OT subject but worth a main-stream read- OT News Feeds...

"Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is examining a plan to seal off humanitarian aid to northern Gaza in an attempt to starve out Hamas, sources say. Julia Frankel reports for AP News.

Hamas tried to persuade Iran to join the Oct. 7 attacks, secret documents reviewed by the Israeli military show. The documents also show a potential Hamas plan far bigger than the Oct. 7, including a Sept. 11-style toppling of a Tel Aviv skyscraper. Ronen Bergman, Adam Rasgon, and Patrick Kingsley report for the New York Times; Joby Warrick, Souad Mekhennet, and Loveday Morris report for the Washington Post.

The second round of a U.N.-led polio vaccination campaign in Gaza is set to begin today. CNN reports. 

A Hezbollah drone strike on a military base in northern Israel killed four soldiers and wounded dozens, the Israeli military said yesterday, adding that it would investigate how the drone entered Israel without triggering an alert. Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Aaron Boxerman, Johnatan Reiss, and Thomas Fuller report for the New York Times.

The U.S. military will deploy a sophisticated missile defense system and about 100 troops to operate it in Israel, ahead of another potential ballistic missile attack from Iran, the Pentagon said yesterday. The new deployment means U.S. soldiers could actively engage in fighting between Israel and Iran on Israeli soil. Barak Ravid reports for Axios."

More specifically, Harris has a target of 51 percent of the vote. In our simulations on Monday, Harris projected to get 51.0 percent of the popular vote — and the Electoral College was a toss-up. More than that (even Biden’s 51.3 percent from 2020 would probably do it) and she likely wins; less, and she probably loses. Trump, conversely, has a target line of 48.7 percent of the vote; that reflects the likely slant of the Electoral College toward the GOP.

The big picture: Who is favored to win the presidency?

Chance each candidate has of winning Electoral College or the popular vote in the 2024 presidential election and our best predictions of the outcome based on 40,000 simulations from our model

This is today-lots of time left but clearly the challenge is in the undecided voters, the number of which is very small.  Gonna be a long night 11/5-6.  

"The Biden administration sent a letter to Israeli leaders on Monday demanding that Israel take steps within 30 days to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza or risk U.S. military aid being affected, according to a copy of the letter obtained by Axios. The letter, whose authenticity was confirmed by U.S. and Israeli officials, comes amid concerns over civilian deaths and dwindling aid access to Gaza’s north. Barak Ravid reports; the Washington Post reports.

President Emmanuel Macron reportedly told a cabinet meeting yesterday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must not forget “his country was created by a U.N. decision,” urging Israel to abide by U.N. decisions. It comes amid rising tensions between the two leaders over Israel’s strikes in Lebanon. Camille Knight reports for France24; Clea Calcutt reports for POLITICO.

Israeli forces targeted southern Beirut with fresh strikes today for the first time in days. Israel’s military issued evacuation warnings, and said on X the target was an underground warehouse used by Hezbollah. Mohamad El Chamaa, Rachel Pannett, and Annabelle Timsit report for the Washington Post.

Israeli strikes on the southern Lebanese city of Nabatieh killed five people, including the local mayor. Lebanon’s prime minister accused Israel of “intentionally” targeting a municipal council meeting. Meanwhile, Hezbollah said it sent “barrages” of rockets into several areas of northern Israel overnight. BBC News reports; Jessie Yeung reports for CNN.

Lebanon’s hospitals are buckling amid Israel’s offensive, with some forced to close or struggling to operate. The U.N. has warned the “targeting of health and relief operations is broadening.” Euan Ward reports for the New York Times.

Israel is opposed to a “unilateral ceasefire” in its war with Hezbollah, Netanayhu told Macron, claiming it would only return the security situation in Lebanon “to what it was before.” Lauren Iszo and Alex Stambaugh report for CNN.

The United States said yesterday that it opposed the scope of Israel’s recent airstrikes in Beirut. A State Department spokesperson said Washington had expressed its concerns to Netanyahu. Humeyra Pamuk and Laila Bassam report for Reuters."

"There has been “some improvement” in food aid delivery to northern Gaza in recent days, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said yesterday, a day after the United States threatened to withhold military aid to Israel if it failed to allow more aid into Gaza. There was no official response from the Israeli government. Matthew Mpoke Bigg reports for the New York Times.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is weighing presenting a post-war Gaza plan based on ideas developed by Israel and the United Arab Emirates, U.S. officials say. Several White House and State Department officials are concerned that it would marginalize the Palestinian Authority president and government. Barak Ravid reports for Axios.

