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‘End of the War’ in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran? Not Quite Yet by Guy Millière

Posted By on November 4th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21084/end-war-gaza-lebanon-iran

US President Joe Biden said that Sinwar had been an “insurmountable obstacle” and that his death offered “the opportunity… for a political settlement” in Gaza. A short time later, US Vice President Kamala Harris said that it was now possible to “finally end the war in Gaza.”

Had Israel complied with the Biden-Harris administration’s request and not gone into Rafah, Sinwar would still be preparing the next massacres and making sure that Hamas keeps stealing the humanitarian aid intended for the people of Gaza. When the IDF killed him, just a mile from the Egyptian border, he was found carrying a large sum of money and the passport of a man described as an “UNRWA teacher.”

Hamas continues to steal the humanitarian aid and then sells it on the black market at extortionate prices, from which Hamas has “profited by at least half a billion dollars.” Approximately 200 trucks of aid enter Gaza every day, yet the media report that Gazans are “starving” and that the blame for the supposed “war crime” goes, of course, to — Israel.

[B]y waiving sanctions that block Iran from selling its oil, the Biden-Harris administration has effectively been funding Iran’s nuclear weapons program to the tune of roughly $100 billion.

“After Iran’s Oct. 1 missile attack, Mr. Biden told Israel not to attack Iran’s nuclear program. Mr. Trump replied, ‘Isn’t that what you’re supposed to hit? It’s the biggest risk we have, nuclear weapons.’ He reportedly told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, ‘Do what you have to do’… [Trump] tells Israel to do what it needs to do to end the war quickly in victory. Ms. Harris piles on restrictions and insists a cease-fire lead to a two-state solution disconnected from reality.”— Elliot Kaufman, Wall Street Journal, November 1, 2024.

“Now, as the ICC expands and abuses its powers to attack Israel, and Unrwa is exposed as compromised by Hamas, Mr. Biden blocks new sanctions against the ICC and tries to preserve Unrwa.” — Elliot Kaufman, Wall Street Journal, November 1, 2024.

Which will Americans vote for this week? The policies of President Trump or the policies of Presidents Biden and Obama?

October 17. Israeli authorities announce that Yahya Sinwar, the leader of the Hamas terrorist organization, the man who planned and ordered the atrocities of October 7, 2023 and the hostage-taking that accompanied them, has been eliminated. In the hours that followed, US President Joe Biden said that Sinwar had been an “insurmountable obstacle” and that his death offered “the opportunity… for a political settlement” in Gaza. A short time later, US Vice President Kamala Harris said that it was now possible to “finally end the war in Gaza.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Is This The Biggest Suppression Poll in History? Matt Margolis

Posted By on November 4th, 2024

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/11/02/is-this-the-biggest-suppression-poll-in-history-n4933899

I warned you about suppression polls, and the mother of all suppression polls appears to have just dropped. And it’s not even from a swing state.

The latest Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll just dropped, and it claims that Kamala Harris has a three-point lead in Iowa.

“Kamala Harris now leads Donald Trump in Iowa — a startling reversal for Democrats and Republicans who have all but written off the state’s presidential contest as a certain Trump victory,” the Des Moines Register reports. “A new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows Vice President Harris leading former President Trump 47% to 44% among likely voters just days before a high-stakes election that appears deadlocked in key battleground states.”

The results follow a September Iowa Poll that showed Trump with a 4-point lead over Harris and a June Iowa Poll showing him with an 18-point lead over Democratic President Joe Biden, who was the presumed Democratic nominee at the time.  

“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co. “She has clearly leaped into a leading position.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has abandoned his independent presidential campaign to support Trump but remains on the Iowa ballot, gets 3% of the vote. That’s down from 6% in September and 9% in June.  

Fewer than 1% say they would vote for Libertarian presidential candidate Chase Oliver, 1% would vote for someone else, 3% aren’t sure and 2% don’t want to say for whom they already cast a ballot.  

