Limited Incursions

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The US intelligence community is beginning to wake up to the possibility of Vladimir Putin having Russia engage in a limited incursion into NATO territory in an attempt to relieve Western pressure on him regarding his invasion of Ukraine. (That invasion, keep in mind, he was explicitly permitted to carry out by ex-President Joe Biden, so long as Putin kept it to a small one.)

The likelihood of the most extreme scenario—a limited land incursion—is low, but gets higher as time goes on, according to the reports.

It’s a threat that needs to be taken seriously and to be prepared for.

Putin’s military doesn’t need to be up to snuff to embark on a limited invasion of NATO territory. His military just has to be better than the forces he’d face, and depleted as his military is, they are, strongly so. Likely he couldn’t run all the way to Dunkirk, but he could run all the way to the Baltic Sea. Nobody in Europe, individually or in the aggregate as an alliance presently has the wherewithal to defeat a Russian invasion.

The authors suggested a grey area type of invasion/incursion, and doing so, they missed the larger picture.

The possible threats range from a cyberattack on a NATO country….

Do the authors mean like the cyberattacks Putin has been running all along against the Baltic States for some years?

They posed this bit of ignorance as if it were a serious deterrent:

Such a move [armed invasion] has always been considered extremely unlikely because it would trigger NATO’s Article 5, which commits members to collective defense.

This is a chimera, at best. There’s nothing in Article 5 that requires an armed response by NATO members. The nations’ Foreign Ministers shaking their fingers very firmly at Putin, or Prime Ministers and Presidents issuing strongly worded statements objecting to the invasion, would satisfy the Article.

Dodging NYC’s Pied-à-Terre Tax

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Folks subject to New York City Democratic Socialist of America Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax, and folks who aren’t subject but got the threatening letter from Mamdani anyway, are looking for ways to duck the tax.

offshore corporation in the Cayman Islands to hold their New York City pied-à-terre

Nope. Still a pied-à-terre subject to the tax. The owner’s corporation would still have to pay the tax.

pay a stranger to pretend to live in their second home as a full-time resident

Nope. That has other tax implications—income tax, for instance, as well as making the owner now subject to NYC’s landlord laws. And that’s apart from whether the owner can dodge the outright tax fraud aspect of the move.

There’s another way, guaranteed legal and guaranteed to get the owner out from under the socialist’s thumb. This consists of those owners selling those pied-à-terres to folks who want to live in the city, and for the now ex-owner stopping living there altogether. The city, anymore, as very little left to recommend it—even the finance industry is on the move out of the city, some out of the State—so there’s little loss here.

This Needs to be Rejected

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There is an “agreement” regarding the Strait of Hormuz that’s nearing completion. The trouble is, though, is that it’s between Iran and Oman, and it grants “oversight” of the Strait to…Oman and Iran. The arrangement would set up an inbound lane near Iran and an outbound lane near Oman.

While the deal would exclude charging ships tolls or fees, Iran might not be prevented from collecting voluntary payments to cover costs like security and search and rescue….

Oh, yeah….

This arrangement must be scotched from the start.

Neither Oman nor Iran can be allowed any sort of oversight, no matter how seemingly benign, of an international water like the Strait of Hormuz. The international water needs no oversight, only protection from nations trying to seize control of it.

Obsessive-Compulsive

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Progressive-Democratic Party politicians are beating each other up over who should hold sway over Party—socialists or Establishment Democrats. Their serious policy differences and the power struggle that otherwise would fracture Party, though, are not stopping them from linking arms in order to go against President Donald Trump (R). Consider the just concluded Party primary election in Michigan to determine who should represent Party in the US Senate. Democratic Socialist of America member Abdul el-Sayed edged Establishment Democrat Haley Stevens. El-Dayed’s campaign was marked by vitriol toward Stevens. However,

Ms Stevens, who spent the campaign avoiding the subject of Mr El-Sayed’s not-quite-spoken animus, last week ventured a diagonal allusion to it. “You want to blame all your problems on Jewish Americans,” she said in an online post. But she also vowed to support him in the general election—a paradox that nicely captures her party’s pusillanimity on the Jewish question.

Hours after her defeat, Stevens posted on X:

I love Michigan and am so proud to have put up my hand to serve. I spoke with Abdul a few moments ago to offer him my full support as we work to defeat Mike Rogers this November. Thank you, Michigan.

She loves Michigan, or she hates President Donald Trump (R) and/or Jews that much? Trump, not Rogers, since both el-Sayed and Stevens, were running against Trump, not Rogers. Jews, since el-Sayed never hid his antisemitic bigotry under a bushel, while Stevens tacitly agreed with his bigotry through her silence on that.

And Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D, NY) endorsement of el-Sayed within hours of his primary victory. The Jewish Party mucky-muck looked past el-Sayed’s hatred of him and his religious confreres to make his endorsement explicitly about his own hatred of Trump.

Democrats are united by a common purpose: putting a check on Donald Trump by defeating his Republican enablers and taking back the Senate. We look forward to working with Abdul….

Progressive-Democratic Party politicians are so deeply immersed in their anti-Trump obsession that they’re compulsively supporting the candidate whom they so deeply despised before the Primary and who has such strong contempt for them and such raw hatred of so many Americans.

This is the Progressive-Democratic Party our nation is facing in the fall mid-terms. Weak-kneed on honesty, lacking entirely the courage to denounce bigotry, embracing the destructive policies of the Democratic Socialists of America, accepting violence-embracing, if not outright inciting, rhetoric (you put one ogre on a pike, and then everyone else gets the message).

Corruption, Thy Name Is…

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The lede lays it out in no uncertain terms.

Arizona’s largest county suffered a significant breach of its election data in the days before the 2020 presidential election when a self-described hacker foiled security and obtained 633,000 voter registration files but the Biden Justice Department and local prosecutors declined to bring charges even after the FBI got the suspect to confess, according to declassified documents made public Thursday by the White House.

And this:

FBI Director Kash Patel sent a letter to that task force this week stating the bureau spent “significant resources” but could not get the US Attorney’s Office in Phoenix, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, the Maricopa County Arizona Attorney’s Office or the Pinal County, Arizona Attorney’s Office to bring charges despite an admission from the alleged hacker.

The Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party politicians insist that our election system is entirely secure and there’s no need for a SAVE Act to secure it. Never mind that the hacker suspect described just how “secure” the Maricopa County setup was (and is?):

The suspect, who described himself as a “hacker or tinkerer,” told the agents that he first discovered the vulnerabilities in Maricopa’s website about two months earlier, in September 2020. “He noticed his voter ID appeared in the URL” after entering his own voter information and “tested the vulnerability by entering several seven-digit numbers into the URL path resulting in access to different voter registration information,” the agents wrote.

That lack of security is so bad it has to be deliberate. The software designer, tester, and their supervisors, along with the Election Monitor chief all need to be on trial for that criminal negligence.