Flotsam and Jetsam - So, Joe is Back From Israel

So, Joe Biden made a trip to Israel, and the reviews are in. Stephen Kruiser at PJM thinks Biden's 'Hamas Helper' Trip to Israel Was an Embarrassing Disaster. The Babylon Bee snarks Biden Announces He Has Secured Pinky Promise From Hamas Not To Use $100 Million For Terrorism, Capt. Ed at Hat Hair elaborates "This is satire, but it prompts the larger and more fundamental question why we’re sending aid to a territory that elects terrorists as its government. The Gazans made that choice; the Iranian popluace didn’t, for instance. Let them live with the consequences of it. Biden felt compelled to do it for PR purposes with Egypt and Jordan, so it’s understandable in that sense, but we should have cut off all aid in 2006-7 when Gazans voted for Hamas. Or did we learn nothing from 9/11?"

Then he came home and gave a speech to the American public. Nick Arama at Red State notes Biden Misses His Cue, Talks More About Palestinians Than Americans or Israelis, Fights With Teleprompter. Ace,  Bait-and-Switch: BIDEN FALSELY BILLS PITCH FOR UKRAINE FUNDING AS A "STATEMENT ON ISRAEL" SEGUES FROM UKRAINE TO "ISLAMOPHOBIA" "He's literally now talking more about Ukraine than Israel." Ukraine pays better. Also from Ace, A Dazed Biden Mumbles Weakly to Reporters While White House Handlers Look On In Grim Apprehension. "America is back, baby. The Islamic street shudders at the sight of this straight-shouldered leader of the west, confident, masterful, and vital. He's like Aragorn, except if Aragorn were an All-American Football Star who almost replaced Roger Staubach as QB at Navy." From the Wombat's In The Mailbox: 10.18.23,  Twitchy: A ‘Disheveled’ Biden Wandered Around AF1 Talking to Reporters (While WH Staff Looked ‘Terrified’).

 At Da Caller, Biden White House’s Media Gaffe Could Put Operators’ Lives ‘In Danger,’ Special Operations Group Says. Put faces of special ops team on Facebook. “I don’t even know what to say. These are horrible operational security failures,” Cook told the DCNF. “The risk is high. These guys that got pictured, it could ruin their careers. They could put their families in danger. It could put them in danger,” Dave Strom at Hat Hair, sees a Big Win for Biden: Now Americans at Risk Everywhere. Althouse whines about "You cannot forget that the same people that attacked Israel are right now pouring at levels that nobody can believe into our beautiful U.S.A. through our totally open border." "Said Donald Trump, quoted in "For Republicans, All Roads Lead to the U.S.-Mexico Border/G.O.P. lawmakers and candidates regularly invoke record-high border crossings to address a range of issues, including crime and jobs" (NYT). It doesn't appeal to me, this merging of the illegal immigration issue with the Hamas massacre and its aftermath, but perhaps you're enthused about Republicans leveraging their old issue on this new tragedy." From the Wombat's In The Mailbox: 10.18.23, American Greatness, Our Post-Hamas Wreckage, House GOP Introduces Bill to Block Palestinian Refugees from Coming into the U.S., and University of Pennsylvania Loses Major Donor and Board Member over Anti-Semitism, The Geller Reports US Embassies Being Overrun, Rioting, Burning Fires, in Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Yemen, Turkey and across the Middle East, The Lid: Biden Border Crisis Endangering Us All: 659 Known Terrorists Captured at the Border This Year Alone, This Ain’t Hell: Navy chief arrested for domestic battery after celebrating his promotion, Marines squeak by, Biden reiterates ability to support Ukraine and Israel, Schumer rushing Israel military aid, Second US carrier strike group heading to the eastern Mediterranean, Defense Secretary: The US will support both Israel and Ukraine. Chris Skeet at PJM wonders After This, Why Would Anyone Jewish Still Vote Democrat?

NewsMax reports Mortgages Climb to 8% and Alaska Sues Biden Administration Over Canceled Oil, Gas Leases. Da Caller reports on how a Watchdog Report Highlights Enormous Cost Of Biden’s ‘Unlawful’ Food Stamp Expansion. A billion here, a billion there. He's not giving away his (or Hunter's) money.