It’s worth noting that an Emerson College poll out of Iowa was released on Saturday as well, and it had Trump ahead nine points. Trump has led in every poll out of Iowa against either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. Yet, this poll is making a huge splash. Why?

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

On Election Eve, Majority Of Voters Deeply Dissatisfied With Biden-Harris Years: TIPP Tracking Poll Terry Jones

Posted By on November 4th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/11/04/on-election-eve-majority-of-voters-deeply-dissatisfied-with-biden-harris-years-tipp-tracking-poll/

As most know, reading the tea leaves about who will win an election by looking only at political preference polls can be difficult. Polls jump around, and people often don’t want others to know who they will vote for. But there is a way around that: Ask people how they feel about their own lives. The TIPP Tracking Poll did just that, asking voters how they’re doing under the Biden-Harris administration. Not well, it turns out.

In a national online survey taken from Oct. 30 to Nov. 1, the TIPP Tracking Poll asked a series of four questions to 1,603 registered voters, with a margin of error of +/-2.5 percentage points. The responses suggest a majority of Americans harbor deep disappointments over the path the nation has traveled since the outbreak of COVID.

But it’s a split majority: Registered Democrats continue to express positive feelings about both the Biden-Harris administration and the general direction of the country. Republicans and independent/third-party voters remain mostly dissatisfied.

The first question asked simply: “Are you better off now compared to your situation pre-COVID?”

A majority of 54% said “no,” while 36% answered “yes.” Another 10% responded “not sure.”

But a closer look reveals two very different views, based on party affiliation. Among Democrats, 56% said they were better off now than before COVID, while only 34% felt they were worse off, with 10% not sure.

They inhabit a different mental universe than those in the other two major political groupings. For Republicans, 69% said they were worse off, versus 23% saying they were better off and 8% not sure. Independents weren’t far behind at 62% “worse,” 27% “better” and 11% unsure.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

US Elections and the Old Family Album by Amir Taheri

Posted By on November 3rd, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21083/us-elections-family-album

The kinder authors use the label “conservative” against those left behind as if that were an insult. But one conserves only what one regards as precious and worth preserving. Advocates of wokeism never bother to ask why so many Americans don’t wish to board that bus and try to cling to their American way of life, as portrayed in Rip Smith’s old family album in “Magic Town”.

In theory, the US has a multiparty system. In practice, however, for the past few decades at least, it has appeared as 43 effectively one-party states with the remaining seven swinging between two parties.

The strength of the American system lies in the fact that the structures of the republic set limits to democratic waywardness caused by momentary changes of public mood and cultural-ideological fashions such as wokeism.

For decades, at least until the early days of the current century, a saying attributed to a 19th century vaudeville troupe was often used to assess the prevailing political mood in an imaginary “average America”: Will it play in Peoria?

I first heard the phrase in 1974 from Thomas Philip (Tip) O’Neil, the 47th Speaker of the US House of Representatives. In answer to questions about likely policies the federal government might pursue on various issues, he said: “We have to see how it plays in Peoria!”

The subtext was that Peoria, a small town in Illinois, represents the mood in America.

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Finally, a leader who’s willing to fight the culture war Kemi Badenoch is the anti-Kamala, just the breath of fresh air the Western world needed. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on November 3rd, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/11/02/finally-a-leader-whos-willing-to-fight-the-culture-war/

Imagine if, a few years ago, you had told the wet leftists of the British establishment that one day there’d be a black woman in charge of a major political party and that they would freak out about it. That instead of celebrating this final breakthrough for race relations, these self-styled progressives would be bitterly murmuring into their muesli that ‘She’s a bit abrasive’ and ‘God help us now’. They’d have refused to believe you. Yet here we are. Kemi Badenoch has won the Conservative Party leadership contest and becomes the first black person ever to lead a major party in Britain. And the left ain’t happy.

