What does Kamala Harris stand for?  Brown skin?

She's a shape-shifter

After a promising start in January, her campaign has stalled. While she is in the competition for the nomination, she’s stuck in the mid– single digits in most national and early-state polls and draws modest crowds. Perhaps three dozen people showed up to see her in Waterloo, where they were packed into a few rows in front of the stage so that the large room—an ornate century-old former department store—wouldn’t look so empty.

People like Harris; they just can’t quite place her. Like the acquaintance you recognize but can’t recall how you met, she seems both familiar and yet mysterious. Is she a liberal or a moderate, establishment or populist, reformer or radical? Critics point out that she has flip- flopped or obfuscated her positions on important policy issues, like health care and immigration, and the speeches she could use to define herself often devolve into paeans to unity.

For all that, however, Harris remains in the hunt. She consistently polls among the top five candidates in the jumbled Democratic field, and she has the financial resources to remain viable. Her campaign raised $11.6 million in the quarter ending Sept. 30—a respectable haul, although far short of what some other front runners pulled in. As more long-shot candidates bow out of the race, campaign officials expect Harris to benefit from voters’ renewed focus. With a little luck, they say, she still has a fairly clear path to the nomination.

Among the top-polling Democrats, some churn seems inevitable. Former Vice President Joe Biden remains the apparent front runner, but his unsteady debate performances and shambling campaign have many insiders convinced he’s on the brink of collapse. When and if that happens, the next leading candidates, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, could face a rebellion from mainstream Democrats who see them as too left-wing. In such a world, Harris would be well positioned as the alternative: a practical idealist with undeniable political skills and a respected track record of problem solving rather than grandstanding. As a 54-year-old black woman, she also offers a compelling profile for Democrats hungry for diversity and fresh faces. Among the top-tier candidates, who also include Pete Buttigieg, she is one of two women and the only person of color. And she’s younger than the three septuagenarian front runners by a decade and a half.

Criminal-justice reformers charge that Harris is cautious at best and hypocritical at worst, an ambitious pol who wants to have it both ways and lacks the guts to pursue bold reforms. A new wave of progressive DAs like Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner has gone much further than Harris ever did, with initiatives like restricting the use of cash bail, which reformers say unfairly penalizes the poor while allowing the rich to buy their way out of jail. “There’s sort of a laundry list for what it means to be a progressive prosecutor, and she doesn’t check a single one of the boxes,” says Lara Bazelon, a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law. “At least she didn’t when she was an actual prosecutor and she was in a position to do something to make the system more fair.”

Harris, Bazelon notes, dismissed the idea of legalizing marijuana as recently as 2014, but now that it’s popular she supports it. “That seems to be a theme: once she’s not in any sort of political risk, and there’s a consensus that a reform is a good thing, she’s behind it,” Bazelon said. “But when it’s time to be bold and do the right thing, she doesn’t.”

Since her election to the Senate in 2016, Harris has thrilled liberal audiences with her punishing interrogations of Trump Administration officials. She made former Attorney General Jeff Sessions blanch and Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh squirm. And in May, she deftly filleted the current Attorney General, William Barr, asking him, “Has the President or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested that you open an investigation of anyone?” Barr was reduced to stuttering. He wouldn’t or couldn’t answer. In recent weeks, the clip has gone viral again as new questions have arisen about Barr’s involvement in the President’s political pressuring of foreign governments.

Sitting in the office in Los Angeles, Harris says she asked that question on a prosecutor’s hunch. “It has become clear to me that these are the kinds of questions you have to ask members of this Administration,” she says. “What kind of unethical requests has this President made of you? I knew by instinct and by example that it is not beyond him to think that America’s justice system is his personal apparatus for political gain. He’s made that quite clear.”

Various commentators have found Harris elusive, and she can be hard to pin down on policy positions. Early in her presidential campaign she called for abolishing private health insurance, then took it back, then later released a health care plan that would be government- run but allow for both public and private health insurance. In the first debate, Harris scored a clean hit on Biden with her attack on his opposition to federally mandated busing in the 1970s, and surged in the polls. But in the ensuing days she couldn’t definitively describe her own position on busing. When I asked her what ought to be done about the ongoing segregation of public schools, she spent several minutes discussing the need to “speak the truth about all of this,” before finally settling on a prescription: “To deal with this issue,” she said, “we need to collect the data and then we need to expose it.”

By upbringing and orientation, Harris seems to have a strong sense of right and wrong and a fierce drive to fight injustice, coupled with virtually no largescale policy instincts. Presented with a problem, she looks for ways to solve it, starting with data, guided by few firm ideological convictions. “All these grand ideas that academics and so many have about how you’re going to transform the world,” she says. “But, you know, pay attention to the basics.”

