As you might guess I’m not much of a fan of Representative Talib of Michigan. She is an ultra leftist anti-Semite who is wrong on almost every issue out there.
Her defense of Hamas is horrible although to be fair as a Palestinian brought up by Palestinians, I’m less shocked by the antisemitism than most because of what she has been taught all her life. It would be extraordinary if she wasn’t an anti-Semite and frankly coming from the district she represents it she likely would not be sitting in congress if she didn’t have her current opinions on Israel.
But while I strongly object to all of these things this story concerning her suggestion that Michigan Democrat voters protest Biden’s “support” for Israel by voting uncommitted in the Michigan primary is quintessentially American:
It’s early voting time in Michigan. On Saturday, Tlaib was outside a polling place, a civic center, and urged Michigan Democrats to show Biden they condemn his support of Israel in the Israel-Hamas war. The uncommitted movement tracks with her recent votes in Congress. She and fellow Squad member Rep.Cori Bush (D-MO) voted against banning Hamas terrorists from entering the United States. Tlaib was the only vote in the House to refuse to condemn the rape of women by Hamas.
Any reader of this blog knows that I not only support Israel here but think that the destruction of Hamas is long overdue. I think she’s wrong and dead wrong.
In addition to being dead wrong she is going about advancing her dead wrong position in exactly the right way. In a republic if you have a position you wish political leaders to support what are you supposed to do? You energize a voting block to pressure pols to adopt the position you are trying to advance.
This is exactly how our system is supposed to work and as the Muslim population grows in the US and starts to outstrip other communities these methods are more likely to be effective. The fact that she is pushing for something horrible is not relevant to the method being used. Of course the irony that she is using this democratic method to support a group of people who violently exterminate any internal opposition is likely lost on her but that’s to be expected.
I suspect as the Tom Hagen math continues in Talib’s favor you will see a lot of Democrats walking away from Israel. With luck Hamas will be a footnote in history long before that date.
While all eyes are currently on what was one of the most dramatic and exciting Superbowl Games in the history of the sport the real prize of the day goes to the IDF, Shin Bet who managed to raid a location where two of their hostages were being held and rescued them at the cost of only one wounded while taking out quite a large number of Hamas.
That they were able to get hostages freed at all is incredible, that they managed to pull this off in only an hour is staggering, that they did so without Israeli causalities seems almost impossible.
The spike of the football, the raid took place in the city of Raffa which apparently the Biden Administration has been pressuring the Israeli government to leave alone. As Elder of Ziyon put it:
Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt and the US have been pressuring Israel not to operate in Rafah. After seeing that hostages are kept there and Israel saved some, practically no Israelis will agree.
I’m presuming that Hamas will be smuggling any remaining living hostages out of the country but frankly if I’m Egypt I really don’t want to be seen as part of that operation. Then again:
That’s a lot of tanks just to make sure Gazans trapped in Hamas hell stay in Gaza. Probably a violation of the 1979 peace treaty as well. https://t.co/76oLLPENxv
Egypt has warned Hamas that it must agree to a hostages-for-ceasefire deal with Jerusalem within two weeks to avert an Israel Defense Forces operation in the terror group’s last stronghold in the Gaza Strip, the southernmost city of Rafah, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.
This week, Israel will reportedly dispatch to Cairo negotiators to discuss a new hostage deal with U.S., Egyptian and Qatari officials.
Given that drawing Egypt into a war with Israel would be a big win for Hamas I’m betting they’re not going to listen to that advice.
I have a lot of little things to say but not enough for an under the Fedora Day so today we’re going to give Don Surber the sincerest from of flattery and imitate his Saturday Link Fest with a few other thoughts:
First at Stacy McCain’s site we have a story about how thanks to a family squabble an iconic business will close:
The litigation later forced the family to change the name of its original location to Tony and Nick’s Steaks in 2022. Anthony Jr.’s two sons — Anthony III and Michael, who were also employed at the sandwich empire — followed him out the door, taking copies of the company’s financial records with them and turned them over to federal investigators. Those documents revealed that Lucidonio Sr. and Nicholas Lucidonio hid the success of their business from tax collectors by keeping two sets of books almost from the day the sandwich shop opened.
While one might have an opinion of members of an Italian (Sicilian?) family turning in another member of their family to the feds may I humbly point out that if they weren’t cooking the books it wouldn’t be an issue.
As my Sicilian parents who owned business taught me young, “Always pay the government first because they’re the only ones who can take from you before you go to court.”