President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris had hoped the Gaza war would fade in the final weeks of the presidential race, but fresh Israeli military offensives are making that impossible, U.S. officials and campaign aides say. John Hudson, Yasmeen Abutaleb, Mohamad El Chamaa and Missy Ryan report for the Washington Post.

Palestinians are facing a spike in Israeli demolition orders in East Jerusalem, a BBC investigation has found. Wyre Davies reports."

Edit to add:

The U.S. military struck five underground weapons facilities in areas of Yemen controlled by the Houthis yesterday, an attack that could also serve as a warning to Iran. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that President Biden had ordered the strikes to “further degrade the Houthis’ capability.” John Ismay reports for the New York Times."

"Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, believed to be the chief architect of the Oct. 7 attacks, was killed by Israeli forces in a surprise battlefield encounter on Wednesday, the Israeli military confirmed yesterday. The IDF said its soldiers had been patrolling in Rafah when the man, since identified as Sinwar, “ran alone into one of the buildings” and was killed after being located with a drone. Graeme Baker reports for BBC News; Ronen Bergman, Aaron Boxerman, Raja Abdulrahim, Patrick Kingsley, and Michael Levenson report for the New York Times. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sinwar’s death marked “the beginning of the end.” He was the third of three Hamas leaders to be killed since the International Criminal Court issued warrants for their arrest. The Washington Post reports; Matthew Mpoke Bigg reports for the New York Times.

President Biden congratulated Netanyahu on Sinwar’s death death in a phone call yesterday. A White House readout said that Biden and Netanyahu “ discussed how to use this moment to bring the hostages home and to bring the war to a close.” Eugenia Yosef, Sophie Tanno, and Kevin Liptack report for CNN.

Sinwar’s death creates an opportunity to resume Gaza hostage release and ceasefire negotiations, U.S. and Israeli officials say. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who spoke with the Qatari prime minister and Saudi Arabia foreign minister yesterday, said that Washington would “redouble its efforts with partners to end this conflict.” Barak Ravid reports for Axios; the Washington Post reports. 

Lebanon’s Hezbollah said today it is transitioning “to a new and escalating phase in the confrontation with Israel.” Iran also said that “the spirit of resistance will be strengthened” after Sinwar’s death. James Mackenzie, Nidal Al-Mughrabi, and Samia Nakhoul report for Reuters."

Tom Nichols Staff writer

You know the expression and what it means, but I will use only the abbreviation: WTF. In military circles, it is rendered as “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.” On the show The Good Place, it is “What the fork.” I think I have a pretty good vocabulary, but I find myself at a loss for any other way to describe a week in American electoral politics that must rank among the most bizarre in modern times.

Trump, of course, tops the leaderboard for gobsmacking moments, and this week, his comments ran the gamut from vile to hilarious to head-scratching. Even so, nothing could match his description of the January 6 insurrection—one of the darkest moments in American political history—as “a day of love.”

This vertigo-inducing moment occurred during Trump’s Univision town hall two nights ago. A Cuban American construction worker named Ramiro González said that he was “disturbed” by Trump’s behavior on January 6 but wanted to give Trump a chance to win back his vote. Trump’s answer was a slurry of sentence fragments and passive constructions, but its mendacity was unmistakable:

Some of those people went down to the Capitol, I said, peacefully and patriotically, nothing done wrong at all. Nothing done wrong. And action was taken, strong action. Ashli Babbitt was killed. Nobody was killed. There were no guns down there. We didn’t have guns. The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns. And when I say “we,” these are people that walk down, this was a tiny percentage of the overall, which nobody sees and nobody shows.

Everything was fine, you see, but “action was taken.” By someone. For some reason. Note also that Trump aligns himself with the insurrectionists: “We” didn’t have guns; “they” had them. (This is a lie: Some of the rioters were armed.) And then Trump concluded: “But that was a day of love, from the standpoint of millions …”

A “day of love” is one way to put it. Other ways to put it, of course, are “one of the worst days for American law enforcement since 9/11” and “the first time a hostile force carrying Confederate flags managed to breach the Capitol.” In response to Trump’s words, the former Capitol police officer Aquilino Gonell went on X and posted a video of the mob attacking him. “Here’s me receiving an outpouring amount of affection during the ‘day of love,’” he said, adding, “They almost loved me to death.”

González has now said that he was not convinced by Trump’s response and will not be voting for him. But millions of other voters have continued to support Trump despite his obvious approval of this brutal attack on our constitutional order. I had hoped, however, that by now, Trump might be shunned among political and cultural leaders—at least by those who have not already bent the knee. After everything Trump has said and done, why would any decent person want him to stand among a group of dignitaries while he curses, makes bad jokes, and does some of his usual rally shtick?

