Monthly Archives: August 2024

Commie Kammie and revisionist history

Posted on by
4

Kamala Harris has done more flips than a transgender Olympic gymnast. Here’s a sampling:

In her aborted 2019 campaign, she promised to ban fracking. That’s not a popular position in swing state Pennsylvania, and so now she promises not to.

She used to support “Medicare for All,” a great-sounding name for a program that would abolish private health insurance and financially wreck the existing Medicare program. Now she says “never mind.”

She mocked President Trump’s construction of a border wall as a “medieval vanity project.” While Vice President, she supported her boss’s abandonment and demolition of what Trump had constructed, and welcomed the ensuing invasion by over ten million illegal aliens. That’s not very popular in swing border states like Arizona and Nevada – or anywhere else north of the Rio Grande. She’s now saying she supports building that same wall that she mocked.

As a Senator in 2019, she co-sponsored legislation banning gasoline-powered cars by 2040. Now she says she opposes such legislation.

In her 2019 campaign for President, she advocated “mandatory buy-backs” of privately owned guns – a government confiscation that would be in flagrant violation of the Second Amendment. Now she says she disfavors that program.

As Vice President in 2022, she cast a tie-breaking vote in the Senate to increase IRS funding to go after service workers who were not paying taxes on tips. Now, she has copied President Trump’s proposal to abolish federal income tax on tips.

In an utterly unfair and unworkable plan, she now proposes to tax unrealized capital gains. Money will be considered “income” and taxed as such even if it hasn’t actually “come in.”

While contending that she favors a free market, she now wants the government to set the price of groceries and other basic products.  

I’ll say this about her flip-flops. Most of the flips are better than the flops; most of her new positions are better than her old ones. But it’s impossible to believe her. If she’s elected, won’t she flip back to the flops?

That’s a fair question to ask her. But she’s not taking questions. She’s refused to hold a press conference or sit for an interview since becoming the presumed Democratic nominee over a month ago. And unlike her opponent, she was not campaigning prior to that. So, here we are, two months before the election, and the Democratic candidate has never held a campaign press conference or interview.

The media naturally lets her get away with that. They know, as she knows, that she would probably do poorly in an interview. They give her a pass because they want her to win.

She has finally agreed to an interview with a sympathetic host on a sympathetic media outlet. But in a weird twist, she’ll be accompanied by an old white liar that she’s picked as her running mate. No word on whether her mom or her support Labradoodle will also be at her side.

Maybe it will be like “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” where the contestants could phone a friend for help with a question. They’ll call it “Who Wants to be President?”

At the core, this is a hard-left politician who came of age in the hard-left political caldron of San Francisco. She now seeks to edit her leftism out of her past. She has gone so far as to adopt the slogan “unburdened by the past.”

Translation: “In deciding who I would be in the future, pay no attention to who I’ve been in the past.”

She’s a fraud, and the media are consciously complicit.

N.B. The photos are a play on a famous incident of revisionist history by another hard-left outfit, the Soviet Union. The person to the right of Stalin was not actually Kamala (whose face I’ve photoshopped in) but the head of the Soviet secret police. After he fell out of favor, Stalin instructed Soviet censors to doctor the photo to remove him.

Please don’t feed the vagrants

Posted on by
12

People are funny about racoons. These flea-bitten, sometimes rabid, garbage-eating vermin with no visible means of support, elicit, in some people, feelings of love.

A woman in Canada was feeding dozens every day. When she died – of cancer, not rabies – her dying request to her husband was that he continue to feed the racoons. He has done so. And they’ve been fruitful, or at least they’ve multiplied.

A woman in Indiana feeds 25 or more a day. She buys 50-pound bags of dog food for them.

A woman in Colorado found what she called “a baby racoon.” She took it home and adopted it. She and about 20 of her friends adored it. When it grew bigger and problematic, she offered it to the local animal shelter. The shelter refused, and instead called the Health Department.

You can see where this is going. The Health Department showed up at the lady’s door, tested the racoon for rabies, the test was positive, and the lady and her 20 friends had to undergo rabies treatment.

