NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A tale of two Americas Red states are growing, while blue states are mired in lawlessness and decline.Joel Kotkin

Posted By on November 10th, 2022

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/11/09/a-tale-of-two-americas/

Yesterday’s Midterms were not a victory for conservative or progressive ideology, but an assertion of the growing power of geography in American politics. It was less a national election than a clash of civilisations.

Virtually nowhere in blue areas did Republicans make gains. Both the north-east and California – the central players in Democratic Party politics – stayed solidly blue. Even the most well-regarded GOP candidates, such as Lanhee Chen who ran for California state controller, struggled to make inroads in Democratic territory.

Meanwhile, the senators and governors of the leading red states – Texas’s Greg Abbott, Georgia’s Brian Kemp, Florida’s Ron DeSantis, Ohio’s Mike DeWine – all won handily. Almost all blue-state governors remained the same as well, although the Democratic incumbents often won by smaller margins.

So, what is happening in this increasingly inexplicable country? Essentially, there are now two prevailing realities in the US. One is primarily urban, single and, despite some GOP gains in this demographic, still largely non-white. It functions on the backs of finance, tech and the service industries. The other is largely suburban or exurban, family centric and more likely involved in basic industries like manufacturing, logistics, agriculture and energy.

Usually, the media assume these two Americas represent equally viable political economies. But this is increasingly not the case. In population terms at least, red America is now growing far more rapidly than blue America. And this makes it more important politically. Since 1990, Texas has gained eight congressional seats, Florida five and Arizona three. In contrast, New York has lost five, Pennsylvania four and Illinois three. California, which now suffers higher net outbound-migration rates than most Rustbelt states, lost a congressional seat in 2020 for the first time in its history.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

What The Palestinians Need Now by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on November 10th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19106/what-palestinians-need

Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip live under two regimes that crack down on critics, and imprison and intimidate journalists, human rights activists and political opponents. Those who dare to criticize the Palestinian Authority or Hamas often face various forms of punishment, including torture and incarceration.
The situation under the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank is not any better. There, Palestinian security forces continue to arrest, harass and intimidate political activists, university students and academics.
In the past week, the Palestinian Authority security forces arrested and threatened a number of Palestinian political activists who called for reforms.
There are two reasons why, under the current circumstances, the Palestinians cannot hold elections.
First, the split between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip due to the ongoing dispute between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. The PA fears that Hamas will not allow a free election in the Gaza Strip, especially in light of Hamas’ crackdown on its opponents there. Similarly, Hamas fears that the PA will not allow a free election in the West Bank, especially in light of the continued security crackdown on Hamas members there.
Second, the high probability that Hamas would win.
While one can understand why it is not a good idea to hold elections that would help Hamas extend its control to the West Bank, there is no reason why Palestinians should be arrested and intimidated for demanding freedom of expression and an end to corruption.
Unsurprisingly, violations committed by Palestinians against Palestinians are virtually always ignored by the Western media and the international community. Such abuses are of no interest to Westerners because they cannot be blamed on Israel. By turning a blind eye to the violations, the international community and media effectively incentivize the Palestinian Authority and Hamas to continue their repressive measures against their own people.
Sadly, it does not look as if the Palestinians are coming any closer to freedom of speech or freedom of assembly — unless it is to denounce Israel. Rather, as their corrupt and incompetent leaders clearly do not care about their well-being, it looks as if they are going in exactly the opposite direction.
While, literally across the street, the Israelis have free debate in newspapers, quarrelsome programs on television and protests, the Palestinians continue to find themselves arrested, silenced and terrorized for daring to demand the freedoms they see every day next door.

Under the kleptocratic Palestinian Authority (PA) and the theocratic Hamas regimes, Palestinians have no freedom of speech and no independent or free media.

Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip live under two regimes that crack down on critics, and imprison and intimidate journalists, human rights activists and political opponents. Those who dare to criticize the Palestinian Authority or Hamas often face various forms of punishment, including torture and incarceration.

Take, for example, the case of legal expert Dr. Mohammed al-Talbani, who was forced to sign a pledge not to offend Hamas or its government on social media. The move came after he criticized death sentences issued by Hamas courts in the Gaza Strip.

Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip live under two regimes that crack down on critics, and imprison and intimidate journalists, human rights activists and political opponents. Those who dare to criticize the Palestinian Authority or Hamas often face various forms of punishment, including torture and incarceration.

The situation under the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank is not any better. There, Palestinian security forces continue to arrest, harass and intimidate political activists, university students and academics.

