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The Class of 2024 has officially been placed

Coronation: Kamala Harris Has Already Locked Down the Delegations of Five States

The most studied condition in any 4 years of history.

"What's an upbeat?" The post Metallica producer Flemming Rasmussen on Lars Ulrich: “I thought he was useless” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

By the beginning of 2024, the Democrats had settled on a simple strategy to retain control of the Presidency and the Senate while regaining a majority in the House of Representatives. The most important element of the plan was to work with corporate media to assure that the electorate remained focused on the purported threat to our democracy presented by former President Trump and his “extremist MAGA” supporters. This would permit President Biden and other Democrats seeking reelection to avoid pesky questions about inflation, the border crisis, rampant crime rates and dangerous conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. Their strategy collapsed on June 27. Alex [Soros] doesn’t seem to realize that his overt support of Harris will doom her campaign if she is the Democratic presidential nominee. That was, of course, the date of the presidential debate during which America’s worst kept secret was revealed to the shrinking number of voters who still believed Biden was fit to serve a second term. His performance was so unnerving that it immediately prompted calls for him to drop out of the presidential race. An AP-NORC poll showed that 65 percent of Democrat voters wanted him to withdraw. The Washington Post reported Saturday that 37 congressional Democrats had also called for him to step aside and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin joined the chorus on ABC’s “This Week.” At some point during this barrage of bad news Biden finally accepted reality and announced on X that he would be dropping out of the race: My fellow Democrats, I have decided not to accept the nomination and to focus all my energies on my duties as President for the remainder of my term. My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best decision I’ve made. Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year. Democrats — it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Biden also posted a letter on X in which he takes credit for all manner of fictitious accomplishments that allegedly leave the country better off than when he found it: “America has never been better positioned to lead than we are today.” This delusional assertion is followed by an even more astonishing claim: “We have protected and preserved our democracy.” Never mind the colossal bait-and-switch the Democrat power brokers have just perpetrated on the 14.5 million primary voters who backed Joe Biden. It is by no means certain that, had they been given a choice between Kamala Harris and another candidate during the primaries, these voters would have chosen our incompetent Vice President. Yet it is probable that the party’s 739 unelected “super delegates” will arrange for Harris to “win” the nomination no matter who challenges her. And she will be challenged. Her 2020 presidential run was so cringeworthy that she had to drop out before the first primary. Since becoming Vice President, she has become a national joke. Her inclination to produce meaningless word salads in response to straightforward questions, combined with her notorious cackle, would again be deadly in an honest contest for the nomination. Republicans, meanwhile, salivate for a campaign with Harris at the top of the Democrat ticket. GOP VP nominee J.D. Vance offered these observations on X regarding this point: Joe Biden has been the worst President in my lifetime and Kamala Harris has been right there with him every step of the way. Over the last four years she co-signed Biden’s open border and green scam policies that drove up the cost of housing and groceries. She owns all of these failures, and she lied for nearly four years about Biden’s mental capacity — saddling the nation with a president who can’t do the job. President Trump and I are ready to save America. Soros and the Democrats Is the “save America” verbiage MAGA hyperbole? Consider this revelation from the Wall Street Journal, “Democratic megadonors George and Alex Soros, the father-son pair who are responsible for tens of millions of dollars in spending each election cycle, both threw their weight behind Kamala Harris on Sunday shortly after Joe Biden announced he would exit the race.” On X, Alex Soros posted a picture of himself arm and arm with Harris beneath the following exhortation: “It’s time for us all to unite around Kamala Harris and beat Donald Trump. She is the best and most qualified candidate we have. Long live the American Dream!” Who believes that Soros actually supports the “American Dream”? The obvious answer is, of course, “no one.” This photo suggests that Alex is a