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It really reflects favorably on the people of Delaware that they would elect Biden to the US Senate seven times, ignoring how bad a public speaker he has been for his entire life. Only recently did we learn the reason — that Biden is a stutterer.
King George VI of Great Britain was a stutterer, too, and along with Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee led the country during World War II. King George never expected to become King, but it was necessary to remover his brother, a Nazi sympathizer, from the throne. The decisions were made by Churchill (war and foreign policy) and Attlee (everything else) but King George refused to leave Britain and inspired his people. Despite his poor speaking ability. Biden will do the same.
Trump isn’t really a Nazi sympathizer even though he praises neo-Nazis. But he really does share a lot of characteristics with both the Fascist Mussolini and with the late Argentinian strongman Juan Peron, who took what had been a very prosperous country and ran it into the ground.
“There is this phony and dangerous libertarian theme that ANY government public health guidance is politically driven by the deep state, designed to take away your liberty”
A Trump appointed federal judge basically said just that, overturning essentially all coronavirus restrictions in Pennsylvania, in defiance of over a century of binding judicial precedent including SC decisions earlier this year. Yet the Trump cult claims that it is liberals who are judicial activists.
Most California forests are on federal land. Specifically, 57 percent of California forests are on federal land, 3% is state land, and the rest is private. It is Trump who has been mismanaging the federal land. And the private property worshipers will balk at any government regulation of what they do on their own land.
Currently, of the 29 significant fires in California, only seven are not on federal land. But Trump’s cult will insist that he is NEVER responsible for ANYTHING.
“It is not a life or death matter. And definitely not a degradation toward God.”
Actually, smoking is the single most preventable cause of death in most of the world. And we are thumbing our nose towards HaShem who has gifted us with life if we do stupid stuff that endangers our lives — like smoking, or going to mass spreading events.
“They’re radical communists.”
I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that your yeshiva never offered a basic political science class. Antifa is anarchist. Anarchists are the opposite of communists. Instead of an oppressive totalitarian regime, they want no regime at all. Both are awful but anarchists will never be sufficiently well organized to accomplish anything because they are ideologically opposed to organizing.
The FBI announced today, after months of Justice Department lies that claimed that Antifa was responsible for deadly violence, that the murderer of two California police officers in June was in fact associated with the far right Boogaloo movement.
Yup. These folks are as bad as we claim.
The “Apartheid” slur is particularly horrible because many of the people who put together the Apartheid system such as Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd had themselves openly supported the Nazis during WW2. It is a chilul HaShem that the State of Israel at times helped the Apartheid regime, often over the objections of the South African Jewish community. For many years the only member of the South African parliament who opposed Apartheid was Helen Suzman, elected repeatedly from the Jewish area of Johannesburg.
(Even more sad is that under the venal corrupt leadership of the African National Congress, South Africa is heading rapidly towards failed state status. 🙁 )
“Who believes Charlie over the Financial Times?”
Did Financial Times present any actual data?
“Maybe just hiring More cops is Not enough?”
Maybe not. He also hired Ray Kelly as NYPD Commissioner. 299 fewer homicides by the end of three years. That is a larger drop than Kelly would manage under Bloomberg.
“He saw what Balto. (run by DemonCrats) has done to the Black Community, at least since the 60’s.”
You clearly do not understand Baltimore at all. It enacted mandatory racial segregation in housing over a century ago, the first city to do so, and that became the model for the rest of the US. Back then, blacks voted Republican, but the Republicans didn’t want them any more than the Democrats did. The Republican Party from the 1870s to the 1930s tried to systematically exclude blacks from leadership but nevertheless five black Republicans managed to get themselves elected to the Baltimore City Council! The reason is unlike the rest of the South, the racists never managed to prevent blacks from voting. 🙂
By the 1960s the Democrats were kicking their racists out and blacks have been voting Democratic ever since. The last Republican mayor of Baltimore was elected in 1963; he was appalled by the opposition of Barry Goldwater and other Republicans (including Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush) to civil fights and endorsed Lyndon Johnson for President. The last Republican to carry Baltimore in a general election was the liberal US Senator Charles Mathias in 1980. Mathias’ last public act before he died was to endorse Barack Obama for President in 2008. Baltimore went to single member City Council districts a while back; some hoped that that might allow a Republican to win a seat (that last time that had happened was in 1937) but the decades long history of Republicans waging war on Baltimore has made that impossible.
