What do the current presidential polls mean?

The New Neo Posted on by

Ace reports on polls that are encouraging for Trump. When I read that sort of thing, I have mixed feelings.

The first feeling is the stirring of hope. Of course, the 2024 presidential election shouldn’t even be close. In terms of a comparison of their records as president, Trump should be leading Biden by at least 80/20. Realistically, however, I know that TDR and the MSM and force of habit mean that the actual numbers are far closer. But it doesn’t surprise me that Trump is nevertheless ahead; that’s how terrible Biden has been.

Paradoxically, Trump has also been helped by the lawfare against him. A lot of people, even those who dislike Trump but understand the danger of politically motivated trials, don’t like what’s happening to him and blame the Biden administration and the Democrats for banana republic tactics.

But … but … despite encouraging polls, over the years I have lost a great deal of faith in the validity of election results. The opportunity to cheat is there, because Democrats keep trying to advance rules to make cheating more easy rather than less. I think there’s little question that the left has no ethical objections to cheating; it’s only the practical considerations that might thwart them, and in big blue cities there isn’t much to stop them. And it’s in big blue cities that cheating gives the Democrats a great deal of bang for their buck, even in swing states or perhaps especially in swing states.

What’s more, there’s plenty of time before voting starts to cook up some new anti-Trump scheme and spread the word with the full cooperation of the MSM.

So it’s hard for me to have a strong belief that Biden will lose and Trump will win. I write “Biden” because, although many if not most people have been saying for ages that Biden won’t be running, I have long held that – short of him dying or close to it – Biden will remain the Democrats’ nominee in 2024. It’s an ominous prospect – and yet it may be helpful in a way, because Biden has become so unpopular an incumbent.

But even if Trump were to be elected – and I strongly hope that will happen – it’s terrible to even contemplate the forces that will be arrayed against him.

Biden to Israel: I’ll tell you where the Nazis are hiding if you promise not to hurt them

The New Neo Posted on by

Biden and/or Biden’s handlers have come up with a new way to madden:

“The Biden administration, working urgently to stave off a full-scale Israeli invasion of Rafah, is offering Israel valuable assistance if it holds back, including sensitive intelligence to help the Israeli military pinpoint the location of Hamas leaders and find the group’s hidden tunnels, according to four people familiar with the U.S. offers,” reports the Washington Post.

With “friends” like the Biden administration, the State Department, and our intelligence agencies, who needs enemies?

Let’s see what the possibilities are here. My leading one is that the so-called intelligence is pretty much worthless, and that this is just an attempt at teasing Israel into sparing Hamas while getting little in return.

But another possibility is that the administration has actionable intelligence it’s been holding back on in order to coerce Israel/Netanyahu into letting Hamas live to fight another day. And that, in turn, is motivated by the same goal as the previous possibility: to further the left’s delusional and/or malevolent notion that Iran should be empowered to dominate the region. That latter aim has been in evidence since Obama took office, and although it was temporarily reversed by the Trump administration it roared back as soon as Biden was inaugurated.

A further goal is to force Netanyahu out of power, an aim which also originated with Obama. The funny thing – and I don’t mean “funny ha-ha” – is that Biden was chosen by Obama to supposedly be the foreign policy expert, the cool and experienced hand, in the Obama administration. Biden’s previous foreign policy experience was, however, at being wrong. And then he picked up more experience at furthering Obama’s Iran-enabling goals.

Whether the Biden family also gets some money on the side out of this approach is possible, although unknown.

Hopefully, if will all backfire on the Biden administration politically and militarily as well, and Israel will not yield to this sort of pressure.

NOTE: I’m having trouble finding it right now, but I also read a report that the Biden administration is helping to organize and fund the anti-Netanyahu contingent in Israel. If true, it wouldn’t be the first time; the Obama administration used taxpayer money to interfere against Netanyahu in Israeli elections.

Happy Mother’s Day!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a slightly-edited repeat of my traditional Mother’s Day post. It was written while my mother was still alive.]

Okay, who are these three dark beauties?

A hint: one of them is one of the very first pictures you’ve ever seen on this blog of neo, sans apple. Not that you’d recognize me, of course. Even my own mother might not recognize me from this photo.

