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Ruth King

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TIPP Poll: Six Straight Presidential Wins Called With Unmatched Accuracy

By on December 3rd, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/12/03/tipp-poll-six-straight-presidential-wins-called-with-unmatched-accuracy/

Editor’s note: For the past several years, Issues & Insights has worked with TIPP on a monthly poll, the results of which we published each week. This week, TIPP celebrated its unbroken streak of being the most accurate presidential pollster since 2004. The article below has been reprinted with permission. For more information about TIPP, click here. To read our I&I/TIPP poll reports, click here.

We are proud to share our 2024 performance with our readers. The TIPP Poll is the only national poll to correctly identify the winners of the last six presidential elections. By various measures, it consistently ranks as the most accurate. Here, we provide the data to substantiate this claim.

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The Gentle Art of Negotiating with Terrorists by Daniel Greenfield

By on December 2nd, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21170/negotiating-with-terrorists

Offering to negotiate with Islamic terrorists is a statement of weakness. Jihadists only offer to negotiate out of fear, weakness or to entrap us, and they assume we do the same thing. Nothing would ever convince them that we genuinely want to live in peace with them, or that we prefer alternatives to violence. So any time we offer to negotiate, they see it as weakness or a trick.

If our diplomats ever understood this cultural reality, they would stop being baffled when the negotiations fall apart.

Western liberals believe that peace will be achieved when all the wars end, but peace in the Muslim world is not a permanent state; rather it is a temporary truce in an endless war. Liberals tell us that the problem is a lack of understanding, but the lack of understanding is coming from them.

The first rule of negotiating with Islamic terrorists is don’t. The second rule is if you do it, do it with heavy artillery.

Islamic terrorists don’t negotiate. They make demands in hopes of securing concessions without actually giving up anything. Only the most dedicated historian could find an example of a negotiation process during which the Islamic terrorists made an actual concession, followed through on it, and did not later take it back or turn right around and go back to terrorism.

The most prominent counterexamples are the three decades of negotiations between Israel and Islamic terrorist groups, which initially won a round of Nobel Peace Prizes and then degenerated into an endless war during which the terrorists took back every concession they ever made, did not follow through on any of them, and used Israeli concessions to become a much worse threat.

Negotiating with the Taliban, Hezbollah and Iran all had the same end result.

Offering to negotiate with Islamic terrorists is a statement of weakness. Jihadists only offer to negotiate out of fear, weakness or to entrap us, and they assume we do the same thing. Nothing would ever convince them that we genuinely want to live in peace with them, or that we prefer alternatives to violence. So any time we offer to negotiate, they see it as weakness or a trick.

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POSITIVE NEWS FROM ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN READ IT ALL

By on December 2nd, 2024

Late news from Israel hints of a tenuous cease fire in Lebanon against Hezbollah. Put that news in the “we’ll see” category. The one thing that never ceases in Israel, 24/7, even during war, is the ongoing and outsize research and development of technology, medicine, and science to bring succor and hope to billions of people in in the world. To his enormous credit Michael Ordman’s weekly newsletter details the foregoing.  rsk

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com 

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This is a truly dark day for our nation Our political class has just sanctioned death for the ‘worthless’. Brendan O’Neill

By on December 2nd, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/11/29/this-is-a-truly-dark-day-for-our-nation/

For me, the grimmest thing about today’s ‘assisted dying’ debate in the House of Commons was when MPs emitted an audible groan upon hearing about Canada’s state-sanctioned killing of the wretched. It was the Conservative MP Danny Kruger who had the temerity to mention these unfortunates put to death by their own government. He referred to ‘medics’ in Canada, who are ‘specialists in assisted death’, who ‘personally kill hundreds of patients a year’. A collective whine shook the chamber as MPs were confronted with the truth of what they were voting for: the right of state-approved bodies to slay certain members of the public. ‘If honourable members have a difficulty with the language’, Kruger shot back, ‘then I wonder what they’re doing here’.

