Tim Walz on China: lying then, or lying now?

The New Neo Posted on by

Or both?

The story, according to Minnesota Public Radio and the Walz campaign:

Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz “was so proud of his extensive experience” traveling to China that he “occasionally used to exaggerate it” by claiming to have visited the communist country twice as often as he actually did, Minnesota Public Radio reported on Monday.

Walz went on around 15 trips to China in the 1990s and early 2000s—rather than over 30, as he stated earlier in his political career—his campaign told Minnesota Public Radio this week.

Why is Walz pulling back on his “old China hand” credentials? Because the House Oversight Committee is investigating the nature of his longtime ties to China.

I guess that what appeals to the voters of Minnesota doesn’t sound so great on the national stage. So Tim adjusts the story accordingly.

Helene’s devastation, plus politics

The New Neo Posted on by

We don’t know the final death toll of Hurricane Helene, but it’s already high:

The Category 4 hurricane made landfall along Florida’s Big Bend region late Thursday night, with winds of 140 mph and a devastating storm surge. Helene left behind widespread destruction from the Sunshine State through Georgia into the Carolinas and Tennessee Valley as the storm traveled across the U.S.

At least 120 people have been confirmed dead across six states – Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee. …

Communities in western North Carolina were hit especially hard by the effects of Hurricane Helene, with catastrophic flooding destroying hundreds of roads and bridges. Access to several areas has been cut off, preventing crews from getting much-needed supplies like food, water and fuel to residents.

Dozens of people are now confirmed dead in North Carolina, and hundreds of people remain unaccounted for due to the lack of power and communication access.

Later in the article, it says that the storm brought between 10 and 29 inches of rain to the mountain areas of North Carolina. That is a storm of astounding magnitude.

NOTE: Reactions to natural disasters are often used to make political points. You probably recall how George W. Bush was blamed for the toll of Katrina in 2005. Now, with Biden symbolically at the helm, does anyone expect much leadership from him or from VP Harris, who is busy staging photo-ops on the storm? This article describes the plans of Biden, Harris, and Trump. The latter seems to be going to the area first (to Georgia; NC is still too messed up), and the others say they hope to in the future.

Hope for Iran?

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “sdferr.”]

Netanyahu has a message for the long-suffering people of Iran:

The vast majority of Iranians know their regime doesn’t care a whit about them. If it did care, if it cared about you, it would stop wasting billions of dollars on futile wars across the Middle East. It would start improving your lives. Imagine if all the vast money the regime wasted on nuclear weapons and foreign wars were invested in your children’s education, in improving your health care, in building your nation’s infrastructure, water, sewage, all the other things that you need. Imagine that.”

“When Iran is finally free — and that moment will come a lot sooner than people think – everything will be different,” he promises. “Our two ancient peoples, the Jewish people and the Persian people, will finally be at peace. Our two countries, Israel and Iran, will be at peace.

“When that day comes, the terror network that the regime built in five continents will be bankrupt, dismantled. Iran will thrive as never before. Global investment. Massive tourism. Brilliant technological innovation based on the tremendous talents that exists inside Iran. Doesn’t that sound better than endless poverty, repression and war?”

Concludes Netanyahu: “Don’t let a small group of fanatic theocrats crush your hopes and your dreams. You deserve better. Your children deserve better. The entire world deserves better. I know you don’t support the rapists and murderers of Hamas and Hezbollah, but your leaders do. You deserve more. The people of Iran should know – Israel stands with you. May we together know a future of prosperity and peace.”

Just about everyone knows that the majority of Iran’s people don’t want the theocracy that has ruled the country with an iron fist for over forty years. So far, they have been powerless to overthrow that regime. Perhaps Netanyahu is getting way ahead of himself with this vision of a Middle East at peace, but at this point it’s at least a possible consequence of the twistings and turnings that have led us from October 7, 2023 to this moment.

The death of Narallah and the attacks on the Hezbollah hierarchy are not direct hits on the Iranian mullahs, but they have to feel more vulnerable at this point. Hezbollah was – and perhaps still is – their strongest and most well-equipped proxy. It had extended Iran’s reach very far: to South America, to Syria, to Iraq, and of course most of all to Lebanon, Iran’s colonial crown jewel. Now Israel has reduced the power of that outpost of horror, at least temporarily, with stunning speed and remarkable ingenuity of a type that has astounded the world and was not predicted by anyone, as far as I know. Exploding pagers and walkie-talkies? Even screenwriters hadn’t come up with anything like that – but Israel did.

