The teacher and Obama: on those pesky Trump-voting men

The New Neo Posted on by

There was an instructor at the University of Kansas who had some interesting ideas about the 2024 election, ideas he felt obliged to share with his students. I use the past tense “was” because he’s now on leave:

An instructor at the University of Kansas has been placed on leave after a video on X showed him suggesting to his class that men who won’t vote for a female president should be shot.

“(If you think) guys are smarter than girls, you’ve got some serious problems,” the man in the video said. “That’s what frustrates me. There are going to be some males in our society that will refuse to vote for a potential female president because they don’t think females are smart enough to be president. We could line all those guys up and shoot them. They clearly don’t understand the way the world works.

“Did I say that? Scratch that from the recording. I don’t want the deans hearing that I said that.”

Oopsie doopsie. This was being recorded and apparently the instructor knew it. Here’s part of the university’s response:

“The instructor is being placed on administrative leave, pending further investigation. The instructor offers his sincerest apologies and deeply regrets the situation. His intent was to emphasize his advocacy for women’s rights and equality, and he recognizes he did a very poor job of doing so. The university has an established process for situations like this and will follow that process.”

In a similar statement on X, KU added that the comments “made an inappropriate reference to violence.”

Free speech advocates say he should be reinstated:

“The First Amendment protects professors who tell brief, off-topic jokes in the classroom,” said Graham Piro, FIRE program officer, in a statement. “It also protects hyperbole. In order to constitute a true threat, a speaker must communicate a serious intent to commit an act of unlawful violence against a specific individual or a group of individuals.

Sorry, but that’s not the standard that’s applied if a professor were to say something of the sort against a protected group. For example, let’s say the professor had joked that people who vote for Kamala Harris should be shot. I don’t think such a teacher would last at any university, although I could be wrong.

A more interesting story, I think, is Obama’s latest statements on the matter – not the matter of free speech, but the matter of voting for a woman. Obama recently came out of pseudo-retirement to say this in a talk in Pittsburgh to a group of black men. He said they didn’t seem as entusiastic for Harris as they had been for him, and then added:

And you’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses, I’ve got a problem with that,” he said.

“Because part of it makes me think — and I’m speaking to men directly — part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.”

Typical Obama. Kamala Harris’ individual characteristics are just “reasons and excuses” with which Obama has a problem, because the most salient characteristics anyone has are the identity groups to which that person belongs. Kamala Harris is black and a woman (yes, she’s also Indian, but that’s not Obama’s concern) – and that’s the reason to vote for her.

When Obama was running for president, he and many of his spokespeople made it clear that anyone who didn’t support him was suspected of having racism as the motivation. This was noticeable right from the start. I wrote this post in June of 2008, and it was already quite clear what he was trying to do:

Barack Obama, the candidate who wants to end divisiveness, and who wants to run a clean and honorable campaign without negativity, said the following in a recent campaign speech at a Florida fund-raising reception:

“It is going to be very difficult for Republicans to run on their stewardship of the economy or their outstanding foreign policy. We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. ‘He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?'”

We have here a truly masterful attempt to flames of paranoia on the part of his followers and adopt the mantle of victimization for himself, thus raising rather than lowering the amount of divisiveness and vitriol in the campaign. Pretty good for just a couple of sentences.

Obama is correct in saying that there have been racist remarks against him. These have originated from fringe elements and/or commenters in the blogosphere and/or anonymous email campaigns. They focus on his “funny name,” for example, or the fact that he’s black.

But in this speech he appears to attribute – or to encourage his supporters to attribute – these charges to the entire Republican Party, couched as a threatening “they.” At the same time, he fails to differentiate these attacks – and actually connects them as part of an undifferentiated list – from extremely legitimate concerns that people have voiced about other characteristics of his, such as his inexperience.

In the final sentence of the paragraph he slyly encourages a phenomenon I’ve noticed happening more and more: the charge that any criticism of Obama emanates from racism. If the racism isn’t overt and clear, as in the emails, then it’s covert; “inexperience” (a valid concern based on the objective facts of his history) becomes a code word (wink wink) for hidden racism and fearmongering.

This is dangerous demagoguery.

