When Kamala Harris first jumped into the 2024 race, the joy was palpable. Every major Democrat leapt to celebrate. The legacy media uncorked the champagne. Rank-and-file Democratic voters had a pep in their step. After all, the Democratic Party had pulled off an unprecedented feat: After rigging the Democratic primaries to avoid any serious opposition to ailing incumbent Joe Biden, they had, without a single vote, removed his nomination and handed it to Biden’s younger, more diverse vice...

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Kamala Harris sat down for an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, and Bret Baier simply asked her some basic questions, causing her to squirm, dodge, and lie. ? Order my new book from Amazon here: https://amzn.to/40vEC9U ⚡️ Join my exclusive Locals community here: https://markdice.locals.com/support ? Sponsor me through Patreon here: https://Patreon.com/MarkDice Order my book "Hollywood Propaganda: How TV, Movies, and Music Shape Our Culture" from Amazon: https://amzn.to/30xPFl5 or download the e-book from Kindle, iBooks, Google Play, or Nook. ? Order my book, "The True Story of Fake News" ➡️ https://amzn.to/2Zb1Vps ? Order my book "The Liberal Media Industrial Complex" here: https://amzn.to/2X5oGKx Mark Dice is an independent media analyst and bestselling author of "Hollywood Propaganda: How TV, Movies, and Music Shape Our Culture.” He has a bachelor's degree in Communication from California State University and was the first conservative YouTuber to reach 1 million subscribers (in 2017). He has been featured on Fox News, Newsmax, the History Channel, E! Entertainment, the Drudge Report, and news outlets around the world. This video description and the pinned comment contains Amazon and/or other affiliate links, which means if you click them and purchase the product(s), Mark will receive a small commission. Copyright © 2024 by Mark Dice. All Rights Reserved.

I am not attempting to fuel whatever irrational exuberance those conservatives among our readership might be feeling today. It’s my experience that irrational exuberance among conservatives is in quite short supply these days anyway; that’s mostly been true since George W. Bush sucked it out of the movement in his second term. And especially since Barack Obama put the anti-American Hard Left in charge of the Democrat Party and then put the Democrat Party in charge of the country, the problem among conservatives and even just ordinary Americans who hate the country has been a tendency toward despair rather than toward irrational exuberance. But this data point, which comes from Gallup, one of the polling organizations out there that can generally be trusted, could be fuel for exuberance — whether irrational or otherwise: #NEW NATIONAL party identification tracker Republican: 49% (+7) Democratic: 42% Gallup | Oct. 1-12 — Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) October 16, 2024 Upon seeing that number, conservative pollster Rich Baris was, well, exuberant: Baris reacts to Gallup's final party ID of R+7: "Holy shit. Oh my God. That's the final Gallup ID. You do realize that, right? I think that's their final. Oh my God." — Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) October 16, 2024 The official number Gallup is using has a 48–45 Republican advantage, as it’s the average over the course of the 2024 cycle Gallup has polled. The GOP bulge grew to R+7 over the last round of polling in the two weeks prior to the report. Even at R+3, you’re looking at an eye-popping, historical result predictive of something quite Trumpian happening in three weeks. Here’s a historical look at Gallup’s party ID survey in presidential cycles over the past 30 years or so: Somewhat related to this would be Donald Trump’s runaway performance on Polymarket of late, where he’s now a 60–40 favorite. Two obvious questions immediately come to mind: First, is this true? And second, does it matter? We’ll take on the second question first. The answer is: Hell Yes, It Matters. Don’t forget that these media polls that have Kamala Harris holding onto a tight lead, or keeping the race tied, generally show a bias toward the Left on the basis of a sample anywhere from 3 to 7 points more Democrat than Republican. Much of that is driven by response bias, which we’ve discussed in this column before. Older, white, leftist women — just think of them as MSNBC viewers — are the most aggressive responders to political surveys, and have been for a good while. There are several reasons for this, but the three most obvious are that (1) government is God to these people, so anything having to do with politics will immediately get their attention, (2) they generally don’t get a whole lot of engagement in their lives beyond a small number of people (other than whatever happens on social media, of course), and (3) everybody else screens their calls because they’re busy. Gallup is a little different story, though. If you get something from Gallup, given its reputation, you’re more likely to answer it. And they don’t do a lot of horse-race polling; Gallup surveys are much more general and focused on public attitudes rather than X or Y candidate. That lends itself to a broader response. So if Gallup says