Posts on the midterms

 Abdul El-Sayed's Election Eve Nightmare Just Got Even Worse – RedState

Another Michigan Democrat supports Mike Rogers! Former Democratic congresswoman Hanson Clark publicly supported Haley's decision, expressing her support for Mike Rogers and stating she would vote for him. Democratic support for Mike Rogers reached a record amount. 

Barack Obama’s DOJ Found Evidence of Ilhan Omar’s Sham Marriage and Buried It for a Decade - Renewed Right

"Let that be the lesson: commit immigration fraud early enough, and the Obama Justice Department will give you a pass. But the statute of limitations problem may not protect Omar after all."

El-Sayed’s Answer on Men in Girls’ Locker Rooms Is the Worst Thing Any Sane Parent Could Imagine – RedState . . . "When asked about conflicts over transgender kids on sports teams, El-Sayed argued that such concerns are largely manufactured.

"They aren't. They're very real. There are countless examples of biological males either hurting females in sports or exposing themselves to young women and girls in locker rooms. To be clear, there are three stages the Left uses when trying to downplay horrific things — 1) It's not a real thing, 2) It happens, but it is extremely rare, and 3) It's real, but here's why it's actually a good thing." . . . 

Uncle Paul's Parodies

Victor Davis Hanson: The Final Countdown to the Midterms

"There’s no doubt that Donald Trump will be impeached, and there’s no doubt that everybody around him will be subpoenaed. There will be investigations. He will not be able to get an appointee confirmed by a partisan Senate should he lose it. But if we look at the Clinton-Obama precedents, it didn’t bother them a bit." 

 Lifelong Democrat voting Republican as Abdul El-Sayed fear keeps him ‘up at night’  "Those are the words of lifelong Democrat Mark Whitefield who is deeply concerned about the prospect of Abdul El-Sayed winning Michigan's upcoming Senate race.

"He outlined one of the major hurdles facing El-Sayed in his quest to beat Republican Mike Rogers on Nov. 3: a growing fear among the state's Jewish community over his past comments.

• Nightmare for Abdul El-Sayed as Democratic rival's fiancé backs Republican
• Democrat chasm widens as progressive El-Sayed wins in vital swing state primary

"Whitefield is the former president of Temple Israel synagogue in Michigan's Oakland County, which was targeted by terrorist Ayman Mohamed Ghazali in March." . . .

What They Never Tell You About the Days After Gettysburg

Root History

"On the morning of July 4th, 1863, Robert E. Lee's army was retreating from Gettysburg — and the town of 2,400 people woke up to approximately 50,000 casualties scattered across three square miles of Pennsylvania farmland. Nine wounded men for every single resident. This video isn't about the battle itself. It's about what happened after the guns fell silent, and what it actually took to survive the aftermath.

"We cover the overwhelmed medical system that still couldn't keep pace with the volume of wounded despite Jonathan Letterman's newly reformed ambulance corps, the civilians who turned their homes, churches, and barns into makeshift hospitals, the nearly 4,000 dead horses that created a public health crisis of their own, and the months-long burial crisis that left hundreds of Confederate soldiers in unmarked graves for over a decade. It traces the creation of the Soldiers' National Cemetery, the reburial effort that began that October, and how all of it led directly to the 272 words Abraham Lincoln delivered on November 19th, 1863 — words written specifically to answer what that much loss demanded to be answered. "This is the human cost behind the casualty numbers, and what a country does when it isn't prepared for the scale of what it just survived."

Watch Dem Get Angry as Host Calmly Corrects His Lie, It Didn’t End Well for Him

The Rubin Report

Dave Rubin of “The Rubin Report” shares a DM clip of “Raging Moderate’s” Scott Galloway grilling Abdul El-Sayed with facts that destroy his narrative about Israel committing a genocide in Gaza.

UPDATE: Former El-Sayed staffer among group indicted for antisemitic threats and vandalism

"One of Abdul El-Sayed’s former campaign staffers was among the group of anti-Israel activists who were indicted for terrorizing members of Michigan’s Jewish community and University of Michigan officials.

"Mariam Odeh, 24, was indicted in June for vandalizing the homes of University of Michigan administrators in an attempt to coerce them into cutting ties with Israel, the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Michigan. Odeh and the seven other activists she was indicted alongside have all pleaded not guilty.

"Odeh, from Dearborn, Mich., was paid almost $750 as an hourly employee for the El-Sayed campaign, the Detroit News first reported, citing internal campaign documents.

“Upon discovering an error in reviewing our HR files, we’d like to correct information on her [Odeh’s] employment for transparency. She was hired in February as an hourly employee and left the campaign on April 15. The campaign issued one missed hourly back payment in May that will appear on our next FEC filing,” El-Sayed’s spokeswoman Roxie Richner told the Detroit News back in June.

"Odeh allegedly participated in vandalism and protests that included putting fake corpses on the lawns of faculty members, as well as spray painting anti-Israeli sentiments on the driveway of the president of the university at the time, according to prosecutors.

"Federal officials announced Friday the addition of four more alleged co-conspirators to the indictment." . . .

Charlie Kirk and First Amendment abuse

 What percentage of these loathsome people with microphones and bullhorns are women and why? Why do we hear a chorus of young female voices cheering every evil act?  TD

Susan Quinn - American Thinker

"Why should these comments be acceptable under the protection of the First Amendment? The fact that none of his descriptions of Kirk were true can’t be countered."

"We’ve seen and heard plenty of obnoxious, hateful comments over the last few years, usually directed at the Right by the Left. But the latest revelation of a smear against Charlie Kirk, former CEO of Turning Point USA, by a spoiled and ignorant college student, enraged me on multiple levels.

"The revelation came out over one year after the original rant. The young woman was Isabela Casahuga Lemgruger, 19, a student at the University of Texas, San Antonio (UTSA). Everything about her “poem” that she recited was obscene.

"There have been other people, including teachers, who have shown their hatred of Charlie Kirk through their reprehensible social media comments. But Lemgruger stood out as particularly egregious. (After the brief introduction in the video, her comments are only a couple of minutes in length.)

"Why does this incident in particular rank so high on the evil scale? First, the young woman is an immigrant from a very wealthy family that has lived in nine different countries; her lack of appreciation for this country and its laws was tragic. Second, her sneering veneer was sickening, considering that she was celebrating the death of a principled, Christian husband and father of two children. Third, she was gleeful about her opportunity to denigrate an honorable man who had just been killed. And finally, her advocating her effort to demonstrate the First Amendment was a travesty. 

"As if her display of arrogance were not abysmal enough, the political commentator to whom she spoke, Christian Collins, demonstrated his ineptness in countering her attack. His short rejoinder was to say that he would pray for her." . . . More.

SMUG/ ARROGANT/ PRIVILEGED: Synonyms  Words appearing most in articles about Isabela Casahuga Lemgruger

There Is Nothing Progressive About Progressives

 Daniel Winston - American Thinker

"To call yourself progressive is to claim the future as your permanent address and to assign everyone who disagrees with you a seat somewhere in the moral lowlands. It is an annexation of time itself, performed before the argument begins. But a claim that large invites an obvious test.

"Take the movement’s central commitments one at a time and ask of each whether it carries us further from the arrangements that humanity spent centuries and oceans of blood escaping, or back toward them. Run that test honestly, and the results are close to uniform. Nearly everything the contemporary left says is regressive in its essence. Not merely mistaken, not merely excessive. Regressive.

"Sir Henry Maine wrote in 1861 that the movement of progressive societies had been a movement from status to contract, from a world in which your position was fixed at birth by blood and caste to a world in which you were judged by what you did. That sentence contains much of what the modern world achieved through actual progress.

"Now consider a hiring regime that sorts applicants by ancestry, a university that admits by lineage-adjusted formula, a conference that assigns speaking authority by pigmentation. That is not the frontier of human freedom but a caste system with a diversity officer, installed by people who loudly imagine themselves the heirs of the abolitionists.

"Consider what has happened to speech. Every free society had to fight its way out from under blasphemy law. Progressives have rebuilt the ancient apparatus and renamed the parts.

"There is a body of doctrine that may not be questioned. There is a category of statement punished not because it is false but because it is profane to the nouveau religion. There is excommunication, which we now call cancellation. There is a Holy Office, and it now calls itself a misinformation desk. There is the public confession, in which the accused stands before the assembly and recites his failings in the approved vocabulary, hoping to be readmitted. Mao’s cadres called that a struggle session. Nobody calls it progress except the people running it." . . . More.

Daniel Winston is a marriage and family therapist who studied for decades with Dr. David Schnarch. He runs twelve-hour intensives for couples, has trained more than 150 senior therapists worldwide in the Crucible Approach, and volunteers as an emergency medic and on a search-and-rescue team.

Alaska’s Ranked-Choice Voting [RCV] Experiment Takes a Sinister Turn

"Democrat Mary Peltola’s scheme to dupe voters in the Senate race vindicates critics of ranked-choice voting."

