Friday, October 04, 2024
No blogging today
Big social events today, including the opening of a bottle of Grange -- for those who know what that is all about
Wednesday, October 02, 2024
Iran opens the door to retaliation
Iran unleashed its second direct military assault against Israel on Tuesday, this time with 181 ballistic missiles. All Israeli civilians were ordered into bomb shelters, and most missiles were intercepted. But this is an act of war against a sovereign state and American ally, and it warrants a response targeting Iran’s military and nuclear assets.
This is Iran’s second missile barrage since April, and no country can let this become a new normal. Israel reported a few civilians injured and one Palestinian may have been killed near Jericho in the attack. A terrorist shooting, possibly co-ordinated, killed six Israelis. The work by the U.S. and Israel to shoot down most of the missiles was spectacular, but it shouldn’t have to be, and next time it may not be.
Rockets fired from southern Lebanon are intercepted by Israel's Iron Dome air defence system over the Upper Galilee region in northern Israel on September 27. Picture: Jalaa Marey/AFP
Rockets fired from southern Lebanon are intercepted by Israel's Iron Dome air defence system over the Upper Galilee region in northern Israel on September 27. Picture: Jalaa Marey/AFP
After April’s attack, the Biden Administration pressured Israel for a token response and President Biden said Israel should “take the win” since there was no great harm to Israel. Israel’s restraint has now yielded this escalation, and it is under no obligation to restrain its retaliation this time.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hinted at a stronger response in a statement to Israelis: “Iran made a big mistake tonight — and it will pay for it. The regime in Iran doesn’t understand our determination to defend ourselves and retaliate against our enemies.” He cited the Hamas and Hezbollah leaders who have been killed since Oct. 7, adding “and there are probably those in Tehran who don’t understand this. They will understand.”
But does Mr. Biden understand? Iran’s act of war is an opening to do considerable damage to the regime’s missile program, drone plants and nuclear sites. This is a test for a President who has been unwilling even to enforce oil sanctions against Iran. It is also a chance to restore at least a measure of U.S. deterrence that has vanished during his Presidency.
Before the attack, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned Iran of “severe consequences.” National security adviser Jake Sullivan reiterated the pledge after the missile barrage. Having issued such a warning, Mr. Biden has an obligation to follow through or further erode U.S. credibility.
If there were ever cause to target Iran’s nuclear facilities, this is it. Iran has shown that it might well use a bomb if it’s acquired, and Tehran would certainly use it as deterrent cover for conventional and terrorist attacks on Israel, Sunni Arab states and perhaps the U.S. Iran is closer than ever to a nuclear weapon and won’t stop itself. The question for American and Israeli leaders is: If not now, when?
Iran’s revolutionary regime has shown itself again to be a regional and global menace. It started this war via Hamas, which it funds, arms and trains to carry out massacres like the one on Oct. 7, and it escalated via Hezbollah, spreading war to Lebanon. Other proxies destabilise Iraq and Yemen, fire on Israeli and U.S. troops and block global shipping. It sends drones and missiles to Russia and rains ballistic missiles on Israel. All while seeking nukes.
Escalating this confrontation now is a gamble for Iran. With Hamas depleted and Hezbollah in disarray, Iran’s proxies can’t defend it the way they usually would. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may be betting that Mr. Biden will shrink again from defending the civilised world from a dangerous regime. Will he be right?
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‘Nervous, glum’: Why Vance walked all over Walz in VP clash
Vice presidential debates typically don’t make much of a difference in presidential elections.
But the race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris is one of the closest in decades, which upped the pressure on their running mates in their only head-to-head contest.
And under the harsh spotlight of prime time TV, Tim Walz struggled to meet the moment.
The Minnesota Governor came from the clouds to join the Democratic ticket based on his folksy charm, his joyful attitude and his viral attack on his opponents as “weird”.
None of that was on show against JD Vance, his Republican rival.
Right from the start, Mr Walz was noticeably nervous. The crisis in the Middle East was the obvious first question, and yet he stumbled through his answer and confused Israel with Iran.
He was often on the defensive and seemed so focused on remembering his lines that he missed opportunities to confront his opponent.
And unlike the Vice President, who was constantly ready with a laugh or a smirk or a shake of the head in response to Mr Trump during their debate, Mr Walz’s expression during Mr Vance’s answers mostly landed somewhere between blank and glum and tired.
That Mr Vance was the more accomplished performer was no surprise. The Yale-educated lawyer regularly confronts tough questions from reporters, while the Democrats have surprisingly steered Mr Walz away from the media in recent weeks, depriving him of practice.
The Republican – who began the night as one of the most unpopular vice presidential picks in history – was also obviously determined to reach out to female voters. By and large, he shied away from his trollish tendencies, instead seeking common ground with Mr Walz while admitting he needed to work harder to convince voters to trust him on issues like abortion.
It made for a far less combative debate than the contest between Ms Harris and Mr Trump, with the pair shaking hands and introducing their wives at the end. But the winner was clear.
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Donald Trump was right, says, ‘I told you so’ as 151,000 violent convicted criminals released into U.S. as Kamala Harris visits southern border to find out what’s going on
“I say, I told you so.”
That was former President Donald Trump’s reaction at a Michigan rally on Sept. 27 of tens of thousands of violent, convicted criminals being let into the U.S. by the Biden-Harris Department of Homeland Security, according to the latest data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) released on Sept. 25 via Congressional oversight by U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas).
The numbers were breathtaking: 13,376 convicted murderers, 16,120 convicted of sexual assault, 64,579 convicted of assault, 43,546 convicted of burglary, larceny or robbery, 13,876 convicted of weapons offenses, 2,606 convicted of kidnapping and 2,218 convicted of commercialized sexual offenses — all before they ever came to America and were released into the country by the federal government.
According to the House Homeland Security Committee release on Sept. 27, “they had previously been encountered by CBP, turned over to ICE, had their criminal history documented, and then were released into the United States.”
The vast majority of these convicted criminals — 151,851 out of 156,521, or 97 percent — were not currently detained by ICE, with only 4,670 are detention and subject to removal. Of the convicted murderers, the numbers are even worse: only 277 are in detention, or just 2.2 percent.
The rest are apparently just roaming around. But now Harris is promising that when she is in office — apparently heedless that she has already been in office for almost four years — to complete her border visit checkbox photo opportunity, posted on X on Sept. 29, “As president, I will secure our border, disrupt the flow of fentanyl coming into the United States, and work to fix our broken system of immigration.”
But one of the things “broken” is the Biden-Harris administration’s propensity to release convicted criminals into the U.S., simply out of incompetence or worse, on purpose.
The other thing “broken” is public perception that the current Democratic administration even gives a whit about the problem, with Harris upside down on immigration versus Trump, for example, in the latest national Quinnipiac poll taken Sept. 19 to Sept. 22, with 53 percent of likely voters saying Trump would do a better job handling immigration and 45 percent saying Harris. That’s consistent across almost all national polls taken the entire election cycle. If the election comes down to immigration, the border and illegal alien criminals, it might not be close.
Trump found it curious that the numbers were released at all — the letter from ICE as Vice President Kamala Harris made her visit to the U.S. southern border since 2021, stating, “So, these numbers just came out — nobody’s ever seen these numbers for years, nobody’s ever seen them — and probably some patriot in ICE or somebody just did something, they just said the country is going bad, you can’t have a country like that. We have think of it murderers — convicted murderers — imprisoned for life, many get the electric chair or they get whatever their form of death penalty. These are convicted people for life are… now in our country and I can finally look at them and see.”
Here, Trump is reminding voters of his warning in his very first speech as a candidate when he began running for president in June 2015, when he famously stated, “The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems. Thank you. It’s true, and these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Turns out, Trump was right, yet again. Allowing unrestricted illegal immigration — since Feb. 2021, there have been 8.3 million encounters by the U.S. Border Patrol on the southwest border, the most in recorded U.S. history — will allow a certain percentage of proven criminals, including violent criminals, into the U.S.
So, 156,521 out of 8.3 million, that’s a 1.87 percent violent crime rate, almost 2 out of every 100 let into the country, are convicted, violent criminals. Compare that to the national violent crime rate, which includes murder, manslaughter, rape and robbery, of 0.36 percent, or 363.8 out of every 100,000 — that’s five times the national violent crime rate.
Perhaps Kamala Harris does not need to visit the southern border to find out why this is happening, but by visiting the Oval Office, the Department of Homeland Security and by looking in the mirror.
