I am going to leave this post up and respond to it in due course but these kinds of angry, pissed off rants are not appropriate for our community. These points can be made without bringing all this negative sentiment in here.
On review, I am taking the post down as it has false and misleading information in it. Your inflation number is incorrect, and your statement that inflation is not down is also incorrect.
Finally, telling me to stop saying, writing or arguing something is way out of bounds. In the future, be more careful with your data, and keep the sentiment respectful for all involved, particularly the President. Thank you.
Geoff Duncan is the former Lieutenant Governor of Georgia, elected in 2018 and did not run for reelection in 2022. He knew his refusal to support Trump's baseless claims of having won Georgia would doom his reelection chances, and besides, in late 2020 he and his family went through hell from MAGAs angry with him for that refusal. The current Lieutenant Governor is a MAGA loyalist who was one of the false electors who tried to steal Georgia's electoral votes in 2020.
Simon, even though its a poll and I tend to disregard all polls at this moment in time, the college poll results are significant. The media focus has been on the protests, the violence generated by both protestors and others, the damage to university property and canceling of graduations. Sadly, a few universities capitulated to the protestors which just fuels a well-funded, planned movement across the country. I hope the main stream media picks up the Axios poll and gives it the air time it deserves.
As always, please join me on Spoutible, Simon. 🙋🏻♀️. @ISJ408
There should be more coverage of the great things Joe Biden has done so far while emphasizing what he has had to contend with including a rogue house and pro Trump Supreme Court. It needs to be put in proper context and hope the American people understand how his Herculean efforts paid off. How about sparing America from a trump second term in 2020. These out to count for something.
Not to mention a lunatic (criminal) ex-president with a big mouth and scared/complicit house and senate members who do his bidding. And a national press that is failing us for the most part.
That’s the problem; our national press is failing us. Democrats are not “bad at messaging” - this makes me want to tear out my hair and smash things when I hear it - but we have a press who is pro-Republican and anti-Democrat. The NYT all but admitted they don’t like Joe Biden because he is neither impressed nor bamboozled by them.
He is demonstrating TRUE Leadership 2 protect Framers’🇺🇸 I would hope the ElectedOfficeHolders could follow 🇺🇦’s example when IndictedWarCriminalPutin attacked a SovereignCountry PUTDOWN policy disagreements joined opposition 4 the democracy of 🇺🇦. Not Leader McConnell or Attorney General Barr who this pushing age 80 believes they’re too afraid of MAGA. Both know how Authoritarian’s work & their cowardice will NOT protect anything or anyone when the Dictator has No Use 4 them. #MoscowMitch in my POV has spent past 4 decades focusing on taking down FoundingFathers’ vision for OurGreat🇺🇸. I’ve been an Independent most of my life. Since 2016 have only voted 💙 I stand with 🇺🇦& believe that Together We Will Keep Our Republic. The Hopium way is work daily to save Framers’🇺🇸, Not Project2025, and Worry Less.
Thank you so much Simon for putting some very important issues into context. We all know the media is trying to do it's utmost best to create controversy for Joe Biden. The truth of this election is and has always been as you say everyday - we'd much rather be us than them.
You talk about, “Why it Matters”. If there is no cease fire. If Israel keeps annihilating the Palestinians and Biden does nothing to stop it he will lose votes. These people “MATTER” and many Americans know this, obviously, with the protests going on. what is Biden going to do? This needs to be addressed and ended!!
I don't know what Biden could do to rein in Netanyahu, he's shown for thirty years that he doesn't give a damn what America thinks. To quote Bill Clinton, “Who the fuck does he think he is? Who’s the fucking superpower here?”
Although I too am horrified and haunted by civilian casualties, what infuriates me is the credence that everyone, everyone, gives to the casualty figures being offered by Hamas. Like these animals would give accurate numbers. Please people, get a grip.
Michael Moore was on CNN pleading with the president to stop funding Israel. Bernie Sanders also knows Biden is losing votes with many young people over the Issue in Israel. Do you think Biden is afraid of losing votes from people who are pro Israel? I think that might be the case!! I am a Jew and I want the bombing to stop!!!!
