Democrats look for an excuse to blame Ron DeSantis for Hurricane Ian as the fallout from the natural disaster continues.
Vladimir Putin annexes parts of Ukraine, upping the chances of nuclear war.
And Joe Biden goes wandering again.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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Slash Ben will get to all the news in just one moment.
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We have more news from the fallout from Hurricane Ian.
Dozens of people are dead in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian.
Mostly people who were drowned.
You would assume these are disproportionately elderly citizens who either couldn't leave the house or didn't leave the house and then were unable to escape when the floodwaters rose.
According to the Washington Post, Florida residents are grappling with widespread destruction and flooding after Hurricane Ian, one of the most powerful storms to ever hit the United States, amid ongoing search efforts and a death toll that has risen to at least 62.
Across the most affected parts of the state, local and federal rescue crews continue to scour neighborhoods for survivors.
We're not in recovery phase, said Chase Fabrizio, the leader of Maryland Task Force 1, a search and rescue crew of FEMA.
We are still in the search.
Across the southwest and central regions of the state, about 800,000 homes and businesses remained without power on Sunday afternoon, according to poweroutage.us.
In North Carolina, there were still 16,000 customers without power.
By the way, that 800,000 homes and businesses remaining without power, that is down from well north of 2 million in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane.
Meanwhile, several bridges were destroyed, complicating rescue efforts.
The causeway to Sanibel Island, a 12-mile barrier island, was rendered impassable, cutting off the island from the mainland.
President Biden and First Lady Jill Biden are planning to travel to Puerto Rico on Monday and Florida on Wednesday to survey the hurricane damage.
Again, this is one of my least favorite things in American politics is when people from the White House feel the necessity to jet set to disaster areas to gaze out across the wreckage and be like, ah, well, now that I'm here, I guess everything is OK.
Again, I hated it when it was Bush.
I didn't like it.
I don't like it with Obama, I don't like it with Trump.
It's just a consistent bugaboo of my own.
I really don't like it when we act as though the president has godlike powers to quell the rising waters.
That's not the way any of this works.
According to the Florida Medical Examiner's Commission, they said the hurricane had caused at least 58 deaths in the state, most of them from drowning.
That tally did not include Charlotte County, where local officials have also confirmed multiple deaths.
As I said, many of the victims were older than age 60.
Bodies were found inside flooded cars, floating in water, and on the beach.
There were four storm-related deaths in North Carolina as well.
Now naturally, because this is the United States, everything turns political pretty quickly.
Ron DeSantis, by all available metrics, has been doing a pretty good job of handling all of this.
He announced that all the ports in Florida would be open by Saturday.
The ports, Tampa Bay, Miami, Everglades, they are reopened for fueling.
And I think between today and tomorrow, all the ports in the state of Florida, up and down both coasts will be operational.
Many in the media are looking for an excuse to blame.
DeSantis for some things. So the thing that they have come up with so far is DeSantis defending his Lee County late evacuation order. By late evacuation order we mean it was still 21 hours before the Cat 4 superstorm had landfall on North Captiva Island. And again, that was a mandatory evacuation order that only went out 21 hours beforehand, specifically because the storm took a really, really late turn. It was expected, of course, to move north into the Panhandle, and then it took this very late breaking turn.
Again, that's still almost a day to get out, if you need to get out.
So, the fact that a lot of people didn't leave, a lot of people were told to leave, and they didn't.
Some local officials said the county was lulled into a sense of false complacency in the lead-up to the cataclysmic event.
The barrier islands first hit by Ian were all part of the projected models of the storm paths 72 hours before it slammed into the United States, but Fort Myers was not.
And Fort Myers is, of course, the place where he did not say mandatory evacuation until about 21 hours before.
So again, following the map meant That DeSantis did what he did, but they're going to try to pretend now that somehow this was an act of incompetence and that if he had just come out and said, everybody in Florida, I guess, should have evacuated the state, that would have fixed it.
This is a dog that won't hunt.
People knew if they were in the storm path, they had to get out of the way.
Again, if you have a full day to get out of the way of a Cat 4 and you don't get out of the way of a Cat 4, generally that is by choice.
There's not a lot of information that people 20 hours beforehand We're basically stuck in traffic trying to get out of that particular area.
If we find out differently, obviously, then maybe the math changes a little bit, but that is not what we know thus far.
The other area where the media are jumping all over DeSantis is that DeSantis talked about the fact that in the aftermath of, for example, Hurricane Katrina, you saw widespread looting.
You saw people who were stealing things.
You saw a lot of criminality.
He said, while he was touring the state, do not think about looting.
