Israeli election results: reports of Netanyahu’s political death seem to have been premature

The New Neo Posted on by

Netanyahu’s party has done better than expected, but not well enough to win an outright majority.

It’s interesting, isn’t it? – the “better than expected” part. The not reaching a majority part was completely expected. It had been widely predicted that neither coalition would reach a majority in the election.

The results so far: It seems that the Netanyahu bloc has 53 seats and his opponent Eisenkot’s bloc has 48, with the Arab parties having 19.

If Eisenkot were to form a government it would need to include the Arab coalition. Would he and his allies do so? I don’t think it’s likely, although it depends on how nakedly ambitious they are and how strongly they’re dedicated to stopping Netanyahu. Several of them have gone on record prior to the election as saying they wouldn’t agree to a coalition with the Arab parties, but will they adhere to that? The other alternative would be a coalition government with Netanyahu.

In an opinion piece by an Israeli – in the Netanyahu-hating Guardian – the headline reads, “A bitter night in Israel for all who craved a fresh start. Netanyahu survives for now – and we are more divided than ever.”

An excerpt:

At 10pm Jerusalem time, three television stations published their exit polls by veteran pollsters showing a stinging loss for Netanyahu’s current government. In all three, his current coalition won just 50 out of 120 parliamentary seats, with 70 for the opposition. It was small consolation for Netanyahu that his Likud party held a slight lead over the main challenger, the Yashar party led by former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot.

Millions of Israelis who voted for opposition parties felt exhilarated. Together, four Zionist lists within the opposition ran a two- or three-seat lead over Netanyahu’s bloc, though neither of those groupings was close to a 61-seat majority. Eisenkot gave a passionate speech about the defeat of the “coalition of failure”, by a “larger and stronger Zionist majority”. ….

Then the counting began. Within hours, Netanyahu’s bloc staged a reversal, pulling significantly ahead of the four opposition Zionist parties many hoped would replace him. The Arab parties retained a strong showing but lower than the original heady projections. But three of the four Zionist parties preferred to exclude them for coalition-building purposes. As a result, even if the total opposition vote outweighs support for the outgoing government, Netanyahu might have done it again.

It is not yet clear if any one group of parties can reach a 61-seat majority. Negotiations to form a coalition will take dizzying twists in the coming weeks; maybe a minority government or a stalemate will be the unsatisfying result.

More here:

Parties opposed to Netanyahu have a clear majority … But they are fractured and divided between right, left and center, and between Jewish and Arab parties.

Eisenkot’s Yashar party is the largest in the opposition, projected to win 21 seats, but his path to power runs through cooperation with the Arab parties, … a scenario not all the party leaders in the opposition are willing to accept.

We’ve seen this sort of thing (or something like it) before in Israel. Netanyahu often has managed to pull out a coalition but in 2019 he failed to do so:

Israeli lawmakers have voted to dissolve parliament after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to form a coalition government.

The vote triggered a fresh election, which will be held on 17 September.

Mr Netanyahu was unable to reach a deal for a fresh right-wing coalition following last month’s election.

At the heart of the impasse was a military conscription bill governing exemptions for ultra-Orthodox Jewish seminary students.

The upshot was that no one could form a government, and the Knesset once again dissolved itself and there was a third election in March of 2020. Here’s how that went:

The result was initially a stalemate, which was resolved when Likud and Blue & White reached a coalition agreement. Under the terms of the agreement, the premiership would rotate between Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz, with Gantz given the new position of Alternate Prime Minister until November 2021. …

Netanyahu and the new Israeli government were sworn in on 17 May. On 23 December, the Knesset again dissolved, resulting in the need for new elections.

In that next election in March of 2021, Bennet and Lapid took power by allying with the Arab parties So there is precedent for that, but the whole thing didn’t last very long; in November of 2022 there was still another election and Netanyahu won an outright majority.

The thirty-sixth government, a national unity government formed between eight political parties following the 2021 elections, held the narrowest possible majority (61 seats) in the 120-member Knesset. In April 2022, MK Idit Silman left the governing coalition, leaving it without a majority.

