The Patriot Post® · Thursday: Below the Fold

By Douglas Andrews, Thomas Gallatin, & Jordan Candler ·
https://patriotpost.us/articles/110548-thursday-below-the-fold-2024-09-26

Government & Politics

  • Short-term funding patch ready for Biden’s signature (Roll Call)

  • Dems, foreign leaders, and election interference: Yesterday, we noted an outrageous case of election interference perpetrated by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his sugar daddy, the Biden/Harris administration. This seems to have caught the attention of the House Oversight Committee, which on Wednesday announced that it would investigate the gross misuse of taxpayer funds to fly Zelensky to the crucial battleground state of Pennsylvania, whereupon he trashed Donald Trump and JD Vance. “The Committee seeks to understand the circumstances that led — and any facts that could justify — the Biden-Harris Administration to transport President Zelensky on a Department of the Air Force aircraft to Pennsylvania to introduce government officials to President Zelensky about the Russia-Ukraine war,” Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer wrote in a letter to AG Merrick Garland and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. But it’s not just Zelensky and Putin and the Iranians who are campaigning for Kamala. As Politico reports, London Mayor Sadiq Khan is warning the American people against electing Trump. “What I’d say in a respectful way to Americans is: I don’t think you realize that the rest of the world is watching because we’ve got skin in the game,” Khan said. Memo to Mayor Khan: If you want to be respectful, take Tim Walz’s advice and “mind your own damn business.”

  • Soros gets into the election interference game: With 40 days until the election, even low-information voters are beginning to pay more attention to politics. And what better time for an America-hating leftist billionaire to put his elbow on the scale on behalf of Kamala Harris? As Blaze Media’s Joseph MacKinnon reports: “Democratic mega-donor George Soros has been leaning on the Democrat-controlled Federal Communications Commission for months in hopes of fast-tracking his group’s acquisition of over 200 radio stations in over 40 markets — including stations that run shows from Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, Erick Erickson, Sean Hannity, and Dana Loesch.” And it looks like Soros is going to get his wish, even if his fellow leftists on the FCC have to cut corners to make it happen. MacKinnon continues: “On Wednesday, the FCC reportedly [approved] the purchase, meaning that in a matter of days, Soros will likely take control of communications to over 165 million Americans with the help of unvetted foreign investors whom Democrats have spared from the FCC’s customary national security review process.” Trump-appointed FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr calls it “an unprecedented decision for the commission” amid a broader “weaponization of government power … against free speech.”

  • Eric Adams indicted: In a historic first for New York City, sitting mayor Eric Adams was indicted by a grand jury in connection to a federal investigation into foreign money that was illegally funneled into Adam’s 2021 mayoral campaign. Besides Adams, two others — Brianna Suggs, who was his top campaign fundraiser, and Winnie Greco, his director of Asian affairs — are also likely to be indicted. Connections to Turkey and five other nations have been investigated in the probe. Adams insists he’s innocent while insinuating that the indictment is connected to his vocal criticism of the Biden/Harris administration’s open border policies that have flooded NYC with over 250,000 migrants since 2022. He said, “When the federal government did nothing as its broken immigration policies overloaded our shelter system with no relief, I put the people of New York before party and politics.” Adams refuses to step down and has called for a speedy trial. On that point, conservative pundit Ben Shapiro quipped, “He should probably go stab someone at a New York subway station so the prosecutors release him quickly.”

  • Biden on “The View”: Joe Biden made an appearance on that daytime cackling hen show “The View,” where he tightly tied Kamala Harris to every one of his failed policy decisions — the very decisions Harris has been ironically campaigning against. As Biden put it, “As vice president, there wasn’t a single thing that I did that she couldn’t do, and so I was able to delegate her responsibility on everything from foreign policy to domestic policy.” The disastrous Afghanistan exit: ✅. The immigration crisis: ✅. Forty-year-high inflation: ✅. When the topic turned to Donald Trump, cohost Whoopi Goldberg began describing Trump as a “bug” that wouldn’t go away, and Biden responded by slapping the table, imitating the smashing of a bug, which produced laughter from the audience and hosts. This is the same man who laments violence and dangerous rhetoric, yet he continues to call Trump a threat to democracy and now acts as if the former president is some kind of pest that needs to be killed. These people really do hate the man.