My own mother, you say? Of course she would. Ah, but she’s here too, looking a bit different than she does today—Mother’s Day—at ninety-eight years of age. Just a bit; maybe her own mother wouldn’t recognize her, either.

Her own mother? She’s the one who’s all dressed up, with longer hair than the rest of us.

The photo of my grandmother was taken in the 1880’s; the one of my mother in the teens of the twentieth century; and the one of me, of course, in the 1950s.

Heredity, ain’t it great? My mother and grandmother are both sitting for formal portraits at a professional photographer’s studio, but by the time I came around amateur snapshots were easy to take with a smallish Brownie camera. My mother is sitting on the knee of her own grandfather, my grandmother’s father, a dapper gentleman who was always very well-turned out. I’m next to my older brother, who’s reading a book to me but is cropped out of this photo. My grandmother sits alone in all her finery.

We all not only resemble each other greatly in our features and coloring, but in our solemnity. My mother’s and grandmother’s seriousness is probably explained by the strange and formal setting; mine is due to my concentration on the book, which was Peter Pan (my brother was only pretending to read it, since he couldn’t read yet, but I didn’t know that at the time). My mother’s resemblance to me is enhanced by our similar hairdos (or lack thereof), although hers was short because it hadn’t really grown in yet, and mine was short because she purposely kept it that way (easier to deal with).

My grandmother not only has the pretty ruffled dress and the long flowing locks, but if you look really closely you can see a tiny earring dangling from her earlobe. When I was young, she showed me her baby earrings; several miniature, delicate pairs. It astounded me that they’d actually pierced a baby’s ears (and that my grandmother had let the holes close up later on, and couldn’t wear pierced earrings any more), whereas I had to fight for the right to have mine done in my early teens.

I’m not sure what my mother’s wearing; some sort of baby smock. But I know what I have on: my brother’s hand-me-down pajamas, and I was none too happy about it, of that you can be sure.

So, a very happy Mother’s Day to you all! What would mothers be without babies…and mothers…and babies….and mothers….?

Comparison of the Jewish and Muslim state populations in the US

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve read a number of comments from people wondering about comparisons of Jewish and Muslim populations in different states in the US, so I’m tackling the question here.

In Europe the proportions are way in favor of Muslims, due to a combination of the Holocaust and of the encouragement of Muslim immigration. That is one of the main reasons Europe is in such a quandary, with many countries there deeply afraid of their own Muslim populations, which are substantial.

Just to take an example (doing some quick math here): in Sweden there are about 15,000 Jews out of a total population of about ten and a half million people. That’s a Jewish population of about .15%; in other words, minuscule. But Sweden has many more Muslims, probably about 8% of the total population. France is 5% Muslim and about .65% Jewish. These figures may not be exactly correct, but there’s no question that all over Western Europe the number of Muslims in the population dwarfs the number of Jews, a situation that has had tremendous political repercussions.

In fact, almost all the Jews in the world are concentrated in two countries: Israel and the US, which have roughly the same number as each other. And most US Jews cluster in certain cities in blue states, although for the most part those states would be blue even without the Jewish vote. One of those states is also red (at least at the moment): Florida.

But to get to the point of this post, here is a ranking of the Muslim population of the US, state by state. And here is the same for the Jewish population of the US, state by state.

Michigan, for example, has three times more Muslims than Jews. That tells you something.

Most US Jews are concentrated in California (1,234,540 and 3.1% of the state’s population) , New York (1,785,727 and 8.8% of the state’s population), New Jersey (626,220 and 6.7% of the state’s population), Maryland (240,100 and 3.9%), Masschusetts (301,880 and 4.3%), Pennsylvania (434,165 and 3.3%), Illinois (325,160 and 2.5%), Florida (672,465 and 3.1%), and Connecticut (118,350 and 3.3%). Nearly all those states are so very blue that – at least, by my quick calculation – even if every single Jew in them voted for Republicans the states would remain blue. As I already said, Florida is red. That leaves Pennsylvania as the only state where the Jewish vote would make a difference, and (interestingly enough) Pennsylvania has an extremely pro-Israel Democrat as senator, Fetterman, as well as a fairly pro-Israel Jewish Democrat, Josh Shapiro, as governor.

