Tag: Kamala Harris

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies

Say No to Reich-Harris Reich

Kamala Harris, Robert Reich, censorship, X, Twitter, mind control, free speech

Freedom of speech is constantly embattled.

Just one example: government-instigated stomping on social-media speech in recent years, proof of which has been revealed thanks to litigation, freedom of information requests, and the purchase of Twitter by a friend of free speech.

But the embarrassing revelations have not caused our censors to retreat.

They’re not trying to censor people, they suggest, just trying to stop lies, hate, misinformation. And now Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, wants to arrest Elon Musk for resisting censorship as Twitter’s new owner.

Reich says: “Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X.”

Reich has also said that we must regulate speech to “direct people’s attention . . . to a healthy public conversation that is most participatory.” As Jonathan Turley observes, “the ‘healthy public conversation’ with Robert Reich increasingly appears to be his talking and the rest of us listening.”

Would “regulators around the world” include U.S. regulators? Since the First Amendment has yet to be rescinded, perhaps Reich would prefer other countries to handle imprisoning Elon Musk for letting people speak “too” freely. But I’m guessing Reich would be fine with a U.S. arrest.

Reich would fit right in with a Harris administration, if we get one, led by a woman who calls the First Amendment a “privilege” and has lamented that social media sites are “directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight and regulation.” Which, she declares, “has to stop.”

Something has to stop.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Communists Within the Form

“They’re not communists,” comedian Dave Smith recently told Tucker Carlson, referring to leading Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris. “They work for big business!”

Sure, but beside the point: they spew out commie talking points not as an excuse to overthrow the state and set up a communist one, but to overthrow the last vestiges of the Constitution — free-speech rights, private property rights, the whole shebang — and consolidate power in the corporatist, neo-mercantilist fascism that yearns to squelch all dissent.

National candidates talking “far left” allows gullible left-leaners to back powerful insiders against the real outsiders, the churchgoers, the small business owners and entrepreneurs, free-lance professionals and the like. 

The real revolution is what Garet Garrett, expanding upon Aristotle, called “revolution within the form.”

So, are Kamala Harris and Tim Walz just “useful idiots” preparing the way for the plutocrats’ totalitarian end game?

Would-be Cackler-in-Chief aside, the Washington Free Beacon’s Alana Goodman posits that Walz may be an out-and-out communist:

  • “As a high school teacher in the 1990s, Democratic vice-presidential candidate and Minnesota governor Tim Walz appeared to extol life under Chinese communism, telling his students that it is a system in which ‘everyone shares’ and gets free food and housing.”
  • “Walz’s rosy description of communism in China is similar to his recent controversial remark that ‘one person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.’ It also reflects his longstanding ties to the country.”
  • “After returning to the United States in the early 1990s, Walz started leading trips to China for American high school students, with support from the Chinese government. The trips were ‘arranged by a friend of Walz in China’s foreign affairs department,’ the Star-Herald reported at the time. The Chinese government also provided some of the funding for the program.”

True-believing communists in the old style? Or just woke, post-Marxist totalitarians? 

It hardly matters when the point of what they say is not the dogma, but the performance, allowing them to revolt against us, and the constitutional order we rely upon.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Commie Kamala?

Kamala Harris, communism, socialism, media, economics

“It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is,” Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell wrote last week. 

“It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food,” explaining Democrat nominee Kamala Harris’s economic program. “Supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Far-off Washington bureaucrats would. The FTC [Federal Trade Commission] would be able to tell, say, a Kroger in Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk.”

Rampell, certainly no conservative, concluded by suggesting to the Vice-President, “If your opponent claims you’re a ‘communist,’ maybe don’t start with an economic agenda that can (accurately) be labeled as federal price controls.”

The Post’s editorial board also noted that “every campaign makes expensive promises” but “[e]ven adjusting for the pandering standards of campaign economics” her speech “ranks as a disappointment.”

But as destructive as price controls would be, the Post’s Aaron Blake points out that, according to various polls, blaming big corporations for price gouging appears to strike a chord with the public.*

“It’s not just a potent boogeyman,” Blake explains, “it’s a potent boogeyman that deflects blame from the administration that has been in charge these past 3½ years.”

So is Vice-President Harris really a communist or just a run-of-mill blame-shifting politician?

Well, sadly, those two things are not mutually exclusive. She could be [shudder] both.

So, if you are scared that former President Trump will usher in authoritarianism, should he prevail this November, you now know that, instead, you can choose communism.

That is, the Democrats’ excuse-making, blame-shifting, market-killing standard bearer.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Though, the polling shows the public views “increasing oil production” as more effective in bringing prices down. Don’t hold your breath for Ms. Harris and Democrats to endorse that.

