יום שבת, ה׳ תמוז תשפ״וSaturday, June 20, 2026
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By JoeSettler
Dear Opposition Members... You seem confused... Let me clear it up for you... You lost.
The left understands that it is working against natural emotions of loyalty and loss, and so it uses deception.
Conservative movements and parties cannibalize themselves.
The glorious day of the inglorious man is here. And someone else is paying. Any someone else who isn't him.
By Adam Levick
Many commentators on the far left scolded those who would suggest a connection between culture and success – imputing racism to such arguments.
The difference between victory and defeat often comes down to morale.
The key to winning the game is in the numbers. Demographics.
Readers will notice that my blog, Sultan Knish, did not predict any Romney landslides. It did not engage in empty cheers or promise that he would win half the country and restore moral leadership. That's not what this site is about. This site is about the hard truths and now as we sit in the dark, let's pass out some of those around the room. We can blame Chris Christie, Sandy or Romney's last debate performance. But let's look at the actual election.
There are plenty of ways to cast the divisions between parties and movements, but the elemental act of voting divides rhetoric from motive. Obama called voting the best revenge, because for a sizable portion of his base that's exactly what voting is. Their votes are a violent act, a spiteful assault on a country that they can never participate in for economic or cultural reasons. Change for them is not a positive program, but a negative assault on the national majority. Bankrupting the country by robbing it for their own benefit is their revenge.
Weekly poll average: Likud-Beitenu at 38 seats; Labor at 22; the Right wing parties a little over 66 seats and the left has just under 54. The Jewish Home-National Union list rose to 9 seats while Kadima continues its decline into oblivion.
Every now and then an email comes my way warning about the day when the government unleashes the military against its own citizens. This day isn't likely to come because for one thing the current regime is not particularly fond of the military. The Obama Administration isn't inflicting massive cuts on the military, cutting their health care and pushing veteran officers out the door because it likes the military as an institution. It doesn't.
Both men are, above all else, pragmatic. They will defy logic and critics to shake up the political spectrum. Bibi has done it several times. A few months ago, polls guaranteed him a sure win if he called early elections. The announcements were made; dates were discussed and then, in the dead of night, he made a deal to unite with Kadima. No surprise to anyone, that deal fell apart rather quickly and Israel is once again on the path to elections.
The presidential and vice-presidential debates provided us with two snapshots of two different and yet very similar men. The Obama who showed up to debate Mitt Romney and the Biden who showed up to debate Paul Ryan were outwardly different types. One white and one black, one elderly and one middle-aged, one a veteran of the Senate and the other a political tyro rushed through the ranks on the promise of his electability.
Media spin helped turn his convention into a hit and the Libya disaster, combined with Romney’s “47 percent” gaffe, has seemed to produce a genuine surge for the president in the past few weeks. Conservatives may dispute the accuracy of polls that may be based on samples skewed to the Democrats or based on expectations of a repeat of the “hope and change” turnout figures of 2008. But after months of the race being seen as a dead heat, there’s little doubt Obama is ahead right now. However, the glee on the left contains within it the possibility of a reversal.
When the full-tide of left-wing smear and innuendo are arraigned against them conservatives have developed a tendency not of standing up for, or explaining, their principles, but running for the left-wing foot-hills.
By Barry Rubin
Barack Obama is not a Communist, a fascist, a Muslim, a Marxist, a Progressive or even a socialist. Obama and those who control much of America’s academia, mass media, and entertainment industry—plus a number of trade unions and hundreds of foundations, think tanks, and front groups—are believers in a new, very American form of leftism.
Poverty is complicated. So are jobs and wars. Race however is simple. There are bad people and there are good people. The oppressed and the oppressors. And that paradigm, that one talking point that they store up and unleash at every occasion is the sum total of their contribution to every debate under the sun.
Rabbi Asher Lopatin, who will succeed Rabbi Avi Weiss as head of YCT, is most definitely on the left side of the Orthodox spectrum. Nevertheless he can keep YCT from sliding too far to the left and cross the line of Orthodoxy. YCT founder Rabbi Avi Weiss candidly admitted that he has parted ways with his Rebbe on the approach to these issues. And he has incorporated it into the philosophy of his Yeshiva.
Obama and Biden are both symbols of the Post-American America. Biden represents the outgoing American administration and Obama represents the incoming Post-American administration. It is vital to make the American administration look weak, foolish and useless so as to affirm the right of the Post-American administration to seize power from it.
Our current political grammar, which leans heavily on ideas such as moderation and extremism, was crafted by the left. Like Orwell's Newspeak, the meaning of such words is relative and varies unpredictably. That relativism has given us the moderate Taliban and the moderate Muslim Brotherhood. Before long, it might give us the moderate Al-Qaeda member.
A few months ago the CEO of Chick Fil A would have done nothing worse than echo a consensus so mainstream that it was adopted as a campaign position by the leftiest Democrat to sit in the White House. A few months later that same position is so outrageous that it leads to mass boycotts, threats of violence and mayors of dysfunctional urban centers threatening to drive the reactionary chicken franchise out of their cities.
Bashing Haredim on the dole is easy; but doing the same thing to the Muslims, who don't report income or pay taxes, is dangerous because it comes too close to a real national problem. Going on about your children being shot at because of the settlers is safe, but talking about the destructive political interests that ceded portions of the West Bank and Gaza to Islamic terrorists is a dangerous topic.
Obama responded to an economic crisis by working to create two kinds of jobs. Government and union jobs. This was not about anything as simple as rewarding his supporters. The Black community got very little in exchange for supporting him. The Hispanic community similarly ended up with some token appointments, but not much to show for it. This was about shifting jobs from the private sector into the public sector and its feeders.
The American chief executive has a great deal of power and a chief executive who dons imperial robes is a danger with few precedents. There have been conflicts between the branches, but even FDR made a pretense of bowing to some outside authority. Obama never has, with the exception of the King of Saudi Arabia.
No one who boycotts Israel wants a specific demand met, what they want is an excuse for unleashing that overpowering hatred that Wagner tried to rationalize by claiming that Jews were incapable of creating true music and that the left rationalizes by claiming that the Jewish State is starving babies. The elaborate explanations are not the content, they are the context, they make the hatred, which is the end, seem like it is only the means to a noble end.
The Israeli left is one of the few socialist movements in the First World to lose power because of immigration. Around the same time that Western immigration policies were being tuned to bring in populations with less investment in their new nations, new Israeli immigrants were more patriotic and nationalistic.
Progressives tried to balance out the instability they created by importing alien traditionalists to battle their traditionalists. But the demographic growth of traditionalists, alien and native, leads us to two kinds of societies. The kind run by native traditionalists and the kind run by alien traditionalists. And which one it will be almost entirely depends on how much power the progressives have had and for how long.
By Z Street
Got that? The goal of J Street is not to represent American Jews on the left, but is instead "to move American Jews" to the left and to the Administration's/friends on the Hill's point of view, and to "provide them with cover."
Out of 95 thousand registered Kadima party members, only 40% voted by 10 p.m., when the polls closed. It was rumored that left-leaning Haim Ramon was planning to resign as Chair of the Kadima Council. Along with the Mofaz win, this may suggest that the party is moving to the right. It may also mean that Kadima could not be taken for granted as partnering with the left on issues such as religious vs. secular tensions.
Two of the four new judges appointed to Israel's Supreme Court will be inaugurated this morning at the President's Residence in Jerusalem, just a week before the retirement of Chief Judge Dorit Beinish. The two, Noam Solberg and Zvi Zilbertal, served until today as judges in the Jerusalem District Court. Solberg, who lives in the […]
