Tag Archives: political parties

Harris’ Closing Argument

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Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris made her closing argument Tuesday on the Ellipse, hoping the location would emphasize the irony and contrast in comparison with former-President and Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s speech there on 6 January 2021. The irony is lost, though, when you recall that Trump, in that speech, called on his supporters to protest peacefully at the Capitol and that the rioters there were a tiny few compared to the thousands on the Ellipse who listened to his speech—and that those rioters had begun gathering at the Capitol before Trump gave his speech.

That’s a minor point regarding Harris’ closing “argument.” The high points of her speech are these:

Trump is a bad man, Evil incarnate. She spent several minutes on this.

Harris has a to-do list. That list was largely devoid of how she would enact any particularly item, it even lacked specificity of what many of those items actually might be. She did promise price controls, though, in the form of punishing businesses for what she calls price gauging, but which have been price increases caused by the several inflation-spiking policies and regulations she and her boss, Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden, enacted in the first few months of their administration and expanded on over the last three-and-a-half years. She did, though, make explicit her price control plan to cap drug prices.

Her to-do list also included these inflation-driving items: $25,000 to each first-time home buyer and increasing even further her tax credits for families with children.

She tried to contrast Trump’s security policies with her own, non-specific plans, terming Trump in another of her “bad man” claims a threat to global security. She tried to slide past the security our nation, and our friends and allies, enjoyed during his last term—no wars at all, and the Abraham Peace Accords in the Middle East.

This is in contrast with the Biden-Harris/Harris-Biden administration’s panic-ridden abandonment of Afghanistan, followed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the People’s Republic of China’s increasingly naked threats to conquer the Republic of China, Iran’s nearby nuclear weapon breakout, and open warfare by Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists on Israel, a war aided and abetted, and entered into, by Iran. And there’s the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden situation, a situation in which her administration’s policy has functionally surrendered those waters to Houthi terrorists via this administration’s determinedly ineffective tit-for-tat responses to Houthi missile and drone attacks all along what used to be a busy route for commercial shipping.

Most of her to-do list, most of her policies, were left unspecified, unclarified, vague. This gloss-over was deliberate: her policies are ill-defined in her own mind.

There are a couple of exceptions to that last, though. She fully intends to support eliminating altogether the Senate filibuster so she can convert our nation to one-party rule. She fully intends to support revamping (I can’t call it reforming) our Supreme Court so she can convert it from its Constitutional role of coequal branch and check on the other two branches into a rubber stamp court supporting whatever her one-party government wants to do.

This is not someone whom we can afford running our nation. Nor is the Party she heads.

Harris’ Immigration Policy

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Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate, and Border Czar, Kamala Harris’ immigration policy has accomplished much. Lockland, OH, Mayor Mark Mason:

Our county officials estimate that we have around 3,000 of those [illegal aliens] that have come to a village of 3,420 residents. And our complaint is, if the federal government is going to have an open borders policy, with that they need to have a policy directing these immigrants to communities that can absorb that kind of population increase[.]

And

Village Administrator Doug Wehmeyer told Fox News Digital recently that it is leading to around $150,000 in losses for the village, as the illegal immigrants do not pay taxes and are displacing local residents who are moving out of those apartments.

Except that, with the Biden-Harris/Harris-Biden administration having created the problem, it isn’t really possible to count on that administration to fix the problem. Have a policy directing illegal aliens? The administration has one, and it’s executing on it. Nor Biden nor Harris care a fig about the communities they’re flooding with these illegal aliens.

Mason again:

If you’re going to let immigrants just come over freely, you’ve got to educate them on the cultural differences in how things operate here and make them understand that some of the things that maybe you’re used to in Mauritania [isn’t] necessarily acceptable here in the United States[.]

Assimilate newcomers, whether immigrants or illegal aliens, into American culture? That’s racist according to the Left.

This flooding of Lockland and the associated decision to not bother with assimilation efforts, is an example of the depth of the destruction Harris’ immigration policy has succeeded in accomplishing.

Wait—she was Vice President, not President. True enough, but as VP and as Border Czar, she had enormous influence over the Progressive-Democrat President’s decisions. She agreed with them rather than argued against them.

Fundamentally Transform America

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That’s what ex-President Barack Obama (D) bragged was about to occur shortly before his 2008 election victory. He got a major step of that transformation when he nationalized roughly one-sixth of our economy with his nationalization of our health care coverage industry with his Obamacare.

Now the Progressive-Democratic Party is on the verge of finishing the transformation as they sit on the knife’s edge of a sweeping election victory next week. The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial headline lays it out:

[Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala] Harris has already endorsed President Biden’s plan to impose “ethics” rules on the Justices that would invite political harassment and compromise judicial independence. Now she won’t disavow packing the Court. She has called for Democrats, if they keep the Senate in November, to bypass the 60-vote filibuster rule, letting them enact such bills without even a modicum of compromise.

Those would be the final two straws in the destruction of our federated republican democracy form of government. It would be the institution of one-party rule, with the minority party not even a loyal opposition but merely irrelevant, and the conversion of our Supreme Court and of our Federal judiciary in general from its current status as an independent, coequal check on the power of the central government into a rubber stamp of Party decisions.

The WSJ editors aren’t given to hyperbole, and they’re not being hyperbolic in their closing paragraph.

Democrats are serious. They say Mr Trump is a threat to democracy and US institutions, while they’re pledging to restructure the judiciary wholesale. Do they notice the cognitive dissonance? Apparently not. But voters might.

That’s what’s at stake next week.

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?