Free Republic

What’s your take on the Reform challenge to the Tories? Is the Blue Wall at any risk of becoming the Brown Wall, or worse, turning Red altogether?

[Marrying his teacher or something, then divorcing her when she got cancer, affairs, etc. And all while criticizing Clinton. Priceless.]

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Nothing particularly scandalous about marrying people you know, until the left started in on power relations and so on. Even abandoning a spouse after a bout with illness is not all that different from trading her in for a newer model. With JFK, that occurred over days, not years.

The issue with JFK is that he is mainly famous for being young and good-looking. He backed down at Bay of Pigs, leading to the missile crisis, where he backed down again, withdrawing US nukes from Turkey. He also got Federal employees unionized, which has been a key driver of bloated Federal spending combined with increasing dysfunction. Overall, he was a president famous for being famous.

[I think you just use a rifle to take out ground crew and that is the end of the F15 flights...

Aren’t F15’s so last century anyway?]

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Astonishing that anyone thinks a national Civil War II is gonna start out any differently from the first, with entire states lining up in coalition on both sides. This means similar equipment on both sides, up to and including the nuclear triad.

[20 megatons a few times would clear up this issue.]

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An Israel that balks at cutting off Gaza’s water is not nuking anyone. Heck, it won’t even execute Arabs arrested for terror attacks, and has not changed its laws on this even after 10/7. And unlike the US, there is no ban on retroactive legislation. That’s how Eichmann got his neck stretched, after being abducted from Argentina, at the ripe young age of 56. Paradoxically, the guy might have lived longer in Germany, where Germans voted to repeal the death penalty just so their vilest butchers would be spared, and even multi-decade prison sentences were whittled down to a single digit number.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2005/06/04/the-paradoxes-of-a-death-penalty-stance/d9815e20-5457-4b5e-b2ff-f451ca6d1734/

[It’s just the reality of cost to produce

Would’ve happened no matter who is president

They are publicly held and have even greater responsibility to the shareholders to produce a positive return]

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I’m amazed it took this long. Tupperware makes the best plasticware in the biz, but the prices are out of this world. Like it or not, few will pay as much for them as it costs for Corning glassware. Rubbermaid and Sterilite aren’t quite as good, but way cheaper. And foreign makes of multiple origins are always nipping at their heels, although Walmart has so far held the line in stocking its store shelves with only Sterilite and/or Rubbermaid.

[Interesting the analysis assumes President Biden is competent and is acting rationally.]

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Their assumption is that in striking a balance between the Muslim vote and a Jewish vote 2x the size and Jewish political funding maybe 100x as large as its Muslim counterpart, he will go with Jewish interests. Biden’s been doing this for 50 years. He can do arithmetic.

The difficulty for India is that Western suppliers will likely balk at substantial tech transfers. That was the previous sticking point. Russia was reputedly pretty open-handed with those arrangements.

The interesting aspect of those transfers is that India hasn’t really spun up new domestic versions of Russian weaponry. The transfers seem aimed at ensuring that India has its own domestic production capacity for parts and accessories related to Russian gear it already uses, in the event Russia shuts its own for economic or other reasons. At the same time, even this capacity seems limited. India continues to purchase a lot of Russian parts to keep its equipment operational. It’s as if the tech transfers were merely notional.

Whereas outright technology theft is the rule with Chinese purchases of Russian equipment. Just about every Russian platform purchased by China has a Chinese clone, where the technology isn’t merely reverse engineered, but purloined, perhaps via cash payments to key people at Russia’s arms manufacturers. At the same time, however, the limits to Chinese larceny are evident in the fact that they have been unable, if memory serves, to match the the longevity of Russian engines for the SU-27 family, which themselves are a pale shadow of their Western counterparts.

[Looked at their prices in my area. Just the cheeseburger and order of fries shown above (no drink) comes to $15.05 at an outlying location - not in or anywhere near a big-city metropolitan area.]

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That seems pricier than Denny’s and Waffle House, which have more menu options, something for the whole family.

Correction:

It’s a list of popular books its left-wing audience might want to read. That automatically excludes most leftright-wing authors.

It’s a list of popular books its left-wing audience might want to read. That automatically excludes most left-wing authors.

[Highly intelligent but not very wise has been the perennial failing of that group.]