Which brings me to the Al Smith dinner.

The Smith dinner, named after one of the great governors of New York (and the first Catholic major-party nominee for president), is a formal-dress charity event hosted by the Catholic archbishop of New York. Politicians attend (especially during an election year) to give speeches and engage in some good-natured banter and camaraderie.

Trump, of course, has no evident good nature. His previous in-person appearance at the dinner was in 2016, and it was so shameful and mean-spirited that, as The New York Times noted this morning, Trump and his wife “slunk out of the room the second it was over.” This year was no better. Kamala Harris had the good sense not to attend, and sent a video message instead. (It wasn’t very good comedy, but so it goes.) Trump showed up in person, however, and made sure to be just as offensive and rude as he had been eight years before.

The point is not that Trump is too bilious to be funny; the point is that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Archbishop Timothy Dolan, and many others who should know better sat there and pretended that Trump was just a regular political candidate soft-shoeing his way through an Al Smith dinner. All of these people should have refused to share a stage with Trump, but the dinner was another example of what Jonathan Last acidly—and rightly—calls “Kabuki Normality,” the careful pretense that all is well, and that appearing with a convicted felon, a man found liable for sexual abuse, a racist and a misogynist and a “fascist to the core,” is just another day at the office for the leader of New York’s Catholics and the senior Democratic senator from New York.

Elsewhere, Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, has finally decided to take a stand on a question he’s been weaseling out of answering for weeks: Did Trump lose to Joe Biden? “No,” he said to a reporter during a question-and-answer session at an event in Pennsylvania this week. “I think there are serious problems in 2020. So, did Donald Trump lose the election? Not by the words that I would use, okay? … I really couldn’t care less if you agree or disagree with me on this issue.”

Even by the Ohio senator’s standards of disdain, this signals a new level of contempt. Yet Vance’s embracing of the Trump campaign’s Big Lie caused barely a ripple in the national consciousness today—because Trump was busy flooding the zone with nutty, baffling answers on Fox & Friends this morning.

Asked who his favorite president was when he was little, Trump said, “Ronald Reagan.” Reagan took office when Trump was in his mid-30s. Trump went on to claim that Fox staffers wrote some of his jokes for the Smith dinner (which Fox denied). He did his usual riffs about Harris and her IQ; said that if she is elected, we will no longer have cows—no, I don’t get it either—and disparaged Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was “probably a great president,” Trump allowed, “although I’ve always said, why wasn’t that settled?”

He meant the Civil War.

Trump finished up by saying he was going to go talk to Fox owner Rupert Murdoch and demand that Murdoch stop Fox from running “negative” Harris-campaign ads about Trump—“and then we’re going to have a victory.”

It’s normal to both express shock and laugh at such things, but none of this is funny. Trump is unfit to enter the White House. He is unstable, disordered, and morally repulsive. Yet today, the election could be a coin toss. If Trump wins, in January, he will sit behind the Resolute desk, and military aides will once again walk him through the process to order the use of nuclear weapons.

No phrase or expletive is enough to capture that terrifying possibility.

Reports that North Korean soldiers may soon join Russia’s frontlines are reviving talks of sending European troops to support Kyiv, Lithuania’s foreign minister told POLITICO. Separately, South Korea said today it may consider supplying weapons to Ukraine to counter Russia-North Korea military ties. Nicholas Vinocur reports; Hyunsu Yim reports for Reuters.

"The Israeli military yesterday said it killed Hashem Safieddine, the presumed next leader of Hezbollah, in an airstrike near Beirut in early October. The strike had targeted a meeting of senior Hezbollah leaders, and was one of the heaviest bombardments to hit the Dahiya area since the killing of Hezbollah’s long-time leader, Hassan Nasrallah, on Sept. 27. Michael Crowley, Aaron Boxerman, Gabby Sobelman, and Ephrat Livni report for the New York Times.

In a statement yesterday, Hezbollah claimed “exclusive responsibility” for the drone strike targeting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s home over the weekend. Netanyahu’s office confirmed there were no injuries and that no one was home at the time. Lior Soroka, Sammy Westfall, and John Hudson report for the Washington Post.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Netanyahu and top Israeli officials yesterday, urging Israel to take “urgent and sustained steps” to increase the flow of aid into Gaza and “capitalize” on Yahya Sinwar’s death to end the war. Blinken said Netanyahu made a “commitment” that Israel is not applying a surrender-or-starve policy to Palestinians who refuse to leave northern Gaza. The Washington Post reports; Jennifer Hansler and Kylie Atwood report for CNN."