Untapped Relief: FEMA Is Sitting on Billions of Unused Disaster Funds

by James Varney 

Although the Federal Emergency Management Agency told Congress last month that it had $4 billion in its Disaster Relief Fund, officials also warned that the Fund could have a shortfall of $6 billion by year’s end, a situation FEMA says could deteriorate in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

While FEMA is expected to ask Congress for new money, budget experts note a surprising fact: FEMA is currently sitting on untapped reserves appropriated for past disasters stretching back decades. 

An August report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General noted that in 2022, FEMA “estimated that 847 disaster declarations with approximately $73 billion in unliquidated funds remained open.” 

Drilling down on that data, the OIG found that $8.3 billion of that total was for disasters declared in 2012 or earlier.

Such developments are part of a larger pattern in which FEMA failed to close out specific grant programs “within a certain timeframe, known as the period of performance (POP),” according to the IG report. Those projects now represent billions in unliquidated appropriations that could potentially be returned to the DRF (Disaster Relief Fund).”

These “unliquidated obligations” reflect the complex federal budgeting processes. Safeguards are important so that FEMA funding doesn’t become a slush fund that the agency can spend however it chooses, budget experts said, but the inability to tap unspent appropriations from long-ago crises complicates the agency’s ability to respond to immediate disasters.

‘Age Old-Game’

“This is an age-old game that happens and it doesn’t matter what administration is in,” said Brian Cavanaugh, who served as an appropriations manager at FEMA in the Trump administration. “It’s unfortunate how complex disaster relief has become, but it’s skyrocketing costs.”

Cavanaugh said neither action from Congress nor an executive order from the White House would be required to tap those funds because FEMA is operating on the sort of continuing resolutions Congress routinely authorizes. If the money is part of “immediate needs funding,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas could draw from the billions in untapped money to help the victims of Helene and then inform lawmakers he was compelled to do so, leaving elected officials facing charges they sought to pinch pennies when Americans were desperate.

FEMA did not respond to a request for comment about whether it could access the earmarked funds.

Mayorkas, whose Department oversees FEMA, stressed the agency is not broke, and both he and other FEMA officials said this week there was enough money in the Disaster Relief Fund to meet the needs of victims of Hurricane Helene, which with a death count of more than 200 stands as the most lethal storm to hit the U.S. since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Most of Helene’s bills will come due in the future, and Mayorkas said FEMA can meet the day-to-day needs of operations right now in afflicted states but might be hard-pressed if another storm like Helene were to hit this year. Hurricane season officially lasts until the end of November, but historically, September and October have been the months in which the occasional monster smites the U.S. 

“We are meeting the immediate needs with the money that we have,” Mayorkas told a press gaggle Oct. 2 on Air Force One. “We are expecting another hurricane hitting. We do not have the funds. FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season and ... what is imminent.”

On Oct. 3, FEMA, which handles state and local government relief aid as well as the federal flood insurance plan and individual emergency requests, said it had spent at least $20 million in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida – three of the states that bore the brunt of Helene as it ripped ashore last week. The figures FEMA provided did not include Georgia, another state hard-hit by Helene, which made landfall in Florida on Sept. 26 as a Category 4 hurricane.

Longtime FEMA critics said the looming shortfall is not surprising, given its main job is to use federal taxpayer dollars to reimburse state and local governments for recovery costs, in addition to more immediate money it provides to victims on an individual basis.

“It doesn’t strike me as too weird,” said Chris Edwards, policy scholar at the conservative Cato Institute. “Right now, $20 million is peanuts, but it’s not necessarily unreasonable to think the upcoming bills will be much, much higher.”

Skyrocketing Costs

The skyrocketing costs associated with disaster recovery are one of the main drivers of FEMA’s predicted budget woes. Last year, the U.S. saw a record 28 storms that caused more than $1 billion in damages, and the $1 billion threshold has been reached 19 times thus far in 2024. Since 2001, there have been nine times that FEMA nearly ran out of money in its Disaster Relief Fund, forcing it to pause hundreds of non “life-saving services” the agency runs.

The price tag on some of those services, such as those associated with assistance to immigration, has seen an unprecedented surge due to millions of illegal entrants during Biden’s term. FEMA has spent more than $640 million on those programs in 2024, leading to criticism this week from Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and others.