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Jews aren’t stupid. Left wing Jew haters despise Jews for what they think, whether it’s belief in a Jewish deity or support for Israel. Right wing Jew haters despise Jews for what they are - the taint is in the blood. In the worst case, and a Communist dictatorship transpires, a Jew can discard his religion and backing for a Jewish state. Whereas in a Nazi dictatorship, a Jew might be able to lie about his ancestry, but cannot escape the results of a DNA test. In Germany, a single Jewish grandparent meant a one-way trip to Treblinka or Sobibor, terminated by a dry shower.

[I know, I know, FDR got intelligence about the secrets that millions of Jews were getting killed in the early Holocaust and kept it quiet, and he had a chance to allow refugees to come to the US but refused it, so FDR was never truly in favor of the Jewish cause.]

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Context matters. FDR mounted an all-out war effort in which maybe half the country’s able-bodied adult males were drafted and 40% of the economy was harnessed. He needed every ounce of popular support he got, and Jews weren’t exactly a popular demographic then. Henry Ford got the Protocols of the Elders of Zion translated into English and widely-distributed and published a Jew-hating paper called the Dearborn Independent whose entire purpose was to alert its readers to the Jewish menace. None of this had any impact on Ford’s car sales. That’s the kind of disdain in which Jews were held, that this type of rank prejudice did not trigger a collapse in Ford sales volumes.

Think $900b is a lot to spend annually on defense? How about $10T? That kind of spending built weapon systems (the A bomb, sonar and radar) that were only theoretical before the war, but exacted a huge toll. Civilian car production ended, as well as a host of other items. Among other things, sugar, tires, gasoline, meat, coffee, butter, canned goods and shoes were rationed.

American citizens of Japanese descent were being interned. Why would Americans care about literal foreigners, kin to another despised minority? You might say this was cynical political calculation, but it was a calculation necessary to sustain a war effort in which unprecedented demands were being made of the entire population, a hefty chunk of whom - Germans and Italians - sympathized to some extent with their ethnic brethren across the Atlantic.

FDR used every last bit of political capital he had to get the war effort going. There was nothing left for Jewish refugees, many of whom had other options (Dominican Republic, et al) but refused to lower their sights. Now, if those refugees had known beforehand they were targeted for extermination and that Hitler would conquer most of Western Europe, they would have settled for any spot of dry land. Unfortunately, only hindsight is 20-20, and these refugees paid with their lives for underestimating the threat and being too picky.

[I’m not Jewish but I’ve definitely noticed the rise in Jew Hate. Even here on Free Republic occasionally! ]

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It was always latent. As Jew hatred becomes normalized, people who merely hinted at it become more open about their leanings. The vast majority aren’t Jew haters, but a substantial double digit minority is.

[The now working-class populist Republican party has a greater number of low-propensity voters, many of whom only show up when Trump is on the ticket as evidenced by the dismal 2018 and 2022 midterms.]

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Trump’s problem is that instead of paying canvassers to either get voters to the voting booth or collect mail-in ballots, he prefers to hold ego-boosting mass rallies - with his biggest fans in attendance - that waste tens of millions. Roman-style triumphs are fun, but should be held, as in Rome, *after* rather than before a victory.

The GOP guy is heir to a 2-store grocery chain. Maybe disgruntled customers showed up in force.

[Turns out he’s British.]

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There’s a type of Brit who combines broad generalization in a supercilious tone with slapdash work. This essay is a fine example. It has to be said, however, that at Internet era piece rates, The Hill likely did not pay enough for a fully-researched article.

[I’m\ read once that the reason Bush looked at his watch was that the moderators were letting Clinton talk longer than he was supposed to.]

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I seem to recall the same, but it was an awkward moment in a campaign full of them.

[But we got clinton and the rest is history]

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Many moons ago, LP Hartley wrote - the past is a foreign country - they do things differently there. In that sense, we have sojourned through several foreign countries since, without having needed a valid passport to make the journey.

[No Perot and Bush wins]

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Indeed.

[Bush looking at his watch during the debate, was another big moment in that campaign. He mailed it in.]

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Dubya learned from Bush pere - every public gesture, facial expression and word has to be carefully guarded, lest it be taken out of context and used as a weapon by the other side. That’s allegedly the source of “fool me twice, won’t get fooled again”. “Shame on me” might have been used as a sound bite against him.