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Family bands can go one of two ways. Generally, they’re very, very good, or they’re very, very embarrassing. 

Take the Von Trapp family made famous in The Sound of Music. The film has loomed so large that many people, especially younger ones, have forgotten, or never knew, that this was a real family. They did escape from Austria to evade the Nazis, and they came to America where they performed as a touring music group until 1957. As your faithful correspondent writes this, many of them are making their living just up the road from this writer’s house in Vermont. In fact, I sold my last house through the Von Trapp realty firm. 

Or take the Petersen family, a modern American family musical group. They’re not only technically good (skilled vocals, sweet and close harmonies) enough to sell out Branson, Missouri, for years, but they’re generally well-liked. Why? First, because they’re good, but second, because they sing songs with universal themes. They cover well-known hits that speak of love, despair, disappointment and triumph. In a word, they don’t beat listeners over the head with partisan politics. 

But then there are family singing groups like the Marsh Family from the UK. It’s not that they’re technically bad, although the track you’re going to hear below has a corny synthesized musical accompaniment. They can sing well enough. 

It’s what they sing. Here’s a sample, sung by Matriarch Marsh:

♫He’s got convictions-he did the nasty

And undermined the cons-ti-too-shee-un

Yes. Really. When you have to add an extra syllable to “constitution” to make it fit the melodic meter, you may be too focused on partisan politics and not enough making good music. 

There’s more. These very white Brits sound like they’re trying to get a favored spot under Kam Kam’s coconut tree by singing in a faux-Jamaican accent and style. Here’s another line, but you really have to hear it to take in the full horror. 

♫Give me hope Kamala

Hope Kamala

Gimme hope Kamala for the election

Listen and weep:

What motivates a British family to be-clown itself this way over an American presidential candidate? One wonders if the Marshes are enjoying their illegal alien invasion, too, and all the cultural enrichment happening at knifepoint on England’s streets. 

Let’s see what Twitter has to say. 

Well, if they’re like American liberals, they could tour hurricane-ravaged North Carolina and they’d probably just make fun of the dumb, starving hicks like American leftists are doing. 

Looks like somebody noticed something!

Last week, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Cella warned about dangers the Chinese Communist Party-linked Gotion battery plant pose to national security, particularly the Camp Grayling National Guard base used to train Taiwanese soldiers.

On Wednesday, federal prosecutors charged five University of Michigan graduates from China with spying on the military base as it conducted Northern Strike, one of the largest National Guard exercises in the nation that also involved the Taiwanese military, The Detroit News reports.

“Camp Grayling is the hub of the National All-Domain Warfighting Center, which trains our troops and those of our allies, including Taiwan, in strategic and tactical battle operations,” Cella told the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability during a hearing on the CCP last week, according to the Taipei Times.

FBI Special Agent Caroline Julee Colpoys wrote in a criminal complaint filed Wednesday that five Chinese nationals were found with cameras at Camp Grayling during Northern Strike on Aug. 13, 2023, when they were caught by a Utah National Guard sergeant major taking photos just feet from military vehicles, tents and communications equipment.

Read the Full Story at The Midwesterner

Though it took the media several suspicious days to notice, most Americans now know that huge portions of the southeast have been destroyed by Hurricane Helene. Television shows us dramatic images of the wind destruction, but it’s the water that can truly destroy towns and cities. 

This storm was one of the worst to hit the American south in decades. Even places far in-land, such as Western North Carolina, took the kind of direct hit that most of us associate with living right on the ocean. Whole towns in the foothills of mountains have been wiped off the map. The rain dump was so fast and furious that even mountainside dwellers—the lucky ones—are stuck behind impassable downed trees and roads that don’t exist anymore. 

The woman who wants to be our next President sprang into action. From her flying office, Kamala Harris let scared Americans know she was on the job by sharing a picture of her airliner suite. Here she is “taking notes” on what appears to be blank paper, while “listening to a phone call” while her earbuds are not plugged in to the phone. 

On October 2, Harris made a stop in hurricane-ravaged Augusta, Georgia, to announce the federal government’s generosity. Every person with an immediate need can get up to—wait for it—$750. That’s right, a whole $750. What can you get with that? Not much. It’s not enough to replace all four brakes on the average car. It’s less than one month’s rent in most areas for a studio-efficiency apartment. 

Funny how illegal border crossers—criminals by definition—get a whole lot more just for showing up. They don’t even have to lose their home, they don’t have to be sitting on a tree stump praying that a rescue truck can get up the mountain. All they have to do is break into the country, and New York City, for example, will give them a loaded debit card with twice the money that Americans in New York get for monthly food stamps. 

As you would expect, social media users were a bit put off. 

Remember the devastating Lahaina wildfire that killed hundreds in Hawaii? The internet does. 

Remember when a freight train derailed in Ohio and sent a plume of toxic gas into the air, and nobody from the White House bothered to show up or say anything for weeks? The internet does. 

User Markus puts the $750 “government money” (it’s your tax dollars) in perspective:

Well, quite. 

The tipping point is here. 

For the first time in decades, more Americans now identify as Republican (48%) than Democratic (45%).

👉🏻 https://t.co/7PcABiyUFn pic.twitter.com/MXsKg0JKOo

— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) September 27, 2024

More Americans are identifying as Republicans than Democrats for the first time in decades in what appears to be a grand awakening to the Washington establishment, according to a new Gallup poll.

Forty-eight percent of respondents to the poll said they either identify as Republicans or are leaning Republican for the upcoming election, compared with 45 percent who identified as Democrats.

Breitbart reports that the Gallup analysts also said that “nearly all” measures that have shown some relationship to past presidential election outcomes favor the GOP.

