https://www.foxnews.com/politics/live-updates-election-12-8-2020
Raffensperger, a Republican and a supporter of President Trump, also pushed back against a barrage of criticism from the president, telling reporters that “disinformation regarding election administration should be condemned and rejected. Integrity matters. Truth matters.”
Despite encouraging news that at least three vaccines provide some protection against COVID-19, leading Israeli medical entrepreneurs say additional vaccine and treatment options are still needed to end the pandemic.
“There will be other vaccines, no question,” said Eyal Desheh, chairman of MigVax, an Israeli company developing an oral vaccine for COVID-19. “But I would caution against declaring victory.”
https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/we-are-not-americans-says-satmar-grand-rabbi-651419
We need to understand that we are in exile, we live here but we are not Americans,” the rabbi asserted.
Large crowds gathered Monday afternoon for the funeral of a beloved Hasidic rabbi in Williamsburg, home to the Satmar Hasidic community in Brooklyn. Thousands gathered at the funeral, according to the New York Post, and most did not wear masks.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/07/opinions/safe-harbor-day-trump-efforts-over-honig/index.html
But the arrival of the safe harbor date should effectively extinguish any dying embers of hope even for the last few remaining election denialists. And what an utter disaster — legally and otherwise — the Trump team's effort to contest the election in the courts has been. The lawyers for Trump and his campaign have had more than 30 lawsuits thrown out or withdrawn from courts across the country almost as quickly as they've been filed. It's tough to identify any one particular low point, but I'll go with the federal district court judge who characterized one of Giuliani's federal lawsuits as "Frankenstein's monster."
https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/12/coronavirus-orthodox-brooklyn-blima-marcus-emes.html
Sherman, the Chabad-Lubavitch father who has since returned to his local ambulatory practice in Crown Heights, has not faced anything quite as scary. But he says that his efforts to pressure his fellow community members to comply with COVID-19 safety measures are often met with “anger, frustration, and contempt.” “Somehow,” he told me, “I’ve become the threat.”
https://www.foxnews.com/world/swedens-pandemic-experiment-ends-spiking-coronavirus-cases
Sweden’s Covid-19 experiment is over.
After a late autumn surge in infections led to rising hospitalizations and deaths, the government has abandoned its attempt—unique among Western nations—to combat the pandemic through voluntary measures.
Like other Europeans, Swedes are now heading into the winter facing restrictions ranging from a ban on large gatherings to curbs on alcohol sales and school closures—all aimed at preventing the country’s health system from being swamped by patients and capping what is already among the highest per capita death tolls in the world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/us/politics/jews-disloyal-trump.html
The accusation that Jews have a “dual loyalty” — that they are not to be trusted because their true allegiance is to their religion, rather than to the country in which they live — dates back thousands of years. It animated the Nazis in 1930s Germany, when they accused Jewish people of being traitors and used charges of disloyalty to justify their arrests, persecutions and mass killings.
As far back as the Middle Ages, Jews were tagged in their communities as inherently untrustworthy and suspect, incapable of being loyal to their ruler because of their ties to other Jews around the world. They were also viewed as a threat to the church because of their religious beliefs.
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1775&context=msr
Likewise, in discussing the exodus, Hitchens dogmatically asserts: “There was no flight from Egypt, no wandering in the desert . . . , and no dramatic conquest of the Promised Land. It was all, quite simply and very ineptly, made up at a much later date. No Egyptian chronicle mentions this episode either, even in passing. . . . All the Mosaic myths can be safely and easily discarded” (pp. 102–3). These narratives can be “easily discarded” by Hitchens only because he has failed to do even a superficial survey of the evidence in favor of the historicity of the bibli-cal traditions. Might we suggest that Hitchens begin with Hoffmeier’s Israel in Egypt and Ancient Israel in Sinai?14 It should be noted that Hoffmeier’s books were not published by some small evangelical theo-logical press but by Oxford University—hardly a bastion of regres-sive fundamentalist apologetics. Hitchens’s claim that “no Egyptian chronicle mentions this episode [of Moses and the Israelites] either, even in passing” (p. 102) is simply polemical balderdash.
The history of later Judaism fares no better under the pen of Mr. Hitchens. Take, for example, his discussion of “the vapid and annoying holiday known as ‘Hannukah’ [sic]” (p. 273). (“You’re a mean one, Mr. Hitch!”) Hitchens informs us that in celebrating Hanukkah, “the Jews borrow shamelessly from Christians in the pathetic hope of a cele-bration that coincides with ‘Christmas’ ” (p. 273). This is a remarkable achievement, considering that the origin of the festival of Hanukkah, the “dedication” of the temple, antedates Christianity—indeed, Jesus Hitchens, god is not Great (Hamblin) • 59 himself is said to have come to Jerusalem to celebrate the Feast of the Dedication (John 10:22)! In a stunning case of blaming the victim, Hitchens informs us that the Maccabean revolt was an attempt to “forcibly restor[e] Mosaic fundamentalism against the many Jews . . . who had become attracted by Hellenism” (p. 273). In Hitchens’s worldview, it seems to be just another case of evil “fundamentalists” (read: Jews who wanted to follow their religious traditions) oppressing benign “true early multicul-turalists” (p. 273) (read: Jews who wanted to abandon their religion and become hellenized). Note, also, the anachronistic transposition of the concepts of modern “fundamentalist” and “multiculturalist”—not necessarily antonyms, by the way—onto the ancient world.
The problem was not, as Hitchens declares, that fundamentalist Jews oppressed a minority of Jews who voluntarily hellenized. Rather, Antiochus IV (reigned 175–164 bc), a king of the Greek Seleucid dynasty that ruled much of the Near East in the second century bc, became the banner-bearer for the policy of enforced hellenization of the Jews.
https://www.businessinsider.com/american-jews-condemn-trump-for-saying-israel-is-your-country-2020-9
During an annual White House conference call to honor the upcoming High Holidays on Wednesday, Trump told American Jewish leaders, "we really appreciate you, we love your country also and thank you very much."
The president's apparent suggestion that Americans are Israelis is similar to previous remarks Trump has made and sparked outrage over, including when he told an audience of Jewish Americans that Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu is "your prime minister" and called Jews who are Democrats "disloyal."
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/anyone-who-thinks-trump-is-good-for-the-jews-is-a-freier-645875
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/kemp-trump-clash-election-results
Trump took to Twitter to voice his frustration over losing the traditionally red state by 12,500 votes and said, “I will easily & quickly win Georgia if Governor [Kemp] or the Secretary of State permit a simple signature verification.”
“Has not been done and will show large scale discrepancies,” Trump claimed. “Why are these two ‘Republicans’ saying no? If we win Georgia, everything else falls in place!”
But the president’s Saturday comments did not line up with what Kemp reportedly told Trump.
“As I told the President this morning, I’ve publicly called for a signature audit three times (11/20, 11/24, 12/3) to restore confidence in our election process and to ensure that only legal votes are counted in Georgia,” Kemp fired back on Twitter, directly responding to Trump’s tweet.
Faced with possible Republican loss of the Senate, President Donald Trump spent more time at a campaign rally Saturday ranting about his election loss and ripping Georgia Republican leaders who refused his demands to subvert the results in the Peach State.
Trump did promote incumbent Georgia Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler – whose Jan. 5 re-election bids will decide control of the Senate – but framed most of the rally around his own legacy and false allegations about the election.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/05/politics/trump-georgia-brian-kemp-phone-call/index.html
President Donald Trump on Saturday called Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, pushing him to convince state legislators to overturn President-elect Joe Biden's win in the state, a source familiar with the conversation told CNN.