The American Spectator | USA News and Politics  

They long ago declared war on election integrity and applaud Mary Peltola for duping the voters. Even if she loses they will ignore the lesson that Alaska teaches us about RCV.

"If you look at the history of Alaska’s elections since it was admitted to the Union in 1959, it becomes obvious that it is not a “blue” state. The last time Alaska’s voters cast their ballots for a Democrat in a presidential election was 1964, and they haven’t elected a Democratic Senator since 2008. Likewise, only three Democrats have won Alaska’s at-large House seat in the last 67 years. This is to be expected considering that Democrats constitute only 12 percent of the state’s electorate. Still, in 2020, they managed to dupe the voters into scrapping their traditional election process and replacing it with an “improved” system that would somehow reform campaign financing — Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV).

"If the Democrats had any genuine interest in honest elections, they would have avoided RCV like the plague. It is a system that is quite deliberately designed to disfranchise as many voters as possible while creating chaos and confusion among election officials. This was clearly illustrated by the results of Alaska’s first full scale experiment with it during the 2022 midterms: A state where Democrats are a tiny minority and which President Trump won by double digits in all three of his White House runs somehow elected Democrat Mary Peltola to its at-large seat in the House. Peltola was kicked out by the voters after only one full term, but RCV may allow her to seize the U.S. Senate seat currently held by GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan.

"This seems implausible until one grasps how RCV works: Voters rank candidates in a given race according to preference. If no candidate wins more than 50 percent of the votes cast on the first ballot, a series of elimination rounds redistributes the votes until one candidate finally reaches a majority. If some voters have marked their ballots for only a single candidate, and that candidate fails to reach the final round, their ballots are thrown away. This quite literally disfranchises those voters because their ballots are not counted in the final tally. In 2022, Mary Peltola finally crossed the 50 percent line 16 days after Election Day. This is not what Alaskans thought they had voted for in 2020. As Kimberly Strassel wrote at the time in the Wall Street Journal

:

Two years ago, left-leaning outside groups quietly funded Alaska liberals (posing under the vanilla title Alaskans for Better Elections) backing a ballot initiative to do away with the state’s perfectly good election system. It was replaced with a “top four” primary and a ranked-choice general election. Most Alaskans didn’t know what they were voting for, since the initiative was a mind-numbing 25 pages of single type, and its boosters tucked the voting part into the garble. The initiative instead led with a provision claiming it would eliminate “dark money.” . . .

. . . ""The spread of RCV will … multiply opportunities for fraud and induce Americans to vote for candidates they would not support under ordinary circumstances." More.

Texas Judge to Lawyer: Your ‘White Mediocrity’ Can’t Handle ‘Black Excellence’

Could her favorite TV choices be Joy Reid and MSNOW?

Legal Insurrection  

"Anti-white racism exists, and this case strikes me as a prime example. Most of us would agree that Brown’s behavior crossed a line and demands accountability."

U.S. District Judge Ada Brown

"Texas lawyer Ezra Young filed a misconduct complaint against U.S. District Judge Ada Brown after she subjected him to a series of despicable racial insults during an April hearing in Dallas. Young represented a black female professor who filed suit after being denied tenure.

According to the hearing transcript obtained by Bloomberg Law, Brown, a black and Native American woman, said, “I think what’s happening here, quite candidly, is you are very intimidated for some reason, Mr. Young, with Black excellence, in light of your White mediocrity. Yeah. Right?” She added, “You should write that down. I mean, you — I’m — you look like a White man, right?”

Young politely informed her that he was not white, but Latino.

“Well, you are White-presenting; is that fair to say?” she asked.

“I’m fair-skinned, Your Honor, yes.”

Brown replied, “You’re the White savior, come to save all the stupid Black lawyers in Texas who need your help, from New York.”

In another exchange, Brown alleged that Young had engaged in “racial bullying” of black attorneys involved in the case." . . .More.

I Saw Slotkin Threaten GOP Staff. She Deserves An Ethics Probe

Now you can sign a Change.org petition calling on the Senate to open an investigation into Sen. Elissa Slotkin’s threats against Republican staffers.

Conservative Review  

"If Sen. Slotkin does not correct her statement or apologize to the millions of young conservatives she appeared to threaten when she came to our campus, an ethics investigation is warranted." 

ChatGPT

"Two weeks ago, Sen. Elissa Slotkin came to my campus for an interview at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics. Despite our political differences, I, like many other students, was very excited to hear her speak — it is not often a sitting U.S. senator comes to talk to students, after all.  

"However, Slotkin did not just come to talk about the midterm elections or to encourage political participation among students. In fact, she came to do the opposite, at least as it pertained to one segment of students.  