You should remember that this is a Second Amendment state.
If you try to loot things, you may get shot.
We want to make sure we're maintaining law and order.
Don't even think about looting.
Don't even think about taking advantage of people in this vulnerable situation.
And so, local law enforcement is involved in monitoring that.
I told Kevin if the state needs to help as well, because you can have people bringing boats into some of these islands and trying to ransack people's homes.
I can tell you, in the state of Florida, You never know what may be lurking behind somebody's home.
And I would not want to chance that if I were you, given that we're a Second Amendment state.
Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody seconded that.
She said, looting is not going to be tolerated in the state of Florida, which obviously differentiates it from the place where I came from, California, where looting was tolerated in widespread fashion without a natural disaster, just because, hell, why not?
Anyway, here was the Florida AG.
In no way, shape, or form do we want Floridians to feel when we ask them to evacuate that they can't do so and leave their property securely.
And yes, we have seen instances of folks going into homes trying to burglarize them.
And we don't want that to be any reason for folks to be hesitant to leave in the future or even now.
So we've issued those strong warnings and certainly Florida Governor DeSantis has been strong and made sure that everyone knows Florida is a law and order state.
And that will not be tolerated.
Now, this is a completely racially neutral standard.
Don't loot things and you won't get shot.
This seems pretty obvious, except to the folks over at MSNBC.
Joy Reid tweeted out, when the looting starts, the shooting starts, segregationists, Miami Sheriff Walter Headley, 1967, didn't take DeSantis.
Long to return to form, ah, he's a segregationist now.
So when he says that you shouldn't loot in the middle of a hurricane aftermath recovery, And that there are a lot of people in Florida who own guns.
That's obviously a form of segregation.
By the way, you talk about the low bigotry, the soft bigotry of low expectations.
That's pretty hard bigotry right there because apparently Joy Reid is now assuming that everybody who would be looting in the state of Florida is black, which is why Ron DeSantis would be saying that.
An insane proposition given the fact a lot of not black people live in Florida and presumably many criminals who are not black live in Florida and would be engaging in looting if that were to happen.
So, well done there from Joy Reid.
Again, this is a dog that's not going to hunt so far.
There's a struggle to come up with some sort of narrative as to how DeSantis is blowing this because what Democrats are really afraid of is that DeSantis will respond to this in actually mature, responsible fashion.
And if that happens, it boosts his chances at 2024 even more.
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris continuing to do what she does worst, which is be vice president.
So the vice president of the United States actually said out loud that hurricane and disaster relief should be Allotted and allocated based on race, which is crazy.
You should actually give people who need the money and the resources, the money and resources they need, not based on their skin color, but again, because this entire administration has been pervaded by equity considerations.
This is how you end up with Kamala Harris saying this sort of nonsense.
It is our lowest income communities and our communities of color that are most impacted by these extreme conditions and impacted by issues that are not of their own making.
Absolutely.
And so we have to address this in a way that is about giving resources based on equity, understanding that we fight for equality, but we also need to fight for equity, understanding not everyone starts out at the same place.
And if we want people to be in an equal place, sometimes we have to take into account those disparities.
The smarm is so strong with this one.
So just to get this straight, we're not going to pay attention to which communities need it most.
We're going to pay attention to which communities are apparently most stacked with people of color in the name of equity, according to Kamala Harris.
This, of course, prompted the state of Florida to be like, no, that's not the way this is working.
That would actually be illegal.
You can't actually do that under federal or state law.
That is discriminatory.
The fact that the vice president of the United States keeps saying stuff like this is, once again, demonstrative of the worldview that is incredibly perverse.
The idea being, again, the old New York Times headline, World to End Tomorrow, Women and Minorities Hit Hardest.
Now it's hurricane hits, women and minorities hit hardest, even if we have, by the way, we have no evidence that that's the case.
Many of the areas that were absolutely destroyed here, like Sanibel Island, that is a very wealthy area.
You're talking about some of the wealthiest areas of Florida, like vacation islands with a lot of white people who are very, very rich.
And apparently, those people don't get any aid because, what, equity?
Or something.
Meanwhile, in another ironic headline, according to the Daily Wire, a Coast Guard hero who was praised by Joe Biden for saving lives after Hurricane Ian is now facing discharge because he didn't get the COVID jab.
Apparently, Aviation Survival Technician Second Class Zach Loesch Earned praise on a Friday phone call from the commander-in-chief for kicking in a wall to save a trapped wheelchair-bound woman and her husband.
The guardsman hoisted the woman in her wheelchair to a waiting helicopter, according to Breitbart, which interviewed him.
