Plus: You have to hand it to the Israeli intelligence services.
• Might we suggest carrier pigeons?
• Having apparently run out of Supreme Court justices to attempt to drive from public life, the left-wing nonprofit journalistic outfit ProPublica has directed its attention to sullying one of their most notable achievements: the Dobbs decision, which returned the power to regulate abortion to the people and to the states. Georgia now has a heartbeat law, which outlaws abortion once a fetus has a detectable heartbeat (with exceptions for rape, incest, and maternal health). A recent ProPublica article blamed the law for the deaths of two women who had taken chemical-abortion drugs (whose riskiness goes unremarked upon). The drugs killed the children but failed to expel all of their remains. One woman unsuccessfully sought treatment in a hospital, and the other feared it—both, supposedly, results of the law. But as our former colleague Isaac Schorr pointed out at Mediaite, the law does not forbid the surgical removal of an already dead child. No reasonable person who read the plain text of the law would think otherwise, which may be why ProPublica did not include the relevant portion. Even the argument that the doctors’ uncertainty about the law prevented treatment is unsubstantiated. The ProPublica article eventually admits that “it is not clear” why doctors waited to perform the necessary procedure. Laws against abortion haven’t caused any deaths, but ProPublica is doing its part to raise the death toll.
• Mark Robinson is the first black lieutenant governor of North Carolina, and the first black nominee of a major party to be the state’s governor. He came up from a difficult family background, worked blue-collar jobs, went bankrupt three times, got his college degree only in 2022, and came late to politics. With that biography, it could be forgiven if he was rough around the edges. But when Republicans nominated him, they knew that his baggage was much worse than that, including an internet paper trail of conspiratorial antisemitism. That has helped his Democratic opponent, state attorney general Josh Stein, build nearly a double-digit lead in the key swing state. Now, on the last day for candidates to drop out, CNN released a nuclear-grade opposition dump on Robinson, drawn from his comments between 2008 and 2012 on a pornographic website message board. These ranged from saying that he enjoyed watching transgender pornography, called himself a “perv” and a “black NAZI!,” to declaring, “Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it (slavery) back. I would certainly buy a few.” Robinson branded the posts a “manufactured” fiction and vowed to stay in the race. But CNN seems to have done its homework — while Trump, who gave Robinson a fulsome endorsement, and the North Carolina GOP plainly did not.
• High-profile cases breed turf battles between the federal and state governments. The second assassination attempt against Donald Trump has prosecutors from both the Department of Justice and the state of Florida building cases against Ryan Routh. So far, only the feds have filed charges. They allege not attempted murder but illegal possession of an SKS rifle. (He is a felon, and the gun had an obliterated serial number.) Under the dual-sovereignty doctrine, double jeopardy does not forbid separate prosecutions by the federal and state governments for the same crime. Both the feds and Florida have vital interests at stake—public safety, including that of candidates for high office—and both have applicable attempted-murder statutes that carry potential sentences of life imprisonment. The issue is not which government should proceed to the other’s exclusion but rather which should proceed first. We suspect that will be the feds. That is probably fine, notwithstanding the department’s claim, since late 2022, that Trump’s candidacy against Biden and Harris created a conflict requiring a special counsel for Trump cases. The important thing for ambitious, competitive lawyers to remember is that the object is to prosecute the assailant, not undermine each other.
• Ahead of his rally in Nassau County, N.Y., Donald Trump fired off a Truth Social post in which he offhandedly vowed to unravel one of the accomplishments of his presidency: the cap on the deduction for state and local taxes (SALT). Before Trump and Republicans created the $10,000 cap, individuals were able to deduct an unlimited amount of state income taxes and local property taxes from their federal returns. This provided a huge benefit to wealthy individuals in high-tax blue states who could reduce their tax burden. It also provided an incentive for progressive states to spend more money and raise taxes, because they knew that the economic effects as well as the political backlash to those tax increases would be blunted by the deduction. But beyond being bad fiscal policy that fuels bigger government, restoring the deduction is terrible politics for a populist Republican presidential candidate. The states most affected by the SALT deduction are solid-blue ones that will not be competitive, led by California, New York, and New Jersey. If Trump really wanted to adopt a bold and sensible policy with populist appeal, instead of calling for bringing back the SALT deduction, he should be calling for eliminating it altogether.