At Da Signal, Jim Jordan Calls Off Third Speaker Vote, Temporarily Backs McHenry. Am Con says Jim Jordan Wrestles With a New Twenty. "Like Kevin McCarthy before him, Jim Jordan is trying to wrestle the Speaker’s gavel from twenty holdouts." From  Da Caller Henry Rogers identifies  The 22 Republicans Who Voted Against Jim Jordan For Speaker In Second Ballot Vote and ‘We’ll Wait’: Jordan Backers Oppose Elevating Acting Speaker’s Powers After Second Vote Fails. From the Wombat's In The Mailbox: 10.18.23, Dana Loesch, House Speaker Fight Round 2 – Electric Boogaloo, and The Geller Reports GOP RINOs Are Working Deal to Give Speakership to Radical Democrat Hakeem Jeffries and Give Power Back to Dems.

Atop Da Summit, a Poll: RFK Independent Run Will Swing Election To Biden "A 10-point drop in support among Republicans for Trump with RFK Jr. on the ticket." It may seem nonsensical, but it might be right. Trump needs independents, which RFK Jr. will dig into.

Alas, Maryland to lose third Senator, as Da Caller reports Newsom’s Senate Appointee Laphonza Butler Will Not Seek A Full Term In 2024. 

Capt. Ed, WHOA: Sidney Powell Flips, Cuts a Deal in Georgia. at Da Caller, Sidney Powell Takes Plea Deal In Georgia Election Case, down to misdemeanors. Also, Twitter Troll Slapped With Prison Sentence Over Misleading Election Memes. “Avoid the line. Vote from home,” it stated. “Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925. Vote for Hillary and be a part of history.” At NotTheBee, Why do you think California just made it illegal to count ballots by hand? "Voting with Dominion voting machines is so safe and secure that they're making it illegal to NOT use the machines."

So, did you watch Wednesday's insurrection on TV? Ben Whedon and Nick Ballasy at JTN report Pro-ceasefire protestors overrun Capitol Hill demanding end to Israel-Hamas conflict, arrests made. "The demonstration occurred in the Cannon Office Building and U.S. Capitol Police arrested a large group of protestors." Do you expect them to get years in the hoosegow or a wrist-slap. I know what I'm betting.

Stacy McCain feigns ignorance Why Does Google Hate the Blogfather? Wednesday night, explaining the new ads at Instapundit, Professor Glenn Reynolds revealed the censorship he has experienced: Sorry, the problem is that InstaPundit has been demonetized by Google, for unspecified “dangerous” content. Between the overall trend of ad revenue decline — which hits everyone — and the trend of cutting advertising to right-leaning sites, and now this, ad revenue is down about 90% from its high, I’d estimate, and it may get worse." Insty,  AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: CNN Blames Fog Of War For Errant Reporting On Gaza Bombing, Russian Collusion, Jussie Smollett, Covington Catholic, Hunter’s Laptop, The Steele Dossier, Kyle Rittenhouse, Origins Of Covid (Continued In Article Please Click For More). Pixy Miso at Ace's Daily Tech News 20 October 2023,  "Facebook and Instagram are censoring terrorist propaganda. (Tech Crunch) Apparently this is a bad thing now that the terrorists are Arabs who murder babies rather than grandmothers from Iowa who went for a stroll on a bad day. Apple has censored John Stewart. (The Verge) Apparently his views were not aligned with corporate on the topics of AI and China, which Apple views as good but aren't."

At Twitchy, Sarah Silverman Comes Out AGAINST Hamas, Learns the Hard Way What Her Party REALLY Thinks of Jews. Chad@ChadsRcool, "It is actually funny to watch these people waking up and seeing their bedfellows for who they are. Like they’ve been sleeping next to a troll for years and finally the spell has worn off."

