Would El-Sayed Be Better Off If He Just Answered the Durned Question? Hooray for J.K. Rowling’s Update: Women’s Rights and ‘Trans’ Activism. Rep. Omar: This Is Not a Trick Question. More
In a no-holds-barred final debate for arguably the most fascinating midterm race in the nation, neither candidate held back. Republican Senate hopeful Mike Rogers and Democrat Abdul El-Sayed clashed onstage in Michigan:
The neck-and-neck race is one of the nation’s most closely watched contests in the November midterms and could help determine which party wins control of the Senate. Democrats hope to take advantage of Mr. Trump’s unpopularity and voters’ frustration with inflation and the Iran War. Republicans have sought to capitalize on divisions between progressives like El-Sayed and more moderate Democrats on Middle East policy and Medicare for All.
El-Sayed called Rogers’ platform a “MAGA vision” and argued the former congressman “stand[s] hip-to-hip with Donald Trump on all of his worst policies…. “He’s going to bend to Donald Trump because he is a sock puppet for the man,” said El-Sayed.
Rogers pushed back at one point, saying: “He wants to make this about Donald Trump. The bingo game ought to be: ‘How many times can he put Trump in any answer?'”
El-Sayed mentioned Trump 18 times, according to Fox Digital, which dubbed President Trump “the unofficial third person on stage.” Rogers said that some of El-Sayed’s supporters are tied to Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood. Rogers asked, “Are you for America or are you for these terrorist groups overseas?” Things became heated:
The most contentious moment of the debate came during a question on public safety, when Rogers hammered El-Sayed over his past support for defunding the police, accused him of deleting social media posts on the issue and pointed to El-Sayed’s past comments involving former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, who was backed by the Muslim Brotherhood.
El-Sayed fired back that it was “beneath” Rogers to question his commitment to the Constitution, declaring that he was “proud to be an American” and calling Rogers’ line of questioning “shameful.”
Rogers did not question El-Sayed’s “commitment to the Constitution”; Rogers instead asked him about alleged ties to Islamist organizations and issues, both relevant. Examiner Chief Political Correspondent Byron York raised the notion that El-Sayed’s evasiveness might be turning the tide against him:
Had el Sayed said simply, “Yes, I disavow the Muslim Brotherhood,” he might have put a quick end to the discussion. Instead, he engaged the questioner in a extended exercise in misdirection. His main strategy was to argue that questions about his family’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood somehow violated the religion clauses of the First Amendment.
Another Senate race is suddenly in the spotlight. The Wall Street Journal’s Barton Swaim writes about “Michele Tafoya in the Red Zone,” asking if Republican Tafoya could win a Senate seat from Minnesota, which hasn’t elected a Republican to a statewide office in two decades. Swaim writes:
… Michele Tafoya, is that rare thing in recent American politics: a strong candidate. Fans of the National Football League, of which there are many in Minnesota, remember Ms. Tafoya as for many years an NFL sideline reporter for ABC, ESPN and, from 2011 to 2022, NBC. Ms. Tafoya, an on-camera natural, has the added ability to explain policy views in crisp terms and with a smile.
Woman in the Arena. Six years after taking the controversial position that transgender activism poses a threat to women’s rights, J.K. Rowling has penned an update. It’s magnificent. Rowling says that, when she talks about trans activism, her critics often demand to know how it affects her. She responds:
It’s true, of course, that trans activism doesn’t impact all women negatively. In fact, the more privileged you are, the less it tends to affect you, and the more it might benefit you. Aside from an avalanche of death, rape and torture threats, it hasn’t noticeably affected my life. Nor does it hurt wealthy women who repost the vogueish mantras while sitting in dressing rooms guarded by private security guards.
It doesn’t hurt women in the upper echelons of media, publishing and academia, who don’t need a changing room at work and who feel a snobbish disdain for working class women who don’t want to strip off in front of heterosexual males who’ve ‘identified’ into the women’s changing room. Trans activism doesn’t hurt headline-hungry female politicians whose attitude to women’s rights is ‘whatever is good for me personally’. On the contrary, trans activism has been good for those women. It’s fashionable, and keeps them popular with their progressive tribe, and costs them, personally, absolutely nothing.
“Activist Psychiatrists Are Afraid of Evidence” in the Wall Street Journal’s Free Expression section is also concerned with the issue of “gender ideology.” A psychiatrist and the medical officer of the organization Do No Harm say that the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) refuses to let them discuss and put the issue on the agenda for an upcoming meeting. They write:
Aacap’s message is clear: The academy would rather circle the wagons around child gender transition than hold an open debate on whether this is good clinical practice. The annual meeting’s schedule has been released, and it includes only sessions that treat pediatric gender transition as settled science and medically necessary care. So much for balance and a diversity of views.
Okay, this shouldn’t be a hard question. Rep. lhan Omar addresses allegations she married her brother after federal raid:
Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., dismissed longstanding allegations that she married her brother for immigration purposes as “insane” during a Wednesday interview, while saying she was unaware of any familial relationship with her former husband.
“Not to my knowledge,” Omar told MS NOW’s Chris Hayes when asked whether there was any “weird kernel of truth” to allegations involving her ex-husband, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi..
Who says a billionaire’s tax won’t affect the behavior of billionaires? Mark Zuckerberg feared the billionaire’s tax so much that he threatened to leave California, but Meta’s board cut him a deal. Proponents of the billionaire tax forget that billionaires are—well—billionaires and thus more able than the rest of us to respond to destructive taxes.
Is there really a chance of peace? “A (very) small glimmer of hope that Putin will finally make peace” is the headline above a New York Post editorial. Meanwhile, David Ignatius of the Washington Post writes:
Vladimir Putin is hardly a “humanitarian,” despite the cringe-worthy homage that U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff paid to him in St. Petersburg on Wednesday. But is the Russian president ready to begin serious peace negotiations to halt the brutal war in Ukraine?
That’s what a top Kremlin aide claimed after the meeting, but we won’t know if it’s true until Russia, Ukraine and the United States begin negotiations that officials close to the talks said are tentatively set to start in November. This fledgling peace effort is at least moving in the right direction, though. For a change, the United States, Europe, Ukraine and Russia have found a framework for discussing an end to the war.
We’re learning more about a purely fabricated, fake poll. The latest poll is always a boon for lazy reporters, but it’s a good idea to verify them. A New York Post story suggests that New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is lazy and more interested in being in the spotlight than working. Ominous lead to a Powerline post:
A hallmark of a failed state is when politicians and their supporters can’t afford to give up power, because they will be criminally prosecuted by their successors if they do. Democrats have already tried to jail Donald Trump and various other Republicans, and they are now talking openly about bringing bogus prosecutions for the purpose of deterring people–young people, specifically–from coming out as Republicans.
Ms. Must owes you something positive after that. From “American Exceptionalism Is No Myth” in Free Expression, which argues that it’s better over here:
The Brits themselves don’t seem to see it. When asked to imagine how they’d fit into the 50-state U.S. economic hierarchy, they rank themselves in the top 10. That is so far off the mark as to qualify as delusional. The U.S. contains within itself more than four dozen economic statelets that are more productive per-capita than the place that once produced Rolls-Royce, the Beatles, Harry Potter and my No. 1 guy, Daniel Day-Lewis.
Mississippi drinks their milkshake.
