All posts by David Lublin

Our Muslim and Sikh Neighbors

One of my favorite books as a kid was The Chosen by Chaim Potok. Today, I’ve been thinking a lot about a small moment in the sequel when Reuven, a rabbinical student, explains to his terrified teacher, a rabbi who survived the Holocaust, that there won’t be pogroms in the wake of conviction of the Rosenbergs for spying:

“Reuven, will there be–trouble?” His voice was tense with fear.

“What kind of trouble?”

“For Jews.”

“No. There won’t be any trouble for Jews.” Then, I realized what was disturbing him. “It doesn’t work like that,” I said, very gently. “There will be no pogroms because of the Rosenbergs.”

He looked me in disbelief. He had been in this country two years and he still didn’t understand what it was really all about.

Treating and respecting people as individuals no matter their faith is at the cornerstone of what makes America function and truly a marvelous place. It’s what allows not just to rub along but to be a single people: Americans.

In a time when many are using fear over security to whip up support for political purposes, we cannot succumb to groupthink over our Muslim and Sikh neighbors that would have us think that they are part of some pernicious group conspiracy. We know all too well where such thoughts lead.

As Fareed Zakaria explained so well in his column on the wave of anti-Muslim rhetoric in America:

It also misunderstands how religion works in people’s lives. Imagine a Bangladeshi taxi driver in New York. He has not, in any meaningful sense, chosen to be Muslim. He was born into a religion, grew up with it, and like hundreds of millions of people around the world in every religion, follows it out of a mixture of faith, respect for his parents and family, camaraderie with his community and inertia. His knowledge of the sacred texts is limited. He is trying to make a living and provide for his family. For him, Islam provides identity and psychological support in a hard life. This is what religion looks like for the vast majority of Muslims.

Muslims and Sikhs aren’t just like us. They are us. At least they are if we want to remain who we are and have struggled so long to become as a nation and a people.

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Republican Board of Elections Members Violated the Open Meetings Act

According to an opinion by the Open Meetings Compliance Board, the three Republican members of the Montgomery County Board of Elections violated the Open Meetings Act when they held a private conference call. As readers may recall, this call took place during the heated debate over the movement of early voting locations to less Democratic areas in the County.

From the opinion’s conclusion:

We have concluded that three voting members, a majority of the voting members of the elections board, constitute a “quorum” for purposes of the Act such that a conference call among three voting members constituted a meeting subject to the Act. We have recognized that applying the Act’s quorum definition to the elections board is complicated, and this matter posed the unusual circumstance in which the public body’s own definition, when applied, did not secure the public’s right to observe every stage of the public body’s consideration of public business. Although we can see that the board members might reasonably have relied on the bylaws provision when they conducted the board’s business among themselves, we nonetheless find that the conference call violated the Act. We therefore direct the elections board to the acknowledgment requirement in $ 3-211. We have not commented on how the elections board must transact business under the elections laws.

You can read the full letter here:
Open Meetings Compliance Letter on Paul E. Bessel’s Complaint

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Why the Council’s Liquor Reform Won’t Work

Today, I am pleased to present a guest post from Adam Pagnucco:

Rising to the defense of the county’s liquor monopoly, the County Council has put forward a proposal for reform.  They claim it will cure most of the problems at the Department of Liquor Control (DLC) while causing none of the budgetary consequences of allowing full private sector competition with the department.  Are they right?

Let’s examine their recommendation in detail.

The council’s proposal focuses on “special orders,” which are requests by customers for products not in DLC’s regular stock.  The DLC’s performance in delivering these products is a huge source of complaints for restaurants and retailers, who claim that DLC regularly shorts orders, misses orders, delivers the wrong products and charges mark-ups that are significantly higher than in the District of Columbia.  The following story is a typical description of DLC’s operations in this area.

Mike Hill, general manager of Adega Wine Cellars & Café in Silver Spring, said they have problems getting specialty wines and craft beer.

“If we like a beer or wine and we want to bring that into our store, the turnaround time can be eight days if we’re lucky or two to three months to not at all in some cases,” Hill said.

