Democratic Senate candidate from Texas James Talarico has been missing from the campaign trail since September 26:
According to local press, Talarico’s campaign claims he is having a bad bout with the flu, which they say required a visit to urgent care. …
Paxton’s campaign was right on it, taking full advantage by putting out a milk carton photo of Talarico and asking if he’s been seen.
I, for one, believe the flu story, for the simple reason that I got the flu 12 days ago and I’m still not all better. Plus my son, who is far younger than I, also is still somewhat sick. This is a nasty, nasty bug that started with a cough, segued into many days of fever and exhaustion, and then turned into several GI symptoms; I’ll spare you by not describing the latter except to say they haven’t totally gone away.
So yes, Talarico’s campaign could actually be telling the truth about this. However, there isn’t much else it’s telling the truth about, especially the extreme leftism of the candidate, although certain aides seem to be letting it slip:
#TXSEN NEWS:
In the closing days of James Talarico’s race against @KenPaxtonTX, Talarico’s own staffers could cause major problems for the Texas Democrat — in this exclusive footage, one of Talarico’s Marxist field organizers explains how she views him as the "vehicle" to push Texas drastically leftward, and that Talarico is actually far more anti-Israel than he publicly claims to be
Jonathan Turley takes Macron to task for pretending to champion free speech while attacking it:
French President Emmanuel Macron went full Orwell this week. While long the darling of Western media, Macron has been one of the most anti-free-speech leaders in the world. This week, he declared that “The so-called American ‘free speech’ today, which some people have promoted, is the opposite of free speech.” …
In my book The Indispensable Right, I discuss how France has careened down the slippery slope of censorship for decades, and the desire to silence others has now become an insatiable appetite.
Macron has supported figures like his anti-free-speech ally Thierry Breton in globalizing the reach of the infamous Digital Services Act (DSA) to curtail speech, including Americans and American companies.
In his latest pitch for censorship, Macron pulls out an old saw that if everyone can speak freely, no one can speak freely.
Macron declared that “There is no freedom if there is no limit to my freedom, which begins with the freedom of others and respect for a common framework. I know this when I walk down the street: my freedom cannot mean hitting you, insulting you or trashing the public space we all share.”
That line is remarkably telling. It captures how even “insulting” language is treated as a crime in France.
Of course there is an inherent problem with free speech – which is that liars have free reign and can spread their lies with impunity. But who decides who the liars are? That is the question, and that is what makes free speech necessary. We saw during the COVID era that the government was busily engaged in censoring what turned out to be the truth. We need no further demonstration of the dangers of censorship.
But France, unlike the US but like most of Europe, has no robust tradition of freedom of speech. I discovered that – much to my surprise – quite early in my blogging career, when I traveled to France twenty years ago to write about the al-Durah trials. You can read what I wrote back then in several posts, especially this one. Here’s an excerpt:
What I hadn’t realized was how US-centric my questions had been. Yes, of course, I knew that France has a different legal system than ours: theirs was based mainly on the Napoleonic Code, whereas ours was a predominantly common law system of evolving and changing interpretations of previous case law and statutes, under the overarching protection of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
But surely, as two Western countries purporting to share a love of liberty, the law of France and that of the US shouldn’t be all that different.
It was only when I looked into the law of defamation under the French legal system that I realized the differences were not subtle, as I’d previously thought. They were major, reflecting profound differences in the attitudes of each country towards justice, its citizenry, society–and, in particular, the value and desirability of freedom of speech.
Here is a summary of French law concerning defamation; see pages thirteen and fourteen for the relevant material.
Essentially, France has made it incredibly easy to win a libel suit. Nearly all you need to do is to show that you were defamed (“any allegation or imputation of an act affecting the honor or reputation of the person or body against whom it is made”). I said “nearly all” because yes, there is a defense, and that is truth.
Well, that doesn’t sound so bad, does it? But it is bad, and this is why: the burden of proof in France falls on the defendant.
That’s such a dry, legal phrase: “burden of proof.” But what it means in practice is that it’s up to the person who made the defamatory statement to prove to a three-judge panel (not a jury; this reflects the fact that the French have far less trust in the decisions of its ordinary citizen than the US does) that the defamatory statement was true. Or, if the statement concerned a matter of public importance, he/she is required to prove that he/she conducted a serious investigation before making the statement, and that the statement was measured and objective and without even a trace of personal hostility.