Biden said in a press release, And he personally thanked Loesch and Lieutenant Commander Christopher Hooper for the heroic work they and their Coast Guard colleagues have performed during search and rescue operations in response to Hurricane Ian.
Apparently, Biden said that Hooper's team also saved a one-month-old baby.
It was not clear where the rescues occurred.
There's only one problem, according to the Daily Wire.
The next time Loesch hears from a federal official, it could be to warn that his career is over because he told Breitbart that he had applied for a religious exemption to avoid taking the COVID vax, but doesn't expect to have it honored.
He said if I'd asked any of the people I saved yesterday if they wanted to come with me, even though I'm un-vaxxed, every single one of them would have said yes, he said.
And all of this is madness, and again, demonstrative of the silliness of this administration, which has very screwed up priorities, shall we say.
Meanwhile, the left is trying to take advantage of Hurricane Ian, not just to bag on Ron DeSantis for no discernible reason, but also to push the idea that this is climate change.
So they had on the Noted scientific expert, Bill Nye, who's mostly a noted scientific expert because he spoke to us about basic, basic science, like how to make a potato battery when we were all eight.
But apparently Bill Nye is like the best climate scientist they could come up with over at CNN.
So the very, very well versed in all climatology, Bill Nye, and Jim Acosta, who's very well versed in how mirrors work, they really went at it here.
If we don't acknowledge there's a problem, We're not going to get it done.
And so I just, I just want to ask conservative lawmakers to cut it out.
I understand that you want to get reelected.
I understand that you have this primary system, which motivates you to get these, these hardcore conservative voters engaged.
But look, you've just, just cut it out.
We've got hundreds of thousands of people Suffering tremendously.
Now, come on, let's get to work.
This is the United States.
Come on, let's be world leaders, for crying out loud.
And Bill, I mean, when we talk to people out here on the ground, you know, I talked to several folks this morning who were saying this, you know, we just need to come together as a country.
I'm sorry, listening to Bill Nye lecture you about climate change.
If only we had the will, man.
If only we could all wear weird bow ties and still live off the legacy of making a show that we used to put on our VHS tapes in 1997.
And then you got Jim Acosta being like, I too am a climate change expert because I'm standing in Florida wearing a polo shirt that's unbuttoned.
Look at me.
I know about climate change as well.
The data demonstrate hurricanes are not more common and they're not more severe.
This is one of the areas where the link between climate change and weather events is actually the weakest by all available data.
It is interesting to note that Bill Gates was a big proponent of the idea that we have to do world-beating change in order to prevent climate change.
Even Bill Gates came out yesterday and he said, I don't think it's realistic to say that people are utterly going to change their lifestyle because of concerns about climate.
You can have a cultural revolution where you're trying to throw everything up.
You can create a North Korean type situation where the state is in control.
Other than immense central authority to have people just obey, I think the collective action problem is just completely not solvable.
Anyone who says that we will tell people to stop eating meat or stop wanting to have a nice house and we'll just basically change human desires, I think that's too difficult.
You make a case for it, but I don't think it's realistic for that to play an absolutely central role.
That is correct.
I mean, shock of shocks, it turns out that apparently Bill Gates is now living in the world of reality.
Well, there is one piece of news with regard to climate change that seems relevant here, and that is that the UN is now basically admitting that they are working with the world search engines to shut down all available information that rebutts the common narrative on the left, right, which is that climate change is entirely man-made, not mostly, entirely, and also that we can prevent all climate change in the future if only you stop eating meat and only if you get a smaller house and And you just get rid of that gas powered vehicle and if you have fewer kids and all the rest of it.
This is why you had a UN official, Melissa Fleming, at the World Economic Forum explaining that because the UN is in charge of the science, they now get to hang out with the folks over at Google and determine exactly what sort of stuff you get to see on this topic.
You know, we partnered with Google, for example, if you Google climate change, you will at the top of your search, you will get all kinds of UN resources.
We started this partnership when we were shocked to see that when we Googled climate change, we were getting incredibly distorted information right at the top.
So we're becoming much more proactive.
We own the science, and we think that the world should know it.
And the platforms themselves also do.
But again, it's a huge, huge challenge that I think All sectors of society need to be very active in.
In the words of tyranny right there, we own the science.
We are the same thing you heard from Anthony Fauci.
He was the science, therefore you had to listen to him no matter how wrong he was.
And now you have this UN official saying we own the science, therefore we are working with search engines to prevent you from seeing information that rebuts some of the things that we are saying.
