Tag: Kamala Harris

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crime and punishment education and schooling national politics & policies

Forever Be Changed

Kamala Harris, power

I’ve discussed Kamala Harris’s support, as district attorney and attorney general in California, for an abusive law enabling the arrest of parents if their children miss “too much” time at school, how the law has been deployed against parents like Cheree Peoples, whose daughter has sickle cell anemia.

I’ve quoted Harris’s words.

Now I will quote more of them. But let’s also listen to those words and observe her demeanor and tone, how Kamala Harris gloats about her use of power.

“As a prosecutor … I have a huge stick. So I decided I was gonna start prosecuting parents for truancy.… ‘If you don’t go to school, Kamala’s gonna put you and me in jail.’ [laughs] … I said [to prosecutors] ‘when you go over there, look really mean.’

“I learned that with the swipe of my pen, I could charge someone with the lowest-​level offense. That person could be arrested, they could lose time from work and their family, maybe lose their job. They’d have to come out of their own pocket to help hire a lawyer.… Weeks later, I could dismiss the charges. But their life would forever be changed.”

Video of Harris saying such things is part of a political attack ad about why men needn’t be prejudiced against female candidates in order to oppose giving Kamala Harris power over everyone in the country.

In the waning days of the campaign, we could do worse than to share this evidence, her own candid, joyous testimony about herself.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom

Censors Slapped at Start

Kamala Harris, satire, free speech, censorship

Californians may now be allowed to see and laugh at “falsehoods” after all.

The Golden State legislature and Governor Newsom will probably fail in their attempt, made in open violation of the First Amendment, to ban certain parody and satire that communicates what they call “falsehoods.” (California hasn’t yet outlawed political novels.)

The battle isn’t over yet. But a court has issued a preliminary injunction against recently passed legislation, declaring that it “does not pass constitutional scrutiny.”

Cited in the ruling is this excellent insight: “‘Especially as to political speech, counter speech is the tried and true buffer and elixir,’ not speech restriction.”

Further, by “singling out and censoring political speech, California hasn’t saved democracy — it has undermined it. The First Amendment does not brook appeals to ‘enhancing the ability of … citizenry to make wise decisions by restricting the flow of information to them.’” Though the judge determined that California has “a valid interest in protecting the integrity and reliability of the electoral process,” the current legislation “lacks the narrow tailoring and least restrictive alternative that a content based law requires under strict scrutiny.”

What could such “narrow tailoring” have consisted of? The repudiated legislation has everything to do with speech that should be unhindered and nothing to do with protecting the electoral process. 

AB2839 and a related law, AB2655, were the rapid response of California’s kingpins to an effective parody video of a “Kamala Harris” “ad.” In it, “Harris” explains that she is a vacuous “deep-​state puppet.”

The First Amendment protects the right to utter truth, falsehoods, and the kinds of satirical fictions and parodic exaggerations that everybody but opponents of free speech understand to be fictions and exaggerations.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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inflation and inflationism national politics & policies

Quips & Stunts

Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, economy, inflation, democracy, government

The Epoch Times has produced a handy policy comparison between the two major-​party candidates for the presidency of the United States, former President Donald Trump and current Vice President Kamala Harris. 

Maybe issues don’t matter so much now, though: more talked-​about is Trump’s stunt scooping fries at McDonald’s, which got Democrats so upset (to their detriment), or Kamala Harris’s bizarre quip at a rally where two young men shouted “Jesus Is Lord!” and “Christ Is King!” as they were being thrown out. The Veep’s response that they were at the wrong rally was construed by many to suggest that her supporters aren’t Christians.

Nevertheless, The Epoch Times is right to emphasize policy. It’s a big subject, so let’s just compare the candidates on “The Economy.”

Donald Trump “Pledges to reduce inflation by increasing American energy production, cutting wasteful government spending, and preventing illegal immigration,” and “Seeks to lower commodity prices by ending global wars.” Are these “good for the economy”? Probably; mostly. But distant from the heart of inflation. 

Worse, Trump allegedly “‘Strongly’ feels presidents ‘should have at least a say’ in the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy decisions.” The Fed is indeed key, but the only way to reduce inflation immediately is through the kind of policies presidents tend to hate — for example, the deflation that Fed Chairman Paul Volcker performed on Jimmy Carter’s economy that helped get Reagan elected.

Kamala Harris sticks to progressive standards, proposing “a federal ban on corporate price gouging on food and groceries to tackle inflation,” which would backfire into a major economic debacle, complete with shortages and calls for rationing and worse. It fits in nicely with another typical progressive plank, calling for “raising the minimum wage,” which would lead to less employment partly through increased robotization of businesses now employing the workers affected, the low-​skilled (the ones Trump calls “great”).

Looking over their substantive policies, it’s easy to see why “culture war” issues prevail.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people national politics & policies partisanship

Something Pathological

Kamala Harris, Fox, interview, Bret Baier

Fox News’s interview with Kamala Harris itself made news. The betting markets had Ms. Harris tanking; we await post-​interview polls. Bret Baier did more than a competent job, pressing the Democratic candidate like Sam Donaldson used to press President Ronald Reagan. 

