Tuesday: Hili dialogue

NOTE: Hili died today from metastatic liver cancer.  I am devastated but Andrzej even more so. He lost his wife and his cat companion within a bit more than a year. If you have a message for Andrzej, put it in the comments and I will convey it to him. 

Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, November 3, 2026, and it’s Election Day. I trust you will vote if you’re American, as that is our duty (though sometimes not our pleasure). It’s also National Sandwich Day.  Here’s my pastrami sandwich at Katz’s in NYC, eaten in 2014. It is of course on rye bread with hot mustard, and accompanied by the requisites: a plate of pickles (with the prized half sours) and a can of Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray soda, which, with its celery flavor, happens to be the perfect accompaniment to pastrami or corned beef.

It’s also Cliché Day, World Jellyfish Day, and Skeptics Day International.

There’s a Google Doodle today urging you to vote. Click on the icon below to see where it goes, which tells you where you must go to vote based on your location.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 3 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Although most of us think, based on the polls, that Democrats will win the House of Representatives tomorrow, the Senate is a more dicey call. The NYT, though, argues that the latest polls show the Democrats flipping enough seats to take the Senate as well (article archived here).

Democrats are ahead of Republicans in almost all of the seven battleground states that will determine which party controls the Senate, according to the final set of polls from The New York Times and Siena University before the midterm elections.

The surveys found that Democrats hold sizable leads in Texas, which has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1988, and Kansas, which has not elected one since 1932.

To win a Senate majority, Democrats need to defend all the seats they currently hold and flip at least four seats that are currently held by Republicans. It has been seen as an uphill battle because many of the seats they need to win are in Republican strongholds.

But the new polls found Democratic candidates ahead in five states that now have Republican senators and effectively tied in a sixth. They hold leads in Kansas, Maine, Ohio and Texas and a narrow edge in Alaska. They are effectively tied in Iowa.

In Michigan, the lone top Senate battleground already held by Democrats, the poll found the Democratic candidate leading by double digits. (It was conducted before a Democratic feud erupted in Michigan this weekend.) The surveys did not include North Carolina, where polls have long found the Democrat leading and Republicans have pared back their campaign spending.

Dissatisfaction with President Trump and frustration over his management of the economy are dragging down Republicans, according to the polls. Just 38 percent of likely voters approved of the president’s job performance in the seven states in the poll, a strikingly low figure given that Mr. Trump had won five of the states by double digits just two years ago.

The newfound Democratic strength was powered by growing trust in the party to handle the economy — the key motivating issue for voters this year. Democrats hold a nine-point advantage on the cost of living across the battlegrounds, and they led on this crucial measure in every single state.

Here’s the chart that the NYT gives. As always, I’m not going watch the votes roll in over the evening; I’d prefer to go to sleep peacefully and wake up tomorrow to find out who’s ahead (or won):

*The WSJ reports that America’s Arab allies in the Middle East are getting reading for another American attack on Iran, something that Trump himself has intimated.

America’s Gulf allies are steeling themselves for a heavy U.S. bombardment of Iran that they expect to trigger a vicious cycle of retaliation against their own economic and civilian infrastructure as early as this week.

Their concerns are heightened by a lack of progress in the various efforts to reach a negotiated end to the conflict while the U.S. and Iran are threatening especially ferocious fighting if the conflict resurges.

President Trump has been leaning toward a large postelection attack that could target Iranian infrastructure and nuclear sites, but hasn’t decided whether to go ahead, The Wall Street Journal has reported. Iranian officials said over the weekend their response to any attack would be unrestrained.

“The only reason why I’m not finished with Iran is I want to be nice. I want to try and save all those lives if I can,” Trump said Sunday at a rally in Iowa ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections. “But at some point we’re going to have to give them the hammer.”