So to be clear, we all want the hostages returned, Hamas to be gone, and the fighting to end. How we get there is where there are significant disagreements inside our family, and between the US and Israel. Joe Biden for example wants a two state solution and a Palestinian state, something that Bibi, Hamas and Hizbollah all don't want.
But we also have to be clear that while the protests have intensified in recent weeks Biden has some of his best polling of the cycle, and poll after poll show that Israel-Gaza remains a very distant issue for all but a very few people in the US, including young people.
Kathy, I’m reading over and over that *most* of the protestors that have been arrested on campuses have NOT been students. Whether they are bought and paid for, or volunteer bad actors, or just drifters who hang out in the various college co-ops, who knows, but the point remains that they aren’t actual students.
I have a good friend who attended a college with…shall we say a really really notorious student cooperative. According to her, there were all kinds of hangers-on who “crashed” there who were *not* students at the college in question. This was back in the 80’s and I think a lot of schools have tightened up rules since then, but, I would not be at all surprised if there were randoms crashing with “friends” in dorm rooms and the like. (Or if we are to believe Reddit, people’s *parents*!)
I think the whole Gaza issue is being blown way out of proportion by bad actors. This may sound callous, but I, for one, care this much ><; I’m a domestic issues voter and a vote blue no matter who. I am impressed with the Democratic candidates and incumbents, the ground game that the Biden campaign is putting on, the leadership of the DNC, DSCC, and local Democratic parties. 🗳️ 🌊
Agree on Dem candidates, ground game, and leadership.💪💙
People Power For Florida is all over the state registering young voters. Founded by popular University of Central Fl alumni, Rep Anna Eskamani, PPFF as well as the Rep take NO corporate donations.Their ground game is amazing. Oh…to be 30-somthimg again !
If it's 8% of college students who have participated in the protests it's probably 3-4% of 18-29 year olds over all, and could be much lower. A few other notes about the data that's been thrown at us:
- Strong support for ceasefire. This is not surprising, but it never really told us very much. You could be pro-cease fire and support Biden. You could be pro-cease fire only after the hostages were released etc. That we've often been told that the broad support for a cease fire was in opposition to Biden was never true; and Biden himself has been for a cease fire for many many months. He even negotiated one that Hamas walked away from months ago.
- But the uncommitted. There is no data that tells us why some people in a few states voted uncommitted. The critics of Biden claimed all uncommitted voters in their data to support opposition to Biden's policies. My guess is that at most a third to half of the uncommitted were voting due to Israel-Palestine, and not the many many other issues which could have encouraged folks to lodge a protest vote. Claiming all the uncommitted as Israel-Palestine protest votes was always ridiculous.
In my view the critics of Biden - and criticism on this issue is valid, legitimate - have frequently misled on the level of support of their position inside the family, encouraging more aggressive tactics, which I think repelled people who may have been sympathetic and open to weighing in for the people of Gaza. As I wrote in my two memos I think the protest movement has blown it politically and their legitimate concerns about Israel's conduct of the war have been lost to stories of chaos, vandalism, wild anti-Semitism and the disruption of end of year activities for students who lost so much during COVID. Onward.
There was another poll a month or so back that showed Gaza, and FoPo in general, to be way down on the list of what matters to young Americans. In general - sure, people might be upset on humanitarian grounds, but they won’t really be *concerned* or *affected* unless actual American lives are at stake. Otherwise, domestic policy, such as jobs and body autonomy and reproductive rights, rank far higher, because these are immediate, in-our-backyard concerns.
Vietnam was a losing issue for LBJ because the protestors had their friends and family coming back missing limbs, in wheelchairs, in body bags even. Or traumatized and with a mental health system that couldn’t really deal with them. *And there was a draft.* Let me say it louder for the people in back: THERE WAS A DRAFT. And if you were 18 or 19 and not educated or skilled, congratulations, it’s the infantry - combat troops - for you! *This* is what people were upset about, not so much about what foreigners were doing to each other.
Iraq, same but to a much lesser degree as there was no draft, and technological, medical and therapeutic advances have lessened the outright casualty and permanent disability rate, but, there were still deaths, disabilities, and trauma that was not easily healed.
Combine “no American lives at stake” with the fact that a lot of the protestors arrested on campus were not, in fact, students, and all this “but Gaza” starts to smell like an open can of sardines left out in a Phoenix summer.
