Donald Trump is, was and will always be Donald Trump. It’s why we love him. All this hand wringing, once again, about him not taking this opportunity to not be Donald Trump is just a recycle of a well worn smear.
“Harris came out calm, exceeded low expectations, repeated well her memorized talking points, avoided until the last 20 minutes her trademark word-salads, and repeatedly baited and incited an increasingly angrier Trump.” Yes, he got angry. I’m angry. What rational American isn’t angry? These evil clowns are whistling, cackling past the graveyard…..but those whose eyes have been opened are enraged.
As for ‘moving the dial,’ the left will never be moved to reason. It’s a mental illness. I’m sure you saw the clip of the parents whose young son was killed by a Haitian migrant who said they wish a white person killed him because it reflects badly on the migrants. This is beyond irrationality. It’s madness.
The takeaway from the debate is the media is the gravest threat to America. ABC moderators presented a Kafkaesque show of bias, one sided “fact checks” and debate rigging. Trump was debating the moderators not the flapping-tongued Harris. If they could have pulled a Crooks, they would have.
What do we remember, if anything now, about the second presidential debate of 2012?
Not whether Obama or Romney won.
But only how CNN’s Candy Crowley blew up her career and embarrassed CNN—by outrageously hijacking the debate, and as a partisan, fact-checking (and erroneously so) Romney in efforts to help Obama.
So, too, we won’t remember much of these debate details, given the shameful role of the two ABC moderators.
Harris came out calm, exceeded low expectations, repeated well her memorized talking points, avoided until the last 20 minutes her trademark word-salads, and repeatedly baited and incited an increasingly angrier Trump.
Harris called for unity, while smearing him as a racist and repeating the old lies about Charlottesville, “bloodbath,” the 2025 project, and Trump’s supposed support for a federal ban on abortion.
Trump might seem to have matched or beaten Harris if one only reads a transcript of the entire debate—given she never honestly would or could reconcile her past and antithetical present positions.
Nor could Harris explain why she simply did not implement her visions either the last three years or would do so in the next five months.
An irritated Trump started well and ended well; she in-between calmly and successfully at times baited and got Trump’s goat.
But all that will neither matter nor be recalled.
The debate will instead be remembered as a three-on-one pile-on, given the unprofessional and biased team of ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis. Rather than refuting pre-debate fears that their past anti-Trump biases would warp the debate, they only confirmed them.
Both disrupted the tempo to fact check (sometimes in error), and to editorialize Trump’s statements, while letting Harris’s Charlottesville, IVF, national abortion ban, “bloodbath” or 2025 lies go unchecked.
Often their disruptive fact checks of Trump were simply wrong, such as their preposterous claim that no states allow partial birth or late abortions where the viable baby is terminated—when at least six states put no limitations on any abortions.
The questions addressed to Trump on January 6 were designed to provoke. They had no counterpart addressed to Harris—as for example, would she distance herself from Biden, or how she came to win the nomination without winning any elected delegates, or her last person in the room on Afghanistan boast, or if she wished to retract any of her inflammatory past statements, such as bragging that the deadly 2020 demonstrations would not and should not stop, or her tweets to help bail out violent 2020 rioters, or her lie that the border patrol whipped immigrants in the manner reminiscent of slavery and the Klan, or her boast that she was a radical and woke.
Instead, Muir and Davis only asked Trump about supposedly controversial past statements.
Harris was never reprimanded for trying to speak over Trump. Trump was reminded to address the question asked; not so Harris who rarely did.
Watching the entire debate may have aided Harris, given her low expectations. Yet the better sound bites in the next week may help Trump. But the moderators’ shameless bias may swing empathy toward Trump.
So, the real story was how ABC’s moderators ruined the debate, their own reputations, and their network’s brand.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2024-09-12 11:51:232024-09-12 11:51:23The Best Debate Take
I was wondering, not exactly idly, where American foreign aid now is sent, and found online a list of the ten countries that receive the most aid from Washington. Here is that list.
In 2023, the United States spent nearly $61 billion on foreign aid. Fully half of that budget has gone to just ten countries:
Ukraine ($16.4 billion)
Israel ($3.3 billion)
Ethiopia ($1.95 billion)
Jordan ($1.65 billion)
Egypt ($1.43 billion)
Afghanistan ($1.19 billion)
Somalia ($1.13 billion)
Yemen ($1.05 billion)
Congo ($987 million)
Syria ($896 million)
Now I have no objection to aid for Ukraine, as it fights to push Putin’s troops out of the country. This unusually large sum — $16.4 billion, and much more so far in 2024 — far outstrips the amounts for the other recipients of aid. This aid only started to be given in 2020, after Russia invaded Ukraine, and it will not continue at anything like that level once that Ukraine-Russia war is over.
As for #2 on the list, I certainly do not object to the sums given to Israel, which for the fourth time in its young life is having to fight for its very existence (the previous wars were in 1948, 1967, and 1973) as it faces a seven-front war, with Hamas in Gaza, with Hezbollah in Lebanon, with the Houthis in Lebanon, with Assad’s army in Syria, with assorted terrorist groups — Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — in Judea and Samaria, with the Shi’a militia, Kata’ib Hezbollah, in Iraq, and looming behind them all, pulling the strings of these various proxies, the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Nor do I begrudge Ethiopia its aid, for that Christian country has endured several years of severe drought and internal conflict, including the war involving the Ethiopian central government and the northernmost region of Tigray. Ethiopia has once again become engaged in violent internal conflict, this time involving militia groups from the regions of Amhara and Oromia. And Ethiopia has long had a close relationship with the United States for many decades, beginning under the reign of Haile Selassie. The amount we provide is to help the government restore peace; as with the aid given to Ukraine, it isn’t intended to be a long-term commitment.
But. beyond that, I wonder. Of the seven remaining countries on the list of the top ten recipients, all but one are Muslim countries. Why are we transferring wealth to Muslim countries when the Arab states of the Gulf have trillions of dollars in their sovereign funds? Why do we not insist that the rich Arabs should be helping their brethren, instead of assuming that we should support Muslim states that, precisely because they are Muslim, cannot possibly be our friends (as the Qur’an directs them not to be; see suras 3:28 and 5:51)? Saudi Arabia has more than $1 trillion in its sovereign wealth fund. The UAE has even more: $1.7 trillion. In the first half of 2024 the sovereign wealth funds of five Gulf Arab states — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain — invested $39 billion. Surely they can spare $8 billion to provide to other Arab states, which is roughly the total the United States now gives to the seven Muslim states on the list above.
For reasons that deserve to be pondered, Anwar Sadat got the American aid ball rolling for Egypt with his “prince-of-peace” impersonation. And that money has continued ever since, despite the litany of human rights abuses in that country. Egypt need not be continuously bribed to keep the peace with Israel. What keeps the peace between Israel and Egypt is the IDF. If Egypt needs money, the Gulf states, whose monarchs share El-Sisi’s fear and hatred of the Muslim Brotherhood, should be happy to help.
Jordan, similarly, need not be given large sums by the Americans. The Hashemite king need only hold out his hand in Eleemosynary Position #1, and the Emirates and Saudis will be glad to help out a fellow monarch, especially one who doesn’t want to be overthrown by the two-thirds of his population that is Palestinian. That would be a dangerous example for the monarchs in the Gulf. King Abdullah, like the Saudi Crown Prince and the Emirati rulers, is prepared to repress the Muslim Brotherhood. He, too, needs no American bribe to keep the peace with Israel. The IDF maintains that peace.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2024-09-12 11:51:222024-09-12 11:51:22A Very Short List, and a Very Long Question
Some Pennsylvania voters on CNN and CBS News panels praised former President Donald Trump’s Tuesday debate performance while criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris.
Harris and Trump went head-to-head in their first debate on ABC News, with the race still neck-and-neck. While most voters on the corporate media panels in the crucial commonwealth leaned toward Harris post-debate, two individuals from each segment explained their support for Trump.
“He spoke facts. She just basically repeated everything that Biden has said in the past,” a female voter, who said Trump won the debate, asserted on CBS.
“Donald Trump made a strong closing statement by saying, ‘Why didn’t they do all of the things she’s proposing during the three-and-a-half years that they were in office?’ And Biden did this entire moderate stance back in 2020. And she’s trying to do it again in 2024,” said a male voter on the panel, who also asserted Trump won the debate. “But she didn’t talk about her policy changes between 2020 and 2024. Her whole centrist moderate stance is just a façade.”
WATCH:
ABC News debate moderator Linsey Davis provided Harris an opportunity to address her numerous policy changes, but the vice president instead used her time to discuss her “values” rather than explaining her shifting stances.
The male voter later commended Trump for trying to discuss illegal immigration while alleging Harris “deflected” instead of addressing the issue.
WATCH:
A female voter featured on the CNN panel who was undecided before the debate and now believes Trump won the face-off said she was unsure of whether she can trust Harris’ assertions that she can solve the issues that Americans have experienced during her administration.
“I think it’s important to remember that we are voting for the leader of our country and not who we like the most or who we want in our wedding party, but who is actually going to make our country better. And we’re in an incredibly unique situation where we’ve had both of the candidates in office before, and we’ve gotten to see what they would do and when facts come to facts, my life was better when Trump was in office,” she said. “The economy was higher, inflation was lower, things were better overall. And now with Kamala’s administration, things haven’t been so fantastic. And she’s saying she can fix the problems that her administration has caused, but I just don’t know if I can afford to take that risk.”
A male military veteran on the panel who is still undecided after the debate, but also asserted he thinks Trump came out on top explained why he appreciated the former president’s answer on the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal.
“When I first heard that we were abandoning or we were withdrawing from Afghanistan and the way it was happening, I had my Kennedy moment. It was very similar to when we decided to invade Iraq back under President Bush,” he said. “And when I saw that we were leaving, that amount of high tech equipment in the hands of our enemy, and later that that day or later that week, I saw on the news where them celebrating with our guns in their hands. I realized what a travesty that was … in the loss of money in that we abandoned when we left. Plus the very bullets that we left there that they were shooting at us as we flew away in the plane.”
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2024-09-12 09:54:592024-09-12 09:54:59‘He Spoke Facts’: Some Key Swing-State Voters On Corporate Media Panels Praise Trump, Criticize Harris
The phrase “separation of church and state” is widely misunderstood. Often, it’s raised as an argument against Christians who engage in politics. Yet, the separation of church and state is nowhere in the U.S. Constitution nor any founding documents. Rather, it can be found in a personal letter penned by Thomas Jefferson in 1802 to the Danbury Baptist Association. In the name of religious freedom, Jefferson wrote not that the church should stay out of government affairs, but that government affairs have no place interfering with the church.
In his 2024 election sermon, Cornerstone Chapel Senior Pastor Gary Hamrick explained how in our country’s history, “[T]he church has always played … a critical role in speaking out about faith and politics and how faith should shape our politics.” Over time, he acknowledged, “Jefferson’s phrase [concerning the] separation of church and state … letter has been used to remove God from the public square and to remove church from government influence.” Rather than protecting our First Amendment rights, those in opposition have sought to intimidate “a lot of pastors from addressing things that are referred to as political in the pulpit.”
But as believers, we can’t afford to allow these tactics to push us back into the shadows of fear. Consider Jesus’s words from Matthew 5:13-16:
“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet. You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.”
Our Lord could not have been clearer: we are meant to be seen, and we are meant to have an impact. That’s what it means to be salt and light. Some Christians believe this truth, except when it comes to politics. In light of this, Hamrick half-joked, “Please save the emails accusing me of being political.” Because in all seriousness, “I’m not being political.” What the pastor went on to contend is the very truth all believers need to engrain into their minds: to discuss policy and government affairs is not to “be political.” It is simply a matter of biblical obedience.
According to Hamrick, Christians have to understand “that the culture has hijacked the narrative on social and moral issues” in order to gloss over the fact “that the Bible has already addressed” them all. “[T]he culture has twisted … distorted and perverted those social and moral issues into political issues” to deter people of faith from speaking out about them. And to this, the pastor underscored, “I have news for our culture: God had a say on all these subjects long before there was even a word ‘political.’”
He continued, “God had the first word long before anybody. And so, it’s important to understand we’re just talking about the biblical issues, and we’re looking at what is happening in our culture, and especially on the presidential election level” to be salt and light through our voting and other political engagement. “[I]f Christians would come together and vote their values,” Hamrick stated, “we could change America.”
As Hamrick made clear, the church needs to “be equipped to know who to vote for or who not to vote for, based on whether that candidate’s policies more closely align with biblical values.” In doing so, believers are not to “look to a person to save us,” because “our faith is not in a political hero.” Instead, we reflect on the reality that “our faith is in the Savior,” Jesus Christ, and “He is our only hope for America.” Hamrick went on to emphasize that “we have a moral obligation to represent Christ as ambassadors, and one way to do this is through politics.
“[B]y political engagement,” he added, “I mean advocating for policies that promote righteousness, voting for candidates who most closely represent our biblical values, praying for our elected leaders and holding them accountable, and even running for elected office” if God calls one to do so. Because ultimately, “if Christians do not stay politically engaged … what will fill the vacuum” other than “every evil demonic practice”?
Hamrick said it well when he observed that while “good government cannot save us,” bad government can certainly harm us. With the upcoming election in mind, he then posed the question: “What can we do to advance the kingdom of God for the glory of God, and to stem the tide of evil in our land until Jesus comes?” Considering this question, there’s one crucial thought to keep in mind during a time of political mayhem: there will never be a perfect candidate on the ballot. Even so, “God uses flawed, sinful people.”
According to Hamrick, his major concern is not that Christians don’t want to do the right thing and use their vote, but that they won’t vote for any “candidate who doesn’t have the total package.” This mindset, he went on to explain, is dangerous.
