Middle East and Other Musings: Flynn Warns, What Is Happening Has Been Planned. FBI No longer Has Any Credibility. Palestinian Schmucks Never Learn.

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Michael Flynn Gives Chilling Warning to Americans After FBI Trump Raid

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What is going on has been planned. It did not just happen:
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Yugoslavia, Syria, Ukraine: How to plan a Revolution with Saul Alinsky

Herland Report TV host, Hanne Nabintu Herland speaks with Fort Russ News’ editor-in-chief, Joaquin Flores about #GeneSharp, Saul Alinsky and how to create revolutions.

We also address the Arab Spring, Yugoslavia, Serbia and what really happened in Ukraine 2014. Watch it here.

“Five billion USD were spent to create the Maidan in Ukraine to overthrow the government, as Victoria Nuland testified before Congress.”

“People find it hard to believe, that these revolutions are so carefully planned and executed. Yet Nuland pointed that very fact out before Congress.”

“It implies, of course, an enormous use of money in order to influence other states. In history, many of the same actors, people and conceptions about how to make revolutions happen, come from a limited number of sources,” says political scientist, graduate from California State University, accomplished journalist and editor-in-chief of Fort Russ News, Joaquin Flores.

The Herland Report has several TV programs with Fort Russ News editor-in-chief, Joaquin Flores: How to create revolutions, the Kosovo-Serbia war, Syria and Libya. In this TV program, he analyses the European situation in light of the globalist attempt to quench self-determination in nation states.

Watch them here. Program 1 on how to start a revolution, program 2 on how to create war Syria, program 3 on Yugoslavia, Serbia, Ukraine and program 4 about Europe.

Political scientist, Joaquin Flores states: “What happened at a certain point was that the US began to act independently of the trilateral order that defined international relations post World War II. We began to see, for example, how the war in Yugoslavia was organized.”

“It was not from the European Trade Union Commission, it was organized from the University of Chicago, from what had been learned about labour and community organizing in the early 20th century.”

“There was a method on how to organize people who used to work under very poor conditions, and they did not have the education or the ability to organize themselves. So, people who were idealists from the old Left developed these methods of organizing revolts.”

“These were distilled into books, one of the Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals”. This would then become the work of Gene Sharp who wrote “From dictatorship to Democracy”.”

Flores: “The Gene Sharp texts are critical, because it takes the lessons from labour organizing and weaponizes it to work AGAINST people. It is a 180 degree reversal of the initial idea.”<

“In the Yugoslavia conflict, the methods began being built up in the 1980’s. Yugoslavia was already fragile, lacking a single clear leader after Tito. There are the classic ways of infiltrating things: get one elite against the other, get groups in government to switch sides, that is a very old method of changing the power structure in a nation.”

“But what was different with Yugoslavia, was the creating of a veneer of “democracy” and making it look like the hundreds of thousands in the street demanded the government to come down.”

“The people usually gather for this or that reform, but it was now made to be about the whole government to go.”

“What we saw in Yugoslavia and Ukraine as well, was that they were able to link Serbian Nationalism to European Liberalism – in the sense of Liberal liberalism and Conservative Liberalism, free market Liberalism.”

“Then you had the real Nationalists and the extreme Nationalism from the Gladio project, which has always been about building up far Right Nationalist movements.”

“So, it was not like George Soros and America is building up these pseudo-fake Socialist, Leftwing human rights movements, they had full spectrum dominance.”

“When countries are sold a false bill of goods by the IMF and the World Bank and they are told that they need to undergo a process of austerity, and in order to qualify for this they need to have democracy reforms, it is actually mandatory that you allow George Soros fronted organizations to go in and alter the system in the country.”

“The US takes taxpayer’s money and state dollars are funneled into the Soros systems and suddenly he is now a “philantropist”, but it is not his money. He is the middle man that creates a fire wall that allows it to be this plausible deniability between there being a distance between the US government and this “random, pro-democracy billionaire.”

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Who do you believe since the FBI has lost all credibility?
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Hunter Biden laptop repairman John Paul Mac Isaac says FBI agent threatened him to hush up

By Miranda Devine

The computer repair shop owner who blew the whistle on Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop claims in a new book that an FBI agent threatened him to stay silent.

John Paul Mac Isaac said two federal agents came to his Mac Shop in Wilmington, Del. in December 2019 to recoup the laptop following a subpoena, he details in his new book “American Injustice: My Battle to Expose the Truth.”

The repairman, who had volunteered to hand the laptop over to the feds two months earlier, said the alleged threat came after he made a joke, telling them: “Hey, lads, I’ll remember to change your names when I write the book.”

“Agent Wilson kept walking but Agent DeMeo paused and turned to face me,” Paul Mac writes of the encounter.