After a year of such heartache and horror, it’s a welcome moment of hope. Netanyahu seems to be positioning himself as a contender for the job of “leader of the free world” – after all, at the moment, there’s a vacancy. The “free world” has been shrinking lately, but his vision is that it can expand and that Iran can be part of it.

Today is the 20th anniversary of this blog [BUMPED UP: scroll down for new posts]

The New Neo Posted on by

That’s mind-boggling to me.

I started very tentatively, at my son’s suggestion. When he said I should start a blog I immediately said, “No, no way.” But he went to Blogger.com, showed me a few blog templates and told me to choose one and a blog title, and set it up. I didn’t give any of it much thought at all at the time and really just did it to get him to stop nagging me. But he told me it would be there if I ever wanted to fool around with it.

A week or two later, I guess I was bored enough to go there and fool around with it. After a few posts entitled “Test,” I published my very first real post, which was this one, only of course it was on my old Blogger website and got transferred over here many years later when I moved.

I posted intermittently for a few months, with almost no visitors and no comments. Actually, it took me a while to even get a site counter up there – at first I didn’t know there was such a thing. So I’m not sure what my initial traffic was, but if I got ten visitors a day that would have been a surprisingly large number to me.

Then one day in late February of 2005 – for no reason I can explain – I decided to get serious. What would happen, I wondered, if I tried posting every day and writing to other bloggers asking them to promote me? I made a little pact with myself to do that for one month and watch my traffic and comments, and if nothing improved I’d just quit. I was uncertain I could actually grind out a post or two every day for a whole month, but I did manage to do that, and got a few links from other bloggers who were in a generous mood.

In a month or two I had hundreds of readers a day, which seemed like a big big deal at the time. I even got a few Instalanches with ten thousand or more. I originally had no photo on the blog, but I decided I needed one because all my readers assumed I was a man and I wanted to correct that notion. It was my son, again, who suggested – because of my shyness – that I mimic the Magritte painting with the apple. The first photo I put on the blog was so bad (I don’t seem to have it anymore) that I soon replaced it with this better one – which I replaced a few years ago because it had gotten so outdated:

By the time a few more months had passed, I had a respectable mid-level – although not huge – audience and an active comments section.

Back in those days there were a lot of individual bloggers and there was a lot of blogger camaraderie. Blogs were the hot new trend, and the excitement was building. Pajamas Media formed and we had huge blogger get-togethers where I met people I’d been corresponding with, and the din of a hundred bloggers all jabbering together was formidable. When we had meals, much of the food went untouched because there was so much animated talking that people couldn’t bear to stop long enough to eat.

Those days are long gone. But they lasted a few years and were very fun.

And how did I meet Gerard? He was one of the many bloggers I wrote to, explaining what my site was about and sending some links. He was kind enough to link to me on his blog, and there were two or three short exchanges of that nature. Then, for reasons that remain obscure, one day he sent me a very long email about what was actually going on in his life at the time. It was written with his usual flair and I was fascinated. So that’s how we met – in the virtual world, long before we met in what he called the world dimensional (that phrase is from a poem by Hart Crane).

Well, now it’s a habit for me to blog. I also value my readers highly. Do I do it for you? Do I do it for me? Yes and yes.

Let’s celebrate!

Some thoughts on the recent turns that the war in the Middle East has taken

The New Neo Posted on by

With the killing of Nasrallah announced earlier today, and all the events of the last year in that region of the world, here are some musings.

Of course, Israelis detested Nasrallah. But I wonder how many Arabs felt the same way and are happy that Israel managed to take him out. He was an agent of Iran, which after all isn’t part of the Arab world, and had been responsible for the death of many Arabs, too. And although the vast majority of the Arabs of Gaza and the West Bank (or Judah and Sumeria) are highly invested in the perpetual war to destroy Israel, I wonder how many others in the region would just like the Palestinians and Iranians to cease and desist. For example, the Lebanese might recall the days when their country was a very pleasant place in which to live, and might want some of that back again. The Palestinians have stirred up trouble and bloodshed wherever they’ve gone. And the same for the Iranian mullahtocracy.

But even if it’s correct that many Arabs would like the wars to stop and could live with the existence of the state of Israel, will it matter? Because the billion dollar question is: what will Iran do?