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All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Tuesday, October 01, 2024
Israel defends itself — and may save Western civilisation
How will we ever repay the debt we owe Israel? What the Jewish state has done in the past year – for its own defence, but in the process and not coincidentally for the security of all of us – will rank among the most important contributions to the defence of Western civilisation in the past three-quarters of a century.
Having been hit with a devastating attack on its people, beyond the fetid imagining of some of the vilest antisemites, Israel has in 12 months done nothing less than redraw the balance of global security, not just in the region, but in the wider world.
It has eliminated thousands of the terrorists whose commitment to a savage theocratic ideology has claimed so many lives across the region and the world for decades. It has, with extraordinary tactical accuracy, dispatched some of the masterminds of the worst evil on the planet, including most recently Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader in Lebanon. It has repelled and then reversed the previously inexorably advancing power of one of the world’s most terrifying autocracies, the Islamic Republic of Iran. It has demonstrated to all the West’s foes, including Iran’s allies in Moscow and Beijing, that our system of free markets and free people, and the voluntary alliance network we have constructed to defend it, generates resources and capabilities of vast technical superiority.
Above all, it has provided an unexpected but crucial reminder to our enemies that there are at least some willing and able to pursue and defeat them whatever the risk to our own lives and resources.
The only appropriate responses to Israel’s gallantry, fortitude and skill from us - its nominal allies, especially in the US – are “thank you” and “how can we help?”
Instead, time and again Israel’s supposed friends, including the administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, have, while expressing sympathy over the outrage of October 7 and uttering the usual support for “Israel’s right to defend itself,” repeatedly tried to restrain it from doing just that. Their early, valuable support has been steadily diminished by the way they have too often connived with the anti-Israel extremists in their own party.
Before Israel had even buried its dead last October and as Hamas was busy murdering its hostages, there were calls for Israel to ceasefire. For a year we have heard our leaders’ “balanced” condemnations of Hamas and its terror masters on the one hand and the Jewish state on the other, a false equivalence that says more about the moral disorder in our own politics than about Israel’s motives and actions.
In Europe, they have gone even further, as usual, rewarding Hamas and Hezbollah by nominally recognising a nonexistent Palestinian state and prosecuting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on bogus war-crimes charges.
Do they not get that in the end we have to make a choice: our ally, on the front lines of defense against barbarism or our enemies, those who literally want to see us all buried?
Fortunately for all of us, it seems Israel is prevailing despite the chorus of hecklers.
Perhaps all this sounds too blithe for skeptical readers; or at least premature given the rising expectation of a much wider conflict to come. And it is true that there has been awful loss of innocent lives in Gaza, Lebanon and elsewhere that undoubtedly fuels the ire of the enemy across the world. What if Mr Netanyahu and his government’s aggressive prosecution proves a Pyrrhic victory?
But that wider conflict was perhaps always inevitable, given Iran’s stated objectives and its consistent efforts to achieve them. We can say two things tentatively about that long-feared wider confrontation. First, the strategic tactical, intelligence and technological genius Israel has demonstrated over the past year might have done so much damage to Iran’s proxy armies and their military and political leaders that they will be ill-prepared and equipped for the bigger struggle to come, and Israel – and, let’s hope, reliable allies – better placed to defeat its enemies. Second, having observed this Israeli superiority over that time and eagerness not to bring the destruction on itself a wide war would surely bring, perhaps Iran will be deterred.
Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few, Winston Churchill said of the men of the Royal Air Force after they had repelled Hitler’s Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain. (Reminder to some recently confused “conservatives”: The former were the good guys; the latter the real villains.)
We should echo those words today as we watch in awe what a country smaller in area than New Jersey, with a population less than North Carolina’s and an economy smaller than that of Washington state, has done for all of us.
As Israelis solemnly mark a year since October 7, we should not only redouble our expressions of sympathy and solidarity. We should show them our gratitude, and if we are willing to be really honest, acknowledge a little of our own shame.
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Who are the stupid party now?
David Lammy, British Foreign Secretary under Labour
David Lammy made an appearance on UK television’s Mastermind Celebrity Edition in 2008. For the uninitiated, Mastermind is a highbrow cerebral quiz show that has been broadcast on the BBC for more than fifty years. Those who have sat in its iconic black chair consider it to be the game show equivalent of Everest. The Harvard-educated Lammy, who was Labour’s Minister of State for Higher Education at the time, would surely have no trouble handling a show with such intellectual fortitude. Right?
Among the many absurdities made by the MP for Tottenham were that Marie Antoinette was the recipient of the Nobel prize in physics, that Henry VII acceded to the English throne after the death of Henry VIII, and that the Rose Revolution took place in Yugoslavia in 2003 – seemingly forgetting the fact that the country ceased to exist more than a decade earlier. He is now serving as Foreign Secretary.
My point is that education does not imply intelligence. Even with the most expensive advanced degrees in the world, if you are unable to understand basic facts, you will not make a very effective politician. What does the term over-educated mean? There are a number of definitions. Here’s mine: someone who can calculate a coffee jar’s volume to the closest decimal place, but lacks the strength to open it.
Lammy has always been an outspoken progressive who has a history of making ridiculous statements. These intemperate outbursts, which take the form of self-righteous moralising, can range from the undiplomatic to the idiotic. This was the man who called Donald Trump a ‘racist KKK and Nazi sympathiser’ and equated Brexiteer Conservatives to Nazis. Often framed via the lens of identity politics, he appears to be Labour’s biggest instigator of race baiting. His most well-known gaffe came in 2013, when the papal conclave chose a new pope. ‘Do we really need silly innuendo about the race of the next pope?’ Lammy tweeted in response to the BBC’s rhetorical question about whether the smoke from the Sistine Chapel’s chimney will indicate the election of a new pope – black or white. When colour is all you see, don’t be surprised if your interpretation is somewhat limited.
Tuesday was Lammy’s first significant foreign policy speech, also referred to as the Kew lecture. In his inaugural address, he seemed to suggest that climate change poses a more pervasive and fundamental threat than autocratic regimes or terrorism. The Foreign Office will make tackling the climate ‘central’ to everything it does. I don’t think suicide bombers are concerned with rising sea levels, and Vladimir Putin is probably not going to be deterred from stationing tanks in Kiev because his soldiers might get a little too warm inside a T-55.
Joking aside, it is extremely alarming how ignorant Lammy is of foreign policy matters. Just prior to his speech, he unveiled a brand-new Substack page. The blog, titled Progressive Realism (PR), describes itself as ‘a foreign policy newsletter where you will find an in-depth look at my approach to the UK’s foreign affairs, and how it is shaped by the principle of progressive realism’. Call me cynical, but the moment I see the word ‘progressive’, an alarm bell goes off in my head. My suspicions were confirmed as I continued reading. It would appear that he has tacitly endorsed the ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Central Asia. ‘Azerbaijan has been able to liberate territory it lost in the early 1990s,’ Lammy writes on PR.
The Foreign Secretary seems to approve of Azerbaijan’s capture of Nagorno-Karabakh, a breakaway region of Azerbaijan controlled by Armenia. In flagrant violation of international law, Baku ethnically cleansed approximately 120,000 Christian Armenians last year. Furthermore, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has close ties with Moscow. Endorsing a dictatorship over a fledgling post-Soviet liberal democracy? That doesn’t sound very progressive to me. It’s a shame that Lammy failed to look on a map and find out the location of the Rose Revolution. It was in Georgia, next door to Armenia.
Maybe he didn’t write the post for mitigation purposes? But since it’s a personal blog, surely you should accept full responsibility for anything that is published under your name? Now he is in a bind. He faces backlash from the Azeris if he apologises. You incur the wrath of the other 50 per cent when you take a position on something you barely understand. This is something that should be written in large font and stapled to the door of every cabinet office in the Western world.
To make this solely about David Lammy would be unfair. You will be shocked to hear that Sir Keir Starmer has added more overeducated, equally useless individuals to his cabinet.
Whereas Lammy appears to be a dead cert to win the coveted stupidest MP of the year award, Anneliese Dodds, the Women and Equalities Minister, is his main rival. Although Dodds holds a PhD from the London School of Economics, it appears that she lacks a basic understanding of the biological reality of sex. She has refused to amend the Equality Act in order to make the legal definition of a woman more explicit. According to the legislation, ‘sex’ refers to your gender identity rather than your biological sex. Closing this loophole would stop transgender women from entering women-only spaces, such as changing rooms, as well as prevent them from joining sports teams that are exclusively made up of women.