And the informational environment is just going to get worse here because there are so many people at the very top who are fully, full-on convinced that they know better than you and therefore they get to dictate terms to you and prevent you from seeing any sort of dissenting information.
Meanwhile, the White House is attempting to use Hurricanians to blame gas companies, again, for rising gas prices.
So here is Karine Jean-Pierre, the wildly untalented press secretary to the President of the United States, explaining that the White House is going to make sure that gas companies don't take advantage of hurricanes.
Again, this is one of the dumbest talking points for the White House.
The gas prices, they were going down.
Now they spiked a little bit.
And that's what happens when you have a natural disaster and it attenuates all of the lines.
So instead, you have KJP out there saying, well, you know, it's really just that they got greedy again.
So every time prices go up, it's because companies are getting greedy.
I guess when they go down, it's because they become randomly altruistic.
So here's Kareem Shump here.
What we're saying is we're just making sure that while people are dealing, while we are all dealing with a hurricane, that gas and oil companies don't take advantage of it.
It's just a little bit of a, hey, we want to make sure in this time When people are losing their homes, when people are dealing with an incredibly difficult time, that we shouldn't take advantage of it.
That's it.
It is just coming from the President, and we feel that coming from the President is a powerful voice.
And so, look, we know that disruptions from hurricanes can pose challenges to markets, but the latest projections show that major refineries should not be impacted.
One of the most irritating aspects of the modern day left, and I would say the left for the past several decades, is something that has been termed emotivism by a wide variety of philosophers.
real companies. So there's nothing more to it than just being just vigilant about that.
One of the most irritating aspects of the modern day left, and I would say the left for the past several decades, is something that has been termed emotivism by a wide variety of philosophers. Emotivism is the attribution of an emotional, a sort of motive, an emotional motive to what your opponent is doing.
Your opponent isn't doing something because they, in good faith, have the wrong ideas.
Your opponent is doing it because they're mean or greedy or terrible.
You saw this with regard to Bill Nye and Jim Acosta, right?
The reason that people are not saying that hurricanes are linked to climate change is not because maybe they have differing data or maybe they actually look at the data, unlike Bill Nye and Jim Acosta.
It's because they're mean and they're cruel and they need to get elected in Republican primaries.
Now you have Corine Jean-Pierre suggesting that the reason the oil prices are going up is not because of market conditions.
It's because of the cruelty and evil of the oil companies.
This does allow you to avoid the consequence of your own bad policy.
You just get to claim that the real reason that your policies are failing is because everyone is mean.
The real reason that your policies just are having precisely the opposite of their intended consequence is because everybody around you is cruel and vicious.
Gavin Newsom is doing this routine.
So the gas prices in California are extraordinarily high.
We're talking about six bucks per gallon.
The average price a gallon per this week in California is $6.29 a gallon in California. $6.29.
Where I live, which is in South Florida, you're talking about still well below $4 a gallon.
In California, it's above $6 a gallon.
Right now, well above it.
But here's Gavin Newsom blaming the oil companies for being greedy, not his own garbage policy.
Gas prices in California have increased by a record 84 cents per gallon in just over one week.
That's a $2.50 difference compared to U.S.
prices.
It just doesn't add up.
The degree of divergence from the national prices has never happened before.
And oil companies, they provide no explanation.
The fact is, they're ripping you off.
Their record profits are coming at your expense.
And that's why today I'm calling for a windfall tax to ensure these profits go directly back to help millions of Californians who are paying for this oil company extortion.
In addition, earlier today I directed the Air Resources Board to make an early transition to our winter blend gasoline.
This should immediately increase supply and result in savings.
Savings of up to 25 cents per gallon within the next...
Okay.
He's such a used car salesman.
I love it.
We are going to do this thing and it's going to reduce gas prices by 25 cents per gallon, which will bring us to just about $6 per gallon, which is still like more than $2 more than any place else in the country.
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It's probably because oil companies in California are particularly mean.
Like everywhere else, they're very altruistic, but in California, they're extraordinarily mean.
Or, alternatively, California's energy policy is garbage.
It's a really, really bad energy policy.
That's precisely what the editorial board over at the Wall Street Journal is saying.
Quote, California gas prices have long been higher than the national average, owing to hefty fuel taxes and climate regulations.
But the difference now is the largest in at least two decades.
Taxes add about 66 cents to the price of a gallon, about twice as much on average as other states.
California's cap-and-trade program and low-carbon fuel standard add roughly another $0.46 a gallon.
So just right off the bat, you're talking about the cap-and-trade program and the taxes.
You're talking about $1.12 that is being added directly to the price of gas.
Okay, so that's already explaining more than half of the discrepancy.