He said delivery times vary from 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. He explained that sometimes he receives orders that should have gone to other restaurants or stores. Other times his business receives sealed boxes that are labeled as one type of wine, but turn out to be another type when they open it.

“About 75 percent of my wall is bare because of items we’re unable to get,” Hill said.

The council is right to be concerned about this.  Their proposal would allow retailers and restaurants to purchase specialty wines and beer directly from private distributors.  That sounds great on the surface, but the devil is in the details.  Let’s have a look at the major features of what the council has in mind.

  1. DLC remains in control.

DLC has sole authority to determine what beverages are regular stock or special order, and the council’s proposed legislation does nothing to change that.  DLC would also have sole authority to levy and administer a fee on any transactions between private customers and private distributors, an issue explored further below.  Because DLC continues to preside over, control and impose charges on any purchases under the council’s proposal, that guarantees that its many inefficiencies will continue to plague the entire system.

  1. The economics don’t work.

The council would have private distributors make small deliveries of specialty products while retaining most of the volume for direct delivery by DLC.  That’s a problem.  Distribution is a capital-intensive industry.  Assets like warehouses and trucks are expensive to maintain.  To make money, distributors need to move lots of volume through their warehouses and send out lots of full trucks.  If they can’t do that, many won’t be able to profit under the council’s proposal and they could simply stay out.  Since distributors strike exclusive arrangements with manufacturers, this factor alone could exclude many beverages from the council’s proposed new system, thereby limiting its scope and defeating its purpose.

The two largest distributors in Maryland, Reliable Churchill and Republic National, made this argument in a July 2015 letter to the county council.  They wrote:

We suggest that some wholesalers, including us, will not be able to deliver special orders for economic reasons.  At present, private wholesalers deliver only to the Department of Liquor Control (the “Department”) warehouse so they have no regular delivery routes in the County.  To fulfill a special order, the private wholesaler would have to make a special trip to the licensee.  By their nature, special orders are for small quantities.  The profit on such a small transaction would not cover our delivery costs incurred by sending a truck for a special delivery.  In other words, there is no financial incentive to make the special delivery and, in fact, a disincentive.

We do not want the [council’s] resolution to raise expectations unnecessarily, so we are writing again.  As you know, private wholesalers are not required to fill all orders.  Also a winery and distillery can use only one private distributor in Maryland.  A distributor can refuse to fill an order if it is not economically feasible.  Common sense dictates that a private wholesaler would not fill orders costing them money because they are not in business to lose money.  It is almost certain that Republic National and Reliable cannot afford to make a special delivery to a licensee.

Wholesalers Letter to Council 1 Wholesalers Letter to Council 2

  1. The do-nothing fee.

The most controversial aspect of the council’s proposal is that DLC would be able to charge a fee on any special order transactions between private customers and private distributors even though it does nothing to facilitate them.  According to the council’s legislation, the fee would be “set at a level sufficient to replace the Department of Liquor Control for Montgomery County’s estimated revenue lost by allowing private licensed Maryland wholesalers to sell and distribute beer and light wine products…”  So DLC would be made whole.  It would be the sole determiner of exactly how high of a fee would be required to make it whole.  And since DLC is hugely inefficient in the special order segment – something even the council admits – the fee would reflect DLC’s bloated service costs rather than any cost savings obtained by going private.  And who would ultimately wind up paying this fee?  That’s right, the consumer.

Here’s what the state’s two largest distributors wrote about the do-nothing fee (which they characterize as a tax) in the letter shown above.

We also suggest that the local tax you intend to impose on special orders is counter-productive.  It makes a bad economic situation worse.  First, increasing the cost of products will encourage people to shop outside the County, thereby creating a hit for County business.  The County should lower prices to keep business in the county.  Already, tens of millions of dollars are spent outside the county on alcoholic beverages due to the comparatively higher costs.  Second, the tax makes delivery of a special order even more costly, discouraging wholesalers from delivering special orders.  Wholesalers cannot charge more in Montgomery County to recoup a local charge.  Third, state law precludes local taxation of alcoholic beverages, thereby suggesting that the local charge is illegal and cannot be implemented.  Fourth, we expect significant opposition to this proposal of a local charge based on its statewide implications.  Last, in some ways, the County should pay wholesalers to deliver special orders because they are solving a County problem at their expense.  We know that will never happen.