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What Neighborliness Is Not

Tim Walz, socialism, communism, white dudes, Kamala Harris, racism

In a late July mass videochat session, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz did not in any way acknowledge the cringe in the name of the “White Dudes for Kamala Harris” fundraiser. 

But the governor did advise his supporters to at least talk to their political opponents. 

“Look, I got a Florida Man as a brother,” Kamala Harris’s VP sidekick said. “We all have him in our families, but these are our neighbors and our relatives, and at heart, they’re good people. They’re not mean-spirited. They’re not small. They’re not petty like they hear on stage.”

But what are these MAGA folk? How does the governor who signed a bill directing public schools to freely distribute tampons in boys’ restrooms as well as girls’ characterize people disinclined to approve of such a thing? “They’re angry, they’re confused, they’re frustrated, they feel like they got left behind sometimes.”

Somehow, Walz neglects how they feel betrayed by past representation, and are aghast at the craziness of . . . Tim Walz . . . who tells his fellow “white dudes” to “reach out, make the case.”

So, a case for what? Tampons everywhere?

Well, socialism. “Don’t ever shy away from our progressive values,” Walz said. “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.”

That’s where I bet he loses his “Florida Man” brothers. 

A politician talking up socialism is never pushing “neighborliness.” Such politicians are always pushing increased expropriation (taxes), increased regulation, and massive subsidy. 

Most who feel “left behind sometimes” are not asking for subsidies, much less the “neighborliness” of regulators and taxmen. And when they hear the word “socialism,” their trigger fingers itch. They know that over a hundred million people were killed, last century, by self-described “socialist” leaders, outside of war.

Killing fields do not make good neighbors.

Meanwhile, one of the most important critiques of socialism is that of Ludwig von Mises, who showed that without markets in capital as well as consumer goods, chaos and poverty reign. Without price signals, goods can only be misallocated.

Like putting tampons in boys’ bathrooms.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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ideological culture national politics & policies partisanship

Unburdened by the Leftism

Kamala Harris, commie, communist, left, progressive

Democrats have effectively sidelined the biggest story of this election year — the assassination attempt upon the candidate the party has sought to destroy since 2015 — with a brazen switcheroo-coup from presidential candidate Sleepy Joe to the once-widely disliked Vice President Kamala Harris.

It was all done unceremoniously and undemocratically in a breathtakingly daring backroom duress deal, detailed by Seymour Hersh.

Also itemized last week? The cover-up of Kamala Harris’s record. In “Kamalaflage: Dems race to expunge the evidence of Harris’ leftist history,” Jim Bovard informs New York Post readers about the media’s memory-holing. 

“In 2019, GovTrack labeled Kamala Harris the ‘most liberal’ senator — further to the left than even Bernie Sanders — but this month deleted the webpage that said so,” explains Mr. Bovard.

So, what’s to the left of a “democratic socialist”?

Maybe the Vice President was channeling her father, a Post Keynesian (far, far left if not exactly Marxist) economist, when she pushed the progressives’ beloved “equity” theory of equality, which she explicitly construed as equality of outcomes. 

If you wonder how far to the left she has gone, consider her work to help BLM-associated rioters. “In 2020, as looters and arsonists ravaged Minneapolis after the killing of George Floyd, then-Sen. Harris urged people to donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund ‘to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.’” 

Bovard says this appeal “effectively exonerated anyone committing violence or other crimes, portraying them as worthy of speedy release from jail — but the bail fund paid to release rapists and child molesters and future murderers, not just looters.”

Now, fittingly, Harris has chosen Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, the man who in 2020 “allowed rioters to burn down half of Minneapolis.”

Would a Democratic president want to burn down half of America?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Repeal Obamacare

Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, MAGA, socialism, debt, lizard

Oy vey! Given the alternative of Donald Trump on the one hand and — now that Biden has bailed — a bad-as-Biden Biden-substitute on the other, Americans must re-level their look at the lesser of two evils.

It may be difficult to resist hoping that Trump gets elected this November to allow many of the Democrats’ worst initiatives be left to die on a withering vine. (Examples of the worst: Congress-bypassing regulations designed to penalize production of gas-powered cars and outlaw certain freelance or contract work.)

Still, the candidate and his party have many flaws.

We cannot forget that. Indeed, with their abandonment of the tiniest desire to reduce the size of the federal leviathan, remembrance should be easy. 

Shrink government? Radically reduce spending? Reduce debt? No such goal was seriously pursued in the first Trump administration, and no such goal is mentioned in the twenty-point Trump-Republican Party platform.

There’s talk of tax cuts, ending inflation (somehow), diverting spending from Democratic projects. Sure. But the platform insists that Social Security and Medicare programs not be modified in any way. 

In any way!

And about Obamacare — the biggest expansion of the medical state in recent years, which Republicans had once pledged to repeal — the platform is mute.

