Musk Stumped for Trump in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Saturday
FRIDAY 10/25/24
Israel Strikes Back – The Israeli Defense Force struck missile production facilities and surface-to-air missile facilities in Iran overnight Saturday in retaliatory counterattacks, with Haaretz reporting “strong” explosions heard in Tehran and other provinces. Iranian officials said it “thwarted” the Israeli attack, but “limited damage” was caused. Both the US and the IDF have warned against escalation by Iran, with Israel saying it “will be obligated” to respond, while the US is pushing for ceasefire deals in Gaza and Lebanon after the Israeli strikes.
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Fake Video Sparks Conspiracy – A fake video that purports to show someone’s hands destroying ballots in Bucks County, Pennsylvania for Donald J. Trump was manufactured and spread by Russia, US officials said Friday, NPR’s All Things Considered reports. The video, spread by Elon Musk’s X/Twitter and other social media sites, was officially debunked by local election officials who say the envelops and ballots in the video do not match what the county uses for early voting by mail.
Goes without saying?... Though it’s not being said out loud, yet, the fake video in its attempt to spark outrage among Trump supporters is evidence that Russia is working to tip the election scales toward the former president, just as it did for his presidential election win in 2016. Election officials’ debunking of this vide is unlikely to allay their concerns.
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Voter Registration Fraud – Meanwhile, in Lancaster County, in south-central Pennsylvania east of Harrisburg, election officials are reviewing thousands of voter registration applications because some of them may be fraudulent, LNP/LancasterOnline reports. Problematic applications were detected by elections staff in two batches of about 2,500 applications dropped at the Lancaster Board of Commissioners’ office before next Monday’s registration deadline.
“At this point, it is believed that the fraudulent voter registrations are connected to a large-scale canvassing operation for voter registrations,” said District Attorney Heather Adams.
Some of the 2,500 applications are legitimate.
Your reaction to this report probably depends on whether you believe the lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump; It’s either an indication that illegal aliens will get some registrations past officials by November 5, or that officials are able to prevent such fraudulent registration.
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No Endorsement – The Washington Post is “returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates,” Publisher/CEO Will Lewis said Friday, in explaining why it will refrain from endorsing Kamala Harris for president, media correspondent David Folkenflik reports in a scoop for NPR. Those roots go all the way back to 1988, the last time the WaPo did not endorse.
This follows the Los Angeles Times’ decision not to endorse, which led to resignations of its editorials’ editor and two editorial board members.
Retaliation… The two big-city newspapers’ owners are worried about retaliation if Donald J. Trump wins the November 5 election and follows his former chief of staff John F. Kelly’s description in The New York Times of the ex-president as being a fascist.
As founder of Amazon, WaPo owner Jeff Bezos, often described as a libertarian, has several contracts with the federal government including the US Postal Service. Fellow billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong is the businessman and medical device inventor who owns the LA Times.
--TL
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FRIDAY 10/25/24
UPDATE -- NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told Semafor that a Wall Street Journal report of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk speaking with Russian President Vladmir Putin should be investigated.
Musk Talks to Putin – Russian President/dictator Vladmir Putin and SpaceX/Starlink/Tesla/X-Twitter chief Elon Musk have been “in regular contact” since 2022, The Wall Street Journal reports in a scoop “confirmed by several current and former US, European and Russian officials.” They told the newspaper that Musk and Putin have spoken about personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions.
For example, Putin at one point asked Musk to “avoid” activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jingping, a close ally of Putin’s Russia.
Connections … Musk negotiated a unique arrangement with China in order to build a Tesla factory there the beginning of this decade. While every other automaker from outside China – US, European, Japanese and South Korean – must have a 50% partner, usually a local government in China in order to build and sell cars there and for export, Tesla owns its factory outright. More recently, Musk has led the America PAC that has contributed $72 million to the Trump/Vance campaign as of early October, according to NPR. And, of course, Musk has been holding his own rallies for Trump/Vance in 19-delegate swing state Pennsylvania and he will join the ex-president and his campaign in a rally Sunday at Madison Square Garden.