the country is R+7, and they turn out to be right, it’s a very big deal. It indicates that the polling model used by the vast majority of these media polls you’ve been scratching your head over for a month is horribly flawed. If you’re running multistate or national polls with a D+4 sample and the electorate turns out to be R+7 (or functionally R+7; what this means is Republicans are catching a very sizable majority of the independent voters this cycle), then you could well be off by 10 or 12 points in your findings. And it isn’t just a sign Donald Trump is underpolling. You could be seeing a half-dozen or more Republican candidates for the Senate who are showing little deficits against incumbent Democrats in those various media polls all of a sudden pull upset victories. So yeah. This is, as Kamala Harris Campaign Saboteur Joe Biden once said, “a big f**king deal.” But is it true? That’s up to you to decide, at least for the next three weeks or so — and we’ll find out for sure on Nov. 5. Having thus hedged my bets, what I can say is that it isn’t really so shocking that America would look to the GOP this time. Let’s not forget that Republicans outvoted Democrats by a sizable seven million votes in the last national election cycle. We were all surprised and, on the conservative side, disappointed that the expected red wave didn’t fully materialize in 2022, but when you consider that there was an 81 million to 69 million margin in Joe Biden’s favor in 2020 that flipped over to a seven million vote advantage for the GOP in 2022, you’re looking at some reasonable portion of a 19-million vote swing in two years. How much better have things gotten for the Democrats since then? Here are just a few of the more obvious reasons why Gallup’s R+7 might just be a real number. They’ve watched as the Ukraine war has dragged on with no effort made at bringing it to a close so the billions of dollars in deficit spending we’re sending over there could be stopped. And then they watched Oct. 7 and the Israeli response that has now turned into a straight-up war between Israel and Iran, the IDF having more or less cleared Iran’s Hamas and Hezbollah proxies off the table. What’s the Biden administration doing? Weakly calling for a ceasefire as our ally whips the rear end of our enemy. How many Americans like the Biden foreign policy and its results? They’ve also watched the border, and the administration’s continuing refusal to do anything to stop the bleeding there. Nobody really believes Biden and Kamala Harris when they claim the border is under control and crossings are down. Apprehensions might be down, but if there are more gotaways and less apprehendees, that’s pretty cold comfort, isn’t it? Not to mention we now have the satanic miracle of the CBP One app, which has resulted in your tax dollars being spent to fly migrants into towns like Springfield, Ohio, Charleroi, Pennsylvania, and Fairhope, Alabama direct from their home countries — no perilous journey across the border needed. Survey after survey shows the public is beyond exasperated with immigration and border policy, and when even members of the Democrats’ traditional base, most notably black and Hispanic men, are throwing up their hands in disgust, you can imagine it might affect the party ID numbers. Oh, and nobody thinks the Great Replacement Theory is some conspiracy-nut story anymore. I’m not sure anybody ever did, but when Democrats went all-out to block voter ID or policies like the SAVE Act, which would have put teeth into stopping illegals and other non-citizens from voting, the mask really fell off. There is zero reason you would oppose voter ID or the SAVE Act unless you’re actively trying to turn out illegal votes. This is a tell, and everybody knows it. Sooner or later, it would piss off marginal Democrats who might just identify with a different party. Nobody believes Biden and Harris’ pat lines about economic policy anymore. Everybody realizes Bidenomics is a bust by now, as housing costs, grocery bills, insurance premiums, auto payments, and every other damn thing is more expensive by a lot, not a little, and wages aren’t keeping up. How can they? We have a fundamentally dysfunctional economy where too much economic power is in the hands of too few corporations that are connected to our political ruling class in too many corrupt ways, and everything the Obama/Biden/Harris political team has done over the past 16 years has fueled our transition into something that looks way too much like old-style Italian fascist economics. People might not understand this as such, but they definitely recognize something is wrong. And it isn’t like you can send Kamala out there to fix it with a word salad. Then there’s the culture. Mark Mitchell from Rasmussen Reports, on his Monday podcast, noted that Trump was beating Harris by 16 points with men in a Pennsylvania poll they had just released, while her advantage on Trump with women was just 8 points. The Harris campaign is utterly incompetent at attracting men — in fact, it’s the most male-repellent political campaign we’ve ever seen. The whole thing rests on an insane, extreme, no-holds-barred abortion stance that might resound with single females but doesn’t really fly with anybody else. And with Trump largely sidestepping abortion this cycle, all Team Harris is doing is digging a bigger and bigger hole while the media cheers them on. Maybe abortion will end up being the thing that saves Harris. I don’t really think so. If Gallup’s numbers are correct and this is really an R+7 electorate, nothing can save her. And she’s going to be one of a whole host of Democrats getting rightly repudiated on Election Night. If those numbers are correct, that is. READ MORE: And Now, the Cholesterol Race Begins Five Quick Things: This Is All the Left’s Fault, You Know The post Is This Right? Is America Now R+7? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Dear Montana voters — and anyone else who can share this with a Montana voter: You guys are the people who will vote whether to kick Jon Tester out of the U.S. Senate or empower him for yet another six more years to single-handedly continue destroying America with his extreme-leftist agenda. He continually has pursued his radical left agenda, voting in lockstep with the Obamas, Bidens, and Harrises. He does it by voting way-out Left Woke for periods of 5 years and 9 months during his every six-year Senate term. Then he fools all of you by fraudulently shifting his gears shamelessly for the last three months, suddenly masquerading as a moderate. Let’s talk plainly here: He hoodwinks you in Montana every six years and makes all of you look like idiots. In fact, he himself considers you a bunch of rubes. In his mind, all it takes for him to get the votes of your deep red, MAGA state — so that he can keep enabling Kamala Harris, Obama, and Biden with your votes — is to wear a buzz cut, carry a hefty paunch over his belt, and remind you that he lost three fingers at age 9 in a tragic meat grinder accident. The accident indeed was tragic. That tragedy left him with enough other fingers to raise his hand and vote again and again for over a decade against every single value you believe in, and still have one middle finger left to vote to convict Donald Trump on impeachments and destroy this country. His vote — that Montana Senate seat of his — repeatedly has made the difference, on vote after vote, between a 50–50 tie that Kamala Harris breaks, or a 51-49 Democrat woke vote that becomes 51–49 the other way when West Virginia’s Joe Manchin gets replaced next month by a conservative pro-Trump Republican. Please understand that. When you vote for Trump over a Hillary, a Biden, or a Harris by 15 points and yet also vote for Tester, you look like yokels to all the rest of America. And who is to say that the rest of America is wrong? Are you Ocasio Democrats or Trump Republicans? If you are for Trump, how can you be the ones who saddle him with an impossible Senate that tries to impeach him, sabotage him, keep the border wide open, kill American energy, and so much worse? We are talking about a Senate that is 51 Democrats and 49 Republicans. West Virginia is switching from Democrat to GOP. That makes it 50–50. If you insanely reelect Tester yet again, that keeps it at 50–50, which allows a Democrat vice president like Weird Walz to vote for the entire Harris agenda. But if you kick Tester out, that makes the Senate 51–49 Republican, and a Democrat vice president will not matter (if that side wins, G-d forbid). If you don’t throw out Tester, he will be right back to five years and nine more months of radical left Senate voting in step with Kamala Harris on the open border, budget out of control, American boycott of our own energy sources, crime explosion, and selection of radical left-wing judges out of touch from Montana family values. I am writing you for several reasons. California, New York, and Illinois are hopelessly Blue Democrat (for now). They elect extreme left senators on purpose. But you Montanaguys are great. You really (seem to) get it. You are among the very reddest of Republican conservative states. Nearly 75 percent of all Montana registered voters turned out in 2016, and you voted for Trump over Hillary by 56.17 percent to 35.75, a remarkable 21-point blowout. Four years later, you gave Trump another blowout victory, this time over Joe Biden, by 56.92 percent to 40.55 — again, a 16-point landslide. And yet … Why did you also elect Jon Tester to the Senate to destroy Trump? You sent the extreme-left Tester to Washington in 2018, two years after electing Trump, giving Tester a spread of 50.33 to 46.78 percent — three and a half points. What were you thinking? Jon Tester voted with Bernie Sanders to impeach President Trump in 2020. Jon Tester voted with Bernie Sanders again to impeach President Trump in 2021. But Jon Tester voted twice with Bernie Sanders not to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas on how he has mishandled the southern border and lied to Congress about it. Jon Tester voted with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris 99 percent of the time. These are simple facts, easy to confirm. He voted with Harris and Biden on 716 out of 723 votes during the 117th Congress. How much more extreme left can a senator get? From Montana yet? Do you understand what you have been doing, how he has been lying to you? In November 2022, he voted to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act