FEMA rebutted the claims by insisting those sums did not come out of the Disaster Relief Fund. Yet as Cavanaugh, Edwards, and others noted, the relief fund isn’t the main driver of FEMA’s expenses, which are primarily reimbursements to state and local agencies that handle things like debris removal, road and power grid repairs, and the like.

Thus far, FEMA has been getting mixed reviews from elected officials for its response to Hurricane Helene in afflicted states. While five state officials in North Carolina’s hard-hit Buncombe County did not respond to questions from RCI, some Tar Heel residents have complained in media reports about the agency’s invisibility.

While FEMA rarely initiates or administers contracts to clean debris, restore power, or search for survivors, the agency does provide emergency cash to storm victims who apply for it. Flood insurance protection comes not from private homeowners policies but from a federal program run by FEMA.

‘Crazy’ Numbers

Generally, FEMA, along with state or local officials and a neutral third-party civil engineer, will estimate the cost of such work, and then the final figure will come through negotiations. But given those settlements are far in the future, they should not have any bearing on FEMA’s current budget.

“It’s just crazy how expensive the numbers have gotten,” said Jeremy Portnoy of OpenTheBooks, a nonpartisan watchdog of government spending. “They’ve been warning for months now they are running out of money.”

Portnoy first called attention to FEMA’s unspent funds in conversations with RealClearInvestigations on Sept. 8. He said it seems bizarre that federal officials would have a pot substantial enough to cover a projected shortfall while adding billions to the Disaster Relief Fund, but fail to draw on it.

“There is all that money just sitting there,” Portnoy said. “They’re saying they don’t have enough money but when you juxtapose it with the more than $8 billion, well, why not use that right now in Florida and other places?”

The “unliquidated obligations” have stayed on FEMA’s books because it “subjectively” extended the deadlines on some projects. The deadline for 2012’s Superstorm Sandy has been extended to 2026. 

“As a result, the potential risk for fraud, waste, and abuse increases the longer a program remains open,” a DHS report concluded.

Although DHS could probably reach into such unliquidated obligations to help restore order in areas devastated by Helene, experts note that bureaucracies are loath to resort to such tactics when budget negotiations are near, as they are when the fiscal year ends this month.

“The bridges that have been washed out, that’s not something FEMA will have to pay tomorrow,” Cavanaugh said. 

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/10/06/untapped_relief_fema_is_sitting_on_billions_of_unused_disaster_funds_1063217.html

Walz a Laughingstock? Yes, But He’s Much Worse

In the wake of his disastrous debate performance, Tim Walz has become a laughingstock. That is appropriate. But the relatively benign view expressed by CNN–Walz is a nice guy, but an incompetent governor–doesn’t tell one-quarter of the story. The reality is far worse.

I don’t suppose Walz is actually the Manchurian Candidate, but his admiration for Communist China is both obvious and bizarre. Who, after all, would choose the China of 1994 as a honeymoon destination? And go there another 30 times? Walz now says he “misspoke” when he said he had been to China 30 times, and it wasn’t actually that many. Walz “misspeaks” a lot.

But we don’t have to draw inferences from Walz’s love affair with America’s number one rival to understand that Walz is anti-American. Consider, rather, his appointment of left-wing extremist Brian Lozenski to head up a restructuring of K-12 education in Minnesota. This is under the guise of “Ethnic Studies,” a purported academic discipline that now, as a matter of law, is to be inserted into every class, in every grade starting in kindergarten, in every public school in Minnesota. Lozenski is the guru of Ethnic Studies, having been involved in that effort in California, and now, by virtue of Walz’s appointment, leading the Ethnic Studies movement in Minnesota.

What, according to Lozenski, is Ethnic Studies all about? I quoted Lozenski here. In Lozenski’s telling, “Ethnic Studies” means hating Israel and the United States:

Given the devastating impact of Israeli colonialism on the lives of people across the Arab region, Palestine is a central issue for Arab students; studying Israeli settler colonialism in comparison to US settler colonialism is illuminating for all students, and at the heart of the discipline of Ethnic Studies.

The Great Satan and the Little Satan, the only two “settler colonialist” nations: that is what the Iranian mullahs preached, and what Tim Walz evidently believes. Or at least what he wants kindergarteners in Minnesota to believe. More here.

