IOWA — There is always a bit of unchecked hubris in politics ahead of a big midterm election. Special elections, at times, lull strategists into believing their party will safely hold on to its majority or snatch it away from the other side.
Between 1900 and 2008, by-elections were fairly predictive when lined up with what happened later.
But that has not been the case in the last 10 years. Ahead of the 2010 midterm elections, Democrats won pretty much every special election contest. Yet in November 2010, Republicans brought home one of the largest majority sweeps in the history of the House, winning 63 seats and earning their biggest majority in over 50 years. Republicans racked up a few good special election wins ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, only to lose their majority to the Democrats in that year's midterm elections.
Still, this does not mean special elections — particularly those won and lost at the most local levels — offer us a plausible interpretation of where we are heading in this country or an indicator of how we feel about those in power. That sentiment has dramatically shifted what our political parties have looked like in the last 10 years.
Last Tuesday, a state House seat centered in Newton, Iowa, flipped from blue to red for the first time in 46 years. Republican Jon Dunwell defeated Democratic Steve Mullan for House District 29 by 20 points, giving Iowa Republicans a 60-40 majority in the state House and marking the third special election they have won this year.
Dunwell said he focused on local issues that affect the people of the district by knocking on doors and attending community and school board meetings. “When you listen to people and hear them engage in dialogue and discussion about the things that are important to them, it begins to shape how you understand what is important to the community,” he explained.
This race demonstrated first that localism matters. Second, Joe Biden is a drag on Democrats running for office even in traditionally Democratic territory in the heartland.
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+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Those not taking the Covid vaccine and other palliatives have a 6 times greater chance of dying from the virus. Democrats so politicized their negative rhetoric and telling the public they did so because of their trumped distrust of Trump killed tens of thousands of American citizens.
______________________________________________________________________Perhaps one day Sidney Powell will prevail and Dominion Voting Machines will be found capable of being penetrated by hackers. I do believe our election system is vulnerable and thus all elections become suspect. Therefore, you would think Democrats would be vitally interested in fair and believable elections but they are not. Why? Because winning is more important than integrity.
And:
We also know they are not above buying votes with tax payer money:
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ I keep warning:
Last month, David Albright, renowned and prominent physicist, stated “Iran is one month away from enough highly enriched uranium for at least one nuclear bomb.” Where does that place us now? How far away is Iran from attaching it to a nuclear warhead or a drone? And what are our options?
On October 13th, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, while discussing the Iranian nuclear program with visiting Israeli officials, said Iran was refusing to negotiate in good faith and that if diplomatic talks break down, the United States will be looking at “other options.” Yet, on that very same day, the U.S. special envoy to Iran Robert Malley said at a talk in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “the United States and the world must prepare for a nuclear Iran." Which is the real policy of the Biden administration? Will Israel be forced to act alone against this existential threat to their existence, and if so, are they capable of doing this, on their own?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++. One would think the logic of this is overwhelming but not so with Democrats who have been taking over by radicals. These radicals seek anything controversial that stirs up passions inures to their benefit. Their goal remains create upheaval as an element in destroying America.
Some ideas must be debated, but not historical facts
A Texas educator’s bogus claim that the study of the Holocaust must be balanced with revisionist lies is being used to discredit a law about critical race theory. They’re not the same thing.
By JONATHAN S. TOBIN
(October 18, 2021 / JNS) Some Jewish liberals say that they saw this coming. There were those who believed that the movement to stop the teaching of critical race theory in the schools was bound to negatively impact teaching about the Holocaust. They claim that those fears were vindicated by the comments of a Texas educator in Southlake, Texas, who was taped telling teachers in a training session that “make sure that if … you have a book on the Holocaust, that you have one that has opposing, that has other perspectives.”
The context for this absurd suggestion was how to abide by a law recently passed in Texas that said “a teacher may not be compelled to discuss a particular event or widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs” and that those who do so “shall, to the best of the teachers’ ability, strive to explorer the topic from diverse and contending perspectives without giving difference to any one perspective … .”
The purpose of that law was to halt the way left-wing theories about race have been incorporated into school curricula and lesson plans, and which effectively amount to a form of political indoctrination.
While critical race theory is defended as merely teaching about America’s troubled racial past, it goes much further than that by seeking to enshrine race consciousness at the heart of every discussion and to make us view people solely through their skin color or origin rather than as individuals. Rather than advocacy for civil rights, it discounts the enormous progress towards greater liberty and equality, treating America as an irredeemably racist nation populated by people who are defined as either privileged or unprivileged. Linked to the fallacious narratives of The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” it amounts to a form of dangerous historical revisionism that undermines the teaching of civics and puts in its place a biased political doctrine.
Nevertheless, legislative efforts to arrest this toxic trend are, at best, blunt instruments that can confuse more than help educators. Laws that seek to micro-manage teaching are bound to create havoc, even if the motives behind them are basically fair-minded.
Nevertheless, the attempt to link Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism to the movement seeking to push back against the teaching of critical race theory has a lot more to do with the polarization of American society along partisan lines than anything else. The problem here is not so much one about vaguely worded laws as it is the comparison between teaching historical facts and that of teaching theories about history.