In the past week, the Palestinian Authority security forces arrested and threatened a number of Palestinian political activists who called for reforms.

There are two reasons why, under the current circumstances, the Palestinians cannot hold elections.

First, the split between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip due to the ongoing dispute between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. The PA fears that Hamas will not allow a free election in the Gaza Strip, especially in light of Hamas’ crackdown on its opponents there. Similarly, Hamas fears that the PA will not allow a free election in the West Bank, especially in light of the continued security crackdown on Hamas members there.

Second, the high probability that Hamas would win.

While one can understand why it is not a good idea to hold elections that would help Hamas extend its control to the West Bank, there is no reason why Palestinians should be arrested and intimidated for demanding freedom of expression and an end to corruption.

Unsurprisingly, violations committed by Palestinians against Palestinians are virtually always ignored by the Western media and the international community. Such abuses are of no interest to Westerners because they cannot be blamed on Israel. By turning a blind eye to the violations, the international community and media effectively incentivize the Palestinian Authority and Hamas to continue their repressive measures against their own people.

Sadly, it does not look as if the Palestinians are coming any closer to freedom of speech or freedom of assembly — unless it is to denounce Israel. Rather, as their corrupt and incompetent leaders clearly do not care about their well-being, it looks as if they are going in exactly the opposite direction.

While, literally across the street, the Israelis have free debate in newspapers, quarrelsome programs on television and protests, the Palestinians continue to find themselves arrested, silenced and terrorized for daring to demand the freedoms they see every day next door.

Under the kleptocratic Palestinian Authority (PA) and the theocratic Hamas regimes, Palestinians have no freedom of speech and no independent or free media.

Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip live under two regimes that crack down on critics, and imprison and intimidate journalists, human rights activists and political opponents. Those who dare to criticize the Palestinian Authority or Hamas often face various forms of punishment, including torture and incarceration.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Dead guy wins Pennsylvania race and ‘our democracy’ is saved By Eric Utter

Posted By on November 10th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/11/dead_guy_wins_pennsylvania_race_and_our_democracy_is_saved.html

A Pennsylvania state representative who died last month was reelected on November 8 despite that fact.

You can probably guess the representative’s party affiliation. Yes, Democrat Anthony “Tony” DeLuca, who passed away October 9, won in a landslide, garnering over 85% of the vote. At the time of DeLuca’s death, it was too late for officials to change the election ballots, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.

DeLuca, Pennsylvania’s longest-serving state rep, easily defeated Green Party challenger Queonia “Zarah” Livingston, who is alive. (Livingston is a far-left extremist who ran on a platform including “environmental justice,” and “ending the war on drugs.”)

This is the same state that elected John Fetterman, a man who lived with/off his parents until he was 50 and who has been afflicted with severe cognitive difficulties after suffering a stroke early in his campaign.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

How They Count Votes in Brazil Augusto Zimmermann

Posted By on November 10th, 2022

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2022/11/how-they-count-votes-in-brazil/

The second round of Brazil’s presidential elections was held on Sunday, October 30. The former president, Lula da Silva, who has served prison time for corruption, apparently won 50.90% of the vote and the incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, received 49.10%. In other words, Lula was declared winner with less than 1 per cent lead over Bolsonaro. This is according to judges of the Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE), Brazil’s top electoral authority. It was an unexpected comeback for the former president, who was directly responsible for the biggest series of corruption scandals in the nation’s history.[1] Lula is “back at the scene of the crime”, according to the description made not a long time ago by his own vice-president in the presidential ticket. According to J.R. Guzzo, one of Brazil’s most accomplished journalists, the 2022 election in Brazil has been “a legal and political fraud as we have never seen in this country”.[2]  In an article entitled De Volta à Cena do Crime (Back at the Scene of the Crime), he commented:

Lula returned to the presidency via the general collapse of the Constitution and Brazilian laws throughout the electoral process – the result of an unprecedented meddling of the judiciary, which was entirely illegal in each step of the process. The basic fact is that the judiciary, with Justice Alexandre de Moraes issuing orders and Lula in the role of its sole beneficiary, did everything it could for any neutral observer to conclude this was a rigged election … Basically, Supreme Court justices and its electoral arm, the Superior Electoral Tribunal, put together piece by piece a mechanism designed to favour the leftist candidate. The first step was for these unelected judges to simply overturn the four criminal convictions against Lula and, with it, perform the “magic” of disappearing with all the dirty record which precluded him from being a candidate.[3] 

