. As Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) noted on X: “As V.P., Kamala was the deciding vote on the ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ that gave the IRS $80 billion of your tax dollars to make sure they tax every tip workers earn! Kamala Harris is a total fraud!” This isn’t likely to inspire confidence among the voters that Harris will follow through with her pledge to eliminate taxes on tips or anything else. Her history suggests skepticism. She voted against the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) when she was a U.S. Senator and has subsequently advocated repealing the statute. It is, however, not easy to nail down Vice President Harris on her tax policies or anything else. It is difficult to escape the impression that she and her campaign staff believe she can run out the clock. Her campaign website contains no policy page detailing her position on any issue, including the economy. Moreover, she has neither indulged the corporate media by agreeing to a sit-down interview nor faced the public in the kind of live press conferences to which her Republican opponent has routinely subjected himself since 2015. She has, instead, restricted her public appearances to canned speeches full of tired bromides as she did during a recent rally in Wisconsin, where she offered this “strategy” for solving inflation: While our economy is doing well by many measures, prices for everyday things like groceries are still too high. You know it and I know it. You know, when I was Attorney General, I went after price fixing schemes. And, when I am President, it will be a day one priority to fight to bring down prices. I’ll take on big corporations that engage in illegal price gouging. I’ll take on corporate landlords that unfairly raise rent on working families. I will take on Big Pharma and cap the costs of prescription drugs for all Americans. This nonsense was cut-and-pasted from President Biden’s talking points on the issue when he was finally forced to admit that inflation wasn’t transitory. None of these “solutions” will solve the problem because it wasn’t caused by corporate price-gouging, greedy landlords, or evil drug companies. It was caused by the fiscal incontinence of the Biden-Harris administration beginning with the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, an unnecessary and inflationary stimulus that passed only because Harris cast a tie-breaking vote in the Senate. This was the first of many wild spending bills, culminating with the Orwellian “Inflation Reduction Act,” that produced a cumulative inflation rate of more than 20 percent. Unless the Democrats have a plan to win the election without regard to ballots cast by eligible voters, Harris is likely to lose. Her 2024 campaign is already beginning to resemble the shambolic, unfocused effort she eventually abandoned in 2020 before any primary voter had a chance to reject her. Harris has an aptitude for achieving high office without the benefit of votes. Nonetheless, the voters are very restive about the economy in general, and inflation in particular. And no amount of propaganda from the corporate media will reduce the rising prices they continue to pay for the necessities of life. If you are old enough to remember 1980, you know the voters are capable of saying, “OK, it’s time to listen to my wallet.” READ MORE from David Catron: For Kamala Harris ‘Weird’ Is the New ‘Deplorable’ Will the Media Makeover of Harris Work? Can Manchin Be Trusted on Voter Integrity? The post Harris Can Avoid Reporters But Not Economics appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

A long time ago in Baltimore, I sat outside an Immigration office with my pal, Tom Welsh, ready to answer questions about my worthiness for American citizenship. Because of my mother’s international bank job, I’d spent 20 years since arriving from Cuba as a U.S. resident rather than a citizen. Now a young adult, I looked forward to my entry into the winner’s circle. Tom was there to testify ahead of me that I deserved the high honor. Being slightly less conservative than me, he and I got into a heated political argument. When the Immigration woman came out and called his name, Tom glanced at me and said, “I don’t know now … ” All my life, I’ve loved the culture, history, courage, and literature of the little island that conquered the world. All ended well. I became a citizen and am still best friends with Tom. But the funny incident also gave me a valuable early lesson on the right to disagree in a free country. It’s a lesson the once great nation, Great Britain, has quickly forgotten. It has only been one month since the anemic Conservative Party got deservedly routed in the last UK election. They’d spent the past five years squandering their 2019 landslide by flagrantly ignoring the will of their voters to stem the mass inflow of Muslim immigrants — the vast majority of them hostile to Anglican Judeo-Christian culture. According to the Ministry of Defence, twice as many British Muslims joined ISIS in 2014 than their host nation’s military. Yet the alien waves kept coming, with little impediment from four successive Conservative Prime Ministers — Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak. Even worse, during the COVID pandemic, Johnson mandated some of the most repressive lockdown measures in Europe. His scandalous personal evasion of them led to his resignation. Pre-election 2024, the people understood the Labour Party would be a disaster. Yet they could no longer reward a government that insulted their intelligence while blatantly ignoring their top priority. So previous Conservative voters stayed home in July, effecting the lowest electoral turnout since 