“'I want young people coming out of school to say, ‘Should I go work for the Trump administration? Like, that sounds fun, I might get an opportunity.’ I want them to be like, ‘[blasphemy], that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want, so let me avoid participating in that.’ I want that deterrence message,” Slotkin told the audience. 

"I was shocked. The senator sought to send a “deterrence message” to young conservatives interested in serving our country in government. How would this “deterrence” be achieved? By investigating myriad members of the Trump administration, up and down the chain of command. Slotkin spoke so highly of our “democracy,” yet I was left wondering whether my friends had a place in the “democracy” she envisioned.  

"During high school, I spent a semester serving as a U.S. Senate page. It gave me enormous respect for the Senate. Despite their policy differences, the senators I encountered seemed genuinely excited for the next generation of public servants and sought to encourage our future careers.  

"Slotkin shattered that perception. I still believe such a vision of the Senate is achievable, but only if it acts; only if, as a body, it recognizes that such conduct is unbecoming of one of its members. The Senate is fundamentally a collegial body. Such collegiality requires it to define what conduct should be encouraged and what should be discouraged. " . . .   More.

Michael Bicksel is a student at the University of Chicago and a senior editor for the Chicago Thinker, where he originally reported Sen. Slotkin’s remarks.

A Cambridge Democrat for 60 years just registered Republican — Alan Dershowitz says the party left him

 Mass Daily News

CAMBRIDGE — Alan Dershowitz has been a Democrat his entire adult life. He voted for Hillary Clinton. He supported Obama. He taught at Harvard Law for 50 years. He lives in Cambridge — one of the most liberal cities in America.

"On Tuesday, the 87-year-old lawyer announced he's done. He's registered as a Republican."

Dershowitz: Why I Registered as a Republican

"Even as recently as 10 years ago I couldn't have imagined myself uttering the words 'I am a Republican,'" Dershowitz wrote on Substack. "But recent events have pushed me away from the Democratic Party and toward what I regard as the lesser of two evils — the deeply flawed but far better Republican Party."

The reason, in his telling, comes down to one thing: Israel.

"The Democratic Party has become the most anti-Israel party in modern history," he wrote. "It openly embraces antisemitism."

"Dershowitz didn't mince words about what he's giving up. He says he still agrees with Democrats on abortion, immigration, separation of church and state, and taxation. He calls himself a "foreign policy Republican" — someone who would put an asterisk next to his registration if the form allowed it." . . . More.  

The more interesting question is why the differences between Democratic Socialists and supposedly mainstream Democrats keep getting smaller—

 

AfterMath - Home

In ‘Caliphornia,’ a dangerous bill is about to be passed that will force your children to be indoctrinated with Islamic ideology in the classroom  

"Public schools are legally permitted to teach about religion from a historical and cultural standpoint under the First Amendment, but they are strictly barred from proselytizing or forcing religious practices. The federal court will ultimately determine whether this specific field trip violated those constitutional boundaries."

 If Democrats Walk Like Socialists And Talk Like Socialists, Maybe They’re Socialists   "Most of the media will spend the next three months pretending that Democrat socialists are sweet and pure as they continue to attack Republicans.

"For the last ten years, Trump has worked very hard to reduce the size and power of government, lower taxes, reduce regulations, and essentially give more power to the people and the private sector. Meanwhile, the media and other Democrats have intentionally told the public that Trump is an authoritarian, a fascist, a dictator, and a king. In addition to endless Hitler comparisons, they investigated him for years on claims that he was a Putin pawn or asset.

"We will hear a lot about affordability from the media and other Democrats before the election, but they didn’t seem nearly as concerned about affordability in 2022, when Biden-era inflation reached over 9% and average gas prices went above $5 per gallon. At the time, they were telling us how great Biden’s policies were.

"Now Democratic Socialists are becoming an increasingly visible part of Democrat politics, but the media is working hard to convince the public that their ideas really aren’t all that radical. At the same time, the media tries to maintain a clear distinction between establishment Democrats and Democratic Socialists, even though there is considerable overlap in many of their policies.

"An interesting indication of how blurred that distinction has become came recently when centrist House Democrats circulated a “Promise to America.” One of the promises was very simple: “We are capitalist, not socialist.” There are 212 Democrats in the House, and only ten signed it." . . .

El-Sayed campaigns with Farrakhan aide who blamed Jews for slave trade

"Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed continues to double down on his public associations with antisemites, campaigning Thursday alongside a Nation of Islam “student minister” and acolyte of the antisemitic group’s longtime leader, Louis Farrakhan, who has referred to Jews as “termites” and praised Adolf Hitler." . . .

