Jeff Brees retweeted
Bill Maher presents Israeli history for dummies
For those who believe all that they have been told my mainstream media or the 'free Palestine' movement, this is important fact checked information to digest
Most of the people chanting 'from the river to the sea' have no idea what it means, perhaps it would be best to get just a little educated on what your are protesting
Jeff Brees retweeted
Thank you to everyone who has asked me for my recommendations on the statewide propositions.
YES on 39, 41, 42, 43, 45
NO on 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 37, 38, 40, 44
Yes, I'm writing a "Susan does the props" column. Here's a preview:
NO on Prop. 1 - It's $11.25 billion of borrowed money for "affordable housing" that will enrich favored developers and burden taxpayers for decades.
NO on Prop. 2 - A budget shell game to enable spending that the state can't afford.
NO on Prop. 3 - Another permanent extension of "temporary" tax hikes. Just stop with this.
NO on Prop. 4 - Allows taxpayer dollars to be used for political campaigns. Seriously, no.
NO on Prop. 5 - Guts the people's power to recall elected officials by prohibiting a replacement election on the same ballot. Changes the law to allow the ousted official to run in the later special election to fill the office. The legislature put this on the ballot. Of course they did.
(There is no 6 through 36. Don't call the county, your ballot is not missing any pages.)
NO on Prop. 37 - A $25 billion program to fund second mortgages for people who can't come up with a down payment, paid for by the people who get the mortgages. Caps on the income of people who are eligible. Caps on the price of the (newly constructed only) homes/condos they can buy. Goodies for developers who agree to conditions. It's a lot of government effort to push people into having two mortgage payments they're barely able to afford. And then they have to pay HOA fees, property taxes, insurance premiums and utility bills. What could go wrong?
NO on Prop. 38 - This is $8.4 billion of borrowed money for medical research, to be repaid with interest by California taxpayers. The mandated spending split seems designed to benefit the individual who paid to collect the signatures to get it on the ballot.
YES on Prop. 39 - Voter ID. It's long past time for California to join 36 other states and the civilized world in verifying the identity of voters.
NO on Prop. 40 - The "billionaires tax," which has a provision allowing the Legislature to amend it later. Guess why.
YES on Prop. 41 - Requires pre-election audits of programs that would be funded by a proposed special tax. Good idea.
YES on Prop. 42 - Prohibits a tax on retirement accounts and other assets, blocking Prop. 40. Another good idea.
YES on Prop. 43 - Protects taxpayers by making it harder to raise taxes. Restores the required two-thirds vote to pass local special (earmarked) taxes. Closes a court-created loophole that since 2017 has made it easier to pass sales tax increases and other costly taxes. Vote yes to close this loophole.
NO on Prop. 44 - Similar to the kidney dialysis propositions that relentlessly haunted previous ballots, this is an attempt to harass non-unionized clinics.
YES on Prop. 45 - Creates CEQA streamlining for certain types of projects, including single-family home developments and water projects. May also ease the path for some horrific projects, so this one's a mixed bag.
That's the list of propositions that are on your statewide ballot.
A note about the statewide offices:
If you think California is on the wrong track, the two most important offices for fixing the problems are governor and controller.
It will get better if Steve Hilton is elected governor.
It will get better if Herb Morgan is elected controller.
Their opponents really need to get out of the business.
A note about judicial races:
Two recently appointed appellate court justices who recklessly widened the loophole that makes it easier to raise taxes are on the ballot for retention. If you vote in Los Angeles, Ventura, Santa Barbara or San Luis Obispo counties:
Vote NO to retaining Armen Tamzarian
Vote NO to retaining Audra Mori.
###
Jeff Brees retweeted
This was Gaza, just five days before they made the biggest mistake in Muslim history. Was it worth it, Hamas?
Jeff Brees retweeted
Young activists think socialism means FREE STUFF.
They have no idea it's failed again and again.
"It's not that people have to be trained into liking socialism," explains @robkhenderson: "They have to be educated out of liking it.”
