 Dear Weekend Jolter, As recently as this month, President Biden was making claims about his fiscal record so preposterous that CNN described them as "thoroughly inaccurate." "I was able to cut the federal debt by $1.7 trillion." He didn't. "We've cut the deficit by over $1 trillion." In reality, the deficit fell from historic highs largely because of the expiration of Covid-era emergency spending — Biden has long dishonestly claimed credit for this, without acknowledging the negative impact his own policies had or would have on the budget. In his State of the Union address, Biden boasted of presiding over "the largest deficit reduction in American history." The latest budget estimates must put an end to the president's fiscal fable for good. As Dominic Pino reports, the Congressional Budget Office's last monthly report of the fiscal year puts the 2023 deficit at $1.7 trillion. Really, it's about $2 trillion, up from $1 trillion in 2022, excluding calculations pertaining to the administration's student-debt cancellation that didn't happen. Falling tax revenues, rising interest payments, and growing entitlement spending largely account for the jump. Either way, the deficit is growing (doubled, in fact), Biden's not actually a fiscally responsible president, and the markets have caught on. From NR's editorial: This year's economic and political circumstances should not have led to a doubling in the deficit. Economic growth has been slow but positive, the unemployment rate is very low, the pandemic and its extra spending is in the past, no major new domestic programs were created, and U.S. forces aren't fighting any major wars. Revenue is down from the record high of 2022, but it's still high compared with the long-run average, as a share of GDP. Given those fundamentals, the bond market is spooked. Fitch downgraded U.S. debt in August, citing long-run fiscal problems and Congress's unwillingness to deal with them. When it made that announcement, the yield on a ten-year Treasury bond was about 4 percent. Today, it's closer to 5 percent. The yield on a ten-year Treasury has been rising gradually since mid May, when it was around 3.5 percent. The bond market is speaking with a clarity that has been missing in Washington. Higher bond yields reflect lower confidence that bondholders will be paid back. Treasuries are still safe assets, but they aren't as safe as they used to be.
Meanwhile, borrowing costs for the government are rising, challenging the administration's convenient assumptions that cheap debt made the case for big spending. According to slightly variant Treasury and CBO figures, net interest on the debt for fiscal 2023 is estimated to be about $700 billion, having risen at least 33 percent "mainly because interest rates were significantly higher." As Rich Lowry writes, "It's a sign of the times that even New York Times columnist Paul Krugman says that we should start worrying about the deficit." He also notes that "no one is pure here." The national debt increased by nearly $8 trillion under Donald Trump, and so far by nearly $6 trillion under Biden. The reason it was difficult to take Matt Gaetz & Co.'s supposed concern for America's unchecked spending seriously during the shutdown/speaker fight was congressional Republicans' absent record of resistance to it under Trump. Covid-19 spending made the red ink redder, but the deficit's growth outside of a period of national emergency will demonstrate once more that neither party views the problem as a priority except when it can be used as a political cudgel. With Biden's claim to be a deficit warrior even less plausible than before, the issue is sure to fade from talking points, if Biden remembers them. NR's editorial, with the last word: When a crisis comes — and such crises almost by definition come suddenly and at a time no one predicts — politicians will find that they have to care.