Check out that word, prove. It means just what it says, not “indicate he/she had reason to believe it was true” or “suggest it might be true,” or even “prove it was most likely true.” It places the burden of proof in defending against a libel suit unconscionably — almost ludicrously — high.
In this time in which social media has taken over so much of our communication, and algorithms manipulate people for nefarious reasons, the spread of lies is facilitated and helped along by the general historical ignorance of much of the Western world (especially young people). But censorship adds another layer of control and ultimately gives more opportunity to spread lies of the official variety.
What is the solution? I confess that I don’t know. But Macron’s solution, or Andy Burnham’s, is no solution at all.
Yesterday, on the October 7 anniversary, Mamdani managed to squeeze out a few words of sympathy for victims of Hamas before condemning Israel for fake genocide. That was too many Israel-sympathetic words for the left to stomach, apparently. Nothing will satisfy them, although the destruction of Israel and Jews would be considered a good start.
It is mind-boggling how the people heckling Mamdani wrap themselves in the cloak of virtue. But of course, that’s an old ploy as well – the Reign of Terror comes to mind, in which the killers talked incessantly of virtue and especially of the virtue of the common man. But there is no inherent virtue in a mob.
On this anniversary there are many articles reflecting on the intervening three years and what we have learned.
In some ways, the post-10/7 wars have gone better than expected for Israel. At the beginning, it seemed as though Hezbollah, for example, would be a more formidable foe than it has been. That doesn’t mean it’s been easy, or that Israel can ever rest. But it does mean that 10/7 acted more as a wakeup call to galvanize Israel into taking the threats seriously and understanding that its enemies really do mean to destroy it.
Unfortunately, another thing that’s been learned is how powerful Jew-hatred is, including when it’s cloaked in a fake “anti-Zionism” that is nothing more than a vicious double standard that will not allow Israel to defend itself. This did not begin on 10/7; I’ve written two posts so far about how far back it goes, and how instrumental the Soviets were in spreading the word (please see this as well as this).
The anti-Jewish forces got busy right away, as early as 10/8 when Israel had done nothing as yet except be viciously attacked. But Jew-hatred always finds fertile ground, and it has spread immensely since 10/7, both on left and right. A lie really does get halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on. It is sobering and depressing, but it’s reality these days.
Has there ever been a people more frequently or more preposterously lied about than the Jews?
I don’t ask that in expectation of sympathy. It’s perversely flattering to excite the sort of malign curiosity that cannot be satisfied by what’s observably true. But there’s also been a heavy price to pay for being a figment of such superstitious fear and loathing that even the presence of Jews isn’t necessary for fear and loathing to take root and flourish. Distant hearsay can be enough. …
… [F]olklore hasn’t quite given up on the figure of the Wandering Jew, cursed to roam the earth homeless as punishment for taunting Jesus on the way to the crucifixion. Long before academic anti-Zionists began to call for the expulsion of Israelis from Israel, Luther had posited their eternal exile as an expression, sanctioned by God, of their vagabondage of soul. And as for the Jew as companion of the devil, not to say the devil himself, I can personally vouch for the tenacity of that superstition, as more than one of my schoolfellows have asked—in Prestwich, north Manchester, England, 1954—if I would show them what remained of my tail.
Regarding the Blood Libel, the malicious medieval defamation that told of Jews kidnapping and killing Gentile children for their blood, either to add zest to matzah or to replenish the blood of male Jews who menstruated profusely as a consequence of circumcision—another fantasy, too lurid and deranged to be simply called a falsehood—it too has resurfaced in recent years, determining the way the deaths of Palestinian children in the latest Gaza war have been presented as the result of Israel Defense Forces soldiers killing little ones “for sport” and laughing as they do so. No footage of such vile behavior exists, of course. I myself was widely misreported as arguing, in a piece in the [London] Observer a couple of years ago, that the press should cover up all word of such deaths. In fact, I argued for no such thing, nor would the left-leaning Observer have printed the piece had its staff thought that was my meaning. My target was the narrative strategy of the BBC and other news outlets, in which nine stories out of 10 led with the latest death count of Palestinian children—too cruel had they been even a quarter true, but which time and again proved unverifiable.
The charge of genocide leveled at Israel, a charge that invariably comes with the pseudo-authoritative definite article—the genocide, to muffle dissent and to rejig the hierarchy of genocides in favor of Israel’s victims—could be said to be the biggest lie of all.
And an extremely successful lie, at that. On the left in the 2026 election in the US, it is almost required that a Democrat candidate support the claim. The right – or the former right, such as Tucker Carlson – has its adherents, as well.
Powerline has this post of remembrance. The stories remain heartbreaking, just like the 9/11 stories. But there is no going back and undoing what happened. The only way is to go forward. But how to do that in the face of the remarkable moral inversion of much of the world? Here is a comment there which deals with that question:
The most stunning thing to me is the response of Western Civilization to the horrendous Satanic acts of Hamas on October 7th. In a functional, optimistic and honorable civilization, our collective response should have been total commitment to the eradication of Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamism in general. Sadly, the opposite has happened. Many (mostly European) countries have doubled down on Jew hatred, admiration for the sub-human “palestinian cause” and total fecklessness in the face of their suicidal choices of importing millions of proto-terrorists into their own countries.
Israel and the United States of America* have stood virtually alone against the creeping scourge of “submission”.
‘Tell me what you accuse the Jews of [and] I’ll tell you what you are guilty of’, said the great Soviet writer Vasily Grossman. Today, that grim, eternal truth was starkly illustrated by the Green Party’s passing of a motion saying ‘Zionism is Racism’. To throw around the word ‘racism’ even as you single out Jewish sovereignty as uniquely demonic, to pose as an enemy of bigotry even as you dream of the erasure of the world’s only Jewish state, takes moral duplicity to sickening new heights. In their snivelling whisperings about ‘racism’, these scumbags reveal their own.
It was at their conference in Brighton that the Green Party of England and Wales voted in favour of the ‘Zionism is Racism’ screed. The motion expressly defines the Greens as an ‘anti-Zionist party’. It says Zionism is a species of racial hatred, and will henceforth be ‘treated as any other form of racism’. Most obnoxiously of all, it commits the Greens to campaigning for the scrubbing of the Jewish nation from the face of the Earth. It calls for ‘the establishment of a single democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine, with Jerusalem as its capital’. So no more Jewish homeland. No more tiny patch of land, a poxy 263 by 71 miles, for the Jews to call their own. All of it would disappear. Imagine accusing others of being ‘genocidal’ even as you agitate for the total dismantling of the ancestral kingdom of the Jews.
I have been meaning to post this interview with Dara Horn, who has written penetratingly on Jew-hatred and what is actually behind it. Now seems like a good time to recommend watching it. A great many people have tackled that topic, to be sure. But I’m especially impressed with her insight:
Perhaps not, although he has a history of claiming Egyptian citizenship:
Michigan progressive Democrat U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed said in a previously unreported 2016 video that he held dual U.S.-Egyptian citizenship, contradicting his campaign’s claim that he has never been an Egyptian citizen.
The video, first reported Monday by The Washington Free Beacon, shows El-Sayed speaking at a GlobeMed conference in Detroit while serving as the city’s health director.
“I carry dual citizenship, and I grew up spending most of my summers in another country where I understood what it meant not to have the right to self-govern,” El-Sayed told the audience.
Now he says he was mistaken:
Richner said El-Sayed had been told as a child that his grandfather pursued Egyptian citizenship on his behalf because his parents were born in Egypt.
But when El-Sayed and his family later attempted to verify his status, she said they could find no documentation establishing Egyptian citizenship.
I can’t say I care either way. El-Sayed is cut from the same cloth as Mamdani, a leftist and Muslim with a smooth exterior and disarming smile, who unfortunately has a chance of winning his election.
Actress Eva Marie Saint has died at 102. By all accounts, she had a good life: married to one man, two children, and a productive career:
Her publicist, Jeff Sanderson, said she died of natural causes at her home in Los Angeles, surrounded by family and loved ones.
A regal-looking blonde who ricocheted from playing sultry spies to Southern belles and Superman’s stepmother, Saint made her motion picture debut opposite Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan’s “On the Waterfront” (1954). …
Saint married director-producer Jeffrey Hayden in 1951, and the couple stayed together for 65 years until his death in 2016. They had two children. Saint had made it clear that family was more important to her than her career.
“I had an agent once who wanted me to make many more movies,” she told CBS’ “Sunday Morning” in 2014. “I said, ‘I can’t. I can only do one a year, if that. I have children, young children.’ And he said, ‘Well, I guess you won’t be a superstar.’ And I said, ‘Well, I guess not.'”
… take a look at some clips from his recent interview with Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg. His idiocy is on full display, as is his shameless “gee gosh golly” disingenuousness.