Harris came to the interview “fashionably” (strategically?) late, which added some frisson to the affair. But what stuck out to me was a repeated evasion, which to Kamala no doubt felt natural, but to this onlooker, anyway, seemed bizarre.

Trump.

When challenged about Biden Administration failures of policy, leadership, or efficacy, candidate Harris — in addition to insisting that she will lead in a totally new direction, mostly unspecified — kept on blaming, somehow, Donald Trump.

Republican Vice Presidential candidate J. D. Vance noted this, saying “something pathological is going on.”

That pathology is TDS: Trump Derangement Syndrome.

“You’ve been in office for three-​and-​a-​half years,” Baier challenged in the interview’s most memorable exchange, eliciting from the Democrat an immediate response: “And Donald Trump has been running for office since …” A stunned, incredulous Baier watched Harris rant on against Trump, declaring that “he is unfit to serve, that he is unstable, that he is dangerous, and that people are exhausted with someone who professes to be a leader who spends full time demeaning and engaging in personal grievances, and it being about him instead of the American people.”

This is her appeal to the middle, to non-​partisan voters: not for her or her policies, but against Trump.

Democrats need their devil. Without him could they win a national election?

And we should inquire whether the reverse is also true.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment education and schooling general freedom

Kamala Harris’s Attack on Parents

Kamala Harris, truancy, truant, schools, education, regulations, consequences

Among the skeletons rattling around in presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s closet is her support — while San Francisco’s district attorney and while running for state attorney general — for a law to punish parents for their children’s absences from school.

The story, reported by Huffpost, NPR, and others several years ago, has more recently been publicized by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Harris supported the harass-​parents truancy program when it was conceived in the state legislature, saying that “a child going without an education is tantamount to a crime.” Under the program, which still exists, a school can refer persistent truancy to a district attorney’s office, which can then threaten to prosecute parents.

One victim was Cheree Peoples, who was arrested and handcuffed in 2013 while still in her pajamas. “You would swear I had killed somebody.” Her daughter Shayla had missed twenty days of school in the current school year. Cheree faced a possible penalty of $2,500 or a year in jail. 

Shayla has sickle cell anemia and required frequent hospitalization. 

Shayla’s mother fought the charges for a long time. Eventually, they were dropped.

Harris bragged about the truancy program while being inaugurated as attorney general. “If you fail in your responsibility to your kids, we are going to work to make sure you face the full force and consequences of the law.”

Today, Harris says the harass-​parents law she championed has been abused by others. But isn’t the law itself the abuse?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom

California vs. Inconvenient Speech

Kamala Harris, parody, satire, free speech, censorship, deep fake

California Governor Newsom wants to outlaw all political speech annoying to himself. If legislation he’s just signed is allowed to stand, he’ll be well on the way to doing so.

One target of California’s two new laws, the Babylon Bee, is filing suit against them.

The Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents the Bee, says that the subjects of the lawsuit, California’s AB2839 and AB265, “censor speech through subjective standards like prohibiting pictures and videos ‘likely to harm’ a candidate’s ‘electoral prospects.’… AB 2655 applies to large online platforms and requires them to sometimes label, and other times remove, posts with ‘materially deceptive content.’”

Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon observes that, contrary to the wishes of “self-​serving politicians [who] abuse their power to try and control public discourse and clamp down on comedy,” the right to tell jokes they dislike is secured by the First Amendment.

The vague nature of the laws would enable California officials to “police speech they disagree with,” according to ADF and Captain Obvious.

One of the laws requires a disclaimer to be attached to satirical content, a mandate that also violates the First Amendment.

The immediate incentive for fast-​tracking the censorship bills into law was a parody video of Kamala Harris that includes a simulation of her voice. The video does bill itself as parody but that is obvious regardless. This video “should be illegal,” Newsom asseverated.

No, it shouldn’t. 

Anyway, watch the hilarity on YouTube … while you can.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability crime and punishment national politics & policies

Destroying What Has Been

Kamala Harris, tweets, riots, bail

Let’s assume that chief executives responsible for major appointments know something about whom they’re appointing.

Minnesota governor Tim Walz, the Democrat running for vice president, was fine with the appointment of an associate professor “of urban and multicultural education,” Brian Lozenski, to help write the state’s “ethnic studies” standards. Those were supposed to have been released for public comment in August but being kept under wraps.

Lozenski’s left-​wing ideas are notorious in Minnesota. For instance, he has advocated overthrowing the United States — not to be replaced by an Elysium of reason and freedom, we can be sure.

Let’s also assume that someone running for president of the United States is familiar with his or her own views and agenda.

One thing we should know about his running mate, the current Vice President Kamala Harris, is that in 2020 she asked people to “help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.” In jail for unpeacefully destroying the property of others. 

A couple of years later, she denied making the appeal … but her tweet doing so remained up on the platform and, regardless, had been screenshot.

Commentators sometimes suggest that the future policies of Kamala Harris are mysterious, since she has said or half-​said so many different things.