“I understand elections are serious things with serious consequences,” he said. And yet, “what other decisions do you make in your life that must meet 100% of the criteria?” What other decisions do we choose to only move forward with if they meet 100% of what we want? The truth is, if we’re to probe this question, most of us will find that we “don’t make a decision based on 100%. … Nothing is 100% based on certain criteria.”
Consider your spouse, job, church, house, or school. Do any of these areas meet every single one of your expectations? Would you consider any of them to be absolutely 100% perfect? For the vast majority, chances are the answer is no. And that’s because, as the pastor contended, there is “no perfect spouse. There’s no perfect church. There’s no perfect child. There’s no perfect job. There’s no perfect neighborhood. And … there is no perfect candidate.” Jesus Christ is the only Being who is perfect. And if we want to make progress in advancing the gospel in all areas of this life, we have to “get over looking for the most perfect person” and start voting “for the better choice.”
To hammer this point home, Hamrick took time to emphasize the many examples of imperfect leaders Scripture has to offer. For instance, “David was a righteous leader” and “a man after God’s own heart. But he committed adultery.” Yet, God still used him. Hezekiah, another righteous king, “had terrible foreign policy that also incurred the wrath of God as a national judgment.” Yet, God still used him. And Samson, who’s mentioned in the Hebrews 11 Hall of Faith, had “a weakness for women.” Yet, God still used him.
“I’m not making excuses for their bad behavior or their sin,” Hamrick clarified. “They all paid consequences for their sin.” But “my point is that God uses flawed people to promote good policies for a nation. You see it all through the Bible.” This is also true of the way God uses the unrighteous, such as King Nebuchadnezzar, to “put it on their hearts to do righteous things for Israel and for the Jewish people.” In the Bible, God used “unrighteous kings” to establish policies “that promoted good for the benefit of the nation,” and He can do the same today.
“Please stop looking at the person and look at their policies,” Hamrick pleaded. Because, looking at it in black and white, the choice can become easier. “On a personal level,” he noted, “I’d rather have a mean orange man who gave us three Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe v. Wade than a joyful hen who believes in killing babies in the ninth month.” Ultimately, “[W]e have to stop focusing on who’s a good candidate, because Jesus said in Luke 18:19, ‘No one is good except God.’” If we take this at face value, then we can finally understand “there is no good candidate.” But God being God means He can use anyone “to accomplish His good purposes.”
So, as we move closer to the election, Hamrick suggested we consider these seven top issues as we determine who is the better candidate: judicial nominees, border security, Israel, religious liberty, biological sex, family, and life. All these topics, and more, have already been addressed within the pages of Scripture. And as we analyze them, the pastor urged us to remember that voting is “not just a right and a privilege. It’s a duty.” Silence is simply not an option.
Consider the fact that “God entrusts a lot to us,” Hamrick emphasized. “[O]ne of the things He has entrusted to us is the wonderful privilege as Americans of living in the greatest and freest country in the world. … He’s entrusted this freedom to us.” And so, we have to ask, “[W]hat are we going to do with what He’s entrusted to us? … Because if we do nothing, if we check out, if we remain silent, evil will rush into the vacuum.”
Even this pastor, as passionate as his sermon was, noted that, concerning this upcoming election, he’s “not an enthusiastic voter.” Yet he asserted nonetheless, “I’m going to vote.”
He referenced the words of Frederick Douglass, who said, “I will unite with anyone to do right and no one to do wrong.” And even in these times, there are numerous groups and people Christians can fight alongside to do what is right. With this, Hamrick concluded: “Until Jesus comes, get out there [and] vote. Be His ambassadors. Be salt and light in this world and advance the kingdom of God for the glory of God to stem the tide of evil in our land until Jesus comes. Let your voices be heard. Let your votes be counted, and let God arise, and let His enemies be scattered.”
The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2024-09-12 09:54:572024-09-12 09:54:57Pastor Hamrick: ‘Get Over Looking for the Most Perfect Person’ and ‘Vote for the Better Choice’
One of the more disturbing parts of the recent Presidential debate was when one of the moderators asked Kamala Harris about her flip-flopping on key issues like guns and fracking. Kudos to the moderator who raised the question, but shame on them for letting her avoid providing an answer.
She prevaricated for more than two minutes and then used a canned phrase, “My values have not changed.” She has been using this phrase recently in a number of formats.
Yahoo Finance thinks flip-flopping is good. It shows Kamala Harris moving toward the center where voters want her to be. However, it is more likely she is lying to get elected, and she will revert to her San Francisco roots as soon as she is elected. That is a considerable risk for voters and the country.
ADVERTISEMENT
Remember, Biden ran as a “moderate” who would unite the country. Instead, he has governed as a radical and divided the country further.
Since politicians are known to say anything to get elected, their actual track record is what matters most. Harris has a stellar record as an extreme left-wing Senator and Vice President. Trump has established that, and his campaign needs to continue to prevent her from being let off the hook for her past positions.
Moreover, there is something insidiously deceptive about the phrase, “My values have not changed.” She seems to be saying that her underlying beliefs that will inform her governing decisions have not changed, but she is lying just to get elected.
Most people form a worldview of some sort derived from their parents, education, community, and religion. These values guide their lives, and policy positions are informed by those values. You can’t divorce policy from values or personal behavior.
She served as a loyal Vice President in perhaps the most left-wing administration in history. She was intimately involved in the disastrous retreat from Afghanistan and signed critical legislation as the tiebreaker that led to the worst inflation in 50 years.
She has been deeply involved in all the recent Democrat assaults on our system: intimidating Supreme Court Justices, weaponizing law enforcement and intelligence agencies to attack political opponents, blowing out the fiscal budget, colluding with foreign intelligence, using Federal agencies to interfere in elections, aiding Iran, calling MAGA supporter domestic terrorists, accusing the military of white supremacy, harming Israel, erasing the concept and legal standing of women, and conspiring with media oligarchs to censor free speech.
She has stood silently as Joe Biden descends into dementia, leaving the entire nation at risk while wars rage around the world.
She stood by, likely knowing (or at least should have known from press reports and Congressional hearings) that financial ties to Russia, Ukraine, and China compromised the Biden family. She knew or should have known, that such behavior is a grave national security risk, if not unspeakable corruption at the highest levels of our politics.
If you are loyal to a scoundrel, what does that tell you about her “values”?
Culturally, she has always been for abortion on demand and has endorsed the radical transgender social agenda.
Her religious affiliations don’t provide much guidance to her values. She says she is a Baptist, raised by a communist father and a Hindu mother, and is married to a liberal reform Jewish attorney. Her husband, in a previous marriage, got the nanny pregnant. Who you choose to marry also reflects “your values.”
However, her behavior would indicate that this amalgam of religious “values” does not seem to inform her conduct. She had a long affair with a married man. As a San Francisco politician, she has long been a promoter of homosexual and transgender agendas.
According to the gay newspaper The Advocate:
“She was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016. She received perfect 100 scores on the Human Rights Campaign Congressional Scorecard, which measures support for LGBTQ+ equality, before leaving the Senate to become vice president. Her record likewise includes perfect ratings from reproductive rights groups such as Planned Parenthood Action Fund, NARAL Pro-Choice America (now known as Reproductive Freedom for All), and NARAL Pro-Choice California.”
When she was running for President in 2019, she filled out a form requested by the ACLU. According to the Independent, an English newspaper:
“Harris’s answers on the form by the American Civil Liberties Union indicate that she once backed funding cuts to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and supported taxes being used to fund gender transition surgeries for federal prisoners and detained immigrants. The now-vice president also backed federally decriminalizing drug possession for personal use, and she pledged to “end” immigration detention.”
She was widely sympathetic to riots and violence by Black Lives Matter and supported a fund to provide bail for those arrested. She was among those who wanted to “re-imagine” law enforcement by reducing or eliminating bail, letting prisoners out of prisons, abolishing the idea of prisons and incarceration, defunding the police, and substituting social workers for police. She seems to feel criminals have no moral agency in their behavior and that their violence and theft are simply a product of the environment.
She says that she wants to abolish private health insurance.
She has proposed price controls and the seizure of the private property of patent holders.
What values support such positions? And she tells us her values have not changed.
She has the values of an ultra-left liberal. Economically, she supports socialist answers and believes in wealth redistribution through currency debasement and high confiscatory taxation. She is a cultural Marxist.
She believes in higher capital gains taxes and even capital gains on unrealized gains, which would destroy the stock market.
That is her record. She came to these positions through the values she says have not changed. She will say anything to get elected but cannot hide from such an extensive history of progressive positions.
Finally, her choice of Vice President Tim Walz, also a far-left progressive, tells you where her values are.
Thus, if someone tells you their values have not changed, believe them. Taking temporary policy positions to win votes is simply a deception. A deceitful person should not get your vote.
One may disagree with Trump, but Trump is a known quantity. Given his high profile, one can find interviews on YouTube from 40 years ago in which he says the same thing he does today.
He may be rambunctious. He may be arrogant. He may be unconventional for a politician. But unlike Kamala Harris, he is not trying to hide his positions on important matters of the day.
TAKE ACTION
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2024-09-12 02:32:002024-09-12 02:32:00Flip Flopping, “My Values Have Not Changed”, and Deceit
In an article titled “Harris Flip-Flops on Building the Border Wall,” Axios is reporting that Kamala Harris is suddenly pledging to “spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the wall along the southern border.”
That claim is demonstrably false and is based on a misrepresentation of the Senate Border Act of 2024, which has been repeatedly misportrayed as a “tough” border bill.
Axios’ article, written by Alex Thompson and Hans Nichols, claims that Harris promised to build a wall because she announced at the “Democratic National Convention last week” that she “wouldsign the recent bipartisan border security bill.” And according to a statement obtained by Axios from Republican Senator James Lankford (OK), the bill “requires the Trump border wall.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Those claims are highly misleading for two reasons.
First, Harris’ support of the bill isn’t new or noteworthy, as Axios leads its readers to believe. Biden has repeatedly lobbied to pass the bill, Senate Democrats overwhelmingly voted for it, and Harris ran a television ad before the convention bragging that she “backed” the bill.
Second, the actual text of the bill makes funds “available” for a border barrier but doesn’t require it to be built. Pages 76–78 of the bill contain the operative text, which:
allocates “funds” that “remain available until September 30, 2028” for a “steel bollard pedestrian barrier.”
Those facts are reinforced by pages 76–77 of the bill, which document that the funds for the border barrier were “made available” in laws passed in 2020 and 2021 but weren’t spent.
In short, Axios misconstrues the availability of funds as a requirement to use them.
As explained by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Congress generally appropriates budget authority to an agency for use during a specific period…. However, agencies do not always obligate and outlay these funds in time, which ultimately results in cancelled appropriations.”
ADVERTISEMENT
The “Tough” Border Bill
Axios’ article adds to the long string of claims that falsely portray the Senate Border Act as tough. This is a frequent talking point of Democrats like:
Joe Biden, who called it “the toughest border enforcement in history.”
U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (CT), who called it “the toughest border security bill in decades.”
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who said the bill “would have delivered the toughest border measures in decades.”
U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich (NM), who called it “the toughest border security legislation in history.”
Kamala Harris, who called it “the toughest border control bill in decades.”
In reality, the bill’s 370 pages of legalese are laced with loopholes that codify Biden’s open border policies. Chris Murphy, the Democrat architect of the bill, spelled out these provisions in a moment of candor while selling the bill to his followers:
“The border never closes.”
Asylum claims are “processed in a non-detained, non-adversarial way.”
“Most asylum seekers can work immediately.”
There is a “slightly higher asylum screening standard at the border.”
“All immigrants” receive a “brand new right to legal representation.”
Shutdown authority “can only be used for a limited number of days per year” and “sunsets in 3 years.”
“Emergency cases that show up in between the ports still need to be accepted.”
“The ports must process a minimum of 1400 claims a day.”
There is a “new pathway to citizenship for Afghan parolees (the Afghan Adjustment Act) and the children of H1B holders.”
In vivid contrast, House Republicans passed a bill that would build the wall and close loopholes used by Biden that allow and entice illegal immigration. However, 100% of House Democrats voted against it, and Senate Democrats shelved it. In the words of the Congressional Budget Office, the Republican bill would:
“require DHS to construct at least 900 miles of wall and physical barriers.”
“require the federal government to detain arriving aliens or return them.”
ban “handing out work permits for simply crossing at a port of entry.”
“limit both the rules of eligibility” to “apply for asylum” and the “circumstances under which asylum could be granted.”
“create a new criminal penalty for overstaying a visa.”
“require all U.S. employers to use E-Verify, the federal web-based system for confirming eligibility to work.”
“significantly restrict” the President’s “ability to grant parole.”
A Gallup survey conducted in June found that 77% of U.S. adults consider “the situation at the U.S. border with Mexico” to be a “crisis” or “major problem.” By portraying Harris and Democrats as tough on the border, Axios and other media outlets like ABC are misinforming voters about an issue with deadly implications.
Why Does Trump Oppose the Senate Bill?
Another canard in the same Axios article is the claim that Trump “ordered his allies to kill” the Senate Border Act, “fearing it would help Democrats in the November elections.”
That common allegation is derived from a post that Trump made on Truth Social in which he stated, “This Bill is a great gift to the Democrats, and a Death Wish for The Republican Party.”
Contradicting the Democrat and media spin that Trump opposes the bill because he doesn’t want the border crisis fixed before the election, Trump wrote in the very same post that the bill must be defeated because it:
“only gives Shutdown Authority after 5000 Encounters a day, when we already have the right to CLOSE THE BORDER NOW, which must be done.”
“takes the HORRIBLE JOB the Democrats have done on Immigration and the Border, absolves them, and puts it all squarely on the shoulders of Republicans.”
In summary, the claim that Kamala Harris promised to build a border wall has no basis in realityand bolsters counterfactual propaganda that Democrats are strong on border security. Meanwhile, Democrats universally opposed a strong border bill, and objective measures show that the border has been far less secure under Biden and Harris than ever recorded in the nation’s history.
