Maybe we should ask the Israelis to help

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under the protection of rainbow power

US warships come under attack in Red Sea as nearly two dozen incoming missiles and drones shot down

We have neither the will nor the capability to do anything about the Iranian proxys. the Houthis, who have shut down the red Sea and forced 90% of Suez-bound cargo traffic to forego the Canal and divert around the tip of Africa instead.

We know about the Harris/Biden/Blinken triumvirate’s refusal to wipe out the Houthi missile sites for fear of offending Iran, but we couldn’t do much about it even if we wanted to, because of the miserable shape of our navy.

It’s a shame that the Navy’s only refueling tanker in the Middle East ran aground three days ago and we have no replacement, but not to worry, our military’s on top of things and is looking for a commercial vessel as a substitute. Once located, only a few weeks of retrofitting will be needed before it’s ready to be put in use.

Compounding the problem is the fact that the Big Horn is the only oiler the Navy has in the Middle East. One shipowner told gCaptain that the Navy is scrambling to find a commercial oil tanker to take its place and deliver jet fuel to the USS Abraham Lincoln.

If the Navy resorts to using a commercial oil tanker as a temporary replacement, it would need to install a Consolidated Cargo Handling and Fueling (CONSOL) system for underway replenishment operations. This system includes specialized refueling rigs, tensioned fueling hoses, and high-capacity fuel pumps—all essential for safely transferring fuel to warships at sea. The tanker would also require robust communication and control systems to ensure precise coordination during refueling maneuvers.

Call in the IDF.

If I were a client of Deloitte Haskins, I'd be concerned about what other political-activist partners breach their clients' confidential information (UPDATED)

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BURN NOTICE: Leaker of JD Vance Private Communications Revealed

In an exclusive story published Friday, Breitbart's Matthew Boyle has revealed the name of the person who leaked private communications between the private citizen and now Senator and Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance and an until-now unnamed person, which included uncomplimentary comments Vance made in 2020 about then-President Donald Trump. The leaker, named Kevin Gallagher, is a consultant for Deloitte, a financial services firm. The Washington Post originally broke the story about the leaked messages but did not release the name of the person with whom JD Vance was messaging. Boyle wrote:

But what the Post did not do is tell its audience who Vance was communicating with in these messages, or provide the full context of the conversation, since it only reported part of one side of it. The Post argued it granted the source who provided these messages anonymity “because of concerns about retaliation,” but Breitbart News can reveal the person’s identity here for the first time as a well-connected Deloitte consultant.

Here's where Breitbart News spills the goods on the leaker:

The Deloitte consultant, whose identity the Washington Post’s Peter Jamison hid from the newspaper’s readers, is named Kevin Gallagher. Deloitte’s website lists Gallagher as a “principal” with the firm, based in Connecticut. Breitbart News has seen a screenshot of messages that Vance sent to Gallagher—the other side of the conversation is not available, because Gallagher had deleted his account, thereby deleting the messages—confirming that Gallagher is in fact the recipient of these.

A "principal" generally means a person highly placed in the firm. Deloitte, among other areas, provides services to various levels of government. For now, anyway. Should the Trump/Vance ticket win the election in November, this debacle may well end up costing Deloitte some significant government contracts. A company, after all, that does business with the United States government should be expected to maintain some degree of control over the unauthorized release of information; in this, Deloitte is not doing so well, a source told the publication:

A source close to Trump’s family told Breitbart News that the Trumps are watching this episode with horror. “The entire government affairs team at Deloitte should be fired,” the source close to Trump’s family said. “If they’re too dumb to understand how this is going to affect Deloitte’s access to a Trump administration then they have no business working in government affairs.”

Kev’s a Yale graduate, of course; Deloitte only hires the best.

UPDATE: That was fast — clicking on Mr. Gallagher’s Deloitte page now produces the following message:

A modest price cut at Andrew Kissel's old place on Quaker Lane

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38, 48, and 58 Quaker Lane has been dropped from $35 million to $11 million, or buy individual lots separately, $3.75M for lot 38-48, $7.25M on Lot 58, $11M for both I wrote about this property in August after the broker had despaired of selling the full parcel for $35 million and offered the one with the house on it for just $20 million; good thing you waited.

The listing now says that the lots will be sold in toto or individually via an auction that begins today and will end October 10, and the listed prices are intended to be “starting bids”. Great expectations are not always fulfilled.

And all P. Diddy's Hollywood friends condemn Trump because "he's crass".

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Fortunately for the Hollywood 1,000, the Epstein Rule will spare them from prosecution. Here’s just a partial list of the A-List celebrities and their lessers who frolicked at Mr. Diddy’s days-long sex fests and rape sessions. Leonardo DiCaprio was unavailable for comment.

Over at his blog Battle Swarm, Larry Person details some of the back story for those of us who, like him, haven’t been following Diddy’s career since 2008.

I Say, This “Diddy” Fellow Seems Like A Bit Of A Scoundrel

Quelle dommage

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***Original post***

The Israeli Defense Forces launched a strike on Iran's Hezbollah headquarters in Beirut Friday with a target of eliminating the group's leader, Hassan Nasrallah. 

"The IDF conducted a precise strike on the Central Headquarters of the Hezbollah terrorist organization, embedded under residential buildings in the heart of the Dahieh in Beirut," IDF released in a statement. 

UPDATE: They got him.