Because one so seldom hears overt expressions of racism any more, and certainly not from mainstream candidates, there has been a tendency to imagine it is everywhere, but hidden. Here Obama cynically fosters that belief and encourages the definition of his entire opposition as energized by this impossible-to-prove – or, more importantly, impossible-to-disprove – motive.

No, it turns out that most of them haven’t mentioned he’s black, except in approving terms. But they don’t have to nowadays to be racists; Obama has taken care of that.

That’s actually the entire post from back then. Obama’s words alarmed me and were a portent of things to come.

But back to the present and Obama’s remarks in Pittsburgh:

[Obama] said that the “women in our lives have been getting our backs this entire time.”

“When we get in trouble and the system isn’t working for us, they’re the ones out there marching and protesting,” he said.

“And now you’re thinking about sitting out or supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you, because you think that’s a sign of strength, because that’s what being a man is? Putting women down? That’s not acceptable.”

There may indeed be men – black or white – or women, for that matter, who don’t want a woman president. They’re not going to care what Obama says on this. But by far more men – black or white – or women, for that matter, don’t want to vote for a particular woman named Kamala Harris because of her own very individual characteristics, the foremost of which is incompetence plus the inability to answer a question.

And note the dig about “supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you.” It actually took me a moment to realize that Obama must be referring to Donald Trump. In Obama’s circles, Trump’s anti-black racism is considered some sort of truism that doesn’t need proof or even evidence. But in what ways has Trump “denigrated” black men?

I doubt that Obama’s message is going to change the minds of a significant number of black men who have decided not to vote for Harris, or even to vote for Trump. I strongly suspect they are paying attention to things other than identity politics, such as how their lives have been going under Biden versus under Trump. As well they might.

ADDENDUM:

Black pastor Darrel B. Harrison has some trenchant and on-point observations:

Notwithstanding @BarackObama’s ethno-tribalist herding of black men into a sheep’s pen, as it were, so they can be told by him, their self-appointed political shepherd, for whom they are to cast their vote in November, he is stripping these men of their identity as image-bearers of God (Gen. 1:27).

Imagine having your entire identity reduced to the color of your skin and subsequently being told that on that basis alone—the basis of a static and immutable aspect of your personhood (melanin), as opposed to your God-given intellect and discernment—that you must vote for someone simply because that person looks like you.

Think about that.

In Obama’s eyes these black men aren’t “brothas,” they’re sheep. They’re not men, they’re political pawns to be used and discarded once the election is over — just like he did to black people in 2008 and 2012.

RIP Ethel Kennedy

The New Neo Posted on by

I was surprised to read last night that Ethel Kennedy, widow of RFK and mother of RFK Jr., had died at ninety-six – but that was only because I had not realized that she was still alive. Ninety-six is old but it’s not unbelievably old; however, my perception was that she belonged to an era so different from our present one that it seemed impossibly distant.

Here is her son’s beautiful tribute to his mother:

My mom, Ethel Skakel Kennedy, passed peacefully into Heaven this morning. She was 96. She died in Boston surrounded by many of her nine surviving children and her friends. God gave her 34 grandchildren, 24 great-grandchildren, and the energy to give them all the attention they required. He blessed her with a rich and eventful life. Even as she declined in recent months, she never lost her sense of fun, her humor, her spark, her spunk, and her joie de vivre. She wrung joy from every moment, but for 56 years she has spoken with yearning of the day she would reunite with her beloved husband. She is with him now, with my brothers David and Michael, with her parents, her six siblings, all of whom predeceased her, and her “adopted” Kennedy siblings Jack, Kick, Joe, Teddy, Eunice, Jean, Rosemary, and Patricia. From the day she met my father, her new family observed that she was “more Kennedy than the Kennedys.” She was never more enthusiastic about the afterlife than when she considered that she would also be reunited with her many dogs, including 16 Irish setters — all conveniently named “Rusty.”

The cognitive dissonance that allowed her to keep two inconsistent truths in her heart at the same time without budging made my mother a collection of irreconcilable convictions. Among these was her ironic combination of deep — nearly blind — reverence for the Catholic Church and irreverence toward its clerics. She was at once starstruck by America’s presidents, all of whom she came to know personally, and at the same time skeptical of government and toward all figures of authority. She balanced her contempt for pretension and hypocrisy with a boundless tolerance for error and mistakes in others.