What mystery?

All of her left-​wing, socialist, anti-​capitalist, anti-​First Amendment, anti-​Second Amendment statements and actions express her true impulses. All her blarney about how she’s now a big fan of fracking or a gun owner who’d drop any intruder, etc., are attempts to fool voters who’d be appalled by her actual agenda.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies subsidy tax policy

Kamala Hood

Kamala Harris, crony corporations, green, taxes, spending, welfare

American politics is largely devoted to the grand task of taking from some and giving to others, a sort of Robin Hood mania that has nothing to do with giving back to taxpayers what was taken from taxpayers (as in the legend) — or doing much of anything for the poor — but, instead, to ostentatiously give to some and quietly take from as many people as possible.

Nevertheless, that giving is not always ostentatious. Sometimes it is surreptitious. 

Or at least not ballyhooed.

Kamala Harris has taken up an old Democratic Party stalking point: soak the rich! Though she tries not to mention just how much money she and her fellow Biden Administration insiders have been giving to a few big corporations.

“Despite Harris’ rhetoric of fighting for the middle class,” writes Jack Salmon at Reason, “her policies have disproportionately benefited the wealthy and large corporations while leaving middle- and lower-​income Americans behind. Far from soaking the rich, Harris’ legacy has been one of feeding them.”

Corporate subsidies have “exploded,” explains Mr. Salmon, going from a ten-​year budget allocation of $1.2 trillion in 2021 to now surpassing $2 trillion.

Nearly doubled!

“The beneficiaries of this largesse are extremely concentrated,” Salmon notes, most of it going to “just 15 large corporations, seven of which are foreign.” Of course, a lot of this is under cover of “saving the planet” and fighting “climate change”: “Wind turbine manufacturers like General Electric, Vestas, and Siemens/​Gamesa — who collectively produce 79 percent of all turbines — are among the biggest winners.”

Robbing from the few and giving to the many makes neither for good mathematics or a winning political strategy. Robbing from the many and giving to the few is what usually works. But if your appeal is to “the left,” you have to pretend to grab most from the super-​rich few.

Your pals.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture national politics & policies

The Value of Principles

The late Bernie Baltic used to ask politicians, who invariably wanted him to write them a check, “What are your principles?”

They would then recite their key issues or the issues they thought were key to getting Bernie to write that check. He would stop them, saying, “Not your issues — issue positions can change — your principles.”

Values are like sorta like principles. In politician speak.

“My values haven’t changed,” Vice-​President Kamala Harris assured us, after being quizzed about her flip-​flopping on issues including fracking (hello Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes), defunding the police and building a border wall.

CNN host Erin Burnett recently took the Democratic nominee to task, citing an investigation that counted more than 50 instances of Harris “slamming Trump’s border wall,” even while her “campaign ads actually showcase that wall.”

Hard to believe but true: Kamala’s TV spot touts Trump’s wall — his “big distraction,” as she dubbed it — as a symbol of her tough border stance. 

You can’t make this stuff up.

In her 2019 book, The Truths We Hold, Kamala Harris identified “a bigger reason to oppose a border wall,” decrying such a structure as “a monument standing in opposition to not just everything I value but to the fundamental values upon which this country was built.”

Therefore … it would seem obvious that her values have indeed changed. Or perhaps the problem is that she doesn’t have any values that cannot be trumped (go ahead, pun intended) by the all-​powerful need to secure her personal political advance.

That’s her paramount principle. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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national politics & policies tax policy

Kill the Stock Market!

Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, Marxism, socialism, equity, stock, capital gains tax

Taxing capital gains is a form of income taxation that Democrats love. 

And it’s not just a matter of increasing revenue. Remember that President Obama thought that increasing the capital gains rate was a good idea even if it decreased government revenue. Democrats are playing to a soak-​the-​rich sentiment among their base, even when the most important supporters are billionaires.

Take Mark Cuban. He’s a billionaire. And he supports Kamala Harris for president. 

Weeks ago, the Democrat standard-​bearer came out with a wild proposal to tax unrealized capital gains. And Cuban, for all his faults, is not an idiot; he knows just how incredibly corrosive that tax on capital would be.

“It would kill the stock market,” he points out. 

In a chat with Fox Business, Cuban explained how he told Democratic insiders that taxing unrealized capital gains (as when stocks you hold gain value, but you haven’t sold them so you have no income from them), would become “the ultimate employment plan for private equity, because companies are not going to go public because you can get whipsawed, right?” 

By this he means that a stock owner might have to borrow money to cover taxes, only to have the stocks go down later and enjoy neither rebate from the government nor any income from the investment to cover the debt.

Cuban insists that Democratic insiders are pragmatic and will not push this tax.

Yet, with both members (comrades?) of the presidential ticket spouting Marxist talking points, how do we know that they are stable (corrupt?) enough to save public capitalism from their malign agenda?

How can we be sure they’re just lying?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: Since unrealized capital gains aren’t income, I don’t know how taxing them could be constitutional. Perhaps someone can explain this to me.

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