White House Dossier's

Biden gets low marks on economy and major concerns about his age as he looks to Trump rematch, new poll shows . . .  President Joe Biden's age and his handling of the economy are two of his greatest weaknesses as the 80-year-old incumbent gears up for a possible rematch with former President Donald Trump, a new poll showed Monday. Those major concerns could be what's dragging Biden's overall job approval underwater at 42%, versus some 57% who disapprove. A 60% majority of registered voters indicated in the poll that they do not consider Biden "mentally up for the job" of being president. Nearly three-fourths of respondents, 73%, said they think Biden is too old to run for president — a much higher response than they gave Trump, who is 77 years old. Majorities of registered voters said they disapproved of how Biden has handled the economy (59%), inflation (63%) and growth of the middle class (58%). Voters also gave Biden net negative approval ratings on his handling of the war in Ukraine and U.S. dealings with China. CNBC

Trump’s status as an anti-hero is making him unstoppable . . . If anyone had hoped that the dubious distinction of becoming the first American president to have a police mugshot taken might be a humiliating or humbling experience for the person concerned — or that four criminal indictments, 91 felony counts and an enforced tour of US courtrooms in the run-up to an election might precipitate some kind of fall in popularity — they must be feeling somewhat disillusioned. Since the release of the image of Donald Trump in Fulton County jail — showing the former president adopting a thuggish pose, brows furrowed and eyes glaring contumaciously up towards the camera — he has only increased his lead. Trump is now more than 50 points clear of his nearest rival Ron DeSantis in some surveys. Far from working against him, Trump’s mugshot became instantly iconic. His campaign said that it had made more than $9.4mn since the mugshot was released, including $864,000 from selling 24,000 coffee mugs printed with the image (geddit?) and $1.7mn from T-shirts. Financial Times

Vivek Ramaswamy Seeks Meeting With Julian Assange . . . Vivek Ramaswamy is seeking a meeting with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, he told the Washington Free Beacon, which could make him the first U.S. presidential candidate to meet with the controversial publisher in prison. "I’d like to meet him. No success in getting in touch yet," Ramaswamy told the Free Beacon on Friday, adding that he has asked former representative Ron Paul for help brokering the sit-down during Ramaswamy's planned visit to London later this month. Ramaswamy has vowed to pardon the Wikileaks founder on his first day in office, calling it "downright shameful" that Assange "still sits in a foreign prison in exile." Free Beacon

Impeachment trial of Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton set to begin . . .  Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton is bracing for his impeachment trial set to begin Tuesday, historically brought by state senators of his own political party. The state Senate is taking up 16 articles of impeachment relating to allegations of bribery, dereliction of duty and disregard of official duty against Paxton, who will be just the third person to stand for an impeachment trial in the history of the Texas legislature. A close ally to former President Donald Trump, Paxton spearheaded several lawsuits in December 2020 challenging the presidential election results in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin showing a victory for Joe Biden. Fox News

McConnell facing increasing scrutiny as Senate reconvenes after latest freeze-up . . .  Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is facing a fresh set of questions about his health and ability to lead the GOP conference following his latest public freeze-up — the second incident in just more than a month. While speaking to reporters in Covington, Ky., last week, McConnell, 81, froze and was unresponsive for roughly 30 seconds at the podium, prompting his aides to check if he was OK. McConnell resumed the press gaggle following the episode, but he required help from his aide to hear the questions being asked. The Hill

Congress is turning into the Soviet Politburo.

Pence: "It Should Not Take That Long" To Defeat The Russians; U.S. Must Spend More In Ukraine . . . Mike Pence explains why he favors sending more money and weapons to Ukraine, telling FNC's Shannon Bream that it won't take "that long" to defeat Russia. "Joe Biden said in his State of the Union address that we're there as long as it takes... I'm going to tell you, it shouldn't take that long," Pence said during an interview on "FOX News Sunday". Real Clear Politics

A US-Russia war over Ukraine would be catastrophic --
Predictably, Washington 'experts' discharge advice that is not grounded in reality -- Rebekah Koffler Fox News

In Democrats' incessant prosecution of Trump, progressives ignore free speech rights . . .  By Jonathan Turley. Many Democrats dismiss free speech concerns over the prosecution of Donald Trump and his aides for their actions in challenging the 2020 election. “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” Those words from philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche capture the fear that the struggle against the ideas and people we oppose will twist us into the very thing we hate. For Democrats, that moment has come in an age of rage against former President Donald Trump in particular and conservatives in general. It's an age when reason and restraint are strangers. In various areas, Democrats have embraced repellent concepts in the effort to silence or even jail their opponents. What is most striking is that legal arguments now used by the left were once used against the left. Power of the state used to suppress information. USA Today