God also endowed her with a perpetual attitude of gratitude that fueled her taste for adventure and an irrepressible buoyancy in a life beset by a continuous parade of heartbreaking tragedies. Her sunny optimism eventually brought my shattered father back to life following the assassination of his brother and then helped her children to thrive after her husband’s assassination five years later.

Among her most defining qualities were moral and physical fearlessness. She was a peerless equestrian and held the high jump record on horseback, jumping 7?9? on a Quarter Horse. Critics named her among the best female amateur tennis players, and she was a competitive diver. But she did every sport well — from football to skiing, waterskiing and kayaking. Her disciplined stoicism and her deep faith in God enabled her to endure over ten years of pregnancy without complaint. She also suffered the murders of her husband and Uncle Jack, and the early deaths of two of her children. Various air crashes killed both of her parents, her brother, her sister-in-law, and her nephew John. She never enjoyed flying, but her worry never stopped her from boarding a plane. While giving short shrift to her own monumental suffering, she always showed intense compassion for others.

My mother invented tough love, and she could be hard on her children when we didn’t live up to her expectations. But she was also intensely loyal, and we always knew that she would stand fiercely behind us when we came under attack by others. She was our role model for self-discipline, for resilience, and for self-confidence. She deeded to each of her 11 children her love of good stories, her athleticism, her competitive spirit, and the deep curiosity about the world, and the intense interest in people of all backgrounds, which caused her to pepper everyone she met — from cab drivers to presidents — with a relentless cascade of questions about their lives. She also gave us all her love of language and for good storytelling. I credit her for all my virtues. I’m grateful for her generosity in overlooking my faults.

Boris Johnson on Trump’s foreign policy

The New Neo Posted on by

Of course, Boris Johnson’s own reputation is hardly stellar these days. But he had some kind words for Trump:

But, you know, with Trump, a lot of the people on the liberal side of the left, liberal side of the argument, kind of demonized him on foreign policy. Actually, from where I sit, he projected an image of a strong America.

He stood up to Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator. He bombed him when he used chemical weapons against his own people. Donald Trump hit back, and Assad never used chemical weapons again. He took out — we talk about Iran. Trump took out Qasem Soleimani, the head of the IRGC, Quds Force. Iran really went quiet after that.

And when it came to Putin, a lot of people say Trump is a big buddy of Putin. Well, I didn’t see that when I was foreign secretary. I saw Trump expel 60 Russian diplomats after they poisoned some people, as you may remember, and the Russians poisoned people in our country with chemical weapons, with Novichok.

And I saw Trump give the Ukrainians — and everybody says he’s, you know, he’s friendly with Putin. I don’t see that. He gave the Ukrainians those shoulder-launched Javelin missiles, which were very important to Ukraine in the defense of Kyiv in routing Putin’s troops.

So, I, you know, I don’t know what’s gonna happen, but I have hope that Trump will, if Trump is elected, that he will be the strong president overseas that I saw.

I’m with Johnson on all of that, and what’s more I think Trump’s foreign policy accomplishments are obvious to anyone who looks at them objectively. I do disagree, though, that the left “kind of” demonized Trump on foreign policy. They very much demonized him on foreign policy and just about everything else.

CBS “News”: Ta-Nehisi Coates must get the kid-glove treatment

The New Neo Posted on by

Ta-Nehisi Coates is someone I’ve written about several times before. I refer you to the first three posts on the list that can be found here. In my opinion, his works are vile – and all the more vile because he cloaks his hatred in a smoothly literary style.

His latest work has focused his bile on Israel and Jews. He has accomplished the astounding feat of writing on the subject as though he just dropped in from Mars, because he omits any mention of Hamas, 10/7, or Arab terrorism from his book. Here’s a review by Coleman Hughes:

And here’s another review, if you prefer reading to watching a fairly lengthy video. An excerpt:

Though a talented writer who styles himself as a journalist, Coates mostly pens words about himself and his personal impressions of the world without bothering much with grounding his work in facts or trying to place his ideas in a context that tells more than one narrow side of a story. Indeed, he is someone who thinks writers and journalists should not be seeking to tell both sides of complex stories, believing that they should boil everything down to conform to simplistic left-wing conclusions, whether accurate or not. That is exactly how toxic ideologies like critical race theory and intersectionality work. …

[Coates’] entire personal experience on this topic [of Israel and Palestine] consists of a single 10-day trip to “Palestine” from which he extrapolated not just 150 pages of text but a series of damning conclusions.