The Holocaust is a historical fact. Denying that it happened is not a legitimate point of view or scholarly school of thought. Those who claim that the truth about the murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators is a matter of debate are anti-Semitic liars whose only motive is a desire to erase the record of Jewish suffering so as to justify or rationalize contemporary hatred of the Jews.
Similarly, slavery and the facts about the role that despicable practice and its defenders played in American history, in addition to the way Jim Crow laws perpetuated its legacy after the Civil War, is not up for debate.
Unfortunately, modern American primary and secondary education have to some extent discarded the traditional teaching of history. In its place, we now have educational experiences that talk more about concepts and ways of thinking about the past while downplaying supposedly unimportant facts and dates. Learning to think critically about history or any field of study is vital, but that can only succeed if it is based on a solid factual foundation—something that is often left out of contemporary schooling. That’s the only reasonable explanation for the fact that surveys consistently show that most Americans, especially those under 45, have an abysmal lack of knowledge about the history of their own country.
Nor is the teaching of the Holocaust exempt from this problem. Some 38 states, including Texas, have passed laws mandating some form of Holocaust education. But many of the courses designed to comply with those mandates tend to emphasize concepts that seek to universalize the lessons of the events in question instead of sticking to the facts about the attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe.
This has helped create a general belief in American society that the Holocaust is more a metaphor for anything or anyone that people think is awful than a reference to a particular set of events. In this way, inappropriate Holocaust analogies have proliferated, as, for example, right-wingers demonizing vaccine mandates and left-wingers comparing former President Donald Trump to the Nazis. Both sides of the political spectrum condemn their opponents’ misuse of the past while remaining blind to their own mistakes.
Another layer to the problem is the general contempt for the idea of objectivity in studying either the past or the present that has come into fashion.
On college campuses, freedom of speech and scholarship is considered less important than enforcing bans on saying or teaching that offends sensitivities about controversial subjects. With respect to journalism, there is a popular movement among many in the profession—linked to their support of critical race theory—that claims that attempting to tell both sides of a political dispute is an inherently misguided effort that serves only to prop up an allegedly all-powerful edifice of white supremacy that still dominates American life. The resemblance between this didactic approach to both scholarship and journalism to traditional Marxist dialectics about history is no coincidence.
In that context, a defense of objective study and the rejection of one-sided narratives in both journalism and history are not defensible, but a necessary response to these troubling trends.
None of this excuses what that Texas educator said, but it does help explain why Americans seem so confused about the past or even what is going on today. The correct response to that idiotic comment that set off outrage across the Jewish world is not an effort to discredit those who oppose critical race theory. Due to its links to intersectionality and the labeling of Israel and its supporters as possessors of “white privilege,” that idea continues to grant a permission slip to anti-Semitism. That remains true even if some Jews on the left ignore it because they prioritize solidarity with political allies over the security of their own community.
Instead, we should be focusing on a return to a more rigorous approach to the teaching of history. That a growing number of Americans, including some teachers, continue not to know the difference between a historical fact like the Holocaust and a toxic idea like critical race theory is the real problem. As long as this is true, we’re probably doomed to continued confusion and more troubling statements about both the Holocaust and racism. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Why Democrats push for Universal Income will not work:
Why A Universal Basic Income Won't Work by John F. Cogan, Daniel Heil via PolicyEd
Though many believe that universal basic income (UBI) is an attractive alternative to current welfare policy, many features of a UBI would make it a destructive policy for the very recipients it intends to help. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Progressive Court-Packing Meltdown The Justices shouldn’t be intimidated by an impotent commission. By The Editorial Board
An early sign that President Biden would follow rather than lead his party was his refusal to repudiate “court-packing” in the 2020 campaign. As President he still had a chance to dismiss the idea as an exercise in constitutional arson. Instead, he appointed a commission to study packing the Supreme Court.
The commission is now completing its work as the Justices open a highly contested term with abortion and the Second Amendment on the docket. Its mere existence is a sign of Democratic ambitions to intimidate the Court. But the good news is that the project appears to be ending in disarray. While it may only whet the appetites of progressives over the long run, the Biden court-packing meltdown also signals that norms against political meddling in the judiciary remain intact—for now.
*** The 36-member group, mostly composed of liberal academics, released a draft report ahead of a public meeting last Friday. The materials amplify progressive grievances about the confirmations of Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Sections like “Growing Calls for Structural Reform” are too solicitous of what is an assault on America’s independent federal judiciary.
Yet the main takeaway of the report is to brush back the court-packers, sometimes in strong terms. “Courts cannot serve as effective checks on government officials if their personnel can be altered by those same government officials,” the draft says.
“In some countries, alterations of the size of a country’s high court has been a worrying sign of democratic backsliding,” it notes, giving examples of Venezuela and Turkey. “Stable democracies since the mid-twentieth century,” it says, “have not tended to make such moves.”