Governments including Qatar and the United Arab Emirates were running security drills—including at airports—and attendees at a major energy conference in Abu Dhabi were cutting short their stays on advice from their governments. Schools in the capital of Saudi Arabia, which is also under fire from the Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen, will remain online this week. Dutch and Belgian embassies in the region warned Thursday that security conditions could deteriorate quickly in the region.

Anwar Gargash, senior foreign-policy adviser to the U.A.E.’s president, said at a security conference over the weekend that the country hopes the diplomatic efforts will pan out, but is “braced for the worst.”

Will this happen? I’m guessing it will, and not long after the midterm results are in. Certainly before Congress recalibrates towards being Democratic in January, as they could put the brakes on Trump’s ambitions, though I’m not yet sure how. But Trump is impatient (his waffling is just that, not patience), and I’m betting he’ll order a strike within a month of the midterms. (But remember, I’m not a pundit; your guess is as good as mine.)

*Although Chuck Schumer has called Hayley Stevens’s defection from supporting El-Sayed a “despicable betrayal”, last Thursday Nancy Pelosi just pronounced both el-Sayed’s and Mamdani’s demonization of Israel as “concerning” and “wrong.”

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., criticized New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed over their views on Israel Thursday, calling their positions “wrong” and saying they did not reflect congressional Democrats.

The two progressive Democrats were mentioned by “On Brand” podcast host Donny Deutsch, who asked Pelosi how he, as a Jewish man, could reconcile his support for the Democratic Party with politicians whose statements he considered antisemitic.

“When you say Israel doesn’t have the right to be a Jewish state, that’s antisemitic as far as I’m concerned with all that,” Deutsch said.

When Pelosi asked for examples, Deutsch named Mamdani and El-Sayed, calling their comments “concerning.”

“No, it’s more than concerning,” Pelosi responded. “It’s wrong. It’s wrong. And it isn’t a reflection of the Democrats in the Congress of the United States. This new person in Michigan, we’ll see if he gets elected to the Congress. But the mayor, bless his heart, I hope he succeeds as mayor, but I don’t agree with some of the things he has said. But in terms of our people in the House of Representatives, if somebody says that, the other members disassociate themselves from it.”

Note that this is the opposite of what Chuck Schumer tweeted: “Senate Democrats are united in our support for Abdul El-Sayed.”  Are they?  More:

Earlier in the interview with Deutsch, Pelosi initially denied that anyone in the Democratic Party was antisemitic.

“The fact is that I really do not know of anybody there on our side who is engaged in antisemitism. That may be what it appears to be or what they’re charged to be. But if they are, it’s only a few. If there are, I think sometimes they say things that they shouldn’t and can be interpreted that way,” Pelosi said.Despite her concerns about Mamdani and El-Sayed’s comments, she dismissed their impact on the party as a whole.“People represent their districts, and we have to respect that. The job description, job title is representative, but that doesn’t mean it has an impact on the consensus of the Democratic Party, and [House Minority Leader] Hakeem Jeffries has been very clear on that,” Pelosi said.. . . . Rabbi Yaakov Menken, executive vice president of the Coalition for Jewish Values, acknowledged Pelosi “as one of the Jewish community’s best friends among House Democrats” but said it was alarming that she did not seem to recognize antisemitism among her colleagues.“Pelosi claims she wants for those voices to be marginalized within her party, yet she demonstrates that she has turned a deaf ear, both to antisemitic expression from her colleagues and to the rabbis anxious to set her straight on the magnitude of the problem. If she is indeed one of our best friends, should we not be scared by that?” Menken told Fox News Digital.

I agree with the rabbi; Pelosi doesn’t seem to recognize that no Democratic anti-Semite is every going to be blatantly anti-Semitic because even Democrats won’t tolerate that. They thus use code words like “Zionist” or “genocide,” or even express support for an immediate two-state solution, which is effectively calling for more terrorism to rain down on Israel. But at least Pelosi isn’t as gullible as Schumer.

*With the Israeli Prime Minister post not yet settled, Amit Segal tells us who the most important person in the recent election (and Israeli politics in general) is.