For Coates, everything he saw in “Palestine”—whether on Palestinian-guided tours of places like Hebron or even time spent in Haifa or Tel Aviv—was a reflection of the historical American experience of “Jim Crow” discrimination. Woke ideologues falsely analogize the Palestinian war to destroy Israel to the struggle for civil rights in the United States. In this way, Coates superimposes his own beliefs about an America that is an irredeemably racist nation onto the complex conflict between Jews and Arabs over possession of the land of Israel. The fact that the conflict isn’t racial doesn’t matter because to speak of this reality would prevent him from painting a largely fictional picture of a Jewish state he would like to see destroyed.

Coates dismisses Zionism as mere colonialism. He does this in part by misconstruing the writing of Zionist founding fathers who used the word in a very different way than he does or by simply falsely claiming that Israel’s birth was somehow the work of imperialism rather than by an act of what can only be fairly described as decolonization. …

Jewish rights and Jewish history aren’t so much misinterpreted as denied altogether. …

Those Israelis who are not identifiably “white”—whether they are part of the Mizrachi majority, meaning from other countries in the Mediterranean or Arab Mideast, or Ethiopians—are merely the moral equivalent of blacks who served the Confederacy or Jim Crow governments with no legitimacy as part of a people returned to their homeland.

Equally telling is his view that the Palestinians, who play the role of oppressed former slaves in his personal psychodrama version of the Middle East, have no agency, and their actions don’t matter.

Hard as it may be to imagine, his book never mentions terrorism, the Second Intifada from 2000 to 2005 that resulted in the deaths of more than 1,000 Israelis, the numerous rejections of peace offers and independence by the Palestinians. Hamas and Oct. 7 rate not a single mention anywhere in his text. It is not so much an example of bad reporting or history as a parody of a book about a complicated topic.

Actually, it’s an example of vicious Jew-hating propaganda, unashamed and unapologetic. And I believe Coates is such a praised literary lion that his book will influence a great many people who are ignorant of the actual history.

Meanwhile, the interview at CBS – in which one reporter actually challenged Coates on his garbage – has had some very instructive fallout. The reporter has gotten into a heap of trouble at CBS. Some excerpts:

Interviewer Dokoupil [of CBS] had the gall to question Nahesi-Coates about his anti-Israel comments.

“Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it?”

“Why leave out that Israel deals with terror groups that want to eliminate it?”

“Why not detail anything of the first and second intifada. . . the cafe bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits?”

This, as Puck News’ Dylan Byers reported on X, was when things started to go wrong for Dokoupil. According to Byers:

“CBS NEWS has been roiling after a CBS Mornings interview in which anchor Tony Dokoupil pressed Ta-Nehisi Coates over his pro-Palestinian framing of Israel-Palestine conflict. The interview was celebrated by many—’tense and substantive,’ per WaPo—but angered some at CBS who felt Dokoupil brought his own bias.”

Byers then noted that CBS News honchos Wendy McMahon and Adrienne Roark, at a Monday morning meeting, “told staff that the interview did not meet editorial standards for impartiality, though they declined to elaborate on how or why. When they tried to move on, CBS News chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford criticized the leaders for their decision, saying the following…”

Much much more at the link.

Dokoupil must have thought he was interviewing a Republican. He forgot the cardinal rule that Coates – a much-feted literary lion who is black, leftist, and a mouthpiece for blaming whites and now Jews for whatever is wrong with the world – cannot be challenged like that.

So now we have this sad result. It’s hard to summarize, but the gist of it is that Dokoupil was made to apologize in a big struggle session, and it has also been revealed that CBS vetted its questions with Coates and Dokoupil failed to check everything out with him. This of course is not journalism. But CBS doesn’t do journalism. An excerpt:

But Coates also revealed a detail that caught our eye. As he was praising King [who also interviewed him] as a “great journalist and a great interviewer,” he said that “Gayle came behind the stage before we went [on] and she had gone through the book, and I’m not saying she agreed with the book. She was like, ‘I’m gonna ask you about this. I’m gonna ask you about that.’?”