Isaac said the agent then told him: “It is our experience that nothing ever happens to people that don’t talk about these things.”

Isaac says that the agents told him that most people do not speak about their interactions with them. John Paul Mac Isaac claims that two federal agents threatened him when they picked up Hunter Biden’s laptop. Robert Miller

The owner said he locked the door after the agents walked out, leaving him to “digest the encounter.”

“Was I being paranoid, or had what the agent just told me been a direct threat, or at best a thinly veiled one?” he writes.

Issac was left with the “laptop from hell” after President Biden’s son abandoned it at his shop in April 2019.

The investigation into Biden’s laptop has been highly criticized due to its extreme length.

Eight months after giving the laptop’s hard drive to the FBI, the shop owner alerted then-President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani who, in turn, provided a copy to The Post.

The Post’s reporting on the trove of emails discovered on the device has raised serious questions about what President Biden knew of his son’s overseas business deals.

Issac said he was eventually forced to shut down his business after being harassed when his private information was leaked.

He filed a multimillion-dollar defamation suit in May against Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff and a string of media outlets, including CNN, the Daily Beast and Politico, saying they falsely accused him of peddling Russian disinformation.

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The Midterms Are Far From Over

The key voters are the 18% who disapprove of Biden but still plan to vote for congressional Democrats.

Midterm elections are usually seen as a referendum on the president. Based on Joe Biden’s approval ratings, Republicans should have locked victory in by now. But while a July 27-28 Harvard CAPS-Harris poll finds Mr. Biden’s job approval at a historic low of 38%, the Democrats still get 50% of the generic congressional ballot. Of the poll’s respondents, 18% disapprove of Mr. Biden’s performance yet plan to vote Democratic in November. A closer look at this group could prove useful to both parties as Election Day approaches.

The key battleground is the economy and inflation. Nearly 90% of these voters say, contrary to the Biden administration’s assertions, that the U.S. is in a recession now or will be in the next year, and more than 60% say their personal financial situation is getting worse. Around 4 in 5 don’t approve of the president’s performance on either inflation or the economy.

The Inflation Reduction Act is a risky proposition for the Democrats. If they can pass the package and convince Americans that its $739 billion in taxes and $433 billion in spending will live up to its name, great. But if the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation’s message wins out—that the bill is a tax increase on virtually all Americans—it could sink the Democrats’ chances.

The bill has also made headlines for dedicating record amounts to climate change, but Democrats should be careful: 70% of these swing voters want Mr. Biden to focus on lowering gasoline prices rather than climate change. Fifty-eight percent mostly blame Mr. Biden’s policies for high fuel prices, and 64% want him to reverse his stance and approve the Keystone Pipeline. More than half oppose the idea of bypassing Congress by declaring a “climate emergency.”

Democrats shouldn’t overestimate the popularity of the position that abortion up until birth is acceptable. Nor should Republicans expect swing voters to accept complete abortion bans. While 73% disapprove of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, only 48% say the reversal has made them more likely to vote Democrat. (And the electorate isn’t as permissive about abortion as the party: In the June version of the Harris Poll, 58% of all respondents favored restrictions after the 15th week of pregnancy, far earlier than Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey allowed.)

Jan. 6 is also a losing cause among pro-Democratic Biden disapprovers. A slim majority—53%—think Congress’s investigation and hearings are biased (up from 37% in June). Nearly 6 in 10 don’t think Mr. Trump should face criminal indictment. But they disapprove of Mr. Trump even more strongly than of Mr. Biden. Nearly 80% don’t want the former president to run in 2024, compared with only 71% for the incumbent. The Democrats can frame the midterms as yet another battle against Trump.

One good sign for Democrats is that the Republicans’ effort to paint them as elitists hasn’t totally worked. These swing voters skew young, lower-income and less-educated. Four in 10 of them are under 35; a similar proportion earn less than $50,000 a year; and only 1 in 5 has a four-year college degree.

Law-and-order appeals are unpromising with these voters, who care less about crime and immigration than those who already plan to vote Republican. Guns and women’s rights are their most important issues after inflation. Republicans should continue to make popular compromises on gun control, such as those in June’s bipartisan bill, and ditch threats of full abortion bans.

Republicans are stuck at the 50-yard line, held back by fears of extremism and of Mr. Trump’s potential return. To make any progress, they will have to double down on the economy and push energy independence over climate change to reach these struggling Americans. They will need to win the message war over the Inflation Reduction Act as a wasteful taxing-and-spending spree in times that demand pro-growth policies and fiscal responsibility.

The midterms will depend on whether voters’ fear of inflation or of the unknown wins out. Democrats need to stoke fears about what Republicans would do with congressional majorities; Republicans need to alleviate them. Democrats need to prove they deserve to stay in power by fighting inflation now, while Republicans can frame the tax-and-spend bill as the last straw.