Perhaps, in these days of brutal ideological combat, that kind of pragmatism could be sold as refreshing. But in Harris’ case it seems to be having the opposite effect. Some of the attendees at her events in Iowa told me they don’t think she’s progressive enough; others said she strikes them as too far left. “She hasn’t gone far enough to get the activists behind her, but she’s gone too far for some of the moderates,” says Larry Gerston, a professor emeritus of political science at San Jose State University. “So she’s in kind of a no-person’s-land in terms of having a good base.” And yet, polls indicate that Democratic voters still want to like her—if only they can figure out what she’s about.

More HERE 

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Reactions to My Tweet Reveal the Ignorant Brutality of Young Socialists and Communists

Mike Gonzalez

An eye-opening social experiment unfolded on my Twitter feed over the past several days that reveals a lot about America’s new brand of young communists and socialists.

Not to bury the lede: Yes, they are still as repugnantly brutal as their predecessors in St. Petersburg and Phnom Penh—but today they add ignorance and infantilism to the toxic mix.

In other words, it is their professors who are to be blamed. Our young socialists are simply the puppies that Napoleon took away in the beginning of George Orwell’s novella “Animal Farm” and then unleashed on Snowball later on in the book.

Our beef is with today’s Napoleon—that is, the former 1960s radicals who have taken over America’s faculties and indoctrinated America’s youth.

Platforms such as Tumblr and Twitter have amplified the problem by becoming breeding grounds where misinformation and socialist propaganda flourish. Far from keeping to their own dark corners of the internet, the young Marxists also have learned how to weaponize their collective power to bully and harass users who dare disagree.

Here’s what happened. On Oct. 1, the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, that is, the day communist rule was formalized over the planet’s most populous country, I sent out this tweet:

"A landlord murdered at the start of the People’s Republic of China. Nothing to celebrate in 70 years of communism"

The tweet, as you can see, depicts the cruelty that communists visit upon the societies they take over. It has always been thus, from the cold-blooded murder of the Russian tsar’s young children, the massacre of kulaks in Russia, the man-made Holomodor famine in Ukraine, Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward collectivization, the paredon firing squads of Cuba, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the Vietnamese boatpeople, Hungary in 1956, Prague in 1966, Tiananmen Square in 1989, and so on.

At first, I got supportive retweets. Some were from friends who have suffered personally from Marxism and lived to tell about it. One was from Rose Tang, a brave journalist who survived Tiananmen Square and whom I met in Hong Kong in the ’90s. Others were Cuban Americans and Russian Americans. They cover the political gamut. Rose can’t stand President Donald Trump, others like him.

Then something began happening that initially left me puzzled and bemused—then a little bit sad when I realized what it meant about some members of our present generation of youth.

Thousands—no exaggeration, thousands—of retweets and mentions began to pour in from young socialists and communists celebrating the murdering of landlords, bemoaning that a good bullet was wasted when rocks abounded, and even some telling me I was next.

My notifications began to blow up with these chilling messages throughout the day—and it hasn’t stopped yet. Just when I think the users have finished, a new cycle will pick up in the middle of the night and continue through the early morning and afternoon. It’s from around the globe, too.

One reason I was initially bemused is that most of the tweets are utter drivel—the memes these socialists employed were infantile, like this one with the little dog dancing because landlords were murdered—revealing a generation that has spent way too much time in front of video games and not enough reading good books, like “Animal Farm,” or better yet, “Lord of the Flies.”

They celebrated that they had “owned” me, because, you know, “ratio.”

Their responses not only revealed an alarming disregard for human life—they were also utterly ignorant of economics. An important theme was the supposed parasitic nature of landowners. This exposes yet again that they have not been taught the useful function of people who own and upkeep property so that those who cannot own it can have a place to live.

Or perhaps it exposed that far too many socialists have never met a landlord because they are living in their mother’s basement? Hard to say for sure.

But, of course, they never would have concluded that the very nature of owning anything was good, because they oppose the very concept of ownership to begin with. That was another of the themes that emerged in this exercise: To many of our hipster socialists, all “property” is “theft.”

Another theme was that capitalism has produced evils and suffering for the past 300 years, including slavery. I explained here last week how The New York Times has now joined that effort to indoctrinate our youth with this lie with its 1619 Project, which takes off where Howard Zinn and others have led.

And that’s just it. These kids have these views about property not because they’re Neolithic hunter-gatherers with no possessions, but because they have been taught these things by their professors.

