This Trump Prosecutor Took the Fifth on Every Question Asked of Him by US Rep. Matt Gaetz. This piece of excrement, devoid of all integrity, is a prosecutor of President Trump.

https://twitter.com/RepMattGaetz/status/1786003646712270941

These Catholic Lite Catholics have become like non-denominational Christianity. But make no mistake non-denominational Christianity is Protestantism in its various evolved forms. 

What Catholic Lite Catholics want is a “bleeding heart” Church, and not the Bleeding Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ! They want feel-good religion. They want comfort religion. They don’t want their conscience seared by the hard Truths of Jesus Christ who is Truth Himself!

When Catholic Lite Catholics hear and see true Catholicism, they can’t take it—it is a foreign religion to them. It confronts their coloring book Catholicism and scars them. It is too traumatic for them, especially the Sufferings of Jesus Christ and of His Blessed Mother. 

For the entire article click HERE on the Associated Press website!

Here’s a money byte:

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — It was the music that changed first. Or maybe that’s just when many people at the pale brick Catholic church in the quiet Wisconsin neighborhood finally began to realize what was happening.

The choir director, a fixture at St. Maria Goretti for nearly 40 years, was suddenly gone. Contemporary hymns were replaced by music rooted in medieval Europe.

So much was changing. Sermons were focusing more on sin and confession. Priests were rarely seen without cassocks. Altar girls, for a time, were banned.

At the parish elementary school, students began hearing about abortion and hell.

“It was like a step back in time,” said one former parishioner, still so dazed by the tumultuous changes that began in 2021 with a new pastor that he only spoke on condition of anonymity.

It’s not just St. Maria Goretti.

I appreciate that cigar culture has finer points, but the smell of cigars still makes me queasy. Likewise, Flannery O’Connor. She is an acquired taste, and this review of Wildcat, the new biodrama of O’Connor, is written from the perspective of one who has not thoroughly acquired it. I daresay I’m not alone on the periphery of her fandom. Most people, when asked if they have read Flannery O’Connor…

Source

A new poll finds that most registered voters who are white Christians would vote for Republican Donald Trump over Democrat Joe Biden if the 2024 presidential election were held today. Most registered voters who are black Protestants or religious “nones” – those who self-identify as atheists, agnostics, or “nothing in particular” – would vote for Biden
 

The post Voters’ views of Trump and Biden differ sharply by religion appeared first on The Catholic Thing.

A criminal investigation into the Archdiocese of New Orleans is based on a suspicion that it may be linked to child sex trafficking, according to allegations presented in a search warrant granted to Louisiana State Police. That warrant alleges that multiple sex abuse victims provided statements that claim they were transported to other parishes and outside of Louisiana, where they were sexually abused. It further alleges a scheme within the archdiocese in which abused children were instructed to provide “gifts” to certain priests, which were meant to signal that the children were targets for sexual abuse. When the alleged events took place is unclear.

The post Archdiocese of New Orleans suspected of child sex trafficking, warrant shows appeared first on The Catholic Thing.

For many years, according at least to the U.S. State Department and other Western diplomatic agencies, the “Palestinians” were wishing for a separate state. This is the “two-state” solution to the “Israeli” problem, said to be otherwise intractable. (I will be placing my scare quotes carefully.)

Most Americans, and probably most Catholics, have been willing to concede this as a diplomatic fix; it gives us something glib to say. Most Israelis are, also, willing to be glib. They offer, or used to offer, “land for peace.” This never worked for them.

I do not have the space or patience to rehearse the whole history of the Arab response to “Zionism,” from Ottoman times to the present. Since 1948, it has often been expressed with murderous violence, through aggressive wars and acts of terrorism. Repeatedly, neighboring Arab states have tried to wipe the “new” entity off the map.

This was unwise, on the part of the Arabs, because they lost every war, to an Israel fighting valiantly for survival; including at the beginning when the odds were entirely on the Arab side.

A fecund people, the Arabs in and around the old British mandate of Palestine had essentially two options. They could stay and become citizens (there are two million Arab Israelis now), or they could flee and become refugees. Half fled: voluntarily, unlike the Jews who were evicted from almost every Muslim country.