Tim Walz Turns Against Kamala and Embraces This Candidate

 "Many Democrats have attributed Harris’s loss to her selection of Walz as her running mate." I'm sure any one of her TV interviews would have told you all one needed to know. TD

The American Spectator | USA News and Politics

"Harris was interviewed last week by CNN about Walz’s comments, and she said that she was unaware of them. She was, she said, still deciding whether or not to run for president." She is no Lady Thatcher or Golda Meir you know.

"I’ve become friends with school shooters.”

That was a real line uttered by Tim Walz during the 2024 vice presidential debate, which he entirely flubbed. In her book, 107 Days, Kamala Harris went after Walz — hard — for his debate performance. JD Vance, she said, was acting mid-mannered in order to counter Trump’s anger and insults. “When Tim fell for it and started nodding and smiling at JD’s fake bipartisanship,” Harris wrote, “I moaned to Doug, ‘What is happening?’” She continued, “I told the television screen: ‘You’re not there to make friends with the guy who is attacking your running mate.’” (RELATED: Kamala Harris’s Sad Book Tour Will Now Be Longer Than Her Campaign)

"Harris went on to confirm the veracity of the SNL sketch that aired the following weekend showing her (played by Maya Rudolph) watching the debate alongside her husband, Doug Emhoff (played by Andy Samberg), in disappointment and consternation. “While I did not in fact spit out wine, it was otherwise uncanny in its portrait of our evening,” she said.

"Many Democrats have attributed Harris’s loss to her selection of Walz as her running mate. On election night, campaign surrogate Lindy Li told Fox News’ Jacqui Heinrich: “One of the things that are top of mind is the choice of Tim Walz as vice presidential candidate… A lot of people are saying tonight that it should have been Josh Shapiro. Frankly, people have been saying that for months.”

"Harris hasn’t done much to counter that narrative. Further, she wrote in 107 Days that her first choice for a running mate was Pete Buttigieg, but she thought the U.S. was too homophobic to elect a gay man as vice president.

"Buttigieg, she wrote, “would have been an ideal partner — if I were a straight white man…. But we were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man. Part of me wanted to say, Screw it, let’s just do it. But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk.” (RELATED: Meet the Post-Biden Democrats: Biden’s Democrats)

""Many Democrats don’t want Kamala Harris to run for president again. Earlier this month, 20 Democrats told Politico that she is failing to define herself as a politician in the aftermath of her loss. Former South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges went after her, saying that Democrats want someone who is “fresh, new” and “I hear a lot of talk about that — ‘we don’t need recycled candidates.’” Harris, he said, “seems like more of the same to me.”

""The Wall Street Journal also reported earlier this month that donors “have told [Harris] directly that a bid would be a long shot.”

"'The other week, I described all of this as a “Democrat Campaign to Destroy Kamala Harris.” Now Tim Walz has joined the mix and has turned against his own former running mate. (READ MORE: The Democrat Campaign to Destroy Kamala Harris)" . . . More.

Ellie Gardey Holmes is Reporter and Associate Editor at The American Spectator.... She is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame, where she studied political science, philosophy, and journalism. Ellie has previously written for the Daily Caller, College Fix, and Irish Rover.

Vivian Silver, 74: Lifelong peace activist who drove Gazans to hospitals

 The Times of Israel

"Canadian-born peace activist Vivian Silver, 74, was killed by Hamas terrorists in her home in Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7.

"For more than a month, she was declared missing, and believed to be captured and held hostage in Gaza. But on November 14, her family confirmed that her remains had finally been identified via DNA.

"One of her sons, Yonatan Zeigen, was on the phone with his mother when gunmen arrived in Be’eri. When he heard gunshots outside her window, he told her to hang up so she could stay quiet, he told the BBC.

"They began to text one other on WhatsApp. He last heard from her around 11 a.m. that Saturday, as Silver hid inside a closet in the house, and told her son that the terrorists were inside the house. She believed that a massacre was happening and told her son that she loved him.

“‘She wrote me, ‘They’re inside the house, it’s time to stop joking and say goodbye.'”

“‘And I wrote back that ‘I love you, Mum. I have no words, I’m with you.'” Vivian responded, “I feel you.”

"That was the last message, Zeigen told the BBC." . . . More.

Vivian Silver: 1949-2023   

. . . Israeli-Canadian peace activist Vivian Silver, 74, was murdered by Hamas during its October 7 massacre in southern Israel. Her home in Kibbutz Beeri, near the Gaza border, and her body had been so violently destroyed, it took almost 40 days to identify her remains." . . .