Greetings, and welcome to Friday, Oct. 30, 2026. Halloween is tomorrow and Election Day is Tuesday, so the scariest masks of the season are still to come, and some of them will be on the ballot. The leaves around here are a little past peak color, and the winds are starting up. No doubt they'll be totally gone a few days from now.
My calendar says it’s Candy Corn Day, Checklist Day, Haunted Refrigerator Night, and Mischief Night. Grab a handful of candy corn (yes, some of us actually like it), make a checklist with “VOTE” at the top in big letters, clean out whatever’s lurking in the back of the fridge before it files for residency, and keep the mischief to a minimum tonight. Leave the toilet paper in the trees to the professionals in Washington.
Today in History:
1905: Tsar Nicholas II issues the October Manifesto, promising Russians a constitution and an elected legislature.
1938: Orson Welles’ “The War of the Worlds” radio broadcast convinces some listeners that Martians have landed in New Jersey.
1941: President Franklin Roosevelt approves $1 billion in Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet Union.
1953: Gen. George C. Marshall becomes the first professional soldier awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, honored for the Marshall Plan.
1956: Hungarian Prime Minister Imre Nagy announces an end to one-party rule during the Hungarian Revolution, days before Soviet tanks crush it.
1961: The Soviets detonate the Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever tested, over the Arctic.
1974: Muhammad Ali knocks out George Foreman in the eighth round of the “Rumble in the Jungle” in Kinshasa, Zaire, to regain the heavyweight title.
1975: Prince Juan Carlos assumes power as Spain’s interim head of state, as dictator Francisco Franco lies dying.
1983: Argentina holds its first democratic election after seven years of military rule, electing Raúl Alfonsín president.
1985: Space shuttle Challenger launches on what would be its final successful mission.
1995: Quebec voters narrowly reject independence from Canada, 50.6% to 49.4%.
2001: President George W. Bush throws a strike from the mound at Yankee Stadium before Game 3 of the World Series, seven weeks after 9/11.
Birthdays Today include: John Adams, the second president; Ezra Pound, poet; Dick Vermeil, Super Bowl-winning football coach; Grace Slick, singer from Jefferson Airplane; Henry Winkler, actor, (The Fonz on Happy Days); Kevin Pollak, actor and comedian (A Few Good Men); Diego Maradona, soccer legend; and Nia Long, actress (Boyz n the Hood). If today’s your birthday, too, happy birthday from all of us here.
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File this one under history repeating itself. Comes word Thursday from the Washington Free Beacon’s Andrew Stiles:
The Obama administration “found evidence suggesting” that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) committed immigration fraud by marrying her brother, the New York Times revealed on Thursday.
Imagine that!
Federal agents opened an investigation in 2016, the Times reported, and found reason to believe that Omar and Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, who obtained a provisional green card following their marriage in 2009, were siblings. Prosecutors declined to pursue the matter because the alleged crime—federal marriage fraud—fell outside the statute of limitations.
In a dramatic reversal based on the Times’s past coverage of allegations, the esteemed publication conceded that “Several aspects of [Omar’s] marriage to Mr. Elmi have long been murky.” For example, the happy couple’s marriage certificate was signed by a Christian minister rather than a Muslim imam—a curious detail that neither Omar nor the minister, Wilecia Harris, has publicly explained.
“Murky.” [SFX: Muffled laughter].
Yeah, I guess that’s one word for it. My colleague Catherine Salgado has the details of the Times report, and they’re worth your time.
I think we now have some idea why Obama has been defending Omar so vehemently. He knows the splash from this one hitting the water is going to soak him. And as Andy lays out in some detail, the New York Times spent years running interference for her. No shock there. But I wonder once again why anyone takes the little paragraph factory on Eighth Avenue seriously anymore.
Ed Driscoll at Instapundit reminds us that in his 2003 book Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media Elite, Bernard Goldberg wrote:
So let’s get to the root cause of liberal media bias in America.
You guessed it! The New York Times, a paper 99.5 percent of the American people do not read, yet which is still the most influential newspaper in America because the most influential people in America do in fact read it.
So, yes, the New York Times does indeed occupy a unique place in American journalism. And it’s not just because its columns are syndicated to hundreds of local papers around the country. It’s mostly because it sets the agenda for so many other news outlets, especially the networks where most Americans get their world and national news. The fact is, the Big Three news networks wouldn’t know what to put on the air without it. As I’ve said in the past, if the New York Times went on strike tomorrow morning, they’d have to cancel the CBS, NBC, and ABC evening newscasts tomorrow night.
Heh. He says that like it’s a bad thing.
If Goldberg is right (and I’ve yet to hear a serious argument that he isn’t in most respects), then what the Times did Thursday matters more than anything the Free Beacon or any of the rest of us could run.
For years, the Omar marriage question was strictly the stuff of “conservative blogs,” which is exactly how the Times framed it. When the Times covered it at all, the point was to discredit both the story and whoever kept chasing it. Particularly conservative outlets. Its glowing December 2018 profile sniffed that conservative bloggers had “seized on” Omar’s brief marriage to a British citizen. Its July 2019 “fact check” assured readers that “no proof has emerged substantiating these claims,” a conclusion resting largely on the say-so of the woman making the denial. Shoe-leather journalism at its finest.
And that was that. The Times says there’s nothing there, the networks say there’s nothing there, and anyone still asking is a crank.
Except now the Times tells us federal agents had been on it since 2016. Under Barack Obama. They found enough to believe the man Omar married was her brother, and the only reason nobody was charged is that the clock had run out. Apparently the “rumors” had a case file.
Which brings us back to Obama. On October 18, less than a week after Homeland Security agents searched Omar’s Washington residence, the former president called the Trump administration’s probe an “appalling” use of state power to intimidate a political opponent. Strong words, given that his own administration’s agents looked at the same marriage and apparently reached the same conclusion.
Did he know? Somebody ought to ask him. Probably not the Times. Hard to believe nobody briefed the boss when his own agents were looking at a sitting state legislator turned congressional candidate, but that’s a question, not an answer, until someone asks it. I suspect they won't because that would box Obama in.
Related: There's a Spicy New Plot Twist in the Ilhan Omar Sham Marriage Scandal
Then there’s the timing. This story lands five days before an election Democrats are expected to do well in. Or at least that’s what the Times keeps telling us. The paper sat on its “murky” doubts on Omar for the better part of a decade. It seems fair to wonder what made Thursday the day to air them.
So here’s the test of Goldberg’s theory. If the Times really sets the table for ABC, CBS and NBC, the evening newscasts should be all over this. So, too, the local papers. Watch and see whether they are. If they aren’t, we’ve learned something about the media. And we’ve learned the Times only sets the table when it suits the leftists and their agenda.
I’ll trot out my well-worn 1956 Barnhart Dictionary, which defines a reporter as someone who reports the news, and a journalist as someone who writes what he thinks. By that measure, the Times is influential mostly because it tells other newsroom animals what they already believe. Let it commit an act of actual reporting, and here comes the friction. A related example:
EXCLUSIVE: CBS News chief Bari Weiss faced “significant resistance” from staff at the network’s 9am meeting this morning while discussing the growing Alaska ballot scandal as she urged reporters to dig into the story, according to sources at the meeting. https://t.co/K79XGIqu1F
— Joseph A. Wulfsohn (@JosephWulfsohn) October 29, 2026
Reporters resisting being told to actually report. Barnhart would be proud. That resistance is the tell.
Stephen Kruiser has a column up on all this that’s, as always, worth a read:
The New York Times usually only trots out the unnamed “officials” when it wants to run a hit piece on Trump. That throws an interesting twist into this convoluted story. Yeah, it’s big news that the Obama DOJ was onto Omar’s brother-wife immigration scam, but the fact that The New York Times is the news organization informing us of that fact brings up more than a few questions.
The one at the top of my list is: does this mean that even the Democrats have grown weary of Omar’s shtick?
The answer looks like yes, and we’ve seen this movie before. Jim Traficant. Gary Hart. Bob Menendez. Eric Swalwell. The list goes on. The moment one of them can’t be protected anymore, out come the knives. The Times and every downstream pipe in that sewer system reverse course so violently you could get whiplash just watching. Omar is simply the latest in a long string of embarrassments to find out that their protection lasts only as long as they're useful to the party and its agenda.
At this point, it's a question of when, not if, this Omar thing comes to a head. After the election, of course.
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Thought for the Day: Orson Welles proved a convincing voice can make people believe almost anything for an hour. Campaigns only need to keep it up until Tuesday.
VIP members: Let's hear your take. Your voice matters.
Take care, gang. I'll be here tomorrow. Hope you will, too.