As far as the Muslim populations go: New York (724,475 and 3.6%), California (504,056 and 1.3%), Illinois (473,792 and 3.7%), New Jersey (321,652 and 3.5%), Michigan (241,828 and 2.4%), Maryland (188,914 and 3.1%), Pennsylvania 1.2%, and Massachusetts 1.9%. We therefore can see that Illinois and Michigan have more Muslims than Jews, especially Michigan, and their Muslim populations are fairly sizeable. There are other states with more Muslims than Jews, but they have a lot fewer of either and as voting blocks neither is especially important although in swing states they could make a difference. For example, North Carolina has 1.3% Muslims to .5% Jews. Georgia has almost the same number of both: 1.3% Jews and 1.2% Muslims. Louisiana has .3% Jews and .5% Muslims. Maine has .9% Jews and 1.2% Muslims, and Iowa has .2% Jews and .7% Muslims. A lot of states are like that.

So that’s the answer, as best I can tell.

Michigan: sounds like the voting fix may be in

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve noticed that when a state turns blue – both legislative houses plus a governorship controlled by Democrats – the government often uses the opportunity to change the voting laws in an attempt to ensure that the state never goes Republican again. And usually, there’s little the Republicans can do about those changes unless they somehow violate the state constitution and the state’s highest courts are not blue as well. The laws are passed legally, signed into law, and the die is cast.

For example, there’s Michigan:

In the 2022 mid-term elections in Michigan, voters handed control of the Michigan Legislature to the Democrats, giving them a majority in both the Michigan House of Representatives and the Michigan Senate — something that hasn’t happened for forty years. Since then, they’ve been working hand in glove with our notorious Democrat governor, Gretchen Whitmer, including passing a slew of bills that significantly transform election procedures in the State of Michigan and make it easier to commit election fraud, while at the same time making it harder to uncover it.

That’s the ticket. As Turkey’s Endogan once said, “Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off.”

More on Michigan:

The new legislation hands over verification of absentee ballots from an elected bipartisan board of inspectors to city or township clerks. They also significantly expand the powers of election clerks and the Secretary of State. For example, the Secretary of State can now dictate election procedures without going through the formal rule-making process. This greatly increases the potential for fraud and significantly reduces the safeguards against it.

Senate Bill 367 allows clerks in municipalities with at least 5,000 people to process and count absentee ballots eight days before Election Day. The eight-day, pre-election day window will make it very difficult for poll watchers to observe the handling and counting of mail-in votes. (What could possibly go wrong there?) Municipalities will work closely with the SoS, to whom the bill assigns the task of unilaterally “supervising the implementation and conduct of early voting for state and federal elections.” (God forbid that the SoS has entrenched political biases.)

According to Representative Ruth Johnson (R) Holly, MI, these bills remove every instance of the word ‘fraud’ in the previous law and replace them with the word, ‘error.’ Criminality of intent is thus effectively insulated from prosecution and the ability to address election fraud is stripped away. In fact, under Senate Bills 603 and 604, alleged fraud can no longer be used to request a recount.

This not only seems to be doing away with the idea of fraud triggering a recount (which in the case of actual fraud wouldn’t do much good anyway, because if fraudulent votes have been cast they will just be counted again), it also seems to be doing away with bipartisan control over the voting process. But I assume that’s the point and the goal. The Democrats are trying to make it impossible for Republicans to ever get control and use the same mechanisms against them. And so what if the voters come to no longer trust the process. As long as the left can remain in control, the left doesn’t need their trust or their acquiescence.

Liberty and “hate speech”: as mild-mannered Canada morphs into China

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s been happening step-by-step under Trudeau, but this prospect is especially alarming (hat tip Instapundit):

I remembered seeing something about Trudeau’s digital censorship bill on Michael Shellengerger’s Public site earlier this year, but the idea of police arresting people on the basis of retroactive searches apparently didn’t register. “No way,” I thought …

… [T]he retroactive punishment clause … places a responsibility on Canadians (or visitors to Canada, as I’d learn) to delete any old statements on the Internet that may constitute illegal hate speech under the new bill.