Nevertheless the main problem Baltimore faces is a lack of tax base as it has been prohibited since the late 1940s from annexing suburbs. Note that pretty much every booming city in America has either consolidated city and county government (Louisville, Lexington, Indianapolis, Jacksonville — NYC, Philadelphia, and San Francisco had already done this in the 19th century) or been allowed to annex suburbs like crazy (Houston, Phoenix, Dallas, San Antonio, San Diego, San Jose, Los Angeles).
It is pretty amazing that Trump’s cult is trying to spin that he didn’t do anything wrong when he ADMITTED that he was lying and that he did so ON THE RECORD, ON TAPE.
The stock market did crash, but he has convinced the Fed to print about seven trillion dollars to prop it up. But the Republicans won’t consider the much smaller relief package that the Democrats pushed through the House of Representatives way back in may. Relief for big time investors but not for the little guy.
#Biden2020.
“beginning in the mid-1990s under Rudolph Giuliani as mayor”
Actually it began under Dinkins, as I pointed out earlier. He hired six thousand additional NYPD officers, most of whom will be retired shortly if they haven’t already.
“It’s also not exactly accurate to compare murder rates from now to 40-60 years ago”
This entire thread started with the OP doing just that. In any case, I didn’t compare rates, I compared numbers. The city has a much larger population today than in the 1970s. so De Blasio’s low homicide rates are even more impressive.
“we’ll get a conservative Mayor in a year or so”
We are more likely to get a nutty far leftist who really DOES want to de-fund police, unlike De Blasio. 🙁
The main Republican candidate is Curtis Sliwa, an admitted fraudster. 🙁 🙁
“in which direction NYC is heading.”
Compared to the same point last year:
Homicides up 33.6%
Rapes down 23.6%
Robberies down 0.2%
Felonious assaults down 3.2%
Burglaries up 41.8%
Grand larcenies down 20.2%
Auto thefts up 60.4%
Petty larcenies down 8.1%
Misdemeanor assaults down 21.3%
Other sex crimes down 27.6%So it is a mixed bag.
“Just look at HK. A place which was fully democratic and in a short period has lost many freedoms due to China taking over their country.”
HK was never democratic under British rule.
None of the “denials” debunk the story because nobody was with Trump 100% of the time, many aren’t really denials but arguments, Trump is already on record as lying in his attempt to rebut, Trump himself has lied thousands of times, many of the alleged denials are from people who are themselves proven liars (Bolton, Sanders, Gidley), every other world leader scheduled to attend made it to the cemetery along with Kelly and Dunford, and Trump is on record having derided military service by others on other occasions.
And now Trump is confirmed to have knowingly lied about the coronavirus.
The Trump cult is more and more disconnected from any semblance of reality.
Next the Trump cult will complain that it is “bias” that the mainstream media will report that there are recordings of Trump admitting that he was deliberately lying about the dangers of the coronavirus.
“The MSM picked up the story from the Atlantic.”
Other MSM confirmed that Goldberg is telling the truth.
Trump is the ultimate witness to the event and he lied even while trying to deny what he said: He claimed he called Melania in the US. Melania was on the trip with him.
Goldberg has credibility. Trump has none. He lies about absolutely everything.
“Can you imagine Obama requesting a news organization fire an employee ?”
Every one of the Trump cult here would be calling for Obama’s impeachment. They are all hypocrites.
“the MSM media has covered the Serbia-Kosovo deal”
It is all over the MSM. And it is unraveling; Serbia is now saying that it won’t move its embassy if Israel recognizes Kosovo. And the EU is threatening both.
