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David Harsanyi:Will Kamala Harris Ever Explain Any of Her Extraordinary Policy Flip-Flops?

Posted By on September 14th, 2024

https://www.nysun.com/article/will-kamala-harris-ever-explain-any-of-her-extraordinary-policy-flip-flops
So we’ve been through an entire debate, and Vice President Harris hasn’t explained any of her extraordinary policy flip-flops.

I’m sorry, a person can’t just wake up one morning and abandon their entire worldview without an explanation. I mean, they can try, but no sensible person would take them seriously. Sure, politicians have been calibrating and triangulating their positions since Pericles.

Most have been compelled to explain their ideological evolution — or have the decency to lie about it. None has ever relied on an army of anonymous campaign flacks to erase a lifetime of positions.

Well, not until Ms. Harris.

We all understand Democrats are desperate to shield voters from their candidate’s mind-numbing tautological rhetoric. Who can blame them, right? “Kamala Harris” is an empty vessel to be filled with the aspirations and dreams of gullible partisans. And allowing her to speak extemporaneously in public would kill all the joy, quicky.

These swirling platitudes and nervous laugh, however, don’t suggest that Ms. Harris isn’t bright. They suggest that she has no genuine philosophical or ethical belief system — other than, perhaps, obtaining and using power. Indeed, there’s little chance she will coherently expound on her sudden policy U-turns because they make zero ideological sense.

Let’s remember that Ms. Harris hasn’t merely been tinkering with the top marginal tax rate in her economic plan. She’s on the record championing, often quite passionately and definitively, a bunch of completely harebrained extremism.

“Will you fully endorse the Green New Deal tonight?” an Iowa voter asked Ms. Harris in 2019.

Yes, she answered. Fully.

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Why Are Grocery Bills So High? Avian influenza, higher shipping costs, and a drought in the Midwest are real factors. Price gouging? Not so much. By Madeleine Rowley

Posted By on September 14th, 2024

https://www.thefp.com/p/why-are-grocery-bills-so-high

At the presidential debate, Vice President Kamala Harris told the American public she has “a plan” to alleviate America’s housing shortage, help small businesses, and “address the price of groceries.” That plan, like the rest of her policies, is elusive, but in a recently released “issues page” on her campaign site, she listed cracking down on “on anti-competitive practices” as a top priority. On the campaign trail she has promised that, if elected, she’ll call for “the first-ever federal ban on corporate price gouging on food and groceries” within her first hundred days in office. 

With that line of attack, Harris has certainly tapped into a vein of voter anger: Lots of Americans are upset about their grocery bills, which rose dramatically during the inflation that followed the pandemic and have never come back down. Food prices increased by 11 percent in 2022, professor Ricky Volpe, of Cal Poly’s Agribusiness Department, told The Free Press. And while they’re only projected to rise 0.7 percent in 2025, those 2022 grocery prices have stuck. Americans still notice when they pay $5.24 for a pound of ground beef that cost only $3.80 a few years ago.

Unsurprisingly, a survey conducted by the Food Industry Association last month found that 69 percent of Americans feel their income hasn’t kept up with food inflation. That group includes significant percentages of older consumers (Boomers and Gen X) as well as people at the low end of the income scale. 

But it’s worth asking: Why have food prices gone up so much? And does price gouging—the practice of jacking up prices during a natural disaster or other short-term emergency—really have anything to do with it? Volpe told me that, in fact, if food prices are rising beyond what consumers feel is reasonable, the food companies themselves play a surprisingly small role in the price hikes. Grocery stores, for instance—even giant superstores—are intensely competitive. Grocery store profit margins are among the lowest in all of American business, often as low as 1 percent. 

According to Volpe, the rising costs of labor, shipping, and packaging have increased more than food prices since the onset of the pandemic and have played a more significant role. Matt Lind, 31, owns a food distribution company, Farmlind Produce, that purchases fresh fruits and vegetables from farms nationwide and trucks them to grocery stores and restaurants on the East Coast. “Post-Covid,” he told me, “freight out of California was around $6,000 this time of year. Last week, I paid as much as $8,400.” 

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

France at War with Itself by Drieu Godefridi

Posted By on September 13th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20924/france-at-war-with-itself

The French people, the plurality of whom voted “right-wing” in the first round, were astonished to discover, after the second round, a “left-of-center” National Assembly, a parliament that seemingly does not represent the real country.

