Tag Archives: political parties

Indicative, but also Misleading

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A Wall Street Poll found strong support for Israel in the war Hamas has inflicted on it, but the question the paper chose to illustrate the matter also is misleading.

Overall support for Israelis is solid, although there is considerable support for both Palestinians and Israelis “equally” in the Hamas war.

Unsurprisingly, given the strong antisemitic streak running through the Progressive-Democratic Party, those worthies especially strongly sympathize with both Palestinians and Israelis rather than with Israelis alone.

What’s misleading about the question, though, is the tacit inclusion of the terrorist Hamas gang under the rubric “Palestinian people.” The question needs to be asked concerning sympathizing with Israelis, whose civilians are explicitly targeted by Hamas, vs sympathizing with Gazans, whose civilians are equally targeted by Hamas in the form of shields and Gazan residences and facilities used by the terrorists for weapons storage and launch sites and command centers.

Sympathizing with both Israelis and Gazans (not generic Palestinians) would have more legitimacy given Hamas’ assaults on both sets of civilians more or less equally, albeit one with deliberate targeting and the other with deliberate abandon.

“Invisible Americans”

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Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D, MI) thinks she has the support of “invisible” Americans, her constituents. It’s…unfortunate…that she does, but it’s especially saddening given what she thinks her constituents believe, which they seem to demonstrate by repeatedly electing her. Her antisemitic bigotry is blatant.

Here’s her claim regarding her openly supported slogan From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. It’s

an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate.

This is a lie. The region encompassed by the slogan she so enthusiastically supports includes the region in which is situated the nation of Israel. Even were Tlaib’s associated claim that her one-nation solution wherein Jews and Arabs live “side-by-side” with “equal rights” were true, it would only be a supposedly peaceful driving out of Jews from their homeland since they would be dramatically outnumbered in population and in voting. Her own interpretation calls for the removal of Jews from the Middle East.

The more accurate interpretation of her slogan is the one that’s been the case since the First Intifada, a four-year period of overt terrorism against Israel perpetrated by Hamas. It’s a slogan of hatred of Jews and a call for their extermination, as noted by Congressman Max Miller (R, OH) on the House floor during the debate regarding House censure of Tlaib:

To be clear, “from the river to the sea,” as someone who’s Jewish, means to exterminate my people. I understand she thinks it’s some kind of aspirational message. I do think it’s aspirational—an aspiration to the genocide of Jews.

In response to the censure debate, Tlaib was careful to carry through her antisemitic bigotry: when she spoke during her part of the debate, she wore a Hamas keffiyeh over her blazer.

Rebuilding San Francisco?

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San Francisco is moving to alter certain requirements and political priorities in order to increase residential housing construction. San Francisco even has changed some actual rules so developers can build market-rate apartments with fewer requirements to provide affordable housing. One project coming out of these moves is this one:

In what would be the city’s most ambitious residential development in several years, local property developer Bayhill Ventures last month announced plans for a 71-story rental tower in San Francisco’s ailing financial district.

Cabrini Green come to San Fran, degentrifying the financial district? Only with the critical difference that this area will have even fewer police with which to enforce laws and keep folks safe than Chicago provided Cabrini Green.

It’s not certain that that outcome will be realized. However, the construction comes inside an established environment of a reduced police force; laws decriminalizing, among others, drugs and shoplifting; and prosecutors reluctant to prosecute. (Yes, I’m aware that San Francisco residents recalled an especially egregious non-prosecuting prosecutor, but his replacement is better only compared with that low bar.)

We’ll see.

Oil Buyback

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Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden now plans to buy 2.7 million barrels of oil to put back into our oil strategic reserve.

Couple things about that.

We had 630 million barrels of oil in our strategic reserve before Biden took office and started selling it to the People’s Republic of China while claiming he was doing it to slow the gasoline price inflation his spending was causing. As recently as 24 November last, our reserve was down to 351 million barrels. According to my second grade arithmetic, that means Biden had reduced our reserve by 279 million barrels in just those two years and 10 months. My third grade arithmetic tells me that those 27 million barrels he’s buying for the reserve is just 1% of what he’s taken out of it. Which makes buying that oil an insulting effort to distract us with his pretense of refilling our reserve after his dangerous reduction.

The other thing is that he’s buying that oil at $79/barrel, which means he’s spending $213.3 million to buy that 1%. To replace all 279 million barrels, he’ll have to pay more than $22 billion at those $79 per. When the prior administration (the Trump administration for those following along at home) refilled the reserve after the Obama admin draw-down, Trump’s buyers paid $30-$55 per barrel. Call it, for this back of the envelope estimate, an average of $42.5 per barrel. At that price, Biden could replace the oil he removed for a total cost of $11.8 billion dollars. Bidenomics is going to cost us ordinary American taxpayers more than $10 billion at today’s actual price. That is, if Biden follows through on refilling our strategic oil reserve.

Update: third grade arithmetic tells me that those 27 million barrels should have been third grade arithmetic tells me that those 2.7 million barrels. Fershlugginer keyboard….

Federal Intimidation

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The Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden now is trying to cow school districts into pushing Progressive-Democratic Party gender identity and sexual orientation ideology by threatening to withhold Federal funding from the districts’ free and reduced-price school lunch programs.

This is Party using children as hostage in its push for that destructive claptrap. Those programs often provide the only healthy meal those children get in a school day, and denying those children is a blatant attempt to intimidate those districts into compliance with Party ideology. Party’s ransom demand is the surrender of those children to Party diktat.

Aside from that deep immorality, the move also is illegal. South Dakota v Dole made clear that the Federal government cannot use threats of withholding funding in order to coerce compliance with Federal diktats regarding intra-State, or local, behaviors. Dole was a case in which the Federal government withheld a percentage of Federal highway funding from South Dakota over its refusal to comply with a then-recently enacted alcohol drinking age limit, and South Dakota objected to the withholding. The ruling held that the Feds could, indeed, withhold a percentage of Federal funding, but it could not do withhold a high enough fraction to be coercive. Withholding all of the school lunch funding is plainly coercive, and it’s intended to be so.