What if the do-nothing fee is removed?  Well, there’s a catch: the county issues bonds backed by liquor profits.  The council and the County Executive use this as a basis for opposing full private competition but it’s also relevant to the council’s proposal.  The County Executive believes that the do-nothing fee is required to protect those bonds in the case that any liquor distribution is done privately.  In the memo below, the Executive writes to the Council President:

I have been advised by the County’s Bond Counsel that edits were required to earlier drafts of the [liquor control] legislation to avoid a downgrade to the over $100 million in outstanding Department of Liquor Control (DLC) Revenue bonds as well as prevent litigation from existing bondholders due to a material deterioration in the security of the bonds.  According to Bond Counsel, at the time the bonds were sold bondholders had the security of a near monopoly created by State law.  If this legislation is approved that near monopoly will no longer exist under State law; so the security of the bonds will have changed.  Prior drafts of the legislation did not limit the reduction in DLC revenues pledged for the payment of the bonds and did not mandate the imposition of the surcharge [on private transactions].

The best option for reducing the possibility of a downgrade or a bondholder action is to require that the surcharge collected from the wholesalers is equal to lost revenues.  Therefore we have inserted provisions making the surcharge mandatory and “set at a level sufficient to replace… the estimated revenue lost.”  This provision should remain even after the bonds have been paid to protect County services supported by the DLC earnings transfer.

Leggett DLC 1 Leggett DLC 2

And so if the council’s recommendation is adopted with a do-nothing fee, it will – surprise! – do nothing because distributors won’t participate.  And if it is adopted without one, it would cause many of the same budgetary issues as an End the Monopoly approach with few of the offsetting benefits.

  1. A Get Out of Jail Free Card for DLC.

Remember the board game Monopoly?  One of its most famous playing cards allows a player to Get Out of Jail Free.  That’s exactly what the council’s proposal does for DLC.

Get out of jail free-1

The proposals by Comptroller Peter Franchot and Delegate Bill Frick would expose DLC to full private sector competition – the only force that will compel DLC to improve.  But the council’s system would keep DLC in the driver’s seat.  DLC would decide which beverages to sell, which ones to delegate to the private sector and exactly how much money it will charge to be “compensated.”  It will remain free to run its warehouse with sticky notes and to suffer shortages of as many as 154 cases a day.  Its broken ordering system will now include extra accounting and paperwork to administer the do-nothing fee.  And if anyone speaks up in the future in favor of real change, the DLC’s bureaucracy will say, “Wait a minute.  A new procedure has just been put in place.  We need time to implement it.  And once we do, we promise things will improve.”  And a year will pass.  And five years.  And then a decade.  And businesses will continue to struggle while consumers simply flee to the District of Columbia, which they do now.

The council’s proposal is designed to force citizens – consumers and businesses alike – to subjugate their interests to the liquor monopoly.  Good government demands the opposite: the county should serve the interests of the citizens.  And there’s only one way to do that.

End the Monopoly.

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Explaining Hogan’s Stance on Syrian Refugees

Romney Hogan ModelsYesterday’s post showed the strong relationship between the share who voted No on Question 4 in 2012 (the Maryland Dream Act) and support for Romney and Hogan across Maryland counties. Today, I look at models that control for other variables to test whether immigration or other factors best predicts support for Republican candidates in our state.

Immigration is Powerful

Immigration dominates  other factors when explaining GOP support at the county level. The Romney model projects that Romney gained an estimated 9.5% additional votes for every 10% increase in the share who voted against the Dream Act.

Immigration has an even stronger relationship on the vote for Gov. Larry Hogan–he gained 13.1% more votes for every 10% who voted No on Question 4. So Hogan did a better job than Romney of magnifying the anti-immigration vote.

Same-Sex Marriage

Same-sex marriage was on the ballot in 2012 and a source of disagreement in the presidential campaign. As the state became the first to vote Yes on marriage equality, a 10% rise in support for marriage for equality cost Romney an estimated 2.5% of the vote.

Two years later, when support for marriage had increased further according to the polls, Hogan did his best to minimize discussion of the issue and take it off the table. He succeeded. Unlike for Romney, views on marriage equality had no impact on support for Hogan.