From the comments there:
Tucker Carlson is Exhibit A (the competition is tough) for the brain prion worm that produces antisemitism. It causes a once rational (though not terribly bright) person to go totally bonkers.
Here’s an excerpt:
Brutal exchange: Tucker Carlson incorrectly tells Jacob Rees-Mogg that Russia has "a much larger economy" than Britain.
It doesn't: by GDP, Britain's is about $4.0 trillion and Russia's about $2.5 trillion.
And don’t think Carlson doesn’t have fans who look up to him and believe the horse manure he’s peddling. The only question is how many are influenced by him. I don’t know the answer, but it’s not zero.
Hard to believe that Nidal Hasan – aka the Fort Hood terrorist – is still alive. But perhaps not for long:
The Pentagon announced Monday night that Nidal Malik Hasan, 56, better known as the Fort Hood shooter, will be executed by a U.S. Army firing squad on a date to be determined by the Secretary of the Army.
The former Army major and psychiatrist fatally shot 13 unarmed U.S. soldiers and wounded 32 others during a deadly rampage on Nov. 5, 2009, at Fort Hood, Texas. He shouted “Allahu Akbar” during the massacre.
The shootings occurred inside a crowded medical building where soldiers preparing to deploy were waiting for medical exams and vaccinations.
It was the deadliest non-combat attack ever on an American military base.
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell announced on X that “Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has recommended — and President Donald J. Trump has approved — death by U.S. Army firing squad for convicted terrorist Nidal Malik Hasan.”
The original recommendation when he was sentenced was for the death penalty.
Retired Colonel Terry Lee, after working with Hasan, recalled the fatal shooting of two recruiters in Little Rock, Arkansas, greatly affected Hasan. Lee told Fox News that Hasan made “outlandish” statements against the American military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, reportedly saying that “the Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor”, referring to American soldiers. Hasan expressed hope U.S. president Barack Obama would withdraw troops. He was frequently agitated and argumentative with other Army personnel.
Despite these problems, in May 2009, Hasan was promoted to major. In July 2009 he was transferred to Darnall Army Medical Center in Fort Hood, Texas, moving into the city of Killeen. Two weeks later, he lawfully purchased an FN Five-seven handgun. Prior to his transfer, Hasan had received a ‘poor performance’ evaluation from supervisors and medical faculty. Despite concerns, his former boss, Lt. Col. Ben Phillips, graded his performance as “outstanding”.
Why is he still alive? This:
Due to mandatory appeals and the military’s historical reluctance to execute convicts, USA Today noted in 2019 that an execution would still be years away.
My guess is that Hasan would just as soon be executed and that he would consider it martyrdom.
The terrorist copilot had been plotting his attack for a long time, and his plan was mega-destructive. Fortunately, it didn’t work. But it came close:
According to the officials, al-Hammami began his attempt to seize control of the aircraft only after it reached Jordanian airspace because he intended to continue toward Israel as though the flight were making a normal landing at Ben Gurion Airport, then crash the plane into the airport.
If he was unable to reach Ben Gurion, investigators believe al-Hammami planned to crash the aircraft into a U.S. military base in Jordan.
The investigation also found that the Omani pilot had planned to carry out the attack as early as July but postponed it because of a personal connection with one of the crew members aboard his flight at the time, deciding to “spare him” and wait for another opportunity.
Nice guy.
Note that the heroic passengers on the FlyDubai plane felt that some of the crew members were acting suspiciously, as though they might be in league with or at least sympathetic to the terrorist.
When a person is willing and even eager to martry him/herself, the sky’s the limit for the destruction possible. That is one of the main reasons Islam, with its emphasis on the rewards of martyrdom, is so potentially dangerous. Israel had gotten careless in letting others do the vetting:
“I searched and checked which company flies to Tel Aviv, and that’s why I chose flydubai,” he was quoted as saying. “I tried to get accepted by all the airlines. I planned the operation even before I was hired by the company.”
Earlier Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office announced a review of the security arrangements governing foreign civil aviation to Israel, following scrutiny of security gaps exposed by the incident.
It really was nothing short of a miracle that this plane and all its passengers were saved.
There’s an opportunity to close those gaps. And the problem isn’t limited to Israel or the Middle East. Jihadi pilots or and/or crew are possible anywhere, and with that ax in the cockpit – which I assume is standard equipment – the opportunity to do damage to a non-jihadi pilot is there.
