"Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward"

Historian Rick Perlstein's take down of the polling industry is really great. I definitely needed to read it.

The crazy truth is, polls have always had a mixed result at predicting election outcomes and their success rate now is not really much better than the polls from 100 years ago that everyone now accepts were flawed. So why does never new poll result grab my attention? I don't know if I can stop.

Does the NC GOP have any options for the Governor's race right now?

Does anyone know what happens if Mark Robinson does drop out of the NC Gubernatorial race? Can he still be replaced or is it too late? Absentee ballots to military and overseas voters were sent out last week and tomorrow ballots for everyone else who requested to vote by mail in North Carolina will be sent out. So it must be too late to change the name on the ballot. I don't see how Robinson could be replaced if his name is already on a ballot that is out in the world. So if he dropped out, would that just be like conceding the race?

Gambling that Hezbollah will "back down"

This is insane. Israel is simply escalating the conflict with Hezbollah. There's no other way to interpret their actions. The idea that Israel would expect Hezbollah to just back down after the two pager attacks and then a widened bombing campaign in Southern Lebanon is completely detached from reality.

There are two ways to look at this: Either (1) the Israeli government actually believes that Hezbollah will back down after Israel hit it hard several times over the past few days, or (2) they are lying and they know they are stirring up more violence to trigger more war along Israel's Northern border.

I don't think you could possibly believe #1 without holding incredibly racist assumptions about human nature. Again and again, Israel claims the inherent right to "defend itself" by causing violence to its neighbors after Israelis are killed by those neighbors. When that happens, Israelis claim striking back is what anyone would do under those circumstances. But the other side of that coin is that if Israel causes mass casualties on its neighbors than it should expect the neighbors to want to hit back against Israel hard. If that's what "anyone would do in those circumstances" then aren't the Lebanese "anyone" too? If Israelis actually think that Hezbollah will get less violent in these circumstances, they are just admitting that they don't view them as regular people. They are more like animals who must be cowed by inflicting pain until they are "broken in" like a horse. It is a sick and incredibly bigoted way to look at the world.

In my mind it is better if it is #2, they are lying. So instead of viewing Lebanese people as sub-human, Israeli leaders are trying to up the ante and ramp up violence against Lebanon. Why would they do that? My best guess is Gaza is winding down, they are running out of Hamas targets and Netanyahu knows he will go to jail if Israel stops being at war. So he needs a war with Hezbollah to save his own skin.

The term isn't completely about the act

I don't think there's any question that if the Iranian government did this to Israeli soldiers and members of the Mossad (but also ended up wounding children and at least one diplomat), it would be called "terrorism."

Actually, that's probably also true if any "non-Western" government did something like that, especially if the governing was from a predominantly Muslim country.

Red Lines

 It is funny how the press sometimes fetishizes "red lines" and sometimes doesn't.

In 2012, during the revolt against the Assad regime in Syria during the Arab Spring, Barak Obama was asked whether it would be a "red line" if Assad used chemical weapons to put down the revolt. He responded that yes, it would be a "red line" if chemical weapons were "moved around and utilized" and that would "change my calculus." That not very specific response to a question was taken by the press as a major policy statement by the President, and that further it was treated as if he specifically promised to invade Syria if chemical weapons were used there.

When a year later, Assad used chemical weapons against rebels and Obama was under tremendous pressure to immediately order a full-scale invasion of Syria, Instead, Russia got involved and brokered a deal that resulted in destruction of some, but not all, of Assad's chemical weapons. While to normal humans, getting Assad to give up some of its chemical weapons would count as an actual accomplishment and would fit the definition as a "change in [Obama's] calculus," because it was not a full-scale invasion, the press portrayed it almost universally as a Obama breaking his promise. Never mind that he never made a specific promise to invade invade. It was treated like he did. The blood-thirsty foreign correspondents seem to believe that "consequences" can only mean killing a ton of people. Every time Assad used chemical weapons after that, it was portrayed as evidence that Obama was "weak" for not buckling under the foreign press corps' immense pressure to start a new full-scale middle eastern war.