But Lozenski, Tim Walz’s most important education appointee, has been even more explicit than that. He has called for the overthrow of the government of the United States, as I wrote here. This is a quote from the man whom Tim Walz chose to represent his views on public education:

The first tenet of critical race theory is that the United States as constructed is irreversibly racist. So if the nation-state as constructed is irreversibly racist, then it must be done with, it must be overthrown, right. And so we can’t be like, “Oh no, critical race theory is just about telling our stories and divers[ity].” It’s not about that. It’s about overthrow. It’s insurgent. And we, we need to be, I think, more honest with that. … You can’t be a critical race theorist and be pro-U.S. Okay, it is an anti-state theory that says, The United States needs to be deconstructed, period.

That is Tim Walz’s vision for public education: teach our children, starting in kindergarten, that the government of the United States needs to be overthrown, because the United States is irredeemably evil.

The Democrats’ eleventh-hour selection of the far-left Tim Walz as Kamala Harris’s running mate may turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Walz, through his actions and through his appointments, says the quiet part out loud. He hates America and wants to “overthrow” and “deconstruct” our country and our government because we are “irreversibly racist.”

This is why Elon Musk is right when he says America’s future is on the line in this election. It is the first time that an explicitly anti-American ticket has tried to take over the Oval Office. We can’t let that happen.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/10/walz-a-laughingstock-yes-but-hes-much-worse.php

Harris Claims To ‘Love America,’ But Her Record Shows She Hates It

 At a campaign rally in Wisconsin last week with former Rep. Liz Cheney, Vice President Kamala Harris opened by saying, “we love America.” She repeated the phrase several times, emphasizing that what brought her and Cheney together is a love for country that transcends partisan politics. 

Set aside whether the endorsement of Cheney matters at all to voters in either party. Her neocon Never-Trump brand of Republican politics is repugnant to most GOP voters, and Democrats have long denounced her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, as a war criminal.

No one cares about the Cheney family’s endorsement of Harris. The more important question is: does Harris really love America?

Her record suggests she does not, and that in fact she hates America.

Consider what Harris said about America when the New York Times launched its 1619 Project back in 2019. She called it “a masterpiece” and endorsed its central thesis, saying, “We must speak this truth: the very foundation of our country was built on the backs of enslaved people.”

Recall that the entire purpose of the 1619 Project was to “reframe the country’s history” by placing slavery “at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.” The project began with the false claim the “true founding” of America was not 1776 but 1619, when African slaves were first brought to North America. The essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones that launched the 1619 Project made a number of outlandish and quickly debunked historical assertions, like the American Revolution was fought to protect slavery and the American Founders didn’t really believe in the ideals they espoused in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

The 1619 Project, in other words, is deeply anti-American. It asserts the American experiment in self-government was intrinsically evil, corrupt, and disingenuous from the beginning. To the extent Harris endorses that view of America’s history and Founding, it calls into question whether she really does “love America” as she claims.

This is a pattern with Harris. Consistent with her endorsement of the anti-American 1619 Project is her support for reparations. During her brief presidential campaign in 2020, Harris pledged — to none other than race-hustler Al Sharpton, at a conference of black activists — to sign a bill authorizing a federal study of reparations for descendants of slaves.

If you thought Harris’ radicals views about America’s Founding and our history with slavery might also entail radical views of our Constitution, you’d be right. During the 2020 Democratic primary, Harris repeatedly laid out a vision of executive power that makes a mockery of the Constitution’s separation of powers. She promised “executive action” on gun control if Congress didn’t pass federal legislation to her liking within 100 days of taking office. She said the same thing about drug prices, as if she would have to power to act on her own to create law if Congress didn’t do as she ordered.

In fact, on a host of issues she promised to wield legislative powers from the White House, the Constitution be damned. On immigration, Harris vowed to implement DAPA, which was blocked by the courts under the Obama administration. On abortion, she promised to use the Justice Department for a system modeled on the Voting Rights Act that would force states and localities that she deemed to have a history of violating Roe v. Wade to obtain approval from the DOJ before any abortion law or regulation could take effect.

She had a bunch of proposals like that in 2020, all of them totally unconstitutional. During one of the Democratic primary debates, the moderator mentioned that Joe Biden had previously warned about the limits of executive power when it came to something like gun control, and asked Harris for a response. She quipped, “Well, I mean, I would just say, hey, Joe, instead of saying, no, we can’t, let’s say yes, we can.”

