Spoke earlier today to a close friend, former colleague at State (he is still there, works in the building, as we say), about this very issue. He is center left, but open to persuasion (voted for Youngkin in VA). The above quote fits his feelings well, though he admitted that most of the center left sentiment at State sees it differently.

Biden needs MI to win. MI has sadly made vote by mail standards worse since 2020. If you are going to goose the numbers, you need confounding factors for the electoral data.

FWIW, Muslims historically are crap at “honest” GOTV. (I’m excluding the Somali-type racket in MN). So if you are the Biden campaign, you (or preferably an org with plausible deniability) will register a bunch, and count on vote by mail shenanigans. Then when you get weird results, you can explain with, well, “Biden got a lot more votes in Dearborn b/c of Israel.”

Likewise, assume a Jewish protest vote of, “I hate Trump because abortion/Supreme Court, I hate Biden because Israel, I’m not voting at all.” Again, vote by mail fraud can ensure those votes happen anyway.
(Separately, this is why I think Kennedy could take more votes from Biden vs. Trump in the long run. For a certain type of what I would call a “civil liberties” Jewish voter, Kennedy is a path for a protest vote versus staying home — and that type of vote cast can’t be used for vote by mail fraud purposes. Most will be in NY, NJ, CA, where their vote doesn’t help Biden, or in Florida, where they likely won’t flip Florida blue either. There will be some in MI, PA, and Maricopa county in AZ, for example, though Jewish vote in AZ and FL trend comparatively more Republican vs. other states). The Jewish vote has also been incredibly important to Dems for fundraising purposes. It will be interesting to see if the Israel policy has any impact on fundraising; maybe the Iranians and Quataris are now outspending them.

It also wouldn’t surprise me if the Iran Deal was done to fund who knows what in the form of NGOs or other floats back to the Dem party and/or Obama/Joe families personally (someone is funding, for example, the illegal Act Blue donations of 40k a year from the little old lady who doesn’t remember making donations at all, see Project Veritas videos), and that further justifies Biden’s pro-Iran positioning.

Politics is a dirty mess. All the more reason to have less government staffed by humans.

The auto companies are reacting faster to market changes:

“General Motors Co. told the state in a WARN notice last December it would lay off 1,300 employees at plants in Lansing and Orion Township, where the launch of electric pickups has been delayed at least a year. The company said it would offer displaced workers opportunities elsewhere.

Stellantis NV told the state it would lay off up to 2,450 at the Detroit Mack Assembly Plant starting in February, though “only a few hundred” employees were permanently cut, company spokeswoman Jodi Tinson told Crain’s, declining to provide a number. Additionally, the company cut about 400 salaried employees last month, mostly in Auburn Hills, with more anticipated.

Meanwhile, Ford Motor Co. has slashed shifts dramatically at Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Dearborn, where planned output of the F-150 Lightning was reduced by half. The move impacted around 1,400 workers, some of which were offered work at other plants.

Volatility is typical in the industry, but not to this extent, Masters said. Automakers are moving quickly to become leaner while responding to fast changing demand signals, by making cuts at an EV plant while staffing up at a hybrid facility, for example.”

https://www.crainsdetroit.com/manufacturing/auto-industry-layoffs-michigan-underscore-rocky-ev-transition – as of 4/11/2024

– If you live in a “democracy” where everyone routinely votes to censor and imprison one another, you still live in a police state.

– The word “democracy” appears to have become polite shorthand for insisting that an insular minority in control of the American government always knows what is best for the vast, unrepresented majority. Even worse, it sometimes seems nothing more than a convenient disguise for camouflaging abuses of power….

Other key grafs:

…It is for these many reasons that freedom-loving Americans detest the all-too-frequent pronouncements from politicians and pundits that there is nothing so sacred as American “democracy.” “Democracy” means very little without well-defined limits on government power. It means even less without sure-fire protections for individual freedoms and rights.

‘ The word “democracy” is often used interchangeably with some vague notion of the “common good.” Because people with financial and political power are frequently the elite few who are actually defining the “common good” for everyone else, however, assertions of what is good for “our democracy” have a way of sounding abrasive, if not outright divisive. When “defending democracy” includes demonizing political opponents who are accused of transgressing it, those with power behave astonishingly undemocratically, themselves….’

Yep, in case anyone has forgotten…(and it seems that quite a few have)…

This is hugely frustrating to me. People’s minds are being changed based on acceptance of Hamas fake statistics or media misreporting or out and out lies.

I was happy to see my question become the subject of a post. Thanks, neo!

https://twitter.com/chiIIum/status/1778767823860302155

“How Turkish Sanctions Against Israel Will Impact Bilateral Trade”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/how-turkish-sanctions-against-israel-will-impact-bilateral-trade