These hard facts will not be accepted by the enemies of Israel. They continue to wish Israel would go away; yet it won’t, and the genocidal fantasy has led them to a terrible fate.

Of course, the “Palestinian” leaders have earned the greatest punishment for this, because they established a vile, psychopathic “education” system over their refugees, with much supplementary propaganda. They have in effect brainwashed this population, to entrap their loyalties. That they have been successfully brainwashed can be demonstrated, for “Palestinian” views are not shared by the larger Arab world, who are even less welcoming to “Palestinians” than to Israelis.

It takes some effort to create a class of fanatic Jew-killers, such as we saw on October 7th. It is morally worse even than the corruption with which these leaders have enriched and armed themselves; and even than the specific acts of hostage-taking, savage torture, and gratuitous killing done to whoever comes their way. They have delivered their own people into the Hell that is Gaza.

By the concept of Intifada, they have spread their scheme of violent chaos wherever Arab emigrants can be found, and who have children who can be radicalized. For Muslims living away from the traditional Ummah are easily infected with the Islamist bacillus, a disease that invades and spoils Arab life and religion.

This is the reason why conversion to Christianity has become the only practical alternative for Muslims who find themselves at a dead end. For Christianity provides a path out of the quagmire (whereas atheism negates even Islam’s merits).

The Catholic Church could help, by welcoming the Muslim convert and caring particularly for his needs, in the spirit of a Holy Crusade. Her present attitude, of avoiding trespass into Muslim territory and showing timid, artificial “tolerance” for the very Islamic doctrines that are used to oppress Christians, is a failure of our obligation to the Muslim neighbor, and an abandonment of  Christ.

Instead, let’s grow spines.

The excuse for spinelessness is mostly fear. We think the Muslims might kill us if we make an evangelical approach, and sometimes they will. But Saint Francis did not hesitate in his journey to Damietta, or in his approach to the Sultan of Egypt, when he lovingly presented the basic Catholic truths.

(If God is on our side, who can be against us?)

From what I could follow in the news this week, events on the campuses of Columbia, Fordham, UCLA, and so on suggest a reversal of our pusillanimity in the face of Hamas rioting. We begin to see that a large majority of Americans – about three-quarters of those polled – understand the points I was making above, and that they believe the “Palestinians” are not victims, but have often got what they deserved.

The “beatdown” administered by blue-state police is thus a hopeful sign that Americans are not incurably stupid. Moreover, developments in the Sunni Arab world give hope, too, that they will stand with Israel in opposition to Iran and its proxies. Certainly, their sympathy with the “Palestinians” evaporated long ago.

We must be careful what we wish for. Under terrorist leadership for many decades, the “Palestinian” wish for freedom, “from the river to the sea,” and thus for the extinction of Israel, created a situation for them in which their only friends are malevolent crazies.

It is not just a question of prayer, for prayer is not always beneficial. As Christians ought to know, it matters what you pray for. Praying for peace, while setting conditions, is praying to the Devil. And it gets worse when the Devil sets out to reward our prayers.

We do not love with CONDITIONS. God makes His answers indifferently to them, and He helpfully ignores what is not good for us.

The Western peacenik thinks that peace and all good things can be advanced by dialogue, and in this case dialogue “between the faiths,” under rules written by those who have no religion at all. It is one of many propositions we might have hoped would have perished on October 7th, rather than so many women and children.

“Peace talks” have generally contributed to the occasion for war, and all the peace talks in which Israel ever participated, have ended poorly. The most promising, such as Oslo, cost them most dear.

Hamas was the anfractuous reward for the painful Israeli evacuation of Gaza in 2005, the product of some “peace process.”

For Israel has something to learn, too: that glib wishes bring the opposite result, in every case.

The post Careful What You Wish For appeared first on The Catholic Thing.