Harris’ disdain for the Constitution is matched by her disdain for law and order during the BLM riots in the summer of 2020. She infamously helped raise money to bail out those arrested for rioting and looting, saying, “The people’s voices must be heard.” Of the protests themselves, which were premised on the false narrative that police unfairly and disproportionately target black Americans, Harris said they were “an essential evolution in our country,” and “a mark of a real democracy.”

Maybe somewhere deep down Harris really does love America, or some potential future version of America. But it’s clear from her record that she doesn’t love anything about America’s past and has at least a very dim view of America’s present. It’s also clear that she wants above all to transform America into a post-constitutional leftist oligarchy ruled by people like her.

There are different ways to describe what all that adds up to, but none of them amount anything close to love for America. Harris can insist all she wants on the campaign trail that she “loves America,” but her past statements and policy agenda show she actually hates it.

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John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

https://thefederalist.com/2024/10/07/kamala-harris-claims-to-love-america-but-her-record-shows-she-hates-it/

The Perils of Ignoring the Obvious

 One year ago, I woke up to multiple text messages telling me there was an attack in Israel. I checked the news and like most people could not believe what I was seeing, texting a friend saying, “They even overran an army base.” Little did I know this was just scratching the surface of the devastation, murder, and evil unleashed that day.

Although it shocked me and the rest of the world, it really shouldn’t have. The population of Gaza is raised from childhood to hate Israel, and all Hamas had to do was amass an irregular militia made up of fewer than 1% of Gaza’s military aged males to launch its attack. Despite having no chance to defeat Israel as a whole, they could cut through fences, overwhelm a quiet weekend security force, and lead acts of mass murder and terror against defenseless people in an attempt to win a psychological victory and tilt the broader region into war.

Americans were similarly shocked after the attack on Pearl Harbor, but they should not have been: Even though Japan had no chance of conquering the United States, it dispatched an armada across the Pacific to wreak havoc and destruction on what should have been a quiet Hawaii Sunday morning. The Dec. 7, 1941, attach was, as Franklin Roosevelt, said, “dastardly,” but it shouldn’t have been a surprise. Japan had already proven itself a brutal and belligerent regime and had the right incentives to seek a psychological victory in its attack against the relatively lightly defended U.S. fleet.

Likewise, it should not have been surprising that a terror group committed to demoralizing and paralyzing the United States, and who previously tried to topple the World Trade Center in a 1993 bombing, would just a few years later hijack civilian planes and fly them into the same twin towers. Under fear of this exact scenario, Israel shot down a non-responsive Libyan civilian airliner entering its airspace over 50 years ago.

People talk about so called black-swan events, unforeseen and unpredictable, but all those attacks could be foreseen – if one just looked at capabilities, incentives, and historical patterns of behavior. Sometimes the only surprising question is why they didn’t happen sooner.

Some 70,000 tourists visit Washington D.C. each day. Would it be a complete surprise if a hostile force made up of only 1% of those “visitors” turned out to be foreign infiltrators who converged on the White House with AK-47s or rocket launchers, and rammed a truck through its gates to take over the Oval Office – something a force of 700 fanatical fighters could likely accomplish? This relatively small force would represent a tiny fraction of the million illegal immigrants who cross our border each year. It should surprise no one, but it would shock nearly everyone.

Our major cities’ water systems are vulnerable to mass poisoning. A handful of foreign terrorist cells that attacked enough U.S. schools, shopping malls, and transit centers could likely shut down our entire economy in a matter of days. An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack could destroy our unprotected grid infrastructure and cripple the United States. A 2008 U.S. congressional study estimated that such an attack, if successful, could lead to the death of 90% of the U.S. population due to the long-term breakdown in rule of law and disruption of food supplies.

The same reasoning can be extended to economic meltdowns, which in recent history include the dot-com bubble and the 2008 Great Recession. There was nothing about those events that could not have been foreseen. Today we face comparable if not worse economic and monetary calamities which can be easily envisioned but most of us live as though they will never happen.

Lastly, we should not be surprised when attacks on the Jewish people rapidly escalate. Chants of “Death to Jews” in the streets of major Western capitals and demographic shifts in the West show the writing on the wall. Yet, people keep acting shocked and surprised when even one synagogue is attacked.

I do not know if any of these or similar events will happen in our lifetime. If they were easy to predict, they would be easy to prevent. To be clear, these are not “black-swan” events – which are improbable and unforeseen – the events I’m describing are improbable but foreseeable. While they are long-tail risks, the aggregate of the long-tail risk is large and historically repeats itself more often than we expect.