Currently, between national gas prices and California gas prices, these climate regulations are causing refineries to shut down or convert to producing biofuels that are more profitable because of rich government subsidies.
California lost 12% of refining capacity between 2017 and 2021 and is set to lose another 8% by the end of next year.
Yet refineries outside of the state can't produce its supposedly greener fuel blend.
Alright, so the reason he's going to the winter fuel blend, which is the less green version, is because there's such heavy restrictions on how you do the fuel blend in California that only California refineries can do it.
But California refineries have been shuddering because they can't make enough of a profit by doing business in the state of California because of Gavin Newsom.
But they're the ones who are mean.
They're the ones who are cruel.
It is such Common left-wing government status nonsense to create a vast regulatory scheme that drives up the cost of a product and then blame capitalism for the failure of the competitiveness of the product.
As the Wall Street Journal points out, when California refineries experience problems, gasoline supply becomes tight and prices shoot up.
A few refineries are experiencing scheduled maintenance after running all out over the summer.
A couple experienced unexpected problems.
West Coast fuel inventories are the lowest in a decade.
And California refiners are now reaping huge profits.
Because they can.
And because they have to.
Because you have to stock up right now.
Because when the pendulum swings the other way, you're going to get crushed.
If you're a refiner on the Gulf Coast, your gross profit on gas is about $6.60 per barrel of oil.
If you're in LA, it's about $101, according to Tom Cloza of the Oil Price Information Service.
As much as progressives loathe big oil, their climate policies benefit large refiners and producers that can sustain the state's steep regulatory costs.
They created basically a de facto monopoly for all the people they're now yelling at.
So again, well done here from Gavin Newsom.
This is why he desperately is attempting to backfill his own bad policy by allowing those refineries to produce winter blend, which again is the less clean version of fuel.
Meanwhile, on an international level, the drop in oil prices is actually going to now lead to higher prices because OPEC does not like it when the gas prices drop this much.
So according to the Wall Street Journal, OPEC Plus is now set to consider its most drastic reduction of production since the pandemic.
In order to help prop up falling oil prices, a move that could pressure on global economic growth.
OPEC and its Moscow-led allies, collectively known as OPEC+, is considering a cut of more than a million barrels a day, delegates in the group said.
Concerns about a slowing global economy have dragged oil prices down at their fastest pace since the COVID-19 outbreak began in early 2020, prompting OPEC to consider ways to prop up the price of oil.
Any move by OPEC to raise oil prices could put further pressure on Western consumers who are already hurting from high energy costs while also helping Russia, one of the biggest energy producers in the world, fill its state coffers as it wages war against Ukraine.
So again, The inflationary policy that was pursued by central banks all over the West and the insane spending policies pursued by nearly every European country.
Plus you get off the gas and it turns out that you're still getting the gas and natural gas from from Russia.
Well, then when the prices drop because your economy sinks.
All the places that produce gas restrict supply in order to drive up the price again.
So the prices, which are already inflated because Russia is already taking a two by four to your energy markets, now those prices are set to jump even more.
So again, well done policymakers here.
Oil prices had shot up over $100 a barrel and stayed there for months, but Brent crude, the global oil benchmark, is now down 23% this quarter, following oil prices are often a pressure release valve for the global economy, reducing costs as demand falls in a cycle that repeats itself.
OPEC Plus often holds itself out as a regulator of the oil market, aiming to keep supply and demand balanced, but a production cut would support prices at a time when they are at historically high levels.
Because even though the oil prices have been coming down recently, like over the past month or so, they're still very, very high compared to where they were like a year ago.
Adel Hamezia, a visiting fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard, said the move could play a role in making recessions worse in some countries.
He explained the production cut could push inflation higher and hurt oil demand further.
The US has actually asked OPEC to pump more oil, but it turns out that Joe Biden's plan to yell at the Saudis because they're very, very mean and killed Jamal Khashoggi, it turns out that now the Saudis don't listen to him all that much.
So all Joe Biden is doing is tapping into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
A genius move.
So again, bad policy stacked on top of bad policy.
And I will say the one good piece of news here is it seems like the Federal Reserve is not going to be dissuaded from doing what it has to do on inflation.
According to a senior Federal Reserve official, Lael Brainard, the Fed vice chairwoman, she said that the central bank continues to press up the interest rates in order to beat high inflation.
She warned that additional unforeseen developments could drive prices higher, extending a pattern where inflation accelerates despite forecasts that has already peaked.
So she's saying that we may get even more of this.
So we are headed for stagflation is what it looks like.
