2016’s Reluctant Trumpers Are 2020’s Avid Trumpers By Charlie Gerow

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/10/25/2016s_reluctant_trumpers_are_2020s_avid_trumpers.html
““It wasn’t until after he was president that I fully understood the power of Donald Trump’s message.” 

Four years ago, the media enjoyed covering the phenomenon of so-called Never Trumpers; Republicans who wouldn’t vote for Donald Trump.

There was speculation that these voters, many well connected to the Washington establishment, would put the icing on the electoral cake for Hillary Clinton. Of course, this notion proved fanciful. The Never Trumpers are back in 2020. They’re no greater in number, but the media has gobbled it up again.

But there’s another group of Republicans: those who enthusiastically supported GOP candidates other than Donald Trump before he was nominated. They remained cautious about Trump even after the Republican National Convention. Ultimately, though, they pulled the lever for Trump over Hillary. Call them “Reluctant Trumpers.”

They’re still around, too. But’s there’s a difference: they are now enthusiastic Trumpers. I know. I’m one of them.

Four years ago, I was national co-chair of Carly Fiorina’s fledgling campaign. She and I had served on the board of the American Conservative Union together, and I wanted a conservative candidate. Having supported conservatives since my days on Ronald Reagan’s campaign staff, I wasn’t yet convinced of the bona fides of former Democrat Donald Trump.

Ocasio-Cortez Declines to Promise Support for Pelosi as Speaker, Will Back ‘Most Progressive Candidate’ By Mairead McArdle

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ocasio-cortez-declines-to-promise-support-for-pelosi-as-speaker-will-back-most-progressive-candidate/

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday hedged on whether she would support Nancy Pelosi as House speaker again, saying she will support the “most progressive” candidate.

“If Speaker Pelosi runs again, as she just indicated she will if the Democrats keep the House, will you support her?” CNN’s Jake Tapper asked the freshman congresswoman during an interview on CNN.

“Again, I want to make sure that we win the House. I do believe that we will, but it’s critically important that we are supporting Democrats in tight swing races, making sure that not only all of them come back but that we grow our majority. I believe that we have to see those races as they come, see what candidates are there,” Ocasio-Cortez responded.

“I am committed to making sure that we have the most progressive candidate there. But, if Speaker Pelosi is that most progressive candidate, then I will be supporting her,” she concluded.

The New York progressive’s remarks came just moments after Pelosi confirmed on CNN that she intends to run for speaker of the House should Democrats retain their majority in the chamber.

Last year, Pelosi clashed with Ocasio-Cortez and three other freshmen progressive congresswomen after the four voted against an emergency border-aid bill brought to the floor by leadership, saying they wanted to see more protections for migrants in the measure.

The Middle East and the Next Administration By Hillel Fradkin & Lewis Libby

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/the-middle-east-and-the-next-administration/

Threats and opportunities, old and new.

A   highly unusual development has thrust itself into the Middle East: some good news. As usual, the Middle East is beset by turmoil and is likely to remain so for the next four years. But new and positive responses to these threats have changed the Middle Eastern landscape. A crucial question for the next four years is whether the U.S. will build successfully on these positive developments or risk their withering away.

These positive developments include, most notably, two new alliances of America’s regional friends. These may be capable of giving America serious assistance in the pursuit of its national interests in the region, not to mention their own. If so, they would fulfill a longstanding American hope of a reduction in the burdens it has borne.

The first and most obvious change is the new alliance between Israel and two Gulf states, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain, members of what is called the pragmatic Sunni Arab bloc. This alliance is understood to have at least the implicit support of others, including notably Saudi Arabia, and has the prospect of growing wider and even more capable with the potential inclusion of additional states.

The second, somewhat less noted, positive development is the formation of an alliance in the Eastern Mediterranean designed to protect the region’s waters and their energy resources. Somewhat ad hoc in nature, it now consists of the following countries: Egypt, Greece, Cyprus, Israel, Jordan, France, and the United States, with a possible role for Italy.

Of course, these alliances are the flip side of the threats to peace and stability that the region faces, forces that threaten American interests as well. These are threefold. Two are internal to the region: the revolutionary Shiite regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the ambitious and increasingly Islamist orientation of the regime of the Republic of Turkey under its leader, Tayyip Erdogan. To them may be added their respective non-state radical-Islamist allies. But they are now augmented by a third hostile force of external powers and American adversaries: Russia and China, which increasingly seek a powerful role in the region.