The Holocaust was so shocking and surprising that people could not believe it was real. But  given what was known at the time of Nazi ideology and Hitler’s own writing and speeches, as evil as they were, should it have been surprising?

When countries like Iran vow the complete destruction of Israel, how many of us will still claim to be surprised when they actually act on their genocidal promises?

History shows that events that shock and surprise tend to follow not-so-subtle precursors foreshadowing them. It’s only a question of whether we’re willing to listen.

Yinon Weiss is a retired U.S. Army Special Forces lieutenant colonel. He was born in Israel and trained with the Israeli Defense Forces while serving in the U.S. military.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/10/07/the_perils_of_ignoring_the_obvious_151744.html

Why Israel deserves our support

 

New York. London. Paris. Madrid. Over the past three decades, at various times, these cities have been yoked together under a pall of terror that has spread right across the West. It has set populations against each other, leaving everyone fearing for their lives. The specifics have varied. Sometimes assailants act alone, sometimes in cells. Often they strike at random, at other times after months of careful planning. Yet, taken together, the terror has a name. Not Islam but Islamism — political, messianic, totalitarian. And it struck again in Israel on October 7, 2023, when Hamas slaughtered hundreds of innocent Jews and kidnapped many more.


That isn’t the only parallel between the massacre last year and its precursors in New York and Paris. As with 9/11, the horrors of 7/10 were initially marked by shock, then calls for huge retaliation. As after 9/11, a backlash swiftly followed. Over the past 12 months, campuses and city streets have been swept by anti-Zionism, just as anti-Americanism became the rage on the Left in the early 2000s. Two decades ago, moreover, there were massive protests decrying America’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and calls for the troops to stay home, much like today’s demands for a ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon. And as after 9/11, the backlash proved impotent. The US hung on in Afghanistan until 2021. Today, Israel is busy expanding its war to Lebanon — and perhaps soon to Iran as well.

Yet surely the strongest parallel between those earlier atrocities and October 7 isn’t the bursts of violence, or the reaction, or the escalation. It’s that term I started with. It’s Islamism, and the way the West consistently refuses to name its true enemy. I mean the Muslim Brotherhood, which created Hamas, along with those other barbarians at the gates. On September 12, 2001, after all, we declared a war on “terror”. But terror is a tactic, not an ideology. In later years, as the enemy started to strike us at home in Western towns and cities, we called it “violent extremism” and lumped it together with fascism and other forms of homegrown zealotry.

This happened first, and most importantly, because the enemy told us it was fighting in the name of Islam, and we refused and still refuse, categorically, to wage war on one of the world’s great faiths. Second, we thought we could use our vast military and intelligence resources to weaken and destroy the enemy without being trapped into starting a war with a fifth of humanity. We failed to understand the difference between Islam and Islamism — between Muslims and the Muslim Brotherhood.


By failing to name Islamism as our enemy, we allowed it to prosper. Consider, for instance, what happened in Afghanistan. After 20 years of fighting that enemy without a name, spending trillions of dollars and wasting thousands of lives, we abandoned the country to the Islamist thugs of the Taliban. It was one of the most disgraceful retreats in American history, cloaked by shabby political expediency. We looked away as the Islamists catapulted Afghan women and minorities back to another Dark Age.

There have been other consequences too, often much closer to home. As we remained silent, the Muslim Brotherhood and its many offshoots quietly entrenched themselves across Western cities, from Australian universities to Manchester suburbs. Enabling them to build mosques and take over schools, moreover, our silence has allowed them to proclaim themselves as spokespeople for every Muslim in the West.

This continued reluctance to see the enemy before us allows it to burrow into more and more hearts. As increasing numbers of desperate people arrive upon our shores from war-torn lands, many are finding solace in a new community in those same mosques and schools, as well as online. And for those of us unwilling to turn a blind eye, our Islamist enemies are ready with their tried-and-tested accusations of Islamophobia, carefully deployed to shut down discussion of the true nature of their threat. Any critics of the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots are defamed as racist and intolerant — as purveyors of “hate”.


In this effort to freeze discussion the Islamists are aided and abetted by the ideological Left. In Europe, they proclaim their faith in multiculturalism. In America, social justice warriors do the work on campuses and adjacent institutions.