Badenoch has succeeded Rishi Sunak as Tory leader. She beat Robert Jenrick, winning 53,806 votes from party members to his 41,388. That’s a solid win. She has a clear mandate to steer the party in her preferred direction. Ideally that will be away from both the frothing Brexitphobia of the One Nation melts and the thin, Johnny Come Lately ‘populism’ of Jenrick and his socially odd support base. And towards a greater willingness to fight the culture war. Towards a readiness, even a glee, to lock horns with a political class that has thrown everything from biological truth to our very own national story on to their bonfire of the vanities. Kemi could be the culture warrior we’ve been waiting for.

She has more than proved her mettle in the battle of ideas. She knows what a woman is, which instantly makes her more deserving of a vote than Keir Starmer, who famously turns into a gibbering wreck whenever he’s asked basic questions about biology. Badenoch hasn’t so much ‘waded in’ to the ‘trans row’, as the media like to describe it, as she has marched in, sword of truth raised. She insists we must ‘protect women’s spaces’ from the presence of men. Whether it’s ‘rapists being housed in women’s prisons’ or ‘men playing in women’s sports’, it’s just not on, she says. And we must be free to say so without the ‘fear of being accused of transphobia’. Three cheers for that.

She has stood up for the right of young gay folk to discover their sexuality without being pumped with puberty-blocking drugs or mauled by surgery to ‘correct’ their ‘wrong’ bodies. The sinister medical meddling with gay kids’ bodies is a species of conversion therapy, she says, essentially aimed at ‘making them straight’. She’s right. And her views were lately echoed by JD Vance, who said ‘trans-affirming healthcare’ is ‘pharmaceutical’ conversion therapy. Badenoch has even met with the LGB Alliance, the brilliant gay-rights group ruthlessly maligned by the lost souls of the woke as a ‘hate group’. She’s a better friend of homosexuals than anyone on the Labour benches.

She has challenged the fashionable view of Britain as ‘institutionally racist’. Actually, she says, this is ‘the best country in the world to be black’. Her praise of this plucky nation that ‘sees people, not labels’ infuriates the mostly white wet-wipes of the opinion-forming classes who get off on flagellating both themselves and the kingdom for all the racial crimes of history. To these people, there’s nothing worse – really, nothing – than the sight of a black lady saying ‘It’s good to be black in Britain’. It shatters their ideologies of self-loathing from which they derive their cultural power and media clout. A black woman nipping at the heels of the fashionable shame of white influencers? It just won’t do.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Israel is not a ‘settler-colonial state’ The Jewish State was born through anti-imperial struggle. Jake Wallis Simons

Posted By on November 3rd, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/11/03/israel-is-not-a-settler-colonial-state/

Portraying Israel as a colonial imposition on indigenous people, a ‘settler state’ expropriating their land and culture, is a major pillar of Israelophobia. As I explain in Israelophobia: The Newest Version of the Oldest Hatred and What To Do About It, it is rooted in the suggestion that Jews have no place in the Middle East and are alien to the region, a claim that is easily dismissed with even the briefest look at history. Yet the demonisation persists.

Take Akub, a fashionable Palestinian restaurant in London’s Notting Hill. It is more than just a high-end eatery. In an interview with the New York Times in 2022, its French-trained chef and founder, Fadi Kattan, said his mission was to ‘reclaim a cuisine that is part of a broader Arab tradition involving foods like hummus, falafel, tabbouleh, fattoush and shawarma, that he felt was being co-opted by Israeli cooks’. It seems that whereas normal people cook food, in the eyes of Kattan, Israelis ‘co-opt’ it. This position relies on a highly selective view of history. As one reader remarked in the comments section: ‘Jews have also been making these foods for centuries and have appropriated nothing. There’s been a continuous Jewish presence in the land of Israel for thousands of years. What’s more, many of these foods are not limited to the land of Israel, but common across the former Ottoman Empire.’

People often forget that Judaism is two millennia older than Islam and 1,500 years older than Christianity. Israel was the cradle of Jewish civilisation. At least a thousand years before the birth of Jesus Christ, Jerusalem’s most famous Jew, King David, made the city the capital of the Land of Israel. It has been home to greater or lesser numbers of Jews – the very word ‘Jew’ is a shortening of Judea, the ancient kingdom radiating from Jerusalem in the Iron Age – in Jerusalem ever since.