The groan spoke volumes. With their eye-rolling, our lawmakers exposed how utterly out of touch they are with the strife of the sick and poor who have indeed been killed – yes, killed – in Canada. They have so uncritically bought into the shadowy, euphemistic lingo about a ‘right to die’ that they appear to have forgotten that it involves the literal killing of a person on the basis that his or her life, in the state’s eyes, is miserable and ludicrous. Under Canada’s regime of death, this has included killing people who are not even terminally ill but who simply have ‘unmet social needs’, such as a lack of housing or of future prospects. Sorry for boring you by mentioning that poor people are being put to death under the very banner of ‘assisted dying’ you just pushed through the Commons.

The moan of the MPs was a sign of what was to come: following what was by all accounts a thin debate, MPs voted by 330 to 275 in favour of the bill to legalise assisted dying in England and Wales. After just five hours – shorter than the debates some of us have with mates in the pub – a majority of MPs said ‘aye’ to Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. This doesn’t mean the bill will become law. There will be months of parliamentary scrutiny. But it does mean the bill has cleared a major hurdle. It does mean we’re on the road to a new, misnamed ‘health’ regime in which terminally ill adults expected to die within six months will be permitted to seek the state’s assistance in hurrying them off this mortal coil. It does mean we’re a step closer to people being able to apply for and receive the state’s assistance in taking their own lives.

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America’s working class is taking back control Trump-voting blue-collar workers are re-discovering their political power. Joel Kotkin

By on December 2nd, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/01/americas-working-class-is-taking-back-control/

For a generation, America’s working class, as well as much of its middle class, lost political power. Rather than build their appeal on class interests, politicians kowtowed to Wall Street, Big Tech elites, university ‘experts’ and identitarian interest groups. But, as the 2024 presidential election clearly showed, the working class still has the clout to decide who gets put into the White House. Their choice of Donald Trump was a slap in the face to the ruling class.

The shift of working-class voters to the right, particularly those who work with their hands, has been developing for almost half a century. It accelerated during the pandemic, when their work largely kept the country functioning.

Although the number of college-educated voters has expanded, at least until recently, those without degrees still constitute around 60 per cent of the electorate. These are the voters most responsible for electing Trump, the first Republican nominee ever to win among low-income voters. In 2024, he won among non-college voters by 13 points. He even won over 44 per cent of union households, a proportion not won since former trade-unionist Ronald Reagan did so in the 1980s.

Perhaps most important in the long run, Trump also did well among Latinos, winning upwards of 40 per cent of their vote as a whole, and a majority of males. Many working-class Latinos preferred the immigrant-bashing Trump, because they are the ones who compete with and live in the same neighbourhoods as illegal migrants. His support won him formerly Democratic strongholds, from Texas’s Rio Grande Valley to California’s largely Latino interior. He also made major gains among African American males.

This working-class discontent is not unique to America. Similar patterns can also be seen in the UK, Germany, France and the Netherlands. Immigration has become a primary concern among these voters across the EU as well as Canada. According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans who wish to reduce immigration has soared. Roughly 60 per cent of Americans and a majority of Latinos support even ‘mass deportations’. Much the same shift of opinion has occurred in Europe.

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The Fumes of the 2024 Election The last great hope to stop the madness. by Victor Davis Hanson

By on December 2nd, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-fumes-of-the-2024-election/

Three weeks after the election and the fallout from it, we are starting to appreciate the clarity of the vote. It explains much of the present, the past, and the future.

Consider the following:

1. Even Donald Trump’s enemies are beginning, albeit sheepishly and begrudgingly, to concede he proved indestructible in a way they never imagined. After failed collusion hoaxes, laptop disinformation ruses, the 2020 mail-in ballot ambush, two impeachments, the attempt at ballot removal, five criminal and civil lawfare cases coordinated by the White House, 95% negative media coverage, and $5 billion in 2020 and 2024 political campaign hit ads and vituperation, and two assassinations, the Left failed to defeat him, to bankrupt him, to jail him, and to destroy him.