We need a truth and reconciliation commission about Covid: Diane Bederman

https://dianebederman.com/we-need-a-truth-and-reconciliation-commission-about-c

We need a truth and reconciliation commission about the handling of Covid, the Chinese Virus. Have crimes against humanity been committed?

There are 7.8 billion people on this planet. Since the virus was unleashed last November/December, approximately 1.5 million people have died. Thankfully, few are children. Sadly, many are elderly. In the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1918, 60 million people died.

I suggest the response to Covid by our political and scientific leaders is a prime example of “moral hazard.” A moral hazard is a circumstance or decision in which one party can take risks because they do not have to endure the consequences of their actions. While citizens of all countries are told what they can and cannot do, when they can work, how they can work, or worship, or a walk outside or visit family and friends, leaders, political and scientific, promoting lockdowns will not be adversely affected. They continue to receive their paychecks, while others lose their entire income and end up at food banks.

Every politician, every medical expert must be held to account for the decisions they made and the destruction they have caused. The collateral damage. The Crimes against Humanity.

We get to listen to self-righteous leaders and doctors explain to us all day, every day, why it is in our best interests to shut down the economy and stop going to houses of worship, or attend school, while Walmart stays open and Casinos get up and running. It’s in our best interests, they say, and they feel so bad.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, self-appointed Emperor of all things Covid, never sat down with the hundreds of infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists of the Barrington Declaration who have shared their grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies.  The collateral damage includes the breakdown of the family; from mental illness, suicide, drug addiction, child abuse and wife abuse and sadly, to divorce. Who will care for children when their parents fall apart?

Biden’s Hostility to Israel Another issue that’s being ignored. by by Shmuel Klatzkin

https://spectator.org/bidens-hostility-to-israel/

The year I began my rabbinic studies in Jerusalem, a full-fledged war broke out on Yom Kippur. My fellow students and I set aside our books and made ourselves useful wherever help was needed. Whether helping work in the city’s largest bakery so everyone could have bread, working in a home for severely disabled children, or one of the city’s major hospitals, along with my fellows, I did what I could.

Joe Biden was the number-two person in an administration that in every way sought to lower its commitment to Israel, and to undercut its ability to succeed as a nation or even to defend itself.

What has never left me is an acute appreciation of how slender is the thread upon which Israel’s survival hangs. We did not know that Syrian tanks had penetrated the Israeli lines and, had they been better led, could have unhinged all of Israel’s defenses. We did not know how useless the Bar Lev fortifications had proven against Egypt. That all came later. But that this was a moment of existential crisis was known by all instinctively. It was in the air.

What a difference it made when the news came that America had created an air lifeline for Israel. In the terrible fighting, the IDF had nearly exhausted its ammunition and necessary military hardware. Taking great diplomatic risk, President Nixon decided to set up a continuous air ferry of supplies that enabled Israel to continue to fight, to turn the tables, and to remove the threat of extinction that a Syrian-Egyptian conquest would have meant.

Ever since that time, when I was in my early twenties, I have made a candidate’s position on Israel a top priority in elections. By the time the next presidential came up in 1976, Nixon was gone and Ford’s policy was being unduly demanding of Israel. I was by no means a conservative then, and there was little else about Ford that inspired me, so I voted for the mysterious man from Georgia. But by the time 1980 rolled around, Carter had shown that he blamed Israel exclusively for the failure of Camp David to lead to full Middle East peace, and his fatuous policy towards Iran had allowed that country to turn into a seething cauldron of hatred against Israel and America. I voted for Reagan, though I also was voting for Teddy Kennedy for the Senate because of his friendliness to Israel’s cause.

Why I voted for Trump in 2016 and will vote for him again: By Michael Goodwin

https://nypost.com/2020/10/24/heres-why-im-sticking-with-trump-over-feeble-biden-goodwin/

In March of 2016, I wrote that I would likely support Donald Trump because he was the only presidential candidate speaking for working-class Americans. I also viewed the contempt for Trump by the media and elite of both parties as contempt for his supporters as well.

As the campaign wore on, that contempt became an acceptable form of bigotry, as reflected in Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” smear at a fundraiser.

On Election Day, I put aside concerns about whether Trump was ready and voted for him. My hope was that enough people agreed the nation desperately needed a course correction on policies and leadership, and that Trump, despite his background and lack of experience, could rise to the occasion.

Four years later, everything has changed, not all of it for the better. Trump shook Washington to its core and remade the Republican Party, but the nation’s fault lines make the divisions of four years ago seem almost quaint.

One thing that won’t change is my vote. In fact, the 2020 choice is much easier. There are two main reasons why I’m sticking with Trump.