And so, for the moment at least, we find ourselves at an impasse. More than 20 years after 9/11, and only one year after October 7, we are still refusing to name our enemy. The irony is that not everyone struggles as we do in the West. Consider Saudi Arabia, Islam’s foundational home, the protector of Mecca and Medina, yet which has nonetheless banned the Muslim Brotherhood. A host of other Muslim countries have managed something similar: Syria, Jordan, the UAE, Egypt. This has been a startling transformation. Back in the last century, the Saudis welcomed the Brotherhood, put them in charge of schools and mosques — and funded the Islamists to spread their ideology right across the region and beyond. I witnessed this firsthand, in Kenya. They came to my home when I was only 15, and seized control of our local mosque. One reason I understand the Muslim Brotherhood is that, as a teenager, I was recruited to it.

At first, the Saudis thought they and the Brotherhood were ideologically aligned. But the Brotherhood eventually turned around and tried to overthrow them. At that point, the Saudi princes, capable of ruthlessness as well as generosity, rounded them up and expelled them from their schools, their mosques, their newspapers — and their soil.

Today, a year on from Hamas’ heinous attack on Israel, we should welcome Israel’s war against Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and most importantly, against Iran. Yet Israel must also learn from America’s mistakes. Remember that the war isn’t over until the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood is destroyed. And for that to happen, we must first recognise our enemy in our midst, and that begins by naming it.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an UnHerd columnist. She is also the Founder of the AHA Foundation, and host of The Ayaan Hirsi Ali Podcast. Her Substack is called Restoration.

https://unherd.com/2024/10/why-israel-deserves-our-support/

Michigan and Georgia Arab American voters sour on Harris

Vice President Harris is facing growing signs that Arab American and Muslim voters are souring on her in the key battlegrounds of Michigan and Georgia as anger rises over the expanding conflict in the Middle East.

A poll from the Arab American Institute showed former President Trump leading Harris with those voters by 4 points nationally, amid criticism of the Biden administration’s handling of Israel’s wars against Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas and in Gaza.

The survey comes as Trump and third-party candidates such as Jill Stein have stepped up outreach to the more than 200,000 Arab American and Muslim voters in Michigan, one of seven key battlegrounds that could determine who wins the White House. 

Meanwhile, in Georgia, leaders have begun sounding the alarm that the more than 150,000 Arab American and Muslim voters there might not turn out in a state President Biden won by fewer than 12,000 votes in 2020.

“There’s double trouble that has to be addressed, both the ongoing situation in Gaza but also the now new circumstance created in Lebanon,” said Jim Zogby, the founding director of the Arab American Institute and a former adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). “I don’t know where Harris’s majority comes from if you’re losing a percentage of nonwhite voters, a percentage of young voters and a significant percentage of Arab American voters. I don’t know where you get the rest from.” 

According to David Dulio, a political science professor at Michigan’s Oakland University, Arab Americans and Muslims have been “critical” to the Democratic coalition built in the state. 

“Even a small shift in the support in the community could have an incredibly large impact on the final outcome,” Dulio said. “It’s a small portion of the coalition, but it’s a critical one.”

As Israel expands the conflict into Lebanon, Democrats in Michigan are sounding the alarm bell. 

“I’m not sure people realize how much of an added dimension this brings here,” former House Rep. Andy Levin (D-Mich.) said, referring to Israel’s new war front. “Lebanese Americans are like the grandaddies of the Arab American community in Michigan.” 

Since the Oct. 7 attacks, Arab American support for Democrats has cratered. In the first survey by the Arab American Institute after Hamas’s incursion, Biden registered 17 percent support with the community. 

The National Uncommitted Movement launched a campaign for voters to cast uncommitted ballots during the primary, and close to 1 million Democrats did so. 

The National Uncommitted Movement recently declined to endorse Harris, but many of its leaders have come together with other Arab American leaders to form Arab Americans for Harris-Walz. 

While Harris has more than doubled Democratic support among Arab Americans and Muslims, she is still far behind the 60 percent of the community that voted for Biden in 2020. Democrats have historically enjoyed a 2-to-1 advantage among Arab American and Muslim voters. 

Harris has worked to regain the Democrats’ footing within the community, creating the first Arab American outreach position in a presidential campaign. 

But members of the party campaigning alongside Harris’s Arab outreach liaison say they have had a difficult time connecting with voters.  

“She’s very good, but she’s been having a hell of a time,” Zogby said. “I’ve been going to a couple of things with her, and it’s not been pretty.” 