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Chinese Nationals Posing as Tourists Have Accessed US Military Bases and Other Sensitive Sites: Report . . . Chinese nationals, who sometimes posed as tourists, accessed U.S. military bases and other sensitive sites around 100 times in recent years, according to an exclusive report by The Wall Street Journal. The newspaper cited U.S. officials, who described the incidents as potential forms of espionage. Last year, the U.S. Department of Defense, FBI, and other agencies held a review to try to curb the frequency of these breaches, which involved unauthorized entries into US military bases and other federal sites, the newspaper reported. Most of the incidents took place in rural areas, away from tourist hotspots and commercial airports, according to the Journal. In one such incident, Chinese nationals were found scuba diving off Cape Canaveral, home to the Kennedy Space Center, per the Journal. Military.com

Crime-fighting fog hits shoplifters as retail theft spirals out of control . . . A disorienting and blinding fog connected to a store's alarm is a relatively new security measure to stop would-be thieves as organized retail crime spirals out of control. The technology, which was created by DensityUSA, is already in use in several countries in the European Union and Australia but is becoming more prevalent in the U.S., said Mike Egel, president of DensityUSA. Stores lost an estimated $86.6 billion to retail theft in 2022, and projections indicate that amount may reach $115 billion in 2025, according to Capital One Shopping Research. Fox Business

Time to buy stock in crowd control technology companies. LOL.

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Putin's war on hunger is part of his mass starvation strategy . . . By Rebekah Koffler. Last week, the Kremlin confirmed that Russian President Vladimir Putin is to meet with his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in Russia "soon." The purpose of the meeting is to discuss the new framework for the grain deal, which was brokered by Erdogan in July 2022 and then terminated by Putin almost a year later. It may be tempting to think that Erdogan has some special powers to convince his fellow authoritarian to restart the deal and prevent world hunger. But that is a false expectation.

Weaponizing food security, to coerce Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to capitulate and compel the West to abandon Ukraine in its war against Russia is part of Putin’s strategy of mass starvation.

Using non-military means – even tactics that are considered barbaric by Western standards – is part of Russia’s asymmetric military strategy. This strategy was conceptualized gradually, on Putin’s orders since he came to power more than two decades ago, by the Russian General Staff, the brain trust of the Russian military. The official name of what has become Putin’s playbook is "strategy of indirect action." The Russian generals borrowed heavily – albeit incorporating despotic methods – from the classic works of the British strategist, former army captain and military correspondent for the Times of London B.H. Liddell Hart (1885-1970). Fox News

I described, at the unclassified level, the strategy in my best-selling book, Putin's Playbook.

Cuba uncovers human trafficking of Cubans to fight for Russia in Ukraine . . . Cuba has uncovered a human trafficking ring that has coerced its citizens to fight for Russia in the war in Ukraine, its foreign ministry said on Monday, adding that Cuban authorities were working to "neutralize and dismantle" the network. The statement from Cuba's foreign ministry gave few details, but noted the trafficking ring was operating both within the Caribbean island nation, thousands of miles from Moscow, and in Russia. Reuters

Ukraine threatens legal action against EU if grain curbs drag on . . . Ukraine is threatening to take Brussels and EU member countries to the World Trade Organization if they fail to lift restrictions on its agricultural exports to the bloc this month. The country's grain exports — its main trade commodity — are currently banned from the markets of Poland, Hungary and three other EU countries under a deal struck with the European Commission earlier this year to protect farmers from an influx of cheaper produce from their war-torn neighbor. PoliticoEU

Zelensky ousts defense chief as ministry grapples with corruption claims . . . Ukraine’s defense minister resigned Monday, hours after President Volodymyr Zelensky announced plans to replace him. The move came amid a widening graft probe, as Kyiv looks to signal to Western partners who provide enormous amounts of defense aid that it has zero tolerance for corruption. Washington Post

Where's the money, Lebowski?

Money

Ukrainian oligarch and Zelensky supporter Ihor Kolomoisky arrested in fraud investigation . . . One of Ukraine’s most powerful oligarchs has been arrested in a fraud investigation, state media in the country are reporting. A Kyiv court on Saturday ordered Ihor Kolomoisky, a key supporter of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s 2019 presidential campaign, to 60 days in pre-trial detention while authorities investigate fraud charges against him, reported Ukrinform. Kolomoisky’s media and banking businesses have made him one of the richest men in Ukraine. CNN

Kolomoisky, who bankrolled Zelensky's presidential campaign, is banned, together with his family, from entry to the US due to "Involvement in Significant Corruption"  US State Department 

Biden books are still bombing . . . “He has tried to be kind of a drama-free president, certainly in comparison to his predecessor, and that makes it harder to write a book, both in terms of getting information and turning his story into one that is compelling for readers,” said Allen. After the Trump gold rush for the book industry of the last few years, the Biden era has, so far, been a bust. And that’s not just the case for mainstream journalists accustomed to chronicling the presidency in book form. Conservative readers don’t appear all that interested in reading hundreds of pages about a president they think is senile. Politico