This is more hypocrisy. I tried to get frum Jews here and elsewhere to help re-elect Eliot Engel, Kosovo’s #1 supporter in America. The response was deafening silence other than some objections to supporting any liberal. The Trump cult cares not about Israel but about other things.
“What difference is it that he disparaged McCain before he died ? It shows that he has no respect for an American war hero who suffered in a POW camp in North VN.”
He had disparaged McCain as early as 1999 — it is on video!
The Trump cult is a bunch of anti-American zealots who hate this country, its institutions, and its heroes. They are every bit as bad as the Antifa anarchists and the BLM Marxists. Except that they are worse because they have a lot of power and far more support. It is a chulul HaShem that some Jews are part of this cult.
Iran was in compliance with the nuclear deal. All but Trump propagandists agree. And Trump is a known liar.
The deal pushed any possibility of Iran getting nuclear weapons from six months in the future to 15 years in the future. Trump changed that from 15 years to zero.
Nobody other than an anti-Semite could imagine that this is a positive development.
At the frum stores in my neighborhood, everyone wears a mask.
Most Jews are liberals because the Torah, the Neviim, and Chazal teach (mostly) what would be called liberal values today.
Lindsay and Beame may have been nice people, but they were arguably the two worst mayors in NYC history. I posted the high homicide rates in another comment. But equally problematic was the “planned shrinkage” policy of deliberately cutting public safety services in poor neighborhoods such as the South Bronx and East Brooklyn, deliberately destroying those communities. One consequence was the complete and total destruction of the Jewish community in most of the Bronx. There are hundreds of former synagogue buildings, many of which had been orthodox, that are now churches. (A few were constructively repurposed; the former Hebrew Institute of University Heights — now the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale — is now a Boys and Girls Club; the Young Israel of the Concourse is now part of the Bronx Museum of the Arts although its earlier building is now a church.)
“are we going back to to the days of Lindsey, Beame and Dinkins”
No.
Under Lindsay, annual homicides ranged from 746 to 1691.
Under Beame, annual homicides ranged from 1554 to 1645.
Under Koch, annual homicides ranged from 1504 to 1905.
Under Dinkins, annual homicides peaked at 2245 in his first year and dropped to 1946 in his last year.
Under Giuliani, annual homicides were 1561 in his first year and went down to 633 in his fifth year, then back up to 673 in his seventh year and then to 649 in his last year.
Under Bloomberg, annual homicides went up and down during his first ten years, ranging from 471 to 597. In his eleventh year, homicides dropped to 414 to and then to 332 in his twelfth year.
Under De Blasio, homicides ranged from 289 to 328 his first six years, the lowest homicide numbers since the 1950s when the city’s population was much lower. In this, his seventh year, the numbers project to about 386. Basically we aren’t even headed back to Bloomberg days.
NYC is anything but out of control.
Thanks Trump!!!
When there are mushroom clouds over Tel Aviv the Jewish Trump supporters may finally come to their senses.
“Almost all will involve “mixed gender” classes”
I don’t think that there are any accredited single sex law schools in the US anymore.
“I am scared NYC will look like it did in the 1970s with people abandoning buildings.”
The answer of course is to cancel rents and pay off the landlords. That won’t happen as long as Trump is in the White House and the Republicans hold the Senate. Otherwise we will eventually face Great Depression levels of homelessness and bank defaults.
Prior to the pandemic, the population of NYC in the past 40 years had increased so much that the city had added as many people as the TOTAL population of Dallas or San Diego.
That is actually the source of most of the city’s problems.
“What’s wrong with Free Trade? Why should we reverse all of the fixed trade deals and lowered tariffs? What’s wrong with lower taxes allowing people to actually spend and invest versus giving it to a corrupt government?”
Centrists like Biden (and me) are big free trade supporters. Tariffs are taxes and American consumers and businesses have paid dearly for that corporate welfare. I would end all tariffs if I could.
We have to raise taxes to a level that adequately funds governmental services. Most federal government expenses today are health care, social security, and national defense. Which would you cut?
” raise taxes another 4 trillion”
Better than printing money to pay the government’s bills. The Fed has printed about seven trillion to prop up the stock market. When it stops doing that the crash will be heard around the world.
Trump implemented zero economic policies other than the damaging tax scam that is costing New Yorkers a lot of money while enriching himself and his cronies. Everything else is left over from Obama.
There is a list of categories of prohibited and restricted items at the Customs and Border Protection web site:
https://www.cbp.gov/travel/us-citizens/know-before-you-go/prohibited-and-restricted-items
In the potentially prohibited are anything from any wild animal and recommends contacting the Fish and Wildlife Service for information. I did not see non-food domestic animal products listed so if your shofar is from a domestic sheep you may be okay. I know that is is possible to import a shofar because Judaica stores import them but I don’t know what hoops you have to jump through. I bought a ram’s horn shofar just a few weeks ago at West Side Judaica that had just arrived from Israel.
Good luck!!!
Charlie
Religious Jews who care about Torah values like modesty, honesty in business, honesty in relationships, honesty in speech and writing, and integrity as a public official will be voting for Biden. Most of my community will be.
Trump gaffes?
Well, lets see.
He claimed he didn’t know who David Duke was. (That was exposed as a lie — someone found a recording from years earlier when he clearly said he knew who Duke was. Maybe it is dementia.)
He said the Continental Army took over airports during the American Revolution.
He endorsed Paul Nehlen, a neo-Nazi, in a congressional primary. (That actually probably wasn’t a gaffe — he really did mean it.)
He called neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville “very fine people”.
He called the armed bands bearing swastikas and Confederate flags who took over the Michigan State House “very good”.
He called the 9/11 attacks the 7-11 attacks.
He accused Ted Cruz’s father as having been a conspirator in the assassination of President Kennedy.
He claimed that “Ayatollah Khomeini” was the supreme leader of Iran; Khomeini had died in 1989.
He claimed that Andrew Jackson could have prevented the Civil War; Jackson had died in 1845 and the Civil War began in 1861.
He boasted that because the terrorists had destroyed the World Trade Center buildings, that he himself now owned the tallest building in lower Manhattan.
He claimed that the “1917” Spanish Flu pandemic (1918, actually) brought “World War II” to an end.
According to John Bolton, Trump thought that Finland was part of Russia. (It once was, but it became independent in December 1917.)
I could go on and on but you get the point. The guy who is cognitively impaired is not Biden.
“Once a type of work can be done as telework, there is no reason to live near the corporate headquarters”
My brother has been doing mostly telework for two decades; I have been entirely teleworking since early March. The problem is that obsessive compulsive managers don’t trust their employees and want them in the office. We are lucky to have enlightened bosses!
“NYC will gradually bounce back once there is a vaccine widely available and De Blasio is gone.”
Once there is a vaccine I think it is going to boom faster than anyone imagines as long as either Trump is defeated or his policies are reversed (in particular his trade, immigration, and tax policies). De Blasio is pretty irrelevant and is a lame duck anyway. We do need to elect a centrist mayor in 2021 rather than a woke progressive or a Trumpie.
“Rents and home values are falling.”
If that is true — and I question that — that is incredibly good news for the frum communities in NYC. We will be able to afford to live here!
We have a front loader, so I have no advice to offer.
“The shul even congratulated same-sex couples on their weddings in its newsletter.”
Not true. I saw the shul bulletin in question. A far right Jewish group doctored the bulletin and the lie went viral over the internet. It was actually a congratulations to the parents, who were long term shul members, and not the couple. You can argue about that, but you can’t argue that making up slanderous falsehoods is asur.
“It takes less than a minute to partially disable a voting machine.”
Or to change the software. Without paper backups, there is zero election security. Vote by mail is much more secure because you have the actual ballots. Similarly the scan ballots we use in NY are much more secure than the all electronic systems.
There was really nothing wrong with the old mechanical lever voting machines that were used in NYC until about a decade ago.
