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Tuesday, October 1, 2024
181 Dems Voted Against Penalties For Foreign Election Interference Days Before Zelenskyy’s Campaign Stunt In PA
Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited an ammunition factory in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The Scranton Army Ammunition Plant is one of the few plants in the United States to manufacture 155mm artillery shells, according to AP News. These shells, used in howitzer systems that strike targets up to 20 miles away, have been used by Ukrainian forces in the war against Russia.
Zelensky’s decision to visit the ammunition plant came under fishy circumstances.
Sept. 22, 2024, marked 44 days before the U.S. presidential election. The state of Pennsylvania is seen as a swing state, going to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election before he lost the state in 2020 to Joe Biden.
The tour of the Scranton factory was accompanied by the state’s Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, a top surrogate for Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, as well as Democratic Sen. Bob Casey and Democratic Rep. Matt Cartwright, who are both running for re-election this year. Both Casey and Cartwright face stiff opposition.
Were any Republican congressmen invited to attend the event? Were any invited to speak? Why at this point in time did they visit the largest swing state, when they could have had their meeting at a facility in New York?
Since Zelensky is such a student of military history, perhaps he should have gone to West Point to discuss the Russia-Ukraine war with cadets.
Zelensky on Vance
During the trip, Zelensky was interviewed by The New Yorker. One of the topics that came up involved the Republican vice presidential nominee, J.D. Vance. He called Vance “too radical” on his stances with regards to Ukraine. “Let Mr. Vance read up on the history of the Second World War, when a country was forced to give part of its territory to one particular person,” Zelensky quipped.
Such comments by a foreign leader on American soil just ahead of the 2024 election raised eyebrows.
Zelensky is on the record saying Ukrainians have tried to avoid “being captured by American domestic politics” and “influencing the choices of the American people” ahead of the November election. Unfortunately, Zelensky’s recent actions at the Scranton plant totally discredit his past statements and suggest an interest in interfering in the American election process.
House Republicans are hoping to get answers as they investigate this potential campaign event. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., has opened an investigation into the Biden-Harris administration using taxpayer funding to fly Zelensky to Pennsylvania to campaign for Harris ahead of the 2024 election.
Comer writes: “The Committee seeks to determine whether the Biden-Harris Administration attempted to use a foreign leader to benefit Vice President Harris’s presidential campaign and, if so, necessarily committed an abuse of power.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson has called for Zelensky to immediately fire Ukrainian ambassador to the United States Oksana Markarova, who is said to have organized the tour of the Scranton plant.
The No Foreign Election Interference Act
This potential foreign election interference comes on the heels of related congressional action. Just prior to Zelensky’s visit, House Republicans put a measure on the House floor regarding foreign election interference. I voted for H.R. 8314, the No Foreign Election Interference Act, which imposes penalties if political committees receive contributions from organizations that accept contributions from foreign nationals.
However, 181 Democrats voted against it.
After Trump’s election in 2016, many Democrats dismissed his election as illegitimate due to supposed Russian interference. Yet, when given the chance, Democrats and the media failed to call out Zelensky for his trip, and Democrats voted down a foreign election interference bill in the House.
Democrats may point out that Trump and Zelensky also met, on Friday, and they will try to tell you it’s the same thing. But they are not the same. Scranton, Pennsylvania, was a political rally for Democratic candidates in trouble. Trump’s meeting with Zelensky in his private offices in New York is the definition of international diplomacy.
What is clear is that Russia and Iran are engaged in operations to influence our presidential elections. U.S. intelligence officials recently confirmed that Iran hacked the Trump campaign and attempted to provide the stolen information to the Biden campaign before Biden dropped out of the presidential race.
We are living in turbulent times. Trump has faced two assassination attempts. Iran is making threats on Trump’s life. I recommend Zelensky read up on this history.
NYT Holds Struggle Session After Trump Remains Unbowed by Assassination Attempts
Many Americans will never forget what they saw and heard on July 13th, 2024, when a deranged gunman attempted to assassinate GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump as he was speaking during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
As I've noted before, the imagery was some of the most iconic America will ever see. The bullet that hit Trump traveling through the air. A bloodied Trump raising his fist defiantly to the crowd, with no words uttered beyond "fight fight fight" as the meaning of that look on his face was crystal clear:
"I'm still here. I'm alive, and I'm not going any damn where," it said.
It was such an unbelievably powerful moment, and one made even more powerful once news broke some two months later that yet another attempted assassin had been poised to fire shots at the former president until the Secret Service intervened.
While we all marveled at Trump making an appearance during the first day of the Republican National Convention, which was two days after the first assassination attempt, the liberal media sneered, with some wondering aloud whether the bandage Trump was wearing on the ear that had been grazed by the bullet was necessary.
MSNBC host Ari Melber, for instance, referenced a New York Times article on the subject and declared that he agreed with them that ultimately the "prop" bandage was a calculated part of the "spectacle" Trump was allegedly trying to present.