Right now neither party is showing the discipline to execute a swing-voter strategy and both are playing mostly to their bases. The mystery of why Republicans have not closed the deal is explained by these voters who dislike the president but can’t stand the Republicans either. This group of younger, mostly lower-middle-income moderates will determine if the 2022 midterms are a blowout or a squeaker. They remain up for grabs.

Mr. Penn, chairman and CEO of the Stagwell Group and chairman of the Harris Poll, was chief strategist on Bill Clinton’s 1996 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign, and Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.

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Professor Allan Bloom wrote about this decades ago:
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The closing of the university mind

It's why so many, in institutions across the board, are now so incompetent

By Melanie Phillips

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters; Goya, 1799

The Times reported this week on the deeply alarming findings (£) of a survey it had conducted at Britain’s universities.

It found that ten of them, including three from the elite Russell Group, had started removing books from reading lists or made them optional to protect students from “challenging” content, and had applied trigger warnings to more than 1,000 texts in case they “caused students harm”.

Paul Morgan-Bentley and James Beal wrote:

The texts include the 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead, which has been “removed permanently” from a course reading list at Essex University because of concerns about graphic depictions of slavery.

The classic play Miss Julie, by August Strindberg, has been withdrawn from an English literature module at Sussex University because it includes discussion of suicide.

English students at Aberdeen University are also told they can opt out of discussions on a module about Geoffrey Chaucer and medieval writing as the course “sometimes entails engagement with topics that you may find emotionally challenging”…

Some of Britain’s most influential authors — including William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and Agatha Christie — are among those whose works have been deemed concerning enough to require warnings.

There may well be more instances of lecturers protecting students from challenging literature. Academics attempted to block this newspaper from discovering details about changes to their reading lists, using social media to encourage each other not to comply with requests for information. Some universities refused to disclose any information because of the “potentially negative personal impact” on staff.

The same day, The Times carried another report (£) that a group of hard-left academics had been plotting a witch-hunt against colleagues over gender identity. James Beal wrote:

University and College Union (UCU) members pledged to compile a list of university backroom staff suspected of holding gender-critical beliefs, the minutes from a meeting leaked to The Times reveal. The plan was to use this information to “inform” UCU university branches of their colleagues’ views, accusing them of being “transphobes” and “gender-critical activists”…

Leaked minutes also reveal the extent to which the UCU’s general secretary, Jo Grady, supported those accused of helping to force out Dr Kathleen Stock from Sussex University. Stock, 50, a philosophy professor, quit the university in October 2021 after what she described as a “bullying and harassment” campaign over her gender-critical beliefs.

These findings are shocking; but no-one who has been paying attention to what’s been happening to education in both Britain and America will find them surprising. On both sides of the Atlantic, the universities — with some exceptions, and with “hard” science departments exempt to some extent at least — have been steadily substituting knowledge and rational thought by “victim culture” and ideological identity politics on race and gender, turning themselves into left-wing bastions of propaganda and the suppression of dissent.

The idea that students might be so upset, alarmed or offended by what they read anywhere that they must be “protected” from it is risible, ludicrous, absurd. It strikes at the very core of learning and of having an open mind. Yet countless academics — the supposed guardians and stewards of knowledge and reason — are going down like ninepins in the face of it.

It takes a brave academic to call out what’s going on. One such is Matthew Goodwin, professor of politics at Kent university. On his Substack blog today, he produces startling evidence to illustrate the extent of the problem. He writes:

Since the 1960s, the ratio of left-wing to right-wing academics has jumped from three to one to eight to one today…[Other studies] similarly find that fewer than 20% of academics today vote for right-leaning parties while 75% vote for Labour, the Liberal Democrats, or the Greens. Last year, in my own work, I found that 76% of my colleagues in the world’s most elite institutions identify on the left while 21% of that group identify as ‘far left’. Just 11% put themselves on the right. And in my own area of political science, a recent study at Harvard found that 72% lean to the left with 14% describing themselves as far left. In America, where this ideological bias is especially pronounced, it is simply no longer unusual to find some departments with not a single registered Republican. Is this healthy for our students? Is this conducive to developing well-rounded, critical thinkers?…

One study finds a third of staff would avoid hiring a known Brexit voter while many openly say they would feel uncomfortable mingling with a colleague who holds gender-critical views. Between one third and one half of left-leaning scholars would consciously mark a bid for a research grant lower if it adopted a right-wing perspective, which really matters because the ability of academics to generate funding has a major impact on their career trajectory. My own survey of academics in the world’s most elite universities similarly found that while two-thirds feel positively about left-wing voters, only one in ten feel the same way about right-wing voters…

