Thursday's Final Word

AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson

Yonder come Miss Tabbie, how in the world did you know? By the way she wears her browser and the links she wore ...

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Ed: It's not as if they didn't have some warning about this problem, either. Even before the primary, a story about Jackson chucking a water bottle at a female staffer made the rounds. The "longtime partner" in this case is his second cousin, with whom Jackson has children. He's a Platner Lite, at best. 

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Just the News: The federal government is refusing to turn over records related to an investigation conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement into allegations of immigration fraud by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., citing a legal exemption for ongoing investigations. 

Just the News filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the records in January, seeking the records pertaining to any investigations conducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement into the allegations that Rep. Omar, who represents Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District, married a relative in order to help him remain in the country. 

Omar has denied the allegations. No court records, DNA evidence, or other documentary proof has ever substantiated that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, Omar's legal husband from 2009–2017, was her biological brother.

Ed: That's actually false. The people at Power Line have produced documentary evidence that the man Omar married was her brother, and that marriage was used to get him into the country under fraudulent circumstances. The statute of limitations has long since passed on that crime, however, so it's not clear why ICE is keeping the case open. 

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No more controlling who enters or leaves the country.

Get rid of prisons.

Get rid of the Pentagon.”

Then he dropped the hammer:

“What happens when your diplomats get taken hostage, like under Carter?

You need an army. You don’t like having one… but you NEED one.”

On AOC’s “big tent” fantasy:

“The problem is every Democrat has to defend this crap from the left.

You’ve got to say ‘I’m not DSA’… and make it crystal clear.”

Matthews just joined James Carville on the growing list of lifelong liberals who say they no longer recognize their own party.

Gallup numbers don’t lie:

66% of Democrats now view socialism positively.

Only 42% still view capitalism positively.

The party of FDR and JFK is gone.

What’s left is something else entirely.

Share this before they try to bury it.

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Ed: I meant to include this in my earlier post with Joe Scarborough, but it works here, too. This is the changing of the guard in the Democrat Party, from the old liberal order to the new Marxist order. I appreciate Matthews speaking up against it, but it was the old liberal guard who opened the gates to the Marxists. Joe Biden chose Kamala Harris as a symbolic promise to bequeath control of the party to the hard Left. The DSA is the distillation of the leftist movement, not something separate from it. 

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WSJ: The president was carried between planes in a catering truck and raised to plane level on the far side from where he had boarded. High-ranking officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio as well as reporters boarded Air Force One. The operation wasn’t publicly disclosed until the Washington Post reported it late Monday. 

Sitting presidents have duped the public on their whereabouts for over a century in a series of stunts involving trains, battleships, planes and yachts. Here’s a selection. ...

In March 2000, President Bill Clinton was on a high-profile tour of South Asia. Intelligence agencies warned that visiting Pakistan posed extreme threats from terrorist networks, including al Qaeda. 

The president walked on a red carpet toward a military transport in full view of press cameras in India. Instead of boarding, he moved to two small, twin executive jets parked on the far side of the runway, one labeled with an American flag and one unmarked. The painted jet landed first at a Pakistan air base, filmed by press awaiting Clinton’s arrival, while the president arrived in the other minutes later.

Ed: There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth about this, and it's all nonsense. The Secret Service and AF1 infrastructure exist to protect the head of state, not reporters, or in this case, not primarily Cabinet members. That has always been the mission. The lesson here is that those who choose to travel with the president had better get comfortable with the fact that they are not the mission. 

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... "highly placed" and should be prosecuted to the fullest.

Lt. Col. Robert "Buzz" Patterson told Fox News Digital that presidential decoys and aircraft swaps are routine tools used to protect commanders in chief — and that he personally participated in a nearly identical operation with Clinton that was never publicly reported. The difference now: someone on the inside exposed the playbook.

"There's only a few people who actually know exactly what's going down, and that's by design," Patterson said. "So if somebody leaked it, it was somebody involved in the process."

Ed: Indeed. I have thought the same thing ever since we first heard about this, which is: why are we hearing about it at all? I suspect it may be related to reporters' butthurt over not having everyone snuck off the plane.

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Jim Geraghty at NRO: But keep in mind, Iran has full diplomatic relations with Turkey; the Iranian embassy in Ankara is right next to the Sheraton where I would pick up my copies of The Economist and the International Herald-Tribune. The Iranian regime likely has a decent intelligence network within Turkey, and so the potential threat from agents of the Iranian state is probably at least a little higher than that of a garden-variety Islamist terrorist group.

Also note that on July 16, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq announced it was offering a $10 million reward for the killing of President Trump. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq is a network of “various militias of multiple sects and backers, but it is predominately Shia militias supported by Iran.”

This morning, from the Washington Post:

The assassination threat was relayed by the Israeli government to the CIA, where analysts did not view the intelligence as compelling and conveyed that skepticism to Trump administration officials, one of the officials said.

Another official called the reports of threats against Trump’s life “Israeli-derived, not U.S.-generated, and viewed as low confidence.”

The problem is, the U.S. Secret Service can’t say, “Eh, it’s probably nothing” — or at least they can’t say that without taking a significant risk with their priority mission. A U.S. official told the Post, “The Secret Service has had three near misses with this president, so they’re not taking any chances. They did what they had to do.”