Deregulation … There is also Trump’s interest in appointing Musk, the world’s richest man, as deregulation czar – euphemistically, secretary for a department of government efficiency -- if he wins the presidency. In Tesla’s third-quarter earnings call with Wall Street analysts Wednesday evening, Musk lamented the need to seek approval state-by-state for Tesla’s fully autonomous Cybercab project. “There should be a federal approval process for autonomous vehicles,” Musk said. “If there’s a department of government efficiency, I’ll try to make that happen.”
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Apology to Natives – President Biden finally is fulfilling his promise to visit a Native American community, in order to apologize for a 150-year-plus federal program of separating American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children from their parents in order to simulate them into American society (per NPR’s Morning Edition). The program, which ended in 1969, exposed many of the children to abuse and even death.
Biden visits the Gila River Indian community outside Phoenix, not so coincidentally in the swing state of Arizona, Friday.
“This is part of the president’s legacy. This apology is historic, it’s impactful,” said press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.
--TL
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THURSDAY 10/24/24
No Clarity Here – The latest Marist polls, taken October 17-22, do not add any clarity to the presidential race. Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald J. Trump are “deadlocked” in Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia, Politico reports, with the slight differences explained away as being within the margins of error. Marist polled 1,193 likely voters each, in Arizona and Georgia and 1,226 likely voters in North Carolina.
Arizona: Trump leads Harris, 50% to 49%, but with a plus/minus 3.7-point margin of error.
North Carolina: Same as Arizona, at 50% for Trump and 49% for Harris, but with a 3.6-point margin of error.
Georgia: Trump and Harris are tied at 49%, with a 3.9-point margin of error.
While late polls in 2016 and 2020 gave some clues to the final outcome when compared with earlier polls in those years, we’re not getting any clues this year.
One thing… in the Harris/Walz camp’s favor is that we’re still talking about Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina here, in addition to the more traditional battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
--TL
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WEDNESDAY 10/23/24
DPRK Troops in Russia -- Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, speaking from Rome has confirmed that North Korea has lent troops to Russia, but told reporters the purpose for their deployment was not clear. Earlier this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the North Korean troops are to help Russia in its two-year-old-plus war with his country.
"There is evidence that there are DPKR (North Korean) troops in Russia," Austin said, per The Kyiv Independent. "What exactly are they doing? Left to be seen. Those are things we need to sort out."
Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine's military intelligence (HUR), said the first North Korean units were expected to arrive Wednesday in the Kursk Oblast region of Russia, where Ukrainian troops began their defensive incursion last August.
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Kelly’s October ‘Surprise’ – When he was president, Donald J. Trump was pretty open about his affection for authoritarians and dictators like China’s Xi Jingping and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Similar feelings for Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Russia’s Vladimir Putin have lasted all the way up to, and likely beyond, the November 5th presidential election.
On a certain level, Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, John F. Kelly’s warnings about Trump in a recorded interview with The New York Times might seem anti-climactic. If you haven’t paid attention to the warnings before, you are not terribly likely to suddenly care within two weeks of the election.
Even though Kelly said this: “In many cases I would agree with some of his policies. But again, it’s a very dangerous thing to have the wrong person elected to high office.”
And this: “Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators – he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure. … He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.”
And Kelly, the retired US Marine Corp general who was Trump’s homeland security secretary before he moved to the White House to be his chief of staff, said this, too: “I think he’d love to be just like he was in business – he could tell people to do things and they would do it, and not really bother too much about whether what the legalities were and whatnot.”
--TL
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TUESDAY 10/22/24
Two Weeks from Today – Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris beats Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump in poll averages for four of 10 battleground states, according to The Washington Post. Vice President Harris leads by one point in Nevada and two points each in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.
Trump leads by one point in North Carolina and two points each in Georgia and Arizona, according to the polling averages.
Of course, that’s all margin-of-error territory, indicating that polling hasn’t gotten much more definitive, or even helpful, over the last eight years.
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Blinken Tries Again – Secretary of State Antony Blinken has returned to Israel to meet again with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in hopes of building some peace momentum after the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, last week. Perhaps a bit more realistically, Blinken hopes to de-escalate tensions in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, The Washington Post reports. But as he arrived, an Israeli airstrike near a Beirut hospital killed 13 after Hezbollah said it launched rockets at Israel.
--Compiled and edited by Todd Lassa
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TUESDAY 10/22/24