It looks like a solid period of continuing inflation over economic stagnation pressed forward by higher gas prices generated by lower supply.
Amazing, amazing stuff.
And the markets are taking this into account.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the S&P 500 has moved higher in the one-year period following every midterm election since 1942, but U.S.
stocks are not prepared to do this.
So after every midterm election, when there's a little bit of solidity, when people sort of understand which direction the country is going, the stock market tends to move up.
Right now, people are so freaked out about the markets that they are betting that the market's going to go down next year.
According to the Wall Street Journal, tightening monetary policy and worries about an economic slowdown are clouding the outlook.
Market participants are still contending with the Federal Reserve's aggressive rate-raising campaign aimed at bringing down persistently hot inflation.
Investors expect corporate earnings to weaken as the business environment gets tougher into the year-end.
And recent wild swings in government bonds and currencies are threatening to further destabilize financial markets.
So there's no faith that after this election, things are going to get better anytime soon.
Well, maybe one of the reasons that there is very little faith that things are going to get better anytime soon is because the world draws closer, at least by one step, to the possibility of actual nuclear weapons use.
Over the weekend, Russia annexed actual territories in Ukraine.
The goal of this is to then say that when Ukraine moves into those territories, which are Ukrainian territory, that this is now an aggressive war, no longer a defensive war, and thus Russia can defend itself with any and all means at its disposal, whether we're talking about 300,000 call-up reservists, or a million call-up reservists, or the use of battlefield tactical nuclear weapons.
According to the Washington Post, President Putin's declaration of the annexation of four regions in eastern and southern Ukraine signals the onset of a new and highly dangerous phase in the seven-month war, one that Western officials and analysts fear could escalate to the use of nuclear weapons for the first time in 77 years.
Again, this is one of the problems.
You keep...
You keep caging the bobcat and eventually, if you let even like this much skin near the bobcat, the bobcat goes for it.
Putin has previously threatened to resort to nuclear weapons if Russia's goals in Ukraine continue to be thwarted.
The annexation brings the use of a nuclear weapon a step closer by giving Putin a potential justification on the grounds that the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, as he put it in his speech last week.
He renewed that threat on Friday, made an ominous comment that the U.S.
atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki created a precedent for the use of nuclear weapons, echoing references he has made in the past to the U.S.
invasion of Iraq as setting a precedent for Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
And this is something that the Soviets used to do a lot.
You see it in third world countries a lot.
This idea that our predations, our evils are justified because the United States did this thing 70 years ago in a completely different context.
So Putin is doing that routine now.
U.S.
and Western officials say they still think it's unlikely Putin will carry out his threats, but the truth is that in September-October of last year, nobody thought that Putin was actually going to invade Ukraine.
Most probably, they say, he's hoping to deter the West from providing more sophisticated military assistance to Ukraine, while the mobilization of an additional 300,000 troops allows Russia to reverse or at least halt its military setbacks on the battlefield.
But the threats appear to have only strengthened Western resolve to continue sending weapons to Ukraine, and the Ukrainian military is continuing to advance into Russian-occupied territory NATO and the West are taking a very, very strong stand.
There's a large scale bet here.
It'll either pay off handsomely in that Vladimir Putin will be put back on his heels.
He won't actually do the thing that he is threatening to do.
Or it's going to pay off in the worst possible way in that Russia starts using tactical battlefield nuclear weapons.
The West responds by putting NATO, for example, assets directly over Russian targets.
And then you're really on the brink of full out nuclear warfare with the Russians.
All of this is being pressed forward because the Ukrainians, ironically, have been so successful.
According to the Wall Street Journal, residents of the war-wracked town of Lyman ventured onto the streets on Sunday morning, ensuring unusual quiet after months of fighting unsure about who was now in charge.
The last Russian forces drove out of the city the previous night, trying to avoid getting encircled by the advancing Ukrainian troops.
Not all of the Russians made it out.
Burning Russian vehicles and sprawled bodies of dead Russian soldiers remain on the roadsides outside the cities.
Lyman is a strategic town.
It's on the northern tip of the Donetsk region.
That's one of the four areas that Russia just annexed over the weekend.
Its loss is a major embarrassment for Putin.
The first such retreat from a city he claims is officially part of Russia.
So as I say, the West is talking a big game here.
And thus far, it's been easy for them to talk a big game because the Ukrainians are fighting and doing all the dying.
I mean, it's the Europeans who are undertaking economic Large assets, it's the Europeans, the Americans who are really undertaking the shipping of what are kind of second rate weapons to most of NATO and to the United States in particular.
But they're taking a very strong rhetorical line with regard to Russia.
