Everybody's tabbing for the weekend ...
NEW: POTUS says "to be determined," but his meeting in Budapest with Putin is likely to be a "double meeting."
— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) October 17, 2025
"There is a lot of bad blood with the two presidents," he says.
"These two leaders do not like each other, and we want to make it comfortable for everybody. So one… pic.twitter.com/ErCcChgZNa
Ed: Foreign policy has a momentum, and right now it's in Trump's favor. That doesn't necessarily mean that Putin will end the war, but Putin has to wonder what he can still get out of it at this point. Trump doesn't sound enthusiastic about selling Tomahawks to Ukraine, but just floating the possibility has to worry Putin. It may be best to consolidate the few gains he's made, and pack up the rest of his army.
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Barak Ravid at Axios: White House envoy Steve Witkoff is expected to travel to the Middle East on Sunday night to follow up on the implementation of the deal to end the war in Gaza, a U.S. official and a source with knowledge of the trip told Axios.
Why it matters: The implementation of the first phase of the deal was mostly successful with 20 live Israeli hostages released, close to 2000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees released, an initial Israeli withdrawal from large parts of Gaza and a ceasefire.
At the same time the deal is still extremely fragile and tensions have been growing over Israeli claims that Hamas has been slow-walking the return of the bodies of hostages.
Ed: That's not the only reason the deal is "fragile" at the moment, Witkoff isn't going back to talk to Hamas, but to talk to Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey. The message will likely be that Trump's just about out of patience with Hamas and will shortly let the Israelis finish what Hamas started two years ago. Trump has made that clear enough in his public statements, and I suspect Witkoff's mission on this trip is to make sure everyone knows Trump's not bluffing.
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Once one of the most influential political groups in the South, the New Georgia Project is shutting down this week, marking a stunning fall for an organization that pushed to advance Democratic causes for more than a decade. https://t.co/0SRZFR5WLx
— Greg Bluestein (@bluestein) October 16, 2025
Ed: And did so with USAID and EPA grant money, mainly. Stacey Abram's Adscam came to a screeching halt in February, so it must have taken the intervening months to spend what was left in the pipeline. The details are behind a paywall, but the writing has been on the figurative wall since Trump returned to office.
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WSJ: China has purged its second-most senior general and eight other high-ranking military commanders, as leader Xi Jinping dials up a crackdown on corruption and disloyalty in the armed forces with the ouster of a handpicked protégé.
Gen. He Weidong, the lower-ranking of two vice chairmen on the Communist Party’s top military decision-making body and a member of the 24-man Politburo, has been dismissed from the party and the military for severe disciplinary violations and abuses of power, a spokesman for China’s Defense Ministry said Friday.
The party also purged eight other senior officers, including Adm. Miao Hua, the former head of the Central Military Commission’s political-work department; ex-commanders of China’s strategic-missile force and paramilitary police; and former political commissars of China’s army and navy, according to the spokesman.
Ed: Is this a purge, a mole hunt, or some sort of high-level reform effort? Xi is casting it as the latter, but this is an odd time to launch a reform program -- and strange that it would involve so many of high rank, too. One has to wonder whether cracks have begun to form in Xi's cult of personality regime. That may be why Xi suddenly took a harder line with Trump on rare-earth elements, and why Trump promptly responded in kind.
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🚨58% favor the Trump Administrations deportation efforts, while 35% oppose them.
— Scott Rasmussen (@ScottWRasmussen) October 17, 2025
✅ 37% think the deportations have gone too far, 53% disagree.https://t.co/A0XUGPfXYE pic.twitter.com/0VIhjPJedA
Ed: These numbers roughly align with the trends in the Harvard-Harris CAPS polling throughout the year. Democrats are not only on the wrong side of these numbers, they are not moving these numbers despite their raging hysteria over ICE.
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David Marcus at Fox News: It was Democrats who changed the voting rules in New York City to benefit the far left. It was Democrats who couldn’t get former governor Cuomo enough votes in the primary. And it is Democrats who are failing to call out the threat posed by socialism.
So, how is it possible that it falls on Curtis Sliwa, a mortal enemy of Cuomo, to sacrifice his own ambitions and dignity to save Cuomo from losing – for the second time – to a 33-year-old commie who has never had a real job?
If this is such an emergency that Sliwa must fall on his sword and abandon his priorities, then why haven’t House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, both from New York, had the courage to endorse Cuomo?