The Politics of Syrian Refugees

In his successful effort to win the Governor’s Mansion, Gov. Hogan downplayed his views on same-sex marriage. Hogan has wisely stuck with this approach of doing nothing to please social conservatives beyond stating his personal support for their viewpoint.

Immigration is also a complex issue for Hogan. A thumping majority voted for the Dream Act in 2012. Yet the above models demonstrate immigration’s strong salience to Hogan’s base. Politicians can only afford to tick off their base so much.

What to do? From a calculated political point of view, Hogan pleased his base by opposing Syrian refugees. He also probably doesn’t mind to the extent that his stand is being drowned out in the media by more hysterical reactions by other governors and presidential candidates, as it minimizes the number of alienated pro-immigrant voters.

Notes on Other Factors

Beyond the factors tested above, I also looked at the share of Asians and Hispanics as well as median household income. None had a significant impact on the support for Hogan or Romney once the immigration was included. I should note that income frequently has a bigger impact in surveys than at the aggregate level. Unfortunately, I had no easy measure of county attitudes on economic issues, as opposed to income. African-American areas voted more heavily Democratic according to the models but the impact is lower than one might expect after controlling for immigration.

 

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Anti-Immigrant Sentiment and Republican Support

While yesterday’s post looked at the growth of anti-immigrant, radical right populist parties in Europe, today turns back to Maryland. Specifically, just how closely linked is anti-immigrant sentiment to support for Republicans?

The election results from Question 4 from 2012 provide a handy snapshot of the views of voters on immigrants. Question 4 asked voters if they wanted to keep in place the Maryland Dream Act. The pro-immigrant side won a big victory when 58.9% of Marylanders voted in favor of allowing undocumented immigrants to pay in-state college tuition under certain conditions.

The county results on Question 4 turn out to be an excellent predictor of how each county voted in the 2012 presidential election. The scatterplot below shows that the share of a county’s voters that supported Romney or Hogan tended to increase in line with the share who voted no on Question 4.

Q4 & RomneyThis was not a one off, as the same is true for the 2014 gubernatorial election. Support for the Republican Larry Hogan tended to rise with the share who voted no on Question 4.

Q4 & HoganThe correlation between the share who voted no and the share who voted for Romney in each county was a very high .96. (Correlations have a maximum of 1, which would indicate that one factor perfectly predicts the other.) The correlation between the no vote and vote for Hogan was the same .96.

The next part of this series in immigration will compare the strength of immigration to other issues and demographic factors as predictor of election outcomes.

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Anti-Immigrant Parties on the Rise Internationally

Recent work by Marisa Abrajano and Zoltan Hajnal shows that views on immigration drives American voting behavior. But is the same occurring in other countries?

A number of west European (i.e. not formerly Communist) countries have anti-immigrant parties. Known as radical right, right-wing populist, and extreme right, these parties vary quite a lot in their levels of xenophobia. But they have in common their desire to decrease immigration and hostility to to the European Union.

Has their support increased? The following graph shows total support for radical right parties by year for all parliamentary elections since 2000 in 13 countries:

RRpartiesThe point cloud in the graph does not immediately suggest growth in support in recent years. Statistical models, however, paint a different picture:

ExRModelsBoth models assess simply whether support for radical right parties increased with time. The second model also includes controls for each of the 13 countries.

The two models indicate that support for anti-immigrant radical right parties has grown. The model with country controls shows that their vote has increased by an estimated 0.39% per year from 2000 through 2015. (Models not shown here indicate that growth in their support is not concentrated in the most recent five years.)

Why do the models indicate a steady increase in support for anti-immigrant parties even though no pattern emerges in the point cloud? A close examination of the data from individual countries reveals the answer. The following table shows support for radical right parties in parliamentary elections held since 2000:

ExR1 ExR2In several countries, anti-immigrant parties have gained substantial support since 2000. The True Finns received just 1.6% support in 2003 but 17.7% in elections held earlier this year. Extreme right Greek parties, such as neo-Nazi Golden Dawn, garnered 7-10% of the vote in recent elections, higher than the 0-6% they won prior to 2010. In Austria, the Freedom Party won 20.5% support in 2013–more than double their support in 2002.