2nd: Was at the bank today figured it would be an easy time since I needed to convert three $20 bills into two 10’s six 5’s and ten ones so I can make change if people at St Cecilia’s church want to buy tickets to the WQPH 89.3 FM Shrove Tuesday Brunch on the 13th (Details here). I figured it would take about 30 seconds invoving:
Opening the draw
Counting the bills
Giving them to me
Not anymore. Now a machine is involved so instead the teller has to
Take the last four of my social
Feeding my bills into the reader
Do tons of typing into the computer
Wait for the machine to spit out the bills when the typing is done
Print a receipt for the bills
Give me the bills and receipt
Machines don’t make everything easier
3rd: Over at Pirates Cove Mr. Teach notices climate folks trying to link “climate change” to ancient plagues. to wit:
While modern medicine has advanced considerably since the time of the Romans, this data offers insights into how diseases might change in our own changing climate. “Within the scope of the current climate change it is of major importance to understand the links between climate and human health and we unfortunately do not understand these links as well as we would like,” Zonneveld said. “Investigating the resilience of ancient societies to past climate change and relationships between past climate change and the occurrence of infectious disease might give us better insight into these relationships and the climate change induced challenges we are facing today.
One would have thought that an empire that could conquer so much of the known world, invent formalized sanitation, arches, pioneered early medical tools, concrete, the first bound book, and so much more, would have known not to use fossil fuels, hair dryers, ice makers, and plastics
It never ceases to amaze me that tens of millions have absolute faith in the never ending predictions of doom to come in 30 years when my own local forecast for Sunday has changed three times in the last 72 hours.
4th: I’m told the Doctor that I’ve had for the last 30-40 years or so is about to retire. Baring a major accident/incident before July I will likely not see him again.
This means I will likely have to get a new doc who doesn’t know me or my family or my past. This is normal but I’m not looking forward to it. If there was one thing I had no doubt about with my old doc it’s that he cared if I lived or died. Given what we’ve seen from the medical profession the last few years it will be very hard to get that impression from a stranger.
Of course as I’m in the back nine it more a question of what do I want to die from because in the end I have to die of something.
5th: The New Neo has some thoughts about the Jean Carroll defamation case and the type of precedent it sets:
I don’t think lawsuits like this one should be actionable, whether they be against Trump or anyone else. It should not be legally actionable defamation to say your accuser is lying about you and that you’re not sexually attracted to her. Nor was Trump ever found criminally liable for raping her, because the statute of limitations had run out by the time she made her accusations. I doubt her rape case would have held up in a criminal court anyway – unless it was a court composed of jurors or a judge who hated the defendant.
I predict that once leftists and left leaning institutions like universities are charged with defamation for insisting on their innocence in cases and have judgements made against them the injustice of this will suddenly become clear to the left.
Unexpectedly of course.
6th: If anyone is interested we have some openings in both the 1972 and the 1997 league for Dynasty Baseball.
If you’re up to it and have an interest give me a shout because the window for all of this is closing.
7th: Since I quoted Don Surber for the title of this post it behooves me to mention an interesting twist to the old “learn to code” crowd:
ITEM 14: What the nation needs is coders who learn to mine.
CNBC reported last month, “The U.S. is running out of miners. More than half the nation’s mining workforce, about 221,000 workers, is expected to retire by 2029, according to the Society for Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration, and the number of candidates willing to fill those slots is shrinking.”
Smart people are urging and/or putting their kids into trade schools where basic “manly” skills are taught as it’s becoming increasingly clear that the American left has basically evolved into the passengers of the B Ark of the Golgafrinchan fleet
8th: Since we mentioned the need for coal jobs it’s worth noting more layoffs of Journalists: First this week at the LA Times (Via Legal Insurrection):
As a general rule, most people are sympathetic when they hear about others who have lost their jobs due to layoffs, company closings, and the like.
But in the case of the now-former employees of the Los Angeles Times, that sympathy is in short supply among conservatives and others who were frequent targets of the paper’s agenda-driven news and opinion divisions.
On Sunday, Legal Insurrection reported that the left coast newspaper had announced that staff cutbacks were imminent, with around 100 people set to be let go. In response, unionized employees staged a one-day walkout and demanded, among other things, “to swap traditional seniority protections for those related to diversi
In an internal email this morning, Business Insider CEO Barbara Peng announced that the company is laying off 8% of its staff pic.twitter.com/VY6HIt7ktc
I look forward to the plethora of articles from those journalists remaining insisting that the economy is better than ever. Perhaps AI can write them at the LA Times and Business Insider.
The NFL league championships are this week and from the NFC we are guaranteed a great story of overcoming adversity no matter who wins, either Detroit FINALLY making it to the Superbowl with a rejected QB or San Francisco making it led by the very last pick in the draft born the year Brady was picked and drafted 63 places later than him (262nd).
