Sultan Knish
WALNUTS AND PEANUTS
What conclusions can we draw from the shellacking in NY-9?
1. The Reagan Democrats are back in a big way, while the media is trying to spin this as a single issue vote about gay marriage or Israel, and while those were certainly factors, it was very much a backlash about the whole Obama package.
2. The Jewish vote is in play. Not as much as people think, the Democrats don't have to worry too much about losing the Upper West Side, but Brooklyn and Queens are in play.
This was widely ignored by people who like to toss off the 76 percent figure, but working class Jews in Brooklyn came out for Bush in 2004 and to a lesser degree for McCain in 2008. There's a major gap between the limousine liberal and the poorer and more traditional Jews who kicked Weprin to the curb. 3. Ignoring the values voter is dangerous and stupid. The Coulter crowd have marginalized social conservatives are irrelevant and values voters need to be kicked to the curb, to make way for all the enthusiastic fans of killing social security.
But many conservative leaning Catholic and Jewish voters are actually values voters who are more concerned about moral values, than about the latest Cato talking points. Abandoning moral values dumps an entire category of voters who often come out for Democrats but swing over in tough elections when they like what they hear.
My friend Lisa Graas has been arguing for a three-legged social conservatism for some time now, of "fiscal conservatism, social conservatism and a strong national defense." And that formula may alienate some big Republican donors, but it works.
Compare NY-9 to NY-26. In NY-9, social issues helped Republicans take a Democratic district. In NY-26, Democrats took a Republican district by focusing on Medicare. Ignore values voters at your own peril.
4. Dem arrogance was a major factor here. Obama's steamroller on Israel and Cuomo's steamroller on gay rights pissed off enough centrist voters to make them want to send a message. The left's talking point was that if you just move forward, everyone else will follow. NY-9 is a warning that this isn't going to work.
Clinton at least pretended to be a centrist, Obama has been a DailyKos dream and the party is paying the price. When the far left hijacked the Democratic party and brought down the Democratic Leadership Council and took down Hillary Clinton-- they assumed there would be no reckoning. But the reckoning came in 2010 and 2011. 2012 may be the prize winner of the whole fair.
5. If you're going to pander, then do it right. Democrats threw Weprin at NY-9 because it was just his turn. Being an Orthodox Jew was supposed to help. Unfortunately it actually hurt him.
Orthodox Jews in the district did not care too much about what Wiener did because he never claimed to be one of them. But Weprin claimed to be an Orthodox Jew and as an Orthodox Jew endorsed gay marriage. It's a like a Catholic announcing that as a Catholic he thinks abortion is okay. It's going to get a rise out of people who would usually ignore it. And that's exactly what happened here.
Top that off with Weprin being from outside the district, a family politician who didn't come up the hard way, and with a list of family feuds that got Dems like Koch ready to go after him, and it was all a disaster waiting to happen.
Weprin never expected to be in a high profile campaign. New York City has a bunch of congressmen that no one can name, who have legacy seats thanks to the Democratic party and can't be challenged in them. He assumed he was going to be one of them, inheriting a sweetheart seat from Schumer and Wiener. But he lacked the political instincts and mettle of either man. He was visibly awkward, slow to reply and prone to gaffes.
6. If at first you don't succeed, just cheat. The noises over NY-9 being eliminated in redistricting are growing louder. If the Democrats can't hold the district, they might as well kill it.
NY-9 was the largest Jewish district in the country. Not because a lot of Jews live there, but because most districts with a large Jewish population have been gerrymandered into minority areas to create fixed seats for black and latino congressmen. Some of these gerrymandered seats are ridiculous cross-borough monstrosities, but they serve their purpose.
NY-9 does not have a Jewish majority, but enough of them went off the plantation that the Dems are going to try their damndest to lock down the district so that it can't happen again. And that means carving it up into districts where potential Reagan Democrats will be so isolated that voting will be useless.
7. Bonus round, are Orthodox Jews slowly joining a larger religious centrist coalition of Catholic and Protestant values voters?
The governor's race and NY-9 certainly raise the possibility. The gay marriage bill has startled some in communities which are often insular. The role played by Orthodox politicians like Weprin and Silver in passing it is seen as shameful. Silver will likely be taken down by the gentrification of his community from working class people to liberal yuppies, Weprin proved to be quite vulnerable.