It’s Monday, November 2, and Israel’s future rests in the hands of a triumvirate, though none of its members is the country’s Caesar. As with the alliances that presided over the fall of the Roman Republic, whether Yashar’s Gadi Eisenkot, Yisrael Beiteinu’s Avigdor Liberman and Together’s Naftali Bennett act together or apart will decide the country’s fate.

The conventional wisdom puts Eisenkot at the head of the trio. With 21 seats, Yashar is the second-largest party in the Knesset, and the former IDF chief of staff will most likely be the first to receive the president’s mandate to form a government. Some are watching the enigmatic Liberman and his seven seats. Since 2019, his decisions about whom he will and won’t sit with have denied Benjamin Netanyahu a majority and fueled Israel’s long political crisis. But in my humble view, the man who holds the most power is sitting right now in the upper-middle-class town of Ra’anana: Naftali Bennett.

Here’s why.

The Together chairman is, along with the Yashar chairman, one of only two pivot players in any possible government.

Without him, an Eisenkot-Netanyahu government doesn’t add up. Even with Liberman, Likud and Yashar are stuck six short of a majority. Only Bennett can get them over the line, to a comfortable 67. As the bloc’s second-strongest figure, and once Eisenkot’s rival for its leadership, Bennett holds the other key too. Eisenkot can’t enter any government that includes Haredim and/or Arabs without Bennett providing the parliamentary ballast, and the vaguer but no less essential seal of approval.

But there is a fundamental difference between the two. Eisenkot would serve as prime minister in a minority coalition or, at the very least, as an equal partner in a unity government. He has something significant to gain. Bennett has a lot to lose. He would absorb much of the criticism and the electoral damage for every broken campaign promise, but on the income side of the ledger he’d have to settle for a senior (very senior) ministry, with no return to the most important office in the country.

. . .Over the weekend I spent hours going through every possible permutation for a government: a minority government with the Arabs, a minority government with the Haredim, even the purely hypothetical and absurd Arab-Haredi alliance, with Agudat Yisrael leader Yitzhak Goldknopf and Shas leader Aryeh Deri as rotating prime ministers. But only one answer guarantees Israel a strong and stable government able to contend with the challenges we face: unity.

Bennett may be the pivotal figure, the first rock to tumble in what becomes a landslide. But without Eisenkot and Liberman following him, and possibly Religious Zionism leader Bezalel Smotrich as well, stability will suffer, and with it the country’s most essential needs in security and society. As Sallust, the Roman historian and a contemporary of the First Triumvirate, observed, “Through harmony small states grow; through discord the greatest fall apart.”

Here is Bennett’s tweet (translated from Hebrew) recommending that Israel’s President (who has this task) recommend Eisenkot to cobble together the next government of Israel. It looks as if Bennett’s in favor of a Yashar/Likud coalition, which could, if the Arab parties join in, put Eisenkot in the PM’s seat.

*Over at Air Mail, Larry David has a “modest” proposal—or rather 12 of them—for the Democratic Socialists of America (article archived here). It is of course a spoof if you know David and the DSA: I’ll give you six, and you have the link to see the whole schmear:

I recently attended a meeting of the Democratic Socialists of America, where I officially enrolled as a member. Though I was new to the party, I put forth a number of proposals, many of which were met with considerable enthusiasm and, I’m happy to report, have now been incorporated into their manifesto. I present them herein.

1.) Let’s never forget we’re all in this together. Therefore, we have determined that all doors to private homes must remain unlocked at all times. Strangers may enter as they please to open your fridge, use your bathroom, floss, or just relax and watch a ball game. This open-door policy is the perfect way to get to know our fellow Americans.

. . . 4.) In our Socialist America, everyone will be so fulfilled spiritually and financially that the police department will be dramatically reduced to where an officer’s only job will be to adjudicate domestic disputes. Toward that end, stands will be set up at local farmers markets, where they will work to resolve marital issues in a folksy, farm-to-table manner. Fresh berries will be provided.

