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.