The Times, as it turns out, is still sneering over how Trump kept on keeping on after the two attempts on his life, as evidenced by an incredible piece of pseudo-journalism that asked this question after Trump's well-received appearance at Saturday's Georgia-Alabama game:
The article itself was even more unintentionally comical, with the Times rounding up a handful of maintenance staffers and anti-Trump college football fans at the game to criticize him for being there.
Honestly, I can't think of a much better ad for the Trump campaign than this, complete with them pointing out how members of the corporate media were having struggle sessions over his unwillingness to hide after both attempts to take him out.
In a way, this was the Times telling us they were out of touch with the American electorate without literally stating the fact. I mean we're at a point in our history where, after nearly four years of Joe Biden, people are craving real leadership and someone who is willing to stand their ground, stand up for their country, and stand against woke.
Perhaps I just answered my own question. They wrote this precisely because they know that's what many people see when they look at Trump, and oh no, we can't have that.
Except we have, and we can again depending on the outcome in November.
Kamala Harris Doesn’t Care About White People
Hurricane Helene should be Harris’ ‘Katrina moment,’ but it won’t be because the victims are white Trump supporters.
In the long-ago of 2005, just days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall near New Orleans, a young Kanye West blurted out on live television during a fundraising drive with comedian Mike Meyers that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
It was perhaps an early sign of West’s mental instability, but at the time it ended up defining the media narrative about Katrina and Bush, who was lambasted by the media for being indifferent to the fate of New Orleans because it was mostly poor black people who had been killed or displaced by the storm.
It didn’t matter that the main cause of the problems in New Orleans during and immediately after Katrina — lack of evacuation, widespread looting, poor emergency response and coordination — was corruption at the local and state level, not incompetence at FEMA. (New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin would later be indicted and convicted in federal court on multiple corruption charges.)
But in the moment that didn’t matter. The national news media unfairly blamed President Bush. Every major media outlet ran a now-infamous photo of him looking down on hurricane-ravaged New Orleans from the window of Air Force One, cementing the narrative that the president was detached and indifferent to events on the ground.
It would come to be known as Bush’s “Katrina moment,” and it heralded the effective end of his administration. Democrats sailed to a massive victory in the 2006 midterms, campaigning on Bush’s allegedly flat-footed Katrina response and the unpopular war in Iraq, rendering the president impotent for his last two years in office.
I mention all this because what’s happening in North Carolina in the wake of Hurricane Helene should be Kamala Harris’ “Katrina moment.” Her staged photo pretending to work on the disaster response (earbuds not even plugged into the phone, taking notes on a blank piece of paper), together with the absence of FEMA or any other federal assistance to storm-ravaged areas of western North Carolina and Georgia, should end her presidential campaign.
While Harris spent the weekend at glitzy campaign events in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, and Biden napped on the beach in Delaware, communities in the path of Hurricane Helene were pounded with rain and flooding across six southeastern states, the worst such flooding ever seen in some areas. More than a hundred are dead, thousands are missing. Entire towns have been swept away. Millions are without power. Roads and bridges have been washed out across the region, making it difficult to get clean water and food to stranded communities.
Natural disasters like Hurricane Helene, a category 4 storm, are of course going to cause massive damage and devastation no matter what. But it didn’t have to be as bad as it has become in the absence of timely federal aid from the Biden-Harris administration. Military assets could have been deployed from Fort Bragg (recently renamed “Fort Liberty” by the woke U.S. military) in North Carolina, which is only a couple hundred miles from the worst-hit areas. For decades, Fort Bragg has supported domestic disaster relief. Why isn’t it happening now? Why isn’t every military helicopter within 500 miles of the affected areas in the air right now?
To be clear, what the people of North Carolina and Georgia and Tennessee need right now is evacuation, food and water, shelter — the kinds of things the U.S. military, National Guard, and FEMA are best equipped to provide. But so far none of that seems to be happening. Why?
Setting aside the failure to prepare ahead of time for the massive flooding the hurricane would bring to these areas, why has it taken so long for Biden and Harris to address the disaster, and why have they done so in the most cursory, dismissive ways? Asked by a reporter on Monday why he and Harris weren’t in Washington over the weekend coordinating and commanding the emergency response, Biden responded, shockingly, “I was commanding. I was on the phone for at least two hours yesterday and the day before as well.”
That retort, “I was on the phone for at least two hours,” while Americans are drowning and starving in massive floods, should go down in our history as one of the most callous and shameful things ever said by an American president.
But at least Biden said something. As of Monday afternoon, Harris hadn’t said a word.
It hasn’t escaped anyone’s notice that the victims of the flooding are predominantly poor white people in Appalachia. Given that fact, and the appalling lack of concern from Harris and Biden, there’s a lot more reason right now to claim that Harris doesn’t care about white people than there ever was to claim Bush didn’t care about black people.
Unlike in 2005, you won’t hear that from the media. You’re far more likely, in fact, to hear corporate outlets attack Trump for “making it political” by traveling to Georgia on Monday to help distribute supplies and assist in relief efforts. In delivering comments to the media from the state on Monday, Trump announced he is working with Elon Musk to make satellite internet service Starlink available to storm-ravaged areas currently without means of communication.