On 20 June 2022, following several legislative defeats for the government in the Knesset, prime minister Naftali Bennett and alternate prime minister Yair Lapid announced the introduction of a bill to dissolve the 24th Knesset, which was approved on 30 June. Simultaneously, in accordance with the rotation government agreement that was part of the 2021 coalition deal, Lapid became prime minister and led a caretaker government until a new government took office.

Within the context of the 2018–2022 Israeli political crisis, this was the fifth Knesset election in nearly four years,

After that experience, it seems to me that there will be a lot of pressure for the two sides to have a unity government and avoid seemingly-endless repeats. Then again, I don’t know that the spirit of compromise looms large.

Flavio Bolsonaro takes a Miami vacation

The New Neo Posted on by

It wasn’t a direct flight:

Sources earlier confirmed to CNN that Bolsonaro had left Brazil for the US after losing Sunday’s presidential election runoff against leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Brazil’s Federal Police canceled Bolsonaro’s passports after he failed to surrender them, affiliate CNN Brasil reported.

Speculation about his movements mounted after Argentine news outlet Infobae reported that Bolsonaro, a Trump-aligned candidate, had left Brazil via Argentina. The Argentine government initially said in a statement that it has “no record of Flávio Bolsonaro entering” the country.

But early Wednesday morning Argentinian time, the country’s immigration ministry said in a post to X that Bolsonaro and his family had entered Argentina from Brazil late Tuesday local time, and shortly after had boarded a flight to Guayaquil in Ecuador, according to its flight plan.

It added they had entered Argentina with “valid documentation” and without any “legal impediment.”

And now he’s landed in Miami with his wife and two daughters. The article also points out:

In leaving Brazil for the US, Bolsonaro joins a large community of Brazilian conservatives in exile — including his own brother Eduardo, former Brazilian intelligence chief Alexandre Ramagem and podcaster Paulo Figueiredo.

And you can bet more are following, if they can manage to do so.

Flavio is the son of Jair, a previous president of Brazil and rival of Lula. Jair’s history is instructive. Among other things, it features a J6 semi-equivalent that was used by Lula to successfully do to Jair what the left previously attempted and failed to do to Trump – and still fantasizes doing to him.

Here’s some of the story of how Jair ended up with a 27-year prison sentence (although he’s under house arrest now for health reasons). He lost an election to Lula and then:

On 30 December 2022, one day before the end of his term, Bolsonaro arrived in the US state of Florida and resided in Kissimmee for several months. On 8 January 2023, his supporters attacked the buildings of the Supreme Court of Brazil, the National Congress, and the Planalto Presidential Palace to instigate a military coup d’état and reinstate Bolsonaro as president. While the riots were going on, President Lula blamed Bolsonaro in a press conference. Bolsonaro condemned the protesters in a Twitter post on 9 January, and denied responsibility.

In February 2023, Bolsonaro announced that he would return to Brazil in March. This would be the first time Bolsonaro had returned since December 2022. Bolsonaro had entered the United States on a diplomatic visa, which expired on 31 January, but the family applied for tourist visas to extend their stay in Florida.

Bolsonaro returned to Brazil in March 2023 for the first time since his supporters stormed the Supreme Court, Congress, and the presidential palace two months before. Bolsonaro stated that he returned to the country to help his party and intended to campaign for the 2024 elections. On 14 April 2023, Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes ordered Bolsonaro to submit himself for questioning with the Federal Police over the storming of the Congress. …

On 30 June 2023, the Superior Electoral Court barred Bolsonaro from running for public office until 2030 as a result of his attempts to undermine the validity of Brazil’s 2022 democratic election, as well as for abuse of power with regard to using government channels to promote his campaign. … He was prosecuted on several fraud charges in the 2022 elections and events linked to the 8 January attack on federal government buildings. The decision came after a 5–2 vote in favour of conviction. …

In November 2024 he and 36 others were formally charged with plotting a coup d’état, violent abolition of the democratic rule of law, and criminal organisation. In February 2025 Bolsonaro and 33 others were formally charged with plotting to assassinate Lula da Silva and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. …

On 11 September 2025, the Supreme Federal Court sentenced Bolsonaro to 27 years and 3 months in prison over the coup plot.