What’s abundantly clear to me is that this government appoints people with the IQ of a broken refrigerator. It will inevitably backfire if it is overrun with managerial elites who have no regard for or knowledge of the politics of its people. Since Labour won the election, Keir Starmer’s approval rating has dropped by an astounding 45 percentage points. Rishi Sunak is more well-liked than he is. Eventually, the ruling class is replaced – Pareto called this the ‘circulation of elites’. Nonetheless, hatred toward the powerful is typically incremental. The problem is Labour has barely stepped foot in the door. How long before Starmer is turfed out? Place your bets now.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/keirs-cabinet-of-curiosities/
***************************************All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Monday, September 30, 2024
This is Israel’s greatest victory since the Six-Day War
There is a satirical Israeli song from the Second Lebanon War, ‘Yalla Ya Nasrallah’, with the chorus: ‘Come on, oh Nasrallah/We will screw you, inshallah/we’ll send you back to Allah/with the rest of Hezbollah’. The lyrics are doggerel, but I mention it for two reasons. One, it’s an absolute banger of a tune and, two, all that it threatened has now been carried out. Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah for 32 years, was killed last night in an IDF strike on the Islamist terror group’s underground command centre beneath a Beirut suburb.
“Yalla ya Nasrallah,
We will f*ck you Inshallah,
We will return you to Allah,
With the entire Hezbollah” pic.twitter.com/bMa6VuQwXH
His death is the latest in a series of targeted killings on the leaders of Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy force armed and funded to strengthen Tehran’s grip on the region. These assassinations have included Ibrahim Aqil, commander of Hezbollah’s Radwan special forces unit, along with its chief of staff Hussein Ahmad Dahraj, chief of operations Hassan Yussef Abad Alssatar, head of training Abu Hussan Samir, and others. It has included Ibrahim Qubaisi, head of the rocket and missile division, and Muhammad Hussein Srour, chief of drones and aerial defences. To give a sense of the speed and efficiency of Israel’s operations, all of these targets were killed in the last seven days. Hezbollah has terrorised Israel for almost 40 years and now Israel has eliminated almost its entire chain of command in a week. This represents years, probably decades, of planning and intelligence gathering against one of the most heavily armed forces in the region. As daring and improbable Israeli military victories go, it is up there with the Six-Day War.
Nasrallah’s death brings to an end the reign of a brutal butcher responsible for the deaths of many more Arabs than Israelis. Under his command, Hezbollah not only sided with Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war but took part in the large-scale killing of opposition fighters and civilians, including in Aleppo, Qusair, and Daraya. There’s a reason Syrians took to the streets last night to celebrate. They won’t be the only ones. Nasrallah’s death will be welcomed by the Druze of Majdal Shams, a town in the Israeli Golan Heights, where 12 Arab children were blown up by a Hezbollah rocket while playing soccer in July. It was one of 9,300 rockets Hezbollah has fired at Israel since 8 October, when it decided to join in the Hamas offensive of the previous day. All across the Middle East, in countries where denouncing the Zionist entity is a national pastime, prime ministers and peasants will privately respond to the news of Nasrallah’s demise with the same sentiment: the bastard had it coming.
Not everyone will see it that way, of course. Naturally, Iran won’t be happy. For the past year, it has watched (read: directed) Hezbollah and its other front group Hamas to launch attacks on Israel, only for Israel to respond with overwhelming force and tactical nous, taking out top commanders left and right. The financial cost to Iran in lost investment and hardware must be eye-watering. That will factor into what comes next. If Iran does not respond dramatically — it needn’t be all that effective, it just has to look good on CNN — then it will be a much weakened force in the region. Yet if it does, it risks a spate of targeted assassinations against its own leadership or, if the situation is allowed to escalate, some kind of direct engagement with Israel. Whatever their more hawkish elements say, neither country wants that. Regardless of what Iran does, it will now have to factor in that Israel is a far stronger, much emboldened enemy.
This is a historic victory for the Jewish state and its scale can be measured in the outrage with which it is greeted and the parties expressing it. Israel will be decried at the United Nations and calumnied by the human rights industry. It will be accused of war crimes by law professors from some of the finest universities in the world and charged with dangerous escalation by journalists who consider Israel’s mere existence an escalation. There will be indignation at the US State Department, the British Foreign Office and the European Commission, all of which will now have to spin this latest setback for Iran as another reason to revive the deadly foolish nuclear deal. Rest assured that all the right people are unhappy right now.
Hassan Nasrallah has plagued the Israeli psyche for so long that his death will come as a relief as much as a sense of triumph. But a triumph it is, another reminder that however long it takes, whatever the cost in blood and treasure, Israel always gets its man in the end. Jerusalem has reasserted this message in the most spectacular way. Yalla ya Nasrallah.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/this-is-israels-greatest-victory-since-the-six-day-war/
**************************************************The rise of the expertocrats
‘You are in danger!’ This is how the rhetoric starts. ‘But there is no need to not worry, we will fix it!’
There is a sad irony in this message. The government pretends to offer therapeutic words by identifying a problem only it can fix.
The problem is one of Iatrogenesis.
Derived from the Greek iatros, it means harm brought forth by the healer.
The illness is actually a product of the help offered by the government. The pain comes from the source of the cure. The foundation of the grief is derived from those who declare the loudest, ‘We care the most!!!’
It can become wearying for citizens to identify how often this happens in the self-destroying West. Yet, even under these somewhat bleak conditions, hope can be seen.
The Iatrogenic process starts with some form of legislative or ideological creep.
Authors such as Jonathan Haidt and Abigail Shrier have identified the pattern. The slide starts from a seemingly harmless point, usually a pattern of ill-ease of dysfunction within society. This pattern is then given a label.
Labelling is often akin to pouring accelerant on a fire, particularly if done by an expert.
Without this perceived professional help, the expert can quickly become redundant in society. The economics of their livelihood can be in doubt. An expert on gender studies needs confusion about gender or else, why would their advice be sought? What do some experts do? They embrace strategies that raise the value of their information. This is best achieved by creating an expectation that there will be alarming consequences if their advice is not sought or acted upon. And that help is not cheap. I call this system, ‘expertocracy’.
Expertocracy can be found lurking, lounging, and licentiously lingering in the halls of bureaucracy. Some may call this the ‘technocracy’, but I resist that label. Many experts are terrible at the technical aspects of their profession.
Being an expert is a matter of opinion based on influence. It is even possible to remain part of the expertocracy while making matters worse.
Why ‘licentiously lingering’?
There is an inherent sensuality about those in the expertocracy. They tend to be emotivists who promise to make people ‘feel better’.
The current plaything of the expertocracy is environmental alarmism.
When pressured on their Net Zero logic, the response from ministers is often shallow, incoherent, and avoidant. They cannot explain the continuation of the nuclear embargo other than insisting ‘trust us’. They avoid at all costs engaging with the salient dialogue of Bjorn Lomborg, Ian Plimer, and Steven Koonin.
Koonin summarises his technical findings:
‘In short, the science is insufficient to make useful projections about how the climate will change over the coming decades, much less what effect our actions will have on it.’
His advice concludes, ‘A prudent step would be to pursue adaptation strategies more vigorously … so the best strategy is to promote economic development and strong institutions in developing countries in order to improve their ability to adapt.’
How can it be that our economic leaders do not understand that giving taxpayers back their own money in the form of ‘subsidies’ decreases the productive value of that money? Why not allow them to keep it?
‘Here sir, give them this money and they will thank you for saving them. There will be an inflation number that looks good…’
That this number is a facsimile of reality rarely matters to them.
Education and counselling are two other extremely important industries that are currently under the thumb of expertocrats. They preach the loudest about an existential crisis surrounding the mental health of our young.
When a young person is unhappy, they can be described as having increased anxiety disorder or experiencing a state of depression (an example of concept creep).
If these emotionally compromised people see their peers being more successful, they claim it is an example of racism or a lack of equality (two concepts primary to critical race theory). Expertocrats working in this field have decided that ‘helping’ means limiting those who can access training and addressing the language used to explain history and social roles.
Shrier often describes how these unreal approaches to the feelings of young people have led them to learn irresponsibility through moral avoidance in decision-making. In her words:
‘In the last generation, all traces of tough love and rule-bound parenting have been supplanted by a more empathetic style… The approach to bad behaviour is always therapeutic – meaning it is non-judgemental.’
Non-judgemental in this context means failing to hold young people responsible for their part in creating problems for others.
As a young teacher from a Sydney-based university told me, ‘You mean, I am allowed to implement consequences?’
The idea that this requires permission helps explain why our classes are failing in their duty to be places of learning and are instead turning into environments that placate the emotive fickleness of the young.