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Ed: Damned straight. The mission has been crystal clear since the Secret Service nearly lost Trump in Butler County, PA two years ago. I do agree with Jim, though, that the decision to fly the newer AF1 to Turkey without the full countermeasures being installed was a mistake on Trump's part. It's being addressed now. 

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Ed: Gee, this is the first time I've heard that "trans women" have to cut off the dangly bits and/or commit to estrogen therapy before accessing women's spaces, too. It's funny how there are suddenly boundaries now that Enes Freedom and Royce White want to play by the progressives' rules, eh? And by "funny," I mean "hypocritical and corrupt." Besides, as I wrote earlier, the WNBA can't even define "women" in terms that would support this requirement, so ... pound sand, transphobe!

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John Podhoretz at the NY Post: New York Magazine this week dubbed our town “Habibi City” to mark the rising prominence of Middle Easterners and Muslim immigrants united by fun, frolic — and a consuming hatred of Israel and Jews. ...

The lead piece, by Zaina Arafat, describes how she and her fellow Habibis reacted in 2023 to the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.

“In the months after Oct. 7,” she writes, New York’s Habibis were “increasingly spilling into view, desperate to be close” to “people who looked like you and spoke like you . . .  living under the threat of annihilation. So we protested, we boycotted, we wrote op-eds.”

Um . . . who was living under the threat of annihilation again?

The Habibi actions began on Oct. 8, with campus celebrations of Hamas and denunciations of Israel — and then erupted all over New York, with the ritualistic shredding of posters mourning the 240 hostages taken into Gaza by terrorists.

And those protests! One of them, on Oct. 28, shut down the Brooklyn Bridge when Israel was exactly 12 hours into its invasion of Gaza — that is, when the “genocide” that never actually happened really hadn’t happened yet.

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Ed: Be sure to read it all. And then spend some time on my interview with Prof. Gerald Steinberg at NGO Monitor to understand why we went from 9/11 to "Habibi City" in just 25 years. It was an intentional propaganda campaign that began to pay off for the radical leftists and Islamists in New York City last year. 

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Ed. I'm with Prof. Bernstein on this. The DSA are extremists, and getting accurate research on them published for voters' information is not just a legitimate pursuit but a highly necessary and ongoing task. 

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BizPac Review: In what seems like a national contest among Democrat candidates to out-woke each other, Kansas gubernatorial candidate Cindy Holscher steps into the ring with a hot take on Jesus.

The state senator and current Democrat gubernatorial nominee made the controversial statement in March 2023 over debate on drag performances in front of minors, Newsweek reported.

“I have no idea if Jesus was trans, gay, straight, etc.,” she reportedly wrote on X, and his currently making the rounds.

Republican Kansas gubernatorial candidate Ty Masterson posted Holscher’s “offensive” statement on X as “proof” she’s too radical for the Sunflower State.

Ed: This is almost as stupid as claiming not to be able to define "women" while being a league called the Women's National Basketball Association. Politically, it might be even dumber. It's right up there with James Talarico claiming that God is "non-binary" and that he only learned to appreciate his Christianity by reading "Islamic mystics." These hard-Left progressives have no grip at all on reality. Hopefully, there isn't enough wrong with Kansas to allow Holscher to become its next governor. (Let's see how many get that reference.)

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Ed: Marxists infantilize everyone as part of their claim to power. The proletariat cannot be trusted to act in their own interests, which is why private property must be abolished and the means of production seized. This is not an anomaly; it's a pure form of Marxist expression. The DSA platform reeks with this kind of condescension, in fact. 

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Politico: Democratic socialist Francesca Hong lost by less than 4,000 votes in Wisconsin’s gubernatorial primary, an outcome several high-profile progressives are blaming on Sanders and other top national progressive leaders for staying out of the race. Some said his endorsement alone could have helped bring in badly needed resources for Hong. Others said the Vermont senator has a responsibility to play widely across the battle map.

Sanders, in an interview, touted a series of progressive wins Tuesday night and brushed off the criticism.

"My response is that we have limited resources and capabilities, and there are a lot of really great candidates who have run for office who we have not endorsed,” Sanders told POLITICO on Wednesday.

“We can’t endorse every single candidate,” he added. “So, you know, we have to pick and choose and I think that Hong ran a very, very great, and very strong, grassroots campaign, got a lot of people involved and I applaud her for that.”

Ed: I call BS on that explanation. Sanders kept his distance from Hong for a good reason – she's even nuttier than El-Sayed. I do find it amusing, though, that Sanders objects to socialists attempting to order him to redistribute his goods and services. 

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Ed: It's paywalled, but the tweet makes the point. Hong was about to be a massive disaster. Wanna bet Bernie got a big whiff of this?

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Ed: SHOTS. FIRED. (And popcorn passed.) I'm more amused at the thin skin that these wokesters always have. Get over yourselves. 

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Ed: I wouldn't mind serving for one day, either. My nominee for the job would be my friend and former colleague Katie Pavlich, though I'm not sure she'd want to leave her current gig.  But she would be terrific in the job. 

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Last night's lyric: "Smokin' In the Boys Room" by Brownsville Station. 

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