NAME. RANK. LINK. EDITORIALS On the resolution, for now, of the speaker fight: Mike Johnson's Tough Task Secretary-General Guterres excuses terror: The United Nations Is Rotten from the Top Down The deficit editorial, once more, is here: Markets Are Sounding the Alarm on Deficits ARTICLES David Zimmermann: House Republicans Elect Mike Johnson Speaker, Ending Weeks of Uncertainty Audrey Fahlberg: How Mike Johnson Won the Speaker's Gavel Audrey Fahlberg: GOP Congressman Shares Voicemails from Jordan Backers Threatening His Family: 'I Hope Your Kids F***ing Burn' Charles C. W. Cooke: Sorry You Misinterpreted My Comments about Israel Kathryn Jean Lopez: Look at the Faces of Innocence and Heroism in Israel Brittany Bernstein: New York Times Admits Error in Coverage of Gaza Hospital Blast Phil Klein: Asked about Antisemitism, Karine Jean-Pierre Talks about Hate Crimes against Muslims Instead Ryan Mills: Minneapolis Man Cast as Anti-Palestinian Agitator Was Trying to Get Home When Mob Surrounded Car Noah Rothman: Why Do So Many Young People Support Hamas? Noah Rothman: Your Turn, Democrats Greg Lukianoff: How Donors Can Help Fix Our Broken Campuses Ryan Mills: Progressive Pols Unite with Cops, Conservatives to Urge Supreme Court to Allow Homeless-Camping Crackdown Jim Geraghty: Taiwan and the Shaky 'Silicon Shield' Andrew McCarthy: Jenna Ellis Guilty Plea Underscores the Absurdity of DA Fani Willis's RICO Case Caroline Downey: Female Detransitioner Sues American Academy of Pediatrics for Pushing Youth Gender Transition Michael O'Rielly: The FCC's Net-Neutrality Plan Is Unjustified and Harmful CAPITAL MATTERS Dominic Pino does what he does best, exposing the harmful silliness of government regulators: Regulators Weaponize the 'Poof/Bang' Test LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW. Armond White takes issue with a documentarian's obvious conflict of interest: Pelosi's Embarrassing Home Movies Brian Allen translates euphemisms: What 'Artists for Palestine' Really Means WHILE WE HAVE YOU . . . Noah Rothman argues here that Democrats have been confronted with a Charlottesville moment, considering the outbreak of open hostility toward Jews among demonstrators affiliated with the Left. The question is how they respond: Many who maintain only a hazy recollection of the Trump years subscribe to the myth that elected Republicans never broke with Trump — especially when he provided psychological comfort to America's troglodytic bigots. That is a revisionist history. Many of the Republican Party's leading lights and household names unequivocally condemned Trump for wrestling publicly with himself over how forcefully he should distance himself from the racist demonstrators who descended on UVA — a group whose protests culminated in violence in Charlottesville. Those same voices were joined by more Republicans in denouncing the head of their party when Trump reportedly advocated curtailing the in-migration of "people from 'sh**hole countries.'" Many — perhaps most — of those Republicans who stuck their necks out to reprimand Trump are now gone from the political scene. They paid for their dissent with their careers. But that record didn't stay the hands of the Republican senators, governors, and former Trump administration officials who castigated the president for sitting down to a meal with Kanye West and notorious antisemitic YouTuber Nick Fuentes. Democrats must take stock of the challenge the pro-Hamas faction on the frontier of their coalition now represents. Casting this lot off into the wilderness cannot be a passive activity. It won't be done though inference, by declining to name names and citing no infringing activities in particular. Democrats had the opportunity to throttle the rising antisemitic sentiments in their coalition in their infancy when Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib made it easy. Their routine contraventions of basic standards of decency were condemnable, and they should have been condemned. But a revolt within the party over the discomfort associated with censuring its own scuttled the enterprise, leaving Democrats to endorse a flaccid document that condemned hate in all its forms — not the very specific hate that took one discrete form. That act of cowardice ensured that the Democrats' task would be even more difficult the next time they were confronted with the antisemitism in their ranks. If Democrats pass on the opportunity again, the threat will only grow, and the challenge will seem even less surmountable down the road. But there can be no more ignoring this menace. Calling out anti-Jewish hate that manifests today in support for a barbarian horde that massacres women and children is an absolute imperative. It may be difficult. It may irritate the activists in the streets and the ideologues who populate cable-news sets. It may come at the cost of a few political careers. But the time has come for Democrats of good conscience to stand up and be counted. That, or float passively along with the mobs who plague America's streets. Israel's inevitable and just invasion of Gaza with the aim of neutralizing once and for all the gang responsible for the worst act of violence against Jews since the Holocaust is coming. When it comes, the unrest on America's streets will only get worse, and there is no ambiguity about who its prosecutors will be. The time for Democrats to pull the support structure out from underneath the pro-Hamas Left is now. Tomorrow will be too late.