Non-judgementalism in counselling helps young people perpetuate a scenario where they avoid taking responsibility for their role in the pain they are experiencing. Perhaps they did not study hard enough, and that is why they failed a test. Maybe they made poor choices in friendship groups or activities. These sorts of things. Critical Race Theory reinforces the idea that their pain is created by oppression – either from an individual or the ‘structural oppression’ of society.
The wider this ideology spreads, the more dependent people become on experts and their expertocracy.
They seek answers from experts rather than looking at themselves.
Doug Stokes explained: ‘Virtue no longer consists of what you “do or don’t do”; it consists of having the correct opinions … in short, it is a power-play wrapped in a trauma shield; obey me and do as I tell you, or you will harm the vulnerable groups and I will seek to cast you out.’
Stokes posits that a response against the expertocracy is coming.
‘How long will ordinary people put up with being denigrated, told their country is beyond redemption, and accept forms of elite restructuring of the institutions they hold dear?’
Perhaps the battle over the Misinformation and Disinformation Bill will show us if the reaction against the expertocracy is coming … or not
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/the-rise-of-the-expertocrats/
***************************************All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Sunday, September 29, 2024
French women are afraid. But the country’s politicians don’t seem to care
In a country that has become accustomed to atrocities in the last decade, the brutal murder of a 19-year-old student has outraged France. The body of the young woman, named only as Philippine, was discovered last Saturday in the Bois de Boulogne, a famous park in the west of Paris. She had gone missing on Friday afternoon, shortly after eating lunch in her university canteen.
On Tuesday evening, the authorities in Geneva, acting on information provided by French police, arrested a man as he arrived on a train from Annecy. The man in custody is a 22-year-old Moroccan who had entered France from Spain on June 13, 2019 on a tourist visa. He was 17 at the time so a child welfare authority took him under their wing. Three months later he raped a 23-year-old student.
In 2021, he was sentenced to seven years in prison but he was released into a retention centre in June this year and ordered to be deported to Morocco. The problem was he had no formal identification papers; France asked Morocco to send the relevant documentation so the deportation order could be processed. It was many weeks before Morocco responded. In the interim, a court had freed the man even though the judge acknowledged he presented a risk. He was ordered to report daily to the local gendarmerie. He didn’t. He made his way to Paris.
Philippine’s cruel misfortune was to cross paths with her killer in the Bois de Boulogne as she enjoyed the September sunshine last Friday.
My 19-year old daughter is a student in Paris. Her hall of residence is 700 metres from the Bois de Boulogne. She likes to stroll around the neighbourhood. All week my mind has been troubled by what might have been.
The right in France reacted to the news of the arrest with a mix of fury and disbelief. ‘Philippine’s life was stolen from her by a Moroccan migrant under an OQTF,’ posted Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally, on social media. ‘This migrant therefore had no place on our soil, but he was able to reoffend with complete impunity. Our justice system is lax, our state is dysfunctional, our leaders let the French live with human bombs. It is time for this government to act.’
An OQTF is a deportation order (obligation de quitter le territoire français), which are issued to foreign nationals who are not wanted in France.
A Senate report in 2023 estimated that there are 700,000 people in France subject to deportation orders, the vast majority of whom are at liberty as there are only 1,800 places in retention centres.
In an interview in 2019, French president Emmanuel Macron acknowledged that only 12 per cent of these orders were being executed but he promised this would soon change. He mentioned the figure of 100 per cent. In fact, the execution rate has fallen to seven percent; the EU average is 30 per cent.
Justice is lax in France
In October 2022, a 12-year-old Parisian girl, Lola, was raped and murdered, allegedly by an Algerian woman who was subject to a deportation order. In April this year, Lola’s 49-year-old father suffered a fatal heart attack. The family’s lawyer attributed his death to the ‘hell’ he had endured since the murder of his daughter.
In the days after Lola’s death, Macron’s government spokesman, Olivier Veran, acknowledged that ‘we obviously need to do better’ in deporting unwanted foreign nationals. But they haven’t done better. Last year in Lille, a retired nurse was raped and murdered by an Ivorian in the country illegally. The victim’s sister-in-law declared that ‘the French people are in danger and the State is not doing its job’.
There was a similar sentiment from Claire, a Parisian who was raped last year in her home by a man who should have been deported. ‘Every week, we hear stories of women assaulted by people subject to OQTFs,’ said Claire. ‘I want to speak out to warn women that we are no longer safe in France, even in a neighbourhood we think is safe.’
Claire was vilified by some on the far-left and accused of racism.
Minutes after details were released about the man arrested in connection with Philippine’s death Sandrine Rousseau, a MP in the left-wing coalition, tweeted that ‘the far right will try to take advantage of this to spread its racist and xenophobic hatred’.
The anger of many millions in France, not just the ‘far-right’, is directed as much against the state as the perpetrators. They agree with Claire that women are no longer safe. A culture of denial runs parallel with institutional inefficiency, putting women in jeopardy.
On Wednesday morning, the Socialist MP Francois Hollande denied the charge of lax justice, insisting that ‘it is severe’. Hollande was the president of the Republic between 2012 and 2017, a period when the rot set in. His justice minister, Christiane Taubira, cancelled the construction of 24,000 additional prison places and then issued a circular to judges ordering them to issue lighter sentences so as not to overcrowd prisons.
The justice minister in Michel Barnier’s new government is Didier Migaud, another Socialist. On Tuesday morning, hours before news of the arrest in Geneva, he had scoffed at suggestions that soft sentencing was endangering its citizens. ‘I believe there’s no such thing as lax justice,’ he said. ‘We need to convince those who think there is.’
Justice is lax in France. Migaud needs to be convinced of it before another family suffers the agony that Philippine’s is experiencing.
***************************************
All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Thursday, September 26, 2024
Hope for conservatism in Canada
Some readers might recall that three months ago Trudeau’s Liberal party in Canada suffered a terrible by-election blow when it lost an inner-city Toronto seat that had been held by the Liberals for aeons. To the shock of many, this past June Team Trudeau lost this blue-ribbon inner Toronto seat to Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives by 633 votes. That was bad for Justin. It was also bad for Chrystia Freeland, the Liberal party Deputy Prime Minister, as this by-election loss was for a seat that was next door to her own in the inner-city heartlands of Toronto.
(Second note to readers: the opposition Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre did not throw together lefty policies to try to cater to this inner-city seat full of wokesters. He simply explained how real conservative policies would help them; he shunned all the focus group risk-averse crap; and he ran knowing he could easily win the next general election without such seats but that if the voters in this inner-city constituency wanted to jettison Trudeau they’d be most welcome to come aboard a party with actual conservative values and policies. This approach produced a stunning upset win.)
That was three months ago in June. Then just two weeks ago there were two more by-elections in Canada. One was in Manitoba in the west of Canada where the Liberals generally do badly (to the extent that in the 1980 general election the Liberals won a majority government while taking only two seats, all up, in the four western provinces). And in this just held Manitoba by-election the Liberal candidate won – wait for it – only 4.8 per cent of the vote. Ouch! That is strikingly bad even for the Liberal party in western Canada. The other by-election from two weeks ago took place in Montreal in one of the most historically famous Liberal party constituencies in the country. At the last general election the Liberals had won the seat by over 10,000 votes. Yet in this by-election they lost the seat by 248 votes to the separatist French-Canadian party the Bloc Quebecois that only runs candidates in Quebec. The Liberals gained only 27 per cent of the vote in the by-election. This, by the way, is a riding or constituency that has been held by a former Canadian Liberal prime minister. Hence this was a very, very bad result for Justin.
And what was the Canadian Prime Minister’s response to these two brutal by-election defeats? You can’t make this up. It was a combination of two things.There was the trite, vacuous, vapid, hackneyed, platitudinous slogans that up until recently had served Justin so well – ‘there is lots to reflect on’ and ‘we need to stay focused’ type verbiage. And then there was the blame-shifting founded on a core level sanctimony and smugness. After the two by-election losses Trudeau announced that, ‘Canadians need to be more engaged.’ Got that? He seems to think that he lost because the dumb plebs and Hillary Clinton-type deplorables weren’t paying attention to all the supposedly good things he and his government were doing. (Leave aside that on nearly every front the Canadian economy is bad, the government’s ‘accomplishments’ near-on non-existent and the Trudeau carbon tax is massively unpopular.