Stossel TV Fellow Leyla Taghiyeva explains:
Jeff Brees retweeted
Everyone posts the same Bill Clinton clip from Camp David in 2000, and I understand why. It is a clean story and it is easy to share. But then the replies start. “You cannot trust Clinton”. “He is American. He is pro-Israel”. “That is not the full picture”.
Well then here is Hosni Mubarak, the former president of Egypt, sitting in Cairo and talking about something most people on here have never even heard of. The Mena House conference in 1977. Years before Clinton, and years before the 2000 summit everyone argues about.
He says they held a conference there and the Palestinians refused to participate. It wasn’t some complicated diplomatic disagreement. They simply would not even come. He says that every time there was an opportunity they wasted it, and that if they had taken the document that was already on the table and actually negotiated over it, the region would not be in the disaster it is in now.
That document, in his account, included the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the West Bank and Gaza. The argument was not even whether Israel would leave. The argument was who would control security during the transitional period. Jordanian and Palestinian forces? Israeli and Palestinian forces? Other Arab forces? He says the Israelis did not mind negotiating those points.
Egypt signed a peace agreement and was insulted for it.
Then he says the line that should bother people more than any American speech. For fifty years they repeatedly said NO.
They said NO After 1948. They said NO After 1967.
He says they will keep saying no until there is nothing left to bargain over.
This is not an Israeli spokesman and it is not the White House. This is an Egyptian president telling you the walkout did not begin in 2000. It was already a habit long before that.
Jeff Brees retweeted
The New York Times coverage of the Gaza-Israel war was grossly pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel, according to a peer-reviewed study. Jewish casualties were omitted or minimized while Palestinian casualties were amplified and misrepresented.
Yale University Professor Edieal Pinker published the review in the an academic journal Studies in Conflict & Terrorism. His peer-reviewed research quantitatively evaluated 1,559 New York Times articles published between October 7, 2023, and June 7, 2024, to assess potential narrative imbalances.
The study found that:
- 91% of the analyzed articles failed to mention Israeli casualties that occurred after October 7.
- 1,423 articles completely omitted mentions of both Israeli post-Oct. 7 casualties and Hamas combatant deaths.
- 50% of the articles did not reference the Israeli hostages held by Hamas during the fighting, and 41% omitted mentions of the Israeli casualties from the initial October 7 attack itself.
- Personal stories highlighting Palestinian and Lebanese suffering appeared on average two out of every three days. Comparable accounts of Israeli suffering unrelated directly to the October 7 events appeared in very few articles.
- The word "Israel" appeared 27,205 times across the dataset, compared to just 8,499 mentions of "Hamas," meaning Israel was mentioned more than three times as often. This statistical discrepancy places near-exclusive agency and responsibility on Israel while severely diminishing Hamas's role in sustaining the conflict.
Pinker concluded that these consistent editorial choices cultivated a dominant narrative portraying Israel as the sole aggressor facing few consequences beyond losing international sympathy, while Palestinians were predominantly framed as passive victims. He argues that the coverage deprives readers of a comprehensive understanding of the ongoing combat dynamics and the continuous nature of Israeli losses.
Following the initial release of the study data, The New York Times publicly defended its reporting, claiming it has covered the war with rigor and from all angles. Of course my commentary on their reporting shows that this defense is hot garbage.
The New York Times buried the Holocaust in the back pages and then doubled down on downplaying Jewish suffering after October 7. They are a disgusting business that should be boycotted.
Jeff Brees retweeted
Jews are from Judah (Judea). Arabs are from Arabia. It’s not that complicated.
In the 7th century, Islam emerged in Arabia, and the early Muslim armies began one of the most rapid military expansions in history.
They conquered vast territories across the ancient Middle East, including lands inhabited by peoples with ancient identities and civilizations, such as Jews in the Land of Israel, Copts in Egypt, Assyrians and other Christian communities in the Levant and Mesopotamia, and Persians in Iran.
Over the centuries that followed, Arabic and Islam became dominant across much of the region.