Animals respond to incentives and disincentives. When you incentivize them to come around, they do. They’re soon at your doorstep, in your yard, in your trash, and, if you leave a door open, in your house.

National Geographic – not exactly a group of animal-haters – warns that wildlife experts say feeding the racoons ultimately endangers them by habituating them to busy streets, contributing to their overpopulation, and compromising their ability to fend for themselves.

So it is with vagrants. These flea-bitten, sometimes rabid, garbage-eating vermin with no visible means of support, elicit, in some people, feelings of love.

Those people feed the vagrants. Sometimes food but mainly money. The results are predictable. They’re not fruitful but they do multiply.

Word gets out, and they come from miles around for the freebies. Soon they’re camped under the viaducts, then in the parks, and finally on the sidewalks in their own poop. If you leave a door open, or even closed, they may wind up in your house.

Squatters.

Vagrants rarely have rabies, but they usually have other diseases such as alcoholism, drug abuse, insanity and lice. Their panhandling – presented as a pathetic attempt to get food – is typically a fraudulent means to get money to buy alcohol or drugs.

People who give vagrants money at the stoplights are contributing to their substance diseases. For a moment of selfish feelgoodery, those people are accomplices in the vagrants’ self-destruction.

Giving them food is not as bad as giving them money, since liquor stores and drug dealers don’t take food in payment for liquor and drugs. But it still enables and encourages their lives on the street.

The vagrant-enablers who’ve read this far now think I’m an evil and sadistic person who wants to see vagrants freeze and starve.

That’s not so. I’d like to see them get help. But giving them food or money does not help them; it enables them to keep their lives miserable and to spread some of their misery to the rest of us.

Real help is available at the homeless shelters. There, they can get food and shelter, and can get pointed in the right direction for treatment of their substance addictions and other diseases. The shelters are not likely to call the Health Department, though in appropriate cases they might test them for rabies and they’ll certainly call an ambulance for anyone with a serious, imminent medical condition.

I was interested in the phenomenon of “homeless” people when they first became fashionable some years ago. I spent some time on the streets, did a little panhandling (I scored a Benjamin on the streetcorner in Aspen!) and spoke with many people at the shelters.

Somewhat to my surprise, the staff of the shelters invariably begged me to tell people not to feed the vagrants, for the reasons I’ve stated. Money given to them goes to buy drugs and alcohol, and food given to them enables their vagrancy.

The way to help the vagrants, I was told repeatedly by the shelter staff, is to give them directions to the shelter where they can get food and shelter along with real help and real treatment.

These people don’t need sympathy and freebies. They need treatment and consequences. They need tough love.

For some, their treatment should include involuntary hospitalization in specialized facilities – mental hospitals. Before we became so “compassionate,” we used to give such treatment to people who needed it.

The movie called “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” was instrumental in discrediting such treatment. It was a brilliant movie, but a destructive message that mental institutions are cruel.

It’s a fact that some people need treatment, are not willing to undergo it voluntarily, but are immensely grateful afterward if they get it. It’s a Catch 22 situation, to borrow from another great movie. The people are so insane that they need treatment but are so insane that they won’t voluntarily undergo it.

Should freedom extend so far that we permit insane people to insanely refuse treatment – to the detriment of them and us? Should we allow insane people in need of treatment to insanely reduce themselves to something worse than a racoon?

Here we go again with that hopey-changey scam

Posted on by
3

Barack Obama was elected in 2008 on his vague promise of “hope and change.” It was a shrewd strategy. He played into Americans’ perpetual dissatisfaction with their elected officials. Who doesn’t want change in the political system, and what better thing to hope for?

Moreover, by running mostly on a slogan, he became an empty vessel for people to fill with their individual hankerings. If you hoped that college would be changed to make it tuition free, then Obama’s your man because, after all, he did promise hope and change. If you hoped your dad would change his criminal ways, then Obama’s your man because, after all, he did promise hope and change. If you hoped the Burger King down the street would change to a Chipotle, then Obama’s your man because, after all, he did promise hope and change.

You get the idea.