Also, it was the same judge, Moraes, who had ruled against the father who recently ruled against the son:

Flavio Bolsonaro lost the October 25 runoff to [Lula] by more than 4.4 million votes — 48.2% to Lula’s 51.8% — yet federal police stopped him in the street the next morning and stripped him of all three passports on the order of Justice Alexandre de Moraes.

Moraes — whose wife’s law firm is at the center of a leaked R$131 million contract with jailed banker Daniel Vorcaro, with metadata showing Moraes himself edited the final draft — had previously been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury under the Global Magnitsky Act in July 2025, though those sanctions were lifted in December of that year.

As for the judge who extended the voting hours in the first place, which apparently helped Lula pull out the win against Flavio:

He gained notoriety as a personal attorney of [Lula] in lawsuits related to Operation Car Wash.

On 1 June 2023, Zanin was appointed by president Lula da Silva as Justice of the Supreme Federal Court, replacing retired Justice Ricardo Lewandowski.

Not too suspicious, right?

Did you know that Israel is responsible for the high price of your groceries?

The New Neo Posted on by

That’s one of the Democrats’ approaches. And who knows, perhaps enough voters are stupid enough and hateful enough to believe it.

At any rate, the Democrats must think it’s a winning approach. It’s worked in the past in many parts of the world, after all:

Furthermore, America spends far more on welfare fraud and illegal aliens than it does on Israel, and Democrats are the ones who deliberately fuel inflation and fraud. All of that is information that Jew-hating Muslims and lefties in Michigan hope voters don’t know.

The US also spends far far more on many many other countries; nor does any of that affect the price of our groceries.

More:

Without transcribing the whole ad (you can watch it if you have a very strong stomach or want a Halloween horror film), I’ll say that it features a couple sadly discussing how they can’t buy bananas or eggs because America sent some $60 billion to Israel. The ad ends by disclosing that pro-Israel PACs spent over $220,000 to boost Republican Mike Rogers over jihad-loving Muslim Brotherhood asset El-Sayed. Incidentally, El-Sayed has received many hundreds of thousands of dollars from literal terrorist affiliates, in addition to money from evil billionaires and plutocrats like the Soros family.

The Democrats rely on lies, ignorance, hatred, and envy. Is it a winning combination?

Comey again

The New Neo Posted on by

Comey seems to be in a bit of legal trouble. Again:

The Department of Justice has charged former FBI Director James Comey with transmitting national defense information to an unauthorized person and conspiring to spread it.

The charges fall under 18 U.S.C. § 793, which is known as the U.S. Espionage Act …

The DOJ has now charged Comey three times.

And nothing has come of it. I predict nothing will come of this, either.

Comey of course has clothed himself in his usual self-righteousness. He says:

Well, they’re back again.

It would almost be funny if it weren’t such an appalling abuse of the Department of Justice. One that we cannot become numb to.

Nothing’s changed with me. I’m still innocent. I’m still not afraid of these people. And I still believe in the independent federal judiciary.

Now, Comey himself would be funny if he hadn’t so badly abused the justice system.

One interesting fact is that, although the case was filed in DC District Court, the judge – Trevor McFadden – was appointed by Trump.

The defense says the statute of limitations has already run; the prosecution begs to differ.

Can you believe that Election Day is only a week away?

The New Neo Posted on by

I can’t. I’ve been dreading it for quite some time.

Don’t have a whole lot to say about it, though, that I haven’t already said. I know what the forecasts are, but I don’t know what will actually happen.

Polls seem more useless than ever, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Betting markets? They rely on polls, for the most part.

In other news, Israelis go to the polls today. The prediction is that no one will get a parliamentary majority and a coalition will be necessary. We’ve seen that before and it doesn’t always work out.

The election in Brazil: somehow the left manages to win

The New Neo Posted on by

And this was the way it happened: the polling stations were ordered to stay open two more hours. A judge in leftist Lula’s camp made the ruling, and it came too late for some areas where the polls had already closed and so it was apparently applied differentially.