“One person = One vote.”
A speaker at the Republican Convention just called for an end to that.
“I don’t see the slowness of the Post Office yet.”
Postal service in the Bronx has been slow for decades. Many people did not get their absentee ballots in time for the June primary. (My wife received hers the day after the election.)
“They stopped writing mazal tov for gay marriage”
It never did that.
“they stop having females lead services.”
They still have women’s tefillah groups — or did, prior to the pandemic.
He was shot in the back. Seven times.
JTA is reporting that QAnon fan and future Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene shared an anti-Semitic and Islamophobic video on social media. Trump is a big supporter of hers. This is nothing new; Trump supported neo-Nazi Paul Nehlen in a congressional primary.
I have looked up the traffic counts. The busiest highway in the US is the George Washington Bridge, with approximately 300,000 vehicles traveling its 14 lanes each day pre-pandemic. (The absolute maximum capacity is roughly 42,000 per traffic lane assuming no backups, no toll booths, and no stop lights.) The majority of those vehicles are single passenger commuters who get counted twice. Six of those 14 lanes are covered and would be considered indoors.
“In the past 5 years HIR was twice warned to change its policies or risk being thrown out of the OU”
HIR still has female “clergy” (I personally despise the term as applied to Jewish leaders) and is still an OU shul.
“they are a fake people – they are descendants of Lebanese and Syrians who came for economic opportunities”
That is completely untrue. None of these terms for nationalities were in use until late modern times; the earliest use of the term “Palestinian” appears to have been 1911; Syrian nationalism and Lebanese nationalism are both from the second half of the 19th century — and all three originated with Christians! But in any case the entire region was part of the Ottoman Empire. Moving from Damascus to Jerusalem was like moving from Baltimore to Boston. Not an issue at all. To call Palestinians “fake” with no right to live in the Land is the same kind of nonsense that we hear from Hamas when it insists that Israelis are colonialists! It is similar to telling me that I have no right to live in New York because I was born in Pennsylvania. (The latest twist on this is that the Trumpies will claim that I really was not born in Pennsylvania because my family moved to Maryland when I was a year old.)
Palestinian Arab Muslim families are big into geneology and many can trace their ancestry all the way back to early Ottoman times. This helps to facilitate cousin marriage, which is also very popular among Israeli and Palestinian Arabs. The Ottoman censuses found that the 16th century population was almost entirely Muslim, with few Christians or Jews, and population growth of Muslims is completely explainable through relatively low rates of natural increase.
The term “Palestinian” is older than that of most national identities. It is older than the term “Israeli”. We don’t have to come up with nonsense ahistorical arguments to justify Zionism. And we should not when they provide ammunition to our enemies.
Amil Zola,
You correctly mention many problems we face but they are all addressable with the right leadership. It would take a lot less money to pay the rents and mortgages of the people facing homelessness than it is taking to prop up the stock market — but only Democrats are talking about that. Brick and mortar retail was dying even before the pandemic; hopefully the reduced demand for retail space will reduce the rents of the businesses that survive. The cost of drought relief would be even less than rent relief, although we do need to take some constructive steps on climate change in order to prevent future droughts. A free trade President like Biden could end the tariffs on his first day in office, ending that problem. Manufacturing in the US was actually doing pretty well prior to Trump but his trade wars disrupted supply chains and increased costs for US manufacturing. Manufacturing employment wasn’t increasing not because we weren’t making things but because efficient factories are now almost completely automated; future employment will be of engineers designing the factories rather than semi-skilled workers working in them.
I am an optimist that we will overcome.
“The Orthodox Union (OU), Rabbinical Council of America (RCA) and National Council of Young Israel have all in turn responded to Open Orthodoxy by severing their ties with the Open Orthodox institutions.”
That is not accurate. The Hebrew Institute of Riverdale remains an OU member synagogue and cooperates with RCA rabbis and YI synagogues.
I have stated this before in this comment thread and others have supported that. I am not sure why misinformation continues to be spread.