And now like an exasperated Wile E. Coyote, they have developed a bizarre mixture of fear and respect, venomous though it is, for the unstoppable beep-beep Roadrunner Trump.

2. For all the recent spin, post-election Kamala Harris is going nowhere but to a Dukakis-like retirement. She proved the worst Democratic candidate since the 1972 catastrophe of George McGovern (who was a sincere person, and a decorated WWII B-24 combat bomber pilot).

She will make no Trump 2021-4 comeback, no election victory in 2028, as either president or California governor. Her moneybags donors are exasperated that she and her PACs blew $1.5 billion of their money in little more than a 100-day campaign—while paying for private jets, concerts, and the likes of Al Sharpton, Beyonce, Oprah, etc. to endorse/interview her.

She ran five points behind Joe Biden four years earlier in California. The widely disliked Adam Schiff outperformed Harris this year in his preordained California Senate race. If she runs either for president or governor, she will have to explain in leftwing primaries or in a leftwing state her three-month metamorphosis to a fracker, a crime-fighter, a border hawk, a deporter—or revert back to her true 40-year leftwing persona, claiming temporary flip-flop amnesia in 2024.

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NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

The New Cold War is at Sea If there ever has been a time to educate America about the strategic utility of maritime power, and its essential role in advancing American security, this is the time. By James E. Fanell and Bradley A. Thayer

By on December 2nd, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/01/the-new-cold-war-is-at-sea/

Since the end of Operation Desert Storm and the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. Department of Defense has failed to maintain one of the principal dictates of great power competition—the necessity of having a well-balanced military force. This deficiency has been most evident in the maritime domain. Tellingly, the size of the U.S. Navy has shrunk from about 600 warships in 1986 to just over 290 ships today. This decline in the size, and capabilities, of the U.S. Navy occurred in large part because the nation’s leader was obsessed with what has been termed as “endless wars”—those fought in the land domains of the Middle East (ME), Southwest Asia (SWA), and now Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, this myopic focus on ground war has occurred just as the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has conducted the largest naval build-up and modernization of any nation since the end of World War II.

The reality of these two diametrically opposed trendlines was brought to a head this past week by a series of announcements from both the PRC and U.S., which signals what can be declared as the end of “endless ground wars” and what should be a return to a balanced national defense strategy—namely one that includes the foundational importance of maritime power—something that has been sorely neglected over the past three decades.

The first announcement was made by the PRC’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi who made the unusual statement that “China is ready to work with other countries to use the three global initiatives as an opportunity to elevate global maritime governance and improve the well-being of all people.” Since coming to power in late 2012, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping has implemented three global governance initiatives: the Global Development Initiative in September 2021, the Global Security Initiative in April 2022, and the Global Civilization Initiative in March 2023.

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Yes, Mexico Knows Exactly What It Is Doing Mexico understands that an open border, the destruction of U.S. immigration law, illegal immigration, and emigration of millions of its own citizens to America are entirely in its own interests. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on December 2nd, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/02/yes-mexico-knows-exactly-what-it-is-doing/

President-elect Donald Trump recently had a “talk” with newly elected Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum about the millions who have crossed through Mexico to enter the U.S. illegally.

Afterwards, Trump reported that their conversation went well, and supposedly both had agreed to secure the U.S. border.

But given long-standing, de facto Mexican policy to rely on and profit from an open U.S. border, it was not long afterwards that Sheinbaum claimed she had not been so accommodating.

Or, as she now put it of the Trump conversation, “I give you the certainty that we would never—and we would be incapable of it—propose that we would close the border.” And of course, she is right: Mexico never would wish for a secure U.S. border, although it is wrong that she is incapable of guaranteeing one should she choose to do so.

What, then, is going on?