“By 46 percent to 41 percent, Americans say the Republican Party is better able than the Democratic Party to address what they think is the most important problem facing the country,” Gallup’s Jeffrey M. Jones wrote.

“The top issues Americans currently name as the most important are ones that tend to favor the GOP, including the economy (24 percent), immigration (22 percent), the government (17 percent) and inflation (15 percent).”

The last time that even the same number of Americans identified as Republican and Democrat in the third quarter of an election year (July to September) was in 2004, when former President George W. Bush won his second term.

Even when former President Donald Trump was successful in his 2016 election bid, only 43 percent of respondents identified with Republicans, compared to the Democrats’ 46 percent.

Read More at The Daily Fetched

Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris appears to be impacting her streaming numbers significantly.

Since publicly endorsing Harris on September 10, the night of the presidential debate, Swift has reportedly lost more than 2 million listeners on Spotify, according to data shared by Chartmetric, a music streaming analytics company, with The Wrap.

Before the endorsement, Swift had around 94 million unique listeners on Spotify who had streamed her music in the past month.

By September 27, that number dropped to 91.9 million. For Swift, this decline could represent a hit to her earnings, as Spotify compensates artists based on the number of streams they receive.

Swift’s decline in popularity isn’t limited to Spotify.

The number of viewers for her YouTube videos in the U.S. also dropped by nearly 10% following her endorsement of Harris.

Data from Chartmetric shows that Swift had 102.4 million views on her YouTube channel in the month leading up to her endorsement, but by September 27, that number had fallen to 92.5 million.

Read More at LifeZette

Many Americans are generally sympathetic to what unions claim they stand for, honest pay for honest work. Even though they lean in different directions on unions, both liberals and conservatives can imagine scenarios where corporate power gets out of control and becomes exploitative, and it needs to be met with an opposing force.

But it’s a lot harder for most of us to sympathize with union bosses and the corrupt way in which they operate. As the nation sits through the first day of a Longshoreman’s union strike—47,000 dock and port workers on the east coast—that could cripple the supply chain worse than the government-bungled pandemic response, the head of the union is raising eyebrows.

Harold Daggett is the president of the International Longshoremen’s Association (the striking union). He sat down in front of a camera and delivered a list of dire consequences to other industries and his fellow Americans if the union’s demands aren’t met. Auto dealers out of cars? Too bad. President screaming at my guys to go back to work? Too bad. “I will cripple you,” Daggett said, looking and sounding like a movie mafioso, down to the vulgar gold chain.

Listen for yourself:

It gets better. Turns out—surprise!—Daggett has a past.

Daggett makes almost a million dollars a year, owns multiple yachts, and drives a Bentley. To be fair, union bosses aren’t asked to take a vow of poverty, as disproportionate as such compensation might seem.

But what about the fact that he’s been charged with racketeering by the Department of Justice (he beat both cases)? What about the fact that one of his co-defendants was found rotting in a car during the trial?

Seems a little harder to sympathize with him knowing that. Let’s see what X users had to say.

Why not start with Space Daddy and X owner Elon Musk?

A large-scale voter registration “glitch” saw almost 100,000 people in Arizona included on voter rolls without providing their proof of citizenship.

The Washington Post obtained the audio of a phone call between Governor Katie Hobbs, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, and Attorney General Kris Mayes.

Attorney General Mayes called it an “urgent, dire situation” and expressed concern that they would be accused of trying to rig the 2024 election.

“When this goes public, it is going to have all of the conspiracy theorists in the globe—in the world—coming back to re-litigate the past three elections, at least in Arizona,” Hobbs said.

“And it’s going to validate all of their theories about illegal voting in our elections, even though we all know that’s not true.”

The phone call took place on 10 September.

At the time, it was believed that 150,000 voters were affected. However, this was later was revised to 100,000.

The biggest proportion of voters affected were Republicans.

During the 40-minute phone call, the three officials engage in a desperate debate over how to respond to the problem without disqualifying citizens who are eligible to vote.

During the conversation, Fontes said, “They’re going to beat us up no matter what the hell we do, no matter what the hell we say.”

During the 2020 election, Arizona was the second closest state with Biden carrying the state by around 11,000 votes or 0.3%.

Read More at The Daily Fetched

Peter Doocy confronted White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre about the presence of thousands of illegal immigrants convicted of homicide who are currently living in the U.S.

Doocy raised concerns about data provided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which indicated that, as of July 21, 13,099 illegal immigrants convicted of homicide are freely residing across the country.

Doocy pressed Jean-Pierre on the issue, asking, “Thirteen-thousand people who’ve been convicted of murder crossed the border illegally and are living among us.

So how much danger are U.S. communities in right now because of this?”

Jean-Pierre responded by questioning the accuracy of the data, stating that it represented a “false representation” of the situation.

“I think it’s important to correct the record here, first of all, the false representation of the data ICE shared, so that’s what we’re seeing, false representation,” Jean-Pierre said. “We got to call that out, and this has been fact-checked by some of your colleagues here, by multiple, multiple, multiple outlets. That has been debunked on what has been falsely misrepresented here, so we have to call that out.”

Jean-Pierre further explained that the data about illegal immigrants convicted of these crimes is misleading, emphasizing the need for accuracy when reporting. “If we’re going to report something, and data that’s out there, we got to do it in the way that is not confusing the American people and certainly not lying,” she said. “And so, this has been fact-checked, and so the way that is being falsely represented here is just not okay and I got to be really clear about that.”

In addition to the 13,099 illegal immigrants convicted of homicide, ICE reported that 15,811 illegal immigrants convicted of sexual assault and 14,301 convicted of burglary are also residing in the U.S.

As of July 21, 662,566 non-citizens with criminal histories were listed on ICE’s national docket, including 435,719 convicted criminals and 226,847 individuals with pending criminal charges.

Read More at LifeZette