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The surest way of guaranteeing that we have not seen the last of Donald Trump on the national political scene is to have a failed Biden Presidency. Mitch McConnell thinks so and so does Kevin McCarthy. They are doing everything in their power to just say no to everything proposed by the White House.

William A. Galston makes a stunning series of observations in The Wall Street Journal on June 9. In a piece called “What Drives GOP Resistance to Vaccines?” he notes that the typical demographic of a Republican voter ought to predict that that voter would be vaccinated. It does not.

The first one hundred days went pretty well. President Biden was able to get a covid relief package through the Congress and the economy is picking up as unemployment is dropping. But is it dropping quickly enough?

I don’t understand why the federal government, and particularly the president, is so calm about the ransom ware attacks on American industry. First, the Colonial Pipeline’s software was hijacked and now a large meatpacker JBS was hacked and forced to shutdown operations for a day or two. Hospitals have been targets and so have many other businesses in the U.S.

I moved from an early age. A lot.

Home movies of me right after I learned to walk show me running. I ran for 65 years. I ran a marathon and many shorter races. I loved running, but I can’t run any more.

I also chased things. Gold stars mainly.

She flies.

In the most amazing arena show I have ever seen, Alecia Beth Moore soars high above basketball courts and sites of ice hockey games to the adulation of tens of thousands of fans who know her better as P!nk.`

P!nk has now made a documentary film about her Beautiful Trauma Tour with stops all over the world leading to two sold out shows at Wembley Stadium in London. Each London show had 80,00 attendees. The film, All I Know So Far, has two important points to make.

Our elected representatives have not represented us in quite a while. Despite the emphasis on the rights of the minority in America, the majority still ought to rule and I cannot believe that a majority of Americans even care about having a gun and certainly don’t care about having an assault-style weapon or illicit high capacity magazines for legal handguns. The latter did the damage in San Jose last week.

When George Will came to the Jewish Community Center on Braeswood during the annual Book Fair a few years ago, he started his talk by saying, “ I understand that a few of you here are Jewish.” It got a great laugh.

To readers of this blog, it will come as no surprise that this blog writer is Jewish. I am also a staunch proponent of Israel. The point for today is that the two are not the same as both Bret Stephens and Michelle Goldberg discuss in The New York Times of May 25.

I remember it like it was yesterday, but it was the fall of 1966.

I was a new freshman at Duke University. I had taken my first trip below the Mason-Dixon line to get there and was adjusting to the food (hush puppies and Brunswick stew), clothes (alpaca sweaters and tassel loafers), and language (drawls and y’alls). I was also adjusting to being one of the only Jews on campus.

Thirty-five Republican members of the House of Representatives voted against the wishes of the party leadership and approved the formation of an independent commission to investigate the origins of the January 6 insurrectionist riot on Capitol Hill. Both Minority Leader McCarthy in the House and Minority Leader McConnell in the Senate oppose the formation of the commission claiming that there are enough investigations already on-going and that such a commission might interfere with the work of the Justice Department in bringing the perpetrators to justice. This is hogwash.

As Tom Friedman points out in The New York Times on May 19, Bibi Netanyahu and Hamas are cooperating with each other to keep each other in power through mutually assured destruction. The Israelis are forced to stick with Bibi in wartime and the Palestinians have to defer to Hamas given the leadership vacuum on the West Bank.

Lately, the American left has made a lot of noise in support of the “Palestinian cause.” The left accuses Israel of being an unfair aggressor and warmonger beating up on the defenseless Arabs in both the West Bank and Gaza. I guess these folks don’t remember the 1972 Olympic Games and the massacre in Munich. I do.

There is no such country. As such, there is no such thing as a Palestinian. What there are are Arabs living on land that used to be part of the British Protectorate of Palestine that encompassed what is now Jordan, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Palestine was segmented after the First World War and subsequently, an Arab state was created. Today that Arab state is known as Jordan. What the world refers to as Palestinians are those Arabs left in the non-Jordan, non-Israel parts of what used to be British Palestine.

It might as well be a religion.

The Republican belief that Donald Trump is the future of the GOP as espoused by Lindsey Graham and Kevin McCarthy is ridiculous.

Is America the beacon of world order or not? If not, then leaving Afghanistan on September 11, 2021, twenty years to the day after the events that got us there in the first place, may be not particularly troubling. But if you believe that there is evil in the world and one of the goals and strengths of the United States is trying to make the world a less evil place, perhaps retreating from Afghanistan now is not a great idea.

It’s a neighborhood in East Jerusalem in which Palestinian families live. It is land that was occupied by people who are now Israelis before 1948—before Israel was. Some of these Jews want the Arab occupied land back now and the government of Israel and its courts have deferred making a decision about who gets to live there. During the end of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, violence has broken out yet again at the Al Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount and has spread to street fighting in mixed Jewish-Arab neighborhoods (e.g., Lod).