Within a century of the rise of Islam, the Muslim conquests had expanded far beyond Arabia, across the Middle East, North Africa and Persia, and into southern Europe and parts of Central and South Asia.
So to say that Jews are colonizers in Judea, while Arabs are an “oppressed indigenous community” in Judea, is simply not an accurate description of the region’s history.
Image: Illustration showing the rough boundaries of the ancient territories.
The Nation of Israel Lives
Jeff Brees retweeted
I shared that glorious video earlier of Natasha destroying Mehdi and Gideon in the debate.
This one from that same debate is of the ultimate master himself, the sensational @DouglasKMurray obliterating what little pathetic attempt Mehdi and Gideon made to argue their case with a masterclass of words.
Watch this.
Jeff Brees retweeted
What is not up for debate is that @HausdorffMedia is absolutely bloody brilliant.
When you’re a nobody propagandist like Mehdi who has never actually won an argument, the last person you want to go up against is Natasha.
Literate in the real history, she decimated Mehdi and Gideon before the debate even started, and when you throw in the phenomenal @DouglasKMurray sitting alongside her as her debate teammate, the destruction of the opposition was more emphatic, swift and brutal than Israel’s victory against the attacking Arab armies in the Six Day War.
Just this opening statement already ended the debate. Just watch in awe.
Jeff Brees retweeted
Bernie's Math Homework: A $72 Trillion Question Nobody In The Senate Wants To Show Their Work On
Bernie. Bernie, Bernie, Bernie.
I read your thread twice, once for content and once to make sure I wasn't hallucinating the part where a man who has held federal office since the Ford administration is lecturing ME about what is "too expensive." You want to talk about UnitedHealth's profits like they materialized in a vacuum, completely unconnected to the fifteen-year-old law that guaranteed insurers a captive, subsidized, taxpayer-fed customer base whether they perform well or not. That law is called the Affordable Care Act, Senator, and last I checked, you voted for it. You didn't just witness the fattening of the insurance cow. You helped build the pasture, installed the fence, and handed out the feed, and now you're standing in front of the barn acting shocked that the cow got fat. Somewhere a tree is tirelessly producing oxygen for you tonight, and I think it's owed an apology, because you are not using yours particularly well this evening.
Let's start with the sleight of hand in paragraph one. You call the current system "cruel, broken, and dysfunctional," which, fine, I'll grant you the applause line — even a stopped clock, Senator. But here's what a lot of folks quietly whisper about the ACA and never say on the record: the entire architecture was never designed to be a permanent fix. It was designed to be expensive enough, and dependent enough on subsidy, that it would eventually collapse into the very single-payer system you're pitching tonight. That was Obama's stated goal in private strategy sessions long before it was yours in public speeches. Quinn's Law Number One: liberalism always produces the exact opposite of its stated intent. You wrote a bill called the AFFORDABLE Care Act. Fifteen years later you're standing on the Senate floor admitting it isn't affordable. That's not an insult from me, Senator. That's a confession from you, and confessions from a snollygoster of your tenure are rarer than a two-dollar bill, so I'm framing this one.
Now to the number that should have every accountant in America reaching for the smelling salts: $72 trillion over ten years if "we do nothing." I'd love to see the model behind that figure, because your own side's favorite Yale/PERI study — the one claiming $1 trillion in annual savings and 114,000 lives saved — has been picked apart by health economists for baking in administrative-savings assumptions that have never once materialized in the real world. Meanwhile, independent nonpartisan estimates of full Medicare for All implementation run $25 to $44 trillion over a decade on the LOW end, and up to 40 to 60 percent of the entire federal budget on the high end. That's bigger than Social Security. Bigger than defense. You want the reins to more than half the federal checkbook from the same government that, and I want you to sit with this one, ALREADY runs three single-payer systems into a documented state of disrepair: Medicare, the Veterans Health Administration, and the Indian Health Service. All three are noted for fraud, waste, and corruption. Why exactly would we hand over the rest of American medicine to an operation that can't run the parts it already owns? Couldn't pour water out of a boot with the instructions printed on the heel, and you want the keys to the whole house. If stupidity were a renewable resource, this proposal alone would solve the energy crisis.