• It is hardly surprising that ABC News moderator David Muir was tougher in fact-checking Donald Trump than Kamala Harris. As for Muir’s mid-debate interjection that, “as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country”: The FBI crime statistics have had serious gaps in their collection of data in recent years—omitting Miami-Dade County, New York City, and Los Angeles in 2021, and never collecting data from 2,000 (often much smaller) jurisdictions even in the best recent year. Just a few days after the debate, the National Crime Victimization Survey released its figures for 2023. The NCVS is a useful tool, because while the more widely discussed FBI crime figures count only crimes reported to the police, the NCVS surveys around 240,000 Americans about whether they were victims of reported or unreported crime. In 2023, 22.5 out of every 1,000 Americans over age eleven was the victim of a nonfatal violent crime. That is only slightly lower than the 2022 rate of 23.5. A decline of one-tenth of 1 percent is nothing to celebrate.
• The U.S. Navy’s personnel shortages are now hampering its ability to repair its ships at sea, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. The report found that 63 percent of executive officers surveyed said that insufficient staffing made it “moderately to extremely difficult to complete repairs while underway.” The GAO highlighted inaccurate guidelines and substandard training as contributing factors. Many sailors in engineering departments also have little practical maintenance experience before reaching the fleet, with computer-based training substituted for hands-on work and with the hope that an experienced sailor will train the initiate once he reaches his first ship. Combine inexperience with tool scarcity, the growing time required to retrieve work authorizations and hazmats, and the churn of sailors to and from the ships, and the U.S. Navy finds itself up a creek.
• American families don’t like the blue-state way of life. Since 2004, they have preferred “expansive red states” to “expensive blue states.” That trend has continued and somewhat accelerated, according to a new study by the Institute for Family Studies. Families are leading an exodus out of blue states including New York, California, Oregon, Washington, Illinois, and Massachusetts. They are headed for Idaho, Montana, South Carolina, South Dakota, Florida, and Texas. Families seem to be lured by cheaper land, leading to cheaper housing, not by subsidies. Red states offer lower taxes and sometimes no state income tax, stronger job growth, and increasingly laws that protect children from progressive educational fads. The trend was also driven by pandemic-era movements that brought kids to schools that were open and maskless. What families want from the state is not more paternalism, but freedom.
• Two progressive Denver nonprofits, ViVe Wellness and Organization Papagayo, have moved thousands of Venezuelan migrants, some of whom belong to the violent street gang Tren de Aragua, into run-down apartments in nearby Aurora. According to an email obtained by NR, the nonprofits chose specific apartment complexes because they were poorly managed—no safety inspections, no vetting of tenants, leniency on maximum occupancies—which suggests that the do-gooders behind the migrant-relocation program were aware the new tenants might be disruptive. And they were right: A former tenant told NR that the apartments fell into chaos after the new arrivals: trash everywhere, drug dealing, loud noise through the night. Local politicians, including Governor Jared Polis (D.), have attributed the residents’ concerns to right-wing fearmongering. Yet crimes and citations have more than doubled at two of the apartment complexes since 2022, while nearly doubling at a third complex. Tren de Aragua now uses formally vacant units to host “parties” where they “serve drugs and child prostitution,” according to a CBS report. What started as a humanitarian project to help Venezuelans improve their circumstances has ended in disorder, depravity—and progressive blindness.
• Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson (D., we note superfluously) has long planned to discontinue use of ShotSpotter, and he is not about to change course because of an inconvenient report from his police force. The report found that, in the last eight months, police made 451 arrests tied to alerts from the gunshot-detection tool. In 20 percent of the cases, the absence of any corresponding 911 call indicates that the alerts led to arrests that would not have otherwise happened. Alerts also led to the recovery of 470 guns obtained or used guns illegally. Police aided 143 shooting victims after receiving ShotSpotter alerts. The very same people who claim to prioritize the preservation of black life above all else are now stripping police of a powerful tool for saving those, and other, lives.