In the UK, Sweden and Denmark, support for anti-immigrant parties jumped substantially in elections held this year. The UK Independence Party (UKIP) won a 12.3% of the vote and the Sweden Democrats won 12.9% in this year’s elections. The Danish People’s Party earned 21.1% of the vote, much higher than their previous record of 13.8%.

Other countries have seen smaller changes, or less consistent changes, so the countries where the radical right has gained strength drive the results in the statistical model. Only Belgium has seen support for the radical right decline as the small National Front has disappeared and Flemish Interest has lost support to the New Flemish Alliance–nationalist but not radical right.

Are these trends likely to continue? Excluding countries that held elections this year (and Germany), polling in eight countries says yes. Taking the latest three polls from these countries suggests that average radical right support will jump from 12.2% to 20.3% in the next election. (Note: French results are from presidential rather than legislative elections.)

RRpollsIn short, the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe appears to be driving up support for anti-immigrant parties. The intensified battles over immigration in the U.S. reflect similar debates occurring in many other democracies.

In future posts, I hope to bring the lens back to Maryland and the U.S. on the politics of immigration.

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Del. Kramer Critiques BDS, Part II

I accidentally cut off the second half of Ben Kramer’s (D-19) comments on BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) when I posted them earlier today. Here is the rest of his response to those who oppose legislation that would prevent businesses that support the BDS movement against Israel from doing business with the State of Maryland. The post got cut in the middle of thought, so I’m afraid the beginning here is a bit abrupt.

[In Israel, g]ays and lesbians serve openly in the military and there are no directives such as “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Resolving the challenges of the West Bank are difficult and finding a path toward Palestinian self-determination is fraught with obstacles.

Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza in 2005 without any assurances of peace from its occupants. Since that time, the governmental authorities in Gaza have been taking tens of millions of dollars in foreign aid and have been using it, not to build new hospitals and schools and to create a homeland, but to purchase tens of thousands of rockets from Iran to be launched against Israeli civilian targets from the decrepit medical facilities and schools that do exist in the Gaza. Millions of dollars are spent to build multiple, sophisticated tunnels into Israel, from which to launch terror raids on children in school buses.

Lesson learned…Israel does not have the luxury of making the same mistake in the West Bank.

The BDS movement is driven by Israel’s enemies who are cleverly using relentless propaganda and lies to manipulate the willing, the naive and the uninformed in a time proven strategy to create enmity toward Jews.

From the blood libel of the Middle Ages, in which Jews were accused of murdering Christian children for ceremonial purposes, to the Protocols of Zion and the government sponsored hate-mongering of Nazi Germany…the playbook of the anti-Semites has remained the same…tell the lie, and continue to repeat the lie often enough until the willing, naive, uninformed and misinformed, whether at a conscious or subliminal level, begin to accept it as fact.

How else can we explain the difference of the pro-BDS advocates total disinterest in the nations that are committing egregious human rights violations (including the beneficiaries of the BDS movement) from the impossible standard, for defending its citizens, they have set for Israel…a standard that has never been applied to any other nation, including that of our own.

Perhaps the efforts of those BDS supporting groups, who claim that they are motivated by a desire for peace, would be better off directing their efforts at convincing the Arab world to stop the formal (and informal) education process, of each generation, to hate the Jews. Maybe, if the governmental authorities of the West Bank and Gaza were willing to accept the right of the Jewish people to live in peace, in their homeland, there might actually be peace in the Middle East.

After thousands of years of persecution culminating in the Holocaust, Jews are no longer playing the role of the willing victim and this undoubtedly has caused angst for those who are more comfortable with the Jew in her/his former role.

Finally, for those who claim that boycotts are a time honored, peaceful means of protest, I completely agree with you.

Yes, the apartheid government of South Africa was rightfully boycotted.

However, the absurd effort to draw parallels between the South African government’s system of apartheid and the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors is simply fantastical…but clearly a critical element of the propaganda strategy as the BDS proponents never fail to mention Nelson Mandela and the racist South African regime in their endeavor to confuse and fraudulently link the two movements, to justify BDS.