Over the last half-century, Mexico has gradually, even insidiously, developed both a one-sided, asymmetrical relationship with the U.S. based on professed mutual benefit and yet sought to leverage America by claiming it is supposedly guilty for two centuries of oppressive treatment.

How does the strange U.S.-Mexico supposed co-dependence seem to work?

The Mexican government has traditionally seen the U.S. as an endlessly wealthy country, liberally governed, and more or less willing to listen to Mexico’s grievances of the sort that are common in asymmetrical partnerships.

About 60 percent of the Mexican people traditionally in polls have voiced a positive view of the United States, yet a surprisingly low number when considering the millions who try to cross its border illegally each year.

Nonetheless, Mexico for decades has conveniently explained the vast influxes across the border, unaudited and illegal, as largely in America’s interests—and mirabile dictu even to Mexico’s disadvantage. Polls tell, however, a vastly different and far more accurate story.

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Leftist NY Attorney General and Judge vs. the Rule of Law How they weaponized the justice system to get Trump. by Joseph Klein

By on December 2nd, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/leftist-ny-attorney-general-and-judge-vs-the-rule-of-law/

New York State Attorney General Letitia James and New York Supreme Court Judge Arthur F. Engoron have provided a case study in how the Left conducts war against the integrity and impartiality of law enforcement and the judiciary. Together, they weaponized the justice system to wage their personal vendetta against Donald Trump. Their weapon of choice was a broad and vaguely written New York State fraud statute, Executive Law Section 63(12), which they maliciously twisted for the purpose of ruining Mr. Trump financially.

In 2022, Judge Engoron told Donald Trump’s attorney that Mr. Trump is “just a bad guy” whom Letitia James “should go after as the chief law enforcement officer of the state,” which is precisely what she was doing. Judge Engoron’s highly biased statement alone should have disqualified him from presiding over any case involving Mr. Trump. This judge should also have been disqualified for donating to the Manhattan Democrats in violation of Section 100.5(h) of the New York Courts Rules of Judicial Conduct. But Judge Engoron remained on the case.

Judge Engoron had no reason to doubt that Ms. James would zealously “go after” the man who Judge Engoron smeared as “a bad guy.”  After all, this left-wing fanatic had promised during her attorney general election campaign to target then-President Trump. “I’m running for attorney general because I will never be afraid to challenge this illegitimate president when our fundamental rights are at stake,” this election denier declared. “We need an attorney general who will stand up to Donald Trump.”

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Biden Pardons Son and Co-Conspirator Joe Biden did not just pardon Hunter: he pardoned himself. by Daniel Greenfield

By on December 2nd, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-pardons-son-and-co-conspirator/

The long investigation of the Biden Crime Family ended when its principal member extended a “full and unconditional” pardon to its front man for any and all crimes that Hunter Biden might have committed or taken part in from January 2014 through Dec 1 2024.

The eleven year pardon by Joe Biden for his son and apparent co-conspirator is unprecedented in both its scope and its brazen shameless criminality. Biden’s pardon begins in the last two years of his vice presidency when the lame duck politician was using Hunter to aggressively monetize his fading political influence by conspiring with oligarchs around the world.

President Biden claimed in a press release that he pardoned his son to protect him from being charged for lying on his gun form and failing to pay taxes. But if Biden had been trying to deal with those two cases, he could have just commuted the sentences or offered a narrower pardon.

The gun form incident took place in 2018 and Hunter stopped paying taxes in 2016. Why start the pardon clock on Jan 2014? And why does it end at the vast last possible moment?

What is Joe Biden really trying to protect against?

2014 was the year that Hunter Biden joined the board of Ukraine’s Burisma, scoring a $1 million payday, and millions more for the Biden Crime Family. It was also the year that Yelena Baturina, the wife of former Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov sent $3.5 million to a Hunter organization and attended an event with Joe Biden in D.C. It was also the year that a Kazakh oligarch who had just taken over the BTA Bank with whom both Joe was photographed sent six figures.

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