So let’s get this straight: One journalist is raked over the coals for asking tough questions, while another journalist—if Coates’s recollection is correct—previews her questions and faces no repercussions. (King did not respond to a request for comment.)

Which poses a few questions. Chief among them: Are there different rules for different journalists at CBS?

A former CBS journalist told The Free Press that “If she was showing him specific lines of questioning in advance, that would violate journalistic standards. Now are they going to investigate her and say that what she did was not in keeping with CBS standards? I suspect not.”

One last thing: Let’s just say we have pattern recognition around stories like these. So when two sources at CBS told The Free Press that this whole dustup involved the network’s “Race and Culture Unit,” we weren’t shocked.

According to the company’s website, this unit works “in concert with the CBS News Standards and Ethics department to ensure all stories have the proper context, tone, and intention.” It was formed in the summer of 2020. “We must always be aware of how race and culture impacts our journalism—and, in terms of the future of CBS News, this unit will be as important as Standards and Practices,” a CBS executive said at the time.

Journalism? I think not. Or rather, it’s what journalism (I prefer the term “reporting”) has morphed into these days.

39% of American Muslims are keeping their opinions on 10/7 intact by denying reality

The New Neo Posted on by

Denial is a tried-and-true method of dealing with the pain and confusion of cognitive dissonance. I believe that’s what’s going on here:

When asked which statement “comes closest to your view,” more American Muslims selected “Hamas did not commit murder and rape in Israel on October 7” than “Hamas committed murder and rape in Israel on October 7.”

More than a third (39%) denied the Hamas murders and rapes, while only 31% admitted them. Another 30% said they “don’t know,” in the poll, provided first to The Daily Signal.

You can find much more on the poll here. For example:

Similarly, many American Muslims (43%) said, “Israel does not have a right to exist as a Jewish homeland,” while only 11% of the general public said so. One-third of American Muslims (33%) said “Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish homeland,” compared with two-thirds of overall Americans (66%). …

A majority of Muslims (58%) said Jews have “too much power” over the media, and about the same number (57%) said Jews have “too much power” over federal policy.

My contrast, far fewer among the general public say Jews have “too much power” over the media (22%) and policy (17%), while more Americans say they have “about a normal amount of power” over the media (41%) and policy (45%).

Older Muslims (67% of those older than 65) and college graduate Muslims (64%) proved more likely to say Jews have too much power over the media. …

Meanwhile, 34% of Muslim respondents selected the Israel conflict as their top issue [in the 2024 election], while only 25% chose the economy and 11% selected immigration. …

Almost half (47%) said Harris is “too pro-Israel,” while 29% said she “gets the balance about right,” and 7% called her “too pro-Palestine.”

College graduate Muslims (53%), and Muslims of Asian (62%) and Arab (66%) descent proved more likely to call Harris “too pro-Israel,” while Muslims of other races—black (37%), white (41%), and Hispanic (52%)—proved more likely to say she gets the issue right.

39% also support having sharia law in the US.

I emphasized the 10/7 denial in the title of this post, because that’s such a flagrant denial of reality, but all of these points of view are disturbing. The denial of the events of 10/7 is even more of a stretch than Holocaust denial, because whereas the Nazis tried to hide their crimes from the world, the Gazans proudly documented and broadcast theirs.

It’s not that the existence of “moderate Muslims” is a myth. They exist, and they live in the US. I know some of them. But there are way way too many Muslims in this country who have brought extremist views with them, clung to them, and taught them to their children – both anti-Semitism and other ideas such as the need for sharia law.

Kamala Harris and Joe Biden: joined at the hip

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I touched on Harris’ statement during her appearance on The View, in which a softball question question from Sunny Hostin led to a response that has heads scratching everywhere. But the more I think about it, the stranger it becomes.

To review:

The left-leaning distaff panel asked the 2024 Democratic nominee if she would have done anything “differently” than Biden, 81.

“There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of — and I’ve been a part of — of the decisions that have had impact,” responded Harris, 59.

So not only did Harris say there was nothing – absolutely nothing – she would change in a presidency that was fraught with obvious problems that even the left can see, but she was specifically owning the administration’s decisions and saying she was closely involved with them. In this, she echoed Biden’s recent comments, remarks that were often interpreted as trying to sabotage Harris’ campaign.