Good news: The House chose a speaker, at last. Bad news: The process did little to bring a fractured GOP conference together. Audrey Fahlberg reports on the bad blood, in part concerning the threats lawmakers dealt with from supporters of Jim Jordan's failed bid: [Mike] Johnson's speakership comes as especially welcome news to moderate Republicans like Representative Don Bacon (R., Neb.), who received thousands of phone calls last week amid his refusal to back House Judiciary Chairman and former Speaker-Designate Jim Jordan in three rounds of voting. Some of the calls that explicitly mentioned Bacon's opposition to Jordan's speaker bid included death threats against the Nebraska congressman and his family, according to voicemail transcripts and audio recordings obtained by National Review. "You're a piece of s***," says one anonymous caller, who later mentions Bacon's opposition to Jordan's speaker bid. "I hope you f***ing die. I hope your wife f***ing dies. Again, not a threat. It's just wishful thinking. I hope your kids f***ing burn alive like these Israeli families. You f***ing pig." "Hey, donkey, you're a f***ing pig flesh-eating bastard," says another caller. "If you don't vote for Jim Jordan, you're not gonna be able to walk down the street, plain and simple. You f***ing RINO. You're a c**t." These voicemails, which Bacon's office has handed over to the U.S. Capitol Police and Sergeant at Arms and also shared with NR, are one small part of the massively complicated speaker saga that has tormented the House GOP since October 3.
Jim Geraghty's racking up miles faster than John Kerry. On the heels of a reporting trip earlier this year to Ukraine, the author of the Morning Jolt spent this past week in Taiwan. You can catch up on his stories here, and read about the island nation's critical semiconductor industry (and its implications for Taiwan's security) here: One of the terms you'll run across in discussions of Taiwan, China, and the possibility of an invasion in the coming years is the notion of the "Silicon Shield" — the idea that Taiwan's largest industry, the manufacture of semiconductors, is so important to the world economy that either the world would step in to prevent a Chinese invasion, or China itself would conclude an invasion is not worth the cost, because it, too, is dependent upon semiconductors made in Taiwan. As of last year, China depended on the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) to provide 70 percent of the chips used in its consumer electronics industry, the largest in the world. TMSC is the world's largest chipmaker, and the company supplies Apple, Intel, Qualcomm, AMD, and Nvidia, among other big tech companies, as well as making the semiconductors used in F-35 fighter jets and a wide range of military hardware used by the Pentagon. As I wrote earlier this year, TMSC is one the most geopolitically strategic companies in the world. The concept of the "Silicon Shield" has been endorsed by no less a figure than Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen; in September 2021, she wrote an essay for Foreign Affairs, declaring: "Our semiconductor industry is especially significant: a 'silicon shield' that allows Taiwan to protect itself and others from aggressive attempts by authoritarian regimes to disrupt global supply chains." . . . The potential disruption to the global semiconductor supply chain might give China reason to pause, but a country like Taiwan certainly wouldn't want to put all its eggs in the "Silicon Shield" basket. China might attempt to militarily conquer Taiwan but avoid damaging the TSMC production facilities. Or it might attempt a blockade and force the country to surrender through siege tactics. The supreme value of Taiwan's semiconductor production does indeed make the country more important to the world economy . . . but it also might make Taiwan look like an even more enticing prize. If Beijing were to gain control of the semiconductors that go into the high-tech weapons of every other country, the regime would quickly gain an enormous military advantage over everyone else.