When Obama was elected, he promptly declared it was the start of a “fundamental transformation” in America. Once again, he kept everyone happy (well, not me) because he wasn’t specific. We had to wait and see.

It all worked for Obama, for long enough. He did fundamentally change America. For the worse, in my opinion. But he did change it.

You might wonder how Obama got away with a campaign so short on particulars. Why didn’t the press ask him for some?

Two reasons. First, the press wanted a Black man to be elected President and would settle for a half-Black one who “identified” as all Black. Indeed, they liked it better that way because this crowd is scared of fully Black men who have left the Democrat plantation. (See, Thomas, Clarence and Sowell, Thomas)

I voted against Obama for reasons having nothing to do with his race. It was because he looked far too liberal to me. His race was actually a positive for me. On election eve in 2008, I felt a bit of pride that America had elected a Black man to be President. What an opportunity for healing, I naively dreamed.

Second, the press even back in 2008 was overwhelmingly liberal, and, despite Obama’s vague campaign, they could see that he was too. People who hang with the Reverend Wright and Bill Ayers are plenty liberal if not downright radical.

These two factors set the stage for the press’s most obvious and shameless bias since the days of Franklin Roosevelt – when we had a world war to win. Because in the minds of the press, we had another world war to win.

Kamala Harris is trotting out Version 2.0 of Hope and Change. Of course she can’t call it that, since Obama owns that empty phrase and, besides, promising “change” sounds funny from someone whose distance away from the presidency the last four years was just a heartbeat, and a very feeble one at that.  

And even she is smart enough not to make a dramatic multicolored poster of herself like the one Obama traded on, pictured above. That’s sui generis. (Art, not so much.)

So . . . she ginned up something similar to “Hope and Change.” It’s “Joy.” We’re told her campaign is full of “joy.” Who dislikes joy?

“Donald Trump, that’s who!” is their punch line.

Just so that we don’t confuse joy with governing, maybe we should have a British-style monarchy where the monarch gets tasked with “joy” while the Prime Minister gets tasked with governing.

The reason for Kamala’s joy is that she looks forward to a future “unburdened by the past.” In other words, don’t judge her by her words and actions in the past, including the past four years. Instead, judge her by the words and actions you imagine her speaking and doing in the future. Anyone who dredges up her words and deeds of the past is not unburdened by the past and is a real killjoy.

Like Obama 16 years ago, she won’t spoil what you imagine her saying and doing in the future with any contradictory words today. Since she became the putative Democratic nominee a month ago, she has not held a single press conference and has not sat for a single interview.

It’s working. As in 2008, the press is mostly in the bag. They’ve half-heartedly criticized her for her metaphorical basement campaign, but you get the sense that what they’re craving are not answers to hard questions, but clicks. They want a press conference not to inform the public – they’ll make sure to make it a Press Conference Lite – but to motivate people to tune in to them and their lame questions.

That’s because, as in 2008, but even more so 16 years later, they want another Black president – this time a Black woman. And once again they’ll settle for one that’s only half-Black. In fact, they prefer it that way, since, as mentioned, fully Black people scare this crowd.

And, as in 2008, they are confident that Kamala is very liberal. Ridiculously so, to the point that even they cannot stop themselves from noting the absurdity of some of her proposals like federal price controls on groceries. (Hot dogs will cost only $0.14, but you have to stand in line two hours to get them – and don’t you dare complain, comrade.)

Soviet-style price controls on groceries aside, the press know that Kamala is in the bag for the left – meaning them – just as they are in the bag for her.

Will it work again? Probably. And then we’ll have Version 2.0 of “Fundamental Transformation.”

The left likes all this transforming, of course. But I sense that it leaves them unsatisfied. They want the transforming, but they’re disappointed that it seems to be happening in a peaceful sort of way, mostly. What fun is a revolution if no heads roll?

But the left typically overplays its hand. They don’t resort to conflict as a means of achieving change; they seek change as a way of provoking conflict. There’s still time for Version 2.0 to crash.

Secret Service helter-skelter

Posted on by
7

Look out! Helter-skelter!