One of the brilliant things Netanyahu has done is to make the message very clear: we can find you and kill you wherever you are. And although the higher-ups speak of the glory of martyrdom, I doubt they’re extremely eager for it themselves. It’s hard to know how well such deterrence would work for people who believe that martyrdom is the best way to paradise, but these people also seem to crave and enjoy having power on earth.

Speaking of Iran, one of the men taken out in that Beirut strike was Abbas Nilforoushan, Iran’s big man in Lebanon:

Nilforoushan, Hezbollah’s key Iranian advisor, was behind the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations in Iran. He appears to be second-in-command when it comes to military operations. In a 2020 article, the Israeli news website YNET identified him as the Islamic “Guard’s deputy commander for operations.”

Israel’s latest operations against Hezbollah have had an extraordinary boldness and must strike at least some fear into the hearts of Iran’s proxies and the Iranians themselves. I don’t think they saw anything like this coming and to me it seems to represent a sea change. First the utter shock and science-fiction quality of the exploding pagers, then the walkie-talkies, and then a whole series of targeted killings on the mid-level leaders. Then the higher-ups were obliterated while in a bunker-like headquarters where they were conferring, and my strong suspicious is that it was highly fortified. And yet they’re gone, killed in a place where they probably felt the safest, assembling in person because their other communications were either dismantled or seemed too dangerous to use.

Apparently, Khamenei has now been moved to a “secure” location. But is any location secure?

And to top it all off, the big blast occurred when Netanyahu was addressing the General Assembly of the UN and giving that body a piece of his mind.

NOTE: Joe Biden has come through with a pretty decent statement on the killing of Nasrallah. Then again, it’s being reported that Biden is none too pleased at having been kept out of the information loop and that his ceasefire plans didn’t work out. Harris’ statement starts out fine and then pivots to the usual blah-blah about the need for diplomacy. I think diplomacy has been tried for a long long time in the region, and has utterly failed when dealing with terrorists.

The IDF confirms it: Nasrallah was killed in Friday’s airstrike

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the story:

The underground command center was embedded beneath a residential building, the IDF noted in their report on Saturday, where Nasrallah and his top commanders were coordinating terrorist activities against Israel at the time of the attack.

During Nasrallah’s 32-year leadership of Hezbollah, he was responsible for planning and executing multiple terrorist operations, including attacks on Israeli civilians and soldiers, as well as international attacks that killed other nationals worldwide.

He’d been a terrorist for a long, long time.

I read in one of the comments that Israel finally found a way to use the UN for its advantage; that’s a reference to the fact that Netanyahu’s speech at the UN was apparently designed to get Nasrallah to feel safe enough to hold a meeting of this sort.

Many Iranians seem happy:

Many Syrians seem happy, too (although one always has to be careful with videos; some are of older events).

And I have little doubt that some Lebanese people, especially Christians, are in a celebratory mood too – although I’m not sure whether they feel the freedom to express it openly.

Trump and Zelensky, together again

The New Neo Posted on by

Lots of the back-and-forth can be found here. As far as I can tell, it seemed quite cordial. Remember that they have a history and know each other.

Of course, we don’t know what they said behind closed doors. But I doubt Trump would change course and abandon Ukraine because of Zelensky’s trying to ingratiate himself with the Harris camp. After all, Biden-Harris have supported him, and he has to prepare for the possibility of working with either Harris or Trump post-election. Trump almost certainly would try to end the war if he could, and he might not arm Ukraine as freely as Harris would, but I believe he would try to work in the best interests of both Ukraine and the US.

Here’s more:

Kamala Harris as courtroom prosecutor

The New Neo Posted on by

Joel B. Pollack asks a question: “Say, Has Kamala Ever Led a Prosecution?”:

Former Trump administration Department of Justice official Jeff Clark said Wednesday that he cannot find evidence that Vice President Kamala Harris ever personally led the prosecution of a single case at the local or state level.

“I’m looking to see whether she actually ‘first-chaired’ a trial, ever,” Clark told The Charlie Kirk Show on the Real America’s Voice network. …

Clark notes that he might have to do some research in person at courthouses to get an answer to this, but do note that Harris has admittedly exaggerated the number of cases she handled in the past, too.

I leave it to him to do the courthouse digging. But I’ve done some online sleuthing about this question and a while back I discovered this ABC story on the subject. Unfortunately, it doesn’t answer the question either, but it certainly discusses it in some depth. An excerpt:

In 2003, during Kamala Harris’ run for San Francisco district attorney, her campaign sent out mailers promoting her candidacy that touted her record as a prosecutor with “thirteen years of courtroom experience.”