Ryan Mills flags an important development in the city-by-city effort to get control of homelessness — a situation that's become so difficult, bipartisanship has broken out: Fires in homeless camps are on the rise. So are drug-overdose deaths. Businesses located near camps are losing customers. In some cases, government workers need police escorts to do their jobs on public land filled with sprawling homeless camps. "Families can no longer walk the streets of Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle in safety," a group of state attorneys general wrote. "The pungent smell of urine and human feces fills the air. Hypodermic needles used for narcotics cover the ground. And rats carrying diseases that were once thought eradicated scurry from encampments to nearby businesses and homes." Those are just some of the claims made in more than two dozen amicus briefs filed last month urging the Supreme Court to overturn a recent Ninth Circuit ruling that drastically limited the ability of local governments to enforce camping bans on many homeless people. The briefs represent the perspective of hundreds of groups and people — city leaders, politicians, civic groups, business organizations, downtown residents, law-enforcement leaders, state attorneys general, conservative think tankers — united by their belief that the Ninth Circuit's ruling last year in Johnson v. Grants Pass has hamstrung cities and allowed for the proliferation of squalid and dangerous homeless encampments in Western communities. The Republican leaders of the Arizona legislature filed a brief, arguing that the Ninth Circuit ruling thwarts "the legislature's efforts to address a crisis on its own doorstep." Likewise, Gavin Newsom, the Democratic California governor, filed a brief claiming that Ninth Circuit rulings have "paralyzed communities" and left residents "at risk of exposure to criminal activity and controlled substances, and of subjugation to sex work or physical abuse." Grants Pass, a lower-income city in southern Oregon, petitioned the Supreme Court in August. "I'm feeling pretty good that the court will take the case," Augustus Ogu, the city attorney for Grants Pass, told National Review. "There's too much uncertainty, especially in the Western part of the United States for the court not to take the case. Cities are kind of neutered. We don't know what we can and can't do."
Elsewhere on the news team, Caroline Downey flags an equally important development in the legal battle brewing between "detransitioners" and the medical-industrial complex that is pushing life-altering interventions on susceptible kids: A 21-year-old female detransitioner who underwent hormone therapy as a teenager is suing the American Academy of Pediatrics for allegedly pushing youth gender transition and lying about the dangers of such medical interventions. Isabelle Ayala is accusing the progressive professional medical association, infamous for endorsing so-called gender-affirming care for minors, of civil conspiracy, fraud, and medical malpractice, according to a lawsuit filed Monday and obtained by the Daily Wire. The AAP, the lawsuit claims, knowingly misled the public on youth gender transition by releasing and circulating a 2018 policy statement endorsing the "affirmative model" for gender dysphoria. . . . Ayala has suffered many physical complications from the testosterone injections, the lawsuit said. Among the issues and ailments are vaginal atrophy from the extensive use of testosterone, excess facial and body hair, compromised bone structure, and ongoing mental issues, anxiety, depression, and regret. She is unsure whether her fertility has been irreversibly compromised, and she has since developed an autoimmune disease "that only the males in her family have a history of." Ayala's is the first detransitioner lawsuit in America so far to name the AAP as a defendant. The AAP, the lawsuit said, ditched the consensus, scientifically supported approach known as "watchful waiting." In that strategy, gender-confused children are given counseling and psychotherapy to help them navigate the disruptive parts of puberty, instead of being prescribed cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, and procedures.
Shout-Outs Armin Rosen, at Tablet: The DEI Complex Will Never Protect Jews Lauren Lumpkin, at the Washington Post: Jewish schools adjust security as Israel-Gaza war stokes fears Salena Zito, at the Washington Examiner: Mike Rowe’s intentionally unintentional intentional purpose-driven life CODA I must have listened to this Jack DeJohnette/Special Edition cover of Coltrane's "India" half a dozen times last weekend. I don't know why; it struck me. Maybe it will strike you. This version doesn't evoke Eastern impressions quite the way the original does. But it's pleasant still. Enjoy the fall weather, and the weekend, and thanks for reading. | 
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