-Paul McCartney and the Beatles, et al

The phrase “helter-skelter” has a storied history (not that we’re burdened by the past, anymore). For centuries it meant something like “confused, disorderly and hurriedly.”

In my lifetime, it was the name of a heavy-metal song by an overrated pop group out of Liverpool with mop hair and skinny pants. A weird, murderous cult figure misinterpreted their song as a prediction of race war in America, maybe because it was on an album that came to be called the “White Album.” (Yes, “White” was capitalized, and they never did produce a “Black Album” or even a “black Album.”)

In short, the meaning of “helter-skelter” over the years has been, well, helter-skelter.

Helter-skelter perfectly describes today’s Secret Service.

Until recently, the head of the Secret Service was a close friend of “doctor” Jill named Kimberly Cheatle. She believed the mission of the Service was to be “diverse.”

Cheatle recruited people with the right sex, right skin shades, and right bedroom habits. She recruited at Gay Pride parades, boasted that she was “striving to be the gold standard of DEI,” hosted a seminar on “the respectful use of pronouns,” and dragged – er, bragged – that her efforts had resulted in “more transgender people” joining the Service.

To get women into the Service, they lowered the physical strength requirements for them. For example, a man must be able to do 11 chin-ups, while a woman need do only 4. Since the lighter women on average are “chinning up” only about 70% of the weight that men are, that means their raw chin-up strength is a small fraction of the men’s. It also means that not only women, but also men pretending to be women, need meet only the much lower women’s standards.

Look out! Helter-skelter!

The Service shot itself in the foot on a routine mission to protect President Trump at a modest campaign rally in semi-rural Pennsylvania. A messed-up would-be assassin with his dad’s gun climbed onto an obvious rooftop vantage and shot the President. The bullet tore through the President’s ear, missing his cranium by a fraction of an inch.

That rooftop within easy rifle range of the podium – even for a 21-year-old kid with no training – had never been secured. Moreover, agents of the Service had seen the shooter well before he fired, and were suspicious, but failed to confront him and failed to warn the President.

Look out! Helter-skelter!

When Trump fell behind the podium with the bullet wound to his ear, about two minutes passed before the Service agents were finally able to get him to his feet and off the stage. At least one of those agents was a woman who was not tall enough to shield the President, and evidently not strong enough to help him off the stage quickly.

Fortunately, the shooter had already been neutralized, else the President would have been a sitting duck. As it was, a person right behind the President was killed and another was seriously injured.

Look out! Helter-skelter!

This all occurred after the Trump campaign had requested additional Service protection. In a decision that almost certainly was made by Cheatle (and probably endorsed by the intern du jour who is running the White House), the request was denied.

Look out! Helter-skelter!

That was also after they had denied additional protection for Robert Kennedy, Jr., who is running against the Democrats this year. (Maybe the denial was because they weren’t aware of the fate of his father and uncle. Or maybe it was because they were.)

Look out! Helter-skelter!

Cheatle in subsequent testimony to Congress equivocated, lied, and cheatled. Er, cheated. In a rare display of bipartisanship, politicians of both parties decided she was not competent to protect politicians. She was pushed out of the Service.

It’s interesting how even Democrats suddenly believe in merit over diversity when it comes to protecting their own hides.

Since then, it has come out that Cheatle had a role in another incident. Cocaine was found last year in the White House not long after a visit by Hunter Biden. DNA tests on the area produced a “partial hit” with DNA that the Service had on file. That suggested that the perp was not the person whose DNA they already had on file, but was a relative of that person.

This isn’t Sherlock Holmes stuff. The obvious inference is that the perp was Hunter – a known cocaine user – and the relative whose near-matching DNA was on file was that of his father, Joe.

Cheatle (a Friend-of-Jill, you’ll recall) asked that the DNA evidence be destroyed along with the contraband cocaine. You don’t want to follow-the-science if it leads to places you don’t want to go.

Her underlings refused to destroy the evidence – an act that could constitute the crime of obstruction of justice. But the Service at her direction refused to pursue any further investigation. The excuse was that it would require interviewing some 500 persons who had been to the spot in question over the preceding weeks.