Culture

Brainwashing Jordan Peterson . . . By Newt Gingrich. The Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson has become the perfect model for the threat of totalitarian mind and speech control. The College of Psychologists of Ontario has ordered Mr. Peterson to undertake social media training to retain his clinical license — and the right to call himself a psychologist. The college took issue with several social media posts Mr. Peterson made, which the college deemed inappropriate. One would think his Ph.D in psychology and decades of teaching at Harvard and several Canadian institutions would trump a few tweets. The scenario is worthy of George Orwell’s “1984,” Friedrich Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom,” or the collective writing of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. When Mr. Peterson challenged the brainwashing order, though, it was upheld by three Ontario Court judges. Gingrich360

The new age of agitprop . . . Are we living in a new age of agitprop? It is not unusual for journalism, culture and the arts to reflect the political bias of societies and individual writers. But in the past few decades, the business of providing information and insight has sharply deteriorated. Particularly at the elite level, the media now embrace an increasingly uniform point of view on issues as diverse as gender, race, the pandemic and climate. The mainstream media have abandoned the pursuit of objectivity and truth. Spiked-Online

True fact, as my kids like to say.

Ironically, the president that Jarrett would later to go work for – Joe Biden – has revealed a jaw-dropping pattern of secret emails with fake account names, weaponized the U.S. Department of Justice against political foes, and entanglement with tens of millions of dollars in foreign money and other ethical conflicts. The steady stream of tawdry revelations from Biden’s vice presidential years makes clear it wasn’t just Hillary Clinton and her husband that sought to become richer through the Obama years. When elected vice president, earned roughly $230,000 a year. By the time he left the Blair House, Forbes and others estimated his current net worth as $9 million.  Just the News

COVID-19 ORIGINS: Experts Consulted by Fauci Suddenly Changed Their Minds . . . More revelations concerning the initial responses of top officials at the National Institutes of Health about the origins of COVID-19, which killed an estimated 1.1 million Americans, keep dripping out of the federal bureaucracy. Top officials’ initial narrative hardened into a stubborn insistence on natural origins for COVID-19. However, most leading virologists consulted by Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, initially thought that the novel coronavirus had an unnatural origin. Fauci’s Memo. Today, we can take Fauci’s word for it. On Feb. 1, 2020, he conferred with a group of top virologists to discuss the origins of COVID-19. In his email that day (delivered at 11:58 p.m.) to Department of Health and Human Services officials Garrett Grigsby and Brian Harrison (with copies to other HHS officials, as well as NIH Director Francis Collins), Fauci writes of the virologists. See memo in Daily Signal

Why is Fauci still not in jail?

Labor days: Biden faces GOP pressure to order federal workers back to the office . . . Conservatives are keeping up pressure on the Biden administration to scrap remote work for thousands of federal employees. Lawmakers have been calling on the White House to get the federal workforce back in the office for most of this year.  "The American people deserve to understand the Biden administration’s post-pandemic telework policy and the thinking behind the Biden Administration’s rapidly evolving telework posture," an Aug. 31 letter from the House Oversight Committee to White House chief of staff Jeff Zients reads. Washington Examiner

Yeah, the feds LOVE this "teleworking" thing.

Here's for you Trump supporters! 

Trump spotted in NYC on Labor Day, waves at camera during rare visit . . . Former President Donald Trump made a rare appearance in the Big Apple on Labor Day after hosting an event for MAGA-supporting motorcyclists at his New Jersey golf club. Trump, 77, waved to the camera as he strolled into Trump Tower in Manhattan, where he used to live full-time before moving to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida following his failed 2020 presidential re-election campaign. Trump, who was sporting a dark suit jacket and slacks with a white shirt, spent part of the day with throngs of supporters at his Bedminster golf club. “A very large group of ‘Bikers for Trump’ just left Bedminster,” he posted on Truth Social Monday afternoon. “What a great time we all had.” NY Post

White House Assures Inflation Is Only Affecting People Who Need To Buy Stuff . . . With inflation and other economic woes continuing to plague the nation, The White House took the time to assure the nation over Labor Day that these troubling issues were only affecting people who needed to buy stuff. "Yes, we are continuing to see rising prices across many industries, but we want the American people to understand that those issues are very limited in scope," said historic Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who is black and gay. "If you don't have to purchase food, clothing, transportation or shelter to survive, none of this will affect you!" The press pool then stood and cheered at the very encouraging news. Babylon Bee

Author Of Tell-All Book Says Joe Biden Is Insecure About Being ‘Perceived As Stupid’ . . . Franklin Foer, the author of a new tell-all book about Joe Biden, appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press and said he believes the president has insecurities over “being perceived as stupid” because of the plagiarism scandal that derailed his first presidential campaign. Foer appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday for an interview with Chuck Todd where he described Joe Biden’s insecurities and how they motivate his behavior. Daily Caller

Sounds like Joe is at least smart enough to understand that he is dumb.