On partisan complaints that the current Court has a majority of Republican-appointed Justices, the commission says, “it is far from clear that ideological balance is in and of itself a desirable goal.”
These common-sense observations provoked outrage from the court-packing left. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, the Democratic Party’s leading antagonist of an independent judiciary, called the report “a disappointment.” Demand Justice, the progressive fundraising group trying to shame Justice Stephen Breyer into retirement, blasted it on Twitter.
Much of this campaign is aimed at influencing the final draft. Progressive commissioner Nancy Gertner, a retired district judge, said at Friday’s meeting that she doesn’t think “the current draft adequately reflects” the “differences of opinion” on the commission.
It could be that Bob Bauer, a commission co-chair and Biden adviser, tried to steer the product against court-packing despite the wishes of the more radical members. But now that progressives are inflamed, don’t be surprised if orders come from the White House for Mr. Bauer to make some of the changes they demand.
The handful of conservatives tapped for the commission are no more pleased than the left, and for good reason. At Friday’s meeting the University of Chicago’s William Baude compared the exercise to a commission exploring the possibility of state Legislatures overturning presidential election results.
Even if the commission gently advises against court-packing, it has given an assault on a constitutional norm undeserved legitimacy. Perhaps that’s why two conservative members, Harvard’s Jack Goldsmith and the University of Virginia’s Caleb Nelson, have resigned from the body. They haven’t explained their decisions.
Democrats are already at work reshaping the judiciary through appointments by President Biden, and they will continue to do so if they continue to win elections. That’s the constitutional path. The progressive campaign against the Court will also continue, but we hope the mess of academic squabbling unfolding at the White House’s commission will not intimidate the Justices. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ China’s Hypersonic Wake-Up Call A missile test shows the next war won’t be anything like the last one. By The Editorial Board
Most Americans believe the U.S. has the world’s most dominant military, but that dominance is ending. The report that China has tested a new hypersonic missile should alert the country to the growing danger.
“China tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile in August that circled the globe before speeding towards its target,” reportsthe Financial Times. Hypersonic missiles are harder to track and destroy than ballistic missiles and could evade U.S. missile defenses.
The hypersonic news follows the discovery this year of hundreds of new missile silos in the Chinese desert, almost certainly for nuclear missiles. This isn’t the behavior of a nation merely interested in defending its sovereignty. China has global ambitions, and they include projecting military power as a way to assert its political and commercial interests.
This is important to understand because the next major war won’t look anything like the last one. The U.S. homeland was spared from most of World War II’s destruction. But the next conflict will feature cyber attacks, hypersonic missiles, and unmanned vehicles using artificial intelligence that put the U.S. at risk of attack from afar. Hiding behind fortress America won’t be possible, if it ever was.
It’s also alarming if the reports are correct that U.S. intelligence was caught off-guard by the hypersonic test. The U.S. has intelligence agencies precisely to prevent surprises like this. The Intelligence Community is made up of some 18 organizations that received $85.8 billion in 2020. Congress should investigate what we’re paying for and what we’re getting.
It would also be helpful to stop assisting the People’s Liberation Army. The Chinese firm Phytium Technology, for example, works with the PLA to conduct research on hypersonic flight, according to the Washington Post.
“While the Biden administration rightly placed Phytium on the Commerce Department’s Entity List, it has not applied the Foreign Direct Product Rule that was successfully used to counter Huawei,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R., Wis.) said in a statement. As such, he added, U.S.-derived technology produced by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company still enables Phytium’s research.
None of this is to say that war with China is inevitable, much less imminent. The point is that the post-Cold War era in which the U.S. could assume it had the military edge is over. Regional powers like Russia and Iran are already using asymmetric weapons like cyber to attack the U.S. And China is building similar capability as well as a blue-water navy and anti-satellite weapons.
As the U.S. builds a cradle-to-grave entitlement state while shrinking the military, the world grows more dangerous. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ I believe man's activities do impact our universe but I also believe the issue of climate change has not been resolved from a scientific standpoint. It has become so politicized I no longer believe what the "Greens" have to say because radicals have taken over and their goal is to stir the pot of discord.
Dear Reader
I’ve recently been handed a top-secret document by a former NASA engineer that contradicts everything you’ve been told about global warming.
I initially rejected what he claimed in his dossier.
But when he showed me the evidence inside this 164-page document, I couldn’t argue with him.
It basically proves once and for all that . . .
Global warming is a complete sham.
A sham that our government has spent more than $22 billion a year financing.
That’s $41,856 every minute!
My informant also uncovered a looming crisis that could take down every nation that’s not prepared.
It’s important for all Americans to see just how serious this crisis will be.
The result will be every American being blindsided.
Unable to see it coming because of today’s environmental extremists and their willing accomplices in the mainstream media.
Click here to access this controversial document.
Sincerely,
Tom Luongo Editor Ultimate Wealth Report
P.S. I’ve also reserved for you, a FREE copy of the book that today’s socialists and their pals in the mainstream media don’t want you to read. It’s by the world’s top climate scientist who uncovered this whole $22 billion global warming lie. Click here to access this controversial document.++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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