Those individuals who choose to participate in the discriminatory BDS movement are welcome to do so…that is called freedom of speech.

However, the people of Maryland do not have to see their PUBLIC dollars being used to support such discriminatory behavior, particularly when it undermines Maryland’s policy as articulated in its Declaration of Cooperation with Israel. An agreement which created a cooperative relationship which has benefited the citizens of Maryland and Israel through economic development, tens of millions of dollars in trade, the creation of jobs, as well as, significant achievements through joint scientific and medical research.

Not using public dollars to support discriminatory behavior is also freedom of speech…and as you appropriately pointed out, David…if the boycotters truly believe in the right to boycott…then we should be free to boycott the boycotters.

Like a classic garment carefully folded away in a drawer to be brought out and worn when fashionable again, anti-Semitism is once more all the rage in Europe. Nicely accessorizing it, on this year’s runway, is anti-Zionism. We should resist the urge to emulate the Europeans and reject the misguided, albeit chic, BDS movement fomented by propagandists whose end game has never been the well-being of the Palestinian people, but the destruction of the Jewish homeland and its occupants.

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Kramer Calls BDS Movement Anti-Semitic

Last week, several testified at the Montgomery Legislative Priorities Hearing against legislation that would prevent businesses that support the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement against Israel from doing business with the State of Maryland.

I asked Del. Ben Kramer (D-19) for this thoughts on the hearing and the BDS  movement, as he vocally opposed their agenda at the hearing. Here is his response:

The BDS movement is unequivocally a propaganda tool being utilized by Israel’s enemies to do what they haven’t been able to do militarily, defeat Israel. The goal of the BDS movement is to force a collapse of the Israeli economy, and in doing so, force Israel to withdraw from the small area of land, that Israel has not returned to its Arab neighbors, captured when the Arab nations (yet again) attacked Israel in 1967.

To their credit, Israel’s enemies have done a phenomenal job of rewriting Middle East history to cast Israel as the aggressor in its dealings with the Arab world.

Quickly being forgotten is the fact that the Arab nations have repeatedly unified (a feat in and of itself, because when they are not focused on efforts to rid the Middle East of Jews, they are often caught up in sectarian violence against one another) and launched wars against Israel for decades.

In defending itself, in 1967, Israel captured considerable Arab territory.

However, in a pursuit for peace, Israel has returned 94% of the captured lands to the Arab nations, which attacked Israel.

My question to the BDS supporters, at the hearing, was to name another occasion in the history of the world when a nation that was repeatedly attacked by its neighboring countries, returned the land captured while defending itself, in an effort to achieve peace and stop further military aggression and war.

Additionally, I discussed the egregious human rights violations that are rife throughout the Arab world. More particularly, I quoted the UN Human Rights Chief, Navi Pillay, who recently offered the following: “Across the Arab world, people continue to struggle for their fundamental civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights. The roots of those struggles lie in social injustice, marginalization, and lack of human rights protections.”  He then added: “Unfortunately, intolerance, marginalization, impunity, sectarianism and violence remain significant challenges.”

I further discussed the violent treatment of women, gays and lesbians in the West Bank and Gaza, which is a routine topic of human rights organizations, and that such treatment is not only condoned, but encouraged by the Fatah led Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza. Furthermore, both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas arrest, jail, torture and execute (if suspected of collaborating with Israel) those who dare to openly challenge their governmental authority.

Therefore, my question of the BDS supporters was to identify which of the myriad of Arab countries, with their laundry lists of human rights violations, were they pursuing boycotts, divestment and sanctions against.

The answer was zero, none, nothing . . . not one.

Evidently, the xenophobic Palestinian governmental authorities in the West Bank and Gaza, with their extremist ideologies that call for the relentless pursuit of the destruction of Israel and the death of all Jews in the Middle East, are quite acceptable to those who support the BDS movement.

Apparently, honor killings of wives, daughters and sisters and the treatment of women as chattel, along with intolerance and violence toward the gay and lesbian citizens of Palestinian controlled lands, is of little interest to the ..progressive.. thinkers of pro-BDS.