Moving on to the Republicans’ bad candidate problems: they sure are a prize crop of losers, aren’t they! It’s ironic that the one actually good and credible candidate (Larry Hogan) is running in a state he is very unlikely to win, unless Alsobrooks or Trone really does a Martha Coakley style eff-up. Maryland is just too blue on the federal level. (Not counting Jim Justice as one of the good candidates simply because once Manchin retired we knew WVA was gone no matter how awful a Republican entered the race.)
And, since Maryland primary voting is closed-party voting, who knows if the MAGA loonies will even elect Hogan in the first place.
All of the rest of the Republican candidates in the swing states are awful, each and every one. Some are more awful than others, but none reach the level of “credible,” let alone “strong” or “formidable.” The Republican Party arms are broke, and their primary need in a candidate is “can they self fund?” Hence we get jokers like Eric Hovde, who thinks that a bare-chested plunge into a frozen lake will win him votes somehow. Maybe if you are running for President of the Polar Bears Club? Or we get Tim Sheehy, who isn’t smart enough to keep his skein of lies untangled. (And people were worried he’d be “””so much stronger””” than Maryland Matt Rosendale.)
I was very interested in your comments about many college students shrugging their shoulders at the protests on campus. Our grandson is a junior at an elite college in New England. He is very unhappy with the "students" & their tent enclaves on the commons. Though he is sympathetic with the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza, he understands that Hamas started this on Oct. 7. And he is convinced that to really make a difference, students ought to be going ballcap in hand to all the downtown merchants & others in the college community & asking for donations to World Central Kitchen & Doctors Without Borders. He thinks skipping class, hanging out in tents & then asking for their meals to be delivered seems like performative virtue signaling, with no direct results.
I am going to leave this post up and respond to it in due course but these kinds of angry, pissed off rants are not appropriate for our community. These points can be made without bringing all this negative sentiment in here.
On review, I am taking the post down as it has false and misleading information in it. Your inflation number is incorrect, and your statement that inflation is not down is also incorrect.
Finally, telling me to stop saying, writing or arguing something is way out of bounds. In the future, be more careful with your data, and keep the sentiment respectful for all involved, particularly the President. Thank you.
Geoff Duncan is the former Lieutenant Governor of Georgia, elected in 2018 and did not run for reelection in 2022. He knew his refusal to support Trump's baseless claims of having won Georgia would doom his reelection chances, and besides, in late 2020 he and his family went through hell from MAGAs angry with him for that refusal. The current Lieutenant Governor is a MAGA loyalist who was one of the false electors who tried to steal Georgia's electoral votes in 2020.
This is valuable context. Thank you.
Geoff Duncan is a truly remarkable Republican to publicly take this stance. I'm flabbergasted actually.
Simon, even though its a poll and I tend to disregard all polls at this moment in time, the college poll results are significant. The media focus has been on the protests, the violence generated by both protestors and others, the damage to university property and canceling of graduations. Sadly, a few universities capitulated to the protestors which just fuels a well-funded, planned movement across the country. I hope the main stream media picks up the Axios poll and gives it the air time it deserves.
As always, please join me on Spoutible, Simon. 🙋🏻♀️. @ISJ408
There should be more coverage of the great things Joe Biden has done so far while emphasizing what he has had to contend with including a rogue house and pro Trump Supreme Court. It needs to be put in proper context and hope the American people understand how his Herculean efforts paid off. How about sparing America from a trump second term in 2020. These out to count for something.
Not to mention a lunatic (criminal) ex-president with a big mouth and scared/complicit house and senate members who do his bidding. And a national press that is failing us for the most part.
That’s the problem; our national press is failing us. Democrats are not “bad at messaging” - this makes me want to tear out my hair and smash things when I hear it - but we have a press who is pro-Republican and anti-Democrat. The NYT all but admitted they don’t like Joe Biden because he is neither impressed nor bamboozled by them.
Yes. You said it better than I did.