Increasingly, in Britain and America, large numbers of academics, around six in ten, support requiring job and research grant applicants to submit ‘diversity statements’ before a decision is made. You don’t have to oppose or question diversity to find the use of these statements deeply problematic. Many influential voices consider them ‘litmus tests’ which are designed to weed out applicants who do not subscribe to the dominant orthodoxy…

One study finds less than half of left-leaning academics think academic freedom should always be put first, even if it violates social justice ideology; another finds that about one-quarter of academics would support some kind of campaign to oust a dissenting academic from their job. Recently, this has been symbolised by prominent cases of academics or honorary academics being harassed, investigated or experiencing negative consequences as a direct result of their beliefs or counter-cultural research, such as Kathleen Stock, Jo Phoenix, Tony Sewell, Selina Todd, Rosa Freedman, Michele Moore, among others. These are not exactly right-wing culture warriors.

This hijack of education has been building up for decades. Back in the sixties and seventies, a mindset became the progressive orthodoxy that the west was fundamentally corrupt — colonialist, imperialist, exploitative, racist and dominated by the “patriarchy” — ie, white heterosexual western men were to blame for all the ills of the world. Western society therefore had to be reconfigured, and the way to achieve this was by the “long march through the institutions” — of which the universities were key — to turn western values inside out.

This has now been achieved to the letter.

The corruption of the universities is at the core of most of our society’s ills. Knowledge and rationality have been replaced by ideological propaganda. Instead of teaching young people how to think, the universities have been instructing them what to think. The identity politics which they have enforced upon so many and turned into unchallengeable dogma has meant that increasingly people have been employed or promoted not on the basis of their intellectual achievement (which has been becoming progressively devalued) but their skin colour or sexual identity. All of which helps explain why, across the board in institutions, professions, businesses, politics and the civil service, so many are so incompetent, know so little and can’t even think straight.

The universities, supposedly the crucible of knowledge, rational thought and the free exchange of ideas, are now responsible instead for the closing of the national mind.

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When the WSJ allows Soros to spread his manure on their editorial page should one be concerned?

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The Sanctification of George Soros

How the left stopped worrying about Soros the billionaire and learned to love Soros ‘the Jew’

Two weeks ago, George Soros took to the op-ed pages of the largest paid circulation newspaper in the United States to explain why he has spent tens of millions of dollars backing progressive district attorney candidates across the country. “Americans desperately need a more thoughtful discussion about our response to crime,” the billionaire philanthropist began in a piece for The Wall Street Journal titled, “Why I Support Reform Prosecutors.” Decrying the “demagoguery and divisive partisan attacks that dominate the debate and obscure the issues,” Soros elucidated his reasons for championing prosecutors who support, among other things, abolishing cash bail, reducing prison time for violent offenders, and declining to prosecute whole categories of crime altogether.

The scope of Soros’ efforts has been extensive. Through a combination of direct contributions to candidates, subventions to political action committees, and funding of other third party groups via his Open Society Foundations, Soros has spent upwards of $40 million over the past decade helping to elect some 75 prosecutors in metropolitan areas ranging from Los Angeles to Philadelphia, Manhattan to St. Louis. His pursuit of this agenda has been met with no small amount of controversy, and in some cases active resistance. In San Francisco, the Soros-backed District Attorney Chesa Boudin lost a recall vote earlier this year following a disastrous tenure marked by sharp increases in both violent and petty crime rates. George Gascon, a Soros-backed prosecutor in Los Angeles, will also face a recall. It was no doubt in response to the backlash his public efforts have caused that Soros decided, not unreasonably, to defend his political interventions. “I have done it transparently,” he wrote in the Journal of his massive outlays, “and I have no intention of stopping.”

All well and good. America is a free country, and Soros has every right to spend his vast fortune however he wants within the boundaries of the law, as well as to justify that spending in the public square. The same applies to those of us inhabiting lower tax brackets, who have no less a right to criticize Soros for how he’s trying to influence American public life—which, to repeat, he is very much, and by his own admission, trying to do. That extremely rich people with grand ideological designs should not be immune to criticism—indeed, that they should be subject to even more of it than the rest of us—is a pretty widely accepted view in America, especially on the political left, where the maxim “behind every great fortune lies a great crime” has long been a guiding principle. Indeed, one might go so far as to say that this lack of deference to the wealthy and the titled is one of our major distinguishing national characteristics.

Or used to be. A week after Soros published his piece in the Journal under his own name, proudly and defiantly justifying his expenditure of vast sums aimed at sparking a revolution in the administration of municipal criminal justice, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio introduced an amendment to the $750 billion climate and tax bill aimed at stymying this agenda by providing funds for local law enforcement to keep violent criminals behind bars. The measure had no chance of passing, and when the Democrat-led Senate predictably rejected it, Rubio took to Twitter. “The democrats just blocked my effort to try & force Soros backed prosecutors to put dangerous criminals in jail,” he tweeted in complaint.

