Monthly Archives: October 2024

Alternatively…

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Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris held a rally in Houston over the weekend, and Beyoncé appeared with her and announced her endorsement of Harris.

Beyoncé also was going to perform at the rally, and when she didn’t both she and Harris were booed.

But was she going to perform? Who said so?

NBC News‘ Kelly O’Donnell, Monica Alba, Yamiche Alcindor, and Alexandra Marquez were four pressmen making the claim:

Pop superstar Beyoncé will appear with Vice President Kamala Harris at her event in Houston on Friday evening, according to three sources familiar with the plans.
Beyoncé is also expected to perform, said one of the sources, who has direct knowledge of the preparations.

The voices in their heads and their childhood imaginary friends said so—that’s the source of their “information.”

Even Just the News chose to mislead rally goers and the public at large regarding a Beyoncé performance, both in its headline and its lede:

Beyoncé expected to perform at Harris rally in Houston on Friday
Pop music star Beyoncé Knowles is expected to perform at a campaign rally Friday in hometown Houston for Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris.

Expected by whom? JtN didn’t bother to attribute any source at all for its expectation. We’re just supposed to take the outlet’s metaphorical smiling face at its word.

Alternatively, these pressmen and outlet lied and got caught in their lie. Now they are letting Beyoncé and Harris take the heat for the outcome as these wonders scurry away from their own responsibility for the misapprehension.

Regardless of what anyone might think of Harris or former President and Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump, this performance is just one more example of why the press cannot be taken seriously.

Paul Paints with a Too-Broad Brush

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Former President and Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump is painting with too broad a brush with his blanket tariffs. Kentucky’s Republican Senator Rand Paul is painting with too broad a brush in his criticism of Trump’s tariff proposals.

Tariffs operate solely in the international trade arena, for all that they have domestic effects. Part of what’s not recognized by either man, although less so by Paul than by Trump, is that international trade has very little to do with economics and very much to do with foreign policy.

Paul is correct that protectionist tariffs are net detrimental to domestic economies. (I claim that protecting nascent industries with tariffs is beneficial, but only if they’re withdrawn when the nascent industries are better developed. The difficulty of withdrawing protectionist tariffs when they’re no longer needed, though, more than overwhelms that temporary benefit.) Trump is mistaken to push the blanket protectionist tariffs on all imports, including imports from friends and allies.

Paul’s China People’s Republic of China tariff example, though, illustrates his broad brush error.

Consider a [PRC]-made widget priced at 50 cents competing with an American-made version at $1. By slapping a tariff on the Chinese widget, raising its price to $2, American manufacturers have the freedom to raise theirs as high as $1.99. The consumer is left with no real choice but to pay more.

Reasonable men can debate the size of that tariff, but such a debate misses the essential fact that the PRC is an enemy nation bent on supplanting us in the world and dominating our foreign and domestic policy decisions. We have no business feeding the enemy nation’s economy. That alone argues for the high tariff and not settling for a countervailing one of merely 50 cents to make the imported price the same as the domestic one.

There’s more to this, though.

Consider [PRC]-made electronics. When tariffs are imposed on products like smartphones and laptops, as Donald Trump is proposing to do, American consumers end up paying higher prices. … [The PRC] accounts for more than 90% of US laptop and tablet imports.

Especially in the electronics industry—an industry that reaches far beyond consumer computers and cell phones into all types of communications devices, chip manufacturing, main frame assembly, data centers, artificial intelligence, and on and on—the national security risk of trading at all with the PRC is far too high to be mitigated with jawboning and pretty pleases alone. That risk, after all, runs to cyber espionage and insertion of sleeperware into our several network nodes, intellectual property and data theft, and including spyware and other malware on imported devices’ chips at the very least.

Tariffs set high enough to discourage imports from an enemy nation like the PRC are an entirely valid foreign policy move. That the tariffs might raise domestic prices is a cost of our national security, of our maintaining our independence of action.

“Mantle of Change”

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David Wasserman, a Cook Political Report elections analyst, was quoted in Friday’s Wall Street Journal:

This has been the central challenge for Harris in the snap election: can she seize the mantle of change [from the present Biden/Harris administration or from the prior Trump administration]?