Jan Stoltenberg, who is the head of NATO, he suggested that Ukraine might be able to join NATO like right now.
NATO has an open door policy and every nation, including of course also Ukraine, has the right to choose its own path, including what kind of security arrangements it wants to be a part of.
At the same time, any decision on membership has to be taken by consensus.
All 30 Allies have to agree.
Meanwhile, Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor to the President, he said that the Russian annexation attempt is a fraudulent attempt, which it is.
I mean, the Russian attempt to annex this as a historic part of Russia is silly, but it obviously is an attempt to set up the predicate for the possibility of pouring more troops into the region.
President Biden issued a strong condemnation of Russia's fraudulent attempt to annex sovereign Ukrainian territory.
This act is a flagrant violation of international law, and it has no legitimacy.
Unfortunately, it's also not surprising.
It's straight out of Putin's playbook of deceit, disinformation, and aggression, and we've been warning about it for months.
In fact, I've stood at this podium and warned about it several times, including as recently as last week.
By the way, the Ukrainian advances continue apace.
According to certain Russian sources, they're saying the Ukrainian forces are trying to take over a place called Bereslov.
If those claims are true, it would indicate Ukrainian soldiers have now breached around 72 kilometers into Russian lines in Kherson Oblast, which is, again, one of these regions that Russia is now claiming as its own.
So the possibility of Putin actually doing something wild is growing by the day.
This whole situation is very much reminiscent of the 1939-1940 so-called Winter War in Finland.
At that time, it was right at the outset of World War II.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had been signed.
There was an alliance between the USSR and Germany.
And the USSR decided that while they were kind of gobbling up land that they had not actually expended any military resources for, they may as well go after Finland as well.
And so they declared war on Finland.
They invaded Finland, a very, very tiny country.
And Finland fought back and fought back incredibly hard and actually stalled the Russian advance almost completely.
They were receiving some forms of support from the United States.
They were receiving support from the outside, from a wide variety of nations, ranging from Actually, Italy, to Britain, to the United States, to Hungary.
There's a lot of support against the U.S.S.R.
in Finland.
They basically stopped the U.S.S.R.
dead.
At the very last minute, there was a big infusion of Russian troops into that region, right into the north of Finland.
And basically, the U.S.S.R.
cut a deal with Finland that prevented the rest of the world from going to war directly with Russia.
That was at a time when there were no nuclear weapons.
And so the idea there was that the West was sort of relieved in the sense they wouldn't have to go to war with this enormous country that was the USSR.
They wouldn't have to go to direct war at a time when they were already at war with Hitler.
And Stalin was relieved because he wouldn't have to go directly to war with one of these capitalist countries he thought was fighting another capitalist country in Germany.
He saw the war between Germany and the West as a sort of internecine war in the West.
The difference this time is that we're not talking about the possibility of having to go directly to war with a conventional army in Russia.
That would actually not be all that intimidating for NATO.
NATO has resources that vastly outpace that which Russia can bring to bear.
We're talking about a nuclear-armed country.
And so, the real threat here is not that Russia is going to rush a bunch of troops into the region.
The real threat is the possibility of use of nuclear weapons in the region, violating that precept.
And nobody really knows what's going to happen next.
If Russia were to use a nuclear weapon, nobody knows what the response looks like from the West.
What do they do?
Do they put those NATO airplanes over Russian targets?
Do they provide significant forward military resources to the Ukrainians for the possibility of taking actual Russian terror?
What does that even look like?
And this is why Putin is threatening it, of course.
So this is now a giant bluff.
I mean, this is a giant poker game.
And again, when I say it's a bluff, I hope it's a bluff.
It may not be a bluff, which is why, as I've been saying all along, the best case scenario here is that Putin goes.
But if we're just hoping to avoid the worst case scenario, which is the reinstitution of nuclear weapons, well, then at this point, you have to be talking to Putin about what an off ramp looks like.
By the same token, if Putin can simply hold up the rest of the world by threatening to use a nuclear weapon, well, there's a reason why North Korea has a nuclear weapon.
It's because they've been able to hold at bay the rest of the world despite being a horrific, tyrannical hellhole of a state.
And this is why Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon as well.
Alrighty, coming up, we'll get to Joe Biden, who unfortunately continues his descent into senility.
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Well, speaking of someone who doesn't know what's going on around him most of the time, the president of the United States continues to gaffe apace.
So repeatedly over the weekend, the president of the United States just Made clear that he should not be allowed out of the basement because every time he comes out of the basement He makes a boo-boo. So at one point during a speech over the weekend the president suggested that he was used to being banged up on by Republicans, but I Know I'm being banged up by the Republicans, but come bring it on Yeah, bring bring on a man Also, I don't know why he's on the set from a 1970s game show, but apparently he is.