The 2016 platform said that improving healthcare “must start with repeal of the dishonestly named Affordable Care Act of 2010: Obamacare,” a declaration retained in 2020. Now it’s gone. Republicans seem to have succumbed to the strategy of turning Obamacare into yet another supposedly unassailable, supposedly inextirpable entitlement program.

Unfortunately, you don’t recover or expand liberty by accepting every expansion of serfdom.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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election law national politics & policies

Kamala’s Cast on Noncitizens

Kamala Harris, immigration, voting, elections

How did Kamala Harris vote?

The Vice President’s hometown of San Francisco is one of 17 cities that allow noncitizens to vote in local elections. Like 75 percent of those cities (according to verify.com), the City by the Bay also offers that vote to noncitizens in the country illegally. 

Not included in this list of cities is New York City, as the Big Apple’s measure providing the vote to nearly a million noncitizens is still being battled in court. Or Boston, which only awaits approval by the Massachusetts Legislature.  

Neither are Telluride, Colorado, nor Yellow Springs, Ohio, on the list. Voters in both states, in 2020 and 2022, respectively, passed statewide constitutional amendments to say only U.S. citizens can vote in all state and local elections, canceling those local ordinances. Beginning in 2018, six states have enacted Citizen Only Voting Amendments, and eight more states will vote on them this November. 

Back in 2016, San Franciscans narrowly passed Proposition N giving noncitizen parents and caregivers, legally documented or not, voting rights in school board elections. Harris had been prosecuting attorney in San Fran before becoming California’s attorney general. As AG, Ms. Harris ran for the U.S. Senate and would have gone to vote for herself on Election Day 2016 . . . and on Prop N. 

Surely, she didn’t forget to vote on the proposition. Right?

So, how did she cast her ballot: in favor of providing noncitizens here illegally the franchise? Or not?

If she ever does a non-scripted interview, perhaps an enterprising journalist might pop that question. Or perhaps a voter in swing states such as North Carolina and Wisconsin — where Citizen Only Voting Amendments are on the ballot — will ask Vice President Harris. 

Answer, please. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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The Governor Who Parodied Himself

Political campaigns are hard. Presidential campaigns in which your Selected Candidate is mediocre at best are harder. So wouldn’t it be good to be able to outlaw all things that highlight this mediocrity?

Things like, say, effective parody?

This seems to be the thinking — I hope I’m channeling it accurately — of the governor of California, unhappy with a popular video available at the Mr Reagan YouTube channel.

The video’s maker may have thought he was covering every base by calling it a parody in the very title, an indignity of self-labeling that Jonathan Swift would never have permitted. People consuming Swift’s satire were left to figure out for themselves that when he proposed that the children of poor people be eaten to render them “beneficial to the publick,” he was engaging in satire.

In contrast, the Kamela Harris campaign ad parody in question is called “Kamala Harris Campaign Ad Parody.” Clear. Unmistakable. 

Like the content.

Still, this video has not escaped the agenda of would-be censors like Governor Gavin Newsom. The parody uses a “deepfake” AI-generated voice that sounds like Harris. It’s even got the Harris Cackle. So Newsom wants to outlaw it.

“Manipulating a voice in an ‘ad’ like this one should be illegal,” he says. (Why?) “I’ll be signing a bill . . . to make sure it is.”

But as Reclaim the Net points out, California has already outlawed certain uses of deepfake media. 

These forbidden uses do not, however, include parody, which is constitutionally protected speech.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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nannyism national politics & policies

President Next

Kamala Harris

I’ve never liked Joe Biden. Not as a U.S. Senator, or Vice-President, or President. But I’ll be the first to acknowledge that his decision, announced yesterday, to relinquish his party’s presidential nomination, which he was set to formally receive at the Democratic National Convention next month, was the right thing to do. 

Way to go, Joe!

First, however, Democratic Party bigshots decided — most importantly with money — that Mr. Biden was not cognitively up to the mighty arduous task of running for president. This fact became ever clearer to many Democrat representatives and senators the more they envisioned themselves becoming collateral political damage. 

President Biden held out against their calls for his ouster for weeks after that fateful June debate. The subsequent campaign stops and high-profile interviews designed to showcase his abilities illustrated, instead, that our commander-in-chief was frail, feeble, feckless. 

Now the president has endorsed his Vice President Kamala Harris to be the Democrat’s new standard bearer this fall. Still, stay tuned for an interesting DNC convention where Harris may face other challengers for the nomination. 

And, as Detective Columbo used to say, “Just one more thing.” 

There has been no word on whether in the coming days, not weeks, we will see the first female president of these United States, Kamala Harris. 

If Democrats are too scared to have Biden as their leader this fall, should the American people really be okay with Biden sticking around for six months to be ours? Giving national and world leadership a continued go?

Thanks, but no thanks. Hello, President Harris.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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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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