2001 (barely 60 percent), and producing a Conservative wipeout. This had to happen due to the Conservative betrayal of the citizenry, as did the nightmare that quickly resulted. For the Labour Party under new PM Keir Starmer bears as little resemblance to that of Tony Blair (1997-2007) as the Democratic Party of Bill Clinton does to today’s mutation under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Both parties have gone full socialist. Public obeisance to the COVID overlords showed each the infinite power of statism to oppress people and quash dissent. Because for most of Johnson’s and Donald Trump’s terms, the Left had total media control, very much including social media. Anyone who questioned medical or political dictum since proven detrimental — first, lockdowns, vaccines, masking, school and church closings, social isolation, and later the Wuhan Lab COVID source, the Hunter laptop story, and the 2020 election itself — was permanently suspended from every platform without recourse, even the President of the United States, Trump. In every case, the critics were proven right. In Britain today, Muslim thugs strut the streets, attack women, and menace the “infidel” majority with near absolute impunity. And the government treats them with kid gloves while threatening to crush the opposition. This dichotomy could not hold. Late last month, a Muslim teenager attacked a girls’ Taylor Swift-themed dance class with a knife, killing three little girls and wounding ten more. The butchery provoked riots all over the country. Government and police officials condemned not Islamic violence but the reasonable people protesting them. Starmer appeared on video doing a natural impression of an English twit. “I’ve asked for early consideration and the earliest naming and identification of those involved in the process, who will feel the full force of the law,” he said. Then, Starmer really crossed the line into Orwellian 1984 territory, if forty years late, adding, “And thirdly, I’ve been absolutely clear, the criminal law applies online as well as offline.” Because that’s become the bee in the statists’ bonnet, the difference between yesterday’s hegemonic media tyranny and modern reality: online freedom, courtesy of Elon Musk. Musk bought Twitter in 2022 to liberate speech in America minus fear of censorship. Since then, he has become the bane of dictatorships around the world — in the U.S., Canada, Brazil, Venezuela, and now Britain. Musk’s X is driving the Labour leaders absolutely bonkers, making them international laughingstocks, which only infuriates them further. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley, another twit (calling Inspector Morse), particularly beclowned himself last weekend by actually threatening to extradite and imprison American citizens for unwelcome social media posts. “Whether you’re in this country committing crimes on the street or committing crimes from further afield online, we will come after you,” warned Rowley. “Being a keyboard warrior does not make you safe from the law.” British troopers are certainly welcome to try. It’s been 250 years since Americans taught them a painful lesson, and they’re long overdue for another. But the sad self-induced decline of once Great Britain makes me very sad. All my life, I’ve loved the culture, history, courage, and literature of the little island that conquered the world. I was with King Arthur in Camelot, Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest, Gunga Din in India, Sherlock Holmes on the Yorkshire Moor, and James Bond all around the world. I hope someday the sun will rise again over the British Isles. Until then, I’ll refer to the UK as the UKSR. It’s out — the timeliest political detective thriller in a decade, The Washington Trail! Join DC private eyes Mark Slade and Neil Cork as they try to thwart a plot to end America before it’s too late. Though a pair of lovely femme-fatales just might slow them down. Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and wherever exciting mysteries are sold. READ MORE from Lou Aguilar: The Star Trek Election III: Men vs. Women We’ll Never Have Paris The Impeccable Timing of a Political Thriller The post The Sun Sets on Britain appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The Democrats and the media (please pardon the redundancy) claim that Donald Trump is a radical who would topple our democracy. Last November CNN attempted to rev up the anti-Trumpers with an article portraying Trump as someone whose radical actions would include firing masses of federal bureaucrats and what Trump calls “Marxist” prosecutors as well as rounding up illegal immigrants to ready them for deportation. We know that Harris backed the bailing out of violent Minnesota rioters who did much destruction in light of the George Floyd death in police custody. The article also quotes Trump as saying he’d appoint a special prosecutor to go after Biden because he was the most corrupt president in history. Taken literally, these policies don’t seem radical at all. Firing masses of federal bureaucrats would make the government more responsive to those elected to actually run it. Any president can fire all the U.S. attorneys and replace them because it’s the president’s prerogative to fire people working for him in senate-confirmed positions. George W. Bush did just that in 2006 and the media were caterwauling then about injecting politics into the Justice Department. They were wrong then and would be just as wrong if Trump was reelected and did the same. (READ MORE from Jed Babbin: Iran’s Khamenei Threatens Israel … and the West) More recently, the Dems — and their draft platform — label Trump a radical for his supposed backing of the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” which is an outline for a conservative government in Trump’s second term. But Trump has conclusively rejected “Project 2025,” which says as much about his conservatism as the Democrats’ attempt to label him a radical. The Oxford English Dictionary — of which I have two versions — defines a radical as someone “advocating complete political or social reform” or “representing or supporting an extreme or progressive section of a political party.”  