“Conventional wisdom has it that Trump 2.0 will be a disaster for Palestinians, because Trump 1.0 all but buried the Palestinian national cause. And it is indeed true that under Donald Trump’s first term as president, the U.S.. was wholly guided by the Zionist religious right — the real voice in his ear, either as donors or policymakers. Under Trump and his son-in-law adviser, Jared Kushner, Washington became a policy playground for the settler movement …. Trump upended decades of policy by recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moving the U.S. embassy there; he disenfranchised the Palestinian Authority by closing down the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) office in Washington; he allowed Israel to annex the Golan Heights; he pulled out of the nuclear accords with Iran; and he assassinated Qassem Soleimani, the most powerful Iranian general and diplomat in the region.” (11/09/24)
“President-elect Trump was on track to win 400 electoral votes in a head-to-head race against President Biden, according to the White House’s own internal polls. The news was revealed by Jon Favreau, a one-time speechwriter for former President Obama who now hosts the liberal Pod Save America podcast. ‘Then we find out when the Biden campaign becomes the Harris campaign, that the Biden campaign’s own internal polling at the time when they were telling us he was the strongest candidate, showed that Donald Trump was going to win 400 electoral votes,’ Favreau said. ‘Joe Biden’s decision to run for president again was a catastrophic mistake,’ Favreau added. ‘They refused to acknowledge until very late, that anyone could be upset about inflation. And they just kept telling us that his presidency was historic and it was the greatest economy ever.'” (11/09/24)
Source: Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
by Julie Hollar & Jim Naureckas
“Corporate media may not have all the same goals as MAGA Republicans, but they share the same strategy: Fear works. Appeals to fear have an advantage over other kinds of messages in that they stimulate the deeper parts of our brains, those associated with fight-or-flight responses. Fear-based messages tend to circumvent our higher reasoning faculties and demand our attention, because evolution has taught our species to react strongly and quickly to things that are dangerous. It’s simply a fantasy (advanced repeatedly by Republicans) that Harris was running on identity politics, or as a radical progressive. This innate human tendency has long been noted by the media industry, resulting in the old press adage, ‘If it bleeds, it leads.’ Politicians, too, are aware of this brain hack — and no one relies on evoking fear more than once-and-future President Donald Trump.” (11/09/24)
“A Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) supervisor has been fired for telling staff helping hurricane survivors to skip houses displaying signs supporting Donald Trump. The agency’s head, Deanne Criswell, described the supervisor’s actions as ‘reprehensible,’ saying FEMA takes its mission ‘to help everyone before, during and after disasters seriously.’ Although Criswell’s statement on X does not indicate when or where the incident took place, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said the Division of Emergency Management would be launching an investigation at his direction. DeSantis called the situation ‘targeted discrimination’ of Trump supporters in Florida.” (11/10/24)
“Here are the hard truths of our threatening situation with social Security and Medicare. We have a looming major fiscal crisis which no one denies. There are solutions but no politically easy ones and our options get worse with time. Yet every time a working politician suggests considering even mild changes, the formidable senior lobby and AARP erupt in outrage and beat down the hapless reformer. Former allies of responsible reform flee and the status quo Is again preserved. Facts, as they say, are stubborn things. Social Security is by design a mandatory government administered defined-benefit retirement trust, funded by payroll taxes. However the inflows to the trust are insufficient to support the benefits promised and, unlike private pension plans, there is no corpus of funds earning compound interest to make up the difference. Thus the fund will become insolvent in nine years.” (11/10/24)
“President Joe Biden’s administration on Friday proposed tighter restrictions on oil, solar and wind energy development across more than 6,500 square miles (17,000 square kilometers) of federal land in the U.S. West to protect a declining bird species. However, it is doubtful the changes would survive under President-elect Donald Trump. Greater sage grouse — chicken-sized birds known for an elaborate mating ritual— were once found across much of the U.S. West. Their numbers plummeted in recent decades because of energy exploration, wildfires, disease and other pressures. A 2015 agreement shepherded by the Obama administration kept the birds off the endangered species list, by imposing limits on where and when development could occur across 226,000 square miles (590,000 square kilometers) of remaining grouse habitat spanning 11 states. Now, in the closing weeks of the Biden administration, officials with the Interior Department want to make the protections even stronger.” (11/08/24)
“There’s even a name for what investors have been doing since Donald Trump’s election victory on Tuesday: the Trump Trade. But most of the surge in the major indices took place at the opening bell on Wednesday; since then, gains have been modest. You have to dig into the numbers to see who really benefits from a Trump election. With an expected corporate tax cut that goes even deeper than the current 21 percent, everyone will be a winner at some level. There will be some relative losers too: clean-energy companies, for example, and maybe the auto industry if loosened mandates on electric vehicles domestically make them globally uncompetitive.” [editor’s note: As if the Biden regime was any less corrupt – TLK] (11/08/24)
“A prominent community church in Northern California is under scrutiny for orchestrating a nonofficial ballot drop box scheme in the month leading up to the Nov. 5 presidential election. After SFGATE presented evidence of the church’s ballot-gathering activities to Tehama County’s registrar of voters, officials said they would refer the matter to the District Attorney’s Office. Calvary Chapel, in the Tehama County seat of Red Bluff, is one of the larger churches in the town of around 14,400. While serving its parishioners, the church has been quietly deploying a multifaceted influence campaign called Real Impact with the explicit mission to ‘educate, equip, and encourage Christians to have a godly influence on our society and culture.’ Real Impact originated at the Chino Hills location of Calvary Chapel in 2019 and pledges to ‘[equip] the Church to stand for righteousness in the public square.’ It has since spread to several locations across Calvary’s network of 1,800 chapels.” (11/09/24)
“The 2024 presidential campaign ended pretty much where it began: loathing the never-ending presence of Donald Trump. On the day before the election, The New York Times front page displayed a gaudy editorial (badly disguised as ‘News Analysis’) under the title ‘Torrent of Lies Redefines Political Norms.’ Doesn’t that sound like a hard-charging rerun of 2016? Nothing ever seems to change from the paper that gaudily proclaimed under Trump that ‘The Truth Is More Important Now Than Ever.’ You can point and laugh, since The New York Times refused to admit that Hunter Biden’s laptop full of corruption details was authentic until 2022, and then it acknowledged reality in a story on page A-20, in paragraph 23.” (11/08/24)
“A hologram of a young sex worker haunts Amsterdam’s red light district. Dressed in faded denim hotpants, a leopard-print bra, with a tattoo snaking up her stomach and across her chest, the 3D computer-generated image reaches out and appears to knock on the window to attract attention. She leans forward, breathes on the glass and writes the word ‘help.’ The hologram is designed to represent Bernadette ‘Betty’ Szabo, a 19-year-old woman from Hungary who was murdered a few months after giving birth in 2009. … The murdered teenager’s image is being projected from behind a window, alongside hundreds of young women who continue to make a living in this notoriously risky industry. Investigators hope the lifelike hologram will help jog memories and draw attention to the unsolved murder.” (11/10/24)
