Tag: Kamala Harris

ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall

Best Indicator

Kamala Harris, socialist, communist, democrat

The pollsters were way off. Again.

Sure, there were a couple outfits that, prior to Election Day, said the race between Trump and Biden was going to be close, but most portrayed Biden as way ahead.

Instead, it’s a squeaker.

Still, Biden’s pulling ahead — Michigan was declared for the Democrat as I type this.

Before we blame the pollsters for drawing the wrong conclusions from their data, let’s not draw the wrong conclusions from the most important data of all: Tuesday’s actual votes.

We must remember: people vote for and against candidates for a variety of reasons — personal, tribal, single-issue, broad-spectrum, you-name-it. But how do we determine their actual political values?

Here’s one good indicator, voting . . . on ballot measures.

From Tuesday’s elections we learn, at the very least, that the American people are not foursquare behind the socialistic pandering of Kamala Harris.

Just before Election Day, the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate explained why equality of treatment wasn’t enough: people must be compensated for their past disadvantages, to make outcomes equal. She was pushing a recent meme common on the left, framed as “equality” versus “equity.”

Mrs. Harris may be on her way to Number One Observatory Circle (the vice president’s residence) and then the White House, but Americans aren’t onboard her socialistic egalitarianism. On Tuesday, her home-state Californians repealed Proposition 16, which would have stricken down an equal rights measure of the 1990s in favor of a compensatory hiring and firing scheme based on racial qualifications.

Woke socialists really like this sort of thing. Yet supposedly ultra-blue (pink?) Californians defeated it 56/44.

Once the politics of personality and party are put aside, Americans are not as divided as the political class wishes we were.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets ideological culture national politics & policies

The 79¢ Lie

Sen. Kamala Harris successfully bears aloft the banner of Barack Obama.

As “a person of color”? Yeah, sure — but mainly by pandering to ignorant ideologues.

“Look, women are still not paid equal for equal work in America,” she said recently at a campaign stop.

The Daily Wire n o tes that a few months ago she dug herself deeper:

“The law says that men and women should be paid equally for equal work, but what we know is that in America today, women on average are paid 80 cents on the dollar of what men are paid for the same work. African American women, 61 cents on the dollar, Latinas 53 cents on the dollar. And these are actually not debatable points.”

Well, these points are not debatable . . . in the sense that they have no merit, and everyone who has studied this objectively knows this. Politifact titles its article covering her statement: “On Colbert, Kamala Harris flubs wage gap statistic.”

“Flubs” puts it lightly.

Lies is more like it.

Former President Obama surely fibbed, too, when, in 2016, he said, “[t]oday, the typical woman who works full-time earns 79 cents for every dollar that a typical man makes.”

He knew that he was misusing statistics. He has been made aware of the debunkings of the 79¢ myth. And he understood; he’s no dummy.

The stat is not about “equal pay for equal work.” It aggregates incomes. There is no job-for-job equality and no consideration of real wages (with benefits, for instance). It is just that women-as-a-class take home less pay than men-as-a-class, per capita.

“It is known,” as was said on Game of Thrones.

The lie continues because of America’s “game of thrones.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags feminism, Kamala Harris, lie, pay gap, statistics

ideological culture national politics & policies Popular

Into and Out of the Muck

Tulsi Gabbard, Kamala Harris, debate, prosecuter, criminal justice, reform,

Yesterday I referenced “pigs flying” . . . and Icarus’s waxed-wing fail.

Today, it’s just about the muck.

Now, I am on the road and definitely not catching every word of the Democratic debates. But amidst much nonsense and embarrassment — and there was a lot of it, from what I can tell, not excluding the much-googled New Agey blather of Oprah’s favorite guru, Ms. Marianne Williamson — one exhange stood out: Representative Tulsi Gabbard’s takedown of Kamala Harris’s shockingly punitive and ugly career as a prosecuting attorney.

Now, Rep. Gabbard snuck in her attack* on Harris in place of answering a question about Harris’s own sneak attack, in the previous debate round, on former U. S. Senator and Vice President Joe Biden’s 1970s’ opposition to mandatory bussing. Gabbard ably shifted away from dealing at all with Sleepy Joe — who is a buzzkill and soon-to-be buzzard lunch. She deflected, addressing, instead, a real issue, Kamala Harris as callous crime-fighter.

This shows that Gabbard is developing real politicians’ chops — if you cannot carefully answer a question different from the one asked, you aren’t a true [sic] politician in America.

After the debate, the two candidates took further whacks at each other. The Jezebel article I consulted used the metaphor of “wrestling match” rather than my pigs-in-muck figure, but we are talking about the same thing.

But note, Rep. Gabbard is always calm and well-spoken. She seems able to descend into the muck and coming out without too much stink.

Does this give her an advantage over Donald Trump?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “Senator Harris says she’s proud of her record as a prosecutor and that she’ll be a prosecutor president. But I’m deeply concerned about this record. There are too many examples to cite, but she put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana: she blocked evidence . . . that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so; she kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California. . . .” etc.

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Common Sense general freedom ideological culture

Dependence or Independence?

Post author By Redactor
Post date July 4, 2019
No Comments on Dependence or Independence?