8. Bonus round 2. The spin on Israel hasn't worked. The question is what are the Democrats going to do about it. Sending out Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Steve Israel to keep reciting the same bubbe mayses won't do it. The relationship has to actually be repaired and it's up to the White House to dial down the hostility.
9. Exit. This is very much about Obama. Beyond Israel and gay marriage, there was the perception that voting for Turner would send a message to Obama on the economy and on a host of other issues. The voters are angry, and many of them don't follow party line discipline. Even registered Dems.
NY-9 shouldn't be cause for overconfidence. The same voters who slapped down Weprin have no special allegiance to the Republican party either. What they are is upset and eager to be heard.
They're angry about being ignored, about a government that is constantly doing things but isn't doing anything to fix the economy and about an elite that rams through its own agendas with no regard for them.
These are swing voters and they are a snapshot of an electorate that is fed up and wants politicians to toss aside their blackberries and pay attention to them, instead of to their cronies.
They're America and they are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.
HAVE NO FEAR HENRY WAXMAN IS HERE
Are you a national liberal party with some bigoted tendencies that needs Jewish spokesmen to blame Jewish greed for your loss in NY9? Have no fear, Henry Waxman is here.
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), a prominent Jewish congressman, said the Jewish vote is a concern for his party.
“I think Jewish voters will be Democratic and be for Obama in 2012, especially if you get a Republican candidate like [Texas] Gov. [Rick] Perry,” he said. “But there’s no question the Jewish community is much more bipartisan than it has been in previous years. There are Jews who are trending toward the Republican Party, some of it because of their misunderstanding of Obama’s policies in the Middle East, and some of it, quite frankly, for economic reasons. They feel they want to protect their wealth, which is why a lot of well-off voters vote for Republicans.”
There's one problem with old Henry's Greedy Jews theory-- the party has kept Jewish support on the Upper East Side more than it has in Brooklyn. It's lower and middle-class Jews who turned on Weprin.
Waxman's smear is right up there with claiming that black voters just defected because they wanted more watermelon and fried chicken-- but of course Waxman is Jewish which gives him a media pass to make allegations like that.
It's also a reminder that the Democratic party is quite Antisemitic and that it uses trolls like Waxman (literally a troll, go take at a gander at a photo of him) to make its bigoted statements for it. And finally that yes, Jews can't be antisemites.
The term 'self-hating' is thrown around a lot, but it's often a misnomer and it's simpler and clearer to call them what they are. It's possible to be bigoted against a group while on some level being a member of the group. There are plenty of Christians who hate Christianity. There are Americans who hate America. There are Jews who hate Jews. They don't hate themselves, they just despise the group that they are part of.
FAILURE TO JIHAD
The Union of Jewish Students is to launch a "radical, progressive" campaign, encouraging students to speak up for the rights of both Israelis and Palestinians.
Jewish students arriving at universities in the next fortnight will be asked to pledge their support to "two states for two peoples", hand out Israeli and Palestinian flags, and support "freedom, justice and equality" for all.
There is a belief within UJS that standard advocacy efforts "do not cut it any more" because "students are not stupid". Students will be encouraged to back the "liberation" of Israelis from Palestinian terror, and Palestinians through the formation of a new state.
Campaigns director Dan Sheldon said UJS had decided on the new direction because "hasbara is not working". He said: "We have done our research. Old campaigns regarding Israel have not worked, so we are trying a bold approach."
Surrender is certainly a bold new approach. Really bold. Downright Chamberlainesque. But how do you win a war of ideas, when you have already accepted the position of the other side and are just bargaining for terms?
The Palestinian flag is the flag of a terrorist organization. How does one liberate Israelis from terror through a state? The UJS is doubtfully stupid, more likely anti-Israel students have simply taken it over, just as has happened to a number of Hillels in the states.
In my Front Page article this week, I discussed some of the history of the explosion of Muslim hate on campus.
Hatem “Hate’em” Bazian headed the Muslim Student Association at Berkeley, but there were practical limitations to what a Muslim group could accomplish on campus. Students for Justice in Palestine, which he co-founded, shed the explicit Islamic colors of the MSA and added one more degree of separation between the Muslim Brotherhood and what appeared to be a secular social justice movement whose agenda just happened to align with that of the Brotherhood.
Peel an onion and the layer underneath is usually Brotherhood.