Can she, indeed? She has said within the last few years that she would ban fracking and that she would decriminalize coming over our border illegally, among other things. Her erstwhile Senate colleague Bernie Sanders (I, VT) said late last summer that any words she’s saying now that differ from those positions are only words uttered to garner votes, not serious policy changes. Harris said this fall that her values haven’t changed. In two separate interviews within the last couple of weeks, Harris gave one of the few direct answers she’s ever given to interviewer questions, this one to the question of what she would do differently from Biden. Her direct answer both times was that nothing came to her mind.

Now, at this late stage of the election season (9 days, including today, before Election Day), who would believe her if she did claim explicit, clearly stated, and materially differing policies? How could anyone tell such changes would be sincerely claimed and not just more words as Sanders characterized them earlier? Who could believe such changes, representing as they would—as they must, if they’re truly different—changes to her values?

True Enough. However.

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Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris held a town hall campaign event in Delaware County, PA, Wednesday. CNN‘s Anderson Cooper moderated the event.

No less a light than Progressive-Democrat and ex-President Barack Obama senior official David Axelrod was unimpressed with her failure to perform.

The thing that would concern me is when she doesn’t want to answer a question. Her habit is to kind of go to “word salad city,” and she did that on a couple of answers. One was on Israel. Anderson asked a direct question, “Would you be stronger on Israel than Trump?” And there was a seven-minute answer, but none of it related to the question he was asking.

That’s true enough, although it’s less a matter of Harris not wanting to answer such questions so much as it is that she has no answer to them; she’s that unprepared.

CNN‘s Jake Tapper:

She focused a lot more on Donald Trump, I think it’s fair to say, than she did on many specifics in terms of what she would do as president[.]

That’s because that’s all she has. She has no policies of her own, other than the ones she’s clearly articulated over the years—banning fracking, decriminalizing coming across our border illegally, continuing Party profligate spending. She has given one direct answer on the matter, twice: when asked by different interviewers what she would do differently from Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden, her clear and unequivocal answer was that she couldn’t think of anything she’d do differently.

That however, though: a significant part of her resorting to Axelrod’s word salad city is Cooper letting her get away with it. He chose not to follow up on her evasion; he chose not to press her and repeat, or even restate, the question and insist she give a substantive answer.

Cooper is an example of the coddling the press (Tapper lately notwithstanding) does of Harris.

No Compromise

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Not even a little bit. That would be the outcome of a Progressive-Democratic Party majority in the next Senate as that majority eliminates the filibuster. One outcome of that refusal is demonstrated by Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris in a Tuesday interview with NBC.

Q: What concessions would be on the table? Religious exemptions, for example, is that something that you would consider with a Republican-controlled Congress?
Ms Harris: I don’t think that we should be making concessions when we’re talking about a fundamental freedom to make decisions about your own body.
Q: To Republicans like, for example, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, who would back something like this on a Democratic agenda, if, in fact, Republicans control Congress, would you offer them an olive branch, or is that off the table? Is that not an option for you?
Ms Harris: I’m not gonna engage in hypotheticals, because we can go on with a variety of scenarios. Let’s just start with a fundamental fact: a basic freedom has been taken from the women of America, the freedom to make decisions about their own body, and that cannot be negotiable—which is that we need to put back in the protections of Roe v Wade. And that is it.

Leave aside Harris’ cynical distortion of the legal fact (cynical because as the talented prosecuting lawyer that she is, Harris knows better): there never has been a fundamental freedom for a woman to have an abortion. There has been a Supreme Court opinion that a woman can have an abortion under some conditions. Court opinions have the force of law, but they are not law: only Congress can make laws under our Constitution. In the present case, that Court opinion was rescinded under Roe.

The larger matter here is what it is women should be allowed to do—what their fundamental right is—under a Harris administration. That fundamental right is a woman’s “right” to kill the baby she’s carrying. To deny even a religious exemption to that is to deny a fundamental right that actually exists: the baby’s right to life.