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2024-09-12 02:31:002024-09-12 02:31:00No, Kamala Harris Hasn’t Promised to Build a Border Wall
Meta (Facebook and Instagram) has almost 4 billion active users and moderates content based on Community Standards. Its “Bullying and Harassment” Community Standard generally requires removal of targeted bullying against children and bullying that the victim specifically asks to be removed. This means that videos of trans-identifying men entering women’s sports and spaces, or generally identifying these males as males, is allowed on Meta platform. And for good cause. Frank discussion about and the visualization of trans-identifying males in women’s sports and spaces has been crucial to protecting women, and preserving truth itself.
But all that may change.
ADVERTISEMENT
Meta’s Oversight Board is considering removing two videos that currently abide by Community Standards: one of a trans-identifying male in a women’s bathroom, who asserts a right to be there, and another of a male winning a women’s athletic competition, upsetting many participants and their parents. We believe these two videos are here and here.
In this removal process, the Oversight Board is considering “policy recommendations” that would better consider “the rights of transgender people, especially for access to single-sex spaces and participation in sporting events.” The Oversight Board’s removal decisions are final. Its policy recommendations are not final, but extremely influential to changing Meta’s Community Standards.
The stakes could not be higher. If truthful, real-life discussions about biological sex are banned from Meta, the uniqueness of womanhood, not to mention the progress of women, will be eroded. A speech-prohibitive policy would cripple any large-scale movement to protect women’s sports, domestic abuse shelters, prisons, or overnight camps. But censoring the truth has consequences far beyond this. Threatening the reality of sex works to dissolve the very fabric of our society.
Independent Women’s Forum plans to submit comments on behalf of women and men across this country who wish to speak honestly on this topic. Use this form to tell Meta why this speech matters to you, this country, and our future generation.
The Left will say that leaving these sorts of videos up threatens lives. That’s dangerous and false, but it’s incredibly weighty. The trans-identifying population is online and does have a high suicidality rate, and Meta is cognizant of that. Those in favor of women, truth, equal dignity, civilization, speech, inner peace, and happiness must be equally serious.
To that end, the best type of comment could address, for example:
ADVERTISEMENT
How sex-based speech (including videos) protects women;
How sex-based speech informs the public to best accommodate both trans-identifying individuals and women in tandem;
How censorship of sex-based speech would cause harm in ways the Board may not be thinking about;
How sex-based speech is not harassment;
How social transition ultimately harms many trans-identifying individuals; or
That Meta would lose credibility as an organization for taking such an extreme position.
While comments should recognize the enormity of the consequences, be compassionate, persuasive, and thoughtful in your entries.
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2024-09-12 02:28:002024-09-12 02:28:00Meta’s New Policy Could Erase Women
The new cool kids are all into it. They banter the term around all the time. It is either “decolonization” or “postcolonization.” They like to tell us it concerns their favored terrorist group—Hamas—even though the last colonists there were the Brits. With everyone talking about it, I thought I would look at how decolonization is going.
It worked well for us, the Americans. Pretty well for the Canadians until Pierre Trudeau unleashed his devil child upon them. The Aussies and Kiwis are doing well. Hong Kong was doing great until the barbaric Chinese took it over. Then matters start going downhill from there.
Of course, the rest of the world was ruled by other countries at various levels. There were the Romans, the Greeks, the Mongols, the Turks, the Macedonians, the Ottomans, and a slew of others who were set on ruling the world, but they were not known as “colonists.” The Russians took over Eastern Europe for a while, but they called all those countries under their draconian oversight “satellites.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Colonization seems to focus on the activities of European countries from the 16th century onward. It really focuses on any country where the native population is white. That is what the cool kids don’t seem to like – white people. We are used to having self-hating Jews. Now we also have self-hating white people.
I took a look at the countries that are considered to be colonized. They are for the most part in South America, then Asia and Africa. It is wherever European ships sailed and, by definition of the cool kids, took over an area from the ‘enlightened’ native populations and destroyed everything in their path by raping and pillaging the land. That is not exactly how it went, but don’t try and tell the cool kids that.
After doing my own investigation, I asked a series of smart, insightful people which countries were doing well post-colonization. We all agreed that the country that left their former colonies in the best shape was England. That is well defined by the countries identified above. It was a debate as to which country is the worst, Belgium or Holland. Certainly, the Congo is a perfect example of how well Belgium left things.
ADVERTISEMENT
I asked them which countries are doing well. The list is short. We agreed Hong Kong was doing great until it was destroyed by the Communist Chinese. We agreed upon Singapore and Vietnam. Not a lot of other countries.
These countries have had anywhere from 60 to 100 years to rule themselves with their enlightened native populations. That is 3-5 generations. Most have gone downhill or directly down the toilet when left to their own means. For example, Venezuela was the #1 economy in South America and now is a failed state. Argentina elected a sane person, but he is still trying to get his hands around inflation that was running at over 250%. Argentina has had more than a few coups after Juan Peron did a number on a country that had a strong economy.
Jamaica is a former British colony that represents a middling status post-colonization. Because of tourism, the country’s residents do ok. There has been a large amount of immigration to Canada, the UK, and the U.S. There are and have been travel warnings for Americans who go outside their resorts. Not necessarily a place you want to live. That is the best you can say for many of these countries.
ADVERTISEMENT
There are so many failed states amongst them they are too numerous to count. I carry in my pocket a 500,000,000 reserve note from Zimbabwe. Robert Mugabe did a fine job of destroying that country. They finally converted to using U.S. dollars as their primary currency, along with eleven other countries as well.
There is barely a country in Africa that is a thriving, safe democracy. An expert in the area stated part of the reason that Egypt is unwilling to help Israel along the Philadelphi corridor in Rafah, it too is nearly a failed state and needs the revenue being brought in from smuggling supplies to Hamas. Then there is Libya. The Middle East has Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Algeria appears to be a country that had a short colonial period and is currently a successful state.
India has made some strides and this last election showed signs of reestablishing their desire to be a democracy. The neighboring Pakistan and Bangladesh are disasters.
There are the current colonizers who are being ignored. Turkey has occupied Cyprus and Pakistan has occupied Kashmir. Then there is China which has colonized Mongolia and Tibet. But none of those countries are run by the dreaded white people.
The countries which were former colonies have had more than adequate time to establish themselves. Many have become autocracies or failed states. This is not a statement that they should revert to being colonies of European states. This is to say that these code words of “decolonization” and “post-colonization” are just excuses for their failures.
How long will the Left harbor that argument? The Left is constantly making excuses for the failings of these people instead of holding them to appropriate standards and blaming them for their own failings. And they will continue to blame it all on white people.
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
It’s hard to see how this debate changes anything in the trajectory of the race. Trump is on the upswing, Harris is fading, and it does not appear that this debate changes anything.
The panel on ABC News afterwards is claiming that Trump was “rattled” and that the Harris campaign feels good after the debate, but again–it was not the slam dunk performance she needed.
Kamala repeatedly lied throughout the debate, including claiming she would not ban guns:
Kamala just said she wasn’t gonna take away any guns. Three days ago said she would ban assault rifles. pic.twitter.com/8mQaHfmN0g
The debate has ended and the candidates are walking off stage without shaking hands.
UPDATE 10:44 p.m. ET:
Trump questions why she has not done the things she says she will do already since she has been in office for several years.
UPDATE 10:42 p.m. ET:
Harris cites her history as a prosecutor and says “I’ve only ever had one client: the people.”
Now, Trump is up.
UPDATE 10:41 p.m. ET:
Harris is delivering her closing statement in which she repeats the catch phrase “we’re not going back,” and claims there are two “very different” visions for the country offered by the candidates this evening.
The debate is entering the second commercial break, and then returning with closing statements.
UPDATE 10:30 p.m. ET:
Harris claims she is a gun owner.
UPDATE 10:25 p.m. ET:
“She is Biden,” Trump said.
“Clearly I am not Joe Biden,” Harris replied.
UPDATE 10:22 p.m. ET:
Muir next presses Trump on his recent comments that Harris “became black,” asking him what race Harris is. Trump said he did not care.
UPDATE 10:20 p.m. ET:
The gall of Harris to blame Trump for Biden’s and her failures in Afghanistan is pretty incredible. She is definitely not doing herself any favors in so doing this.
In response, Trump lays out how the deal he negotiated with the Taliban stopped all killings of American soldiers for 18 months but then laid out how he would have gotten out of Afghanistan without seeing Americans killed and without leaving tens of billions of dollars of U.S. military equipment behind.
UPDAYE 10:18 p.m. ET:
The conversation now turns to Afghanistan, and Muir asks Harris if she bears “any responsibility” for what happened in the failed withdrawal from Afghanistan. Harris dodged the question, and then started attacking Trump claiming the deal Trump negotiated to end the war in Afghanistan was “weak.”
UPDATE 10:15 p.m. ET:
Trump tells Kamala “quiet please” while he is explaining that Putin has nuclear weapons. “They sent her to negotiate peace three days before this war started,” Trump said of Harris, arguing she failed as a negotiator.
“She’s worse than Biden,” Trump says, “she goes down as the worst vice president in the history of this country.”
UPDATE 10:11 p.m. ET:
Coming back from the first commercial break, Muir turns to Trump and asks him how he would end the war in Ukraine and whether he wants Ukraine to win the war. Trump said he wants to end the war, and he noted how the U.S. has put hundreds of billions of tax dollars into the war and he called out Harris for failing to get Europe to pay its fair share. He noted how Putin and Zelensky do not respect Biden, and he warns that this could “lead to World War 3” and that President Biden is missing in action and he was thrown aside “like a dog.”
UPDATE 10:02 p.m. ET:
Trump says Kamala “hates Israel,” something Harris denies. Trump also says he would end the war in Ukraine before he even takes office. Then Harris claims Trump said Putin “can do whatever the hell he wants and go into Ukraine,” even though Putin did so when Harris was leading the country as Vice President.
UPDATE 9:57 p.m. ET:
The discussion has moved backward to the 2020 election, and now Harris is claiming that Trump was “fired by 81 million Americans”–the vote total for Biden in 2020–four years ago. Harris then claims world leaders are “laughing at” Trump, but then Trump cites several world leaders back at Harris including particularly Viktor Orban of Hungary.
Trump then bashes Harris for getting zero votes but taking the nomination away from Biden, who got 14 million votes. “I’ll let you in on a little secret,” Trump says. “He [Biden] hates her [Harris].”
UPDATE 9:50 p.m. ET:
There is another emerging theme here where the moderators keep “fact-checking” Trump–sometimes accurately, sometimes not–live during the debate, but allowing Harris to openly and repeatedly lie nonstop from the stage. Harris continues making ugly frowning faces.
UPDATE 9:48 p.m. ET:
Now, the moderators shift the conversation to January 6 and keep pushing Trump on it, but Trump asks why the radical leftists who engaged in riots have not been prosecuted. In her response, Harris touts the Charlottesville Hoax, which has been thoroughly debunked.
UPDATE 9:44 p.m. ET:
Kamala falsely claims she never said she would ban fracking–she is quite clearly on camera saying she would do so. Trump hammers her on this, and on defunding police.
Then, there’s a moment where Trump says to Harris as she’s making funny faces at him–“I’m talking now–sound familiar?”–emulating her line from a previous debate. He pauses then stares back at her. Harris continues to make odd faces back at Trump.
UPDATE 9:40 p.m. ET:
Harris keeps making nasty faces at Trump, trying quite clearly to goad him and get under his skin.
Trump says he “took a bullet to the head” because of the narratives pushed by Harris’s government’s weaponization against him.
UPDATE 9:31 p.m. ET:
Trump says that migrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating people’s pets, and Muir fires back at Trump quoting the city manager saying there are no credible reports of that. Harris in response has a shrill laugh, and then starts quoting establishment Republicans who are working to elect her.
UPDATE 9:29 p.m. ET:
Harris invites Americans to go to Trump rallies, arguing that people leave Trump’s rallies early. Trump responds by arguing that Harris’s rallies are small and that Harris is paying people to be there.
UPDATE 9:25 p.m. ET:
Trump is now fighting back, live fact-checking Harris on IVF and then he asks Harris directly if she would allow abortion in the 7th, 8th, and 9th months of pregnancy–or even afterwards–and she refuses to say she would not.
UPDATE 9:22 p.m. ET:
Trump is holding his own and he’s ripping Harris for lying. Harris is making frowning faces off the side of the camera, coming off childish.
UPDATE 9:21 p.m. ET:
Davis is now commentating instead of moderating, making commentary about Trump’s answer where she says there is no state in the union where it is legal to kill a baby after it is born. But, Davis’s snide remark–which helped set Harris up for a snide remark of her own about Trump telling “lies”–ignores the fact that several Democrats including the Democrat former governor of Virginia Ralph Northam have openly said they want infanticide.
UPDATE 9:18 p.m. ET:
Kamala is not coming across as presidential. She seems like she’s trying to troll Trump, and Trump’s not taking the bait. He’s calm and confident, but not low-energy. Trump’s in-depth policy answers are a stark contrast to Harris’s angry and odd faces she’s making on the other side of the screen.
“She’s a Marxist,” Trump hit her at one point, something Harris did not deny.
Now, the conversation is on abortion, and Trump is laying out how Democrats are the radicals on this issue and Trump is trying to unite the country.
UPDATE 9:13 p.m. ET:
An early theme is emerging here–Harris has very little substance in her commentary throughout the debate, but seems to be trying to goad Trump by attacking him. Trump is holding his own explaining policy while Harris fires off catchy sound bites.
UPDATE 9:12 p.m. ET:
“That’s just a sound bite,” Trump viciously fires back at Harris’s critiques. Then he rips her for plagiarizing Biden’s website in her very thin policy page on her own website.