Let's talk about what "guaranteed healthcare" actually looks like once a government sets a fixed global budget, because it never means what the campaign poster implies. The United Kingdom's NHS currently has roughly 7.4 million people sitting on a waiting list. Canada's average wait for specialist treatment sits at 27.4 weeks — over half a year to see a specialist for a system you'd hold up as the model. When a country caps the total pot of money for healthcare, somebody, somewhere, in an office you never voted for, has to decide who gets the expensive treatment and who gets a wait-list number and a pamphlet. Ask your Canadian and British counterparts how many of THEIR citizens fly to Cleveland or Houston for care they can't get fast enough at home. Innovation doesn't happen in systems that ration by waiting line instead of by price; it happens in the system that's currently subsidizing the entire planet's drug research because it's the only market left where a return on investment is still possible. You want to nationalize the goose right after everyone else stopped feeding it, and you have the nerve to call that compassion.
And since we're doing incentive structures tonight, Senator, here's a question I'd genuinely like a straight answer on. When the budget for a nationalized system is fixed, and a hip replacement for a 78-year-old costs the same line item as a hip replacement for a 38-year-old worker still paying into the system, which patient does the bureaucrat's spreadsheet favor? I'm not the one who invented cost-per-quality-adjusted-life-year calculations — the health economists who built NICE in Britain did that, and it already factors age and remaining productive years into treatment approval. You can dress it up in whatever language you'd like. Call it stewardship. Call it efficiency. I call it exactly what it is: a system where somebody's grandmother gets a pat on the head and a prescription for ibuprofen while the math gets done in a back office. If brains were dynamite, half of Congress couldn't blow their nose, and yet here we are pretending fixed budgets and unlimited demand can coexist without somebody, somewhere, drawing a line nobody voted on.
Here's the part that should really sting, and I say this as someone who watched it happen in real time. Your own party just finished a forty-three day shutdown demanding permanent extension of the same ACA subsidies you're using tonight as evidence the system is broken. Those subsidies were written as TEMPORARY line items in Biden's Autopen's American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Zero Republican votes on either bill. Your party wrote the expiration date. When it arrived exactly as scheduled, your caucus shut down the federal government and then had the nerve to act shocked that a temporary Christmas bonus, in fact, expired on schedule. I keep hearing that ending the subsidy is somehow cruel, and yet nobody on your side has explained why a program can survive fifteen years and still require emergency pandemic cash to stay "affordable." And here's the part that really ought to embarrass you personally, Senator: back in 2013 YOU said Republicans "cannot continue to hold the American people hostage because of their hatred for the Affordable Care Act." In 2019 you said "end this horrific shutdown — stop taking hostages." In 2025, when your own party did the exact same thing over the exact same law, you went quiet in public and voted with the hostage-takers you spent a decade condemning. Quinn's Law Twenty-Two: the bigger the lie, the more the liberal repeats it. Quinn's Law Twenty-Three: liberals love the law right up until it's inconvenient, then they just don't follow it. You're not a statesman on this one, Senator. You're a weathervane with a Vermont accent.
Let's also revisit the insurance-company villain routine, because the hypocrisy here could power a small city. Your party's online base spent an entire news cycle canonizing a 26-year-old accused of murdering a health insurance CEO as some kind of folk hero, motivated, allegedly, by hatred of the insurance industry. Now here you are, defending a law that GUARANTEES that same industry a permanently subsidized customer base by federal statute. You can't cheer the vigilante and defend the victim's business model in the same news year without somebody noticing the whiplash. If you actually cared about breaking the insurance industry's grip, you'd be championing Health Savings Accounts, which put healthcare dollars directly under the individual's control instead of a bureaucracy's. But HSAs give power to the person, not the agency, and that's precisely why your side has never supported them with any real enthusiasm. Blatherskite is a word for a certain kind of talker, Senator, and I think you've earned it fair and square tonight — somebody who produces an impressive quantity of noise that, examined closely, contains no substance that survives contact with arithmetic.