Last week, Congress voted to send $95 billion in additional aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. The largest portion was to Ukraine – $61 billion – after the Congress had previously approved $114 billion, for a total of $175 billion. The total GDP of Ukraine in 2022 was $160.5 billion. In other words, we basically … Continue reading "Congress Passes Mega-Billions More For Ukraine"

The post Congress Passes Mega-Billions More For Ukraine appeared first on Antiwar.com.

My dear friend Bruce Charlton – an Orthospherean from before our first days and indeed the moderator at his own site of the discussion in which we decided to call this blog “the Orthosphere,” a pen friend of mine for years beforehand, and an honored contributor here still (so far as WordPress is concerned, he can post here anything he likes) – has it seems taken my recent post on the difficulties that bedevil radical ontological pluralism as a philosophical challenge. It was not intended as such, but so be it. It would be cheap of me to ignore his response, so, here goes: a fisking, alas.

At his own site, far more influential than ours, he writes:

Kristor, of The Orthosphere, is very good at expounding his own metaphysical assumptions (which are essentially those of Thomistic Roman Catholicism); but when it comes to making a comparative evaluation of different metaphysical “systems”… well, he just doesn’t ever do it!

I used to do it. But after four decades of work on it I moved on to other problems, because it became clear to me on the basis of a wide ranging comparative evaluation of different metaphysical systems that the traditional, classical Platonico-Aristotelian system of the West, and so of the Church (Roman and Orthodox, and thus derivatively of Protestantism), simply works better than the alternatives (along the way I considered process metaphysics, Tychism (of Peirce and of later quantum thinkers), Bergsonian philosophy, advaita Vedanta, Taoism, Sufism, Spinozan and Eleatic monism, Democritean materialism, Deism, LaPlacean determinism, Platonism, Aristotelianism, Hermeticism, and a number of others (indeed, I even for a few weeks seriously entertained pagan polytheism of the Viking and Greek sorts (on account of my interest in nature mysticism and the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were both taken seriously by many serious people), and later of the Mormon sort; come to think of it, I suppose the only major systems I did not investigate were those of Gnosticism (which seemed silly prima facie, like New Age) and Neo-Platonism (which I figured was just Platonism, and I’d get around to it (I did))). The classical metaphysics of the West subsumes all the good bits of the other systems. After a while indeed it seemed to me that most of those other systems were either protoevangelia or partial quotations and borrowings from the mature Christian metaphysical tradition.

In a recent post; Kristor discusses the matter of whether reality is ultimately one (monism) or many (pluralism). By his argument, Kristor apparently supposes that he has logically rejected pluralism as in essence incoherent, therefore necessarily wrong.

On the contrary, I suppose that reality is both a Many and a One. It looks that way to me: I suffer at every moment a Many that is at One, so that many disparate things hang together coherently, indeed immaculately, and always. The difficulty then is to reconcile these two notions.

We run into trouble when we dully suppose – allured by an Ockhamian temptation to improper reduction – that reality is either simply pluralist or simply monist. Neither of those options can be correct, because they both founder immediately on our daily experience – on experience per se, so far as it has been ever vouchsafed to us. At every moment we all apprehend both a Many and a One. There’s no way around it.

Yet what he has done in his discourse is merely to demonstrate that when someone has accepted the assumptions of monism – then swapped out the assumptions that everything is one and replaced it with an assumption of pluralism, the result does not make sense.

I am not a monist. Monism is inadequate to experience. And it is logically incoherent; indeed, it refutes itself: on monism, there can be no such thing as an argument for monism. So, I have not accepted the assumptions of monism.

Kristor’s argument does not at all mean that pluralism is necessarily incoherent; for example when pluralism is one part of a different set of fundamental assumptions concerning the nature of reality.

On radical ontological pluralism, entities have nothing essentially to do with each other, as a matter of their common basic being. In that case, they cannot together form an integral cosmos, for there is no way to obtain a system of entities out of entities that can have nothing to do with each other. We find that there is an integral cosmos. Ergo, ¬ radical ontological pluralism. QED.

Bruce has not addressed this argument.

Perhaps he advocates something other than radical ontological pluralism as I have characterized it, so that my argument does not really touch his metaphysical opinions. Or perhaps he does think that radical ontological pluralism as I have characterized it is true, but has in mind metaphysical axioms that render it agreeable to our experience of an integral cosmos. At least in the conversation so far – three posts, now, counting this one – he has not been forthcoming about either of those alternatives.

Now if on the other hand plural entities *do* have something essentially to do with each other, why then they can well proceed to form together an integral cosmos – to have relations with each other, to exert causal effects upon each other, and so forth, and so together to form a world system, a cosmos. But if they do have this thing in common, the question then becomes, whence that thing? Is it in them essentially or necessarily? Why? How did it get into them in the first place?

Excursus: So we get to the familiar cosmological arguments.

NB: on radical ontological pluralism, none of the cosmological arguments can get underway; for, on that ontology, there can be no such thing as a cosmos, from which such arguments might proceed.

And perhaps Kristor regards his own assumptions as necessarily true because he does not acknowledge that they lead to any fundamental problems.

For example, I think he does not acknowledge the ineradicable depth of the problem of explaining genuine free agency for Men in a reality conceptualized as created from nothing by an “omni-God.”

Nah, this is easy. It is not logically possible to create actualities, that as actual can act, in any way other than as free, i.e., *as capable of action:* of decision among real options, thus also (to boot) of wicked decisions. Easy.

Nor do I think Kristor appreciates the ineradicable depth of the problem of accounting for the existence of evil in a reality wholly created by a wholly Good (and omnipotent) God.

Again, this is easy. If creatures are real, then they can really act; and if they can really act, then they can really choose between options, some of which are necessarily suboptimal. Their knowledge being finite and therefore imperfect, some of them are almost certain to choose unwisely and suboptimally. Some do, and catastrophe ensues. A sad situation, but unavoidable if you want actual and free creatures to begin with, who can do things like love, create, worship, enjoy …

Easy.

I think Kristor does not acknowledge the depth of these problems, because he is satisfied by those abstract and complex “answers” provided by Thomism.

Actually, I figured out theodicy on my own, before I began to read Aquinas seriously. I got started on it because I was personally and deeply engaged in a struggle to understand a massive horrid evil that permanently befell my innocent son, then just a boy. So far as I yet know, the solution is original with me. Once you see it, the solution is easy. So easy that it becomes obvious that there just is no Problem of Evil. There is rather only confusion about evil and actuality.

I limned the theodicy in a few sentences just supra. It took me a decade, and hundreds of pages of work, to figure it out.

And (to complete the circle) these are answers that themselves assume the metaphysical primacy of abstractions.

To talk of abstractions – indeed, to talk at all – is to employ abstractions. There is no way around it. So, never mind this objection: it tells with equal minuscule force against all language. If abstraction is bad per se, then the abstraction that abstraction is bad is itself bad. The notion that abstraction is bad per se refutes itself. Abstraction then is not eo ipso bad.

Kristor – following traditional RC teaching – assumes the fundamental and necessary truth of God’s omniscience / omnipotence / omnipresence (etc.) – and these are abstractions. Similarly; creation from nothing (ex nihilo) is assumed to be necessary, and that is an abstraction. More fundamentally; Kristor’s understanding of God as God, is an abstract one: his understanding of God is in terms of the definitional necessity of God having certain abstract attributes – such as those above.

Bruce on the other hand talks of God by using different abstractions. So, what? How is it possible to talk of God at all, pray – or of  anything else whatever, for that  matter – other than by employing abstract concepts? The question then is not whether this or that person uses abstract concepts, but rather whether the abstract concepts they use are both coherent and adequate to experience.

Radical ontological pluralism simply *cannot* adequate to experience, inasmuch as it proposes that the myriad entities of the Many are noncontingent; as such, they can have nothing to do with each other – this is just part of what it means to say that they are noncontingent – so that they *cannot* conspire to such a world as we experience.

Thus I propose something a bit less radical than radical ontological pluralism; namely, the traditional pluralist teaching of the Church, and of Western philosophy in the main stem from its root in Plato (who got his chops in the schools of Syria – of the Hebrews, i.e. (his Forms are the ancient Hebrew types, in terms of which – in types of which – the scriptures are written)), in which each one of the Many is supposed to be the providential fruit of an One, without at all escheating the actuality of each entity among the Many.

The reason this teaching is traditional is that it works better than the alternatives.

Although we can note that such a focus [on abstractions] seems to date from early in the history of Christianity (albeit there is no evidence of it in the contemporary eye-witness account of the Fourth Gospel) …

Even if there were no such evidence in John’s Gospel – a hard notion to square with his prologue thereto – no matter. We can see it in his students, Polycarp and Ignatius, and in the others of his school. Of course; for, it is not possible to communicate metaphysical or theological propositions in any way other than by employment of abstract concepts. Again, the idea that abstract concepts are by nature suspect is itself just such an abstract concept.

… we can still ask why is it that abstraction occupies such a fundamental position in Christian metaphysics?

OK, wait a minute here; how do you propose to discuss metaphysics without employing conceptual abstractions? Metaphysics *just is* a discourse about, and employing, conceptual abstractions. Dude, it isn’t even physics: it’s metaphysics.

For Kristor (and apparently for most Christians since some time after the ascension of Jesus) there can be no such thing as Christianity except from within the perspective of The Church (however that “The” is defined).

What does that tell you? We’ve got billions of Christians treating Christianity in the traditional way to which Bruce objects, for two thousand years. Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Coptic, and even all the churches of the East who rejected Chalcedon. Then Bruce shows up and has … himself. Not that Bruce is nothing. He’s a formidable guy. But, really? Really? Whom does he trust?

Think of it this way. The market, composed of millions of highly qualified and interested investors, traders, analysts, etc., all arrive together – against each other, NB – at a current valuation of Apple at $x. Bruce values it differently. Who is likely to be right? Bruce, or all of them? I mean, come on.

This is why Tradition is utile. It saves so much time and trouble, such as Bruce and I have engaged in.

For Kristor; Thomism is just true, the nature of Christianity derives from the truth and necessity of the RCC; and therefore all legitimately Christian futures must build upon these.

Sorry, this just isn’t so. Indeed, it’s backward. I’ve proceeded as an honest investigator, and have learnt thereby (not always altogether happily, given my initial preferences) that, after 2,000 years of careful investigation and conversation, the RCC just has it almost completely right, mirabile dictu. Who’d a thunk it? I sure didn’t, to begin with.

I didn’t decide that Aquinas was just right about everything before thinking about any of it. Rather, I thought about it, and eventually – often after much difficulty – figured out that Aquinas had been right about almost everything after all. With respect to the rest, the jury is still out. Still working on it …

For what it’s worth, I’m a Whiteheadian Thomist (so that lots of the ontological pluralism that Bruce loves is woven into my metaphysics). I’m sure that would scandalize Thomas, at least until he heard my arguments …

So! These apparently trivial interpersonal debates between myself and Kristor – or, failures to debate, as I regard them – are like the tip of an iceberg of differences; that I regard as ultimately sustained by a deep and long-term problem of wrong metaphysical assumptions about Christianity being instead regarded as necessary and true metaphysical assumptions.

OK, but then let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we? Which metaphysical principles are wrong?

NB:  Bruce has not in his response actually addressed the inherent difficulty of the radical ontological pluralism I noticed in my post the other day. Namely: does it really work to suppose that reality is at the most fundamental level constituted of many utterly independent and non-contingent – and, thus, utterly unrelated – entities?

Is radical ontological pluralism coherent – whether in itself, as a proposal for the construction of world systems, or in re our quotidian experience of just such a world system?

So far as I can tell, it is not. For, how does one go about constituting a coherent world out of utterly independent entities, that have nothing at bottom in common, or therefore to do with each other? How does one build an integral world out of mutually incommensurable entities?

This, NB, is the nub of the problem of the Many and the One. How do you get a coherent, integral universe out of a set of disparate events, that are all different from each other?

The traditional answer is that, while they are indeed disparate and different, each of the Many has something in common, in virtue of which they can find each other mutually intelligible, so that they can then accommodate themselves to each other in such a way as to constitute together an integral world. And the thing they have in common, according to tradition, is that they are all members of a communion with their common origin, and thus with each other.

No common origin, no common basis of communication, then no possibility of communion, or then of any common world. Rather, then, only islands of being, cut off from all others. Not a Many, then – not a set of members, not a group or genus – but rather just a Democritean chaos.

No One → no coordinate Many; no coordinate Many → no cosmos.

It is hard indeed to see how a coherent integral cosmos could be accomplished in any other way than in virtue of a prior One. It would be good to hear how it might be done. Until such an account has been provided, skepticism about the notion is bound to perdure.

It would be terrific to hear of such an account. Useful and possibly productive conversation on the topic could then proceed. Otherwise, not.

To their great shame, there is a push by the radical and pro-abortion extremist Biden administration to bully the newly elected Guatemalan government to change their protective laws governing abortion.

A sudden influx of chemical abortions in countries like Guatemala would be disastrous. Chemical abortions pose serious health threats to women; four times the rate of immediate complications than from surgical abortions, while thirty-three percent of cases of second-trimester women whose pregnancies had been misdiagnosed required surgical intervention.

There are no hospitals or medical posts in many regions of Guatemala. How can this American government claim to have “deep concern” for women’s health? Guatemalan women have nowhere to go if they experience complications from abortion.

The abortion drugs’ impacts on maternal mortality cannot be ignored, and it would wreak havoc in developing countries like Guatemala. Why?

Guatemala is one of the poorest countries in the world. In fact, it’s the poorest country in Latin America and second-most poor in this hemisphere—only the people of Haiti are in more significant distress. Seventy-five percent of Guatemalans live below the poverty line, and more than 60% live in what the World Bank deems “extreme poverty.”

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Access to healthcare is so dire the World Health Organization declares that “Preventable diseases often result in death; malnutrition is common among children and young adults, and infant mortality rates are high.” The few government-sponsored “health posts” are understaffed and have few medical resources and supplies.

Fifty percent of all girl children under the age of 5 show signs of “stunting” – a failure to physically develop at standard rates. Stunting is the most common indicator of chronic malnutrition, and additionally, one in four women of childbearing age suffer from anemia. Most live in shanties made of salvaged materials on dirt floors without toilets or running water.

The combination of severe poverty, malnourishment, and stunting has a devastating impact on women of childbearing age in Guatemala. These women often face higher risks during pregnancy and childbirth, including higher maternal mortality rates. Additionally, they may lack access to quality healthcare and support services, further exacerbating health challenges.

Although the newly elected administration in Guatemala offers much hope for the future, the women of Guatemala must have access to doctors, schools, adequate health care, potable water, and a nutritional safety net. What they do not need is an influx of unregulated abortion and toxic abortion drugs. To protect its women and girls, Guatemala must continue to keep its protective laws in its constitution.

Shame to the Biden administration for insisting on a policy that would put so many more women at risk.

LifeNews.com Note: Raimundo Rojas is the director of Hispanic outreach for the National Right to Life Committee. He is a former president of Florida Right to Life and has presented the pro-life message to millions in Spanish-language media outlets. He represents NRLC at the United Nations as an NGO. Rojas was born in Santiago de las Vegas, Havana, Cuba and he and his family escaped to the United States in 1968.

The post Joe Biden is Pressuring Pro-Life Guatemala to Stop Protecting Babies From Abortions appeared first on LifeNews.com.

The latest CNN poll is so bad for pro-abortion Joe Biden and so good for pro-life former President Donald Trump that you only imagine the tremors it sent through the Biden camp. Here’s a down and dirty summary, followed by a complete breakdown. The summary is from Byron York

New CNN national poll: Trump over Biden 49-43 in 2-way race, 42-33 in 5-way race. 55% say Trump’s presidency was a success, while 44% say it was a failure. 61% say Biden’s presidency has been a failure, 39% a success.

Momentarily we will also look at latest Gallup Poll which in some ways is even worse for President Biden. The headline is “Biden’s 13th-Quarter Approval Average Lowest Historically: Averages 38.7% job approva.l”

Back to the CNN poll. Jennifer Agiesta, CNN Polling Director, tries to softens the blow, but Guy Benson will have none of that:

Horror show of a CNN poll for Biden. Trump ahead outside the margin of error, up even bigger w/ expanded field.  Majorities see Biden’s presidency as a failure & Trump’s as a success. 60% disapproval for the incumbent.

According to CNN’s Agiesta

Negative views of Biden’s work in office have held for much of his presidency. In the new poll, 60% disapprove of his handling of the job and 40% approve, about the same as it’s been in CNN polling for more than a year. Even Biden’s strongest issue approval ratings in the poll are also in negative territory, with 45% approving of his handling of health care policy and 44% approving his handling of student loan debt. And his worst issue approval rating  – for his handling of the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza – yields 28% approval to 71% disapproval, including an 81% disapproval mark among those younger than 35 and majority disapproval among Democrats (53%).

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What about the economy?

Biden’s approval ratings for the economy (34%) and inflation (29%) remain starkly negative, as voters say economic concerns are more important to them when choosing a candidate than they were in each of the past two presidential contests. In the new poll, 65% of registered voters call the economy extremely important to their vote for president, compared with 40% who felt that way in early 2020 and 46% who said the same at roughly this point in 2016. Those voters who say the economy is deeply important break heavily for Trump in a matchup against Biden, 62% to 30%.

Let’s get back to Gallup. First, its opening paragraph

WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Joe Biden averaged 38.7% job approval during his recently completed 13th quarter in office, which began on Jan. 20 and ended April 19. None of the other nine presidents elected to their first term since Dwight Eisenhower had a lower 13th-quarter average than Biden.

and then its “Bottom Line”:

With about six months remaining before Election Day, Biden stands in a weaker position than any prior incumbent, and thus faces a taller task than they did in getting reelected.

We’ve examined President Biden’s faltering numbers for well over a year. On his best days he garners in the low 40s. On his worst day—see latest Gallup and CNN numbers—President Biden’s job approval numbers hover in the mid-to-high 30s.

One other important survey, analyzed by NBC’s election analyst Steve Kornacki. Midway through his interview on “Meet the Press,” moderator Kristen Welker says, “And I stop here because competent and effective, that was President Biden’s, the crux of his campaign pitch back in 2020.”

KORNACKI: And we actually polled this question in 2020, and it was basically the exact opposite. It was Biden with about a ten-point advantage over Trump and, again, same with handling of crisis. Biden had the edge over Trump.

And how about this? It’s the former president vs. the current president. We don’t really see matchups like this. Well, now we can measure it. Who has the strongest record as president? And, again, Trump outpacing Biden on that front. And, again, you’ve got to mention this one, too. “Necessary mental and physical health.” We asked this four years ago, it was a wash. It’s now a clear liability for Joe Biden.

So these are all troubling numbers for Biden, but it’s not to say there aren’t warning signs for Donald Trump in this poll either.

Always in the background  but increasingly in the foreground are concerns about President Biden’s capacity to continue. Pew Research found poll

More than a third of voters say they are extremely or very confident that Trump has the physical fitness (36%) and mental fitness (38%) needed to do the job of president.

Far fewer say the same of Biden (15% are at least very confident in his physical fitness; 21% are extremely or very confident in his mental fitness). Majorities say they are not too or not at all confident in Biden’s physical and mental fitness.

Pew also did a demographic breakout:

• White voters favor Trump (56%) over Biden (42%) by a wide margin.
• Roughly three-quarters of Black voters (77%) support Biden, while 18% back Trump.
• Hispanic voters are more evenly divided – 52% favor Biden, while 44% back Trump.
• Asian voters favor Biden (59%) over Trump (36%).

In light of all this, it’ll be very, very interesting to see what the Democrat Party does going forward.

LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. This post originally appeared in at National Right to Life News Today —- an online column on pro-life issues.

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