One is because of what he has done, and the other is because of what his opponents have done to sabotage and overthrow him.

Long-standing claims of Biden corruption all but confirmed with Hunter’s emails By Peter Schweizer and Seamus Bruner

https://nypost.com/2020/10/24/biden-corruption-claims-all-but-confirmed-with-hunter-emails/

Thanks to three brave Americans, we now know that Joe Biden has long misled the public about his involvement with his family’s foreign business entanglements while he served as vice president.

At considerable personal risk, former Biden family business partners Tony Bobulinski and Bevan Cooney, and computer shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac, have come forward with tens of thousands of primary-source documents — internal corporate records, emails, and text messages — detailing years of business dealings that centered on trading on the Biden name. This material suggests that, despite Joe Biden’s insistence that he knew nothing about his family’s business deals, he was well aware of his son Hunter Biden’s business ventures in China, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and elsewhere.

These new troves constitute hard evidence of Biden family corruption, and confirm our reporting dating back to our 2018 book “Secret Empires.”

In 2018, when we first broke the foreign influence scandals that have now engulfed the former vice president, it seemed apparent that China and Ukraine were not paying Biden’s family members for their expertise, they were buying access to the vice president of the United States. This was never a scandal solely about Hunter or Joe’s brothers, James and Frank. It was, and has always been, a Joe Biden scandal.

For nearly three years, Biden and his surrogates have responded to the scandal with an increasingly unconvincing series of denials — including another from the former Vice President in his last debate with President Trump.

In response to “Secret Empires,” one of Joe Biden’s aides said “we aren’t going to engage on a politically motivated hit pieces …” Team Biden did not bother to respond to specific allegations that the Biden family vacuumed up millions, in the exact locales where Biden was Obama’s policy “point man.”

President Trump’s Promise

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/president-trumps-promise/91312/

When Americans go to the polls November 3, The New York Sun urges a vote to re-elect President Trump and Vice President Pence. We do so in the belief that the principles for which the President, the Vice President, and the Republican Party stand offer far more promising prospects for the kind of economic growth — and full employment — that can best return our politics to a state of amity.

We have no illusions about how bitter — and personal — things have become. To those who say that Mr. Trump is unfit, we say, compared to whom? Not, in our view, Mr. Biden and his camarilla. In any event, we prefer the advice offered in Cato I, the first of the two letters from the anonymous American revolutionary pamphleteer who enjoins: “Attach yourselves to measures, not to men.”

By our lights, the ad hominem nature of this — and the last — campaign is laid to the Democrats. Shocking is the word for their refusal to accept Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016 and their efforts to foil his presidency. This campaign began even before Mr. Trump swore the constitutional oath. It was, we’ve been learning, set in motion by, in President Obama and Vice President Biden, the highest officers in the country.

From it flowed the vainglory of “resistance.” It was pressed throughout the government in a campaign of leaks, disparagement, and obstruction. The resistance festered not only within the “deep state” of the executive branch. It saw federal district judges issue nationwide injunctions in policy disputes. And the House impeach the President on a party-line vote on charges that, the Senate concluded, did not stand up.

Worst of all, the resistance to the result of a free election was egged on by the press. Our aging eyeballs have never seen anything like it. The Times announced even before the 2016 election that it was abandoning the ideal of objectivity. Others followed. Today, our biggest social mediums have discovered the only way they can defend the Democratic nominee is by refusing to circulate stories on corruption in his family.

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL

Who could have foreseen President Donald Trump’s impressive policy triumphs in the Middle East? Three- and still counting -Arab nations making peace and establishing airline travel between their nations and Israel. However, the turpitude of the Israel bashers in the media, academia, and even in the United States Congress continues. My friend Michael Ordman does a yeoman job in rebutting the lies in weekly reports on Israel’s outsize contributions to science, the arts, technology, agriculture, medicine and a better life in every corner of the world…..rsk

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com 

 
 
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Update on Israeli Covid-19 vaccine. The Covid-19 vaccine being developed by the Israel Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) is beginning Phase 1 human trials. Head of IIBR, Professor Shapira confirmed this at the recent Christian Media zoom Summit attended by this newsletter editor, who asked a question at 1:38:47.
https://worldisraelnews.com/israeli-corona-vaccine-brilife-to-start-human-testing-in-october/
https://youtu.be/EUx5EL1CANQ?t=4976    https://youtu.be/EUx5EL1CANQ?t=5927
 