What followed was the sort of Pavlovian response one has come to expect from progressive politicians, activists, journalists, and other social media impact influencers whenever the name of their benefactor is invoked.

Soros, in case you couldn’t tell, happens to be Jewish, a fact that has absolutely nothing to do with his ideas about criminal justice reform, or with Rubio’s opposition to them. Yet it was this utterly irrelevant detail of Soros’ birth that the progressive hive mind seized upon, spurring its minions to attack an unsubstantiated presumption about Rubio’s motives to the exclusion of his substantive arguments. The rebuke from American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten was particularly rich in light of her response to parents upset about their children being denied in-person schooling during the pandemic. “American Jews,” she said in April 2021, “are now part of the ownership class.”

Put aside the merits of the criminal justice policies Soros is trying to advance with his humongous largesse. Also put aside the fact that, while he was alive, the right-wing Jewish casino magnate Sheldon Adelson was routinely denounced by progressives in terms that, by their own lights, are no less “antisemitic” than what they accuse Rubio of fomenting. The question before us today is whether, in the course of criticizing activities that the country’s biggest progressive donor has undertaken “transparently” (his word), it is possible to even utter his name without being accused of bigotry.

The argument that the mere mention of the name “Soros” is tantamount to antisemitism, which is effectively the position of the progressive political, media, and activist elite, is made entirely in bad faith. Stating the plain and observable fact that some prosecutors are “Soros-backed” is no more of an attack on Jews than the broadcaster Soledad O’Brien’s warning to “full-time Florida residents,” an antisemitic dog whistle about God’s waiting room. If the mind of a Soros supporter, upon hearing his name, races immediately to an image of a “Jew,” and one who serves as a stand-in for “the Jews,” it’s probably not the motives of the critic that need questioning. The impulse to connect “Soros” with Judaism and Jewishness is not unlike the bigotry that associates the term “monkeypox” with Black people. It’s a form of essentialism that expects us to agree with the antisemites that “being Jewish” is somehow relevant to what Americans like Soros (or right-wing Jewish billionaires, for that matter) do with their time and money.

Those engaging in this rhetorical tactic are certainly not pursuing the “thoughtful discussion” that Soros says we “desperately need,” but rather the “demagoguery and divisive partisan attacks” he denounces. Worse, they’re minimizing the threat posed by actual antisemitism by cheapening the accusation.

It wasn’t so long ago that one could scrutinize Soros’ widely disseminated beliefs and well-documented activities without fear of being called a Nazi. “Is the speculator and philanthropist a one-man foreign-policy machine or an unregulated billionaire with a messiah complex?” The New Yorker asked in a long, critical profile of Soros published in 1995. No one thought this allusion to history’s most famous Jew was antisemitic. In a sketch aired during the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, Saturday Night Live depicted Soros as a sinister currency speculator, single-handedly deciding the fate of the U.S. dollar and manipulating American politicians. “Multi-billionaire Hedge Fund Manager; Owner, Democratic Party” read the chyron under his name, displayed during a press conference at which he instructs a random man to sell him his wife.

In 2016, just as Soros was initiating his progressive prosecutor project, Politico reported the details in language that, by today’s standards, would lead to a denunciation as if it was published in Der Stürmer. “Democratic mega-donor George Soros has directed his wealth into an under-the-radar 2016 campaign to advance one of the progressive movement’s core goals—reshaping the American justice system,” the story began. The $3 million Soros had spent by then on just seven DA races exceeded “the total spent on the 2016 presidential campaign by all but a handful of rival super-donors.” As Soros planned to up his giving, “more local candidates should prepare for the shock of one of the biggest donors in American politics flooding their neighborhoods with ads.”

What accounts for this dramatic restriction in acceptable discourse regarding one of America’s most powerful private citizens? How is it that so many intelligent people who pride themselves on their capacity for making elegant distinctions and holding nuanced views about ethnic prejudice could bring themselves to spout such reductionist nonsense, denying the obvious reality that an increasing number of key district attorney races in American cities rise or fall on the interest and engagement of a New York billionaire, while also attempting to silence frank descriptions of that reality by portraying them as a species of bigotry?

The answer, as with so much of what ails us today, lies with another New York billionaire—in this case not so much the man himself as the response he’s engendered. There were a lot of things we were able to discuss in this country Before the Trump Era (BTE) with a degree of sanity—that is, before the Manichean spirit of the “resistance,” with its “no enemies on the left” mentality of the pre-World War II-era Popular Front, seized the minds of our intellectual class. But that was before the sanctification of George Soros—a man who, like the rest of us, has done both good and ill, but whose name we must now only utter in reverence, lest we be suspected of harboring wicked thoughts.