In the east you have Lamar Jackson the pre-emptive MVP facing Patrick Mahomes who now has made the AFC title game in his first six seasons as a starter. Comparisons to Tom Brady and questions if he will beat Brady’s six titles and ten Superbowl appearances are already flying but in the end no matter what he achieves when people ask who was better the record will show that when facing Tom Brady in the AFC Championship game or the Superbowl he was 0-2 against a Tom Brady at age 40 or over.
10th and last at Elder of Ziyon which is a must visit during the Israel Hamas war they note a rather amazing phenom at the UN, collective memory loss:
Q: Given the UN’s big role in Gaza, UNRWA, has there ever been any indication to the UN that tunnels are being built under the city?
UN: Not to us. I mean… it seems to me that all this infrastructure was built in a highly secretive way. I mean, I see it just as an observer… To think that the UN had any understanding of what was… any information about those operations, I think, is… No is clearly the answer to that.
This is even though the UN has admitted in previous years that tunnels were found underneath their own schools.
In fact, former UNRWA Gaza director Matthias Schmale admitted that it is a “safe assumption” there were extensive tunnels under Gaza, in a 2021 interview:
If it wasn’t for the fact that Hogan’s Heroes was a fictional show I’d swear that the UN was recruiting heavily from descendants of the guards at Luft Stalag 13 for their uncanny ability to know nothing and see nothing.
COMMUNISTS ALWAYS RUN OUT OF OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: AOC-affiliated Democratic Socialists of America in ‘financial crisis.’ “The seven-figure deficit comes after the DSA, which leads anti-Israel protests across the country, did not publicly condemn the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks.”
“Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are facing an internal bloodbath as they beg staff members to volunteer to lose their jobs amid a funding crisis.“
Note the decline in revenues for the Democrat Socialists of America. Stacy’s link notes interesting quotes from the piece:
The DSA said they “should be thriving,” but they instead are seeing a “decline in revenue, membership, and overall excitement.” “We’re living in a moment when revived labor struggles and the fight for a free Palestine are galvanizing so many Americans,” the organization said, adding it’s “treading water” and things will continue to be tough.
They seem to not grasp the connection between a sudden decline in revenue and their support for the October 7th attacks and the connected campaign of intimidation of Jews on expensive college campus’ nationwide. ln one respect it’s reasonable that they believed this when you consider recent history:
They pledged allyship to other groups in their tent, not to Judaism or Israel. This was evident in 2019 when daily attacks began on Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn. Activist synagogues in places like Park Slope, which would have been at the forefront of marches had any other group come under attack, spent years staying silent about it. The attackers, often caught on video, were frequently other minorities, not MAGA hat-wearing white people as they would have hoped, so it was awkward to raise a fuss. Progressive politics was the code they followed, and Judaism was an identity umbrella like all the others in their movement. “As a Jew …” they would begin their lectures. As a Jew, they were rarely interested in Judaism.
After all if daily attacks on Jews in Brooklyn didn’t chase away the funds from “reform” or “conservative” Jews why should support for Oct 7th make a difference when it’s time for the Jewish parents of those kids to write a check? After all wasn’t leftism their true religion?
For many liberal Jews, it was hard to ignore that it wasn’t the boogeyman white supremacists that they had been warned about their entire lives. No, it was their professors, their co-workers at the nonprofit, friends of their college-aged kids calling for an end to Israel and celebrating the murder of Jews. And these hateful marches were not happening in rural Alabama, in the places they were taught to fear, but mainly in the bluest of blue cities.
The political bedfellows they had slept beside were sharply opposed to Israel doing anything but simply accepting the attacks of Oct. 7.
By Oct. 8, their “allies” had already taken to the streets, some in grotesque glee over the slaughter of Jews in their homes, others tearing down posters of kidnapped children, to say Israel should just sit down and take it.
In fact their difficulty in accepting the reality of who their actual friends are is perfectly encapsulated in this tweet:
I find it amazing that given the rise in open antisemitism in the US particularly on campus which is dominated by Democrats along with #israel's fight for survival you still avoid supporting the best friend that Israel has had in the white house
Realty hasn’t hit the monied liberal community hard enough for them to support Donald Trump, the man who actually moved the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem after presidents had promised to for decades and never did, the man who pushed the Abraham accords. That, for now at least, is a bridge too far as it risks a final split from the media left.
It does seem however that reality has hit them hard enough that they’ve apparently decided not to fund the people who want to see them dead.
Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog 