I'll be joining Deadline White House on MSNOW at 5pm ET to discuss ...all this.

I know you don’t care for Candace but I found her interview with Hunter Biden about his addiction to be refreshing. We need more face to face conversations like this where people who normally disagree politically still find common ground on topics that make everyone equally human.

Graham Platner.

me too! My dad used to read Dickens out loud to us on Sundays at tea time - he was a very scary Magwitch - and Bill Sykes! My number one Dickens is Little Dorrit- then Great Expectations, then prob Our Mutual Friend - but obv have a very soft spot for 2 Cities - and wrote an intro to an edition of it in 1989

If you’ve never experienced Passover in an Orthodox Jewish home, it’s almost impossible to understand how far it actually goes. People throw around the phrase “spring cleaning” and think that’s what it is. It’s not. It’s a full teardown and rebuild of how you live inside your own house, all for just one week. It doesn’t start a few days before the holiday. It starts weeks, sometimes even months earlier. Every cabinet gets emptied, every shelf is wiped down, and every corner is checked. We’re not just cleaning dirt, we’re on the hunt for chametz, any leavened grain product. Bread, cookies, crumbs, even something that fell behind a couch months ago. You move appliances, you vacuum inside drawers, you scrub surfaces you normally wouldn’t even think about, like high walls. Some people take apart their ovens, some pour boiling water over countertops, others line entire kitchens with foil or special coverings so nothing that touched chametz during the year comes into contact with Pesach food. And that’s just the beginning. In many homes, especially more careful or Hasidic ones, cleaning alone isn’t enough. The entire system gets replaced. Separate dishes, separate pots, separate utensils that were never used with chametz all year. Some families have full Pesach kitchens packed away in boxes eleven months of the year. And it goes further. In certain homes, you won’t eat there unless you know exactly how that kitchen was prepared, down to the smallest detail, and many won’t eat anything that wasn’t prepared in their own home, even if it’s from close friends. Then comes the halachic process. You don’t just clean and call it a day. There’s bedikat chametz, the formal search the night before Pesach, done with a candle and a blessing, where pieces of bread are traditionally placed around the house and then found. The next morning is biur chametz, burning whatever remains. Anything you can’t realistically get rid of gets sold through a rabbi in a formal transaction called mechirat chametz, because owning chametz on Pesach is forbidden, not just eating it. Then the eating itself changes completely. For seven or eight days depending on where you are, there is no bread, no pasta, no flour products unless they are specifically made as matzah, which is unleavened bread made quickly so it doesn’t rise. And matzah itself is a whole world. It has to be made in under 18 minutes from the moment water touches flour, because otherwise it could start fermenting and become chametz. Some only eat shmurah matzah, which means matzah that has been supervised from the time the wheat was harvested to make sure it never came into contact with moisture. Others insist on handmade matzah, not machine. There are also families who won’t eat anything that has even a question of moisture that could have caused fermentation. Then you have kitniyot, which is legumes and similar foods like rice, corn, beans, and peanuts, which adds another layer. Ashkenazi Jews, Jews of European descent, traditionally don’t eat these on Pesach. Sephardic Jews, from Middle Eastern and North African backgrounds, generally do. So even within Orthodox Judaism, what your Pesach looks like depends on your background. One family is eating rice, and another wouldn’t let it into the house. One family is comfortable with certain processed Pesach foods, another will only eat simple, basic items they prepared themselves. And it keeps going. Some peel every vegetable because maybe something touched it in a factory. Others won’t use any product unless it has a very specific Pesach certification, meaning rabbinic approval that it meets all Passover standards. Many won’t eat out at all, not even in kosher restaurants, because they don’t trust anyone else’s standards. In certain homes, even food prepared before Pesach won’t be touched once the holiday starts. Everything is fresh, controlled, and intentional. Then comes the Seder. It’s not just a meal. It’s a structured reliving of Yetziat Mitzrayim, the Exodus from Egypt, guided step by step through the Haggadah, with four cups of wine, matzah on the table, maror eaten to feel the bitterness, korech put together like a reminder you can actually taste, children asking questions, and everyone leaning like free people. It’s built to make it feel like you yourself left Egypt. And that’s the point behind all of this. We’re not just avoiding bread because of some random restriction. Chametz represents inflation, ego, something that rises. Matzah is simple, flat, controlled. The Torah commands us to remember the Exodus as if you yourself left Egypt. All the cleaning, all the restrictions, all the effort, it forces you to step out of your normal life and enter a completely different mode. You feel it physically. Your house looks different, your kitchen functions differently, your diet changes, your schedule changes. You can’t ignore it even if you wanted to. And if you step back, it’s actually insane in the most literal sense. Thousands of years later, Jews are still removing every crumb of bread from their homes because of something that happened in Egypt. Entire industries exist around this. Families plan their lives around it. Kids grow up expecting it as normal. There is no other nation on earth that has maintained something this detailed, this demanding, and this consistent for this long. Empires came and went, languages disappeared, cultures vanished, and Jews are still arguing over how to kasher a countertop and whether a product is acceptable for Pesach. You can call it stubbornness, but it’s more than that. It’s continuity, it’s identity, it’s a direct line from the Torah to a kitchen in Brooklyn in 2026. And for those of us who live it, it’s real. It’s exhausting, it’s expensive, it’s sometimes overwhelming. But it’s also something we take seriously in a way that barely exists anywhere else. Because this is what it means to be part of Am Yisrael, not just believing something but living it in a way that shapes your entire life, down to the crumbs you can’t keep in your house for one week a year. And after all of that, after the cleaning, the stress, the shopping, the kashering, all the details that never seem to end, you sit down at the Seder with your family and it all comes together. You look around the table, your kids are asking the same questions kids have asked for generations, and you realize it worked. This whole system actually worked. It kept us the same people. So wherever you are, whatever your level, whether your kitchen looks like a full Pesach operation or you’re just doing what you can, there’s something powerful about being part of this. Wishing you a happy and kosher Pesach, wherever you are, physically and spiritually.

Is this not a call for political violence?

I was asked last night: “Joe, why do you continue to stand so strongly with Israel? They’re starving children in Gaza.” My answer: “Bcuz for 77yrs, Israel has been this tiny sliver of freedom & democracy in a sea of Islamist tyranny. Bcuz for 77yrs, Israel, surrounded by neighbors pledged to its destruction, has been fighting for its very survival. Bcuz Israel values life, and Israel’s Islamist enemies like Hamas don’t. Bcuz, once again, Israel is being called to care for Palestinian children starving bcuz of a war Israel’s enemies started. And, once again, Israel will do the right thing. I stand with Israel bcuz the world holds Israel to a standard it holds no other country to. That not right. So I stand with Israel.”

if you didn’t think biden was physically capable of serving four more years a week ago, that hasn’t changed today.

Wanna get under Donald’s thin orange skin? Then RT this @JRubinBlogger tweet about what a huge LOSER @realDonaldTrump really is!