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Liz Cheney's Latest Remarks on the FBI's Trump Raid Shows That She Knows Her Career Is Over

By Matt Vespa

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Democrats Are Losing Their Edge With Hispanics

By Steve Corte

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If truth be told he died a deserving death

because he was a hateful man and you schmucks never learn:

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“My father died a Martyr we are behind him on his path,” says son of terror leader

Itamar Marcus | Aug 11, 2022

Khaled Mansour was one of the leaders of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, killed in the recent Gaza war. Al-Jazeera TV Live interviewed some of his family members including his young son who was holding an automatic rifle. His message was very simple and short: He will continue his father’s path:

Islamic Jihad Terrorist Khaled Mansour’s son: “I want to give a message to the Zionist enemy: Although my father died as a Martyr, we are behind him on his path. You think that the mastermind is gone, no, the mastermind is in our hearts. And Allah willing, we will go on this path that he wanted, Allah willing.”

[Al-Jazeera TV Live, Aug. 10, 2022]

Palestinian Islamic Jihad is an international designated terror organization, whose goal is the destruction of Israel.

Operation Breaking Dawn - Following the arrest of Islamic Jihad's West Bank commander Bassam Al-Sa'adi on Aug. 1, 2022, the terror organization planned to attack Israeli civilians living near the Gaza Strip, according to military intelligence. Israel was forced to put those civilians in total lockdown, closing all roads and canceling buses and trains. After three days of lockdown, on Aug. 5 Israel began attacking the terror organization's infrastructure and killed two of its top leaders, northern Gaza commander Tayseer Jabari and southern Gaza commander Khaled Mansour. Islamic Jihad fired over 1,100 rockets and missiles at Israeli residential areas, with approximately 200 rockets falling short inside Gaza, killing at least 16 Palestinian residents including children. Hamas reported 44 Palestinians killed, at least 15 of whom were members of terror organizations. Operation Breaking Dawn ended with a ceasefire under Egyptian mediation on Aug. 7, 2022.

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One swallow doth not make a Spring:
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The Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act Delusions

We’ll know in about three weeks if they’re right about the bill’s politics for midterms.

By Karl Rove

Democrats are belting out hosannas for the Inflation Reduction Act. President Biden says it’ll “immediately help” his party’s candidates for the midterms this fall, while Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer calls it “a game-changer.” The New York Times declared that this “sweeping legislation” gives Democrats “an unfamiliar feeling: hope.”

For starters, if the bill doesn’t immediately reduce inflation, it’s going to be impossible to hide from voters. Americans will experience higher prices every day—when they go to the supermarket, shop for the kids’ new school year or pull into the gasoline station.

Democrats insist the bill will slash prices by spending $433 billion and creating new taxes totaling $739 billion. But nonpartisan experts believe it’ll have no noticeable downward pressure on prices—including the Congressional Budget Office (“negligible at best”), the Bipartisan Policy Center (“small impacts one way or the other”), and the Penn Wharton Budget Model (“statistically indistinguishable from zero”).

Part of the problem is that some of the bill’s promised price cuts don’t kick in for years. Killing the 5% coinsurance for Medicare recipients with catastrophic prescription drug coverage? Doesn’t start until 2024. A $2,000 cap on Part D out-of-pocket payments? Not until 2025. Price controls on Medicare drugs? They start in 2026 with only 10 high-cost drugs that lack generic competition. It’s hard to imagine voters will be swayed by these far-off policies as they struggle today.

By contrast, some of the ways the bill will raise costs and hurt growth begin almost immediately. Take the book minimum tax, which hits companies with at least $1 billion in income in their financial statements. They’ll pay 21% of taxable income or 15% of the income reported to investors, whichever is greater. It falls with particular violence on manufacturing companies. They’re already examining what it’ll do to their taxes, so workers in adversely affected businesses could soon see pay cuts, reduced hours, or even layoffs. That’s not likely to gin up enthusiasm for Democrats.

The bill also establishes that beginning in January, drug companies must pay a rebate if prescription prices for Medicare recipients rise faster than inflation. To cover that difference, drug companies will likely raise prices for non-Medicare patients, perhaps before year’s end

The bill’s green-energy subsides are much bigger for companies using union labor. This payoff to big labor bosses may have the unintended effect of alienating nonunion blue-collar workers who feel Democrats stacked the deck against them.

Then there’s the $80 billion Internal Revenue Service expansion so the IRS can double its audits. Millions of honest taxpayers and small businesses may reasonably fear that they’ll lose time and money to bureaucrats needlessly rooting around in their tax returns.