UPDATE 9:11 p.m. ET:
Trump is now explaining how the migrants that Harris let into the country are “dangerous,” and then the moderators come back to Harris to respond on the economy. She claims “Trump left us” the worst unemployment ever.
Harris then launches into a diatribe about “name-calling” that she claims Trump will engage in, then falsely says Trump wants Project 2025. Trump in his rebuttal corrects her lie again, saying he has “nothing to do” with Project 2025. Trump then explains how the economy was incredible until COVID hit the country, and then explains how he got the country through the pandemic and then the Biden-Harris administration did not actually create jobs but only got “bounce back jobs” post-COVID.
Harris then in her rebuttal says “Donald Trump has no plan for you,” and then proceeds to attack Trump’s economic plans.
UPDATE 9:06 p.m. ET:
Trump in his response corrects Harris’s false claims about his tax plans, and then explains how tariffs work and do not cause inflation. Trump then explains how inflation is ripping the country apart economically. Harris is sitting there shaking her head as Trump lays out how the economy under her administration has been a disaster.
UPDATE 9:05 p.m. ET:
Muir asks Harris the first question, which is whether people are better off today than they were four years ago economically. Harris immediately begins dodging and claiming falsely she was raised in the middle class. She does not answer the question about whether people are better off at all.
UPDATE 9:03 p.m. ET:
Muir and Davis are introducing the rules, and the candidates are coming out on stage. Trump won the coin toss and will deliver the final closing statement. Harris comes right up to Trump and shakes his hand.
UPDATE 9:01 p.m. ET:
The debate is beginning now as Muir and Davis introduce the program and begin with a video introduction of the candidates. UPDATE 8:55 p.m. ET:
Kamala’s mini-podium is becoming a major thing people are noticing:
NEW: Kamala Harris will have a miniature podium during tonight’s debate on ABC against Donald Trump.
The move was requested by Harris’ team who is afraid she will look tiny compared to Trump.
The smaller podium will make it so the candidates look the same size during the… pic.twitter.com/f1BOxoVPeC
A 90-minute debate, with charge and countercharge flying back and forth, is complex to unpack and fact-check in a short article. We will leave that to others. This is being written right after the debate. We have not listened to other commentaries as it will muddy our own impressions.
We want to examine the goal and context of the debate. The Presidential race is very close and will be decided by independents and uncommitted low-information voters.
Those who love Trump love him and his performance will not change their minds. For those committed to Kamala Harris, her positions were largely unknown. Polls show that up to 70% of her supporters don’t know her positions on a variety of topics. She has been an intellectual lightweight and prone to “word salads” when asked questions, so expectations for her were low.
ADVERTISEMENT
Going into the debate, news broke about an ACLU questionnaire that she filled out in 2019 expressing many radical left-wing positions. Even CNN commentators were stunned. It looked like a night when the PR front could be shattered.
She rose well above those low expectations. She got under his skin about the size of his crowds, his multiple legal battles, and the defection of some prominent never-Trump Republicans.
The objective of the debate for Harris was to strengthen her base, protect herself from the failed record of the Biden/Harris years, and obscure her radical and extreme leftist ideology. Both candidates needed to convince the marginal fence-sitters and undecided. Trump missed some key opportunities to expose her and draw the undecided heavily toward him. Harris exceeded the low expectations the media and her side had set for her.
Trump was often so defensive he did not strongly unmask her as the radical she is, so the low-information voter is left with emotional impressions. The impression was that she was more competent than supposed, and he was the same grumpy guy recalling the 2020 election loss.
From January 6th to Charlottesville, she repeated many falsehoods, but importantly, she was on the offensive, and Trump looked irritated throughout much of the debate. She smiled and was seemingly empathetic, but he failed to expose her extreme positions. She did not cackle or filibuster. She knew her lines and delivered them.
Her face did tell when Trump landed a point but she remained calm and sounded almost rational.
ADVERTISEMENT
Trump seemed to have decided to wing it. He landed several strong punches and memorable statements about his opponent’s failings but he did not crush her to achieve a commanding lead going forward.
He did make some good points about inflation and weak foreign policy, especially regarding Iran. But again, people will remember impressions more than positions. He was particularly good on immigration issues and inflation, the two critical issues where he clearly has the advantage with most voters.
For her, there were few convoluted sentences. She was well rehearsed. Instead of Trump unmasking her as an extreme San Francisco liberal, she put him on the defensive for the chaos of his first term. He, in fact, often as he does, uses elliptical sentences that don’t land squarely on the question being asked.
Of course, the chaos of Trump’s first term was engineered by Democrats and our intelligence agencies. Still, though, she exploited people’s memories. Remember, the mainly undecided get their news from the corporate news networks, so she brought back the false media-driven impressions of those years.
She was particularly influential on abortion, painting Trump as an extremist, even though some in the right-to-life movement are mad at him because of his more moderate position.
The last point is important because Trump is weak with urban women. Instead of pointing out that Democrats are defining women out of existence with their radical transgender agenda, he said the states would deal with the abortion issue following the SCOTUS overturning of Roe v. Wade, which left him vulnerable to the claim that “women will have to go out of state to get healthcare” canard.
I wanted to reach through the television screen and say, “Donald, land some haymakers.” A key strategy could have been to ask her what she knew about Biden’s failing mental condition. If she had said he was healthy and capable, he could have asked, “Then why are you here?” If she said she was concerned about it, Trump could have asked why she lied continuously about his actual cognitive condition for over three years.
Or, he could have said, “How can she be supportive of women when she and her administration are legally defining them out of existence?” Notice these are not long sentences.
He asked who was running the White House but did not follow up and paint her as an essential conspirator, hiding the actual mental condition of the President from the public.
I am not saying the debate was a disaster. Trump has momentum and there is still time. But it was a setback in establishing her as the radical she truly is.
She came off better than expected. He missed some key opportunities to expose her failed incumbency and well documented far-left ideology.
He failed to reach out to the middle and the undecided. From that perspective, he did not advance his cause.
My emotional response was one of disappointment because a critical pivotal point in the campaign was somewhat squandered.
This opportunity is important because Kamala is being sold like soap, with slogans and advertising. Much like Biden, she has been in hiding. She finally came out, and Trump failed to put her on the defensive for almost four miserable and damaging years of governing.
Are we entering a period in which we now elect figureheads, political holograms, so to speak, that are really election tokens? At the same time, party bureaucrats and the deep state govern.
I am afraid so, and that is why this debate was so important.
Like him or not, when you vote for Trump, you know what you are getting and who will at least attempt to be in charge of the Washington blob.
With Kamala Harris, we will continue to pretend we choose our president, but others will do the real governing. Who are they? The people who ably prepared Kamala are just in charge of maintaining the false front. The “blob” continues to grow behind the facade.
Needless to say, this was not the outcome of the debate that I had expected. The job of unmasking Kamala Harris must continue. If the American people can learn of her truly radical positions, we still have an excellent chance to win.
TAKE ACTION
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2024-09-11 02:32:002024-09-11 02:32:00About the Debate: A Lost Opportunity
Editors’ Note: For those who howled about the cost of the Trump Border Wall and did so much to delay and obstruct its construction, it would seem the cost of not building the wall has been much higher. In addition, proposals from the likes of Senate candidate Gallego to increase Border Patrol personnel are a nonstarter. If the role of law enforcement is to act as a concierge service, providing housing, food, and transportation, increasing the number of patrol agents increases the number of butlers and drivers to serve illegals. Law enforcement personnel should be used to enforce the law, that is, detain and deport those who have broken our immigration laws. Entry should be allowed only for those who comply with our existing immigration laws. Those nonprofits and NGOs active in breaking our immigration laws should be prosecuted as well, including organizations associated with the Catholic Church. Federal employees who have actively violated the law should also be held accountable.
U.S. Rep. Chip Roy’s office has detailed the ‘breadth and depth’ of the destruction in the report titled, ‘America Invaded.’
The border czar has some explaining to do. But don’t count on a complicit corporate media to ask Democrat Party presidential hopeful Kamala Harris to answer questions about the mayhem the Biden-Harris administration has caused with their deadly open border policies.
ADVERTISEMENT
Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, intends to press the point, however. His office has detailed the “breadth and depth” of the destruction in a new 36-page white paper titled, “America Invaded: How the Biden-Harris Border Crisis is Fundamentally Transforming the United States.” The Texas Republican and his constituents in the Lone Star State’s 21st Congressional District have lived with the damage for nearly four years, as have so many other places in the nation dealing with a tsunami of illegal immigrants that has brought the border to their backyards.
“This document lays out the breadth and depth of the continuing damage to our country — which has morphed from a strong nation built on the rule of law that welcomes immigrants in accordance with that law, to a lawless, dangerous, and unrecognizable collection of individuals without common bond,” Roy said in a press release announcing the report’s release.
The numbers are breathtaking. According to the report, Since President Joe Biden and his No. 2 took office, more than 8.5 million illegal immigrants have crossed the U.S. southwest border, approximately the population of the state of Virginia. The Biden-Harris catch and release programhas sent at least 5.6 million illegal aliens into the interior of the country, while some 1.9 million “got-aways” have slipped the attention of “distracted and exhausted” U.S. Border Patrol agents. All told, more than 7 million illegals have poured into the United States on the Biden administration’s watch.
‘Terrible Scourge’
Deadly fentanyl, horrific crimes, and a mountain of dead bodies have accompanied wave after wave of illegal immigrants. According to the report, fentanyl drug overdoses (poisonings) claimed the lives of 75,000 Americans in 2023 — “an average of over 200 deaths a day.” The epidemic is brought to you by the Mexican drug cartels and killer chemicals made in China smuggled across the border.
“Almost all of us know someone — a family member, a friend, or a neighbor — who has been affected by the terrible scourge of opioid overdose, especially from fentanyl,” said Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes follodeaths have torn apart families, schools and communities, and we grieve for the loss of so much life, talent and goodness.” Utah alone counted 541 dead from drug overdoses in 2022, with opioids like fentanyl accounting for three-quarters of the fatalities, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
ADVERTISEMENT
There are thousands more victims of myriad crimes, including some of the more heinous homicides and assaults on record, Roy’s report points out. Consider the families of Laken Riley,Kayla Hamilton, 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray, who was reportedly lured under a bridge, assaulted for two hours and strangled to death by two illegal immigrants. The little girl’s body was found bound and stripped in a Houston bayou.
“While Border Patrol has intercepted increasing numbers of criminals, DHS [Department of Homeland Security whistleblowers revealed on August 11, 2024, that as many as 950,000 violent criminals have gone unidentified,” the Roy report states. “In some cases, CBP did not collect DNA for nearly 70% of illegal border crossers.”
Welcoming Terrorists
On Sept. 10, 2001, the nation was ill-prepared for the hell that was about to hit it. The border crisis, security officials warn, has potentially planted the seeds of another 9/11.
As the Roy report notes, terrorists are “streaming cross the border in record numbers.” In fiscal year 2023, 169 known or suspected terrorists were arrested at the southern border. How many “got-away” terrorists slipped through is anyone’s guess.
“At least 99 illegal aliens on the terror watchlist were released into the U.S. after being apprehended at the southern border between fiscal years 2021 and 2023,” the report notes.
“Alarmingly, individuals and groups with known or suspected ties to terrorism have capitalized on our porous border by smuggling foreign nationals, some of whom originate from terror-prone countries, into the U.S.,” the report continues.
Meanwhile, drug cartels have been emboldened. According to Roy’s report, the criminal operations are hauling in more than “$13 billion a year off human trafficking alone.” The abuses are horrifying. A U.S. Department of Homeland Security Inspector General’s Management Alert issued last month showed the Biden-Harris administration has lost track of up to several hundred thousand illegal immigrant children, many at risk of being victims of “trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.”
“Mexican cartels have joined forces with Chinese crime syndicates to produce fentanyl and traffic it into American communities,” the white paper states.
‘Absolutely Bizarre’
None of this should be surprising after Biden rolled out the welcome mat for illegal immigrants even before he took office. In one of his first orders of business, Biden pledged a 100-day moratorium on deportations and moved to protect the sanctuary cities — that have been invaded by the illegal immigrants — from ICE and other federal law enforcement authorities. Early on, Biden urged illegals seeking asylum to “surge” to the U.S.-Mexico border.
“We could afford to take in a heartbeat another two million,” Biden said at an Iowa campaign event in 2019, CNN reported. “The idea that a country of 330 million people cannot absorb people who are in desperate need and who are justifiably fleeing oppression is absolutely bizarre.”
Contrary to the gaslighting by Democrats and their allies in corporate media, Biden made his vice president “border czar” and placed her in charge of investigating the “root causes of migration,” which, it turns out, are Biden-Harris border policies.
As illegal immigration became a top concern of the American people — and a significant political liability for Biden and Harris, who stepped over the octogenarian’s political corpse on the way to the Democratic presidential nomination — the gruesome duo have awkwardly tried to distance themselves from a crisis of their own making. Even Democrat Party press agent CNN has had to begrudgingly report that the new “Build that Wall” Kamala Harris running for president sounds nothing like the sanctuary candidate for president in 2019 and the vice president under Biden.
Paying the Cost
The Biden-Harris border debacle has come with a huge cost for the U.S. taxpayer. The Roy report shows the tab for the southwest border states has been draining, with Texas alone forced to spend $13 billion on border security initiatives “to do the job the federal government refuses to do.” Biden has fought Texas’ efforts to secure its border in federal court. As of January, “60 Texas counties have invoked disaster declarations over the border crisis, and 50 Texas counties have passed resolutions declaring an invasion,” according to the report.
“What many people fail to comprehend is that Texas is facing a real threat to the safety and security of our citizens,” Kinney County Attorney Brent Smith told the Center Square. “This is not an immigration policy debate playing out but a constitutional threat to the sovereignty of Texas.”