He is demonstrating TRUE Leadership 2 protect Framers’🇺🇸 I would hope the ElectedOfficeHolders could follow 🇺🇦’s example when IndictedWarCriminalPutin attacked a SovereignCountry PUTDOWN policy disagreements joined opposition 4 the democracy of 🇺🇦. Not Leader McConnell or Attorney General Barr who this pushing age 80 believes they’re too afraid of MAGA. Both know how Authoritarian’s work & their cowardice will NOT protect anything or anyone when the Dictator has No Use 4 them. #MoscowMitch in my POV has spent past 4 decades focusing on taking down FoundingFathers’ vision for OurGreat🇺🇸. I’ve been an Independent most of my life. Since 2016 have only voted 💙 I stand with 🇺🇦& believe that Together We Will Keep Our Republic. The Hopium way is work daily to save Framers’🇺🇸, Not Project2025, and Worry Less.
GO TEAM🗽🗳️💙
Thank you so much Simon for putting some very important issues into context. We all know the media is trying to do it's utmost best to create controversy for Joe Biden. The truth of this election is and has always been as you say everyday - we'd much rather be us than them.
Some valuable polling of college students, Simon. Thank you for providing context and Hopium. 💙
You talk about, “Why it Matters”. If there is no cease fire. If Israel keeps annihilating the Palestinians and Biden does nothing to stop it he will lose votes. These people “MATTER” and many Americans know this, obviously, with the protests going on. what is Biden going to do? This needs to be addressed and ended!!
I don't know what Biden could do to rein in Netanyahu, he's shown for thirty years that he doesn't give a damn what America thinks. To quote Bill Clinton, “Who the fuck does he think he is? Who’s the fucking superpower here?”
Although I too am horrified and haunted by civilian casualties, what infuriates me is the credence that everyone, everyone, gives to the casualty figures being offered by Hamas. Like these animals would give accurate numbers. Please people, get a grip.
Michael Moore was on CNN pleading with the president to stop funding Israel. Bernie Sanders also knows Biden is losing votes with many young people over the Issue in Israel. Do you think Biden is afraid of losing votes from people who are pro Israel? I think that might be the case!! I am a Jew and I want the bombing to stop!!!!
So to be clear, we all want the hostages returned, Hamas to be gone, and the fighting to end. How we get there is where there are significant disagreements inside our family, and between the US and Israel. Joe Biden for example wants a two state solution and a Palestinian state, something that Bibi, Hamas and Hizbollah all don't want.
But we also have to be clear that while the protests have intensified in recent weeks Biden has some of his best polling of the cycle, and poll after poll show that Israel-Gaza remains a very distant issue for all but a very few people in the US, including young people.
This may add to perspective of how many college students have participated in the protests.
One of the largest universities in US, University of Central Florida, had about 100 students protest.
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2024/05/04/ucf-students-protest-war-in-gaza-as-graduation-ceremonies-proceed-nearby/?share=scewasweeew5utr2rrod
Kathy, I’m reading over and over that *most* of the protestors that have been arrested on campuses have NOT been students. Whether they are bought and paid for, or volunteer bad actors, or just drifters who hang out in the various college co-ops, who knows, but the point remains that they aren’t actual students.
I have a good friend who attended a college with…shall we say a really really notorious student cooperative. According to her, there were all kinds of hangers-on who “crashed” there who were *not* students at the college in question. This was back in the 80’s and I think a lot of schools have tightened up rules since then, but, I would not be at all surprised if there were randoms crashing with “friends” in dorm rooms and the like. (Or if we are to believe Reddit, people’s *parents*!)
I think the whole Gaza issue is being blown way out of proportion by bad actors. This may sound callous, but I, for one, care this much ><; I’m a domestic issues voter and a vote blue no matter who. I am impressed with the Democratic candidates and incumbents, the ground game that the Biden campaign is putting on, the leadership of the DNC, DSCC, and local Democratic parties. 🗳️ 🌊
I think there have been bad actors but a majority of the people arrested have been students.
Agree on Dem candidates, ground game, and leadership.💪💙
People Power For Florida is all over the state registering young voters. Founded by popular University of Central Fl alumni, Rep Anna Eskamani, PPFF as well as the Rep take NO corporate donations.Their ground game is amazing. Oh…to be 30-somthimg again !
https://www.peoplepowerforflorida.com/
If it's 8% of college students who have participated in the protests it's probably 3-4% of 18-29 year olds over all, and could be much lower. A few other notes about the data that's been thrown at us:
- Strong support for ceasefire. This is not surprising, but it never really told us very much. You could be pro-cease fire and support Biden. You could be pro-cease fire only after the hostages were released etc. That we've often been told that the broad support for a cease fire was in opposition to Biden was never true; and Biden himself has been for a cease fire for many many months. He even negotiated one that Hamas walked away from months ago.