Blaive noted, however, that while you can delete a past offense, the new Canadian law also punishes future or potential crimes. She wrote:

… “If the courts believe you are likely to commit a ‘hate crime’ or disseminate ‘hate propaganda’ (not defined), you can be placed under house arrest and your ability to communicate with others restricted… If the court believes there’s a risk you may get drunk or high and start tweeting under the influence — although how is unclear, given you can’t use your phone or a PC — it can order you to submit regular urine samples to the authorities. Anyone who refuses to comply with these diktats can be sent to prison…”

Extremely alarming. But Canada has many more restrictions on speech than the US, and has been going in this direction for quite a while.

The legislation has been presented as aimed at protecting children, and most of its most Draconian elements have not been reported on by the MSM, for the most part:

Official Canadian sites stressed the Online Harms Act created “stronger protections for kids” and “a new vision for safer and more inclusive participation online.” Initial CBC coverage was almost indistinguishable from that federal press release, quoting Justice Minister Arif Virani saying “We cannot tolerate anarchy on the Internet,” and “the mental health and even the lives of our kids are at stake.” …

The only mainstream American publication to reference the worst elements of the bill was a March 14 New York Post piece that hit the key notes of life imprisonment and pre-crime …

Canada rarely doles out life prison terms for murder, but C-63, it seemed, was imagining life for offenses that weren’t even crimes, so long as they’re committed with hateful intent. … Add a fuller expanation of the financial rewards of up to $20,000 for snitching (the bill uses the term “informant” twice), combined with penalties up to $50,000 for the accused, and it seemed no one outside of Ezra Levant’s perpetually downranked Rebel News had given all the scary elements of the bill real coverage.

Those articles on Levant’s site, which is almost never mentioned in American media without the prefixes “far right” or “extremist right” and almost never appear in early Google searches, are also the only ones I’ve seen so far that report the seemingly crucial fact that many of the child protection and/or pornography provisions that got the most official coverage appear to already be against the law in Canada. The angles sold by Trudeau and Justice Minister Arif Verani about protecting children and making hate offenses criminal are mostly all on the books already.

So the ostensible reason for the legislation appears to be a sham. The real reason? Control of the population by the left through the mechanism of selective prosecution and fear of prosecution.

Update on Gerard’s book

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s a continuing saga.

I’ve gotten very far. The book is edited and formatted. I’m 90% finished with designing a website for selling the book, including deciding on all the methods for taking money. I have a book cover. I had decided on a publisher to do an initial print run of 300; hopefully I could sell more and do another run, but I’d start with that.

Note the past tense in that last sentence. I had decided on a publisher after doing a ton of research, and the company I chose seemed wonderful: responsive, polite, reasonable in price, and they even sent me free samples of paper types and a book or two they had published. Looked good.

Yesterday I was ready to order my test copy, and if that went well I’d order the print run.

Today I learned that within the last week the company has suddenly gone out of business. So it’s back to the drawing board on that.

This project is taking close to a year longer than I thought it would. But I still hope to issue the book at some point in June. We’ll see.

Impeachment articles filed against Biden

The New Neo Posted on by

This certainly is called for:

Rep. Cory Mills, R-Fla., formally filed articles of impeachment against President Biden on Friday over his recent comments about withholding offensive weapons aid to Israel, drawing parallels to House Democrats’ first impeachment of former President Donald Trump.

The first-term House Republican told Fox News Digital it was his “constitutional duty” to do so.

His legislative text, first obtained by Fox News Digital, accuses Biden of “abuse of power” and charges that he tried to force Israel into changing its own defense policies by leveraging lethal aid.

“In violation of his oath to faithfully execute the office of President and to uphold the Constitution, President Biden abused the powers of his office by soliciting a ‘quid pro quo’ with Israel while leveraging vital military aid for policy changes. This egregious action not only compromised the credibility of the United States but also undermined the interests of our longstanding ally, Israel. Therefore, President Biden’s conduct warrants impeachment, trial, removal from office, and disqualification from holding any future office under the United States,” Mills said in a statement.

I doubt much will come of it. Even if somehow the impeachment vote gets a majority, the Senate would just let it die. But it would get the Democrats on record as being okay with what Joe has done.