The border crisis is gobbling up billions more dollars in lodging costs for illegals, the report notes. Sanctuary city New York City alone has spent more than $1 billion housing the influx of immigrants. And the health care system, public schools, and social service agencies are facing unanticipated costs in caring for illegal aliens. A House committee report earlier this year on the impact of illegal immigrants on social services asserts nearly 60 percent of households headed by illegal immigrants “use one or more major welfare programs.”
‘Flames Have Spread’
The long list of victims includes illegal immigrants themselves. In fiscal year 2022, according to the report, a record 853 foreign nationals died attempting to cross the southwest border. That number includes the deadliest human smuggling case in U.S. history when 53 people, including eight children, were “cooked alive” in a tractor-trailer beneath the San Antonio sun.
Last year, there were more than 8,000 migrant deaths recorded on migratory routes worldwide, the deadliest year in history, according to the Migration Data Portal.
Sadly, the report asserts, the invasion has been carried out in the name of naked politics. America is much less safe because Democrats under Biden-Harris have attempted to harvest the next crop of leftist voters. The regime has fought tooth and nail against legislation like the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE Act), which would require documented proof of citizenship to register to vote. As The Federalist has reported, Virginia recently removed more than 6,300 foreign nationals from its voter rolls. Texas did the same, clearing potentially 6,500-plus noncitizens from its voter database.
The white paper calls for passage of the Secure the Border Act, not the failed Senate bill Biden and Harris have pressed for that lawmakers have called a “joke.” As critics note, among the many warts of the “deal” is the fact that it would commit to law up to 5,000 border crossings per day before the president shuts down the border.
“Radical progressive Democrats have caused the worst border crisis in recent history, and the flames have spread to almost every state and locality in the nation. This crisis is rooted in a fundamental desire to remake and cement one party rule built on dependence on the state,” the report states.
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2024-09-11 02:30:002024-09-11 02:30:00New Report Details Hefty Price Americans Are Paying For Biden-Harris’ Open Border Mayhem
Tucker Carlson recently favorably praised and interviewed Darryl Cooper as one of the best historians around and as a podcaster with a substantial following. Tucker’s admired guest spouted off a Churchill-hating, Hitler-loving, anti-semitic distortion of history. For him, Churchill was “psychotic” and largely responsible for WWII, while Hitler was a deeply, misunderstood man of peace. Tucker’s reception of this idiocy in the interview would make Dana Bash blush. You can find the full interview here.
Tucker has made many important contributions to the conservative movement but has gradually, even before leaving Fox, started to drift into questionable positions. He is the proverbial boy who when “He is good, he is very good and when he is bad, he is very, very bad”. Perhaps this emerges in part from his sensationalist style of “journalism”. He often seems awestruck, with mouth agape, rendering his guests more profound than they are, and often succeeds in transferring that sentiment to his audience.
He had bugged me for a while but my suspicions came to a head around his broadcasts on the Russia/Ukraine war. I had understood there have always been legitimate criticisms of Ukraine yet I strongly opposed Putin’s invasion. What got me was Tucker mouthing Putin’s lies in almost the same words I had read and heard from pro-Russian commentators. It wasn’t even “decent” plagiarism.
ADVERTISEMENT
Trump, in contrast, went to the heart of it. He declared a quick end to military solutions through a negotiated settlement. He famously promised to end the war starting the first 24 hours of his Presidency with consequences for those continuing it. He wisely maintained strategic ambiguity but you could sense Trump’s hot breath towards Putin.
Putin has now come out for Harris over Trump and suddenly declared himself open for negotiations. To openly support one American candidate over another reveals Putin’s panic over a Trump victory. Tucker’s softball interview of Putin was an assist for the dictator in this battle.
Cooper also posted in August of 2023, the following claim that God sent the Romans “to destroy the leprous temple and put an end to the Israelite religion for all time.” He is a thorough-going anti-semite which is likely to be informing his pro-Hitler views. Or perhaps, it’s the other way around. You can’t always know with these lunatics.
Jew Hatred is the Western world’s most ancient hatred. It rests below the surface ready to emerge with or without provocation. It has zero place in the MAGA movement and always has thanks to President Donald J. Trump and other true, patriotic conservatives. His policies towards Israel while in office, his lifelong behaviors towards the many Jews he has known and worked with and his beloved daughter Ivanka’s conversion to Judaism which he honored all attest to the authenticity of his convictions.
Donald Trump rests firmly in the mainstream of the conservative tradition which sees America as a Christian nation based upon Judeo-Christian values. This tradition goes back to George Washington and the Founding Fathers.
ADVERTISEMENT
The MAGA right is the answer to these harmful views in our historical moment. We must always make clear our distance from those such as Candace Owen, a “conservative” who has become a full-blown anti-semite. And we must separate ourselves from retrograde Christian positions so contrary to our mainstream and the authentic message of Christianity.
There is also a practical political reason to draw the line sharply. The left, specifically the communist left, which now operates through cultural Marxism and Wokeness, evokes the principle of the “united front against fascism”. This strategy has guided the left ever since Georgi Dimitrov, Stalin’s henchman, articulated it in 1935. Today it is called intersectionality on campuses. This trope is behind all attacks on the right and on Trump as a fascist or fascist enabler. Any links to Hitler’s beliefs or the holder of such beliefs are used to paint all conservatives with the same brush. It is a key component of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Tucker should quickly and loudly disavow Cooper. He is scheduled to do an interview with J.D. Vance shortly and you can bet that the longer Tucker remains in apparent admiration of a history revisionist Hitler lover, the longer the left will have a field day against the right seeking to fuse us into one big fascist movement in waiting.
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Editors’ Note: We have on several occasions expressed similar fears that due to the excessive issuance of Treasuries, the price will tend to fall, causing interest rates to rise more than would otherwise be the case, even while normal experience would be for interest rates to decline when the economy slides towards recession. Oversupply may not stop the decline in rates due to recession, but it may well reduce the decline. Additionally, oversupply will tend to “crowd out” other private entities that need credit. Further, the use of bonds by financial advisors to hedge against recession, and to balance out equities in a diversified portfolio, may now be in jeopardy because the government budget is so far out of whack it is flooding the market with bonds. In short, the normal portfolio function of bonds, diversification, and safety, are eroded by government financial profligacy. In other countries during such a crisis, the government may resort to the use of the force of law to require institutions and individuals to purchase treasuries, to create artificial demand to fund the government. This spreads the hazard because requiring the market to buy bonds, forces the bad credit risk onto others, converting once solid “safe haven bonds” into certificates of confiscation. The other alternative would be for the Central Bank to print money out of thin air, and purchase bonds for their own account to fund the deficit. That creates currency depreciation or inflation. In the absence of any political opposition to modulate government spending, the only remaining discipline will be the markets. That is a recipe for financial chaos.
U.S. Treasuries have functioned as a safe haven for investors during global turmoil for decades. Here’s Investopedia describes their role in providing financial stability:
“Treasure bills (T-bills) are debt securities that are backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government and, hence, are considered safe havens even in tumultuous economic climates. T-bills are also seen as risk-free, as any principal invested is repaid by the government when the bill matures. Investors, therefore, tend to run to these securities during times of perceived economic chaos.”
The perception of U.S. government debt as the world’s premier safe-haven asset is changing. The CEOs of both U.S. and foreign financial institutions warn of the dangers they’ve seen develop in recent years as U.S. Treasuries have become riskier investments.
U.S. Treasuries No Longer Risk-Free
A new paper by Roberto Gomez-Cram, Howard Kung, and Hanno Lustig underscores that change. Presented at the U.S. Federal Reserve’s annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in August 2024, it points to the U.S. government’s debt-financed spending response to the coronavirus pandemic as the cause of the change.
Central banks and governments need to ensure that bond markets function smoothly. Before the arrival of COVID, the U.S. had not witnessed large responses to fiscal shocks in Treasury markets in the past decades, including during the GFC. Based on extrapolation from recent U.S. experience, one might have expected Treasury yields to be insensitive to fiscal news when bond markets function well.
The U.S. Treasury market’s actual response to COVID was markedly different from its response during the GFC and more in line with the predictions of standard valuation models. Throughout COVID, U.S. Treasurys were marked down along with the sovereign bonds issued by the governments of other advanced economies, such as France, Germany, and the U.K. We provide direct high-frequency evidence that these U.S. Treasury yield increases were concentrated on days with significant fiscal news, the footprint of the risky debt regime. In a large class of standard asset pricing models, the valuation of the government’s IOUs is marked down when the economy is hit by unfunded spending increases.
In March of 2020, foreign investors did not flee to the safety of U.S. Treasurys. Instead, they sold long-dated U.S. Treasurys in a flight from maturity. The convenience yield on long-dated Treasurys declined throughout the COVID period. During COVID, U.S. Treasurys were not trading as the world’s safe asset of choice, but rather, Treasurys were trading much like the sovereign bonds issued by other mature economies. Towards the end of the sample, AAA corporates are priced as close substitutes for long-dated Treasurys.
In response to COVID, U.S. Treasury investors seem to have shifted to the risky debt model when pricing Treasurys. Policymakers, including central banks, should internalize this shift when assessing whether bond markets are functioning properly. In the risky debt regime, valuations will respond to government spending shocks, which may involve large yield changes in bond markets. In this environment, large-scale asset purchases by central banks in response to a large government spending increase have undesirable public finance implications. These purchases, which provide temporary price support, destroy value for taxpayers but subsidize bondholders. These purchases may also distort the incentives of governments and impair the price discovery in government bond markets. It is not inconceivable that governments in some mature economies have overestimated their true fiscal capacity as a result of these large-scale asset purchases.
That last point is highly significant. Even though the U.S. government’s debt-fueled spending response began as a national emergency under former President Trump, excessive spending continued under the Biden-Harris administration. It continued long after the emergency faded and continues today.
By continuing it, the Biden-Harris administration squandered the opportunity to refill the U.S. government’s credit reservoir to restore its risk-free status. They could have reduced spending to sustainable levels after the pandemic ended, but instead, they failed this basic test of fiscal responsibility.
The national debt in relation to the U.S. economy has now reached levels not seen since the end of World War 2. It may be helpful to consider how politicians of that time tackled this challenge. After the war, they adjusted their spending habits and stopped investing money in a war that had already ended. This decision ensured that the U.S. government’s credit reservoir would be replenished for future generations.
It’s a history lesson that today’s politicians either never learned or have chosen to ignore. Because they haven’t heeded the lesson, debt issued by the U.S. government has become riskier to the nation’s creditors. Because it has become riskier for those who lend money to the U.S. government, that same debt has become much more costly to U.S. taxpayers.
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2024-09-11 02:26:002024-09-11 02:26:00U.S. Treasuries No Longer a Safe Haven
A couple months ago, Kamala Harris was the worst VP in American history. Now, she’s heralded as the Savior of the Republic.
Suffering from whiplash? We are too. That’s why we set out to expose how this inexplicable 180 happened.
The Daily Caller’s new documentary, “Cleaning Up Kamala,” shows that one doesn’t just become a warm, joyful “Momala” overnight. It takes a whole billion-dollar media effort.
“Cleaning Up Kamala” debuts Sept 13. and is available exclusively for Patriots subscribers. Catch a first glimpse below.
First, the Daily Caller uncovered the true cost of the Defund the Police movement in “Lawless.” Then “Rigged” exposed the issue Democrats fear most: how their political machine managed to secure Joe Biden the presidency in 2020. Now, with “Cleaning Up Kamala,” we take on a corrupt corporate media establishment that built a new presidential candidate, their candidate, out of whole cloth.
Harris was nobody’s first choice. Voters resoundingly rejected her in the 2020 primaries. Joe Biden chose her as VP to check an identity box, but she proved more incompetent than anyone could have imagine. A revolving door of staffers found it unbearable to work with her. She failed miserably as the border czar and her cackle made everyone uncomfortable. Unsurprisingly, her approval rating stood deep underwater — until she was made into the new Queen of the Democratic Party.
With hilarious clips and insightful interviews, “Cleaning Up Kamala” shows how the media turned this trainwreck into a tulip.
The Daily Caller’s documentary productions are made possible by our faithful Patriots members, and we wouldn’t be able to do it without them. To watch “Cleaning Up Kamala” on Sept. 13, and to help support future investigative documentaries, please consider subscribing.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2024-09-10 19:52:172024-09-10 19:52:17‘Cleaning Up Kamala’ | TRAILER OUT NOW
This Wednesday marks the 23rd Anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attack on America and the God-given freedoms we so cherish. We remember with anger and anguish the nearly 3,000 Americans murdered by Muslim terrorists in the name of Islam. We also remember and honor those first responders, many of whom lost their lives trying to save others.
This is also a time to remember the thousands of American soldiers who were killed, wounded, or are still suffering in the ensuing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and places unknown. We honor all those who answered our Nation’s call to Arms. We also remember the sacrifices made by their families.
On this 23rd Anniversary of 9/11, let us rededicate ourselves to the defeat of this evil. We will never forget September 11; and we must keep the flame of retribution burning until Radical Islam is wiped from the face of the Earth.
Please pray for all our men and women who are in harm’s way today in service of our Nation.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2024-09-10 19:52:152024-09-10 19:52:159/11 ─ We Will Never Forget
“A secret police system may become a menace to free government and free institutions because it carries with it the possibility of abuses of power which are not always quickly comprehended or understood.” — Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone, 1924
“We want no Gestapo or Secret Police; FBI is tending in that direction.” — President Harry Truman, 1945
“Liberty has not only enemies which it conquers, but perfidious friends, who rob the fruits of its victories: Absolute democracy, socialism.” — Lord Acton
“Authority that does not exist for Liberty is not authority but force.” — Lord Acton
“The truth was that all men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.” — James Madison
“The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.” — Selwyn Duke
House Republicans held a forum on the attempted assassination of former President Donald J. Trump on August 26th. They were not chosen to be on the House task force, but wanted to get to the truth of why there were so many failures. Representatives, Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Eli Crane (R-AZ), Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Cory Mills (R-FL), and Chip Roy (R-TX) hosted a forum on the attempted assassination of former President Trump.