But that’s not true. They had established through the DNA tests that the person was a relative of a particular person whose DNA was on file. There could not be many suspects. The only suspects would be the relatives of the person whose DNA was a near-match, who had been on-site recently.

It’s highly likely that the person whose near-matching DNA was on file was Joe, and the relative was Hunter. So only one interview was necessary – an interview of Hunter. In fact, they could dispense with even that interview by simply asking Hunter for a cheek swab to check his DNA against the DNA they’d found.

But that would incriminate the criminal. And a mere interview would incriminate him further because he would deny it, thereby committing the additional crime of lying to the investigators.

To protect Hunter, they dropped the investigation.

Look out! Helter-skelter!

A few weeks ago, there was a campaign rally for Kamala Harris. Understandably, local retail businesses were asked to close down briefly for security purposes. Less understandably, the Service broke into one of the stores, put duct tape over the business’ security cameras, and used the bathroom for their own purposes. When they left, they failed to re-lock the store, and left the cameras duct-taped.

Look out! Helter-skelter!

Just today, an agent at a Trump rally abandoned her post to breast feed her baby that she’d apparently brought along with her.

Look out! Helter-skelter!

There might almost comedy in all this. But someone is apt to get killed.

Kamala is not as stupid as advertised

Posted on by
7

In the death throes of his presidency (at least) Joe Biden threw his DEI hire, Kamala Harris, to the back of the bus. Then off it. And then under it.

The Worst President Ever promised/threatened that if he were to withdraw from the 2024 race, his $200,000,000 in campaign funds, plus or minus, would go to her.

Left unsaid was what everyone knew: She’d waste it because she was unelectable.

Joe’s threat became less threatening as time went on and campaign donors went away. Moreover, his physical state became shakier, as did his mental state. Everyone could see it. Even the poodle media like WaPo and NYT, which had covered for him just months earlier, were forced to acknowledge his state and their lie.

Kamala became what might be called in baseball “a late-inning substitution.” Or maybe they would call her “a closer.” If she succeeds, she gets the “save.” She’ll be a “saver” for the Democrats, and perhaps even a savior.

She may well succeed.

President Trump dismisses her as “not very smart.” In a literal sense, he’s right. She’s not very smart.

But Trump uses “not very smart” to mean “stupid.” In that, I think he’s wrong. She’s not as stupid as advertised. For example, she’s not as stupid as Vice President Dan Quayle was deemed to be (and neither was Dan Quayle).

Her Indian mother received a PhD in endocrinology from UC Berkeley. Her Jamaican father was an economics professor at Stanford. I know you’re not supposed to say this, but she comes from pretty good stock.

She earned a law degree from UC Hastings, the tenth-best law school in California according to US News and World Report. She should have gotten into a better school, given her parents’ academic connections, but she did get in and did graduate (sans honors).

Upon graduating, flunking the bar, and then passing it, Harris became a government employee, and has been one ever since. She started as a prosecutor in San Francisco, and was not a bad one. Although she pledged never to seek the death penalty in a case – and kept that promise – she defended the California death penalty in a court challenge, as her position required. She was considered fairly tough on criminals. She pushed for higher bail for violent ones, and issued citations against the parents of truant students for failing to get their kids to school. 

She dated a well-connected California politician who was 31 years her senior named Willie Brown. He obligingly appointed her to several state government positions. She ultimately wormed her way up to the position of Attorney General of California, and then was elected United States Senator.

She gets difficulty points for those high acrobatic positions, even if no style points.  

Her 2020 presidential campaign flopped before the year 2020 began. But give her credit. Four years later, she’s the Democratic candidate. She’s done that without having won a single delegate, ever. She has now jockeyed herself into a close race with former President Trump.

For a person who lost humiliatingly four years ago and got thrown under the bus this year, she’s done alright. She’s in the Big Leagues.

Her policies? To me as a conservative, most of them are terrible. But since when do American voters bother to evaluate policies? It’s about politics, not principles.

In politics, she’s far more clever than the guy currently in the Oval Office basement, because she’s far smarter.

Here’s an illustration. She decided this week not to choose as her running mate the governor of Pennsylvania, a must-win state for her.