Plus, Kamala Harris is Biden’s impeachment insurance.

The classified documents trial is on hold for a while

The New Neo Posted on by

And that was supposed to be the strongest case against Trump.

Well, it turns out it may have seemed stronger than it was because of prosecutorial misconduct.

However, if the case had been brought in DC or NY instead of Florida, it would be soldiering on without interruption.

Here’s how CNN initially handled the news. Nothing much to see here, right?

“Issues around classified evidence.” No actors; just evidence and “issues.” Big yawn, right?

Julie Kelly has more of the backstory. There are a host of reasons for Judge Cannon’s postponement, but these two are certainly among them:

On Friday night, in another shocking development, Special Counsel Jack Smith admitted materials contained in boxes seized during the August 2022 FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago are not in their original condition, raising serous questions as to how the case can proceed. …

We might next week see the unsealing and docketing of grand jury materials from Washington, D.C.; among the many corrupt facets of this case is the fact the DOJ conducted roughly 99 percent of the investigation in Washington rather than the proper jurisdiction of southern Florida. The reason why is obvious: the ex-chief judge of the D.C. District Court, Obama appointee and Trump hater Beryl Howell, rubber stamped every DOJ request including an egregious request to pierce attorney-client privilege between Donald Trump and his lawyer, Evan Corcoran.

Howell cited the “crime fraud exception” before forcing Corcoran to produce all of this records to Smith. Those records represent the basis for the obstruction counts against Trump and long-time personal aide Waltine Nauta in Smith’s 40-count indictment. Cannon recently expressed frustration during a court hearing last month about the fact grand jury files related to the case remain in Washington—some under seal.

We also have this from Kelly:

A few weeks after the armed FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, the Department of Justice released a stunning photograph depicting alleged contraband seized from Donald Trump’s Palm Beach estate that day; the image showed colored sheets representing scary classification levels attached to files purportedly discovered in Trump’s private office. …

… the crime scene pic immediately went viral—just as Attorney General Merrick Garland, who authorized the unprecedented raid, intended. …

… An ex-CIA officer told ABC News the cover sheets indicated the highest level of secrecy, which in the wrong hands could have resulted in murder. …

New court filings in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s espionage and obstruction case against Trump and two co-defendants conclusively demonstrate that the government used the cover sheets to deceive the public as well as the court. The photo was a stunt, and one that adds more fuel to this dumpster-fire case. …

In what must be considered not only an act of doctoring evidence but willfully misleading the American people into believing the former president is a criminal and threat to national security, agents involved in the raid attached the cover sheets to at least seven files to stage the photo.

Classified cover sheets were not “recovered” in the container, contrary to Bratt’s declaration to the court. In fact, after being busted recently by defense attorneys for mishandling evidence in the case, Bratt had to fess up about how the cover sheets actually ended up on the documents. …

But now defense attorneys claim, and the special counsel concedes, that some placeholders do not match the relevant document. …

In other words, in their zeal to stage a phony photo using official classified cover sheets, FBI agents might have failed to accurately match the placeholder sheet with the appropriate document. This is a potentially case-blowing mistake, particularly if the document in question is one of the 34 records that represents the basis of espionage charges against Trump. …

After the boxes were transported from Florida to the hopelessly corrupt Washington FBI field office (another scandalous aspect of the case since the investigation should have been conducted in southern Florida not in another jurisdiction), a private company took scans of the inside of the boxes. But according to the defense team, the current condition of the boxes does not match the scans taken in August 2022.

As for the MSM, here’s how the Guardian and many other MSM sources have been covering the story: not a word about the possible misconduct; just the delay, and a strong insinuation that Judge Cannon is biased towards Trump. Here’s Politico, which covered it much the same way: very ho-hum, and no details of the new issues except to say there has been a “tangle of pretrial conflicts between special counsel Jack Smith and Trump’s attorneys.” Well, gee; sounds like a courtroom. PBS used a similar approach. Then I got tired of looking; I’m going to assume it would be hard to find an MSM outlet covering the developments properly.

NOTE: Jonathan Turley defends Judge Cannon here.