Pierre Poilievre promises to get rid of the Trudeau carbon tax; get rid of the federal EV mandate; and get rid of the Trudeau ban on crude oil tankers off British Columbia’s north coast. The lefties are saying Poilievre will ‘lay waste to Trudeau’s environmental legislative legacy’. Oh, and don’t forget that Mr Poilievre continues to pledge to halve the budget of the national broadcaster CBC TV and to turn the broadcaster’s posh head offices into social housing units. When a leader is chosen by the paid-up party members – as in Canada, where there are now over 750,000 Conservative party members who alone can vote for leader and only they can remove him – you can observe this thing known as ‘a backbone’ in right-of-centre party leaders because the views of the party room Black Hand types do not determine policy.)
As I said at the start, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau is in deep, deep do-do. He is in his ninth year as PM. His first election win was a big majority government followed by two minority government wins. When Trudeau first won office back in 2015 he scored 63 per cent approval, a sky-high number. Today, after the left-wing economic policies, all the lockdown thuggery, the waning appeal of his vapid pretty boy routine, Trudeau’s approval rating sits at 28 per cent. A few Liberal party MPs are starting to say out loud that Justin should step down.
Polls have consistently shown Trudeau’s Liberals to be about 20 – yes, 20 – points behind Poilievre’s Conservatives. (And in my entire life I don’t recall a Tory party that far ahead in the polls. The Tories lead in every province save Quebec. A couple of recent polls have indicated the Liberals might come in fourth – yes, fourth – in the next election. There are now 343 MPs in Canada’s Lower House, the House of Commons, and some polls put in doubt whether the Liberals can win even 35 of those 343 – so just inner-city Montreal, the bureaucratic capital city of Ottawa (which is like Canberra in being allergic to conservative outlooks), and maybe a few inner-city Toronto ones.
All of this is why the further-left NDP party earlier this month tore up its minority government coalition agreement with Trudeau’s Liberal party. Canada has five-year terms and the next election could be dragged out till as late as next October. But the NDP is just watching to see when a general election might see it replace the Libs as the main party of the left. It’s balancing that against the clear likelihood of a big Tory win and postponing that for another while. But the odds of the NDP pulling the plug on Trudeau go up with every bad poll and every passing day.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/canadian-lessons-for-the-coalition/
*************************************************Get Ready for Another Mail-In Ballot Fiasco
Many states are sending out mail-in ballots now for the Nov. 5 presidential election.
Yet at the same time that so many more voters are depending on the mail to cast their ballots, the two leading national organizations of election officials wrote the U.S. Postal Service to demand immediate action to avoid confusion and chaos with mail-in ballots.
“We implore you to take immediate and tangible corrective action to address the ongoing performance issues with USPS election mail service,” wrote the National Association of State Election Directors and the National Association of Secretaries of State. “Failure to do so will risk limiting voter participation and trust in the election process.”
According to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, mail-in ballots accounted for 43% of the electorate in 2020, an increase of 20 percentage points from 2016.
The letter’s list of problems should alarm anyone thinking of voting through the mail instead of going to a polling place to vote in person. That includes U.S. Postal Service staff nationwide who “are uninformed about USPS policies around election mail,” resulting in “significantly delayed, or otherwise improperly processed” absentee ballots.
“Timely postmarked ballots” are being received “10 or more days after postmark,” the election officials wrote, demonstrating USPS’s “inability to meet their own service delivery deadlines.”
This letter follows a July report from the USPS Office of Inspector General, which warned that its audit of primaries in 13 states found that 2.99% of mail-in ballots reached voters too late and 1.83% were returned to election offices after their legal deadlines. Its list of horror stories included the discovery that “local management at one facility stated they were not aware primary Election Day was that week.”
That means that almost 5% of voters are being disenfranchised, which amounts to hundreds of thousands of votes across the country.
There are reports of other nightmares. Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab said he is “extremely concerned” that in the August primary, 2% of ballots sent by mail were not counted “due to USPS administrative failures.”
“The Pony Express is more efficient at this point,” said Schwab.
In July, Utah had a photo-finish Republican congressional primary where the victory margin was 176 votes. But nearly 1,200 mail-in ballots were not counted because they were first sent to a Las Vegas distribution center and not postmarked on time. Most of those ballots were in a county that was carried 2 to 1 by the candidate who ultimately lost.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation has sued Nevada officials for failure to fix obvious errors on the voter rolls. The organization has found hundreds of questionable voter addresses that include strip clubs, casinos, bars, vacant lots, gas stations, and fast-food restaurants.
“Nevada’s policy of automatically mailing a ballot to every active registered voter makes it essential that election officials have accurate voter rolls and are not mailing ballots to addresses where no one lives,” the legal foundation notes.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation also points out that in 2022, Nevada’s U.S. Senate race was decided by 7,928 votes, which determined party control of that body. Nevada’s secretary of state, PILF noted, “published figures showing that 95,556 ballots were sent to undeliverable or ‘bad’ addresses and another 8,036 were rejected upon receipt.” Also: “Another 1.2 million ballots never came back to officials for counting.”
This year, Nevada has another competitive Senate race that could determine the Senate majority.
Nationwide, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission reports that of the almost 91 million mailed ballots sent to voters in all states in 2020, only 70 million were returned.
What happened to the others? Some weren’t filled out. But other completed ballots were probably lost by an increasingly inefficient Postal Service.
And election officials complained in their letter to the USPS that election mail being “sent to voters” is being returned as “undeliverable” at a “higher than usual rate.” Some voters registered more than once got more than one ballot.
At least 1.1 million ballots went to outdated addresses. Some may have gone to vacant lots and businesses. Some 500,000 were rejected by election officials when they were returned, often due to voter errors that could have been corrected by election officials if the voters had cast their ballots in person.
Registration lists are notoriously chock-full of ineligible, duplicate, fictional, and deceased voters, a fact easily exploited to commit fraud. Ballots cast by mail can become the object of intimidation and vote-buying schemes.
In 2005, a bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker pointed out that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.”
The New York Times admitted in 2012 that “votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth.”
Little has changed. In 2019, a congressional race in North Carolina was thrown out over mail-in ballots gathered through illegal vote trafficking. A judge ordered a new election in the Bridgeport, Connecticut, mayor’s race last year after a video appeared to show two women stuffing large numbers of suspect absentee ballots into drop boxes.
In New York, three Rensselaer County officials are on trial this month, accused of mail-in ballot fraud. A former GOP elections commissioner who has already pleaded guilty testified that looser post-COVID mail-in procedures make it much easier to commit voter fraud.
Before Election Day, Postal Service officials must address concerns about delays and mishandling of absentee ballots. Sloppy U.S. voting rules on everything from vote trafficking by third parties to lax or nonexistent ID laws in many states make it vital there be election observers watching every aspect of the voting and tabulation process.
And after the weeks of litigation and delays in counting that a tsunami of mail-in ballots will no doubt create, we should rethink the advice of those who disparage in-person voting and assure us “that the ballots are in the mail.”
After all, if you won the lottery, would you mail your ticket in or appear in person to claim your jackpot?
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/09/25/get-ready-another-mail-in-ballot-fiasco/
***************************************All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
***********************************************
Wednesday, September 25, 2024
In Speech on Economy, Trump Calls for ‘New American Industrialism’
“To the autoworkers in Michigan, Georgia, and all other parts of our country, I am pinpointing you for greatness,” former President Donald Trump said in a campaign speech on Tuesday.
In a rally held in Savannah, Georgia, Trump laid out his economic vision for the United States if he is reelected in November. His message focused on reviving domestic manufacturing.
Georgia is a key swing state that’s being courted heavily by both Trump and his Democratic opponent for the presidency, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump called his economic policies “new American industrialism,” where the focus will be on bringing offshored manufacturing jobs back to the United States. The 45th president said that, for years, other countries have stripped American jobs and wealth, but added he would “put America first.”
He said that under his leadership “American workers will no longer be worried about losing [their] jobs to foreign nations. Instead, foreign nations will be worried about losing their jobs to America.”
While many vital industries have moved to other counties in recent years, Trump said, he has a plan to bring them back and restore American prosperity.
“This New American Industrialism will create millions of jobs, massively raise wages for American workers, and make the United States into a manufacturing powerhouse,” he said. “We will be able to build ships again. We will be able to build airplanes again. We will become the world leader in robotics. The U.S. auto industry will once again be the envy of the planet.”
To make that happen, the former president said he would incentivize American companies to hire American workers while reducing burdens to economic growth:
I will give you the lowest taxes, the lowest energy costs, the lowest regulatory burden, and free access to the best and biggest market on the planet—but only if you make your product here in America and hire American workers for the job.