From the Wombat's In The Mailbox: 10.18.23, Da Tech Guy: This week College students across the United States proved just how brainwashed they are, The Perfect Example of How Hell Works & The Jewish Left’s Sudden Encounter With Reality, and I’m Old Enough to Remember When the Left Insisted “All Lives Matter” is a Racist Dog Whistle! At Front Page Jay Bergman goes on about Hamas and Universities in Connecticut. "Willful blindness to genocidal anti-Semitism." Helen Raleigh at Da Fed notes Champagne Marxists At Elitist Universities Deny Antisemitism When Dollars Are On The Line. Guy Benson at TownHall sees Harvard Students Try to Play the Victims After Losing Job Opportunities Over Hamas Support. Insty, U. PENN FACULTY SENATE CHAIRS TO BIG DONORS: "Go fuck yourselves. . ." and OUR ACADEMIC INSTITUTIONS HAVE BECOME DERANGED: Quoting Chris Rufo: “A group of prominent academics have signed a letter justifying violent struggle against Israel, including: Adhy Kim (Harvard), RH Lossin (Harvard), Eman Abdelhadi (UChicago), Sophie Lewis (Penn), Marty Cain (Cornell), Maz Do (Cornell), Addie Tsai (William & Mary), Aaron Aceves (UT), Joshua Nguyen (Tufts). Our academic institutions have been deranged.” Deranged is putting it mildly. If you read this letter, you will have a hard time believing anyone sane signed it. Maybe no sane person did. It’s far worse than any of the pro-Hamas student letter I’ve seen, and that’s saying something." Max Eden at CJ, calls them Morally Perverse. "The unwillingness of many college and university leaders to condemn Hamas’s atrocities outright suggests not confusion but subservience to an ideological view." At Campus Reform, Prof says he was fired for anti-Hamas tweet. "A professor claims he was terminated from Washington University in Missouri for his comments on social media supporting Israel's actions against Hamas."  From Spiked, How the educated elites became Hamas apologists. Steve Hayward at Power Line  It Has Come Ty This: The Hamas Lockdown.  At the Free Bacon, It's Not Just Students: Meet the Professors Leading the Academic Embrace of Hamas. "Ohio State's Pranav Jani, a Students for Justice in Palestine faculty adviser, has long praised Palestinian terrorists." Never one to sugar coat it, Kurt Schlichter at TownHall says Academia Needs to Go Extinct. Ace, My World Is Spinning and Reality Is Dissolving Before My Eyes. "Nothing Deb Heine writes here makes any sense at all. None of it. Trans UC Davis Assistant Professor Threatens Jewish Journalists and Their Children on X: 'They Should Fear Us.' Wait wait wait -- a black transgender is a radical professor at a "university" and is engaging in threatening behavior, believing, correctly, that black trans radicals can do whatever they want without any fear of consequences? Universities wouldn't hire such people! They are bastions of reason and virtue!" 

WaEx, Victoria's Secret goes back to basics after DEI marketing tanks sales. Capt. Ed, explains "This is what happens when you hire DEI obsessives as marketing leaders. Successful advertising is aspirational, not didactic. When you advertise lingerie, you are selling an idea of aspirationally looking like the models in the ads. Women generally don’t aspire to look like trannies or obese women, and the men who buy the products for wives and girlfriends don’t aspire to sleep with either. It’s like selling light beer to its core working-class consumer base by partnering with a trans guy doing womanface. Who would be dumb enough to do that? OH, WAIT …"  From the Wombat's In The Mailbox: 10.18.23, Twitchy, We Found The BEST thread on Victoria’s Secret Walking Back Wokeness. 

Linked at The Pirate's Cove in the weekly Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup and links. The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: Best Wrench Wench And Gun Bunny Too? and FMJRA 2.0: Don’t Lean On Me, Man, Because You Can’t Afford The Ticket up at The Other McCain more or less on time.

Spotted in the Wilds of West Virginia

To be fair, gas is much cheaper in WV than either PA or the People’s Republic of MD.

Another Great Moment in Climate Hypocrisy

Elizabeth Warren Transferred Oil-and-Gas Investments to Her Children To Protect Her ‘Green’ Political Profile

Back in August of 2018, investigative journalist Andrew Kerr reported that “Elizabeth Warren Earned Royalties From Natural Gas Producer With Long Rap Sheet Of Environmental Violations, Tax Returns Reveal.”

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren received royalty payments in 2017 from one of the largest natural gas producers in the nation, according to tax return documents her campaign released Wednesday.
Warren received $121 in royalty payments in 2017 from Chesapeake Operating, LLC, a subsidiary company of Chesapeake Energy, according to her tax return. Chesapeake is the second-largest natural gas producer in the nation behind Exxon Mobil and is the most active driller of new gas wells in the country.
Chesapeake has been hit with over $17 million in fines relating to environmental and leasing violations since 2007, the largest being a $3.2 million fine levied in 2013 after one of its subsidiary companies dumped unauthorized materials into dozens of streams and wetlands in West Virginia.