And this was not just a one-off for Harris. She pretty much repeated part of it in an interview with Howard Stern (a NeverTrumper, by the way):

She doubled down on her support for Biden hours later in an interview with SiriusXM’s Howard Stern.

The president is “still doing a great job,” the veep told the shock jock. “He’s not done. He’s not done.”

Granted, Harris has a tough job. The task is to differentiate herself from the errors of Biden while remaining loyal enough that she’s not perceived as attacking him. But she took on this task willingly when she agreed to be his substitute as nominee. Some sort of ambition drives her – to be the first woman president? To have power? To have perks? To do what they ask her to do? All of the above? Some of the above?

It was always obvious that she would have to figure out a way to thread this needle. She has done a poor job of it. But I wonder whether her advisors have helped: is there a message they’ve told her to say and that she’s failed to deliver? Couldn’t she choose one or two disagreements? I wouldn’t think it so hard to say something like this: “I think Biden did a great job, and I was part of some great decisions of which I’m proud. But – as with any administration – of course there are things that, with the benefit of hindsight, I’d change. For example, in the withdrawal from Afghanistan …” and then she could choose something about that fiasco.

And yet she said nothing of the sort. Why?

I refuse to believe Kamala Harris is stupid. You don’t go to law school and pass the bar and not be able to argue a position, even a difficult position. Something else is going on. I may write more about this in a future post, but at the moment here’s what comes to mind for possibilities:

(1) She has some sort of core conflict about her entire career as VP and as presidential candidate. Whether it’s some sort of impostor syndrome in which she doesn’t feel adequate to the task, or whether it’s some other thing, I don’t know.

(2) I have a gut feeling that she’s not a great liar. You may laugh at that idea – after all, she’s a politician, and she often lies through her teeth. But there is something so “off” about her affect that I can at least imagine that lying so much makes her uncomfortable, or has come to make her uncomfortable.

(3) Plus, perhaps she really does feel some sort of loyalty to the man who is responsible for her rise to this position. He chose her as VP when she really wasn’t doing well politically, having dropped out of the primaries quite early after Tulsi Gabbard savaged her in the debates. Joe has been, in a very real way, her sponsor, and she really has worked closely with him for three and a half years. She – and/or Pelosi, Obama, and the rest – shafted him, and she wants to throw him a bone.

(4) She doesn’t want to alienate the voters who like Biden and feel he was dealt with wrongly.

(5) She really isn’t that smart and can’t keep her story straight (I don’t think this is it, but I’m putting it in here as a possibility).

(6) She knows the fix is in and she will win no matter what she says.

That’s not meant to be an exhaustive list.

And meanwhile:

NOTE: See also this about what’s been going on with Joe lately.

Jewish Democrat and former member of the House endorses Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the story:

Peter Deutsch, a former Democratic congressman from Florida, endorsed former President Donald Trump on Monday, citing concerns over Israel’s security as the top issue motivating his decision.

“I feel very comfortable today publicly announcing that I’m endorsing Donald Trump to be reelected as president and I’m planning on voting for him on Nov. 5,” Deutsch said during a press call hosted by the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee to commemorate Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks.

Deutsch, who splits his time between Israel and Florida and served in Congress from 1993 to 2005, expressed particular approval of Trump’s hard-line approach to Iran, including recent remarks in which the former president rebutted President Joe Biden in saying Israel should strike the country’s nuclear facilities.

By contrast, he argued, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have pursued policies that have emboldened Iran even after its ballistic missile strike on Israel last week.

“Their policies towards Iran make the world a dramatically less safe place,” Deutsch, who is Jewish, said in his brief remarks during the call. “It’s not just about what is happening in the Middle East. It’s literally about the homeland. It’s about Israel. Iran, their enemy is not just Israel — their enemy remains the United States. They still want to destroy the United States.”

Seems like a reasonable position to me on the part of Deutsch. I doubt he’s alone, either. But he is no longer in office, and so he’s free to depart from the party line with no loss of assistance from those in the party who decide where the money and other support will be going.

