Tag Archives: politics

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.

It’s Just an Anecdote

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One instance doesn’t make a trend, but still….

An electric emergency vehicle belonging to a fire department in Germany caught fire and burnt down the new fire station.
The fire…started from a vehicle that “contained lithium-ion batteries and an external power connection.” The blaze destroyed nearly a dozen emergency vehicles and caused between $21.5 million and $25.9 million in damage.

It’s just an anecdote, but how many gasoline- or diesel-powered emergency vehicles have burned down their hosting fire stations, much less destroyed millions of dollars in equipment?

Favoring Illegal Aliens over Citizen Homeless

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That’s Chicago’s Progressive-Democrat Mayor Brandon Johnson is doing while pretending to adjust down his city’s illegal alien sanctuary status. The subheadline makes the case clearly:

The Windy City is merging its migrant shelter system with the city’s traditional homeless shelter system

And

The overhaul will see 3,800 beds added to the city’s current homeless services system of 3,000 legacy beds….

Johnson is claiming in his press release on the matter that his system now is a unified sheltering system to serve all Chicagoans.

Where to start. Couple things, in particular. The first is that if Johnson had 3,800 beds all along, why didn’t he allocate them sooner and to the shelters that accommodate the city’s resident homeless?

Because, the second thing is that he’s confused about who is a Chicagoan. Illegal aliens are not at all Chicagoans, they’re illegal aliens.

This is Johnson treating illegals at the direct expense of Chicago’s homeless.

Government Investment Nanny

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The Federal government regulates who it will permit to invest in private investments—startups, pre-IPO opportunities, loans to private companies, and the like. These are highly risky investments, and they have high payoff possibilities, even if those possibilities are low. The Feds limit those who it permits into these private opportunities to folks with $1 million in net assets, not including their primary home residence, or at least $200,000 in yearly income, or $300,000 for a joint household.

Now there’s a move afoot to add a government-regulated glorified intelligence test as an alternative path for investors to make these investments.

A group of lawmakers has proposed legislation that would allow any investor capable of passing an exam to buy private securities—an array of investments like shares in pre-IPO startups or loans to private companies that are considered riskier because they have looser disclosure rules than public securities and can be harder, and sometimes impossible, to sell in a pinch.

Passing an exam as a prerequisite to being allowed to invest in a class of securities—passing an exam as a prerequisite to being allowed to vote in an election. That Jim Crow era requirement has long since been done away with. Except now Congressmen want to revive the practice for investing.

Private securities—meaning outside the scope of government regulation. This is something far too many politicians can’t stand; it limits their power to dictate to us; it limits their power, period.

The idea is that the ability to make these high-risk, high-reward bets should be open to all sophisticated investors, not just those with the biggest bank accounts.

Of course the definition of who’s sufficiently sophisticated, the definition of “sophisticated” itself is carefully left to government personages.

Patrick Woodall, Americans for Financial Reform‘s Managing Director for Policy (AFR is vehemently pushing for even more government regulation of our financial decisions):

Knowledge cannot protect people from the potential losses if they invest in risky, opaque, and illiquid, private offerings[.]

Neither can government. Nor should government try. The decision to run those risks are ours alone.

This is nanny-state-ism intruding into us private citizens’ own affairs far beyond regulation of public company-related investments. Companies are private rather than publicly owned explicitly to get out from under the government’s thumb, and citizens invest here—or would if we could—explicitly to stay out from under the government’s thumb—especially when that thumb operates, according to government, for our own good.

No.

We average Americans do not need government protections from ourselves. We are fully capable of making our own decisions, and we are fully capable of handling, and fully and responsible for, the outcomes of our decisions. We are not wards of the state, much as one of our major political parties is bent on reducing us to that condition.