. . . 6.) The loss of a dog can be devastating and, in some cases, worse than even when a human passes. Recognizing that, we at the D.S.A. will institute a three-week bereavement period during which pet mourners will continue to receive full work compensation. This benefit will also apply to the loss of a cat, turtle, parakeet, or goldfish. For certain farm animals, such as chickens, donkeys, goats, and pigs, the bereavement period will be reduced to two weeks. Conversely, if you are the proud owner of a new pet, you’ll be granted a two-week paternity leave to bond with, house-train, and teach it commands. You’d be surprised what a goldfish can do if you get them early.

. . . 9.) The D.S.A. has great respect for religious traditions. Because of our burgeoning Muslim population, we want to take all measures to give these people a strong sense of belonging in America. Along those lines, we’ll require that all Caucasian women wear a hijab on weekends in solidarity with their Muslim sisters. In addition, Jews will no longer be allowed to refer to themselves as “the Chosen People.” Henceforth, their new nickname will be “the Bagel People.”

. . . 10.) We strongly believe in a two-state solution. To this end, we propose that Palestinians should be given all the land currently occupied by Israel and that Israel should be given Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific, where the weather is beautiful and grapefruits are aplenty. We think the Bagel People will be very happy there.

. . . 11.) Firing is prohibited in Socialist America. The only way anyone will be able to replace a worker is to trade them to another company, like they do in professional sports. The worker will also have a “no trade” clause in their contract so it can be voided if they choose to do so.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is no more.

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From Things With Faces, a grumpy tree:

From The Dodo Pet:

From Meow Incorporated:

This is a post by Masih on Facebook, showing her berating Spanish officials for cozying up to Iranian authorities while denying visas to women protestors blinded by the Iranian cops:

From Luana; more Wikipedia editing:

Over the past months, a single Wikipedia editor has been quietly shaping @AbdulElSayed’s entry.

The editing has been intensive and highly directed. For example:

+ Hasan Piker controversy got cut down.
+ Syed’s antisemitism problem – deleted.
+ Harris and Obama endorsements went in.
+ A line saying AIPAC’s brand is “toxic” included.

Is it an op?

Well, two weeks ago the same editor had this to say in an edit summary on the El-Sayed page:

“another half month of this shit.”

🧵

— Ashley Rindsberg (@AshleyRindsberg) November 2, 2026

From Malcolm. Mama turned around right quick when a baby squealed:

Mama bear and… Wait for it. https://t.co/XF1NtaXAG8

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) October 22, 2026

From the Number Ten Cat, who’s proud of his CBS segment. He got a whole news segment, introduced by Jane Pauley:

CBS = Cat Bringing Smiles

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) November 2, 2026

Two from my feed. First, a viral video of a pro-Palestinian student striking two fellow students (the girl is Jewish) at the University of Michigan. She got arrested, as you’ll see. English translation of the tweet: “Probably the first time in her life that this dumb cow has faced consequences for her actions.”

Wahrscheinlich das erste Mal in ihrem Leben, dass diese dumme Kuh Konsequenzen für ihr handeln erfahren hat. https://t.co/Avtl4SnlrK

— Schrödinger (@OF_Schroedinger) November 2, 2026

I sure hope this is a real video and not staged:

When your Amazon delivery driver is a dog person…🥺🥺
Wait for end…🧐🧐 https://t.co/QDB8voxvlj

— Rosie Bella (@chronicalguy) November 2, 2026

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish boy was gassed to death as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was four years old, and would be 89 today had he survived.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-11-03T12:01:59.123Z

And one from Professor (Emeritus) Cobb. It’s amazing, and he says: “The second vid extract is crazy! Don’t blink!”

Not enough people watched this video. #ScienceSky #SnekSky

— Leah (@leah.myatproto.social) 2026-11-02T18:44:02.102Z