The message seems to be the all-too-familiar Marxist concept of Volksrache (“the people’s revenge”): arousing hatreds in order to channel them towards the “enemies of the regime”, and, in the end, liquidate them. The murder of a policeman, the burning of a synagogue, the death of a delinquent, a war in the Middle East, elections, no elections: everything is used as a pretext for the hate-filled, agitprop vituperation of the minions of La France Insoumise, who, by stirring up hostilities and resentments, particularly anti-Semitic ones, appear to be whipping up violent — even terrorist — militancy, in the tradition of France’s 18th-century terreur.

France appears to be sliding, slowly but surely, towards a version of chaos — the ancestral breeding ground for the violence that would be the victory, the horizon and the ultimate goal not only of Mélenchon’s phalanx, but of all those trying to take down the West.

Since the results were announced of France’s July 2024 legislative elections, President Emmanuel Macron has been unable to build a majority in the National Assembly, which appears more divided than at any time in the history of what the French call “the Fifth Republic”.

The elections produced three blocs, all of which appear to hate each other: the left, coalescing around Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-left La France Insoumise (“France Unbowed”), Macron’s centrist Renaissance party, and Marine Le Pen’s right-wing Rassemblement National (National Rally).

Three factors seem to favor France’s slide towards an open or latent form of even greater internal conflict.

ELECTIONS, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Haitian Voter Fraud Uncovered in Springfield, Ohio Paula Bolyard

Posted By on September 13th, 2024

https://pjmedia.com/paula-bolyard/2024/09/12/breaking-ohio-sos-uncovers-fake-haitian-voter-registrations-springfield-n4932487

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose warned election boards to be extra vigilant in the weeks before the November election after an investigation uncovered illegal voter registration forms circulating in Clark County. 

In a media advisory, the secretary of state’s office noted, “The office’s Election Integrity Unit recently concluded an investigation into the origins of an illegal voter registration form translated into the Haitian Creole language. The Clark County Board of Elections reported this form to our office after rejecting its submission by a local applicant.” 

In a memo to election officials, Hun Yi, director of investigations for the Secretary of State’s Public Integrity Division, said, “The Board confirmed they’ve only received one of these unauthorized forms, but they rightly recognized it as illegal and worked with my team to track down its source with the help of a county government assistance office.”

“The form was erroneously included among others outsourced to a foreign language translation service. It garnered national attention considering the high number of Haitian refugees that have recently migrated to the Springfield area, and it serves as an important reminder that boards and designated voter registration agencies should be vigilant about the use of forms submitted to their office,” Yi added. 

Clark County is home to Springfield, Ohio, where as many as 30,000 Haitians have unexpectedly migrated—most of them semi-legally after the Biden-Harris administration extended Temporary Protected Status to 300,000 Haitian migrants in June. 

The mass migration to Springfield has taxed hospitals, schools, and social services as the population went from around 60,000 to more than 80,000 overnight. 

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

What Would Make the Perfect Democratic Candidate?Christian Schneider

Posted By on September 13th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/09/what-would-make-the-perfect-democratic-candidate/

Kamala Harris happens to possess none of the requisite characteristics.

Imagine an American time traveler from a century ago showing up unannounced in 2024. After he spends a few days marveling at the giant, rotating logs of meat that Greek restaurants use to make gyros, you tell him there’s a presidential election going on and that the Republican candidate incited a violent attempt to overturn the results of the previous election — oh and he’s also a convicted felon.

“Well, I guess the election is over, why even bother with the voting?” he asks.

“No, it’s actually a tie,” you respond, as he gives you a confused look similar to the one he directed at the sweaty, spinning meat.

Of course, in order to win a presidential election, a candidate doesn’t have to be ethical or even felony-free. He or she simply has to be one electoral vote better than the other person. And if the other party can’t field a plausible candidate, it’s not like both lose. The least worst one wins the nation’s grandest prize.

That is how, in 2016, Donald Trump ended up beating Hillary Clinton, perhaps the only candidate less likeable than he is. And a lack of likeability in the Democratic candidate is why, despite his significant shortcomings, the former president is now tied with the current vice president.

As if shopping for candidates at an outlet mall, Democrats for the last three elections have pulled their nominees off the “irregular” pile. All their candidates had significant flaws: Clinton was picked because she was seen as the heir apparent after Democratic primary voters passed her by in 2008. In 2020, elderly Joe Biden won the nomination because panicked Democrats saw the unelectable Bernie Sanders racing toward the nomination. And in 2024, unpopular Vice President Kamala Harris wrested away the nomination because panicked Democrats saw Joe Biden racing toward cognitive decline and thus certain defeat.