The start of Students for Justice in Palestine activities in 2000-2003 coincided with a sharp rise in anti-Semitic incidents on campus and an increase in incidents in California– the epicenter of its activity. Since then the pattern of incidents has resulted in the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights launching an investigation into the University of California.
The rising wave of hate culminated in the SJP’s launch of the first divestment campaign at an American university… on Holocaust Remembrance Day. During 2011’s Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust, they achieved another milestone by getting the Berkeley Student Senate to pass a resolution boycotting companies that do business with Israel.
One can only imagine what's coming in 2012. And then there are the American "Little Bin Ladens" who do their work for them
Take the Jewel of Medina, a novel romanticizing Mohammed’s sexual abuse of a nine year old girl, canceled after Denise Spellberg, an associate professor of Middle-Eastern studies sent an email to Random House calling the book a “declaration of war” and warning them that publishing it would expose its employees to terrorist attacks. Random House complied out of concern for “the safety and security of the Random House building and employees.”
Denise Spellberg’s book Jihad was an example of the outsourcing of terrorist threats and hit lists to the Western enablers of Islamic terrorism. Who needs Osama bin Laden or one of his successors to film a video six months too late, when a University of Texas professor can fire off an email easing the workload of busy terrorists.
Ward Churchill called those who were murdered on September 11, “little Eichmanns”, a term later picked up by radical leftist, Chris Hedges. But Denise Spellberg and her ilk are “little Bin Ladens.” And there are plenty of “little Bin Ladens” hard at work.
See the rest of the outsourced Jihad in my other FPM article-- The Little Bin Ladens
THE CLINTONIZATION OF BACHMANN
The Hillary Clintonization of Bachmann is well underway. Bachmann is suddenly now the crazy lady who needs to be moved off stage so we can avoid the formality of primaries and just select the front runner. If they sound like liberals, well that can't be so, even if they sound exactly like every attack made on Bachmann by liberals to this date.
Attacking Perry on Gardasil is demagoguery. Perry suggesting that critics of his illegal immigration pandering are racists who hate Latinos on the other hand is the kind of true red and white blue rhetoric that should make us all stand up and salute.
Well if your name is President Vincente Fox anyway. http://www.youtube.com/v/-KYLf2AJFPg
The bottom line is it doesn’t make any difference what the sound of your last name is. That is the American way. I’m proud that we are having those individuals be contributing members of our society rather than telling them, you go be on the government dole.
Clearly the sound of the last name is the issue here, you filthy racists.
Anyway as we're told over and over again, this stuff is just a distraction from the important issue that there is a photo of Rick Perry firing a gun into the air, and we really need to focus on that photo and nothing else. Also if we don't talk about Gardasil, it'll never come up in the general election. Or we can just look at his Gardasil press conference, which looks a lot like Blagojevich's "These are all the people I fight for" press conference.
While no one seems to care much that Perry basically suggested that critics of his proposal are racist, rather than against illegal immigration, we're supposed to be furious because Bachmann relayed a woman's story that Gardasil caused her daughter's mental retardation.
Allahpundit at Hotair wants Bachmann to "apologize" for linking Gardasil to mental retardation. Whom should she be apologizing to? Merck.
Ah hell let me apologize on her behalf. Mental retardation is not on the list of Gardasil side effects. Death is. Please don't worry about Gardasil making your daughter retarded, when it can kill her instead.
Of course all vaccines have potential negative side effects, but Gardasil had a higher incidence of negative side effects than the problem it was supposed to address. Perry may have had the highest and cleanest motives in doing so, but criticism of him for the way he did it cannot be treated as illegitimate.
People who treat Bachmann reciting an anecdotal story she heard from a parent, without stating it as a medical fact, for a vaccine with notorious and fatal side effects as some sort of crime-- while acting as if Perry's actions in trying to make a vaccine with a troubling rate of side effects mandatory through an executive order as some minor thing that we needn't get worked up over are showing a bias.
KVELLING FOR PERRY
Jews are kvelling over stuff because Perry is saying most of the right things on Israel.
Gov. Perry today accused the Obama administration of taking sides in last year's Israeli election and of trying to make Israel conform to American ''plans and timetables'' for peace. The governor said his own support for Israel was ''not conditional on the outcome of the peace process.''
Once again, he pledged that as president he would ''begin the process of moving the U.S. ambassador to the city Israel has chosen as its capital,'' a reference to Jerusalem.