that even President Bill Clinton had promoted. In April 2022, he voted to approve Ketanji Brown Jackson (the one who cannot define “woman”) to the Supreme Court without even raising any questions. In January 2022, he voted to oppose additional sanctions on a Putin gas pipeline. In August 2021, he voted for the Harris–Biden $3.5 trillion budget plan that busted the American economy and ruined your lives — and all of America’s — by sending all our costs spiraling higher than the Blue Sky: food prices, gasoline at the pump, home heating and air conditioning, and all related costs through the roof. We still have not recovered three years later. That’s because you let Tester fool you with his buzz cut, his paunch, and by imitating a conservative during the last three months of his six-year leftist term. That $3.5 trillion disaster passed by 50–49. Your Tester from Montana was the whole difference. If there had been a Republican senator from Montana voting instead of Tester, the switched vote would have been 50–49 the other way, and the worst of inflation disasters that have destroyed so much of your lives — and those of all Americans — would have been avoided. He may dress like a farmer and cowboy, maintain a buzz cut and paunch, but he stuck it to the farmers, cowboys, and regular everyday people of Montana and America. Can’t you see past his buzz cut? And all the above is merely a sampling from 2021–2022, only two of his six years since 2019. Tester repeatedly has voted to fund sanctuary cities and grant amnesty to illegal immigrants. He even voted to stop building the border wall. How can you give such landslides to President Donald Trump, as you will again over Kamala Harris and her extreme woke socialist agenda this November, while also sending Jon Tester on another kamikaze mission — in your Montana name — to destroy Trump? How can you keep doing this? Going into this November, there have been 51 Democrat senators and 49 Republicans the past two years. Because of Tester, there were 33 times that the U.S. Senate tied when voting, meaning that Kamala Harris, as vice president, had the power to cast the left-wing tie-breaking vote. The only thing we Americans needed to avoid giving Kamala Harris such tie-breaking power was a Republican senator from Montana instead of Jon Tester and another from West Virginia. West Virginia now has turned and is in the GOP bag for this November; Joe Manchin has quit, and the Democrats have given up hope there. But you of Montana, who elected President Trump in 2016 by 21 points and in 2020 by 15 points, also somehow have stiffed the rest of America with Jon Tester twice in a row, a 12-year nightmare in the U.S. Senate. Montana, please give us our America back. Please kick out Tester and give us a senator worthy of Montana, a Republican whose election will shift the Senate majority from Democrat to Republican. With that majority, the Republicans will take back chairmanship of all Senate committees. That is how the rules work: that one single Senate seat change will take all the Senate committees away from all the Democrat hacks. No more Patty Murray in charge of Appropriations. No more Bernie Sanders as chairman of Health and Education. No more Alex Padilla in charge of Immigration and Border Safety. It all comes down to you of Montana ousting Jon Tester. How hard is this to appreciate? Replace Tester and empower Republicans to set the Senate agenda. Because the U.S. Senate is the only body empowered by our Constitution to approve or reject Supreme Court judicial nominations — and, in fact, all federal judicial nominations — a Republican Senate majority means commonsense judges, but a Tester–Democrat Senate majority means more judges like the Ketanji Jackson he voted for instead of Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. For the love of G-d and blue skies, Montana, please vote to throw out Jon Tester and replace him with a Republican. Subscribe to Rav Fischer’s YouTube channel here at YouTube channel here at bit.ly/3REFTbk  and follow him on X (Twitter) at @DovFischerRabbi to find his latest classes, interviews, speeches, and observations. To be invited to attend any of his three weekly Zoom classes, send a request to rabbi@yioc.org Rav Fischer’s latest 10-minute messages are up: (i) “There is No Palestine” (here) and (ii) “Jewish Campus Students Need to Stop Whining” (here). The post Montana: Help Save Americans by Ousting Tester appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