Democrats may think they’ll get lucky on timing, that the economy will bounce back on its own and obscure the real effects of their bill. Americans received good news Wednesday with July’s flat consumer-price index, largely because of a 4.6% month-over-month decline in energy prices. But as with April’s good inflation news, this doesn’t mean the struggle is over. The CPI was still up 8.5% year over year. The core price index is 5.9% higher than this time last year, driven in part by July increases in costs for food, rent and new cars.

How can we decide if Democrats are right to praise their new bill or just desperate? The president’s job-approval rate sits at 39.9%, with 56% disapproving, according to the RealClearPolitics average. His handling of the economy is even less popular, with 63.4% disapproval, and 71.9% of voters believe the country is going in the wrong direction. Let’s check these numbers again after Labor Day.

If they improve significantly, it would suggest that a growing number of voters believe Mr. Biden and congressional Democrats have a good plan—that against economic logic, they somehow managed to lower prices and strengthen growth by pumping more demand into an inflation-ridden economy through increased government spending and using higher taxes to confiscate capital, profits and income.

But if these numbers don’t improve appreciably, Democrats can know for certain that all their present celebrating of the Inflation Reduction Act was not only premature but unwarranted. I’m betting that’s the case, and if I’m right, their party is in for a particularly painful midterm.

Mr. Rove helped organize the political-action committee American Crossroads and is author of “The Triumph of William McKinley” (Simon & Schuster, 2015).

Not one Republican Senator voted for the so-called 'Inflation Reduction Act,' yet Democrats are ignoring the warning signs and pushing forward with their tax and spend agenda.

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Ross Rants:

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The 528,000 jobs number just released is seasonally adjusted. The unadjusted number is negative. And so it goes.

This weekend I had lunch with a small group of hedge fund managers and super high NW investors. The discussion was all about the market, and where from here. The consensus was generally pessimistic, and an expectation that bad things could happen over the next year geopolitically. Nobody thinks the market is going to have some huge rally from here, and it is possible there could be another leg down. However, there is a belief by some that the market has been so negative for the past several weeks that there could be a further move up over the next 6 months if the recession is shallow, and if rates do not go a lot higher. There is some history that after the market gets very negative, it can recover nicely for a few months after the bottom is hit. We may have just seen that play out, and so maybe there is little more upside for the moment. We really do not know right now where we are on the time spectrum, and what else may happen to cause the market to decline again. The one thing we all knew for certain was, there is huge uncertainty now, and very high risk of something going bad. If you are generally wanting to preserve, it is best to hold sizable cash for a bit longer and wait to see where things go from here. We may be at a plateau for the moment. Taiwan and the Manchin bill both are big events that could upset things. If the experts I had lunch with, all of whom have been active investors for decades, are very uncertain, you should not think you know.

It was also agreed that Kathy Woods is a brilliant marketer, but terrible investor. Her track record at Bernstein, where she was before, was laughable. If you are invested with her now-you have been warned. Just because she had success buying junk tech companies when anyone could buy those stocks and make money, is no reason to think now that all the false euphoria has been washed out of the market, that she can make successful investments. There was also unanimous agreement among these wealthy capitalists who donate to campaigns, that nobody would support Trump. Rents have reached a level that is now unaffordable, and there is a clear trend just starting, that on lease end, tenants are moving out, or doubling up, and that from here rents may have topped out along with home prices. Real estate in general is not going to be the extraordinary bonanza it has been for the past few years. Cap rates are slowly rising, although construction costs have declined. Bottom line, stay conservative, hold some cash, energy stocks, and solid cash flowing companies, and just assume no big market returns for the next few years. The party is over. Nobody was talking about buying bonds other than one special situation which is not readily available. Inflation is not going away soon, and there could be some serious unrest here and abroad as more people struggle to buy food and gas and the basics. Hunker down. As I have mentioned before, if you intend to sell your house in the near term, now is the time before values decline further. Happy times are over.

The payroll report has confused the whole picture. All of the other jobs indices show declining jobs and a declining jobs openings. The 528,000 number is seasonally adjusted. The unadjusted number was MINUS 315,000. Moody Analytics agreed the unadjusted number was negative, but they say July is always that way due to end of school year. . If you ever took a stat course you know seasonal adjustments are dicey and often inaccurate. So we don't really know what the accurate jobs number is. The household survey once again was materially divergent from the payroll report showing only 175,000 jobs added after showing flat or declines for prior four months. The unemployment claims are rising every week. JOLTS shows a 600,000 decline in job openings. Indeed says jobs are declining. The CEO of Uber said 70% of new drivers are people taking the job to make ends meet since their regular job wage does not keep up with inflation. Participation is flat and low, which raises question as to how did they add over 528,000 jobs, and fewer job openings, but no increase in participation. Layoffs are increasing rapidly by the thousands. Tech, Walmart, 7-11 and many others. Real wages continue to be negative by almost 4%. 65% of workers live paycheck to paycheck. Factory orders are declining, It is unclear from the jobs report what is really going on, but what is clear to me is this report is an anomaly. Now the Fed is really in a bind, and the market has misread where the Fed is going. They will likely raise 75 in September, and 50 in October. The market will not like any of that. The question continues to be asked-how can we be in recession with these jobs numbers. Answer: same as before-jobs lag recession by three months, consumers are now being pushed hard, consumer debt is rising vs spending from savings, and the savings rate is low, 4% vs 7% a few months ago. It is very possible the 500,000 new jobs is not really that many more people working. It is likely a major error in the seasonal adjustment formula- very likely, or half of the new jobs were low end service jobs, so it is very possible these were workers taking second jobs to make ends meet, not new workers entering the labor force. Uber being the exact example. Or maybe there are so many people barely able to now feed themselves that the most marginal people are taking a no skill low end service job just to get some money. It is to me, clearly not a sign that economy is growing. I continue to believe the recession already began in June. Do not believe the jobs number -it is not accurate.