Dan Bongino, a former United States Secret Service special agent; Erik Prince, former United States Navy SEAL officer; and Ben Shaffer, a Washington regional SWAT operator, were the witnesses who discussed the timeline of events in Butler, Pennsylvania; communications and rules of engagement between law enforcement; and whether negligence by Secret Service displayed incompetence or potentially nefarious intent.
The forum was two hours and every minute was illuminating. You can listen to the full program on C-Span or Rumble. I know most folks don’t have the time, so I’ll include some of the most relevant information that has not been in mainstream media.
Obama’s weaponization of federal intelligence was on full display in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) came close to ending in DIE for former President Donald J. Trump.
Whistleblowers have told Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) that Department of Homeland Security agents with minimal protective training and experience were assigned to protect former President Donald Trump during an assassination attempt. Hawley added that an SS whistleblower revealed that HQ discouraged agents from asking for additional staff for Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The MSM Silence is Deafening
If you search the web for updates on the Trump assassination attempt, the majority of articles are from July. One article from September 4th states that the House Trump Assassination Task Force was interviewing local law enforcement. Seven Republicans and six democrats were chosen by House Speaker Mike Johnson.
U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, (R-PA), the task force chairman, and ranking member Rep. Jason Crow, (D-CO), sent several letters on September 3rd requesting records on planning, operations and communications and seeking interviews by September 30th from Butler County and Beaver County agencies that were supporting the U.S. Secret Service and Pennsylvania State Police at the rally. Kelly votes with the constitution 46% of the time, and Democrat Crow never votes with the constitution.
Former police officer, Congressman Clay Higgins (R-LA) blasted the FBI for releasing attempted Trump assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks’ body to his family for cremation days after the shooting — calling it “disturbing” that the agency would impede further investigation.
“On July 23rd, Crooks was gone. Nobody knew this until Monday, August 5th, including the County Coroner, law enforcement, Sheriff, etc.” Higgins described the FBI’s actions “as an obstruction to any following investigative effort.” The Congressman claimed that while the body was under the Butler County Coroner’s authority, the coroner would “have never released Crooks’ body to the family for cremation or burial without specific permission from the FBI.”
Along with revealing the “disturbing fact” of Crooks’ body, Higgins blasted the FBI for its handling of the crime scene, stating the law enforcement agency released the area after three days.
The New York Post reported that the parents of Thomas Crooks have retained high-powered attorneys as the feds probe what they knew and when. The Crooks family is being represented by Quinn Logue — a top Pittsburgh law firm, according to Daily Mail. Veteran lawyers, John Quinn and Matthew Logue, specialize in personal injury, legal malpractice and employment litigation cases, according to their website. The firm also does criminal defense — though the partners in the firm seem to focus more on civil litigation, based on their biographies.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who is on a bipartisan Senate investigation into the attempt on Trump’s life, vented his frustration at the progress of the investigation so far.
“All I can really tell you is the Secret Service and FBI are basically dragging their feet. They’re stonewalling us,” Johnson said on Fox News.
The FBI is a political weapon of a larger institution that is now focused almost entirely toward supporting a radical communist agenda to destroy civil society in the United States.
House Republicans Conduct Independent Inquiry
Meanwhile, a handful of House Republicans with military and security backgrounds who were not tapped for the bipartisan group are conducting an independent inquiry featuring frequent broadsides of the Secret Service and FBI.
However, the one thing not discussed was the figure on the water tower who was thought to zipline down the tower and drive away. Veterans at the rally saw the figure and even stated that it was a perfect place for a second shooter. However, once Crooks was dead, there was no reason for a second shooter to out himself.
Prior to the actual C-Span forum, the Dan Bongino Show invited Andy Biggs, Eli Crane, Cory Mills and Chip Roy to a roundtable discussion. Bongino opened with, “The acting SS Director now, who was the deputy director previously, was one of the guys in the decision chain that said, ‘We’re not going to employ counter sniper assets to a Trump rally if it’s not within driving distance of DC. And you’ve got to be thinking to yourself, what the hell are we paying for?”
Congressman Biggs stated, “Look, we’re talking about a $3.3 billion dollar budget. If you are going to restrict the protection service that are designed to protect, then somebody needs to be fired.” Biggs goes on to say that the House is in charge of funds and they need to either stop the funding or reorganize the entire Secret Service.
Congressman Roy exposed the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) practices by former SS Director Cheatle which actually destroys the ability of the agency to function in the manner in which they were established. “DEI has been implemented throughout the federal government and it’s killing us.”
Rep. Cory Mills said, “Given the fact of the untimeliness at which point this is being conducted, you will see at this stage, where I think that criminal gross negligence and purposeful intent will be indistinguishable. When we look at all of this, the failure to communicate properly, it draws me away from just negligence and pulls me into that purposeful intent arena that I don’t necessarily need to get into.”
He continued and said, “Eli Crane and I went out there. We’re not yes men. We’re not people who will say yes to go along to get along and that’s why we’re not picked for these committees. Every single one of us here will tell you, we can’t trust the FBI when they admit to 287,000 violations of FISA where they were spying on American people, all of which we did not vote to authorize or reauthorize. What’s even worse though is when I sat there in the briefings. We had the Intelligence Community (IC) sitting there and we were talking about this FISA reauthorization which I was against to begin with, just like the Patriot Act, which I think is a complete spy on the American people, but they were like, ‘we have a 98% reform.’”
“I looked at them and said, ‘Let me get this straight, you’re telling me that I have to go to the American people and tell them I’m only spying on 4,000 people illegally now this year?’ My whole point is that we can’t trust government to investigate government, which is why we set up this individual task force and is why we’re bringing independent people who have expertise such as yourself (Bongino), and Eric and others so that we can get to the facts and make it transparent. And also, not hide behind some low-level classification where we’re not being transparent to the American people. That’s one of the things that’s my biggest stickler. They’ll use the lowest level classifications and try and put it in a back room. The American taxpayers pay for our salaries, pay for that office, and pay for that information. We need to be transparent and gain accountability and that’s what this is for.”
Bongino comments that there wasn’t a counter-surveillance team from the SS, so nothing was done when Crooks showed up with a range finder. He said that if they were at that site, there was zero chance that they wouldn’t have seen Crooks.
Congressman Mills stated that local law enforcement had actually offered a drone but it was refused by the SS. “After all these weeks, we are now at a point where criminal gross negligence and purposeful intent are indistinguishable.”
The bottom line here is that the American people no longer trust these institutions.
Crooks, who left several explosive devices in his car, had searched for information about bomb components as early as 2019. The day after the forum, Bongino exposed the level of sophisticated bombs and remote detonators that Crooks built and that work. They could not have put together only by the young shooter.
Congressman Michael Waltz, a Green Beret who dealt with explosives, told Bongino that the level of sophistication with the explosive device is way beyond the capacity of this kid. He must have had some help. Bongino said, “Somebody was incentivizing this guy to do this. Was it a foreign actor through a proxy? I don’t know, but the oddities in this case are adding up.” He said the SS didn’t even pick up the local radios that were left with them. Had they picked up the radios, they would have heard, for over an hour, that Crooks was being tracked by the local police.
Bongino commented, “Layered incompetence is intent.”
Rep. Eli Crane, U.S. Navy SEAL, said, “Can you imagine if this had been a ten-man Hezbollah team and not this 20-year-old kid who got within 130 yards of President Trump with an AR-15? He had multiple explosive devices with a remote detonator on them and flew a drone. What if this was a real threat and what message does this send to the rest of the world? What message does it send to the ayatollahs in Iran, what message does it send to North Korea, to Vladimir Putin, to others who would love to make sure President Trump doesn’t get back into office? To me it sends a message, ‘open season’ because this SS is not up to the job.”
Cory Mills adds that the cartels at the border are incentivized to protect their revenue which means not allowing Trump back into office.
At the C-Span forum, Cory Mills spoke about the SS “layers of incompetence.”
“We have to ask, why was the venue selected not having adequate security? Why were the higher vantage points not covered? Why was there not a, either comparable or compatible, communications system established? Where was the security plan, the coms plan, the data range cards? Where was the actual overwatch? Where were the ground teams as far as their rates of instruction? What were the tactical techniques procedures that were to be utilized without identifying and mitigating all existing threats? Why was there not an early morning briefing with all to ensure communications and last-minute security plans? Why was a surveillance drone not utilized even though it was offered? And who, ultimately, is responsible or accountable for one of the truly most life changing incidents for a lot of us, where we almost lost the former president of the United States?”
Rep. Mills goes on to list previous failures:
“August 14, 2024, was a reported failure that a SS agent abandoned her post without permission to breastfeed child before Donald Trump was scheduled to arrive in North Carolina.
“August 12, 2024, was reported that a SS special agent who was the official site agent for July 13, Butler, PA rally was under investigation for posing videos and photos from protective assignments to social media.
“July 27, 2024, a SS agent covered the security camera of a local salon in Pittsburgh, Massachusetts before an event featuring Kamala Harris where the salon was closed, but opened it up without approval and utilized restrooms for an hour and a half while the building’s security alarm was going off.
“July 2, 2023, it was reported that former SS Director Cheatle, the senior agency leader, sought to destroy the cocaine found in the White House in July 2024. The evidence was not destroyed due to pushback from individuals in the SS forensics service division.
“May 20, 2024, a man enters the U.S. SS Miami field office through a propped open door and was not removed from the building until the following morning.
“April 24, 2024, a special agent assigned to Harris’ detail had a mental breakdown where the agent reportedly had physically attacked a commanding agent in charge at the base, after verbal disputes with other agents.
“Sometime between 2023 and 2024, at least two people breached President Obama’s Hawaii residence. Though the president wasn’t there, his two daughters were on the premises at the time.
“April 2023, a drunken intruder entered the home of National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in the middle of the night. The man was able to gain access to Sullivan’s home despite 24/7 SS protective services due to the sensitive nature of Sullivan’s position.
“This is not a new problem as Mr. Bongino has stated, and with a $3 billion dollar budget, I would think that we would start evaluating those mistakes to make those corrective actions. Would you agree that there should be a much better security for protectives than we’re seeing today?”
Bongino agreed and stated, “The SS has a culture problem Congressman.” He goes on to tell how many agents could not meet even basic protective functioning skills and criminal investigative skills, but met other criteria, completely irrelevant to job performance, who were pushed through and told they were to graduate. Bongino was a SS Agent from 1999 to 2011.
Conclusion
Listening to both these forums is of the utmost importance for Americans to be knowledgeable as to how President Obama and his minions, Valerie Jarrett, John Brennan, James Clapper and Eric Holder succeeded in “fundamentally transforming” America. Not only was the intelligence community weaponized against Americans, but the entire federal government and much of the judiciary has been changed. A tyrannical, authoritarian and despotic power is now in charge.
I lived through the 1960s and saw the murders of four men, President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. All were allegedly carried out by “lone gunman.” Evidence on all four murders has shown the lone gunman was not the assassin.
The CIA has been blamed for both JFK’s and RFK’s murders by RFK, Jr. How many more are there?
The question always remains, “Who ordered the hit?”
If Democrats believed in their positions, they wouldn’t have to deceive.
People with nothing to hide usually don’t.
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz’s campaign is another Democratic Party hoax. Their strategy is to talk about “joy,” “vibes,” January 6, and Donald Trump’s conviction in New York, while gaslighting voters about their far-left agenda and Trump’s policy positions. They refuse to discuss their deeply-held tenets because they, and the mandarins who selected them, know that most voters would reject them. They lie about Trump, because the effectiveness of their attacks based on January 6 and lawfare has already peaked, and may now be helping him. They fear that Trump’s populist agenda is converting traditional Democratic voters, and to blunt this, they distort his positions to make him appear extreme.
ADVERTISEMENT
This is the modern Democratic playbook. Think the Russia hoax, Hunter Biden’s laptop, Biden’s crime family and acuity hoaxes, social media censorship, “very fine people,” drinking bleach, and many others. With support from most of the media, academia, and the administrative state, Democrats have every reason to believe their prestidigitation is infallible. It is now so prosaic for Democrats to deceive voters that veteran anchor Chris Matthews admitted on MSNBC that Harris has “to avoid the left-wing corner. They cannot put her in that left-wing because a woman of color who’s also in the hard left is not going to sell.” In other words, if Democrats want to win, they have to lie, and they don’t have to be bashful about doing so.
Harris and Walz are pretending to reinvent themselves, and the media embraces the charade. They expect to deceive enough voters in battleground states to eke out a victory. They might succeed.
As Harris hides from policy discussions and her proxies claim she has abandoned her convictions, the media shamelessly overlooks that Harris is the incumbent vice president who has pushed the administration to the Left, and accuse Republicans of being disingenuous for holding Harris and Walz to their records. This week, Politico criticized J.D. Vance for “tr[ying] to tie Harris to the Biden administration’s policies.” That’s the Biden-Harris Administration, during which Harris has supposedly been the “last person in the room.” As White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre explained two weeks ago, Harris shares full responsibility for all major administration policies, she and Biden are fully aligned, and there is no daylight between them.
While Biden pandered to the far-left, Harris and Walz are the far-left. In 2019, GovTrack, ranked Harris as the “most liberal compared to All Senators.” Once Democrats took the Minnesota House, CNN termed Walz a “progressive champion.”
Amust-see television ad run by Republican Pennsylvania senate candidate Dave McCormick includes video of Harris supporting decriminalization of illegal aliens; resolutely opposing fracking and offshore drilling; suggesting workers in the fossil fuel industry should transition to other jobs; supporting the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement; dismissing putting more police officers on the street as “wrongheaded thinking;” considering giving felons the right to vote; endorsing a mandatory buyback for assault weapons; calling for the elimination of private health insurance, even for people who want to keep their insurance; and supporting free health coverage for “all people,” including illegal aliens.