Harris also spoke with leaders of the National Uncommitted Movement in August. That same month, her campaign manager also met with Arab and Muslim leaders.

This week, Walz spoke at the Emgage Action “Million Muslim Votes” event, while Harris met with Arab leaders before speaking in Detroit. 

“The Vice President is committed to work to earn every vote, unite our country, and to be a President for all Americans,” a Harris spokesperson told The Hill in a statement. “Throughout her career, Vice President Harris has been steadfast in her support of our country’s diverse Muslim community, ensuring first and foremost that they can live free from the hateful policies of the Trump administration.”

However, some members of the community have dismissed her efforts, saying they are not genuine. 

“They have a role for Arab American outreach director for the campaign, but they don’t have a role like that for the actual administration,” Soujoud Hamade, president of the Michigan chapter of the Arab American Bar Association, told The Hill. 

“Most of us know better at this point than to believe their lies anymore, because they’ll come and feed us a bunch of lies so that we vote for them,” added Hamade, who plans on voting for Stein. 

Others have taken a more moderate tone, recognizing the efforts of Harris but adding that it is not enough to win over Arab American and Muslim voters angry with the U.S. support for the Israeli government. 

“The liaisons are doing their best, but they are not decisionmakers. But the concern right now is that decisionmakers are not engaging with the community directly,” said Georgia State Rep. Ruwa Romman (D), who is supporting Harris. 

“Her team has been doing the outreach, and it’s been night and day compared to the Biden campaign,” Romman added. “But, if you’re a person who wants the bombs to stop and the candidate says, ‘Yes, I intend to stop the bombs,’ and that doesn’t happen, it makes you lose hope.” 

The National Uncommitted Movement floated Romman as a potential Palestinian speaker at the Democratic National Convention. In the end, the event did not feature a Palestinian speaker on the main stage. 

While Harris tries to rebuild her party’s relationship with the community, Trump and Stein have capitalized on their anger in an effort to make inroads. 

Trump has been airing ads in Arab American communities in Michigan, and his former director of national intelligence, Richard Grenell, and Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law, Massad Boulos, a Lebanese American businessman, have been leading his outreach to the community.

Their efforts appear to be succeeding with at least a part of the community. 

“His level of outreach has been constant and recurring, and the fact that there’s been this outreach placing value and worth in our community and saying that we deserve a seat at the table, which hasn’t happened from the other side,” Samraa Luqman, a Michigan activist who wrote in Bernie Sanders for president in 2020 but has now endorsed Trump, told The Hill. 

Luqman added that Trump had personally committed to resolving the conflict in meetings with her and other Arab and Muslim voters in Michigan. Luqman also believes Trump’s “personality quirks” might lead to a quicker resolution of the conflict compared to the current efforts led by Biden. 

“My aim is to punish Democrats for their support of genocide,” she added. “You cannot expect any change in policies or in the Democrats unless you actually punish them.” 

According to Luqman, many members of her community are “afraid to voice their support publicly right now.” 

Romman said Harris’s “inability to distinguish herself from Biden on this issue” has also made it easier for third-party candidates such as Stein to make “headway into the community.” 

Polls have shown Stein registering anywhere from 12 percent to more than 30 percent of Arab American support.

Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison dismissed some of these polls, saying “it’s hard for [him] to believe” the latest numbers.

“We know that Kamala Harris sees Arab Americans and understands that they need to have a seat at the table, that they need to be respected,” he added.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4917055-harris-arab-american-muslim-voters-concerns/

"They're Plum Out Of Tricks... And They Know It..."

 by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

Like A Prayer

“Whether it’s Facebook or Twitter or X or Instagram or TikTok, whatever they are, if they don’t moderate and monitor the content we lose total control..."

Hillary Clinton

“We lose total control. . .” she said.

Perhaps when you heard that you thought, “What do you mean ‘we,’ Kemosabe?”

You have also known for some time now, that Hillary is exactly the something wicked that has been coming this way for many years, to the siren song of the cable news harpies shrieking Trump Trump Trump. . . Putin Putin Putin at all hours, day and night, month after dreary month, and all the other avatars of ruin pretending to run the life of our nation. But this utterance begs enough questions to keep Chat GDP vexed and perplexed for the rest of its unnatural life: We lose total control. . . ?