But imagine there was a universe in which Democrats could start fresh and pick the perfect candidate. Say there was no existing infrastructure that favored incumbents and insiders, and progressives were instead free to choose whoever they thought gave them the best chance to win. What would that perfect candidate look like?

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

New Crime Numbers Don’t Help David Muir’s Assertion By Jim Geraghty

Posted By on September 13th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/new-crime-numbers-dont-help-david-muirs-assertion/

In the debate Tuesday:

FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Crime here is up and through the roof. Despite their fraudulent statements that they made. Crime in this country is through the roof. And we have a new form of crime. It’s called migrant crime. And it’s happening at levels that nobody thought possible.

DAVID MUIR: President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country, but Vice President the…

FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: use me, the FBI — they were defrauding statements. They didn’t include the worst cities. They didn’t include the cities with the worst crime. It was a fraud. Just like their number of 818,000 jobs that they said they created turned out to be a fraud.

There are new updated numbers from the National Crime Victimization Survey released this week. The NCVS is a useful tool, because while the more widely discussed FBI crime figures can only count crimes reported to the police, the NCVS surveys a large sample of Americans — around 240,000 people — and extrapolates from that. Some crimes, like murder, are almost always reported to the police, but other crimes, like assault, aren’t always going to be reported, for a variety of reasons.

Overall, the NCVS indicate that in 2023, the rate of nonfatal violent victimization in the United States was 22.5 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older, which was similar to the 2022 rate of 23.5 violent victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older. Violent victimization includes rape or sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault.

Ironically, the NCVS had lower numbers for violent victimizations for 2020 and 2021, despite the widespread perception that crime got significantly worse during the pandemic. In 2018 the figure was 23.8, in 2019 it was 21, it was 16.4 in 2020 — remember, lots of people were stuck at home, and fewer people on the street means less street crime — and in 2021 it was 16.5.

We can argue whether going from 23.5 violent victimizations per 1,000 persons to 22.5 violent victimizations is enough of a decline to argue, as Muir asserted, that “overall violent crime is coming down in this country.” But we can all agree that it’s not much of a decline. And note property crimes are up very slightly, from 101.9 incidents per 1,000 households to 102.2.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The American Horatius By Tony Ruggiero

Posted By on September 13th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/09/the_american_horatius.html

Donald Trump has been in America’s headlights for decades.  By now, we know he’s impulsive, brash, boastful, proud, successful, charismatic, irreverent, and retaliatory.  We also know he’s foresightful, confident, bright, obstinate, entertaining, self-assertive, tenacious, and independent.  This admixture of characteristics couldn’t be more useful in our zeitgeist. 

What isn’t Trump?  He isn’t a utopian.  He isn’t anti-Caucasian.  He isn’t a secularist.  He isn’t unpatriotic.  He isn’t anti-populist.  He isn’t a globalist.  He isn’t a socialist.  He isn’t an ideologue.  He isn’t anti-tradition.  He isn’t anti-police.  He isn’t anti-family.  He isn’t anti-nation-state.  He isn’t a progressive.  He isn’t a deep-statist.  He isn’t anti-heteronormative.  He isn’t an insurrectionist.  He isn’t a vegetarian.  And he isn’t perfect.  

Trump’s natural metapolitical vibe is a spanner in the works of the administrative state, that oligarchy of scalawag bureaucrats and experts who believe themselves entitled to play with America’s past, present, and future.  Trump is a force unto himself, and for that, the left and their media allies ceaselessly malign him, claiming he’s a demagogue, an authoritarian, a threat to democracy.  Humbug!  There’s no greater threat to America than progressive Democrats and their “transformative” ideology.

Trump represents a nascent centripetal power engaged in the necessary and long overdue contraction of leftist ideologies and programs.  He possesses an authentic ineluctable resistance to prevailing postmodern delusions.  Such a person cannot avoid becoming the bête noire, the Nosferatu of the American left. 

EDUCATION Comments turned off

‘Globalizing the Intifada’ at Harvard Dismal spectacles on an American campus. by Hugh Fitzgerald

Posted By on September 13th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/globalizing-the-intifada-at-harvard/

The beginning of college used to be marked by parents helping their children unload their stuff from the back of station wagons and carrying those suitcases, that futon, that stand-alone lamp, that print of Picasso’s peace dove or Don Quixote, or Avedon’s photographs of the Beatles, into the waiting dormitories, after which both parents and child would go out for one last meal together before they drove off and he, or she, was left to face the school daze alone.