little slow on the uptake compared to his father, George. The latter understood that it was necessary to remain in the background while he financed destructive policies like “defund the police.” Alex doesn’t seem to realize that his overt support of Harris will doom her campaign if she is the Democratic presidential nominee. If the Democrats nominate Harris, the Trump-Vance campaign will ensure that the voters are well aware of the Soros connection. And every down ballot Republican running will be telling the voters about it. This may well add up to the sum of all Democrat fears — all three branches of government under GOP control. READ MORE from David Catron: There Is Probably No Stopping Trump Now The Democrats’ Faustian Bargain With Biden Biden’s Debate Debacle Disqualifies His Entire Party The post The Sum of All Democrat Fears appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The success of a political thriller in print or film depends on something more than good writing — great timing. Take one of best screen thrillers of all time, Three Days of the Condor, directed by Sidney Pollack. Robert Redford stars as a CIA desk clerk who finds himself the prey of a deadly conspiracy and doesn’t know who to trust, especially his colleagues. Condor came out in the thick of the post-Watergate fog which suggested CIA involvement in the infamous burglary via the participation of former, or perhaps not, Langley operative Howard Hunt. But as a conservative journalist in 2022, I had a major advantage over my liberal peers — an awareness of reality. With Nixon’s successor Gerald Ford then President, most people in 1975 assumed a domestically intrusive CIA would be taking orders from the White House. Yet few would have suspected the intelligence branch might be working against the White House and may have brought down the previous Republican President. The widespread uncertainty and suspicion of the era was a feast for talented cinematic liberals like Pollack and Redford, inspiring Redford’s most chilling line in the picture, “Maybe there’s a CIA inside the CIA.” The movie is a masterpiece unlike the lesser-known novel that inspired it. The clever concept is the same — about a CIA employee tasked with reading thriller novels then imputing their smarter ideas for the agency. “Who’d invent a job like that?” Redford’s character self-reflectively asks. But the title change from Six Days of the Condor to Three Days of the Condor signals the improvement. It takes three extra days for author James Grady to tell the original story. And his denouement — the government assassins were running drugs from Laos — was anticlimactic and already cliched. Pollack and ace screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr. (Batman the TV series, Never Say Never Again) knew exactly what to slash and what to update. With the long gas lines of 1973 fresh in the public’s mind, Redford’s confrontation with the villain had an extra relevance. “Oil … That’s it, isn’t it? This whole damn thing was about oil.” Seventies producers knew how to improve on source material, not despoil it pushing a woke agenda like today’s Hollywood witches (see Kathleen Kennedy — Star Wars, Barbara Broccoli — James Bond). Men turned the decade’s bestselling books into classic films — Love Story, The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws, All the President’s Men. Condor perfectly fit the bill being not only exceptionally suspenseful but incredibly timely. Bad timing was the risk I took two years ago when I decided to make my new novel a political thriller. I had gambled once before and lost. As a young punk USA Today reporter in 1989, I began writing the ultimate Cold War spy thriller. After all, I thought, who has long been America’s archenemy and would be for the foreseeable future — the Soviet Union of course. Then, just as I finished the book in 1991, the USSR collapsed like a house of cards. I blamed my hero, Ronald Reagan, for ruining my fiction career. Two decades later, bolstered by three well-received novels (Jake for Mayor, Paper Tigers, The Christmas Spirit), I chose to reenter the thriller arena. I had a professional reason. For ten years, I’d critically assailed the mainstream arts’ erasure of the tough guy action hero and the sultry femme-fatale in favor of a constantly rejected feminist fantasy — the asexual macho heroine. In my very first article for this publication from 2018, “The Hollywood Compliance Decree,” I stated that even a basic movie thriller like Taken was already beyond Hollywoke’s creative capability. The final wimpification of James Bond by Barbara Broccoli and Daniel Craig in the ghastly No Time to Die (2021) was the last straw for me (see my review of it). I love the Ian Fleming novels and the seven Sean Connery pictures plus On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Seeing the ultimate male hero turned into an asexual mope was a personal affront. Ironically, Ian Fleming