Politics

• Kamala Harris skirts questions on “historic flood” of migrants three times, whiffs on economic policy answer in tense “60 Minutes” interview (NY Post)

• Kamala smears DeSantis in an effort to look presidential: Was this an attempt to spin the negative news surrounding the Biden-Harris administration’s lackluster response to the Hurricane Helene disaster? Kamala Harris was asked about a report from NBC News that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been ignoring her calls. Harris’s answer demonstrates that this whole claim was a setup. “You know, moments of crisis, if nothing else, should really be the moment that anyone who calls themselves a leader says they’re going to put politics aside and put the people first,” she said. “People are in desperate need of support right now. And playing political games … it’s just utterly irresponsible, and it is selfish, and it is about political gamesmanship instead of doing the job that you took an oath to do, which is to put the people first.” However, it appears it is Harris who is guilty of playing political gamesmanship. When questioned about not taking the vice president’s calls, DeSantis answered, “I didn’t know that she had called. I’m not sure who they called. They didn’t call me.”

• KJP storms out of briefing room after accusing reporter of spreading “misinformation” about Hurricane Helene response (NY Post)

• CBS brass upset that its journalist did journalism: In an interview on CBS, race hustler Ta-Nehisi Coates was asked about his latest book, The Message, based on his 10-day trip to the West Bank last year. In the book, Coates unsurprisingly labels Israel as racist. CBS’s Tony Dokoupil pressed Coates on his take, noting that his failure to take into account the myriad instances of terrorist attacks that Israel has suffered at the hands of Palestinian militants reminded him of the one-sided rhetoric of anti-Israel extremists. Indeed, astoundingly, Coates never mentions Hamas or Hezbollah in his book. Well, pressing Coates on this radical view didn’t sit well with the CBS brass or a number of staffers. The outfit responded to the controversy by apologizing, effectively throwing Dokoupil under the bus. CBS News chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford argued that Dokoupil had done nothing wrong and was simply doing his job as a journalist, but CBS effectively doubled down on its apology by inviting a DEI trauma trainer to mitigate the situation within the organization. That’s what you get for seeking the truth in the Leftmedia.

• Elizabeth Warren uses October 7 anniversary to accuse Netanyahu of “unthinkable violence on innocent civilians” (Washington Free Beacon)

• Dem strategist goes haywire about “Nazi” Trump: On the topic of criminal illegals, Trump recently said, “We have a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” Predictably, CNN anchor John Berman seized on the comment, asking Democrat strategist Aisha Mills about it. “We have long known that Donald Trump has revered the Nazis,” she said. “He has revered Hitler, he’s read his book, used to say he had it on his nightstand. … And when he uses language like this, I don’t think that it’s a Freudian slip. I think that the danger of a Donald Trump is that he would absolutely try to exterminate an entire group of people because he thinks that their genes are somehow different than his own body.” This is an odd prediction given that Trump has already had four years in office and didn’t go Full or even Partial Hitler on us.

Security

• Bout is the blowback from a bad Biden hostage deal: As The Wall Street Journal reports, “Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer known as the ‘Merchant of Death,’ walked out of a U.S. prison almost two years ago in a trade with Moscow for U.S. basketball star Brittney Griner. Now he is back in business, trying to broker the sale of small arms to Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militants.” Imagine that. The 57-year-old Bout has plenty of life left in him, and he seemed to have gone legit when he joined “a pro-Kremlin far-right party and won a seat in a local assembly in 2023.” But you know what they say about merchants of death: they’re merchants. Of death. True to form, when Houthi terrorists went to Moscow in August to buy $10 million worth of death-dealing weaponry, there was Victor Bout. The Team Biden-Harris response? No comment.

• Harris won’t meet Putin to end Ukraine war: Asked by CBS News’s Bill Whitaker about our spectacularly bloody and costly proxy war with Russia — a war whose belligerents should’ve been brought to the table long ago — Kamala Harris said she wouldn’t meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin to negotiate an end to his war with Ukraine unless the latter was included in those talks. “Ukraine must have a say in the future of Ukraine,” she was told to say. Ukrainians are dying every day in service to the Biden-Harris administration’s negotiating stance. For good measure, Harris said that if Trump were still in office, “Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now.” But this doesn’t pass the giggle test. If Donald Trump were still in office, Putin would never have attacked Ukraine in the first place. Remember: Putin took back Soviet land under George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. But he didn’t dare try while Trump was president.

• At least 1.5 million illegal southwest border crossers reported in FY24 (Center Square)

Culture

• Porn industry launches “hands off my porn” campaign against Republicans (Not the Bee)

• Good news in Georgia and Texas: On Monday, the Georgia Supreme Court reinstated that state’s heartbeat bill known as the LIFE Act, which effectively bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, the point at which a preborn baby develops a heartbeat. The decision reverses a lower court, which recently ruled the law unconstitutional. Also on Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a motion by the Biden-Harris administration to appeal a Texas law that protects emergency room doctors from having to perform abortions. The Court also left in place a lower-court ruling that stopped the Biden-Harris administration’s requirement that emergency rooms provide abortions. Following SCOTUS’s overturning of Roe v. Wade two years ago, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a new rule to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), which required hospitals to provide abortions. Since the EMTALA “is silent” on abortion, U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix ruled, “the Guidance cannot answer how doctors should weigh risks to both a mother and her unborn child. Nor can it, in doing so, create a conflict with state law where one does not exist.”

• Toyota dumps Rainbow Mafia: There is a welcome and growing trend of businesses and corporations dumping DEI. The latest is Toyota, which recently announced it was no longer sponsoring the Rainbow Mafia. According to Robby Starbuck, Toyota — which has in the past sponsored a drag queen summer camp for kids, opposed state laws that banned gender-bending procedures on minors, openly supported the gender “equality act” that effectively allows transgender-identifying males to compete in female sports, and donated funds to support the promulgation of gender-bending ideology in schools — has decided to back off driving down this radical leftist road. Toyota will stop sponsoring LGBTQ events and instead “narrow our community activities to align with STEM education and workforce readiness,” a company memo states. What a novel idea — an automaker focusing its efforts on those fields that help its future technological development rather than on pushing a socially divisive and destructive ideology.

• Predictably, men pummel women 19-0: A slaughter on the soccer pitch might not seem like good news, but bear with us. This one, involving the blowout loss of a team of women pretending to be men at the hands feet of real men, gives a good stiff kick in the genitals to the Rainbow Mafiosi while at the same time reinforcing the natural order of things. As The Daily Caller reports, “A group of ‘trans men’ (that is, biological women trying but failing to become men) formed a soccer team in Spain to play in a league of all-male teams, and the results were about as lopsided as you’d expect. The team, Fenix FC (because the mythical avian creature represents ‘rebirth’), played its first game recently in the fifth tier of Spanish ‘football.’ They lost their first game by a score of 19-0.” That sounds more like a football score than a “football” score, but it helps make clear that women aren’t men and men aren’t women.

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