It has not been legal in Israel to publish the results of a poll since Friday night, but the pollsters have continued to take them. A respected pollster, who has continued taking polls, said with full confidence on Monday that Netanyahu’s so-called gevalt campaign has not been working… there could be an equal amount of voters who abandon their parties to back Gantz due to the Netanyahu’s gevalt campaign as voters who leave the Likud’s satellite parties because they are worried about Netanyahu losing.

Targeting the voters of the rightist parties with which you will likely be negotiating a coalition in a matter of days would also generally be considered unacceptable, and Bennett and others on the non-Likud right have been fuming. “We don’t quite understand the rationale behind Netanyahu’s attack on the New Right, of all parties,” lamented Bennett on Monday.

There were no convoys of buses ferrying Arab voters to the polls in 2015, and it is highly unlikely that, if he forms the next government, Netanyahu will annex the West Bank. But, as it did in 2015, his tactic will likely yield the intended result: Victory.

If [Netanyahu] does win and gets the nod from the president, we’ll witness an unprecedented political, legal and personal drama. The man who called for an early election to keep the attorney general from deciding what to do about the criminal cases against him (it didn’t work) will strive to form a coalition that will extricate him from the threat of having to stand trial.

All means will be kosher, all boundaries will be crossed.

Israel’s confusing plethora of small parties actually keeps Ḥaredim and Israeli Arabs, in particular, from becoming too alienated… the advantages of Israel’s parliamentary system outweigh its disadvantages, and for essentially the same reason: because it keeps a great many people in the political system who would otherwise remain outside it.

Gantz’s Blue and White could win more votes than Likud but lack the backing needed to assemble a coalition. If this is the case, Netanyahu will head the next government. However, if Gantz wins by a large enough margin — say 5 seats — the president would be less likely to offer Netanyahu the first crack at putting together a coalition. Moreover, if a number of the smaller parties fall short of the threshold, a likely scenario, the redistribution of their votes among the parties that did pass could change the entire equation.

Therefore, Israelis could conceivably wake up Wednesday morning to some unexpected outcomes. Best to wait and see.

While slamming left-wingers who raise the specter of “dual loyalty,” Trump subscribes to the same noxious notion that American Jews are loyal to a foreign government… Trump’s indulgence of neo-Nazis and demonization of immigrants (note the “replacement” rhetoric used by both the New Zealand killer and U.S. white nationalists) encourages right-wing nationalists, whose victims are often Jews (as was the case at the Tree of Life synagogue).

There were still awkward moments during Trump’s speech that showed what divides many Republican Jews from Trump. But more evident was what has brought them together: Trump’s eager embrace of his advisers’ hawkish pro-Israel policies. No one in the room was more aware of the 180-degree turn the relationship has taken than Trump himself.

In 2019, the numbers don’t look good for Trump. According to Gallup, 71% of Jewish respondents disapprove of the president. In 2018, only 16% of American Jews identified as Republicans. In the 2018 midterms, 79% of American Jewish voters supported Democratic candidates. In other words, what the Conservative Political Action Conference has called “Jexodus” isn’t likely to happen. Most American Jewish voters remain liberal.

Stephen Moore and Herman Cain are, of course, completely unqualified — I say “of course” because their lack of qualifications is, paradoxically, a key qualification not just for Trump but for the G.O.P. in general.

The Fed’s integrity has been threatened before, by presidents and by members of Congress seeking to bend its awesome powers to their short-term partisan advantage. So far, it has generally withstood those attempts, arguably emerging even stronger. Mr. Trump seems determined to mount another attack, which might succeed unless the Republicans who control the Senate put the nation’s interest above his and refuse to go along.

The notion that these detractors would accept some other “Good Republican,” just not these two, is a farce… Instead of spending the last two years going after Trump on policy and crafting an attractive agenda, liberals decided the president was a Russian spy. It makes sense they would extend the insanity to his nominees.

Mayor Pete said that his political values flowed from his religious ones, not the other way round. We do not know if this is true as we can’t look into his soul. The inability to include unborn children within the compass of concern and solidarity raises a prima facie suspicion that he, like his conservative counterparts, is content to squeeze his religious values into his political positions and not be challenged to think anew why he is so concerned about the undocumented and the unemployed but so indifferent to the unborn.

There is already a moral awakening happening in the hearts of religious progressives across this country. There are already droves of faith leaders leading the charge for justice and equity in every corner of America. What we’re lacking are political leaders who are bold and brave enough to engage and embrace people of faith as an integral part of their plan to transform this country. And until that changes, the progressive movement continue to forfeit much of our moral authority to the Religious Right.

When I think about where most of Scripture points me, it is toward defending the poor, and the immigrant, and the stranger, and the prisoner, and the outcast, and those who are left behind by the way society works. And what we have now is this exaltation of wealth and power, almost for its own sake, that in my reading of Scripture couldn’t be more contrary to the message of Christianity. So I think it’s really important to carry a message (to the public), knitting together a lot of groups that have already been on this path for some time, but giving them more visibility in the public sphere.

A recent Netflix ‘Our Planet’ program with David Attenborough delivering a disturbing message of doom about walruses falling off a cliff to their deaths because of climate change is contrived nonsense. The walruses shown in this Netflix film were almost certainly driven over the cliff by polar bears during a well-publicized incident in 2017, not because they were “confused by a combination of shrinking ice cover and their own poor eyesight.”

Though other scenes (in addition to the heartbreaking walrus cliff dive) do convey a visceral sense of loss, I wish there were more of them. So much of this series is pretty much a clone of the Planet Earth and Blue Planet series that came before it. The scenes that attempt to visualize loss can feel tacked on, but they are also the most original and impactful moments of the series.

The reason for the falls might be complicated, but it’s clear that climate change is affecting the walruses… That spring, tens of thousands of walruses appeared at Point Lay, Alaska. Such haul-outs were once rare; now they’re an annual fixture, which the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says is “most likely” connected to global warming. Walruses, it seems, can no more resist the changing of the world than they can defy gravity.