As San Francisco district attorney, Harris promised not to impose the death penalty—even on cop killers—a position she reiterated as a presidential candidate in 2019. She led efforts to promote a bail fund that helped free convicts, including murderers, serial domestic abusers, and violent rioters in the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots. She effectively supported dismantling the 10th Amendment when she advocated a plan to require prior federal review and clearance of state laws involving reproductive health care. Harris said she would abolish the filibuster to pass the Green New Deal. After first equivocating on whether she supports court packing, she endorsed Biden’s call to force long-serving conservative justices off the Court.
ADVERTISEMENT
Harris has remained largely silent about the outbreak of anti-Semitism in the U.S. and Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. She boycotted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress in July and selected far-left advisors for outreach to Jews and Muslims. Following a meeting with Netanyahu, Harris vowed not to be “silent” about Palestinian suffering and issued only conditional support for Israel’s right of defense, saying, “Israel has a right to defend itself and how it does so matters. What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating.”
Harris sought to require companies with more than 100 employees to pay men and women equally, regardless of differences in their experience or job specifics. She has been a leader in the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) movement, by which jobs, promotions, and business opportunities are allocated by race and gender identification, rather than experience, capabilities, or merit. The Biden-Harris Administration mandates DEI in all federal programs, employment, promotions, and contracting (see here, here, here, and here).
Just a few months ago, Harris attacked Special Counsel Robert Hur for questioning Biden’s mental acuity, asserting Hur “could not be more wrong on the facts.” From July 18, 2023, to July 17, 2024, the public calendar shows that Harris shared at least 25 meetings, eight lunches, and 46 events with Biden. Yet Harris consistently—and falsely—defended Biden’s capacity to serve as president. “Joe Biden is extraordinarily strong,” Harris said in June. She added, “I spend a whole lot of time with our president, be it in the Oval Office or the Situation Room and in other places. And I can tell you…not only is he absolutely authoritative in rooms around the globe but in the Oval Office, meeting with members of Congress, meeting with leaders in industry, meeting with community leaders.”
The Trump campaign should run a loop of McCormick’s spot, together with a video of Harris vigorously embracing other far-left positions, her implausible, credibility-busting conversion to centrist, and a selection of her best word salads. This will give voters unvarnished information they have a right to know.
Harris instead prefers to con voters. The Harris campaign website has no policy or issues section, and with few exceptions, she avoids discussing policy in her speeches. Against this wall of silence, anonymous campaign officials are walking back her long-held positions. A July 29, 2024 New York Times article titled “Why the Kamala Harris of Four Years Ago Could Haunt Her in 2024” admitted that Harris ran in 2020 on the Left, but complained, “Now, in a tough general election, Republicans are digging up her old stances.” Shades of “Republicans pounce.”
The Times acknowledged that even after she dropped out of the last presidential election, Harris “joined other Democrats in supporting progressive ideas.” The once great broadsheet attacked Republicans for using Harris’s words against her: “One presidential cycle later…video clips of her old statements and interviews are being weaponized as Republicans aim to define her as a left-wing radical who is out of step with swing voters.”
Unintentionally poignant, the Times reported, “The Harris campaign will rebut most of Republicans’ attacks by arguing that they are exaggerating or lying about her record, said a campaign official briefed on the plans who was not authorized to discuss them publicly.”
Another anonymous Harris staffer told journalists that Harris no longer wants to ban fracking, impose single-payer health insurance, or a federal buyback of assault weapons. She now backs increased funding for border enforcement, and perhaps a border wall.
After nearly 40 days of refusing to participate in interviews or a press conference, Harris finally agreed to a pre-taped joint interview with Walz. Broadcast last night [8/29] by CNN, the 49-minute hagiography intermingled a less than 20 minute warm and supportive exchange with Dana Bash, with footage of the pair campaigning, their families, and the DNC. Despite the softest of probes, and two efforts by Bash, Harris was unable to name any action she would take on day one, and spoke only in generalities about her goals. She confirmed that she no longer seeks to ban fracking, but refused to acknowledge her 2019 declaration that “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.” Bash did not follow up.
In the interview, Harris said she would enforce immigration laws, but evaded Bash’s question about whether she still favored decriminalizing immigration. Harris did say, however, that “my values have not changed.” Finally, the truth.
Since being nominated for president, the one policy area in which Harris has been clear is the economy. And, unsurprisingly, she supports a radical Left agenda, which includes:
A $5 trillion tax increase over a decade, including a 40% increase in corporate tax rates from 21% to 28% and increases in other corporate taxes that will make the United States uncompetitive in world markets, as well as multiple increases in individual tax rates, including phasing out capital gains tax rates for Americans earning more than $1 million.
Price controls on U.S. businesses.
Capital gains taxes on accrued, but unrealized gains.
A federally funded $25,000 give away to first-time homebuyers.
To paraphrase liberal Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell’s view of Harris’s proposed price controls, if Harris wants to avoid being called a Communist, she might want to avoid far-left Marxist economic policies.
Showing her progressive bona fides, Harris passed over moderates to select a far-left running mate in Tim Walz. His first executive action as Minnesota governor was establishing a DEI council. He also worked to ensure that all state actions are viewed through a “lens of equity,” imposed a radical Critical Race Theory-based ethnic studies curriculum on Minnesota’s public schools, refused to use the National Guard to stop the riots after George Floyd’s death, and turnedMinnesota into a sanctuary state. Walz approved driver’s licenses, state funded health care, and college tuition for illegal immigrants; 20-week taxpayer-paid family leave; and automaticvoter registration without proof of citizenship or residency.
Walz supportsrestrictingpolitical speech that he deems inappropriate. He ordered 80% carbon-free electricity by 2030 and 100% by 2040. Under Walz, Minnesota has become a “trans refuge” and provides “gender-affirming care” for minors and mandatory tampons in boys’ bathrooms. His administration opened a hotline for residents to report neighbors who were noncompliant with the state’s stringent COVID-19 lockdowns.
The Harris-Walz campaign is working overtime to hide their candidates’ far-left views.
Except for her hallmark support of abortion rights, Harris’s acceptance speech at the DNC was almost devoid of policy. She never discussed immigration, inflation, DEI, transgenderism, women’s sports, fracking, fossil fuels, healthcare, law enforcement, international trade, the Big Green Deal, filibusters, the Supreme Court, Russia, China, North Korea, or Iran, and barely mentioned the Biden-Harris Administration. She never mentioned her proposed tax increases or price controls, her staff’s purported walk-backs, or any change in her long-held positions.
Harris reiterated her views on Israel’s conditional right of defense, and, despite the Biden-Harris Administration’s consistent cuts in defense spending, promised that America would have the “strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”
She falsely accused Trump of seeking to cut Medicare and Social Security, ignored the middle-class beneficiaries of Trump’s tax cuts and other policies, and claimed the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 speaks for Trump. (Trump was not involved in Project 2025 and disagrees with many of its conclusions.)
Harris accused Trump of intending to enact “what, in effect, is a national sales tax.” Though she presumably meant to disparage trade tariffs—many of which were retained or increased by the Biden-Harris Administration—the ambiguity becomes dishonest when talking to voters who are unaware of the legerdemain.
Harris oddly attacked Trump for requiring “states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions.” (Current law requires states to report on medical treatments.) She attacked Trump for cutting off IVF treatments—something he has never advocated and is expressly repudiated by the Republican platform.
The 2024 GOP platform states, “President Trump has made absolutely clear that he will not cut one penny from Medicare or Social Security.” It further promises, “We will oppose Late Term Abortion, while supporting mothers and policies that advance Prenatal Care, access to Birth Control, and IVF (fertility treatments).”
In her speech, Harris also said that Trump’s “explicit intent [is] to jail journalists, political opponents, and anyone he sees as the enemy.” That is pure invention. By contrast, the Biden-Harris Administration has weaponized the Justice Department to attack conservative parents on school boards, Catholics, and pro-life advocates. Its Justice Department is abusing a seldom-used 1870 statute to enhance the sentences of peaceful abortion protesters, and filed at least 50 cases under the FACE Act against pro-life activists, but only five against abortion activists. It sent federal agents armed with long guns to arrest Mark Houck in front of his children for shoving someone who threatened his child during a demonstration at an abortion clinic (Houck was later acquitted).
The Biden-Harris Administration unconstitutionally appointed special prosecutor Jack Smith to indict Trump, the first administration to seek to imprison a former president. They sent Trump advisors Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro to jail—the first time since 1948 anyone has been jailed for congressional testimony. And they unleashed an unprecedented campaign to censor, suppress, and demonetize conservative voices on social media.
In his acceptance speech, Walz claimed that Trump opposes IVF and fertility treatments and that Trump and Vance own Project 2025. He said, “If these guys get back in the White House, they’ll start jacking up the costs on the middle class, they’ll repeal the Affordable Care Act, they’ll gut Social Security and Medicare, and they will ban abortion across this country, with or without Congress.” These allegations are contrary to Trump’s long-held views and the GOP platform.
There are many policies about which the Democratic and Republican candidates disagree. These are policies about which Harris and Walz could appeal to voters to see things their way. But telling voters the truth about their views on policy is the last thing Harris and Walz want to do.
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2024-09-10 02:30:002024-09-10 02:30:00Harris and Walz Don’t Think Much of Voters
One problem with writing an economic and market commentary is that it is a lot like writing a movie review after seeing only the first few scenes. There is more of the story to come, with complex twists and turns in the plot, but the reviewer must say something even though the ending is unknown. As a result, most reviews are wrong.
A dramatic example can be seen in recent headlines from the Wall Street Journal print edition. On September 3rd, the upper right front page article read: Investors’ Attitude On Stocks Get Ultra Bullish. The very next day, September 4th, in the same prominent spot, the headline ran: Stocks Sell Off On Fears Economy Is Cooling.
Wow! How things can change in a day! It is enough to give your entire portfolio whiplash.
ADVERTISEMENT
But we don’t mean to be critical – we just acknowledged that none of us knows the end of the movie with any certainty.
Nevertheless, we all try to see the future because we have to revise our portfolios from time to time, and that is the very nature of economic commentary. However, just because we do not know everything does not mean we know nothing. Those of us who don’t want to be unburdened by what has been have economic reasoning, experience, and history to draw on. Being burdened by data and history is not a bad thing.
To pick up the thread of our last commentary, we suggested the bulk of the data was showing that the economy was cooling off, that stocks were vulnerable because of extremely high sentiment and over-valuation, and that September, in terms of seasonal performance, is the worst month of the year. If we can be permitted to quote ourselves from Let’s Revise Those Revisions:
“To follow up on that seasonal metaphor, we now think we have had enough cool nights the leaves are starting to turn. But like everyone else, we are looking at a lot of data, and trying to sense a trend. Are there more indicators going up than down? Are all data points equal, or are some more important than others? How do you weigh the data, knowing some is more important than others?
These questions are hard to answer, but we think things have tilted toward the idea that the economy is cooling off. However, much of this data is subject to revisions. This has particularly been the case with government-produced data lately.”
How the rest of the month will go is unknown, but as this is being written, we have not had a single upside day for the month, and we have declined 3.4% in the S&P 500. It has been the worst week of the year. It would seem that September is earning its reputation once again.
ADVERTISEMENT
The continual deterioration in the employment data and subsequent revisions of past months are of greater concern. Both June and July jobs numbers were revised lower once again. Remarkable even for government numbers, 6 of the 7 last monthly jobs reports have been revised lower. Indeed, let’s revise the revisions.
According to the Kobeissi Letter, full-time employment dropped by one million in August, the 7th month in a row. Part-time employment rose for the 16th month in a row, and the number of people working at more than one job is growing. According to the latest Challenger Report, job cuts at US companies were up 193% in August. None of these trends are healthy.
We also suggested that at some point, the market would quit interpreting that “bad news is good news” and likely begin to regard bad news as…bad. That now seems to be the case because even though the weak numbers now justify a FED cut in interest rates, the reason rates may fall is not so much inflation is declining but that the economy is weakening. That is not a good story for forward earnings.
Further, the skew in the employment data is important. Donald Trump has been pilloried in the press because he suggested that most of the new jobs were going to illegal aliens. But, once again, he was correct. According to E.J. Antoni of the Heritage Foundation:
You have to give credit to Biden-Harris immigration policies. They allow foreigners not only to cancel out your votes, but they want them to take your jobs as well. Pass this data to a Democrat if you have the chance.
Also of concern is the number of job openings. A business must have a job opening before a job can be filled, and the trends don’t look promising.
Both the revised employment data and job openings support the FED in its change of direction regarding lowering interest rates. However, we do have some concerns that they might be behind the curve. That is to say, the economy was far weaker than they thought, and now they will move after employment is already imploding. It could be that bad data has not only misled the public but also the policymakers.
Now, we have the real risk of policy error once again. The Fed, already having blown multiple financial bubbles and causing the worst inflation in two generations, may have decided to cut too late. A recession will cause revenue to fall, endangering the ability to service bloated debt in almost all areas of society. This will put pressure on the Fed to once again crank up money creation to support government rescue efforts. We will start another round of intervention if the Treasury Bond market can take it.
Going into September, the public displays record bullishness with these impending rate cuts. Historically, once everyone gets on one side of the boat, the market becomes unbalanced and can capsize.
Judging public sentiment is difficult because of the problem of “what do you think versus what are you doing.” When both survey data (polls asking what do you think), and measures of investor action (what are you doing with your money), indicate the same condition, the market can have problems of vulnerability to bad news.
The American Association of Individual Investors constantly surveys the public, and until mid-September, its polling had been close to the highest bullish readings in the past two years.