Yes, as matter of fact, you do. This might be a book tour too far for Mrs. Clinton and her claque, now that her basket of deplorables shivers in the cold and dark out in Appalachia amid the stink of their kinfolks’ uncollected corpses. The Party of Chaos has managed to piss-off the most ferocious demographic in the land, the wild and cross-grained Scotch-Irish who populate those devastated hills and hollows of Western Carolina and East Tennessee, the people who, for generations, were first to volunteer to fight in America’s wars, the Sargent Yorks, the moonshiners and the stock car heroes, the Johnson Boys, Boones and Crocketts, Hatfields and McCoys, the very warp and woof of our folklore, half horse and half alligator, born fighting. And now you and your gang of wine-club harpies, Beltway mezzofinukes, Hollywood Satan-conjurors, Hamptons charity-hags, globe-trotting errand boys, color revolution maestros, race hustlers, drag queens, lawfare shysters, spooks, cut-outs, beach friends, and grifters has gone and pissed these folks off royally.

My guess would be that you have not begun to see the repercussions of the Hurricane Helene fiasco, which will resound far from the gates of Dollywood for years to come. I hope Alejandro Mayorkas enjoys the waffle-weave sweater he picked up in a Georgetown boutique on Saturday while the dazed people of Buncombe County, NC, stumbled dazed through a shattered landscape of creek-bed and forest scraped down to little more than what their ancestors first came upon in the 1760s. It may have to last him through the term he serves in federal prison when this is all over. And by this, I mean mainly the reign of this wicked regime he's a major player in, with its claws slipping off the levers of power. Do you really suppose that America will elect the empty pant-suit Kamala Harris to front for this depraved cabal?

Remember what the Romanians did to Madame Ceaușescu on Christmas day in 1989, when she and her husband Nicolae, erstwhile president of that sore-beset country, just liberated from decades of communist captivity, were summarily tried by a provisional court after attempting to flee. I’ll tell you: they trussed the two of them up like a couple of Carpathian wild hogs (Sus scrofa), and hauled them before a firing squad. Which is not exactly to say that the United States is like Romania, but that such things happen surprisingly in formerly quiescent places. The people hated her as much, perhaps even more, than her despot husband. Just sayin’.

Why exactly Hillary Clinton would be dumb enough to come out on every news channel and Internet site on Gawd’s green earth to declare the end of free speech throughout Western Civ might remain one of those abiding mysteries of history. Bad timing doesn’t begin to explain it. What does explain it is the psychotic desperation of her party now that the days to election dwindle down and the pathetic figure they “nominated” stumbles from one campaign blunder to the next, and the whole sick crew behind her entertains dark visions of courtrooms and prison cells — including, by the way, her cohort in nation-wrecking Barack Obama, who could be liable to charges such as conspiracy to commit sedition, or even a higher crime, if the election goes the wrong way for him. You might suppose they are fighting for their very lives without being accused of exaggeration.

In the event of Hurricane Helena and other churning contingencies of the season, Mr. Trump is not only looking more presidential, he is apparently being regarded as something close to an actual acting president in the eerie absence of “Joe Biden,” who looks more and more like one of those three-hundred-dollar Home Depot animatronic ghouls Americans are planting in the front yard this season of the walking dead, along with the giant inflated jack-o-lanterns , beckoning skeletons, and plastic tombstones. In other words, it looks like the people are going to vote Mr. Trump back into office, since he is the only thing the least bit presidential on offer in 2024. Even the Covid-addled, the many new demoralized Woke drop-outs, and the beaten-down male youth of America are leaning his way now and it scares the Democrats down to their livers and lights.

Accordingly, I received notice late Sunday from an informant in commercial aviation, with connections to military aviation, that a massive deployment of aircraft is preparing logistics for a major operation set to go down in about a week, probably in the Middle East. I can’t guarantee you that it is for real, but it was a real warning message, at least, from a serious person, and you know that something could be up. . . some humdinger of an October Surprise, like a big fat world war. What else have they got now? Jack Smith’s lame-ass attempt to beef-up an “insurrection” charge against Mr. Trump in Judge Chutkan’s abject facsimile of a federal court? Everything else has been fail, fail, fail all year long . . . the head-cases with rifles. . . all the other court cases contrived by Merrick Garland, Andrew Weissmann, Norm Eisen, and Mary McCord. . . the ineffectual bleatings of The New York Times’s editorial board? They’re plum out of tricks and they know it. So, yes, Hillary. You lose total control. Totally. For now and forever, amen.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/theyre-plum-out-tricks-and-they-know-it