California doesn’t have “show trials” (at least not yet), but it does have its share of show hearings — emergency legislative sessions that aren’t designed to address a serious problem but to provide plenty of showboating opportunities for the governor and lawmakers. Gov. Gavin Newsom seems proud of his recent and politically successful extraordinary legislative session that resulted in a new law designed to battle against gasoline price shocks. “Price spikes have cost Californians billions of dollars over the years, and we’re not waiting around for the industry to do the right thing — we’re taking action to prevent these price spikes and save consumers money at the pump,” Newsom said after signing Assembly Bill X2-1. “Now, the state has the tools to make sure they backfill supplies and plan ahead for maintenance so there aren’t shortages that drive up prices.” Few Californians seriously expect gas prices to subside as a result. Newsom forced the Legislature to stay in Sacramento after the close of the regular session — and at a time when many of them hoped to be out campaigning — to address the supposedly pressing problem of California’s sky-high oil prices. The problem is indeed pressing, as Californians pay around $1.50 a gallon more than the national average. But this is nothing urgent or new. It’s the direct result of public policies promoted by Democratic leaders for years. I’ve written for The American Spectator about the obvious reasons for this price disparity. California imposes the highest gas prices in the nation. It requires a special “environmentally friendly” gas formulation that reduces supply and makes consumers susceptible to price shocks. It imposes the strictest regulations in the nation. Newsom and the Legislature are trying to shutter the industry and replace gas vehicles with electric ones, which has discouraged refiners from expanding capacity. But Californians are experiencing pain at the pump and are upset about it. So state officials have to do something, so they’ve proposed a variety of ideas ranging from the wacky to the pointless. Regarding the former, the California Energy Commission recently released a report calling for the state to possibly “purchase and own refineries in the state to manage the supply and price of gasoline.” That’s unlikely to happen even in California, but the other ideas aren’t great, either. One bill, which was shelved, would have had the state mandate expanded ethanol percentages in gasoline formulations to stretch supply. The final AB X2-1 legislation requires refiners to “develop and impose requirements for refiners operating in the state to maintain minimum levels of inventories of refined transportation fuels meeting California specifications.” That’s likely to increase prices given the cost of maintaining larger inventories. In response to this special-session solution, Chevron reiterated its objections in a letter to lawmakers: “Across the three dozen states in which we work, the California government remains unique in its focus on marketplace interference with negative effects on consumers resulting in the highest U.S. gasoline prices.” Regarding the new law, the company — which has operated in California for 140 years, but recently announced that it’s moving its headquarters to Texas — explained specifically why mandating larger reserves won’t reduce prices: These capacity constraints may reduce storage available during higher demand months. Furthermore, mandatory inventory thresholds remove significant supply from the market that refiners would otherwise sell, creating an economic fundamental of driving up wholesale prices. When refiners build and maintain inventories, it reduces the quantity available for immediate sale, thus restricting supply. With show hearings and show trials, the actual facts and evidence don’t matter. It’s all about appearances and posturing. But what’s really astounding is that the state bureaucracy currently is working on a regulation that, by its own calculations, will raise gas prices by 47 cents to 65 cents a gallon. If Newsom were concerned about lowering gas prices, he would address that particular rule-making by the California Air Resources Board called the Low Carbon Fuel Standard. It promotes the use of lower-emission fuels. The Sacramento Bee reported Wednesday on a letter from legislative Republicans calling on CARB to postpone a vote on the matter. It’s even getting attention from Democrats, per the Bee: “The state Legislature has stayed out of CARB rulemaking in recent years, but even Democratic elected officials are beginning to weigh in on the agency’s climate policies and their impact on consumers.” Newsom and some lawmakers have called for more CARB transparency after the agency has backed away from its specific predictions about how much the rules will raise prices. But most of those calls might also be for show. The Republican letter got it right: “If CARB wants the public, through their elected representatives, to be supportive of new initiatives to protect the environment, CARB should be forthcoming with all information – so the public can consider the costs and benefits.” Democrats have for years blathered about a so-called “mystery surcharge” to explain why California consumers pay more at the pump than consumers in other states. I never found our higher prices to be much of a mystery. But there’s no mystery at all about the latest CARB rules that will — to whatever exact degree — further drive up prices. If Newsom and the Legislature are serious about protecting consumers, they should knock off the public-relations stunts and hold this bureaucracy accountable. Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org. READ MORE: Last Gasp of ‘Progressive DA’ Movement? Newsom Intelligently Wields Veto Pen The post Newsom’s Oil-Price Show Hearings appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

