Who’s in Charge?

Progressive-Democratic Party Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris (D, CA), at a virtual (because, of course) round table with some Arizona small business owners, said that [a] Harris administration, together with Joe Biden as the president of the United States would be friendly to those small businesses.

Hmm….

Of course, she then changed her phrasing: The Biden-Harris administration will provide….

An innocent misspeak by Harris? Or was this a Freudian slip? Or was she projecting?

Or was it something else?

Open New York City for Operation

Open New York City for Operation

The city currently is closed down by order of Da Mare Bill de Blasio (I know, different city. Same guy, though, functionally), and that’s causing a lot of damage, and not just economic.

More than 160 business leaders, including executives at Citigroup Inc, Mastercard Inc, and Nasdaq Inc, have signed a letter to Mayor Bill de Blasio warning of New York City’s deteriorating condition in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and growing anxiety over public safety, cleanliness, and other quality-of-life issues.

De Blasio’s response? No. Gimme money first.

Let’s be clear: to restore city services and save jobs, we need long term borrowing and a federal stimulus—we need these leaders to join the fight to move the city forward[.]

Here’s a stimulus: open the city—withdraw the restrictions—and watch the sharp and prolonged economic growth provide a ton of stimulus.

And watch the malaise that being closed down and cooped up is causing the residents of the city fade as they’re able to go back to work, go back to shopping, go back to socializing. Able to go back to earning money for their bills—the lack of which is another source of serious angst—and spending some of it on entertainment, another angst reducer.

Raising Taxes on Day One

That’s what Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden has said he intends to do; his latest iteration of that intent was last Thursday in a CNN interview.

I’d make the changes on the corporate taxes on day one[.]

Leaving aside the…foolishness…of implementing such an attack on our economy’s health, there has been pushback on the Day One timing—no President, not even a Progressive-Democratic one, can raise taxes by fiat; such a move can only come from the Congress (and subsequently signed by a President or his veto overridden).

That brings up the scenario by which such a raise could, in fact, be implemented on the first day of a President’s term.

Recall that the new Congress always is seated roughly two-and-a-half weeks before the President is inaugurated. (That’s useful, since in the event a Presidential or Vice Presidential candidate doesn’t achieve an outright majority in the Electoral College, it’s the relevant house of Congress that selects the President or Vice President.) If the new Congress has Progressive-Democrat majorities in both the House and the Senate, it easily can pass the relevant tax increases and have the bill ready for the new President to sign into law in the hour after his swearing-in on 20 January 2021—Day One.

That adds to the premium on voting Republican all up and down the ticket in a bit under two months.

“You Do Not Need….”

In Canada, too. There’s a petition—one that drew a record number of signatures—in Canada calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to withdraw his Order in Council (roughly analogous to our Presidents’ Executive Orders) regarding his gun control overreach [emphasis added, but that’s a side issue].

We, the undersigned, citizens of Canada, call upon the Prime Minister to immediately scrap his government’s May 1, 2020, Order in Council decision related to confiscating legally owned firearms and instead pass legislation that will target criminals, stop the smuggling of firearms into Canada, go after those who illegally acquire firearms, and apologize to legal firearms owners in Canada[.]

Trudeau’s Order was instituted through taking cynical advantage of the upset over a mass murder in Nova Scotia a short time earlier, and he executed it in the absence of Parliament, which was not sitting due to the Wuhan Virus situation in Canada. His Order banned more than 1,500 models and variants of rifles, including AR-15s, Mini-14s, and firearms that the Nova Scotia gunman used. Trudeau, in the arrogance of government, rationalized his Order:

You do not need an AR-15 to take down a deer[.]

Those in government can’t conceive of the need for those being ruled over to defend themselves against criminals, including home invaders, rioters, looters—and crazed gunmen—when it’s so plainly the government’s police who are solely responsible for such defense, and it’s the responsibility of the attacked citizens to wait patiently on the government’s police’s arrival.

Those in government can’t conceive of the need for those being ruled over to defend themselves against that very government.

Those in power are oblivious to their own arrogance. That obliviousness itself creates an entirely separate need for the citizenry to define for themselves their need for and their purpose in having weapons.

That obliviousness itself creates an entirely separate need for an armed citizenry, one armed with the weapons of their individual choice, not those permitted by government.

He Misspoke?

Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden spoke to a few reporters who, along with a few union bigwigs, were his entire audience (carefully unfilmed by the press, in contrast to the frequently done panning across President Donald Trump’s audiences with a view to “worrying” about masks and social distancing) at his Warren, MI, campaign stop the other day.

At that campaign event, Biden said that our armed forces had seen 118,984 cases and 6,114 deaths.

Stop and think about that. The context of that particular claim was Biden taking Trump to task for the latter’s alleged mishandling of our nation’s Wuhan Virus situation, haranguing him over the deaths that have resulted and how Trump should have done better. It was within that, that Biden made his charge of hundreds of thousands of Wuhan Virus cases and thousands of Wuhan Virus deaths in our military.

Shortly after Biden made that charge, his Deputy Rapid Response Director, Michael Gwin, “clarified” Biden’s remarks: the military has had only 7 deaths from the virus; Biden mistakenly had read the wrong datum from his notes and had read off Michigan’s virus statistics.

Now think about that. Biden, knowing full well the vanishingly small number of virus-generated deaths in our military, accidentally and unquestioningly read off Michigan’s far larger numbers in support of his castigation?

That’s what Gwin would have us believe. Never mind that Biden had those data written down in his notes.

No.

Biden’s error was not a misspeak, nor was it a “senior moment,” as others might think.

Biden’s error was in his thinking he could utter such an obvious lie and get away with it.

On the other hand, maybe I can interest Gwin’s audience in investing in a bridge across Lake St Clair that I hear the Biden Infrastructure Program is planning on building.