Kamala Harris, debate, Democrats, Fourth of July, Independence Day,

“America does not want to witness a food fight,” Senator Kamala Harris said at last week’s debate, reprimanding her squabbling fellow Democratic Party presidential contenders. “They want to know how we’re going to put food on their table.”

The no doubt well-rehearsed line drew raucous applause. She’s right; we’re not interested in a food fight.

But her second statement struck me as . . . odd . . . and not true.

Harris spoke of how “we” — meaning they, the assembled politicians on the stage — are “going to put food” on “their” — meaning our — tables.

Does she imagine that presidents produce our food, not farmers? Is she trying to say, “You didn’t grow that”?

“Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap,” the author of the Declaration of Independence wrote, “we should soon want bread.”

Perhaps this presidential aspirant remains unaware of how America became a land of abundance? It wasn’t the exertion of career politicians. Or regulators. Or bureaucrats. It was the amazingly productive engine that is a free people.

“Yet this government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way,” Henry David Thoreau explained in his famous 1849 essay, entitled Resistance to Civil Government. “The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished.”

The difference between a society where people honor independence and one where, conversely, they idolize dependence on the government is the difference between bright day and darkest night.

Today’s date is July 4th, but the holiday is Independence Day. It is not a celebration of dependence on cradle-to-grave big brother government. We celebrate freedom for the individual.

A Republic . . . if We, the People can keep it.

But how? How do we restore freedoms lost while retaining extant freedoms?

Well, with ideas. Arguments. Promotion of others’ efforts.

And for two decades, this daily commentary has defended freedom and those fighting for it. And I hope to keep the Common Sense coming far into the future.

Yet, this effort is totally dependent on you — and your generosity. In this 20th year, won’t you make a special pledge of $20? Or $200? Or $2,000 if you have the financial freedom to do so.

“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must,” wrote Tom Paine in 1777, “undergo the fatigues of supporting it.”

Don’t worry, it won’t be so fatiguing. We stand up for freedom and against dependence on big government — with a rhetorical flourish now and again . . . and a sense of humor.

Please pass the ammunition. And no food fight.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people national politics & policies Popular

Birth of a Twitterstorm

Kamala Harris, race, debate, democratic, president, democracy,

“Kamala Harris is *not* an American Black. She is half Indian and half Jamaican,” tweeted Ali Alexander, a self-described black American activist, after the California Senator’s presidential debate performance. “I’m so sick of people robbing American Blacks (like myself) of our history.”*

On Friday, Donald Trump, Jr., retweeted Alexander’s tweet (before later deleting it). His traipsing into the details of Harris’s birth immediately sparked comparison to his father’s “birther attacks” suggesting that President Obama wasn’t born here.**

Seemingly, the entire Democratic presidential field was quick to condemn the tweet and Don Jr.’s retweet as “racist.” So did much of the media. Although months ago, CNN’s Don Lemon argued, “Jamaica is not America.”

The New York Times article identified Ali Alexander only as an “alt-right fringe figure” and “a member of a right-wing constellation of media personalities,” but nowhere informed readers he is African-American.

“This stuff about Harris, about her status, about her blackness,” Jason Johnson, politics editor of TheRoot.com, told Joy Reid on MSNBC, “that’s about black people.”

In fact, on Reid’s program back in February, Johnson was part of a discussion about the senator’s — gasp! — white husband. “She needs to find a strong black man advocate,” advised Tiffany Cross, co-founder and managing editor of The Beat DC. “Let’s just be candid,” Johnson remarked, “it’s not going to be her [white] husband.”

How important is the color of a person’s skin or their ancestry or the skin color of their spouse to that person’s fitness to be president?

It only matters to racists.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “Kamala Harris,” Alexander also pointed out, “comes from Jamaican Slave Owners.” True enough, but how is she responsible for what her ancestors did? Would it matter if she supported . . . reparations?

** For the record, Sen. Harris was born in Oakland, California, which was then and is still part of the United States of America.

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Why Lie?

Post author By Redactor
Post date May 22, 2019
1 Comment on Why Lie?

Kamala Harris, statistics, pay gap, sexism,

Democratic presidential contender and U.S. Senator from California Kamala Harris leaned in to the big lie.

Debuting a new proposal to “close the gender pay gap,” she declared that, “In America today, women for the same work, for the equal work, on average make 80 cents on the dollar, black women make 61 cents on the dollar, Latinas make 53 cents on the dollar — and this has got to end.”

In fact, Harris emphasized the untruthy part of her statement; her numbers do not represent the “on average” difference in remuneration between the sexes (or races) for the “same” or “equal” work at all. Such a gap has been illegal since the Equal Pay Act of 1963. Harris’s figures are, instead, an average of salaries and wages for all the millions of diverse jobs held by women compared to that same average for all the millions of diverse jobs held by men.

Men and women tend to make different choices. More women spend time outside the labor market, often laboring in family households without salaries as such. And they tend to choose less remunerative careers: different work.

Why pretend otherwise? Well, such grievance against perceived injustice can sure serve as a motivator . . . for voters that presidential candidate Harris desperately needs to attract.

And what about her new policy?

“Harris’s plan puts the responsibility on companies,” MSNBC talking head Stephanie Ruhle explained. “Any company who cannot prove that they pay women at the same rate as men is going to have to pay a fine.”

Is that how the system should work: if you cannot prove your innocence, you are guilty?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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