Berachos (55a) There are three things which G-d Himself proclaims, namely, famine, plenty, and a good leader.
Berachos (55a) Rab Judah also said in the name of Rab: There are three things for which one should supplicate: a good king, a good year, and a good dream.
Infectious disease expert says Israel is in the middle of an outbreak that occurs every four years; Health Ministry urges vaccination for pregnant women to lessen spread
https://www.newsweek.com/squad-member-cori-bush-ousted-amid-democrats-israel-divide-1935594
Bush, who was elected to represent Missouri's 1st Congressional District in 2020, is a part of the progressive group of Democratic House lawmakers known as "the Squad," whose members have been some of the loudest critics of the Biden administration's policies regarding the Israel-Hamas war.
The congresswoman was among several Democratic lawmakers who boycotted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's address to a joint session of Congress last month. In a statement at the time, Bush accused pro-Israel lawmakers of "continuing to green-light genocide" and "actively celebrating the man at the forefront of that genocide."
Bell, conversely, has promised to "fight to make sure the United States remains Israel's strongest ally" if elected to Congress. AIPAC also spent more than $8 million in advertisements supporting Bell's primary run, according to The New York Times.
Mr. Trump’s rants are especially counterproductive because he needs Mr. Kemp’s organization in Georgia. Mr. Kemp is supporting the former President and is deploying his turnout machine, but Mr. Trump may convince many of those Republicans to vote for someone else or stay home as they did in 2020.
Mr. Trump won’t win if he’s fighting about the past instead of laying out an agenda for the future. But he simply can’t help himself.
Berachos (28a) Rabban Gamaliel said I will go and apologize to R. Joshua. When he reached his house he saw that the walls were black. He said to him: From the walls of your house it is apparent that you are a charcoal-burner. He replied: Alas for the generation of which you are the leader, seeing that you know nothing of the troubles of the scholars, their struggles to support and sustain themselves!
Hofstadter quotes with some sympathy Hiram W. Evans, the imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who, he says, summed up the major issue of the time ‘as a struggle between “the great mass of Americans of the old pioneer stock” and the “intellectually mongrelised Liberals.”’ ‘We are a movement,’ Evans wrote, ‘of the plain people, very weak in the matter of culture, intellectual support, and trained leadership. We are demanding, and we expect to win, a return of power into the hands of the everyday, not highly cultured, not overly intellectualised, but entirely unspoiled and not de-Americanised, average citizen of the old stock…. This is undoubtedly a weakness. It lays us open to the charge of being “hicks” and “rubes” and “drivers of second-hand Fords.” We admit it.’
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/03/trump-brian-kemp-georgia-00172564
“I’m sitting here scratching my head,” Bobby Saparow, a Republican operative and Brian Kemp’s former campaign manager, told POLITICO. “Attacking the popular governor of a pivotal swing state makes zero sense. If we want to actually unite, ask for the support of the guy who beat your endorsed primary opponent by 52 points and handily defeated Stacey Abrams.”
Trump has been frustrated by the positive attention and massive cash haul Harris has attracted, people close to him said. His campaign was hoping to characterize her as being hard to pin down on policy, but instead Trump at a convention for Black journalists earlier in the week took this idea to the extreme and alleged Harris was hard to pin down on race.
The former president avoided going there during the Atlanta rally, but in front of thousands of his supporters, Trump went after Harris’s intellect, speaking abilities and the pronunciation of her first name.
“Ultimately the core of this election is about economic issues. Every time you’re not talking about that, you’re missing an opportunity to engage independent voters,” GOP pollster David Winston said. “Independents always decide who wins elections.”
The former president and 2024 GOP nominee told the audience at a National Association for Black Journalists conference in Chicago that Harris has misled voters by publicly identifying only with her Indian heritage, and he falsely claimed that “she happened to turn black” a few years ago.
https://www.jpost.com/international/article-813096
Egypt’s President Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi may have given former US President and current presidential candidate Donald Trump a $10 million cash boost for his 2016 campaign, according to a Washington Post investigation.
The investigation found that only five days before Trump became president, an organization linked to the Egyptian intelligence service, the Research and Studies Center, asked a state-run bank in Cairo to “kindly withdraw” nearly $10 million.
The Trump administration did participate in prisoner swaps, including a November 2019 deal in which two Western hostages, one American and one Australian, were freed by the Taliban after more than three years in captivity. In return, the Afghan government freed three high-profile Taliban members. In 2020, Iran released U.S. Navy veteran Michael White after nearly two years in custody as part of a prisoner deal negotiated with Iran. The U.S. freed a dual U.S.-Iranian citizen, Matteo Taerri, a medical doctor who had been imprisoned on charges of evading sanctions.