The result was that Lula won a victory after having been behind in the original election (this was a runoff because neither candidate reached 51% in the first round). The Bolsonaro supporters are angry and contend that the two-hour election extension was unfair – although, by the way, Bolsonaro had also asked for it for different reasons (weather). The question is whether the judge had the authority to order it, and whether it gave the Lula areas an unfair advantage because more of the areas that ended up staying open were Lula strongholds.

It’s somewhat difficult to get reliable and detailed information on this, but it is highly suspicious.

More here.

Bolsonaro has asked for the results to be annulled.

Good luck with that. If fraud has indeed occurred, it’s almost impossible to change the results and have a do-over – and those who challenge the results are demonized. Thing is, sometimes fraud allegations are themselves fraudulent – and sometimes they’re true.

NOTE: Hugh Hewitt wrote a book in 2004 entitled If It’s Not Close They Can’t Cheat. However, many national elections these days seem to be quite close, so it stands to reason that they can cheat.

Medicare for All – and also a pony

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember the old saying “There is no free lunch”? It was a popular phrase when I was young.

According to Google AI:

Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein popularized the acronym TANSTAAFL (“There Ain’t No Such Thing As a Free Lunch”) in his 1966 novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. …

Milton Friedman heavily used the phrase as the title of his 1975 book to argue against government-subsidized programs, price controls, and free-spending policies.

However, both then and now, the left’s favorite tactic is to promise free lunches in various guises, and then fail to deliver them. The hope is that the voting public won’t catch on. Here’s an example:

Democratic Senate candidates Troy Jackson (Maine) and Abdul El-Sayed (Michigan) have renewed the push for Medicare for All, a signature feature of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign a decade ago. Now, as then, the issue has proven an effective vote-winner in Democratic primaries.

Among other things, “Medicare for All” makes use of the envy and anger of many in the younger generation towards the Boomers. They’ve got Medicare; why can’t we? However:

But the mechanics of Medicare for All proposals tend to be far less popular than the slogans. For instance, the Medicare for All Act, cosponsored by 117 House Democrats last year, would cap total revenues at each hospital as a core financing mechanism. Evidence from a unique policy experiment in Maryland shows that such revenue caps reduce the number of patients hospitals can treat, while making care costlier for those whom they do treat. …

Medicare for All advocates argue that private health insurance inevitably creates enormous inefficiencies. They claim that the government could save hundreds of billions of dollars every year by paying less for drugs, hospital care, and insurance administration. These savings could then fund a big expansion of benefits, broadening access to care and picking up costs that are currently borne out-of-pocket.

In reality, other developed countries deal with many of the same painful trade-offs between cost and access to care that Americans lament. The U.S. health-care system, for all its flaws, allows residents to obtain more cutting-edge medical procedures, without the long waiting lists found in other nations. And catastrophic out-of-pocket health-care costs in most European countries are similar to those found in America.

The article goes on to describe a Maryland policy from 2014 that did the following:

… allowed revenues at each hospital in the state and trusted those facilities to ration care for patients. This payment arrangement, known as “global budgeting,” drives much of the savings assumed by single-payer proposals and constitutes Section 611 of the Medicare for All Act.

Unfortunately, global budgeting has had the opposite of its intended effect in Maryland. With total revenues fixed, the state’s hospitals started treating fewer patients and charging more for each patient whom they did treat. Community hospitals have increasingly dumped seriously ill patients on the state’s once-prestigious academic medical centers, like Johns Hopkins, leaving these centers short of funds to deliver the most complex medical procedures. From 2012 to 2023, the state went from performing 61 percent more kidney transplants per capita than the nation to 40 percent fewer. Emergency department waiting times have surged to 153 percent of the national average, substantially higher than any other state. Because Maryland hospitals could maintain total revenues while delivering less care, the cost of common inpatient procedures rose 7 percent to 34 percent more than they did nationwide, depending on the procedure.

So, what do Americans think? They want Medicare for All as long as it’s a free lunch:

A recent poll found that Americans approved of Medicare for All in principle by a margin of 66 percent to 34 percent—but they opposed it, 64 percent to 35 percent, if it would increase their taxes, and by 76 percent to 24 percent if it delayed access to medical tests and treatments.