Culturally, Jews have always intertwined their identity with the land of Israel, particularly since they were exiled to Babylon around 598 BC, when their powerful yearning for return took hold. For millennia, Jews in the diaspora have prayed facing towards the Holy City, exclaimed ‘next year in Jerusalem’ at Passover, mourned the destruction of the Temple by breaking a glass at weddings, longed to be buried there, prayed at the remaining walls of the destroyed Temple, and visited on pilgrimage. Many throughout history have taken the step of uprooting their families and returning to their homeland. All these practices continue to this day.

A thread can be traced backwards through Jewish history that shows the ancient roots of the ideal of repatriation. Beginning in 1516, Palestine – as it had been renamed by the Romans – fell under Ottoman rule, which would last for more than 400 years. Less than 50 years after the conquest, Joseph Nasi, the Duke of Naxos, a Portuguese Jewish diplomat favoured by the Ottomans, attempted to return Jews to their homeland without regard for scriptural prophecies about awaiting the coming of the messiah. In a way, he was the first Zionist.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Judge Glock The Economy Election Kitchen-table issues will be decisive on November 5.

Posted By on November 3rd, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-economy-election

You could consume hundreds of hours of television news and spend weeks reading newspaper election coverage and still not know that the economy is by far the most important issue on voters’ minds. The media focus on culture-war issues and tend to portray the election as a fight for “the soul of the nation.” In reality, voters are far more concerned about things like grocery and housing prices.

Polling data make this clear. Fifty-two percent of voters in a recent Gallup poll described the economy as “extremely important” to their vote; no other issue earned that tag from a majority. Another 38 percent of voters rated the economy as “very important.” Notably, Gallup found that the share of voters rating the economy as “extremely important” was higher in this year’s poll than that recorded in each of the closest-to-the-election polls for presidential elections dating back to 1996, with the exception of that conducted amid the Great Recession in 2008.

Gallup’s results were not an outlier. A September Pew Research Center poll found that 81 percent of registered voters described the economy as very important to their vote, the largest share for any issue; the runner-up was health care, with 65 percent. An Associated Press and NORC poll similarly found the economy was “[o]ne of the most important issues” for 79 percent of voters, again the largest share recorded for any issue; health care again came next at 56 percent.

Voters’ specific concern is inflation. When asked to clarify the most important economic issue, 69 percent said the cost of living, according to an Ipsos poll; no other economic issue cracked double digits. Rising prices are also a particular concern among the young. A September NBC poll found that inflation or cost-of-living was the most important issue overall for almost a third of under 30 voters; no other issue garnered more than 11 percent.

This all should be positive news for Donald Trump. According to a recent New York Times/Siena poll, likely voters named the former president more trustworthy on the economy than they did Harris by a seven percentage-point margin.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

It’s All About Control: The Elite Plan for the Great Food Reset By Janet Levy

Posted By on November 3rd, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/11/it_s_all_about_control_the_elite_plan_for_the_great_food_reset.html

Besides ‘degrowth’ and ‘net zero,’ one other dangerous buzz phrase being bandied about by proponents of the Great Reset is “nature-positive food systems.”  The stated goal of moving to new food systems is to reduce nitrogen emissions, livestock production, and meat consumption.  This is to be achieved by consuming plant-based products, lab-grown foods, and insects (as a source of protein).  The moot question, however, is whether such a change is at all necessary?

The U.N., the World Economic Forum (WEF), the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and other NGOs would have us believe so.  These institutions are controlled by the global elite, who aim to create monopolistic markets for themselves and enslave people, turning them first into captive consumers without choice, and eventually, without free will.  So, the U.N. and its co-conspirators have manufactured a food crisis, and by linking it to their other fabrication — an exaggerated climate crisis — they are using it to reset the world’s food system.