Trump claimed only he could make the exchange and he never paid for any exchange
Facts First: Trump’s claim that he gave opposing countries “NOTHING” to secure the freedom of American prisoners is false. Though Trump obtained or helped to obtain the release of some Americans held abroad without having to release anyone in return, he also presided over at least four exchanges in which he approved the release of prisoners from US detention in exchange for foreign governments releasing Americans.
Israel has a right to defend itself, but more than that it has the right and ample cause to defeat the terrorists who won’t let it live in peace.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/07/30/russia-putin-antifeminism-women-children-society/
Vladimir Putin, who has long cultivated an aura of machismo as Russia’s strongman leader, is enlisting women to grow Russia’s population through childbirth and to rebuild his nation as a great power steeped in traditional family values — a campaign that is eroding equal rights and protections, human rights advocates and Russian feminists say.
“Many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers had seven or eight children, and maybe even more,” Putin declared to an audience of ultraconservative religious and political figures who had convened in the State Kremlin Palace in November. “We should preserve and revive these wonderful traditions.”
The Democratic attacks on Project 2025 were laughable because Mr. Trump is never going to have a governing platform. Oh, and anyone who becomes a political liability to Mr. Trump is expendable.
This is a hard education for Mr. Roberts, who made a loud cause of opposing aid to Ukraine when that became the view of the likes of J.D. Vance. He also adopted the line that anyone who resisted the new right-wing populism of Mr. Trump was a nostalgic Reaganite who doesn’t “know what time it is.”
The lesson for Heritage, and other think tanks, is that it’s better to stick to your principles rather than court the political flavor of the day. And never trust a politician.
In case there was any political doubt, Trump campaign officials Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita shot the wounded in a joint statement on Tuesday. “Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed and should serve as notice to anyone or any group trying to misrepresent their influence with President Trump and his campaign,” they wrote. “It will not end well for you.” Bang, bang, bang, bang.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) hit her party's own vice presidential nominee, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), for what she called "offensive" comments about “childless cat ladies."
"If the Republican Party is trying to improve its image with women, I don't think that this is working," Murkowski told POLITICO, calling Vance's comments unfortunate, unnecessary and "offensive to many women."
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/hitler-institutes-the-mothers-cross
The German Reich needed a robust and growing population and encouraged couples to have large families. It started such encouragement early. Once members of the distaff wing of the Hitler Youth movement, the League of German Girls, turned 18, they became eligible for a branch called Faith and Beauty, which trained these girls in the art of becoming ideal mothers. One component of that ideal was fecundity. And so each year, in honor of his beloved mother, Klara, and in memory of her birthday, a gold medal was awarded to women with seven children, a silver to women with six, and a bronze to women with five.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/j-d-vances-basket-of-deplorables-cf86985f?mod=trending_now_opn_5
One possibility is that at some level Mr. Vance really doesn’t respect people who make different life choices. Politicians often reveal their true beliefs when talking to supporters, as Hillary Clinton did when she sneered at the “basket of deplorables” who supported Mr. Trump in 2016.
Former President Donald Trump’s re-election running mate J.D. Vance was caught in another resurfaced clip talking about Trump and his MAGA fan base.
In the video, Vance blamed the “well-educated and the alt-right” for a “hyper-racialized” 2016 election—and even called some Trump voters “racists.”
https://www.newsweek.com/jd-vance-slammed-former-friend-over-lack-integrity-1931791
"He always approached conversations with respect and kindness," said Nelson. "And what we've seen with Donald Trump is a callousness and a cruelty in the way he talks about people ... he's a bully and he calls people names."
"When JD decided to run for the Senate in 2022, he started adopting that similar persona," they continued. "He just started talking in this divisive, dismissive and cruel way about people who were different from him. And that's just not the person that I used to know."
The presidential race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is essentially tied, according to a new Wall Street Journal poll that shows heightened support for her among nonwhite voters and dramatically increased enthusiasm about the campaign among Democrats.
The former president leads the current vice president 49% to 47% in a two-person matchup, but that is within the margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. Trump held a six-point lead earlier this month over President Biden before he exited the race and backed Harris.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/28/health/alzheimer-blood-test-p-tau-217-wellness/index.html
A combined blood test for cognitive decline has a 90% accuracy rate in determining whether memory loss is due to Alzheimer’s disease, a new study found.