Ed: Because Cuomo is almost as bad as Mamdani, only for different reasons. Cuomo is a corruptocrat and a liar. Mamdani is a radical Leftist and a Hamas sympathizer. At least Cuomo won't drive off capital, but this is a bleak choice for Big Apple voters. Sliwa is the real choice in the race, but most voters won't have the guts to make it.
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BREAKING: Man arrested by the FBI in Louisiana for participating in the October 7 massacre
— Israel War Room (@IsraelWarRoom) October 17, 2025
Mahmoud Amin Ya-qub Al-Muhtadi is accused of being a member of the DFLP terrorist organization's military wing and invading Israel from Gaza on October 7, 2023.
He reportedly entered the… pic.twitter.com/y9alZKiNF0
Read the full complaint against Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi: https://t.co/dvzwpMy5um
— Israel War Room (@IsraelWarRoom) October 17, 2025
His cell phone connected to a cell tower near Kibbutz Kfar Azza later that morning. At least four US citizens were among the 62 residents slaughtered in Kfar Aza that day.
Al-Muhtadi apparently lived in Gaza his entire life until March 2024, when he exited the Strip to Egypt. He applied for a US visa in June 2024, claiming he had no history of involvement in a paramilitary organization or participation in a terrorist attack. He entered the US in September 2024.
In a February 2025 social media message, Al-Muhtadi shared pictures of a gun, him apparently loading the same gun, and what appear to be his children handling the same gun, seemingly taken in his apartment in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he was residing as of May 2025.
From June 2025 to September 2025, he was apparently living and working at a restaurant in Lafayette, Louisiana.
Ed: How did this man get into the US in the first place? The indictment explains that Al-Muhtadi went through normal consular processes. These are the same processes that Trump and Marco Rubio halted and revamped for stricter vetting.
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WSJ: New York’s richest residents can’t stop talking about Mamdani, the Democratic nominee. To many of the city’s uber-wealthy, his sustained popularity has been a shock. The 33-year-old, self-described Democratic Socialist is the overwhelming favorite to win City Hall next month, on a platform that includes free buses and free child care—programs that, as the moneyed are well aware, somebody needs to shell out for.
“I hope Mamdani is going to give out free Xanax,” said Caroline Leventhal, a lifelong Upper East Sider who co-founded “Mic’d and Medicated,” a podcast that dissects the lifestyle of cosmetic surgeries and private ski instructors. “It’s hard to be chill and relaxed.” ...
But the political counterattack has been flaccid. At one August fundraiser for Adams at Osteria La Baia, a tony midtown Italian restaurant, only a handful of supporters showed, including former Gov. David Paterson.
“I’m feeling terrible,” said an Adams donor there, who has since reluctantly pivoted to Cuomo. The former governor, this person added, “would be a terrible mayor, but compared to Mamdani, he’s Winston Churchill.”
Ed: As I wrote above.
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UH OH — Spanberger needs to stop doing interviews.
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) October 17, 2025
“I certainly want to protect every person who might be interested in arriving at the United States— whatever...their desire to move to our country."
AKA she wants mass amnesty for every illegal alien.pic.twitter.com/FMrUabklxq
Ed: It's a bad week for Virginia Democrats to stop sniffing glue. And New York City Democrats. And ... well, pretty much all Democrats.
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Unherd: Such turmoil had become a routine part of campus life. It was as if the faculty and student body were expected to accept constant disruption, including the occupation of major buildings (Hamilton Hall and Butler Library); the hostage-taking of janitors (whom the protesters allegedly threatened as “Jew lovers” that they wished to “fuck up”); and the distribution of pamphlets that could’ve come straight from the Hamas Media Office.
But then, something changed. This Oct. 7, for the first time in two years, a newfound tranquility prevailed. The group of pro-Palestinian agitators was small and mainly huddled outside the main gates on Broadway and 116th Street. There were no large disruptions or violent clashes with the authorities. My friends and I were shocked by how peaceful the day went: the protests took less time and featured far more measured rhetoric.
The Columbia Intifada, it seems, has died down — thanks to President Trump. His campus measures are unquestionably illiberal. But they’ve paradoxically helped to preserve reasonable discourse on campus.
The scale of the cultural transformation is astonishing.
Ed: I voted for this. And if Columbia students and faculty were honest, they should be happy about it.
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.@POTUS on Maduro: "He has offered everything, you're right. You know why? Because he doesn't want to fuck around with the United States." 🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/EhG7Eeaq7P
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) October 17, 2025
Ed: I voted for this, too. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
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