But there is a rather decisive international element in Lula’s victory as well. Just after a few outlets called the election in Brazil, U.S. President Joe Biden orchestrated a rapid international embrace of Lula. In a statement released immediately after the result was officially announced, Biden claimed that Lula had won “following free, fair, and credible elections”.[4]  In short order, Canada’s Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron, and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak all released statements congratulating Lula. “The people of Brazil have spoken”, said Trudeau, writing within an hour and a half of the result.[5]

In August 2021, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan visited Brazil to issue the following warning to the Brazilian president: do not even dare even to question the reliability of your country’s electronic voting system.[6] A month earlier, in July 2021, the newly installed Biden sent his CIA director, William Burns, to travel to the country to meet with senior Brazilian officials. During that meeting, the U.S. delegation warned the Brazilian government that President Bolsonaro “should stop casting doubt in his country’s [entirely electronic] electoral process”.[7] Next, at the June 2022  Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, the Biden administration notoriously repeated the same warning that the U.S. government would not tolerate Bolsonaro casting any doubt on the reliability and security of the nation’s voting machines.[8] Since these messages came before the outcome of the election, this was a clear warning of dire consequences should the Brazilian president contest the alleged fairness and transparency of the electoral process

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

All Hail Peter Morgan! It’s high time for a miniseries about the highly imaginative creator of Netflix’s “The Crown.”  By Bruce Bawer

Posted By on November 10th, 2022

http://All Hail Peter Morgan! It’s high time for a miniseries about the highly imaginative creator of Netflix’s “The Crown.”  By Bruce Bawer

All hail the creative genius of Peter Morgan, who realized years ago just how big a market there was for movies, plays, and TV series about the House of Windsor. 

After a middling early career as a TV and film writer, Morgan hit pay dirt in 2006 with the movie “The Queen,” which garnered Oscar nominations for his screenplay as well as for best picture and nabbed Helen Mirren the best actress nod as Queen Elizabeth II. 

In 2013 came “The Audience,” Morgan’s West End and Broadway play consisting entirely of meetings between Queen Elizabeth II—again played by Mirren—and every last one of her prime ministers up to that date. 

Along the way, Morgan worked on other projects, including the play and movie “Frost/Nixon” and the Freddie Mercury biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody.” But like a moth to a flame, he kept returning to Buckingham Palace. In 2016 came his chef d’oeuvre, “The Crown”—the high-budget Netflix series that follows Queen Elizabeth II throughout her reign. 

“The Crown” is fun to watch, of course, and gorgeous to look at. But from the beginning it’s been criticized for taking outrageous liberties with the facts. Some of its most engaging sequences have turned out to be total fiction. For example, Elizabeth and Jackie Kennedy escaping from a posh reception at Buckingham Palace to bond cozily over the Queen’s dogs. Or Princess Margaret exchanging dirty limericks with LBJ at a White House dinner. 

Almost every scene involving Margaret Thatcher is not just pure invention but borderline calumny. Which isn’t surprising, given Morgan’s partiality to Tony Blair, who not only was the hero of “The Queen” but also was at the center of Morgan’s films “The Deal” (2003), and “The Special Relationship” (2010). 

The fifth season of “The Crown,” covering the 1990s, will debut on November 9—two months and a day after the Queen shuffled off this mortal coil. But Morgan and friends aren’t letting  her death cramp their style: the fabrications in this round of “The Crown” are reportedly more plentiful than ever. We’ll see Prince Charles intriguing against his mother and Prince Philip pressuring her to make nice with his mistress. Shades of “Richard III”! And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, apparently. 

No surprise, then, that there’s more outrage than ever about “The Crown’s” high hooey quotient. In a November 4 article at the BBC website, for example, one Hugh Montgomery posed what he described as “the big question of the moment,” namely: “should The Crown and its creator Peter Morgan be playing so fast-and-loose with the facts?” Morgan has already replied to that: five years ago, defending the liberties he’d taken thus far with the details of the Queen’s life, he said, “I think there’s room to creatively imagine, based on the information we have about her.” 

Well, given that sanction, I’ve come up with a TV project of my own: a miniseries about the life of Peter Morgan. Don’t think for a second that he doesn’t merit such treatment. After all, his oeuvre has had a huge worldwide impact. He’s played a major role in reshaping the reputations of several leading royals and prime ministers. 