The Harris/Biden team will weep; I will not.

to be updated

Of course, there’s another theory, being circulated by those best situated to know:

They've swapped the puppet, but their thirst for power and control remains

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David Strom:

Secret Service Is Being Weaponized Against Trump Campaign

…. I think by now it is pretty obvious that the Mayorkas Department of Homeland Security, in particular, and the Biden administration, in general, were happy to provide substandard security to Trump while knowing that Iran had active plots and hit squads in the country working to assassinate Trump. But you may think that the failures were due solely to massive incompetence. 

… It's hard to go wrong arguing that a failure is due to government incompetence, and without solid proof, accusing somebody of orchestrating the murder of a former president and perhaps future president is a judgment call. 

But there is no question that the failures of the Secret Service to protect President Trump are being used to stymie his ability to campaign. The Secret Service is not only still providing inadequate protection to Trump, but working to ensure that Kamala Harris can campaign freely while vetoing Trump campaign events. 

… On Wednesday, Senator Josh Hawley revealed that a whistleblower was accusing the Secret Service of hampering the Trump campaign by providing security to Kamala Harris sufficient to enable a campaign rally while denying Trump the security assets to do the same thing.

It's the sort of bureaucratic move that usually goes under the radar--an administration putting its thumb on the scale in order to get a result that is unfair but desirable to the powers that be.

This is both playing with the life of a marked man and the future President of the United States and blatant interference with the election campaign. 

I didn't write about this before because I wasn't sure about the quality of the evidence. "Whistleblower" can mean anything and be anybody, and while I didn't have great doubt that this was the case, I decided to wait and see if more came out. 

Well, it did. Several news outlets have confirmed the story. The Secret Service DID deny assets to Trump after having initially approved them, upending his schedule in the final weeks of the campaign. 

When every vote counts in the swing states, these sorts of things can make a big difference to the outcome of the election, and once again, the gang at Homeland Security is playing with Trump's life because they see him as a threat to their power. Biden, Harris, Mayorkas, and all the power-mad crowd do indeed see Trump as an existential threat. 

The threat isn't to democracy but to their desire for total autocratic power. Trump is on the cusp of destroying their grip on power. They want him gone. Or, as Commerce Secretary Raimundo puts it, "extinguished." 

Or perhaps squashed like a bug.

Trump's life is being threatened, and the threats on his life are being used to hamper his campaign. If the assassins don't get him, then the threat of them will still keep him less mobile and able to campaign. 

We can argue about how active the Biden/Harris team is in inviting people to kill Donald Trump, but there is no question that they are using the threats to his life to limit his ability to campaign. 

The Secret Service has been drawn into the political arena as an active participant. Mayorkas, perhaps the most malignant force in Washington, is using his power to ensure Kamala Harris gets elected. He has the power of life and death for Donald Trump, and is using it on her behalf. 

Which is just one more step down the path of weaponizing government. 

Excellent article by Stephen Green over on PJ Media

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Team Biden Can't Understand How It Blew Middle East Peace, and I Can't Stop Cry-Laughing

Excerpts:

Less than one month into his solitary, sad little term, Biden lifted former president Donald Trump’s restoration of U.N. sanctions on Iran. The White House and the State Steno Pool sold the move as something that "could help Washington move toward rejoining the 2015 nuclear agreement aimed at reining in the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program." Trump had withdrawn from Barack Obama's "Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, in 2018, accusing Iran of serious violations."

"Trump had Iran broke and boxed in," I wrote. "Biden unleashed the Kraken."

In addition to that, Biden restored US funding to UNRWA (a virtual arm of Hamas) and removed the Houthis from the Foreign Terrorist Organization and Specially Designated Global Terrorist lists that Trump had finally put them on late in his term. 

But perhaps the most bone-headed move was Biden's rejection of Mike Pompeo and Jared Kushner's Abraham Accords, negotiated under Donald Trump's auspices between Israel and a growing number of Arab states. 

The genius of the Accords was twofold. The first is that the peace agreements were bilateral between Israel and each Arab nation — no U.S. security guarantees required. The Accords were meant to be self-sustaining as trade and cultural contacts grew between states that had been officially at war for decades.

The second is that the negotiations bypassed the Palestinians completely.

Every other peace effort was premised on something more impossible and only slightly less ridiculous than trying to ride a pogo stick to Mars: negotiate a settlement between Israel and the Arabs of Gaza/West Bank before negotiating a formal peace between Israel and the rest of the Arab world.

The Palestinians don't want peace. They want to murder Jews from the river to the sea — and then some. And yet every American president from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama insisted on pounding their skulls on the cement wall of Palestinian intransigence. 

The Accords roadmap was to bring one Arab nation after another on board, culminating in Trump's second term with Saudi Arabia. With Iran broke and the Arabs at peace with Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah would have withered on the vine. Then, and only then, peace might be brokered between Israel and the Arabs of Gaza and the West Bank.

Instead of carrying on, White House PressSec Jen Psaki breezily denounced the Abraham Accords in May of 2021 as having failed to do "anything constructive" because, as I wrote above, the "entire administration is naifs, weaklings, idiots, and Marxists." The Biden-Harris administration let the Accords wither while they empowered Iran and pursued an old-school peace plan starting with — surprise! — an Israeli/Palestinian peace made impossible because Biden had already empowered Iran.

So now the administration has spent the last year, described in dizzying detail by Foer, scrambling around trying to figure out how to put out the fires when they're the ones who poured the gasoline and lit the match.