Now, about the messenger. Because I would be doing my viewers a disservice if I let the argument stand without a word about the man delivering it. You are eighty-three years old, Senator. You own three houses. Your campaign spent $221,000 on chartered private aircraft in a single quarter last year, and when a reporter asked you about the mild irony of flying a $15,000-an-hour jet while denouncing the wealthy, your actual answer was "no apologies for that... you think I'm gonna be sitting on a waiting line at United?" No, Senator, apparently you are not going to sit in line with the rest of us — the same rest of us you'd like sitting in an NHS-style line for a hip replacement while you catch a connecting flight in first class. You honeymooned in the Soviet Union in 1988 and came back enthusiastic about what you saw there. A Democratic senator recently visited a formerly communist country and asked the locals what they thought of American politicians warming back up to socialism. Their answer, word for word: "that's the worst thing ever... you are morons." Not misguided. Not idealistic. Morons — from people who actually lived in the bread line you're romanticizing from a leased jet.
And here's the detail that I think explains everything, Senator, and I say this as gently as a man with a whiteboard can say it: you tried this once already, on a much smaller scale, and you couldn't hack it. You spent time as a young man on a hippie socialist commune, and by every account you did not stick around long enough to collect a pension from it. If a Vermont commune of a few dozen willing adults couldn't hold you, I have genuine, science-teacher-grade doubts about your ability to run a healthcare system for 340 million Americans who never agreed to live there in the first place. You are, in the most literal sense available, the poster child for why socialism doesn't work — because even the guy selling it to us full-time couldn't make it work for himself in a group small enough to fit in a farmhouse.
So here's my counteroffer, Senator, and I want it on the record that I am saying this with a completely straight face: maybe I'm for socialism after all. On one condition. We get to deport every parasite in the system who refuses to contribute a life's worth of work to keep it running. No exceptions. No sob stories. Socialism doesn't care about sob stories, Senator — that's YOUR line, not mine, you've just never applied it to yourself. Pack your bags. Send them all to Greenland. I hear it's lovely this time of year, and I understand the president's been looking to expand our footprint up there anyway. Somebody has to be first in line.
Since we're apparently finding $72 trillion in the couch cushions for a program that hasn't passed, I do have a much smaller question. Who pays for it, Senator? I keep hearing "tax the rich" from your side, and I'll believe the sincerity of that slogan the day one of you voluntarily pays double what the IRS says you owe with no itemized deductions, standard deduction only, before lecturing the rest of us about fair shares. Until then it's just theater, and not even good theater — Lindsay Lohan handing you the keys to the minibar would be a more responsible use of resources. This country was founded by geniuses and every generation since has managed to elect a fresh batch of people who think a $72 trillion program pays for itself if you just believe hard enough. My family of six runs on a teacher's salary, and I could not get away with your math homework in my own classroom, let alone in front of 340 million people who actually have to pay the bill. I could eat a bowl of alphabet soup, poop out a smarter healthcare plan than the one you posted tonight, and still have time to grade papers before first period.
And before anyone accuses me of pulling a conspiracy theory out of thin air, on January 10, 1963, Congressman Albert Herlong stood on the floor of the House and read into the permanent Congressional Record a list of 45 Communist Goals for America, sourced from Cleon Skousen's research. Goal Number 30 calls for discrediting the American founding in favor of the belief that centralized government planning is superior to a free market. Goal Number 32 calls for supporting any movement that hands centralized control over any part of the culture to the state, education, welfare, and social agencies included. I'm not asking anyone to believe in a sixty-year plot. I'm asking you to look at tonight's thread and tell me, honestly, which goal it more closely resembles. You've spent sixty years auditioning for both, Senator, and tonight you finally landed the part.
I have three questions for you, and I'd genuinely like an answer, though I won't be holding my breath long enough to turn a different color over it. Did you not read the actual cost projections on your own bill and are just repeating what the base wants to hear regardless of the math? Are you no longer sharp enough at eighty-three to understand what a $72 trillion price tag actually does to a currency? Or do you understand it perfectly well and are simply comfortable deceiving the people who send you back to Washington every six years? Pick one. There is no fourth option, and "all of the above" is not the flex you think it is.