The natural gas royalties Warren collected in 2017 is negligible in comparison to her estimated net worth of between $3.7 and $10 million, however, the existence of the Democrat’s financial ties with Chesapeake is curious considering her aggressive stance against the energy industry.

But that’s not the whole story of Warren’s ties to and profiting from oil and gas companies.

It appears that as her political profile rose, she sold and/or transferred her interest in various oil and gas interests to her children.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

On her first day as President, Elizabeth Warren says she will “ban fracking—everywhere,” while putting a “total moratorium” on leases offshore and on federal lands. Ms. Warren has signed a pledge to refuse campaign contributions over $200 from the oil-and-gas industry. She’s a past sponsor of a Senate bill called the Keep It in the Ground Act.
So it’s worth noting that, for years, she and her husband reported modest income from natural-gas royalties in her native state of Oklahoma. Ms. Warren’s financial disclosure filed with the Senate in 2012 included $504 of income from “gas well royalty interests” in Latimer County. The next year it was $203. Drill a little deeper and the facts get even more interesting.
. . . . Property records offer further information, although the picture is hardly complete. A 2011 deed says Mr. Mann had sold his interest in “all of the oil, gas, and other minerals” under assorted pieces of land in Latimer County and Pittsburg County. The stated price was $5,000. The buyer? Alexander Warren, the Senator’s son. The deed is dated Aug. 19. It says the transfer of royalty was effective Sept. 1. Two weeks later, Sept. 14, Ms. Warren announced her Senate candidacy in Massachusetts.
There are more transfers in 2014, as Ms. Warren’s political profile was rising. “We are on the cusp of a climate crisis,” she told the Senate that March, “a point of no return that will threaten our health, our economy and our planet.” Two months later, deeds dated May 19 say Ms. Warren conveyed to her two children, Alexander and Amelia, her mineral rights for lands in Okfuskee County and Hughes County, amid the Woodford shale field in the state’s southeast.
One of those Hughes County parcels appears on oil-and-gas leases from June and July 2017, signed by Alexander and Amelia, along with Ms. Warren’s three brothers. The agreements allow exploration and drilling on an 80-acre plot in exchange for royalties on any potential output. The leases had an initial term of three years, so they would appear to remain in effect through this summer.
“Elizabeth and Bruce sold or transferred these mineral interests to her children several years ago,” a Warren campaign spokesman said. “Her children still own them. They generated a few hundred dollars a year.” How long did Ms. Warren and Mr. Mann receive these royalties? Were the amounts larger in the past? The campaign declined to say. For context, gas wells become less productive over time.

The Wall Street Journal notes that “there’s nothing wrong here: Many people hold mineral rights, and ownership can get fractured by inheritance. Fossil fuels make the world go round, powering everything from cars to MRI machines.”

What makes this curious is that it belies the purism of her presidential rhetoric. She speaks as if oil inevitably stains everything it touches. “We want to make real progress on climate?” Ms. Warren said at a November debate. “Then we have to start by attacking the corruption that gives the oil industry and other fossil-fuel industries a stranglehold over this country.” A month later she added: “The biggest climate problem we face is the politicians in Washington who keep saying the right thing but continue to take money from the oil industry.”
But back when she was a Harvard law professor, Ms. Warren and her husband cashed those gas checks—or at least they did until the month before she launched her Senate campaign. Once she entered public life, they apparently unloaded the inconvenient assets by transferring them to children, who then endorsed an oil-and-gas lease that would be politically toxic if it carried Ms. Warren’s signature.

Warren rails against oil and gas companies profiting from “pollution,” but it would appear she has no problem at all doing the same thing, even if it’s on a much smaller scale. Maybe a reporter should ask her at what financial point profiting from pollution becomes unacceptable? And in what way she thinks it acceptable for her to try to transfer “pollution” profits to her children just as she’s making a national name for herself as a green justice warrior?

What, were there no seats left available on the Burisma board?