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Home » Open thread 10/22/2026

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Open thread 10/22/2026 — 25 Comments

  1. Mike Plaiss, informational and depressing opinion piece from The Federalist. Reversal seems nearly impossible.

  2. The premier Federal government think tank I used to research for had its own “polling section,” and looking over the gathered polls, and their analysis, I formed a certain impression.

    In many comments here, over the years, I’ve voiced my suspicion regarding polls as being essentially worthless–unless you can be assured that those conducting those polls are both competent, and without a particular agenda or party preference–because its apparently just too easy to screw such polls up, or to manipulate them, to poll a universe of people who are almost certainly going to deliver the result you want, or to present the results in a such a way as to confirm/illustrate whichever point the pollsters are trying to make, whichever candidate, or issue they favor.

    Then, of course, the MSM also plays its part, by the way they either don’t report the results of unfavorable polls, or report and put a twist on poll results in a way to favor the position or candidate they favor; perhaps twenty pages of questions asked in a national level poll, and they may pull out and report on/emphasize one particular question and answer.

  3. I believe the video with Ann Miller is from the 1938 movie “Tarnished Angels.”
    Wow , 88 years ago !!!

  4. @Mike Plaiss: Didn’t want huxley to miss this. Montpellier featured prominently, and it’s a good essay.

    It is a quite good essay and accords with my limited knowledge.

    I’ve started getting up around 6:30, so I can dress, then walk somewhat leisurely downtown to an Italian restaurant which offers café service at 7:00. I get there around 7:20, which gives me an hour and a half to watch the sun rise and the city wake up before going to my 9:00 class a few blocks away.

    Anyway. This morning a big screen tv was playing soundlessly not far from me. I was watching a news show on a beautiful, I presume rich, young Muslim woman from Oman who had opened a pastry shop. Everything is shiny, new and happy.

    Then the scene cuts to shiny, young children all clad in brand new Muslim clothes, sparkling with gold thread designs. They are all smiling and waving Palestinian flags.

    I’m thinking, this country is doomed.

  5. There are conservative French people and they are many, but from what I can tell not a majority and they are up against the rest of the country, as well as the global elites represented by Macron.

    My host is an excellent example. He is a bright, well-read man, but I’ve heard his min-rant three times about how people like Trump blame the migrants, when it’s really the stinginess of the government not to provide proper schools for all the children.

    He is aware that economic life is getting harder, but he is unable to make the connection between high French debt, weak economy, and the refusal of the French to budge on reducing the debt by even raising the age of retirement from 62 to 64 years of age.

    Meanwhile, the migrants not only are not acculturating, but as the article says half don’t work and they soak up a considerable amount of welfare benefits. Throw in the many migrants’ violent hatred of France and the West, then you have a triple whammy.

    They could find a gradual solution, but they won’t. IMO France will have to suffer a severe breakdown before they can rebuild, if they choose to.

    Or maybe they’ll just go broke and France will have to sell big pieces of itself and the pretty parts will be turned into museums for tourists.

    I don’t know what will happen, but it will get ugly.

  6. I visited France in 2025. Great trip. The “indigenous” French were universally friendly and altogether delightful, even in Paris. Normandy was our principle destination, and it was wonderful, beautiful. The Normans were politely, quietly, but firmly welcoming to Americans. Some of the elders recalled to me how, when they were children, they watched as American boys fought their way across the nearby fields, killing Germans — and in all too many instances — getting killed by Germans. These now elderly Norman-French do not forget this and they remain grateful to the Americans for driving out the Boche and, not least, for the sacrifices they made in doing so. We hired a private guide to tour the D-Day beaches, he was Norman, and young, and he spoke of the landings at Omaha Beach and Pointe du Hoc with such emotion that I was moved me to tears. He privately confided to me that he was glad that our entire tour group, about 10 people, were all Americans and that there no English present.

    I love France and I grieve for that nation and her people over what is happening to them.

  7. Huxley

    The left/progressive mind virus. The facts are in front of your lying eyes. The virus causes you to try and fit the facts into the virus’s frame.

  8. Oh my! This should be quite damning for El-Sayed. CoPilot:

    Abdul El-Sayed’s 2012 Letter to Mohamed Morsi

    Abdul El-Sayed signed a 2012 Arabic-language statement urging then-President Mohamed Morsi to “purge the media and the police” and rejecting outside criticism of Egypt’s Islamist government
    http://www.jfeed.com

    The letter and its content
    The document, published on November 25, 2012 on the Egyptian news portal Al-Ahram Gate, was signed by 46 self?described “leaders of the Egyptian community” in the U.S., including El-Sayed, then a medical student at Columbia University
    http://www.jfeed.com

    Its key points were:

    Support for Morsi’s “revolutionary decisions” — specifically his constitutional declaration granting himself sweeping powers
    http://www.jfeed.com

    A call for Morsi to “purge the media and the police as quickly as possible”
    http://www.jfeed.com

    A declaration that Egyptian Americans “strongly reject those voices… courting America and Europe to take a position against the Egyptian regime”
    Free Beacon

    The letter was in Arabic and was later translated and reported by the Washington Free Beacon and other outlets

    I guess if it written in the Arabic language, it doesn’t count. (sarc)

  9. I always wanted to learn to tap dance but no one taught it in my town. Also, the only area in So Cal without an ice rink. There are not many things I’d go back and change if I had the power to but that is one of them.

  10. Ilhan Omar gave me a laugh:
    “Did you marry your brother?”
    “Not to my knowledge.”
    So, she doesn’t know if she married the guy? Or she doesn’t know if he’s her brother?? Or both???
    = = = = = = = =
    Republicans should form a squad to defeat The Squad at the polls: a “firing squad!”

  11. As we all know, the honorable representative’s “knowledge” is of the fluid and flexible variety.

    (Though she does have several adamantine “values”…)

  12. Ann Miller belonged to the generation that started as child performers on the vaudeville circuit.

    No Drama Skool or Film Skool.
    Just hard work and intuition honed by desperation and experience.
    And often the personal hardships (and bad choices) did not stop with stardom…

    I saw her last hurrah in the nostalgic Broadway show “Sugar Babies” with Mickey Rooney – another hardscrabble child star. They were delightful – and delighted to be tottering back into the limelight. They performed with that generation’s manic eagerness to please.

    Off stage she was a bit eccentric, but Rooney discussed her mystical nonsense with an understanding shrug.

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