once felt the same. Fleming created James Bond as a hard-boiled alternative to more patrician British detectives such as Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey and John Creasey’s the Toff, entertaining as they are. He channeled his idols, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, into Bond. I planned to do the same to the endless parade of woke male pretenders, by bringing cool men and hot women back to the page. Introducing young DC private-eyes Mark Slade and Neil Cork in The Washington Trail. A Thriller for Our Time I realized the book would come out in 2024 (August 13th to be exact) amid a volatile election year. Consequently, I had to predict the state of the presidential race two years in advance. A wrong call would have meant another two years of writing down the drain. But as a conservative journalist in 2022, I had a major advantage over my liberal peers — an awareness of reality. I knew Joe Biden was already falling apart (see my 2020 piece “The Star Trek Election“) and anticipated he’d be badly trailing the Republican candidate, most likely Donald Trump, this year. And that’s just what happened. My book takes place last January with the vegetative incumbent president losing to his predecessor, whom the deep state conspired to oust. Elements in the intelligence communities fear the former chief executive will exact revenge on them, and they’ll do anything to stop him — including murder. Today, things are happening faster than the fall of the Soviet Union, such as the assassination attempt on Trump a week ago. And as I write this, Joe Biden has dropped out of the presidential race. Only this time, I was ready for it. What if the events now taking place are the result of the secrets uncovered by Slade and Cork on The Washington Trail? I hope you’ll read it and find out. Where have all the cool men, hot women, and non-woke storytelling gone? For one place my timely new political thriller novel, The Washington Trail, about two DC private eyes, a femme-fatale, and a plot to end America in a volatile election year. Pre-order today, get it next month, and let me know what you think. READ MORE from Lou Aguilar: The Picture of Donald Trump The Curtains Are Drawn on Biden and Europe’s Rulers Biden Voters Get the Red Pill The post The Impeccable Timing of a Political Thriller appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Have you not noticed that over the past few weeks President Biden and his minions have been very quiet about pressuring Israel for a cease-fire in Gaza? Trump…. could — and should — make it perfectly clear that Hamas is our enemy as is Iran, and that Israel has a blank check in its efforts against both. Israeli forces have taken the fight into Hamas’s last stronghold — the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip — and not one of the Biden crew is saying anything about it. Biden, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and CIA Director William Burns have all been shuttling between meetings with Israeli PM Netanyahu and “representatives” of the Iranian-backed Hamas terrorist network. They have been siding with the Hamas terrorists because 100,000 Muslim Democratic primary voters in Michigan voted not for Biden but for “uncommitted” in Michigan’s Democrat February primary. Biden has, since then, had little sympathy for our only real ally in the Middle East and has supported the Dems’ Hamas Caucus — Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes, Ilhan Omar, and their ilk — instead. (READ MORE from Jed Babbin: Putin’s Audacious Murderers) Biden withheld U.S. smart bombs from Israel and other members of his team have put maximum diplomatic pressure on Israel to sign some sort of temporary peace agreement with the Hamas terrorists. Such an agreement would have left Hamas victorious after its devastating attack on Israel. That would be more than unjust: it would be destructive of Israel’s future and our own national security. But now, as the Wall Street Journal points out acerbically, Biden and his incompetents have finally figured out that it’s Hamas that is blocking peace, not Israel. Biden’s idiots have reluctantly come to that conclusion because, since about late May, Israel has been agreeing to their formulas for a cease-fire while Hamas has continued to refuse to release its hostages. For the record, Hamas killed at least thirty-two American citizens in its October 7 attack on Israel. They also took eight American hostages, only five of whom are believed to be alive. They are: Edan Alexander, Sagui Dekel-Chen, Keith Siegel, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, and Omer Neutra. Some, perhaps all, hold both U.S. and Israeli citizenship. At least three died in Hamas custody: Gadi Haggari, his wife Judith Haggari, and Hayden Chen. Those who killed them should be made to assume room temperature. As Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz has pointed out, the Rafah operation was delayed by months of diplomatic efforts by the U.S. but went ahead on May 6. Katz said, “And we were right. Everyone knows it now, even the U.S., because everyone warned that it would be a catastrophe. It’s a war, yes. It’s not a picnic. But they said that it would take four months to evacuate the population. It took only days.” As the WSJ reported, more than a million Gazans quickly evacuated Rafah to designated safe zones. Israel is fighting our war, not just theirs. If any doubt remained it was erased by the Israeli Saturday air strike on Yemen.  