The mailers, copies of which ABC News has obtained, portrayed Harris as “the veteran prosecutor we need to turn around our District Attorney office” and claimed she had a “long track record of being an outstanding public prosecutor.”

“Kamala has tried hundreds of serious and violent felonies, including homicide, rape, and child sexual assault cases,” the mailer stated.

But in a debate with her opponent, who challenged her on that, she said she had tried “about fifty cases.” My guess is that that number is much closer to the number she’s actually tried, in terms of Clark’s current question. But it would be nice to know.

I also looked for articles from the time period when she would have been a trial prosecutor. I found this one from August of 2000, which doesn’t exactly answer the question either but has a lot of information that might be relevant, such as:

One of the top prosecutors who led a failed revolt in San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan’s office resigned yesterday, saying she was saddened and disenchanted by Hallinan’s administration.

“I’ve become disillusioned and disappointed with the top leadership of the district attorney’s office,” said Kamala Harris, who is among a small exodus of prosecutors angered by the management style of Hallinan’s second in command, Darrell Salomon.

“Based on my number of years as a prosecutor, the bulk of which came in a very well-managed district attorney’s office in Alameda County, I thought I would be able to come to San Francisco and add value to the work of the office,” said Harris, a 10-year prosecutor who headed the career criminal prosecution unit for Hallinan.

Especially relevant might be this:

Harris, 35, was praised by police, prosecutors and defense attorneys as an experienced lawyer who could handle complex cases as well as be a role model for younger prosecutors.

“She’s an incredible lawyer, with great courtroom skills and a sense of justice tempered by compassion,” said Jim Collins, a veteran defense attorney. …

Al Giannini, a longtime homicide prosecutor in Hallinan’s office, called Harris “a highly skilled professional, hard-working trial lawyer.”

Sounds like she certainly has had some trial experience.

Hezbollah, Lebanon, Iran, and Israel

The New Neo Posted on by

First, here’s Caroline Glick:

Today’s news is that Israel has struck an area said to be Hezbollah’s and leader Nasrallah’s headquarters. The former seems to be true, although the truth of the latter – and any resultant damage to Nasrallah himself – is unknown. Here is an article from Axios regarding Nasrallah and the attack:

Israel conducted an airstrike on Friday targeting Hezbollah’s central headquarters in Beirut in an apparent attempt to kill the group’s leadership. …

Israeli officials say senior Hezbollah officials were at the headquarters at the time of the attack. There has been no official response so far from Hezbollah on the attack or on Nasrallah’s status. The Israeli source said the Israel Defense Forces did not yet have confirmation of whether he was hit. …

IDF spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari described the attack as a “precise strike on the central HQ of Hezbollah, which was intentionally built under residential buildings in Beirut in order to use them as human shields.” …

An Israeli official said Israel notified the U.S. minutes before the strike in Beirut, but two senior U.S. officials denied that, telling Axios they had no prior warning.

If I had to guess, I’d say that Israel was targeting the entire Hezbollah leadership and Nasrallah would be included in that. Note also that Hezbollah uses the same modus operandi as Hamas – that is, the use of headquarters and operations underneath civilian structures, the better to be able to talk about innocent casualties at Israel’s hands and/or to deter Israel from striking in the first place.

And of course Israel wouldn’t tell the US in advance, because of the risk of sabotage through leaks. This administration has made its opposition very clear. Not only that, but this announcement was made Wednesday by the US: “the U.S. military is not providing intelligence support to Israel for its operations in Lebanon.” So I see no reason Israel should provide any intelligence about the planned strike to the US.

The Axios article adds:

Friday’s attack is another clear escalation from Israel and suggests Netanyahu’s government has little interest in a ceasefire.

And yet there’s no mention in the article of just why that might be – nothing about the fact that Hezbollah has been sending rockets into Israel on a daily basis since October 8, has been “escalating” its own forces in readiness for a huge attack on Israel, and that between 60,000 and 100,000 Israelis have been forced out of their homes for nearly a year and many of those homes have been destroyed by Hezbollah.

What else is missing from the article? Why, it’s the word “Iran.”

Lastly, it becomes quite apparent that Israel could have done this sort of thing previously. It doesn’t seem to lack for intelligence on Hezbollah, to say the least. But it has desisted because of world opinion and its own desire for peace and not to “escalate” things. But now Israel and its leaders have been made well aware that this is no way out but preemptive actions of this nature, because this really is that sometimes-overused word: an existential battle.