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Tuesday Takeaways The under-polled voters were not silent, wary Trump supporters, but seething upscale women and college students. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 10th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/09/tuesday-takeaways/ What, if anything, did the midterms tell us about the country—other than underwhelming Republicans could still take the House and Senate? During the COVID lockdowns, American elections radically changed to mail-in and early voting. They did so in a wild variety of state-by-state ways. Add ranked voting and a required majority margin to the […]

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Trump Wrongly Blamed for Subpar GOP Performance By Rick Moran

Posted By on November 10th, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2022/11/09/trump-wrongly-blamed-for-sup-par-gop-performance-n1644514 The Republicans had a pretty good midterm election despite what pundits are claiming. The GOP must win three of the remaining four Senate races to win control of the upper chamber — a goal well within reach as Republicans lead in Nevada and Wisconsin. And the party is within spitting distance of a House […]

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Since Dobbs Decision Leak, Violence Against Pro-Lifers Was Over 22 Times That Against Pro-Choicers When you can’t risk admitting the truth. by John R. Lott, Jr.

Posted By on November 10th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/since-dobbs-decision-leak-violence-against-pro-lifers-was-over-22-times-that-against-pro-choicers/

After the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade leaked on May 3rd, news reports blamed abortion-related violence over the summer on pro-life supporters.

“[W]e have seen a steady rise in violence and harassment against providers from anti-abortion extremists who continue to be emboldened by the Supreme Court’s decision,” claimed Melissa Fowler, Chief Program Officer of the National Abortion Federation (NAF).

“People want me dead’: abortion providers fear violence after Roe overturned,” a headline in The Guardian read. Other news outlets, such as NBC News, also focused on the increased threat of violence against abortion providers. But national news sources don’t mention violence against people on the pro-life side of the debate.

It never made much sense, anyway. Why would a major win in the Supreme Court cause pro-life people to suddenly resort to more violence? The pro-choice people would be more upset and, presumably, more likely to lash out.

Using news searches and pre-existing data, the Crime Prevention Research Center, which I head, identified 135 attacks on pro-life entities and people between May 3 and September 24, 2022. By contrast, only six cases involve attacks on pro-choice people. That is a ratio of 22-to-1. And that may be an underestimate of the difference if the media is less likely to cover violence against pro-lifers.

All of the cases and links to the underlying news stories are available here.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

UC Berkeley Calls Cops on Protest Against “Jewish Free Zones” At Berkeley, banning Jews is free speech, protesting anti-Semitism isn’t. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on November 10th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/uc-berkeley-calls-cops-on-protest-against-jewish-free-zones/

During the Black Lives Matter riots, UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ endorsed police defunding. “Elements of our country’s law enforcement culture dehumanize some of the very people whose safety and wellness police officers are sworn to protect,” she falsely claimed.

Two weeks ago, UC Berkeley called the police on a conservative truck protesting campus antisemitism and the “Jewish Free Zones” erected by elements of its law school.

Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky had claimed that the university couldn’t take any action against the “Jewish Free Zones” enacted by student organizations even as he admitted that they would bar 90% of Jewish speakers. “That is their First Amendment right. I find their statement offensive, but they have the right to say it. To punish these student groups, or students, for their speech would clearly violate the Constitution,” he argued.

That was in early October.

In late October, Chemerinsky responded to a truck rented by a conservative group protesting the “Jewish Free Zone” by threatening that, “we’re exploring whether there’s any action that can be taken against the Accuracy in Media for the truck.”

According to Chemerinsky and Berkeley, banning Jews is free speech, protesting the ban isn’t.

Chemerinsky described the ban of 90% of Jewish speakers as merely “offensive”, but condemned a protest against it as “despicable” and “outrageous behavior.”

Adam Guillette, the president of Accuracy in Media, had decided to challenge the culture of campus antisemitism by renting a truck to name and shame the students responsible for the  “Jewish Free Zones”.

It’s a tactic that has been successfully used by groups fighting antisemitism like Canary Mission.

Recalling his own student days, Adam told me that, “When I attended the University of Florida we dealt with the same sort of nonsense and our campus Jewish groups wouldn’t do a thing about it.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Progressives Launch ‘Don’t Run Joe’ Anti-Biden Campaign By Liz Sheld

Posted By on November 10th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/10/morning-greatness-progressives-launch-dont-run-joe-anti-biden-campaign/ Election: Florida Republicans’ Historic Performance, By the Numbers Understanding the Underwhelming GOP Performance Democrats fortify their blue wall — and Electoral College math — for 2024 Minnesota elects first transgender state lawmaker Universal free lunch ballot measure passes easily in Colorado Rep. Kevin McCarthy has announced his bid for House Speaker ‘Vote Like A […]