We have had an aircraft carrier battle group in the Red Sea for months, trying — unsuccessfully — to deter the Houthis (another Shiite group and a proxy for Iran) from attacking Red Sea shipping. Our ships have successfully shot down a lot of Houthi missiles and drones, but the strikes on shipping continue. The carrier group — which will remain on station and be replaced soon by another — has had no deterrent effect. That has now probably come to an end. After a Houthi drone killed a man in Tel Aviv, Israel struck the Yemeni port city of Hodeidah, substantially disabling the port and probably crippling Iranian shipments of arms to the Houthis. Israel is fighting our wars, not just theirs. Biden hasn’t done anything effective to get our hostages back. And not only from Hamas. The Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has just been sentenced to 16 years in a Russian prison on phony spy charges. Mark Swiden and Kai Li, both U.S. citizens, are wrongfully detained by China, also presumably on phony charges. Those situations are different from the Hamas hostages’ because they are held, albeit unjustly, under some legal process. Trump Options on the Hostages Should he become president once again, Trump can and should greatly increase diplomatic efforts and economic sanctions against both Russia and China to get these people back. Toward that end, he said something in his convention speech which is very much worth noting. Trump said, “To the entire world, I tell you this: We want our hostages back, and they better be back before I assume office, or you will be paying a very big price.” He didn’t say which hostages he was speaking of, but it’s obvious that the five still kept by Hamas are at the top of the list. They must be because their lives are in the greatest danger. If Trump is returned to the White House, he will have any number of options to deal with Hamas and its benefactor, Iran. First and foremost, we should offer U.S. forces to help the Israelis find and rescue all those still held by Hamas. Our SEAL Team Six and Delta Force are damned good at it. The Israelis may not need this help, but Trump should offer it nevertheless. Second, whatever intelligence resources we have should be brought to bear on finding the hostages. Again, the Israelis may not need this help but we should bring it to bear. Third would be for Trump to end our pressure on Israel to sign the ridiculous Biden cease-fire accords. He could — and should — make it perfectly clear that Hamas is our enemy as is Iran, and that Israel has a blank check in its efforts against both. Fourth, Trump could send USAF and USN air forces to help Israel in its second-front war against Iranian-backed Hizballah forces in Lebanon. Again, Israel may not want the help but it should be offered nevertheless. Fifth would be for Trump to re-instate his “maximum pressure” campaign of economic sanctions which wrecked the Iranian economy. Biden has let them off too many times. Those of us of a certain age remember clearly the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-1980. Iranian “students” seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held fifty-two hostages for 444 days. It ended on the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated president with the release of all of the hostages. It’s too much to hope for that Trump’s inauguration would result in the release of the five Americans still held hostage by Hamas. Yayah Sinwar, the leader of Hamas forces in Gaza, has been in hiding, probably in Hamas tunnels, since the October 7 attack. He has probably surrounded himself with hostages both American and Israeli to use them as human shields. (READ MORE: Trump Is Lucky, but The Secret Service Blew It) Sinwar must be dealt with and not gently. Israeli forces — and their special forces — are excellent and are on the hunt for Sinwar. Whatever assistance we can give them should be brought to bear immediately. Biden has been too politically scared to do this. He is weak in mind and in the strategic and tactical senses. As this column has often pointed out, the late Donald Rumsfeld often said that weakness is provocative. If he gets the chance, Trump will be far stronger. Bringing our hostages home should — and probably will — be Trump’s immediate task. The post Trump Must Be Bold To Free Hamas Hostages appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.