That's how it goes down when the imputed promise is to kill a bunch of Arabs. What about Biden's much more explicit "red line" that he would cut off weapons shipments to Israel if it invaded Rafah?

Crickets.

Seriously, while some bloggers may point out the contradiction, the mainstream press has completely lost interest in red lines. It's really weird after watching how important any vague line was to them during the Obama years.

Don't get me wrong, I sort of understand why Biden may have let this one go. The Democratic coalition is split on the Gaza conflict and he is afraid that an open conflict with Israel will fatally damage his coalition right before a close election. When you consider all the people who Israel has killed in Rafah, that calculation is ghoulish , but I at least understand where it is coming from. (Plus I'm actually hoping that it is just a political calculation because then maybe the administration will finally do something serious with Israel after the November election, or maybe a new Harris Administration will in January--which is still awful. How many civilians will be killed and maimed between now and then? But that is better than the alternative interpretation. The alternative interpretation, that the "red line" was bullshit all along and that Biden will back whatever atrocities Israel commits in Gaza, is so much worse).

But aside from the "what is Biden really thinking" question, this "red line" post is really about the press. Why were they so universally hard on Obama for not starting a new war, and so easy on Biden for not trying harder to stop one?

Natanyahu's dedication to permanent war risks Israel's oldest peace agreement with the Arab world

How weird that the New York Times could write an entire article about Netanyahu's insistence that Israeli forces remain in the Philadelphi Corridor (the area along the border between Gaza and Egypt) without any mention that doing so violates the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty. In fact, Israel has already violated it when it invaded Rafah a few months ago. Egypt did not seriously protest Israel's violation at the time, largely for domestic reasons. But it is one thing to look the other way when there is a temporary infraction. It's another thing for the Israeli leader to say that he is committed to have Israel violate the treaty from now on.

The U.S. "guaranteed" the 1979 treaty largely by paying off the Egyptian government with a generous foreign aid package. 45 years later, Egyptian leaders have grown pretty dependent on the huge military aid it receives from the U.S. I don't think Sisi could survive as a leader if the officers in the prop up his military led government have their gravy train cut off. But I also don't see how he can tolerate a permanent violation of the treaty with Israel without risking a really serious public backlash.

It’s about bribery

Lots has been written about Trump’s proposal to end federal taxes on tips. It is one of the few concrete policy proposals that Trump has bothered to mention in his presidential campaign.

It is generally viewed it as a ploy to get working class votes. It probably is! The Harris campaign apparently thinks so as they adopted the proposal, even as economist dismiss it as a terrible idea.

But I think something else is going on. In June the Supreme Court effectively legalized bribery of a public official in Snyder v. United States. It’s a pretty outrageous case, but it came at the end of the Supreme Court term that was filled with outrageous decisions, so it didn’t get nearly as much attention as it deserved. In the case, James Snyder, mayor of Portage, IN was prosecuted for bribery when he demanded $13,000 from a local truck dealership after he secured the company a million dollar contract from the city. The Court ruled 6-3 that because the payment came after-the-fact, payment of the $13k was a "gratuity" not a bribe (never mind that Snyder demanded payment). It was a pretty crass ruling, especially considering how certain members of the Court have been caught regularly accepting bribes gifts from rich benefactors interested in the Court's rulings.

After the decision came out, I heard one commentator mention that because tips are taxable income, these gratuities can still be prosecuted unless the recipient of the "gift" reports them as income. It was only after that that I first heard about Trump's bold proposal to exempt tips from taxes.

Maybe it was a coincidence. The first mention of the proposal that I can find was on June 21, 2024, which was a few days before the Snyder decision was officially announced on June 26. But I wonder if the Trump campaign had advance notice that the decision would go that way. And even if that wasn't the original idea, I think post-Snyder, exempting tips would cut off what may be the one remaining way to federally prosecute bribery of public officials in the U.S.

Threatening to "release footage" as a defense when accused of filming where not allowed

 The Trump campaign is run by the dumbest people in the world.