Then again, it might be a good idea for him to hire an excellent lawyer. There is the cautionary tale of Mayor Adams of New York, who strayed from the party line. I’m pretty much in agreement with Barnes in this video on the arrest of Adams, such is my cynicism these days:

About that FEMA money that isn’t available because it was given to illegals

The New Neo Posted on by

Here are some details:

The FEMA Emergency Food and Shelter Program (ESFP). The FEMA migrant-spending program began as an offshoot of a Reagan-era plan called the Emergency Food and Shelter Program (EFSP). EFSP had the goal of providing aid to homeless Americans, most notably the elderly, handicapped, families with kids, Native Americans, and (especially) veterans.

That was essentially where ESFP funding went until a border crisis in the late spring and early summer of 2019. More than 111,000 adult migrants travelling with children in “family units” (FMUs) and unaccompanied alien children (UACs) crossed the border illegally that May, and President Trump needed additional money to get the kids out of CBP facilities.

One would assume money for needy migrant children would have prompted a rapid bipartisan response, but congressional Democrats left Trump twisting in the political wind for weeks before they gave him the funding he needed. …

Trump asked for ESFP to be ended in his FY 2020 and FY 2021 budget requests as duplicative of other federal activities, but as Reagan himself explained, “a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth”. Consequently, ESFP received $125 million in FY 2020 and $130 million in FY 2021.

After taking office, President Biden pushed for and received spending legislation called the “American Rescue Plan” (ARP).

ARP appropriated $400 million for what FEMA termed “regular EFSP” (the one Reagan approved), and an additional $110 million for “humanitarian relief to families and individuals encountered by” DHS. The temporary ESFP for migrants (called “ESFP-H”, for “humanitarian”) from the 2019 supplemental was now a line item.

The program then grew. There’s much much more at the link; it’s difficult to summarize, so I suggest you go there to read it. It’s the most complete treatment of the subject that I’ve seen so far.

There’s also the fact that the Biden/Harris administration seems to feel we have plenty of money to help Lebanon with its “humanitarian needs”:

Most of the responses there are brutal and well-deserved.

Tampa’s vulnerability to Milton

The New Neo Posted on by

The mayor of Tampa was quite blunt about it:

[Mayor] Castor noted that many Floridians are already leaving the area. For those trying to stay home, she urged them to reconsider.

“They may have done that in others,” Castor said, referring to Floridians riding out previous storms. “There’s never been one like this.”

“Helene was a wake-up call. This is literally catastrophic, and I can say without any dramatization whatsoever: If you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you’re going to die,” she continued.

Sometimes hurricanes are overhyped, which creates a “boy who cried wolf” mentality in residents. This time, though, the danger does seem very stark, and what happened with Helene will probably make people pay very serious attention.

Why is Tampa so vulnerable? The answer is rather simple:

The city is especially susceptible to hurricane damage due to its low-lying topography. …

While the city has survived other tropical storms over the years, Hurricane Milton, a category 5 storm which is set to make landfall in Florida on Wednesday, is concerning because Tampa is vulnerable to storm surges due to its shallow waters. Milton’s storm surge is forecasted to raise water levels by eight to 12 feet in Tampa Bay, if peak surge happens during the high tide. …

The last hurricane to directly impact Tampa Bay was the Tarpon Springs Hurricane of 1921. As a Category 3 storm, it caused eight deaths, an 11-foot surge and cost $10 million in damages (worth nearly $180 million today when accounting for inflation).

That seems a lot less serious than what is forecasted for Milton.

More here:

The heightened risk is partially a result of topography. The Gulf of Mexico coastline of Florida is shallow with a gentle, sloping shelf. The higher ocean floor acts as a barrier that retains the storm’s outflow of water, forcing the ocean to surge onto shore. That’s the opposite of Florida’s east coast, where the ocean floor drops suddenly a few miles from the coast.

“You can have the same storm, the same intensity, the same everything, but very different surges,” said Klotzbach.

A 2015 report from the Boston-based catastrophe modeling firm Karen Clark and Co. concluded that Tampa Bay is the most vulnerable place in the U.S. to storm surge flooding from a hurricane and stands to lose $175 billion in damage. …

“It’s a huge population. It’s very exposed, very inexperienced and that’s a losing proposition,” Emanuel, who has studied hurricanes for 40 years, said. “I always thought Tampa would be the city to worry about most.”

Considering everything, Tampa has been rather lucky in regard to hurricanes till now.

___