Their plan to “transition to net zero, nature-positive food systems by 2030” translates into a war on traditional farmers.  Unable to absorb the added costs of new regulations and controls, small, independent producers are being squeezed out of farming.  Their place is being taken by multinational agribusinesses.  Unchecked, these multinationals will dominate farming in a decade or two.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Futile Quest for Equity By Robert Weissberg

Posted By on November 3rd, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/11/the_futile_quest_for_equity.html

Being a pedestrian in New York City can be dangerous. As one headline put it, “Last Years was Deadliest in NYC Streets in Nearly a Decade.” Reckless drivers killed 124 pedestrians, 50 motorcyclists, and 19 bike riders. New York City has tried to reduce these fatalities with lower speed limits, cameras to catch those running red lights and clearly marked pedestrian safety zones.

Surprisingly, the city recently reversed course and eliminated the $250 fine for jaywalking or crossing against the signal. Why invite more deaths and injuries? According to city council member Mercedes Narcisse, “Laws that penalize common behaviors for everyday movement shouldn’t exist, especially when they unfairly impact communities of color,” and since in 2023, 90% of the issued tickets targeted black and Latino pedestrians.

Repealing the jaywalking law is about equity, as understood politically, and requires that all outcomes must reflect population proportionality, and if they do not, government must level them, or at least make it appear that differences are nonexistent. So, though we may be unable to stop unsafe behavior, government can keep such unequal behavior out of the public eye by decriminalizing it, even if imposing equity disproportionately harms the intended beneficiaries. Note. blacks nationally experience death when walking at a 118% higher rate than whites. The New York City law does not help anybody. It probably hurts blacks the most. The only beneficiaries are those made uncomfortable by encountering statistics depicting blacks and Hispanics in a bad light. Why not end poverty by eliminating economic data?

This example is only one of many equity crusades. The city has also relaxed enforcing the law against those not paying subway and bus fares since culprits were disproportionately black and Hispanic. That such fare avoidance may bankrupt the public transportation vital for the city’s poor is irrelevant. Furthermore, as in other cities, “broken windows” policing where minor offences such as public intoxication have been sharply reduced since too many blacks and Hispanics were arrested. New York City’s district attorney Alvin Bragg has “reduced” crime by not prosecuting offenders though actual crime remains rampant.

The equity battle goes beyond decriminalization. Many schools today no longer disproportionately punish blacks for misbehaving, regardless of their bad behavior, while adjusting test standards to eliminate gaps in academic performance.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

State of Play, November 3, 2024 We keep hearing that the race will be close. I think it will be like Patton’s Third Army racing across France in 1944. By Roger Kimball

Posted By on November 3rd, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/03/state-of-play-november-3-2024/

Historians have often noted the tendency of generals to embark on a new war with assumptions more pertinent to the last one. This is what the enemy did last time; ergo, he’ll do something similar this time. That worked for us last time; ergo we should do it again. Fighting the last war is always a dangerous temptation.

The conduct of political warfare is not unlike the conduct of the wars that deploy armies rather than candidates, navies rather than the media, aircraft rather than pollsters. There is always the temptation to think that the assumptions and tactics of the last war are relevant to the current campaign.

This is especially the case, I believe, in the 2024 presidential race. The principals are the same: Donald Trump vs. what Vivek Ramaswamy has dubbed “the System.” The Dems changed out their primary avatar in July, shoehorning in Kamala Harris, where Joe Biden had been standing.  But that maneuver, though profoundly anti-democratic, was merely a cosmetic expedient.  The public face of the campaign was changed.  The organizing soul remained the same.

In essence, the Dems are waging the same campaign now that they waged in 2016, in 2020, and beyond.  Counting once again on their huge advantages in money (almost 3 to 1) and near total control of the media, they believe—or at least have acted as if they believe—that they can play the same game this time and win. They have not yet noticed—or at least have not yet effectively recalibrated their campaign to account for the fact—that many things “on the ground” have changed radically.

The Dems are fighting the last war.  Trump is not.

For one thing, the day-to-day running of the Trump campaign, overseen from on high by Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, is superb. Both are geniuses.  Unlike in 2016 or 2020, this year the Trump juggernaut is a well-oiled, multi-chambered, highly adaptive machine.