But what do I know — I am only a science teacher who insists on reading the CBO score before I sign my name to anything, unlike a man who apparently could not even survive the small-scale pilot program of his own ideology.
#MAGA #Veterans #Trump
@JoJoFromJerz @atrupar @TheYoungTurks @TPUSA
We Need Medicare for All More Than Ever
Over and over again, I hear from critics that moving to Medicare for All is just “too expensive.” That is demonstrably untrue.
But let me tell you what IS too expensive. And that is our current healthcare system, which puts the profits of the big health insurance and drug companies ahead of the well-being of the American people.
Today, not only is our current system cruel, broken and dysfunctional, it is wildly expensive. Despite spending twice as much per capita on healthcare as other wealthy countries, we remain the only major nation on Earth not to guarantee healthcare for all. The result: 85 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured and thousands die unnecessarily every year because they can’t afford the healthcare they need.
The outrageous cost of the current American healthcare system is unsustainable. If we do nothing, it is estimated that we will spend $72 trillion over the next ten years. That is trillion with a T.
These skyrocketing costs are not only making healthcare unaffordable for ordinary Americans, they are negatively impacting businesses and our entire economy. According to a recent survey, employers in our country are expecting the cost of healthcare to skyrocket by 11% next year — the highest in decades.
Last year, as healthcare costs soared, insurance companies made over $54 billion in profits, drug companies continued to charge us, by far, the highest prices in the world for medicine, and healthcare CEOs received huge compensation packages. But that’s not all. The current system maintains massive amounts of expensive bureaucracy and administrative costs designed not to provide high quality healthcare to all, but to make executives and stockholders extraordinarily rich. It is not an accident, for example, that we spend a fraction of what other countries spend on primary healthcare and disease prevention. Not only would investments in these areas make Americans healthier, they would save tens of billions a year in keeping people out of emergency rooms and hospitals.
The Medicare for All legislation that I introduced would save the American people over $1 trillion and 114,000 lives each and every year according to researchers at the Yale School of Public Health. This legislation has 18 cosponsors in the Senate and 115 in the House. Most importantly, it now has the support of 64% of the American people, according to a poll that came out last month.
Over a four-year transition period, Medicare for All would guarantee healthcare as a human right to everyone.
In the first year, we reduce the eligibility age to 55, cover all children under 18, and expand Medicare to cover dental, vision and hearing.
In the second year, the Medicare eligibility age would be reduced to 45. And in the third year it would drop to 35.
By the fourth year, every man, woman and child would be enrolled in a Medicare for All system with no copayments, no premiums, no deductibles and no out-of-pocket expenses.
Every major country on Earth figured out decades ago how to provide universal healthcare to all of their people at a much lower cost than we do. Please don’t tell me we cannot do the same.
Jeff Brees retweeted
Jemele, you’re a walking testament to the compassionate, coddling nature of American capitalism.
You’re mediocre, classless, physically unattractive, and ignorant. You lack any marketable talent or skill, you suck at journalism, and you write like an eighth-grader in remedial English.
Despite all that, you got into Michigan State thanks to affirmative action and got hired at ESPN because of your friendship with Michael Smith and because they needed a Black female to check a box.
Only in America would your story be possible.
I never said capitalism was racist. I said that there is a relationship between capitalism and white supremacy because of how it functions in America. You all are sticking to theory and not looking at the fact that we practice racialized capitalism in this country.
If capitalism were operating in the pure form that you want it to, then there wouldn’t be such a significant racial wealth gap. But there is a racial wealth gap because we exist under a racial construct whether you like it or not.
That does not mean that there are not individuals who are able to achieve despite this construct. But we know that the salaries and pay of white men are higher than those of Black men, Black women, and Latinos. Because in this country value is attached to race.
Don’t get mad at me. Get mad at the institutions.