If you don’t make your product here, then you will have to pay a very substantial tariff when you send your product into the United States.
Trump proposed lowering the corporate tax rate to 15% for companies that make their products in the U.S. Harris has proposed raising the corporate tax rate to 28%. The rate currently is 21%.
The former president said that his policies—which focus on rebuilding American industry and creating energy independence—would strengthen the American economy, but that Harris’ policies were too “radical” and would damage the country. He said that while Harris was fine with jobs going overseas, she would place heavy taxes on American companies.
“Kamala the tax queen is demanding a 33% tax hike on all domestic production,” Trump said. This will make companies flee elsewhere, he said.
Worse, Trump said that Harris’ proposal to tax unrealized capital gains would be catastrophic and would send the country into a depression.
“This woman is grossly incompetent,” he said.
He said that the Biden-Harris administration has imported millions of illegal aliens who are lowering wages and taking American jobs.
“So, as we create millions of new manufacturing jobs here in Georgia and nationwide, we will make sure these jobs go to American citizens, not illegal aliens,” Trump said.
Heritage Foundation economic policy expert E.J. Antoni wrote in June that while unemployment has been falling in recent years, most of the job growth has been among foreign-born workers.
“Over the last year, employment rose 637,000 for foreign-born workers, but fell 299,000 for native-born Americans,” Antoni wrote. “There are fewer native-born Americans employed today than before the [COVID-19] pandemic; meaning, American workers have made no progress in over four years. In fact, they’ve fallen behind.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/09/24/trump-calls-new-american-industrialism-speech-economy/
***************************************************************UK: Are the Tories brave enough to be conservative?
The Conservative party is out of power – and that’s not easy if you’ve been in power for more than a decade. Even after a short spell in government there are certain aspects of life that you miss. The drivers and others who used to manage your life and get you around. The legions of advisers. The security detail (if you held one of the high offices of state). And the civil servants who do your bidding.
That last one is a joke, of course. I know most readers will, like me, have found it difficult to listen to Conservative ministers complaining about civil servants during their 14 years in power. There might well have been cause to moan that civil servants were all a bunch of lazy lefties for the first couple of years. But after four election victories – or three and a half depending on how you count them – complaints that the bureaucrats are thwarting your wishes come to seem like an excuse. Surely 14 years is time enough to hire new bureaucrats?
Whoever wins the leadership race will discover they have two things they can wield: words and ideas
Then you get a reminder that riding the bureaucracy put in by a previous Labour administration did have consequences. In July, an anonymous civil servant wrote a piece in the Guardian in which they said that the general mood in the civil service after Keir Starmer’s election victory was ‘a profound sense of relief’. The then incoming Chief Secretary to the Treasury had ‘purred’ that ‘the adults are back in the room’. Another long-serving official said: ‘I’ve never been so glad to see the back of a government – of any colour.’ So it is fair to say the Tories certainly had their challenges in trying to steer that ship, not only against the tides but against the will of much of the crew.
Today the Conservatives don’t even have that power. They have nothing to hand. But, as I was reminded recently when reading a couple of books about Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley, that does not mean they are completely without arms. Whoever wins the Conservative leadership race will discover that they have two things they can wield: words and ideas. And these two things are not nothing.
When Reagan was out of power in the 1970s, these were all he had, but gosh did he wield them well. Spurred on by his friendship with Buckley and other conservative thinkers, he realised that he had the opportunity to lay out a different vision from that of his Democrat opponents. That vision was not just about nipping around the edges of Democrat policies, but about laying out a separate idea of what America was and what it could be.
Reagan’s vision was one that most conservatives have been able to rattle off for the past five decades: a smaller state, fiscal responsibility, strong defence. Today’s conservatives sometimes do a copy of this. Or a copy of a copy. They talk about free markets, but it’s not always clear that they know what to do to let them flourish. I know it’s not good form to kick someone when they’re down, but it didn’t reassure me when, after leaving office, Liz Truss gave a video interview to this magazine in which she said that conservatives must make the case for free-market economics and, in listing the intellectual foundations for this, referred to the thinker ‘Hay-ak’. Perhaps it was a slip of the tongue, but one got the impression that this was not a name that she had heard said out loud before.
Now, whoever becomes Conservative leader has a choice. They could shadow the Labour government, making comments about wardrobe allowances here, complaining about a national insurance hike there, or they could lay out a different future for the country. One in which, for instance, the state is not the answer to everything, but very often the problem. A country which doesn’t think that the only thing needed to improve public services is more investment. One in which if you do well, half of everything you earn doesn’t go to the government. They could also address the social divisions in Britain that everyone can see but that politicians find almost impossible to address.
The other week one of the Conservative leadership frontrunners, Kemi Badenoch, made reference to the highly sectarian group of MPs to the left of Labour who seem to want to introduce communitarian politics to the UK, specifically by raising issues which they believe will get them ‘the Muslim vote’ (to use the name that one Muslim campaigning group actually calls itself).
What Badenoch said was entirely fair. But one of her supporters was cast in the unenviable position of being her surrogate on talk shows that week and he was asked about her comments. It was an opportunity to give a robust push-back to the expectations of this country’s boring gotcha television interviewers, but you could hear the poor man flailing. Perhaps because he had the disadvantage of being male and white, this was terrain he was especially unhappy on. You could actually hear the man’s mouth dry up as the interview went on.
And yet the Conservative party cannot have truths about the nature of our country policed by the Beth Rigbys of the world, wherever they think the Overton Window of politics should be. If the Conservatives are going to stand any chance of getting back into government they will have to be able to say things that are true – even if they are unpopular with journalists at Sky News.
To do that they will need not just a small degree of bravery but a considerable amount of intellectual and moral grounding. Fortunately they have it, here and elsewhere. I am reminded of what Buckley said at the fifth anniversary dinner for his magazine, National Review: ‘We are probably destined to live out our lives in something less than a totally harmonious relationship with our times.’ Nevertheless, he added that conservatives could take comfort in knowing ‘that for so long as it is mechanically possible, you have a journal, a continuing witness to those truths which animated the birth of our country, and continue to animate our lives’.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/are-the-tories-brave-enough-to-be-conservative/
***************************************All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
***********************************************
Tuesday, September 24, 2024
Say what you want, Bibi and Trump have been vindicated on Mid-East policy
The tragic conflict unfolding in southern Lebanon holds the strangest geostrategic lesson: that the two most reviled democratic leaders in politics today, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, actually understand the Middle East better than most foreign policy professionals. This includes, sad to say, the fatuous posturings of our own government.
Israel’s broad strategic aim against Hezbollah in Lebanon is to remove the constant threat to northern Israeli communities. Rocket attacks are one thing, but after October 7 these communities can’t tolerate the danger of cross-border terror incursions
More than 60,000 Israeli residents have been internally displaced now for nearly a year. This moves Israel’s effective border kilometres inside its nominal border. The October 7 terrorist atrocities have had a similar effect on Israeli communities near Gaza.
Israel is one of the smallest countries in the world, smaller than the equivalent of one-third of Tasmania. On every land border it faces enemies or recent enemies. It has been subject to repeated conventional military attack by massed armies, and every possible form of terrorism.
Hezbollah is a Shi’ite terrorist organisation, unlike Hamas, which is Sunni. Both are funded by Iran’s Shi’ite regime. All three are united by a profound anti-Semitism, by an explicit determination to exterminate Israel and by a religious commitment to an Islamist political order.
Tensions between Israel and Hezbollah have escalated, with Israel launching its most intense bombardment in southern Lebanon following Hezbollah's rocket attacks. President Isaac Herzog denied claims that Israel targeted Hezbollah's communication…
Israel’s strike through exploding message pagers against Hezbollah terrorists was the most precisely targeted military action in modern warfare. Everyone with a pager was a Hezbollah operative. Hezbollah, like Hamas, is proscribed as a terrorist organisation under Australian law.
Yet the Albanese government criticised Israel’s actions. Hezbollah has fired thousands of rockets into Israel since October 7 and has long planned October 7-style murderous raids. The Albanese government claims Israel has a right to defend itself but condemns every single act of self-defence Israel takes or could possibly take.
This exemplifies the undergraduate hollowness of everything the government says on this issue. The Albanese government is neither good enough to be good, nor bad enough to be really bad. It lacks the courage of its convictions, it also lacks the courage of its lack of convictions. Abstaining on a plainly offensive UN resolution, which contradicts Australian policy in many ways, rather than just opposing it, illustrates the wretched, dismaying, morally bankrupt nature of Canberra’s approach.