Also, Joe Biden told a reporter at one point not to look at the teleprompter, is the thing that he said in the middle of a press conference.
America and its allies are not going, let me emphasize this, are not going to be intimidated, are not going to be intimidated by Putin and his reckless words and threats.
He's not going to scare us and he doesn't, or intimidate us.
Putin's actions are a sign he's struggling.
The sham referenda he carried out and this routine he put on.
Don't worry, it's not on there if you're looking, okay?
Who's he talking to and why?
And why is he talking to the teleprompter again?
Yeah, when this was Donald Trump.
Let's just demonstrate who's unfit when it's Joe Biden.
He's everybody's charming grandpa who talks to ghosts.
He did that again.
So that was fun.
He finished his little presser and Jill came to guide him away the way that Wilson used to wheel away Woodrow.
And Joe Biden just starts like shaking hands with the air again.
Maybe it's just, again, my going theory is maybe it's we who cannot see.
Maybe, in fact, he does have a best friend who's a ghost.
It's possible.
I mean, why not?
First of all, that'd make a great pitch for a movie.
It would do better than Bros did over the weekend.
The president who has an imaginary friend who died like 20 years ago.
I think that would work.
Here's the president of the United States and his imaginary dead friend.
There he is.
He's talking to no one.
And then he's like, where should I go?
And Kamala Harris is like... I'm talking about that a little later today, okay?
Kamala Harris is like, let's go this way.
And Joe's like looking down at the floor just to make sure that he doesn't trip over a cord.
Literally, that's what they're doing.
They're all looking down at the floor to make sure that Joe does not trip over the cord to the teleprompter.
Yeah, all of this is very, very encouraging.
It's also very encouraging that the person backing up Joe Biden is Kamala Harris.
Joe Biden suggested that she would not be the last woman to be either vice president or president.
If he is trying to predict here that Kamala Harris will be president, I can dissuade him of that notion.
Kamala Harris will never be president of the United States.
She is awful at this job.
There's no way.
Unless, God forbid, something happens to her and she just accedes to the job, there's no way.
There's no way she becomes elected president of the United States.
You're the first, but Kamala often says you won't be the last.
Kamala won't be the last woman to be vice president or president.
Uh, she's not going to be.
Okay.
Alrighty.
Meanwhile, the Democrats in the polls have begun to sink.
They're receding back to the kind of norm for this area.
There was this spike during the summer.
And the implication during that spike is that possibly the Democrats would have a shot at retaining the House.
That is no longer the case.
It is pretty certain at this point that Republicans are going to pick up significant seats in the House.
It's almost undoubted that they will end up taking the House.
Meanwhile, in the Senate polling, a lot of these polls are really, really close.
In Wisconsin, the RealClearPolitics polling average puts Ron Johnson up in Wisconsin.
It puts Adam Laxalt up in Nevada.
John Fetterman's lead is down to somewhere between two and four points by all available polling.
Georgia's race is dead even, and Brian Kemp is likely to pull Hershel Walker over the finish line in that particular race.
It looks as though J.D.
Vance is going to win his race.
It looks like Rubio is going to win his race.
So what that really means is that Republicans will likely be able to pick up at least a couple more seats, which would put them in the driver's seat for the coming Congress.
They would end up with a majority in both the Senate and in the House.
Maybe that has to do with the quality of the leadership on the Democratic side of the aisle.
Nancy Pelosi had a bit of a gaffe over the weekend.
More and more, she's just Lucille Bluth from Arrested Development.
What does a banana cost, Michael?
It costs like $11?
Here's Nancy Pelosi, teeth a-clacking, explaining that Florida shouldn't be shipping illegal immigrants to Martha's Vineyard, they need to stay down there in Florida and pick the fruit.
Which is, um, super racist.
Right now, the best thing that we can do for our economy is to have comprehensive immigration reform.
We have a shortage of workers in our country, and you see even in Florida, some of the farmers and the growers saying, why are you shipping these immigrants up north, we need them to pick the crops down here.
But that doesn't mean that we don't recognize our moral responsibility as well.
So wait, our moral responsibility is to keep cheap illegal labor in Florida so they can Is that what she's suggesting a moral responsibility is?
Right there?
Man, with a leadership class like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, I can't imagine how things are going wrong for Democrats.
Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing now, including Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez writing letters to a bunch of rabbis about how she should be able to dictate their views on gay rights.
Plus, the Supreme Court is coming back into session.