Despite all of this, and despite every economist telling them, and CBO telling them, that their Manchin bill will not reduce inflation and will likely increase it, and that jobs will be lost, they are charging ahead. Even Zandi who is the top economic consultant to the White House, struggled to make it appear not terrible. Yet they are going to pass it just to make the radicals happy that they are wasting hundreds of billions on more climate insanity. They learned nothing from Solyndra. They ignore the warnings that the drug price fixing will cause a big decline in new research. Over the past several years, generics have kept drug prices fairly stable for most common drugs. The whole pitch about drug prices is pure political lie. There is a 15.5cent tax on oil imports. That will get passed directly on to consumers. And that is supposed to be inflation reduction??? This bill is all about getting out the left wing vote in November, and is terribly destructive to the deficit and inflation. There will not likely be any material increase in oil production. Where do they think they are going to find 87,000 qualified accountants to be IRS auditors since every half qualified accountant is already fully employed. There is no highly qualified accountant who is going to work today for the IRS at lower pay, so the only people IRS will audit are the everyday working guy. Wealthy people pay lawyers to defer or bury income that the IRS will never get to. And now the Dems agreed to allow carried interest income treatment. Hypocrisy does not even begin to describe the Dems. Note that there are only 27,000 border agents, and no money to add to that or build the wall, the military is way behind in recruit quotas, but they want 87,000 new IRS auditors to go after you. It is impossible to actually happen and the supposed added revenue will be hundreds of billions short. There are other terrible things buried in the bill that will be very costly to business. This bill is the height of irresponsibility and stupidity. Insanity does not begin to describe it. I suspect Manchin might be getting the picture that he was snookered and agreed to things he never understood. Why Sinema is going along is a mystery.

It is unclear where China goes from here on Taiwan. Based on what they are doing it appears they plan to blockade Taiwan at some point, not invade. Between mines and warships they can shut down the island. Then we have to bust the blockade, which means war. We chickened out from blockade busting to get wheat and corn out of Ukraine in the face of worldwide famine, so I am sure the Chinses look at that and say -let's just block the ports and the US and allies will do nothing and Taiwan will wither. That seems johto me their coming strategy, and maybe fairly soon.

The climate crazies in the press now blame simple every day weather events on climate change. One even claimed the lightening near the White House that killed three people was due to climate change. It has reached a point that the press blames everything on climate change, just as they blame everything else on racism. This is all they know from the indoctrination they get in college. Actual thought or analysis never enters the process. Now there is a real problem which is coming from the Tonga volcano explosion which will cause the atmosphere to warm further. It has nothing at all to do with man or climate change. It was a massive volcano which has happened only a few times over billions of years in earth history, and can be the cause of major earth weather shocks. One wiped out the dinosaurs and many other creatures. What is interesting is that coal prices are at or near an all time high as the demand for coal for utilities is skyrocketing. So much for the Paris and Glasgow agreements. Did not take long for reality to strike.

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The Next Stage in Israel’s War with Iran Carries Greater Risks

by Dr. Eric R. Mandel, MEPIN

The Iranian regime claimed this month that it foiled two Israeli spy rings’ attempts to enter the Islamic Republic. What were those spy rings looking for? Nuclear arms secrets? Maybe not.

Israel has recently targeted non-nuclear personnel who direct weapons transfers and plan terrorist acts. Rather than just attack Iran’s proxies in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, Israel has decided to attack the head of the octopus within Iran. And they are being uncharacteristically open about it. Israel’s National Security Adviser, Eyal Hulata, went as far as to say that Israel has “acted quite a lot in Iran over the past year.”

Middle East and Other Musings

Friday, August 12, 2022

Flynn Warns, What Is Happening Has Been Planned. FBI No longer Has Any Credibility. Palestinian Schmucks Never Learn.

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