My bad.. that was actually Bush in 2000 when he was running. This was Bush once he got into office.
As we make progress towards security, Israel forces need to withdraw fully to positions they held prior to September 28, 2000. And consistent with the recommendations of the Mitchell Committee, Israeli settlement activity in the occupied territories must stop.
So pardon me if I don't kvell, I've seen this game before. Support for Israel is as deep as the understanding of what Islamic terrorism is. Someone who doesn't really get the latter will sell out the former in five seconds flat. We can't after all discriminate against people because they have a different last name.
"By repeated public attacks only on Israel, this administration has damaged its ability to act as an honest broker, and has encouraged the Arabs to harden their positions in the mistaken belief that Washington can or should deliver Israeli concessions without Arab concessions in return.
That was Clinton in 1992. It's not too different from Perry in 2011.
“Unfortunate errors by the Obama administration have encouraged the Palestinians to take steps backward away from peace. It was a mistake to inject an Israeli construction freeze, including in Jerusalem, as an unprecedented precondition for talks. Indeed, the Palestinian leadership had been negotiating with Israel for years, notwithstanding settlement activity.
The point isn't that the men are the same, but that the sentiments are basically generic. Even when Gore was running in 2000, he was pushing a fairly similar line. Everything Perry is saying is fine, but it's been said over and over again by candidates running for office.
We should encourage Palestinians who are more interested in building a prosperous future than in fueling the grievances of the past. Our aid is, and must remain, predicated on the commitment of the Palestinian leadership to engage honestly and directly with the Israelis in negotiating a peace settlement.
This is from Perry in 2011. Sounds good, except just about every serious candidate has said the same thing. Does that translate into a real commitment? Seemingly Perry has said that he will cut off aid to the bad guys? At least it does until you read the preceding paragraph.
The United States has an interest in the development of Palestinian civil society and institutions.
Which means no we won't be cutting off aid because we have an "interest" in funding those institutions.
Bush said most of the same things in 2000, new moderate leadership, development of palestinian civil institutions, find real partners for peace, etc. What that actually meant was declaring that Arafat was bad, but Abbas is good, and arming and training terrorists as "security forces".
Is that the same thing it will mean under Perry? Who knows, but there's little to celebrate about yet another call for the Palestinians to be nicer and reform their institutions. That game had been played for three administrations.
The long road to peace requires Palestinian partners committed to making the journey. We must isolate Hamas unless and until they renounce terrorism, recognize Israel's right to exist, and abide by past agreements. There is no room at the negotiating table for terrorist organizations.
That was Obama in 2008. That's how generic these sentiments are. Perry may turn out to be more pro-Israel than Bush. He will doubtlessly be less anti-Israel than Obama... but how much less so is an open question that will come down to his priorities and whom he ends up listening to.
The Cheney era in the Bush Administration was a pro-Israel one. The Condoleezza Rice era was an anti-Israel one. But pro and anti are relative. In the Cheney era, the Clinton policies mostly continued but without any real active intervention or involvement at the top. In the Rice era, attacks were constant and the pressure neverending.
If the Perry administration mostly ignores Israel, that would be ideal. And it's a possibility. But how long that will hold up once he's being told by the Saudis that high oil prices and terrorism are caused by regional instability which is caused by Israel is an open question.
The first step in any peaceful negotiation for a two-state solution for the Palestinians is to recognize the right of Israel’s existence. They have to denounce terrorism in both word and deed. And they have to sit down and negotiate with Israel directly. Anything short of that is a non-starter in my opinion.
Here Perry makes a clearer statement, unlike his more ambiguous editorial, but it's still fairly vague between the lines. What does recognizing the right of Israel's existence mean? Does it mean recognizing Israel's right to exist, or its right to exist as a Jewish state? Denouncing terrorism in word sounds nice, but "denounce" is vague at best when it comes to deeds, and the issue isn't denunciation it's that the PA is operating terrorist groups. Negotiating directly is at least clear, though nothing to write home about.
Nothing wrong with any of it, but it's all generic and open ended. He can't really be held to it, because it doesn't mean anything. There's nothing wrong with it, even people like West and Bachmann have said similar things-- but don't confuse it with policy specific commitments.
What Perry has said is that he will expect the PA to meet certain commitments for the peace process to continue and for aid to keep coming. If he actually states and maintains firm commitments, then he'll have done more than any other administration so far, with the possible exception of Bush II, which temporarily did take that line.