I then questioned the BDS supporters as to which of the many nations in the world, dominated by despots and dictators, with unspeakable crimes against their own people and horrific human rights violations, were they pursuing a boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement against.

Once again, the response was a resounding. . . NONE.

The only nation on this planet that they are trying to bring to financial ruin is the only democratic nation in the region and ..coincidentally.. the only nation on our planet with a majority population of, yes . . . you guessed it . . . Jewsl

And then they have the shameful nerve to be indignant that their actions are being construed, by some, as being rooted in anti-Semitism. Evidently, human rights don’t apply to the right of Jews, in the Middle East, to live in peace.

The glaring hypocrisy of the BDS movement is simply blinding. And a group with the name Jew in the title, that supports the BDS movement against Israel, does not make the movement any less hypocritical.

No one says, not even the Israeli people, that Israel is perfection. Yes, just like with all democratic nations there is room for improvement. However, amongst all of the nations in the region, Israel is the only one where all citizens, including the Arab ones, are free to express their sentiments. Either good, bad or that which is ugly, all are welcome to express their thoughts about Israeli society and the democratically elected officials who govern it.

In fact, just two years ago, the Valedictorian at the most prestigious medical school in Israel was a Muslim Arab woman. This woman would never have had the opportunity to achieve such an accomplishment in the majority of the countries surrounding Israel and who are sworn to Israel’s destruction. Israel is a nation that fully includes women, minorities, Muslims, Christians and the LGBT community at the highest levels of academia, government, industry and business.

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Raskin Internal Poll Shows Lead

Sen. Jamie Raskin’s campaign has released an internal poll of 500 likely Democratic voters that shows him with a lead over his opponents:

  • Jamie Raskin, 30 percent
  • Kathleen Matthews, 21 percent
  • Ana Sol Gutiérrez, 11 percent
  • Kumar Barve, 5 percent
  • David Anderson, 3 percent
  • Will Jawando, 2 percent
  • Joel Rubin, 0 percent

Twenty-eight percent of voters remain undecided. The margin of error is +/- 4.4 percent, which means that the true values should be within that range in 19 out of 20 polls.

The Raskin campaign also claims that Jamie has higher favorable to unfavorable ratings than other candidates:

Raskin enjoys a 5:1 favorable: unfavorable rating, compared to 2:1 for Matthews, just under 2:1 for Sol Gutierrez, 1.5:1 for Barve, while the other candidates are unknown to voters.

According to the press release, Raskin leads Matthews by 43 percent in LD 20, which he now represents in the State Senate. He also leads Gutiérrez by 21 points in LD 18.

Analysis

This is essentially a pre-campaign poll, as no commercials have been aired on TV. Little in the way of direct mail has been sent, though I’ve seen one well-done lit piece for former television broadcaster and Marriott Exec Kathleen Matthews.

Right now, it looks as if the race is shaping up largely as most expect with Raskin and Matthews in the lead but neither near being able to claim that they have the nomination locked down. Matthews will likely have the edge in money but Raskin has a strong pre-existing base of supporters and volunteers.

Del. Ana Sol Gutiérrez benefits from her name recognition due her long service on the School Board and a delegate in LD 18. Right now, she looks like a solid bet for third place but will need to raise substantial sums of money or grassroots support to surprise the early frontrunners.

Del. Kumar Barve’s poor showing may surprise. It reflects that he has lower name recognition than the other state legislators in the race because his district–LD 17–is split between CD 8 and CD 6, so fewer voters have seen his name on the ballot.

The other candidates are unknowns. They are likely to remain so unless they can raise money and attract volunteers to assist their campaigns. They also need to win support from people who can validate their message and signal to voters that they merit consideration and deserve a vote.

Finally, as always, take campaign polls with a healthy dollop of salt. Inevitably, they focus on the cream rather than the lemons for their campaign. Moreover, it’s early, so most voters probably do not have fixed opinions.

Final Note

I am supporting Jamie Raskin’s campaign–not exactly shocking news as he is my colleague at American University. Beyond his generally active and effective work as a state senator, I appreciate  his hard work for marriage equality. Jamie will be an excellent advocate for the Eighth and liberal values in the U.S. House. I will still call it as I see it here but thought I should mention it.

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