Question for Omar: Who’s Your Daddy? Bruce Unloosed: on Kathy Hochul. Deer in Headlights: Katie Zacharia. NOT Deer in Headlights: Kimberly Guilfoyle. ‘Sham’ ICC. And More
A callout to Rep. Ilhan Omar, who has added another stellar first to her distinctive roster of achievements—first woman ever to attempt to revise her birthdate upwards.
“U.S. probe of Rep. Ilhan Omar focuses on birth date, citizenship papers, people familiar say” is the Washington Post headline. Only if the future Minnesota Congresswoman was a minor at the time her father became a naturalized citizen in the U.S. could she piggyback on his application for citizenship. The WaPo reports:
The federal investigation that prompted the search of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s D.C. residence on Monday centers on claims that she or her late father may have lied on decades-old immigration paperwork to secure legal status and eventually U.S. citizenship, three people familiar with the matter said.
Omar — a Minnesota Democrat who was born in Somalia and fled civil war there with her family before eventually immigrating to the United States in 1995 — has repeatedly rejected such allegations, which have circulated in conservative media for years. She dismissed them again in a statement Monday as “baseless lies and smear campaigns.”
The New York Post reports that Rep. Omar’s staff got her birthdate changed officially after she was elected to Congress. Omar’s age at the time of immigration is not the only question that revolves around her father. “Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) has always made one wonder how a person could flee oppression in Somalia, find freedom in the U.S., and somehow end up viewing America as the villain in global affairs. Could it be that in Somalia her father was among those doing the oppressing?” asks James Freeman of the Wall Street Journal.
If Omar’s father, Nur Omar Mohamed, misrepresented his history, that could affect Omar’s claim of U.S. citizenship, too. There appear to be missing immigration records. U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro is investigating Omar’s finances, including curious, multimillion-dollar surges in her businesses tied to her husband. Rep. Omar is fundraising off the crisis. I guess it’s refreshing to be talking about Omar’s father rather than her brother?
The New York Post cover announces: “The Bruce Is Loose!” The Bruce is GOP gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman, who is challenging incumbent Governor Kathy Hochul. They debated last night. Michael Goodwin writes that Blakeman outclassed Hochul on the debate stage—paving the way for him to win on Election Day. Blakeman attacked Hochul for her response to the Cornell rape accusations and her remarks on black kids and computers. A body language expert’s verdict: Hochul “looked like a deer in the headlights.”
Hochul wasn’t the only deer in the headlights yesterday. New White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia was nervous at her first briefing, and the Wall Street Journal described the rollout as rocky. But my gosh, the pile-on was vicious. The MSM has got it in for her. President Trump personally helped Zacharia prepare for the briefing—which possibly explains why Zacharia laid it on extra thick about being pleased to work for the president, and also perhaps why the MSM is so astonishingly hostile to Zacharia.
“Inside Kimberly Guilfoyle’s Final Days as Ambassador to Greece.” Kimberly Guilfoyle is NOT a deer in the headlights. To save her job, the Wall Street Journal reports—in a gossipy, front-page feature—that Guilfoyle claimed incriminating texts are AI-generated.
President Trump held a rally in Alaska yesterday, where he pardoned on stage Alaskan truckers targeted by the Biden administration for trying to fix truck engines. Trump is working hard to get people to the polls, but USA TODAY opinion contributor Merrill Matthews writes soberingly that it’s beginning to look a lot like 2006:
A Republican president is facing his second midterm elections. His popularity is in the tank, in part because he took the country into a costly, unpopular war he thought would end quickly. Inflation is too high and federal spending under his party has exploded. The economy, while reasonably strong, faces headwinds. His party could be headed for a major defeat in November.
“The Wealth Tax Stakes in California.” If Prop. 40 passes, an editorial in the Wall Street Journal argues, it will be part of the 2028 Democratic campaign. The editors write:
Targeted individuals would have to pay tax on nearly all their assets worldwide, including artwork, trusts, yachts, business interests and even a dependent’s assets. A Rembrandt in a Miami penthouse would be taxable in California.
The tax would also apply to a taxpayer’s share of voting control in private companies. So if a startup founder owns 10% of shares that carry 50% of voting rights, he’d have to pay tax as if he owned 50% of shares. This is intended to punish entrepreneurs who exercise control over companies.
Yet they could still be soaked if the state Franchise Tax Board determines based on “all the facts and circumstances” that “a substantial purpose” of their move was to avoid the tax. The wealth tax’s supporters say it won’t spur billionaires to leave, but then why write in this “general anti-avoidance” rule?…
Oh, and don’t believe the claim that this is a one-time tax to deal with federal Medicaid cuts. Federal Medicaid payments to California have increased 14% ($16.4 billion) over the last year and exceed the entire general fund budgets of all 49 other states. The wealth-tax revenue would be baked into California’s Medicaid budget, much of which will go to fraudsters.
Speaking of fraud … “Deep blue Minnesota is fed up with fraud — and may derail Dems’ midterm dreams” is a New York Post headline. Isaac Schorr writes:
A state that hasn’t delivered its electoral votes to a Republican presidential candidate since 1972 is bucking the prevailing national political winds and contemplating a change after years of progressive mismanagement.
Yes, Minnesota may have some regrets.
Does Israel, also in the midst of elections, have regrets about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? Yonah Jeremy Bob, writing at The Free Press, suggests that the “Netanyahu era could end this month with a victory by Gadi Eisenkot, the plainspoken former IDF chief who wants to disempower the populist right.” TFP Editors ask how Israel—and history—will judge Netanyahu. Haviv Rettig Gur, Michael Oren, Yossi Klein Halevi, and others weigh in on Netanyahu’s legacy.
Meanwhile, in the same esteemed publication, Douglas Murray weighs in on the “sham” International Criminal Court (which the U.S. has just sanctioned):
Recent years have seen a flourishing of BS institutions. There is the International Association of Genocide Scholars, an organization that suddenly leaped to prominence last year when it was reactivated in order to accuse Israel of “genocide” in Gaza; there is the International Court of Justice (ICJ), a politicized pseudo-court that seems determined to fast-track that same genocide allegation; there is the United Nations Human Rights Council, whose only standing agenda item devoted to a single country is, yes, about the Jewish state; and the list goes on.
But the institution that must win any and all awards for not being what it says on the tin is the International Criminal Court (ICC). Founded in 2002, the ICC has served as a political tool for a quarter century. In the 2000s, European signatories routinely criticized the George W. Bush administration for not signing up the U.S. to be a member of the new institution. But the Bush administration took the view that all Democrat and Republican administrations have taken before and since: No American statesman or soldier should ever find his actions judged under the jurisdiction of a foreign court. American justice is enough.
Just a wee reminder that this year’s Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Navi Pillay, has served as a judge on the ICC.
Whatever France’s shortcomings, it doesn’t deserve this:
Greta Thunberg is in Paris. Yes, as if the French haven’t got enough on their assiettes with ‘youths’ and ‘students’ reducing the cradle of European civilisation to smoking ruins, the overgrown Shirley Temple of Stockholm rocked up this morning outside a school in Saint-Denis. She told the crowd, ‘Young people are not being included in the conversation. Our future is being robbed away from us!’
The clumsy structure of the latter sentence gave me an eerie sensation of an Armageddon-themed ABBA lyric. I can picture a mournful Frida singing it over flickering firelight.
Greta certainly gets around, doesn’t she?
The Spectator calls Greta a “protest addict.”