As I said, the left relies on many voters to remain ignorant of the nearly-inevitable negative consequences of Medicare for All.

Adventures in travel

The New Neo Posted on by

When I first read it, I kept thinking this story was a scam; it’s so preposterous. But apparently it’s true:

More than 5,000 passengers expecting a week of fun in the sun in the Bahamas instead found themselves headed for chilly Canada after stormy weather forced their Royal Caribbean cruise to change course.

The Oasis of the Seas departed New Jersey on Oct. 18 for what was supposed to be a seven-day tropical getaway — but passengers were told with just half a day’s notice that they were heading to Halifax, Nova Scotia, instead.

Quite a change and not a minor one. Not to mention the packing problems. I guess the layered look will be in.

While we’re discussing travel, I bookmarked this link (also from the NY Post) a few months ago and never got around to discussing it. So, now seems like a propitious time:

A couple have sparked outrage among locals after they were filmed having sex on a remote beach in Thailand.

French tourists Halan, 24, and Nadia, 24, were arrested after footage of the pair naked on the sand in Phuket went viral over the weekend.

In the footage, the pair can be seen fully stripped down as they engage in sexual acts in broad daylight at Rayee Beach.

According to horrified onlookers, the couple made little effort to hide their rendezvous, with some claiming they could be heard from across the beach.

The incident has since sparked backlash among locals, who slammed police and authorities for not monitoring the area.

My first question: how remote was the beach?

My second question: did they get carried away by the name of the island?

The coming insurrection?

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s been a lot of recent talk on the right about information coming from Data Republican about the possibility of a coup by the left. Glenn Reynolds has written about it at Substack (hat tip: commenter “sdferr”). Here’s an excerpt:

I hope that all of this is just pre-election vaporware and none of it will come to pass. But it’s worth noting that we’re talking about this because a group of 1500 senior government, military, and NGO officials have been talking about overthrowing the government among themselves. That alone is a cataclysmic change in our political environment. Many of them are likely prosecutable for seditious conspiracy — which unlike most other conspiracy crimes does not require an overt act in support of the conspiracy to constitute a crime — and even if, as is most likely, this whole thing is a fizzle, the Department of Justice should prosecute everyone subject to the law. Letting people get away with this kind of plotting just ensures it will happen again.

I haven’t written about this yet because I consider it something that’s essentially been going on for many many years. A not-dissimilar group was ready, waiting, and prepared in 2016 as the Trump administration was about to begin. What was Russiagate, if not an attempt to overthrow (or at least hamper) the duly-elected government?

I also recall seeing a piece online (after the 2016 election but prior to the inauguration) written by someone in government which referred to a large group of government employees already designating itself as The Resistance. You remember the term, but you may not recall how early it was operating.

I haven’t been able to locate the piece for years, but I recall it fairly clearly. The idea was not to quit a government job but to stay at it and sabotage and undermine everything the administration did, and the article indicated there was a huge number of government employees organized and ready to do just that.

And then there was all the lawfare against Trump during the Biden years. Biden’s involvement wasn’t necessary – although in his better-functioning years he may have approved it. The debanking, the blocking of opinions on the right including but not limited to the Hunter laptop content, the multiple impeachments, all of it was part of a similar effort. I am nearly certain that there were plans for bigger efforts, as well, plans that dovetailed with the current ones.

Some of this was quite successful in hampering Trump and others on the right, but ultimately it failed in its goal of permanent leftist power with the election of Trump in 2024. The left will not stop trying, of that I am quite sure. And as time goes on and more and more younger cohorts enter the voting pool, the number of voters who think socialism and ends-justify-means approaches are just peachy-keen will grow.

I also read a lot about Democrat plans to pack SCOTUS and to eliminate the filibuster, as well as to create some additional blue states. But that’s not the least bit new, either. Democrats tried it during the Biden era and the only thing that stopped them (besides the GOP members of Congress) were Sinema and Manchin. I have never doubted that if Democrats regain control they will attempt to accomplish what they failed to accomplish back then. As I said, the goal has long been entrenched power for the left, by hook or by crook.