- But the uncommitted. There is no data that tells us why some people in a few states voted uncommitted. The critics of Biden claimed all uncommitted voters in their data to support opposition to Biden's policies. My guess is that at most a third to half of the uncommitted were voting due to Israel-Palestine, and not the many many other issues which could have encouraged folks to lodge a protest vote. Claiming all the uncommitted as Israel-Palestine protest votes was always ridiculous.
In my view the critics of Biden - and criticism on this issue is valid, legitimate - have frequently misled on the level of support of their position inside the family, encouraging more aggressive tactics, which I think repelled people who may have been sympathetic and open to weighing in for the people of Gaza. As I wrote in my two memos I think the protest movement has blown it politically and their legitimate concerns about Israel's conduct of the war have been lost to stories of chaos, vandalism, wild anti-Semitism and the disruption of end of year activities for students who lost so much during COVID. Onward.
There was another poll a month or so back that showed Gaza, and FoPo in general, to be way down on the list of what matters to young Americans. In general - sure, people might be upset on humanitarian grounds, but they won’t really be *concerned* or *affected* unless actual American lives are at stake. Otherwise, domestic policy, such as jobs and body autonomy and reproductive rights, rank far higher, because these are immediate, in-our-backyard concerns.
Vietnam was a losing issue for LBJ because the protestors had their friends and family coming back missing limbs, in wheelchairs, in body bags even. Or traumatized and with a mental health system that couldn’t really deal with them. *And there was a draft.* Let me say it louder for the people in back: THERE WAS A DRAFT. And if you were 18 or 19 and not educated or skilled, congratulations, it’s the infantry - combat troops - for you! *This* is what people were upset about, not so much about what foreigners were doing to each other.
Iraq, same but to a much lesser degree as there was no draft, and technological, medical and therapeutic advances have lessened the outright casualty and permanent disability rate, but, there were still deaths, disabilities, and trauma that was not easily healed.
Combine “no American lives at stake” with the fact that a lot of the protestors arrested on campus were not, in fact, students, and all this “but Gaza” starts to smell like an open can of sardines left out in a Phoenix summer.
Moving on to the Republicans’ bad candidate problems: they sure are a prize crop of losers, aren’t they! It’s ironic that the one actually good and credible candidate (Larry Hogan) is running in a state he is very unlikely to win, unless Alsobrooks or Trone really does a Martha Coakley style eff-up. Maryland is just too blue on the federal level. (Not counting Jim Justice as one of the good candidates simply because once Manchin retired we knew WVA was gone no matter how awful a Republican entered the race.)
And, since Maryland primary voting is closed-party voting, who knows if the MAGA loonies will even elect Hogan in the first place.
All of the rest of the Republican candidates in the swing states are awful, each and every one. Some are more awful than others, but none reach the level of “credible,” let alone “strong” or “formidable.” The Republican Party arms are broke, and their primary need in a candidate is “can they self fund?” Hence we get jokers like Eric Hovde, who thinks that a bare-chested plunge into a frozen lake will win him votes somehow. Maybe if you are running for President of the Polar Bears Club? Or we get Tim Sheehy, who isn’t smart enough to keep his skein of lies untangled. (And people were worried he’d be “””so much stronger””” than Maryland Matt Rosendale.)
Hi Simon,
I was very interested in your comments about many college students shrugging their shoulders at the protests on campus. Our grandson is a junior at an elite college in New England. He is very unhappy with the "students" & their tent enclaves on the commons. Though he is sympathetic with the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza, he understands that Hamas started this on Oct. 7. And he is convinced that to really make a difference, students ought to be going ballcap in hand to all the downtown merchants & others in the college community & asking for donations to World Central Kitchen & Doctors Without Borders. He thinks skipping class, hanging out in tents & then asking for their meals to be delivered seems like performative virtue signaling, with no direct results.