The reason Harris passed over him is that he’s Jewish and has been outspoken in his defense of Israel against the barbarian invaders. The governor’s religion and his outspokenness have earned him the contempt of the well-funded terrorist sympathizers in the Democratic Party.

Harris thus showed an abhorrent willingness to compromise principles in order to pander to antisemitism, but also showed a remarkable political shrewdness in doing so.

She might not be very smart, but she’s plenty crafty.

Where do you draw the line on biological men competing in women’s sports?

Posted on by
11

Olympic boxing sunk to a new low last week. An Algerian boxer with XY chromosomes – the ordinary definition of “male” – and commensurate male testosterone levels – beat up a woman in front of thousands of cheering spectators.

The woman who was beat up had to quit 46 seconds into the match, apparently with a broken nose. In tears, she said in her native Italian “not fair, not fair” and explained afterward that she’d “never been hit so hard in my life.”

The XY boxer was declared the winner. Yesterday, the XY boxer won again in a decision where all three judges favored the XY boxer in all three rounds – it was effectively a 9-0 decision – and is headed toward the finals as a clear favorite for the gold medal.

This XY person had previously been disqualified from competition by the International Boxing Association for having tested positive for XY chromosomes and testosterone levels well above the normal range for women – and within the normal range for men.

But the International Olympic Committee disregarded those tests in a feud between them and the IBA. The IOC says the XY has a passport with “female” checked on it, and that’s good enough for them.

The follow-the-science crowd was thus persuaded, ironically, not by a chromosome test or a testosterone test, but by the bureaucrats of the Algerian passport office.  

XY chromosomes result in male anatomy, including testicles. That’s where testosterone is produced. (Testosterone is also produced in female sex organs, but in miniscule levels compared to what’s produced in male testicles.)

Testosterone produces larger, denser muscles, and greater size and strength. This is seen throughout athletics, and is the reason that almost all competitions are divided between male and female competitors.

When men compete against women, the result is a gross mismatch. We saw this in college swimming a few years ago when a swimmer with XY chromosomes who was ranked about 460 in collegiate men’s swimming decided to compete as a woman, and immediately achieved a number one ranking in the women’s sport.

In boxing, the punching power of a male is over two and a half times that of a female. Even that does not tell the whole story. Men are naturally quicker, and so they can land a punch easier and dodge their opponents’ punches easier. Their facial and other bones are bigger, thicker and denser, so they can absorb a punch better. It’s not an exaggeration to say that a man boxing against a woman is like a man boxing against a boy.

What kind of man wants to win a medal by beating up a boy or a woman in front of a cheering crowd?

A bad man, that’s what kind. A man who is arguably a deviant, attention-seeking, woman-beating sadist.

So, where do you draw the line? The IOC is apparently saying that people with XY chromosomes and male testosterone levels can compete against women – so long as they pretend to be women (at least until they launch that first punch).

But why must they pretend to be women? Pretending to be a woman does not make a man into a woman any more than pretending to be a duck makes a person into a duck – no matter how much they look, act and quack like one.

This pretending encourages deceit. It says, “We’ll let you compete as a woman so long as you lie.”

Prominent athletes have condemned these spectacles between women and pretend-women, from gay tennis great Martina Navratilova to transsexual Caitlin Jenner who won gold as Bruce Jenner.

Like them, I don’t care about a person’s sexual “identity.” If they want to hold themselves out as a man when their chromosomes and testosterone says they’re a woman, or vice versa, that’s fine by me. I’ll even play along by using their “preferred pronouns” if that makes them feel good.

But Navratilova, Jenner and I draw a rational, science-based line that does sacrifice women’s athletics on the altar of political fashions. That line is this: People with male chromosomes and testosterone should not compete as women in women’s sports. The result is unfair to women and destructive to their sports.

We’re headed to a world where the only sports are male sports and transgender “female” sports. Women with XX chromosomes need not apply, because they cannot effectively compete against the XYs.  

It’s not only unfair and wrong; it’s dangerous. It’s only a matter of time until before a man kills a woman in the ring. The IOC will have that woman’s blood on their hands.