  • “Extinguish” Trump “for good”? In an interview yesterday with Leftmedia outfit MSNBC, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo was asked by “Morning Joe” cohost Mika Brzezinski about Donald Trump’s recent comment at a rally in Pennsylvania wherein he called himself a “protector” of women. Raimondo replied that his comment “is enraging, it is blood-curdling, and it is BS.” After accusing Trump of lying, she added, “How did we get here? Let’s extinguish him for good.” Despite two assassination attempts and a planned third one, along with near-constant accusations that Trump needs to temper his rhetoric, it is once again a member of the Biden/Harris administration who is guilty of using the very dehumanizing, vitriolic, and dangerously inflammatory rhetoric they bemoan. Meanwhile, how many women have become victims of Biden/Harris’s border malfeasance? That is a genuine threat to the life and well-being of Americans, not Trump’s desire to protect women.

  • Biden signs gun control EO to make illegal what is already illegal: In what amounts to little more than political theater, Joe Biden will sign an executive order today that is supposedly aimed at reducing “gun violence.” The impetus for the order comes a little over a week after a mass attack in Birmingham, Alabama, that tellingly got little national news coverage, likely due to the ethnic nature of the individuals involved. The order is focused on developing better attack response drills in schools, eliminating gun conversion devices (which are already illegal), and establishing a firearms threats task force. That last element is the most insidious of Biden’s order. What exactly will this task force be doing? It looks to be yet another effort aimed at infringing on Americans’ Second Amendment rights, all under the guise of “safety.”

Security

  • Damning Senate report reveals more Secret Service failures: When a bipartisan report reaches common findings, we rightly tend to lend credence to them. Such is the case with a scathing 94-page report released yesterday by the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Within it, the authors detail “a slew of missteps and miscommunications.” Of course, the acting director of the Secret Service, Ronald Rowe, says he’s really upset at what happened on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania. “What I saw made me ashamed,” he said. “I cannot defend why that roof was not better secured.” Among the things that made Rowe ashamed: “The Secret Service agent in charge of [the rally] was made aware of ‘credible intelligence’ of a threat against the former president — but didn’t pass it along to her supervisor or others planning security for the event.” Nor did that agent think to keep Donald Trump off the stage until that threat was accounted for.

  • Secret Service agent accused of sexually assaulting Harris staffer in hotel room (NY Post)

Culture

  • U.S. Air Force targets its “white male” population: White males need not apply. That seems to be the message from the Biden/Harris administration’s woke Air Force, which, as The Daily Caller reports, “finally handed over a trove of documents pertaining to its sweeping ‘goal’ of reducing the number of white male applicants in a popular officer program after spending months stonewalling requests for their release.” What we have here, then, is a continuation of the Left’s takeover of our military, which had long been a bastion of American patriotism. Biden DEI hire and Joint Chiefs Chairman C.Q. Brown issued a 2022 memo indicating “diversity and inclusion” updates to Air Force demographic goals for applicants seeking to become officers. That’s code for de-whitening. We know this because one of the documents in question “depicts a graph that shows the percentage of white male ROTC officer applicants declining from approximately 60% in fiscal year 2019 to a projected 50% in fiscal year 2023,” the Caller says. “The graph further details how the Air Force’s goal is to reduce that percentage down to approximately 43% by fiscal year 2029.”

  • U.S. suicides held steady in 2023 — at a very high level (AP)

  • Newsom vetoes bill to help black families reclaim taken land (AP)

  • Activists claim Marcellus Williams was innocent, but read the horrifying details of the crime for yourself (Not the Bee)

  • Policy: The latest report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights misleads about the victims of violence (City Journal)

Misc.

  • X says it suspended over five million accounts in first transparency report since Elon Musk takeover (AP)

  • Savings plunge as Americans tap out (Daily Signal)

  • A look at Kamala Harris’s “middle class” childhood (Breitbart)

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