WASHINGTON — Joe Biden is a much better person than Donald Trump. But that didn’t keep Biden’s poll numbers from tanking — and ultimately driving him off the 2024 campaign trail. Kamala Harris’ performance as vice president? I don’t recall ever hearing that Harris was a great U.S. senator or great California attorney general or great San Francisco district attorney. Throughout her career, her biggest selling point has been that she was better than her less-than-formidable opponent. Harris first won office in 2003, when she ran against her former boss, San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan, whom the San Francisco Chronicle ranked dead last among California’s 58 county prosecutors in 1999. She won her first race for California attorney general against a Republican who said he’d keep collecting his Los Angeles district attorney pension while pocketing the six-figure AG salary. He lost. Her next opponent was a career lawman with no campaign experience. Nobody voted for Harris in the 2020 presidential primary because she dropped out before Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucus. Biden chose her to be his running mate after he committed to picking a minority woman — and that’s what he got. A running mate who got out early, after a Public Policy Institute of California survey showed her running behind Biden and Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont — in her own state. Because Biden chose to wait until July to back out of the presidential campaign, he was able to crown his veep as successor before the Democratic National Convention. Which is amazing because Harris is the Democratic nominee nobody elected. She’s the candidate Democrats were stuck with, not the one they chose. And she chose Tim Walz to be her running mate. Say what you will about Donald Trump — and I’ll never forgive him for stoking the flames of discontent on Jan. 6, 2021 — but this year Republicans overwhelmingly supported him. Trump lost primaries in Vermont and the District of Columbia, but dominated the race so completely that he claimed 2,265 delegates, far more than the 1,215 needed to win the nod. Nikki Haley was his strongest challenger and she finished with 97 delegates. She endorsed Trump in July, and I understand why. I’m voting for Trump because he is right on issues that matter most to me. When COVID slammed America, Trump put together a savvy task force that guided an anxious country through the early days of the pandemic, advised families and employers on preventive measures, and launched Operation Warp Speed, which produced vaccines in record time and saved millions of lives. As social media has grown, Silicon Valley progressives have used their platforms to enforce conformity. Team Biden, for example, leaned on social media platforms, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg later revealed, to censor “certain COVID content, including humor and satire.” I can see Harris using the awesome might of the federal government to muzzle dissidents. After all, Biden got away with it. Biden and Harris effectively invited millions of people from across the globe to cross our southern border illegally — with no regard for the impact on American workers, schools and local governments. Only when blue cities, many of them “sanctuary cities,” were overwhelmed and desperate did the administration change course. Worse, Harris and company blame Trump for not supporting a bill that ostensibly would have stopped the migrant surge they created. Just by being elected, Trump would discourage illegal border crossings. With his brawler’s persona, Trump’s presidency produced a world that was safer. When Trump was in the Oval Office, Putin didn’t send Russian troops into Ukraine, Hamas did not wage an attack that killed 1,200 in Israel, and Iran did not launch missiles into Israel. The Abraham Accords negotiated under Trump promised to stabilize the Middle East, where today there is so much chaos. You have to wonder if America’s foreign policy rivals would have been so bold if Biden had not ordered an ill-considered withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan that left 13 American service members dead in 2021. Biden made America look weak. So when I hear people talking about what a bad man Trump is and how unworthy he is to be president, I don’t bother to argue. They don’t get that the Nov. 5 election isn’t about one man; it’s about the country and the world. Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM READ MORE from Debra Saunders: Who Wants to Increase the National Debt? Both Trump and Harris Previously Unchallenged, Harris Had to Answer to 60 Minutes The post Why I’m Voting for Donald Trump appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Canada, our neighbor to the north as it is sometimes called, evokes mainly pastoral and benign images: vast timber, mineral, and other oil and gas resources; the mighty Canadian National Railway featured in one of Gordon Lightfoot’s ballads; the splendor of the Banff resort and the glacial Lake Louise; famous hockey teams taking slap shots from the blue line; Sergeant Preston of the Yukon and his Alaskan Malamute named Yukon King; U.S. and Canadian military personnel working seamlessly for North American air defense; and a quasi-European and liberal socialist culture, with a hint of