Israeli Covid-19 antibody serum for Israeli Health ministry. Israel’s Kamada (reported here previously) has signed a deal to supply Israel’s Health ministry with its plasma-based hyperimmune immunoglobulin (IgG) product. The product treats COVID-19 patients with pneumonia and is currently in Phase 1 & 2 trials in Israel.
https://nocamels.com/2020/10/kamada-deal-supply-israel-health-ministry-covid-19-antibody/
 
Hospital uses drones to save lives. (TY TPS) Ziv Medical Center in Tzfat (Safed) will be the first Israeli hospital to use drones. They will transport medical equipment, medicines, and blood and Corona tests, to and from the hospital. Initially, they will carry 5kg loads up to 10km, saving time and bypassing road blockages.
https://unitedwithisrael.org/first-israeli-hospital-deploys-drones-to-save-lives/
 
Preventing worldwide blindness. Israel’s AEYE Health (reported here previously) is pushing hard to get its retinal disease AI diagnostic eye scanner approved by the end of 2020. The Covid-19 pandemic has seriously cut the number of patients visiting eye specialists. The eye scanner can be used easily by GPs or clinic staff.
https://www.israel21c.org/diagnosing-retinal-disease-with-artificial-intelligence/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Cx5XmwLJPw
 
US clears PE diagnostic. Israel Aidoc’s triaging and notification algorithms for flagging and reporting incidental pulmonary embolism (see here) have just been approved by the US FDA.  The solution is an ‘always-on’ safety net for unexpected cases. It is Aidoc’s sixth FDA-approved tool for triage and notification:
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3863760,00.html
 
Another Covid-19 breath test. Israel’s NextGen Biomed is developing a breathalyzer test (see another here)
 to identify Covid-19 infections. The biological markers were identified in an April study by Israel’s Scentech Medical. The two companies are now being merged and a validation trial is scheduled to commence shortly.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-company-announces-identification-of-covid-19-indicators-in-breath-test
https://www.scentech-medical.com/  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rGian6PWqQ
 
Autonomous vehicle imaging can detect Covid-19. Israel’s Adasky (reported here previously) develops and manufactures high-resolution thermal vision AI sensors for the advanced vehicle industry. Its Viper-R system can detect Covid-19 instantly, by scanning multiple individuals 10 meters away for elevated body temperatures.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3864150,00.html
 
Molecular test for Covid-19 or cancer. Nanotechnologists at Israel’s Technion Institute have eliminated the time-consuming amplification process in coronavirus and secondary cancer tests. 100 molecules of the sample are passed one by one through a nanopore – a tiny hole and assessed for the presence of a specific bio-marker.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/slowest-part-of-covid-tests-eliminated-with-israeli-single-molecule-method/
 
Replacing antibiotics in the dairy industry. Israeli biotech Mileutis has developed Imilac – designed to treat mastitis in cows by boosting their immune systems. Imilac is near the marketing stage and can replace the wide use of antibiotics for which resistance is growing and being passed to humans via milk products.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3862670,00.html   http://mileutis.com/
 

Decision Time for the Costco Mom by Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/24/decision-time-for-the-costco-mom/

If you get this wrong, those toilet paper scrums at Costco might become a routine occurrence.

Earlier this year, a strange spectacle kept recurring at one of the country’s most popular big box stores.

Costco shoppers across the land wrestled each other for industrial-sized packages of toilet paper; as panic set in about the looming coronavirus pandemic, well-heeled suburbanites quickly depleted the retailers’ nationwide supply of Charmin and Quilted Northern. Even the store’s discount Kirkland brand sold out fast.

It’s unclear exactly why toilet paper topped the list of the COVID-19 survival kit but the scenes were instructive as far as observing upscale suburban women in their natural habitat. The toilet paper rush of 2020 probably started with a few comments at the monthly Bunco game or the ladies’ league liquid lunch or at a bespoke med spa house party.

Soon enough, premium membership card in hand, suburban women cruised their Range Rovers to the nearest Costco ready to fight for their right to a 30-roll pack like it was the last size 4 Veronica Beard camo blazer at Nordstrom. Photos of TP booty were proudly posted on Facebook; the booties of Jacob and Olivia would be safely clean for years to come.

And thus we had a peek into the workings of the hivemind of modern-day suburban moms.

In 2018, the sorority of suburban sisterhood found a common enemy: Donald Trump. Suburban congressional districts from Washington, D.C. and Chicago to Orange County, California flipped from Republican to Democrat, giving Nancy Pelosi enough new members to take back her coveted speaker’s gavel. Like nearly all midterm elections, the outcome was a rebuke of the sitting president. Millions of white suburban women, amid a booming economy and period of international peace, cried “but his tweets!” all the way to their polling places.