There is no reason for any hostility between Israel and Lebanon. Both are wondrous cradles of civilisation. Australia is the beneficiary of magnificent Lebanese migration over many years. If Hezbollah didn’t constantly attack Israel, there would be no military conflict between them. Hezbollah’s hatred of Israel is ideological, religious, ethnic and tribal. It has caused immense suffering to the Lebanese people.
Yet while Israel is right to reclaim security for its northern towns and villages, the most it can hope for out of these actions is temporary tactical accommodation. Ordinary Lebanese hate the drama and misery that Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel inevitably bring to Lebanon when Israel retaliates.
Israel’s calculation is not only to degrade Hezbollah’s military capabilities but cause enough reaction within Lebanon itself that, for a time at least, Hezbollah returns to an uneasy truce. Israel will want Hezbollah personnel to stay some kilometres away from its border. Israeli towns can live with the danger of rocket attacks. The Israeli Iron Dome intercepts most of them and Israeli civilians are well drilled about air raid shelters.
But they can’t live with the spectre of October 7-style atrocities at a moment’s notice.
So how does this relate to my initial contention that Trump and Netanyahu were historically right and conventional wisdom historically wrong?
Netanyahu once told me in an interview, as he explained to others countless times, that his long-term aim for peace with the Palestinians was “outside in”. That is, that Israel would make peace with its neighbours first. This would lead to a long period of normalisation and eventually, in such an atmosphere, peace with the Palestinians would be possible.
This contradicted every theological dogma of conventional international relations, slavishly held by all Democrat politicians and officials in Washington, and which was of course the wholly derivate Labor Party view here, that the Palestinian issue had to be settled before there could be any broader peace.
Trump, through the Abraham Accords – peace treaties Israel signed with several of its Arab and North African neighbours – gave life to Netanyahu’s dream.
Here’s a key historical point. All up, including the initial partition of the land in 1947, Israel has offered Palestinians their own state four times on the most generous terms imaginable. Don’t take my word for it. Read the memoirs of Bill Clinton and his senior officials.
On each occasion the Palestinian leadership has rejected peace, either because of a hatred of Israel or a rational fear that whichever Palestinian leader makes peace will be assassinated. Until 10 minutes ago, the vast majority of Israeli society supported a two-state solution with an independent Palestinian state. But such an outcome involves enormous risk for Israel, with its tiny territory, and must include binding, credible security guarantees that the Palestinian state won’t be the launching ground for attacks on Israel.
Yet we know that Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and a number of other key actors are dedicated, in their core ideology, to destroying Israel. This history, and this reality, have turned Israelis against any near-term two-state solution.
Therefore, the best hope is to try to “normalise” life as much as possible, including Palestinian life, and revisit sovereignty negotiations down the track. I once had a long discussion with one of Israel’s most hardline politicians who had come to support Palestinian self-government under Israeli control as the best chance of achieving normalisation.
If you got 10 years of normalisation, I asked, would you then support Palestinian sovereignty? Show me the normalisation first, he replied. But with normalisation and a reasonable expectation of peace, Israelis would return to supporting a two-state solution. Before the October 7 attacks Netanyahu allowed billions of dollars of Arab aid into Gaza and also allowed thousands of Gazans to work in Israel for decent wages.
Hamas rendered all that impossible by its barbaric attacks. Tony Blair didn’t resolve the conflicting national and sovereign ambitions in Northern Ireland with the Good Friday peace agreement. He produced instead an arrangement of normalisation, in which sectarian violence became deeply abnormal, as it always should have been.
In retrospect the worst Israeli intelligence failure was not to see that the prospect of an Israel-Saudi Arabia peace deal would lead Iran and its proxies, whether Hamas or Hezbollah, to take extreme action to derail it. The October 7 attack succeeded in that derailment.
It’s impossible to say anything more unfashionable than the next sentence, which is nonetheless true: when the dust settles, it will be the Netanyahu/Trump approach that offers the best chance of peace. But that’s a long way off now.
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Biden’s diplomatic magical thinking
As tensions escalate and bombs fall across the Middle East, President Biden’s emissaries continue to urge all parties to calm down and dial back the violence.
No one is listening, and this brings us to the central paradox of a troubled presidency stumbling toward an inglorious close. Mr Biden may love diplomacy, but diplomacy doesn’t love him back.
No administration in American history has been as committed to Middle East diplomacy as this one. Yet have an administration’s diplomats ever had less success?
Mr Biden tried and failed to get Iran back into a nuclear agreement with the U.S. He tried and failed to get a new Israeli-Palestinian dialogue on track. He tried and failed to stop the civil war in Sudan. He tried and failed to get Saudi Arabia to open formal diplomatic relations with Israel. He tried to settle the war in Yemen through diplomacy, and when that failed and the Houthis began attacking shipping in the Red Sea, the ever-undaunted president sought a diplomatic solution to that problem too. He failed again.
For nearly a year Team Biden has given its all to the diplomatic effort to broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Repeatedly, administration officials have hailed progress toward an agreement that would pause the fighting and send the Israeli hostages home. But senior officials are conceding privately that the chances of a ceasefire deal during Mr. Biden’s remaining months in office are slim.
For the past few weeks Washington has been frantically trying to prevent the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah from escalating dramatically. Like Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Hamas and the Houthis, neither Israel nor Hezbollah thinks Washington is dispensing sound policy advice.
The Biden administration wants something it can’t have in the Middle East: continued influence with diminished presence.
Its diplomacy is aimed at preserving a regional order that depends on the kind of American power projection the president desperately wants to avoid.
The metastasising conflicts across the Middle East that Mr. Biden hates are the natural and inevitable consequence of his own policies.
As America withdraws, or attempts to withdraw, from the region, its influence over the relevant parties diminishes. The less reliable America looks, the less value anyone attaches to promises of American support. The more obviously America looks toward the exits, the less anyone fears American power.
As Iran’s fear of American power fades, it becomes more aggressive. As Gulf Arabs’ confidence in American wisdom and commitment shrinks, they hesitate between their desire to oppose Iran and the need to conciliate the rising power of a dangerous neighbour. This in turn drives Israel to ever tougher and more dramatic responses as it scrambles to convince both Iran and the Arab countries that it can deter Iranian aggression even as America walks away.
Mr Biden has fundamentally misjudged what diplomacy is and what it can and can’t do.
As a man who came of age politically during the Vietnam War and was politically and personally scarred by his support for the Iraq war, the president knows in his bones that military power projection unrelated to an achievable political goal often leads to expensive disasters.
He isn’t wrong about this, but like many in the Democratic policy world, Mr. Biden rejected a misguided overconfidence in military force only to attribute similar magic powers to diplomacy. Diplomacy in quest of an unachievable political goal is as misguided as poorly conceived military adventurism and can ultimately be as costly.
In the 1930s, the U.S. thought Japan’s attempt to conquer China was both immoral and bad for American interests, but a mix of naive pacifism and blind isolationism blocked any serious response. Instead, Washington settled on a diplomatic stance of nonresistance to Japanese aggression mixed with nonrecognition of Japanese conquests and claims. The policy failed to help China.
What it accomplished was to persuade a critical mass of Japanese leaders that America was irredeemably decadent. They gradually came to believe that a nation so foolishly led would respond to the destruction of its Pacific fleet with diplomats rather than aircraft carriers.
Mr Biden’s diplomats must struggle against the near-universal global perception that the administration’s Middle East policy is similarly blind. Allies as well as adversaries increasingly disregard American wishes and discount its warnings.
That isn’t good for American interests, and it won’t bring peace to the region. As events slide out of control, Mr. Biden’s diplomats can do little more than wring their hands and wish for better times. The failure isn’t their fault. Like soldiers sent into a war their leaders don’t know how to win, America’s diplomats were tasked with an impossible mission their leader never thought through.
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All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Monday, September 23, 2024
Biden Claimed For Months That Gaza Ceasefire Was In Sight — Now His Own Officials Reportedly Think It’s A Pipe Dream
Even after multiple assurances from President Joe Biden over recent weeks and months that an Israel-Hamas ceasefire could be right around the corner, U.S. officials are reportedly privately starting to concede that he won’t be able to help secure a deal before his term ends.
Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7 sparked a broader regional war and sent an already chaotic Middle East further into turmoil, prompting the Biden-Harris administration to try to pursue diplomatic solutions to end the conflict and reduce tensions between Arab states. Biden has routinely touted his efforts to secure a ceasefire agreement and hinted on several occasions that a deal was close at hand, but these efforts have largely been fruitless — and now U.S. officials are beginning to believe that it may be impossible to secure anything before Biden leaves office, given the roadblocks that remain between Israel and Hamas, according to sources with direct knowledge of the matter who spoke to The Wall Street Journal. (RELATED: Israel Keeps Foot On Pedal, Reportedly Goes After Terrorist Wanted By US For Bombing Marine Barracks In 1983)
“No deal is imminent,” one of the U.S. officials told the WSJ. “I’m not sure it ever gets done.”
The private concerns that a deal is out of reach aren’t fully reflected in public statements recently made by Biden officials, who have maintained that an agreement is still on the table while expressing frustration with Hamas’ obstinance in negotiations. A senior administration official told reporters in early September that “90 percent” of the deal had been agreed to between Israel and Hamas, which White House spokesman John Kirby reaffirmed during a press briefing on Wednesday.
But former State Department official Gabriel Noronha told the Daily Caller News Foundation that it’s often the remaining, narrower aspects of such a deal that are the hardest to resolve.
“Generally, you take care of the easier-to-agree items first, and the last items are the ones that are the hardest,” Noronha told the DCNF, pointing to disputes over whether Israel should keep some troops in Gaza as one of the sticking points of a deal. “Those are the tough items.”
In recent weeks and months, Biden has seemed more positive about reaching a ceasefire agreement. Biden told reporters at the end of August that he was “optimistic” a deal could soon be reached because most of the terms had been agreed to and that talks were continuing between Arab partners.
Biden said weeks earlier that he “may have something” on a deal but didn’t want to “jinx it,” claiming that his team was “closer than we’ve ever been” to securing an agreement.
“It’s much, much closer than it was three days ago. So, keep your fingers crossed,” Biden told reporters on Aug. 16.
Biden had been adamant for months that a ceasefire was needed urgently, putting forward his own proposal for a deal in May, which has yet to be accepted, and before that warning that a deal had to be reached by March, which never happened. Even as early as February, Biden was predicting that a ceasefire could be reached within days.
“Well, I hope by the beginning of the weekend — I mean the end of the weekend [that a deal will be reached],” Biden told reporters in February.
In the last couple of months, U.S. officials have become increasingly pessimistic that a deal could be reached, largely due to Hamas, which has been stubborn in negotiations and set unrealistic terms for an agreement. Hamas has frequently set new demands for proposals — and after the U.S. and Israel agree to the terms, the terrorist group still rejects offers, according to the WSJ.
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan met with the families of the remaining American hostages in Gaza on Wednesday, relaying the current status of negotiations and reaffirming that Biden won’t stop until their relatives are brought home, according to Hostage Aid Worldwide. But the families “expressed frustration with the lack of tangible progress and stressed that everyone needs to play a larger role in reaching an agreement.”
Adding to the complications are Israel’s tensions with Iran, and its terror proxy group, Hezbollah in Lebanon. Both Hezbollah and Iran have engaged in either direct or indirect skirmishes with Israel since the war broke out last October. Israel is suspected of carrying out a highly-targeted, remote attacks against Hezbollah in recent days, prompting warnings of retaliation from the terrorist group, which is already engaged in cross-fire skirmishes with Israel over the Israeli-Lebanese border.
“There’s no chance now of [a deal] happening,” an Arab official told the WSJ following the attacks in Lebanon this week. “Everyone is in a wait-and-see mode until after the election. The outcome will determine what can happen in the next administration.”
With the convoluted rift between Israel and Hamas over a deal and the compounding factors emanating from Hezbollah and Iran, the Biden-Harris administration has too little control over negotiations at this stage in the game, and it’s unlikely that any deal will be reached between now and the end of Biden’s term, Noronha told the DCNF.
“They’re probably not going to get one before the election, or before January either. But that’s not on them, per se. It speaks to the difficulty of how far apart [Israel and Hamas] are,” Noronha said.
Still, securing a ceasefire agreement in Gaza would represent a notable success for Biden’s foreign policy approach and potentially unlock the possibility of broader regional peace. A deal could pave the way for talks to open up between Israel and Saudi Arabia over establishing formal diplomatic ties, although Saudi Arabia has said such relations aren’t possible until Israel agrees to a two-state solution with the Palestinians.
For the time being, the U.S. is continuing to help broker negotiations between Israel, Egypt, Qatar and Hamas negotiators, with a specific focus on how to overcome the hurdles currently barring a deal from being reached — if it is even possible at this juncture.
“We have run into some resistance,” Kirby told reporters Wednesday. “And we’re just not … any closer today than we were a few days ago.”
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‘Real Ground To Make Up’: ABC Political Director Warns ‘Kamala Harris Has Issues’ With Hispanic Voters
Vice President Kamala Harris is struggling compared to past Democratic candidates among Hispanic voters, which could cost her key states in November, ABC News Political Director Rick Klein said Sunday.
Harris led former President Donald Trump by 17% among likely Hispanic voters in an ABC News poll released September 15. Klein said that the vice president’s margin meant Trump could win Arizona and Nevada.
“Right now, our latest polling shows a solid lead among Latino voters for Kamala Harris, 17 points in our latest ABC-Ipsos poll from just a couple of days ago, but that isn’t nearly the edge she has among black voters or Asian voters and it isn’t nearly the edge that previous Democratic candidates for president have had — 30-plus point advantage for Joe Biden in the exit polls among Latino voters from four years ago,” Klein told “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos.
“Hillary Clinton won Latino voters by 40 points and, of course, she still lost the presidency, so there’s some real ground to make up across demographics, but particularly with Latino voters. Kamala Harris has issues that she’s got to attend to,” Klein added.
Trump picked up substantial support among Hispanic voters in polling before President Joe Biden announced he would not seek reelection July 21, due in part to issues like immigration and the economy. Harris has regained some support from Hispanic voters since replacing Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.
The U.S. Border Patrol encountered nearly 7.4 million illegal immigrants since the start of fiscal year 2021, according to figures released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Trump trails Harris by 2.2% in the RealClearPolling average of polls from September 3 to 18, with the vice president’s lead increasing to an average of 2.6% when Green Party candidate Dr. Jill Stein, independent candidate Cornel West and Libertarian candidate Chase Oliver are included in surveys.
https://dailycaller.com/2024/09/22/abc-kamala-harris-issues-hispanic-voters/
****************************************************‘That’s Enormous’: Steve Kornacki Describes Massive ‘Gender Gap’ Between Trump, Harris In New Poll
NBC National Political Reporter Steve Kornacki said during a “Meet the Press” appearance that Vice President Kamala Harris is benefiting from a significant “gender gap” among voters in a new poll.
Harris leads former President Donald Trump, 49% to 44% in a new NBC poll released Sunday, with her lead expanding to six points when third-party candidates are included. Kornacki noted that the lead was powered by Harris leading Trump among women, which “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker said “completely reshaped” the campaign after Biden announced he would not seek reelection July 21
“One of the things powering that lead, we should note, too there is a pretty pronounced gender gap. Harris, among women, is leading in our poll by 21 polls,” Kornacki told Welker. “Among men, Trump is leading by 12. That is a 33-point gender gap. That’s enormous what we’re seeing right here.”
“Take a look at this, too, the debate, of course, happening in the last couple of weeks,” Kornacki continued, referencing the Sept. 10 debate hosted by ABC News hosts David Muir and Linsey Davis. “Nearly 30% said that debate made them more likely to support Harris, much smaller number for Trump, that might be helping her as well here, and then there’s this: the view, the overall perception of Kamala Harris. Remember, before she got in the race there was a lot of talk that her numbers didn’t look better than Biden’s. She was 32 positive, 50 negative before getting in this race and now this is what you see.”
Harris currently leads Trump by 1.9% in the RealClearPolling average of polls from September 3 to 18, with her lead increasing to 2.1% when Green Party candidate Dr. Jill Stein, independent candidate Cornel West and Libertarian candidate Chase Oliver are included in surveys. The averages did not include the NBC poll as of Sunday morning. (RELATED: MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki Claims Harris Provides ‘More Paths For Democrats’ To Win)
“We have to pause here, because this is the largest increase that we’ve seen for any politician since George W. Bush in the wake of the September 11th attacks on this issue,” Welker gushed after Kornacki showed a graphic showing 48% of respondents to the NBC poll viewed Harris favorably compared to 45% who viewed her unfavorably.
The NBC poll of 1,000 registered voters was conducted Sept. 13-17, with a 3.1% margin of error.
https://dailycaller.com/2024/09/22/steve-kornacki-gender-gap-voters-trump-harris-poll/
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All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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