Nowadays it’s different. Your parents drive you up to the campus, and already the anti-Israel pro-Hamas demonstrators are in the quad, or in Harvard’s case the Yard, screaming their hatred of the Jewish state, accusing it of “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing,” and insistently chanting that “Palestine will be free/From the river to the sea” which everyone knows means only one thing: the disappearance of the state of Israel, the expulsion or killing of its Jewish inhabitants, and its replacement by a twenty-third Arab state of “Palestine.”

And so it was for a friend of my family who is starting his first year at Harvard. He was greeted when he arrived at Harvard Yard by protesters chanting and waving signs about Israel’s need to disappear and the Palestinians’ right to replace them, renewing the screaming from where they had left off last June, at commencement.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

You Hate Trump? We’re dealing with destructive narcissism. by Dennis Prager

Posted By on September 13th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/you-hate-trump/

A great many Americans claim that they cannot vote for former President Donald Trump because they loathe him.

That was also their argument in 2016 and 2020.

That argument was childish in 2016 and 2020, and it remains childish in 2024.

I say “childish” because mature people don’t vote on the basis of whom they like. They vote on the basis of which candidate is best for their country. As I asked both eight years ago and four years ago, other than friends and a spouse, whom do you choose based on how much you like a person? Do you choose your surgeon on that basis? If you or a loved one had cancer and were presented with a choice of two surgeons, one known to be an honorable man and loyal husband, the other known for his abrasive personality and for being a womanizer but also known as one of the best cancer surgeons in the country, which would you choose?

We all know the answer. So, why would you choose a president based on marital fidelity or personality traits?

Though they always mention Trump “the liar” (as far as truth-telling is concerned, Trump is Abe Lincoln compared to President Joe Biden), Trump “the adulterer,” Trump “the mean,” and now Trump “the felon” (although no one can tell you what he was charged with), Trump haters would respond that those are not the only reasons why they would never vote for Trump. He is, they constantly tell us, a threat to democracy.

Trump haters have to say that — because they know that merely listing his alleged and actual obnoxious personal traits makes them look foolish. The problem, however, is that the claim that Trump would end democracy in America is baseless. He was already president for four years, and he in no way threatened democracy. Of course, Trump haters will point to Jan. 6 — and only to Jan. 6, because they have no other example from all four years of the Trump presidency of Trump allegedly threatening democracy.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Identity politics is destroying Barcelona Catalan separatists have prioritised their luxury beliefs over the real needs of locals. Maria Reglero

Posted By on September 13th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/12/identity-politics-is-destroying-barcelona/

Barcelona has been in the news this summer for its many anti-tourism protests. Local residents have been firing water guns and blocking hotel entrances in protest against ‘over-tourism’ and its impact on living conditions.

In some ways this is not surprising. In Barcelona, there are already over four tourists for every local and this is only set to increase. Spain is soon expected to become the world’s No1 tourist destination. By 2040, it is predicted to receive 110million tourists a year, surpassing France (105million) and the United States (100million). Of course, tourism brings huge economic benefits, but the pressures it can place on accommodation and infrastructure have gone completely unaddressed by politicians. And this is far from the only issue plaguing Barcelona.

Catalonia, of which Barcelona is the capital, is ruled by a political class with a pathological obsession with identity politics. Catalonia’s elites have for years promoted the idea of Catalan identity as a nationality – through public schools and state media – rather than as a regional identity within Spain. In Barcelona, a city that was built with the help of migrants from other parts of Spain, this has been particularly divisive.

Nowhere is this clearer than through the Catalan secessionists’ weaponisation of language. Despite both Spanish and Catalan being official languages of the region, children whose mother tongue is Spanish are excluded by design from the public-school system. Since the 1980s, children have been taught exclusively in Catalan from ages three to seven. Spanish is introduced in the second year of primary school, but even then, Spanish classes are limited to two or three hours per week. Until recently, before a 2021 Supreme Court ruling, Spanish was taught as if it were a foreign language and other school subjects were generally not taught in Spanish at all.

It’s fair to say that this system puts native Spanish speakers – a substantial minority – at a disadvantage. It is particularly tough for those with special needs, who consequently aren’t given the same level of support as Catalan speakers.