It is political, and the political message from Harris is clear: The victims of Hurricane Helene are white Trump supporters from a red state, so she doesn’t really care what happens to them.
Biden's Weakness and Confusion on Full Display As He Throws Israel Under Bus in Face of Terrorists
Israel has been making some amazing tactical moves to take out Hezbollah, including some stunning intelligence moves like the pager attacks.
They've shown they've had enough with the terrorists and they're going to do what it takes to take them out:
Israel will launch a "limited" ground invasion into southern Lebanon in the imminent future, a senior U.S. official told Fox News on Monday.
While set details on the invasion remain unclear, the official confirmed this campaign will be smaller in scale than the 2006 operation Israel conducted in its war with Hezbollah, and it is expected to last a shorter period of time. [....]
"Our goal is to ensure the [safe] return of Israel’s northern communities to their homes," Gallant told Israeli troops on Monday, according to a statement provided to Fox News Digital by the Israeli Ministry of Defense. "We are prepared to make every effort necessary to accomplish this mission.
The action was to help stop Hezbollah from continuing to attack them from Lebanon. They had small incursions to deal with them in the past.
Now, you would think the U.S. would be supportive of its ally Israel in this effort against the terrorists. Except, of course, it's Joe Biden in the White House. So, you know what he has to say will not be good. This is an "ally."
I suppose we should count ourselves lucky that he deigned to return from the beach at all, to talk about this and Hurricane Helene.
First, Biden didn't even want to answer the question when he was asked about the news. Then when asked if he was "aware and comfortable" with Israel's plans, he said, "I'm more aware than you know and I'm comfortable with them stopping - we need a ceasefire":
Biden may just be the weakest leader we've ever had. This is basically folding to the terrorists and saying that Israel doesn't have a right to defend itself, just go on being attacked and take it. It's like Biden not wanting Barack Obama to take out Osama bin Laden, another example of his weakness and holding back. I used to think Obama was bad, but Biden is much worse. This only emboldens Iran and its proxies.
Then, not only is Biden weak in the face of terrorists, but does he even know what is going on? Or does he just shout "ceasefire" whenever he's asked (except when it comes to Ukraine)?
Biden said they wouldn't be deploying any more troops to the Middle East, then the Pentagon deployed more people:
Who is really in charge, when he seems so clueless?
BREAKING: Israeli Ground Forces Enter Lebanon
For the first time since 2006, Israeli forces have penetrated into Lebanon in a new, targeted ground offensive against Hezbollah.
Israel has been systematically working to eliminate the terror organization's leadership, using targeted strikes as well as exploding electronic devices in a unique attack on Hezbollah's communications network. But the Israel Defense Force (IDF) has now turned the renewed conflict into on-ground raids against Hezbollah's remaining forces.
"The IDF began limited, localized, and targeted ground rais based on precise intelligence against Hezbollah terrorist targets and infrastructure in southern Lebanon," the military said. "These targets are located in villages close to the border and pose an immediate threat to Israeli communities in northern Israel."
The IDF has signaled that the offensive on the ground is not a war but a series of targeted operations it calls a "methodical plan set out by the General Staff and the Northern Command, which soldiers have been trained and prepared for in recent months."
More on the IDF's plan:
There was no word on how long the operation would last, but the army said soldiers had been training and preparing for the mission in recent months.
Ahead of the Israeli announcement, U.S. officials said Israel had launched small ground raids inside Lebanon. And in another sign the invasion was imminent, Israel declared three small border communities to be a “closed military zone,” restricting access only to army personnel.
There were no reports of direct clashes between Israeli troops and Hezbollah militants. But throughout the evening, Israeli artillery units pounded targets in southern Lebanon and the sounds of airstrikes were heard throughout Beirut. Smoke rose from the capital’s southern suburbs, where Hezbollah has a strong presence, shortly after Israel ordered residents of three buildings to evacuate.
Hezbollah began launching attacks against Israel after Hamas launched its deadly attack on the Jewish state on October 7, 2023 - the single deadliest act of violence against Jews since the Holocaust.
Tim Walz Really Excited After Hearing He Might Get Spanked At Debate
U.S. — A source close to the Harris campaign reveals Tim Walz is "very excited" for this week's Vice Presidential Debate after learning he might get spanked by JD Vance.
"I was nervous at first because Vance seems to know what he's talking about," Kamala Harris' running mate said, "but I didn't realize it was that kind of a debate."
"I can barely contain my excitement!"
Walz, a known tampon aficionado, claims to be "an actual heterosexual married to a woman," dispelling rumors that he is a gay man. However, his newfound eagerness for a spanking by Vance appears to contradict previous statements that he "loves the womens."
"I'm not a gay," Walz said on the campaign trail. "Why do people keep asking me that?"
News of Walz's excitement has reportedly reached JD Vance, who sources claim is now no longer looking forward to the debate.
At publishing time, Tim Walz asked his wife not to come to the debate. "We're just doing guy stuff, you wouldn't be interested," he said.