The question is once in office, will he pressure Israel to keep negotiating when those commitments aren't met and will he adopt flexible definitions of meeting those commitments the way every single administration before him ultimately did. History suggests the answer is yes.
If words are the issue, how about these words.
Both nations decided the risks were worth taking because neither Israel nor America tolerates the terrorism that stains our past. We don’t give in to fear. We stand up for the honor of our nations and our people. When we are attacked, we always remember. We always fight back, and – though it may take some time – we follow through.
...
That means the Palestinians cannot bring to the negotiating table a terrorist organization that rejects Israel’s right to exist. Nowhere else in the world, at no other time, is one party expected to compromise with a partner who denies its very existence. A peace process can happen only when both sides seek peace. And two partners cannot build a bridge when one party refuses even to admit there is something on the other side of the span.
And who is this bold and courageous speaker? It's Harry Reid. Words, they only mean so much. Most politicians know what to say around election time-- it's their overall attitudes on an issue that determines what they will do.
THE ROUNDUP
If only we spent more money on schools... our kids would be completely illiterate. See the charts before enough teachers in schools insure that charts are the only thing kids will be able to read.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that charter schools level the educational playing field for both white and black students, Obama and the Democrat Party leadership have crushed and suppressed school choice programs like that in Washington, DC. Thanks to the all-powerful Democrat constituency -- teachers' unions like the AFT and the NEA -- freeing kids from the slavery of failed public school systems is forbidden.
Forget about reading, if the school unions continue to run things, will kids even be able to speak English?
No seriously...
Public school teachers with unacceptable English pronunciation and grammar are being protected by the Obama Administration, which has forced one state to eliminate a fluency monitoring program created to comply with a 2002 federal education law.
Singling out teachers who can’t speak proper English in American schools—funded by taxpayers, no less—discriminates against Hispanics and others who are not native English speakers, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ). As a result it violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the teachers must remain in their current position.
With only a small proportion of low-English proficiency students (reading between the lines they are referring to illegal immigrants) passing the state’s standardized reading test, Arizona education officials started to look at the teachers in those classrooms. They found a common thread in dozens of districts throughout the state; many instructors don’t speak proper English and, in fact, teach in Spanish, using Spanish-language materials. Some have “unacceptably heavy accents” that causes them to mispronounce words. Others use poor English grammar.
So the definition of civil rights has been broadened to mean that it's racist to hire teachers who actually speak English. Technically it isn't too broadened, as Grigg vs Duke Power Co that requiring employees to have a High School diploma was racist. But that was 1971 when the Supreme Court was as sane as squirrels on acid.
The good news though is that teachers no longer have to teach, but we're obligated to hire more and more of them so our kids can compete with China.
Compete with them in what? I guess in the maintenance of a vast unwieldy Party bureaucracy that no one needs.
PIGS AND DOGS AND PIGDOGS
What we want is to end the occupation and tend legitimacy for, occupation and practices is the nightmare that is holding our hearts, as reflected these practices continued raids and arrests and the building of walls and demolition of houses, and the intensification of settlement activities, and attacks the settlers of Bakla trees and burning of mosques and the latest training dogs to attack us and send the wild pigs to wreak land corrupt, three things which the settlers will confront us: When any person Siatdon find it, well its streets and dogs, and pigs for the uprooting of trees, in addition of course to the tanks.
The once and future President of Palestine, partner in Peace, defender against wild pigs wreaking corruption on the land.
THE ROUNDUP
China to liquidate US treasuries
Israel and Greece have invoked a mutual defense pact. Turkey has suspended defense and trade ties with Israel. Debka lays out some possibilities.
Erdogan rattled the sabers in Egypt and is scaling up threats to Israel. It's a cheap way to turn himself into a leader in a leaderless Muslim world. But Turkey also has heavy debts and if the whole thing falls down, it will need the oil reserves it is fighting over and an external enemy more than ever.
The ADL once again stands up against Jews and for the terrorists.
SS a Ponzi Scheme says Paul Krugman
Anti-Israel Demo in Jordan Fail
He was 5’10″, brown eyes, wearing an Obama ’08 bumper sticker
Compassionate Conservatism 2.0
First Amendment vs Second Amendment
Killing America
Erdogan claims Instant Navy
Holland to ban Burqa
War for peace, peace for war and peace for peace
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