In comparison, neurologists and other memory specialists correctly diagnosed Alzheimer’s in 73% of their cases. Primary care doctors had even less success, with only a 61% accuracy rate, according to the study.
Vance said lower fertility might also be the result of less patriotism. In Israel, which has relatively high fertility, “there’s still a fundamental sense that they love their country, they want their country to keep going. America was always considered by our European friends to be kind of jingoistic back in the 1990s and 2000s. We had pretty healthy fertility rates back then. Now that we’re a little bit more like our European counterparts, much less sort of innately patriotic than we were 20, 30 years ago, our fertility rates have declined.”
He then went on to criticize Harris’ policies of harming parents, while falsely accusing her of seeking to cut the child tax credit. She has previously expressed support for the policy, which was expanded significantly under the Biden administration as part of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) in 2021.
Would you invite your family and friends to a place that might endanger them and cause injuries? That is exactly what you are doing if the Simcha Hall is not licensed – because it means that it did not meet the safety requirements.
We went to a wedding and my husband ended up in the neurology department in the hospital with internal bleeding in the head, a broken nose and a fractured eye socket. He fell and lost consciousness because the hall was lacking simple basic safety features required by law – especially near steps.
Be Responsible! Before booking a Simcha ask the hall to show you their license and insurance policy. No insurance company will insure a business without a legal license. If an accident occurs, you bear responsibility and could be sued along with the hall for negligence!
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-may-replace-jd-vance-within-10-days-chuck-schumer-1931248
In an appearance on CBS News' Face the Nation, Schumer spoke on Sunday about the recent addition of Vance as Trump's running mate.
"The addition of JD Vance to this ticket is incredibly a bad choice. I think Donald Trump, I know him and I think he's probably sitting and watching the TV and everyday it comes out Vance has done something more extreme, more weird, more erratic. And I bet Trump is sitting there scratching his head and wondering why did I pick this guy," Schumer said.
The Senate majority leader continued: "The choice may be one of the best things he ever did for Democrats. Now the president [Trump] has about 10 days before the Ohio ballot is locked in and he has a choice. Does he keep Vance on the ticket, where he already has a lot of baggage and probably is going to have more baggage...or does he pick someone new?"
https://time.com/6999981/j-d-vance-appalachia-history/
For the next two decades, missionaries pitched their efforts to “reclaim” Appalachia by purposely shocking readers and compelling them to donate to the cause. Through newspaper and magazine reports that took unusually extreme examples and portrayed them as common occurrences—like the Tennessee minister who accepted payment for his services with a shot of whiskey—missionaries told stories about the supposed laziness, dirtiness, and violence of Appalachia’s white residents. Their favorite technique was to capture readers’ attention with sensational descriptions of what seemed like African Americans’ dilapidated, filthy, and dark hovels in the woods, filled to the brim with barefooted and rag-clad people—and then surprise the reader by announcing the report was in fact, about a typical mountain white home. Outside aid was needed, the stories told readers, to bring mountain whites up to a respectable level if white Americans were to “hold the fort” of their social and political authority.
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4796125-wsj-editorial-board-slams-vance-cat-lady-remark/
The Wall Street Journal editorial board slammed Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance over previous comments he made about “childless cat ladies.”
“The comment is the sort of smart-aleck crack that gets laughs in certain right-wing male precincts,” the Journal editorial board said in a new opinion piece. “But it doesn’t play well with the millions of female voters, many of them Republican, who will decide the presidential race.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/ben-shapiro-bets-donald-trump-regrets-picking-jd-vance?ref=home
In the wake of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ record-breaking fundraising numbers, Ben Shapiro has an answer for anyone wondering if Donald Trump would pick J.D. Vance as his running mate again: “I doubt it.”
“I think he probably would have picked somebody like Glenn Youngkin from Virginia in an attempt to broaden out his base,” Shapiro said on the latest episode of his self-titled show, according to Media Matters. “Instead, he went with J.D. Vance feeling, because he was right that at the time, he had a very solid advantage in the race against Joe Biden.”
12 killed, all aged 10-20, as Hezbollah rocket hits soccer field, sparking wider war fears
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-saying-you-wont-have-vote-four-years-sparks-fear-1931054
Trump added: "Christians, get out and vote just this time. You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It will be fixed. It will be fine. You won't have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/27/trump-speech-no-need-to-vote-future
Former president implores Christian supporters to vote ‘just this time’, then ‘in four years, you don’t have to vote again’