smugness. But is Canada really all that neighborly? A Banking Fiasco Last week, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, and the U.S. Department of Justice levied an enormous $3 billion fine on TD Bank — the New Jersey–based wholly owned subsidiary of the Canadian TD Bank Financial Group with nearly $2 trillion in assets, listed on the Toronto and New York stock exchanges. TD Bank was charged with inadequate monitoring of anti-money laundering protocols that allowed drug cartels to move over $670 million through TD Bank’s books over a six-year period ending in 2024. The size of the fine is noteworthy. In 2017, Deutsche Bank was fined $630 million by U.S. and U.K. authorities for about $10 billion in transactions originating out of Russia. Over six years later, Deutsche Bank was fined $186 million by the U.S. Federal Reserve for inadequate progress made with anti-money laundering controls. Besides the large and unprecedented fine, what is more remarkable is that TD Bank failed to catch this activity earlier. Ever since 9/11, regulators’ scrutiny of bank operations has intensified. The Federal Reserve, Comptroller of the Currency, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Department of the Treasury have used the Bank Secrecy Act, Know Your Customer protocol, anti-money laundering requirements, and the databases maintained by the Office of Foreign Assets Control to police criminal activity flowing through the banking system. Banking regulation further increased after the meltdown of Wall Street in September 2008 and subsequent demise of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers when the U.S. mortgage industry collapsed under a pile of bad credits and securitizations. Over the years, capital and liquidity requirements have been strengthened and an enhanced culture of compliance has pervaded major U.S. banks. How TD Bank, the tenth-largest bank in the U.S. with assets of $370 million, did not get or read the memo should plague the board of directors, senior management, and regulators. Further, the fines levied against TD Bank are quite surprising in view of the very conservative culture of Canadian banking. Not Paying Their Fair Share But money laundering is not the only problem we have with our neighbor to the north. This year, among NATO’s 31 member countries, 23 are expected to spend at least 2 percent of GDP on defense. Canada is not among them — it spent only 1.4 percent in 2023, according to NATO figures. Remarkably, Canada does not expect to be at 2 percent until after 2030. Canada’s current defense outlay puts the world’s ninth-largest and G7 economy of over $2.1 trillion slightly ahead of Slovenia, the 83rd largest, with a GDP of only $62 billion. Enjoying America’s protective umbrella like Europe, Canada has been allowed to allocate more resources to social programs. Canada’s hesitancy to fund its share in NATO is even more striking because of the joint collaboration between Canada and the United States in the North American Aerospace Defense Command near Colorado Springs, an undertaking whose mission is to defend North America against airborne threats. Historically, Canada was also an integral part of the Normandy landings at Juno Beach on D-Day. Blowing in the Wind While it has been largely forgotten, in June of 2023, Canadian wildfire smoke — mainly from Alberta and British Columbia — spilled into 18 U.S. states, compromising air quality. A Rutgers study assessed the detrimental impact of particulates, particularly in New York City and New Jersey. The only apologies from Canada seem to be online satires. If the U.S. had done this to another country, it would be hauled before the International Court of Justice in the Hague — and sued in perpetuity. Losing Ground Typically, U.S. presidents have visited Ottawa a few months after being elected — but not so Donald Trump. Understandably, the Canadians did not wish to read much into this. It was Trump who had harshly criticized members of NATO for underfunding of their NATO commitments, and the resulting increased contributions have continued during the Biden administration. The obvious question is how relevant is Canada in the current geopolitical construct? In view of China’s efforts to disrupt the trade and investment rules since the end of World War II and undermine the U.S. dollar — to impose its Beijing-dominated command and control system known as the Belt and Road Initiative, and to end the hegemony of the United States and Europe — perhaps an early destination for a new U.S. president should be Beijing, not Ottawa. (RELATED: A Specter Is Haunting China) In any event, the next administration should call on Canada to strengthen its banking controls and accelerate its compliance with NATO’s 2 percent requirement — and be neighborly. Frank Schell is a business strategy consultant and former senior vice president of the First National Bank of Chicago. He was a Lecturer at the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago and is a contributor of opinion pieces to various journals.  READ MORE from Frank Schell: From Harris, America Needs Action, Not Pablum Defang Iran and Support Iranian Good Guys The post What’s Wrong With Canada? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.