That definition doesn’t fit Trump at all, but it does fit both Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Remember, please, that in 2019 Harris was labeled the most liberal senator, a competition that included semi-Marxist Elizabeth Warren and comically-communist Bernie Sanders. So far, Harris is trying to replay the Biden 2020 campaign by hiding from the media. Why not? A basement campaign got Biden elected by not saying anything much except that he wasn’t Donald Trump.  Nevertheless it’s fair to judge how far left Harris and Walz are by their current and past  actions. Harris’s biggest fault is the Biden-Harris open border immigration crisis that she helped cause. It has brought between 10 and 22 million illegal aliens into this country. Harris is not just a radical on this issue, she’s what would normally be called a fanatic. On August 10, Harris said that she’d not only back amnesty for those illegals: she promised to sign legislation that would give them a path to citizenship, which means the right to vote. Harris said, “We know our immigration system is broken and we know what it takes to fix it: comprehensive reform. That includes strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship.” No person who has broken our law to enter the nation illegally should ever be granted citizenship. And then there’s Harris’s fondness for Biden’s “woke” ideology that has been a disaster for our society generally and our military specifically. In 2017, Harris said, “We have to stay woke. Like everybody needs to be woke. And you can talk about if you’re the wokest or woker, but just stay more woke than less woke.” If you can make sense out of that word salad, you can see that Harris is totally dedicated to the “woke” ideology that divides, not unites, and attempts to justify everything from her selection as vice president (Biden admitted in April that she was a “diversity” hire) to transgender people serving in the military. As Kim Strassel makes clear in the Wall Street Journal  Harris is a radical. She was the first to co-sponsor Bernie Sanders’s Medicare reform to basically prohibit private health insurance and then fumbled back from that position to make it entirely unclear what she would do. In 2019, Harris said she would ban fracking for oil but said recently that she wouldn’t.  That same year she backed the “Green New Deal,” which included a federal jobs guarantee among its many bad ideas. Harris has always backed Biden’s “climate change” policies including his attacks on our oil industry. She helped Biden preside over the ban on the Keystone Pipeline which would have brought cheap Canadian oil to the U.S. market. Harris was silent when Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal killed 13 U.S. servicemen and left hundreds of Americans and American allies to the mercies of the Taliban. She is at least partially responsible for the latest State Department screwup which sent $239 million in counterterrorism funding to the Taliban. We know that Harris backed the bailing out of violent Minnesota rioters who did much destruction in light of the George Floyd death in police custody. And then there’s Biden’s plan to overhaul the Supreme Court. Harris supports his effort to create term limits for Supreme Court justices and impose an “ethics code” on the court. Neither of which cannot be done without a fundamental amendment to the Constitution which requires that the justices serve during “good behavior.” Harris and Biden want to guarantee a liberal Supreme Court. That should be enough to vote against her in November. All of that is proof positive that Harris, not Trump, is a radical progressive. And then there’s “Tampon Tim” Walz. Walz is justifiably infamous for pushing and signing Minnesota legislation that put free tampons in boys’ bathrooms. You can imagine what boys did with them. Wearing them stuck in their ears and up their noses comes readily to mind. (READ MORE: What’s Next for Biden and Harris?) Walz is also justifiably infamous for claiming he’d reached a military rank he never achieved and for quitting the Minnesota National Guard when they were ordered to Iraq. (Last week the Harris campaign changed his official governor’s bio to correct his military rank.) But as Breitbart News reported, retired Army command master sergeant Doug Julin said that Walz knew for months — well before he quit the Minnesota National Guard supposedly to run for Congress — that they were deploying to Iraq. Walz literally ran away from his duty. As bad if not worse is what Walz told an MSNBC interviewer in 2022 about freedom of speech. He said, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.”  He wants to suppress or punish speech that’s politically inconvenient for Democrats and clearly doesn’t understand that the First Amendment guarantees free speech whether he agrees with it or not. Walz also signed into law the strongest transgender protection bill in the country and the strongest pro-abortion bill in the country. It’s long past time to label Harris a radical progressive. Walz deserves the same. Let’s stick that label on them and not let people forget it. The post Harris and Walz Are the Radicals appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.