The Martin Center explains here how schools of education have been radicalized. Parents have handed their bundles of joy over to ideologues who have reared them in these beliefs. Like the puppies that nearly killed Snowball.

It could be, of course, that some of my critics are Chinese or Russian bots—but the users I looked into seemed authentic. Social media expert Lyndsey Fifield, who manages the social media activities of The Heritage Foundation and The Daily Signal, tells me these events often are coordinated subtly but intentionally appear organic:

“Users know Twitter’s rules for abusive behavior—so instead of sending multiple tweets, prominent users will retweet content to mark it for attack,” Fifield explains, adding:

[D]ozens or hundreds of users who’d otherwise never see your content will begin spontaneously replying with mockery, liking other abusive tweets in the replies—all with the hope that they’re annoying you and making you think your views are in the minority. And if you respond in any way they will delight in doubling down.

So I was glad to ignore it, but many people noticed and were horrified. Users such as Rod Dreher and Amy Alkon, both of whom I respect, retweeted my tweet and urged others to simply read my replies to see what socialists in 2018 are really about.

Fifield says we should take heart—these tweets, she says, are not at all representative of what most Americans think. Although the rising popularity of socialism with young Americans is real, Twitter is where the most extreme spend their time.

Data suggests Fifield is right—Joe Berkowitz recently pointed out in Fast Company that surveys show that “Twitter users are younger, more likely to identify as Democrats, more highly educated, and have higher incomes than U.S. adults overall. Twitter users also differ from the broader population on some key social issues.”

So the woke minority is just that, a minority, as the Hidden Tribes of America project made clear here in 2018. They are mostly white, supercredentialed (not actually educated, though, obviously), and deeply entrenched in the culture.

It’s hard to believe such a coddled bunch represents a threat.

SOURCE 

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Democrats are wrong. Middle-class incomes surging – thanks to Trump policies

By Steve Moore

Democrats downplaying Trump's economic success
Reaction from University of Chicago economics professor Austan Goolsbee and Heritage Foundation economist Steve Moore.

The latest Census Bureau Current Population Survey data now show that middle-class incomes, after adjusting for inflation, have surged by $5,003 since Donald Trump became president in January 2017. Median household income has now reached $65,976 – an all-time high and up more than 8 percent in 2019 dollars under the Trump presidency.

This data was compiled by the statisticians at Sentier Research, an economic research group whose founders have more than 30 years of experience at the Census Bureau in analyzing the monthly income numbers.

I reported last week in the Wall Street Journal that real median family income had soared by $4,146 under Trump through July 2019. The just-released August numbers from Sentier show a huge monthly gain of $857 in income per household.

These numbers contrast sharply with the 16 years prior to Trump’s presidency. In the eight years that George W. Bush was president, median income barely showed any gain, up just $401 thanks to the deep recession of 2008.

In the seven and a half years that Barack Obama was president, and not including the end of the recession, which Obama inherited, incomes inched up by $1,043 (June 2009 – January 2019). This means that in the 16 years before the Trump presidency, incomes rose by about $1,500 while in less than three years middle incomes have risen three times faster.

The contrast is even sharper when measured on a monthy basis. The monthly rise in incomes under Bush was $4. That number was $11 under Obama and $161 under Trump.

These income numbers are PRE-TAX, so they do NOT include the impact of the Trump tax cut. The Heritage Foundation estimates that the average household has saved $1,400 a year on their federal taxes from the 2017 Trump tax cut. This means many working-class families now have a $6,000 higher after-tax, and after-inflation paycheck today.

These surges in income, especially in the last several months, have occurred at exactly the time when many liberal economists and media talking heads were shouting “recession.” In reality middle-class families were enjoying a near-unprecedented income windfall and “the gains in income levels in recent months,” Sentier reports, “have been accelerating.“

These surges in income, especially in the last several months, have occurred at exactly the time when many liberal economists and media talking heads were shouting “recession.”

These higher wage and salary incomes are no doubt related to the very tight labor market, which has given workers new bargaining power to ask for higher pay. Today there are more than seven million unfilled jobs in America – the highest number of surplus jobs in American history.

These latest income numbers also squarely contradict the claims by Democratic presidential candidates, such as former Vice President Joe Biden and Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who claim that all the gains from the Trump economy have gone to the rich and large corporations. Warren claimed earlier this year that workers had to work "two or three or four jobs" just to keep their incomes from falling.

No, this has been one of the biggest middle-class success stories in modern times, and it is a testament to the success of the Trump tax, regulatory and energy policies.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), A Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here  (Personal).  My annual picture page is here 

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