• In a divisive presidential campaign, bipartisanship might seem like a relief, but it often leads to bad policies. The Biden administration, with the support of Kamala Harris, is taking the same position as Trump and J. D. Vance by seeking to block the acquisition of U.S. Steel by Nippon Steel. These pols are stopping investment in the American workforce by a company in Japan: America’s No. 1 source of foreign direct investment, a country whose prime minister addressed Congress this year, and a stalwart ally against China. U.S. Steel has said that, without the investment, it will likely cut jobs and possibly move its headquarters out of Pittsburgh. Nippon Steel is probably overpaying for U.S. Steel and has promised even more investment in the U.S. than it had initially offered to appease the politicians opposed to it. The people who own both companies, their shareholders (they are both publicly traded), approved the merger almost unanimously. It’s a medium-sized merger deal that would have never attracted much attention, except that it’s an election year, and politicians think that blocking it will help them win Pennsylvania. Who will stand up for the forgotten workers when they’re laid off in a nonelection year?
• In Hong Kong, two journalists have been convicted of sedition. They are Chung Pui-kuen and Patrick Lam. Theirs are the first such convictions since China took over in 1997. Chu Kai-pong is involved in another deplorable “first.” He is the first person to be convicted of sedition for wearing a T-shirt—a T-shirt with a pro-democracy slogan on it. Yes, Hong Kong was killed off in 2020 (thereabouts). This killing off is old news. But we should still look in on the corpse now and then.
• You have to hand it to the Israeli intelligence services. In July, officials in Hezbollah, the Iranian terrorist proxy based in Lebanon, told Reuters that they had resorted to using lower-technology communications, such as pagers, to evade “Israel’s electronic eavesdropping.” This came as no news to the Israelis. According to media reports, the Israeli spy agency Mossad successfully intercepted those pagers during the manufacturing process and planted a small quantity of the high-explosive PETN in each unit. On September 17, those pagers detonated simultaneously, killing at least eleven Hezbollah fighters and commanders and injuring more than 4,000 across Lebanon and Syria. The next day, Hezbollah-issued “walkie-talkie” radios exploded in a second round of the affair. This spectacular operation is just the latest Israeli intelligence coup since the outset of the war. Israeli intelligence penetration of Iran and its vassals in the region is so thorough that it may be staying Iran’s hand. The regime had promised retaliation for the July 31 bombing of a Tehran diplomatic facility that killed Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh but has not delivered. And this operation may just be the opening salvo in Israel’s long-delayed pivot to the north, where Israeli citizens were forced to evacuate their homes under Hezbollah fire after the 10/7 attacks and have not yet returned.
• Mexico’s incoming president, Claudia Sheinbaum, is a leftist and the protégé of outgoing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. With Sheinbaum’s enthusiastic approval, AMLO rammed through a sweeping change to Mexico’s government, making 1,600 federal judicial posts elected offices, including those on the Supreme Court of Justice. Ryan Berg, director of the Americas program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, explains that “Mexico’s checks and balances” are “being weakened to the point of practical elimination.” In at least five ways, AMLO’s reforms appear to violate the U.S.–Mexico–Canada Agreement. They make judicial decisions vulnerable to political influence and donor interests, bans GMOs, bans fracking, dismantles several independent agencies and transfers their functions to the executive branch, and favors Mexican entities over U.S. and Canadian firms with respect to water use. President Biden’s ambassador to Mexico, former Colorado senator Ken Salazar, was slow to criticize the AMLO proposals and a year ago defended AMLO’s widely rejected claims that Mexico’s 2006 presidential election was rigged. Mexico is becoming more autocratic, and the Biden administration is asleep at the wheel.
• Columbia University established a task force on antisemitism, which interviewed almost 500 students. In its report, the task force said, “The testimonies of hundreds of Jewish and Israeli students have made clear that the University community has not treated them with the standards of civility, respect, and fairness it promises to all its students.” A co-chairman of the task force, Ester R. Fuchs, remarked, “There has been a view among some that this is not a real problem, so we thought it was important to demonstrate what is actually happening to students.” In response, dozens of Columbia faculty signed an open letter criticizing the report. “We write as Jewish faculty,” they began. The report “contributes to a hostile narrative about Columbia,” they said. It “is marked by conspicuous neglectful omissions of context and climate,” they said. It “conflates feelings with facts.” For her part, Fuchs said she was “gobsmacked” by the letter. “It’s just sad, and it’s tragic for students on this campus to have a group of faculty dismiss their experiences as just feelings.” Needless to say, this happens in few other contexts at elite universities.