However, as they say, the public can say they feel one way, but act in another. But, in this case, both survey and action data were together, a cautionary development.
This chart indicates the public is “all in” concerning the stock market. Not only do polls indicate excessive bullishness, but the public has also taken action and put a record portion of their household assets in equities.
Meanwhile, hedge funds have been huge sellers, and Warren Buffet has the largest cash hoard in Berkshire Hathaway’s history. Why is Buffet so cautious while the public is so bullish? Who do you think is correct?
This, in turn, raises several interesting questions: If everyone is already bullish and has placed their bets, where does the new money come from to drive stocks higher? Secondly, if stocks were to decline sharply, how would that make the public feel, and what influence would it have on consumer spending?
Our guess is it would be negative on both counts.
The public also holds an even more significant portion of household wealth in real estate, especially residential real estate.
Commercial real estate is already in serious trouble, but residential is in a kind of twilight hour. Prices remain very high and have given little ground to the downside. On the other hand, affordability is terrible, so the demand for homes is off sharply. Then why do not supply and demand get in gear, and prices decline to reflect the lack of demand?
It largely seems to be because the market is “frozen.” Millions of home buyers are financed with 3% mortgages, and they are disinclined to sell because they cannot afford to get into a new house at current higher real estate prices and interest rates. Hence, secondary supply is constrained, even though demand is soft.However, where people are not in those 3% mortgages (newly constructed homes), we are seeing discounts on newly constructed homes relative to existing homes.
Overall, however, the housing market is structurally out of balance, much like the stock market. Inflated like other assets by easy money policies and almost 20 years of ultra-low interest rates, housing prices are running way ahead of the wages needed to purchase a home. That divergence can’t last forever.
If stocks were to decline, as well as residential real estate, we think this would not only make consumers feel poorer, but they would also be poorer, and that could weaken one of the strongest pillars of the economy: consumer spending.
Consumer borrowing has already been at a record, and as we indicated before, rising default rates on credit cards and car loans hint that the consumer might be getting tapped out in terms of the ability to borrow to keep spending at a high rate.
There has already been a palpable shift within consumer spending towards necessities and away from discretionary purchases, another hint that the consumer, while still running hard, is beginning to get winded.
Insofar as stocks are concerned, the weakness so far has been minimal, and no real break in longer-term price trends has occurred. The system still seems awash in liquidity, with neither the Chicago Federal Reserve nor the Goldman Sachs Financial Conditions Index declining. Even the money supply seems to be starting to reverse once again to the upside.
The stock market seems to be in better shape than the underlying economy. Our best guess is that the economy is headed for autumn, and the leaves are now yellow. The big question remains: Will stocks hold up if the leaves turn red?
While the market is still having quite a good year, if you look at sector performance, you can see some shifts indicating economic softness and consumer exhaustion.
This analysis from Yahoo Finance shows better performance from defensive sectors (except big tech) such as utilities, communication services, and consumer defensive, as opposed to industrial, materials, and energy, which are sensitive to cyclical economic trends.
Would we be remiss if we did not note that while stocks are up 14% overall for the year as we write, gold prices are up 20% year to date?
We are not sure what that tells us, but interestingly, an inert metal is performing better than the market of the largest capitalistic country in the world. Perhaps gold is smelling that neither political party will cut spending, and if we nose into recession, excess spending will be piled upon excess as neither party will want to be blamed for suffering a recession and “doing nothing.”
Meanwhile, the movie will continue.
*****
Image credit: Pixabay
TAKE ACTION
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2024-09-10 02:29:002024-09-10 02:29:00There Is More Than A Hint Of Yellow In The Leaves
One problem with writing an economic and market commentary is that it is a lot like writing a movie review after seeing only the first few scenes. There is more of the story to come, with complex twists and turns in the plot, but the reviewer must say something even though the ending is unknown. As a result, most reviews are wrong.
A dramatic example can be seen in recent headlines from the Wall Street Journal print edition. On September 3rd, the upper right front page article read: Investors’ Attitude On Stocks Get Ultra Bullish. The very next day, September 4th, in the same prominent spot, the headline ran: Stocks Sell Off On Fears Economy Is Cooling.
Wow! How things can change in a day! It is enough to give your entire portfolio whiplash.
ADVERTISEMENT
But we don’t mean to be critical – we just acknowledged that none of us knows the end of the movie with any certainty.
Nevertheless, we all try to see the future because we have to revise our portfolios from time to time, and that is the very nature of economic commentary. However, just because we do not know everything does not mean we know nothing. Those of us who don’t want to be unburdened by what has been have economic reasoning, experience, and history to draw on. Being burdened by data and history is not a bad thing.
To pick up the thread of our last commentary, we suggested the bulk of the data was showing that the economy was cooling off, that stocks were vulnerable because of extremely high sentiment and over-valuation, and that September, in terms of seasonal performance, is the worst month of the year. If we can be permitted to quote ourselves from Let’s Revise Those Revisions:
“To follow up on that seasonal metaphor, we now think we have had enough cool nights the leaves are starting to turn. But like everyone else, we are looking at a lot of data, and trying to sense a trend. Are there more indicators going up than down? Are all data points equal, or are some more important than others? How do you weigh the data, knowing some is more important than others?
These questions are hard to answer, but we think things have tilted toward the idea that the economy is cooling off. However, much of this data is subject to revisions. This has particularly been the case with government-produced data lately.”
How the rest of the month will go is unknown, but as this is being written, we have not had a single upside day for the month, and we have declined 3.4% in the S&P 500. It has been the worst week of the year. It would seem that September is earning its reputation once again.
ADVERTISEMENT
The continual deterioration in the employment data and subsequent revisions of past months are of greater concern. Both June and July jobs numbers were revised lower once again. Remarkable even for government numbers, 6 of the 7 last monthly jobs reports have been revised lower. Indeed, let’s revise the revisions.
According to the Kobeissi Letter, full-time employment dropped by one million in August, the 7th month in a row. Part-time employment rose for the 16th month in a row, and the number of people working at more than one job is growing. According to the latest Challenger Report, job cuts at US companies were up 193% in August. None of these trends are healthy.
We also suggested that at some point, the market would quit interpreting that “bad news is good news” and likely begin to regard bad news as…bad. That now seems to be the case because even though the weak numbers now justify a FED cut in interest rates, the reason rates may fall is not so much inflation is declining but that the economy is weakening. That is not a good story for forward earnings.
Further, the skew in the employment data is important. Donald Trump has been pilloried in the press because he suggested that most of the new jobs were going to illegal aliens. But, once again, he was correct. According to E.J. Antoni of the Heritage Foundation:
You have to give credit to Biden-Harris immigration policies. They allow foreigners not only to cancel out your votes, but they want them to take your jobs as well. Pass this data to a Democrat if you have the chance.
Also of concern is the number of job openings. A business must have a job opening before a job can be filled, and the trends don’t look promising.
Both the revised employment data and job openings support the FED in its change of direction regarding lowering interest rates. However, we do have some concerns that they might be behind the curve. That is to say, the economy was far weaker than they thought, and now they will move after employment is already imploding. It could be that bad data has not only misled the public but also the policymakers.
Now, we have the real risk of policy error once again. The Fed, already having blown multiple financial bubbles and causing the worst inflation in two generations, may have decided to cut too late. A recession will cause revenue to fall, endangering the ability to service bloated debt in almost all areas of society. This will put pressure on the Fed to once again crank up money creation to support government rescue efforts. We will start another round of intervention if the Treasury Bond market can take it.
Going into September, the public displays record bullishness with these impending rate cuts. Historically, once everyone gets on one side of the boat, the market becomes unbalanced and can capsize.
Judging public sentiment is difficult because of the problem of “what do you think versus what are you doing.” When both survey data (polls asking what do you think), and measures of investor action (what are you doing with your money), indicate the same condition, the market can have problems of vulnerability to bad news.
The American Association of Individual Investors constantly surveys the public, and until mid-September, its polling had been close to the highest bullish readings in the past two years.
However, as they say, the public can say they feel one way, but act in another. But, in this case, both survey and action data were together, a cautionary development.
This chart indicates the public is “all in” concerning the stock market. Not only do polls indicate excessive bullishness, but the public has also taken action and put a record portion of their household assets in equities.
Meanwhile, hedge funds have been huge sellers, and Warren Buffet has the largest cash hoard in Berkshire Hathaway’s history. Why is Buffet so cautious while the public is so bullish? Who do you think is correct?
This, in turn, raises several interesting questions: If everyone is already bullish and has placed their bets, where does the new money come from to drive stocks higher? Secondly, if stocks were to decline sharply, how would that make the public feel, and what influence would it have on consumer spending?
Our guess is it would be negative on both counts.
The public also holds an even more significant portion of household wealth in real estate, especially residential real estate.
Commercial real estate is already in serious trouble, but residential is in a kind of twilight hour. Prices remain very high and have given little ground to the downside. On the other hand, affordability is terrible, so the demand for homes is off sharply. Then why do not supply and demand get in gear, and prices decline to reflect the lack of demand?
It largely seems to be because the market is “frozen.” Millions of home buyers are financed with 3% mortgages, and they are disinclined to sell because they cannot afford to get into a new house at current higher real estate prices and interest rates. Hence, secondary supply is constrained, even though demand is soft.However, where people are not in those 3% mortgages (newly constructed homes), we are seeing discounts on newly constructed homes relative to existing homes.
Overall, however, the housing market is structurally out of balance, much like the stock market. Inflated like other assets by easy money policies and almost 20 years of ultra-low interest rates, housing prices are running way ahead of the wages needed to purchase a home. That divergence can’t last forever.
If stocks were to decline, as well as residential real estate, we think this would not only make consumers feel poorer, but they would also be poorer, and that could weaken one of the strongest pillars of the economy: consumer spending.
Consumer borrowing has already been at a record, and as we indicated before, rising default rates on credit cards and car loans hint that the consumer might be getting tapped out in terms of the ability to borrow to keep spending at a high rate.
There has already been a palpable shift within consumer spending towards necessities and away from discretionary purchases, another hint that the consumer, while still running hard, is beginning to get winded.
Insofar as stocks are concerned, the weakness so far has been minimal, and no real break in longer-term price trends has occurred. The system still seems awash in liquidity, with neither the Chicago Federal Reserve nor the Goldman Sachs Financial Conditions Index declining. Even the money supply seems to be starting to reverse once again to the upside.
The stock market seems to be in better shape than the underlying economy. Our best guess is that the economy is headed for autumn, and the leaves are now yellow. The big question remains: Will stocks hold up if the leaves turn red?
While the market is still having quite a good year, if you look at sector performance, you can see some shifts indicating economic softness and consumer exhaustion.
This analysis from Yahoo Finance shows better performance from defensive sectors (except big tech) such as utilities, communication services, and consumer defensive, as opposed to industrial, materials, and energy, which are sensitive to cyclical economic trends.
Would we be remiss if we did not note that while stocks are up 14% overall for the year as we write, gold prices are up 20% year to date?
We are not sure what that tells us, but interestingly, an inert metal is performing better than the market of the largest capitalistic country in the world. Perhaps gold is smelling that neither political party will cut spending, and if we nose into recession, excess spending will be piled upon excess as neither party will want to be blamed for suffering a recession and “doing nothing.”
Meanwhile, the movie will continue.
*****
Image credit: Pixabay
TAKE ACTION
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2024-09-10 02:29:002024-09-10 02:29:00The Economy: There Is More Than A Hint Of Yellow In The Leaves
Recently I read how the current campaign between Trump and Harris is divided between the team who is bringing joy to the campaign trail and the one that brings rage. That is a fascinating way to characterize the two campaigns. Let’s take a closer look.
We begin with the fact that we have a campaign between the incumbents and the challengers. No matter what Ms. Harris says, she is the incumbent. By definition, the incumbents are going to tell America that things are wonderful, and we need to continue on the path to greatness with just a few tweaks here and there. The challengers must say negative things because they are forced to say what they are getting isn’t good enough and they can do better. Since historically any campaign could be characterized as Joy vs. Rage, we need to dig a bit deeper.
Theoretically, most if not all journalists should find the sudden change of candidates interesting. There is a significant interest regarding what Harris and Walz knew about President Biden’s inability to continue on as a candidate. It didn’t just happen the night of June 27th when he showed up for the debate. Ms. Harris tells us she worked intimately with Mr. Biden which is why she is prepared to take over his job. Mr. Walz emerged from a Governors’ meeting with President Biden after the debate and vouched for his competence. The American public was purposely deceived, and we deserve to know what they knew and when they knew it. That would be a misdirection from the Joy Campaign though.
ADVERTISEMENT
Niall Ferguson wrote “when the Democrats could no longer keep the Biden fiction alive it turned to another one, pretending Kamala Harris was in fact the perfect candidate, who would sweep to victory on November the fifth.” That is where the Joy campaign began.
Apparently, empirical evidence of policy failures in their respective states (California and Minnesota) has caused people to flood out to Nevada, Texas, Tennessee, Florida, etc. Certainly, crime and homelessness in California to accompany high taxes and excessive poverty is not all caused by Harris, but she certainly contributed to it. The people fleeing Minnesota are obviously related to the policies enacted by “Coach Walz” as the exodus has occurred since he became Governor. Hush – keep that to yourself because it is the Joy Campaign.
As Victor Davis Hanson stated, “No one voted for the Biden-Harris ticket to borrow trillions sparking hyperinflation, to wage war on fossil fuels, to go woke, to welcome in 10 million illegal aliens, to abandon $50 billion in weapons to the terrorist Taliban, and to find America facing existential wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and soon perhaps over Taiwan.” That is because we were not allowed to discuss policy in 2020 as Uncle Joe huddled in his beach home with his wife and juvenile delinquent child while hiding from the public. This is not because we had the Joy Campaign then, but the seeds were certainly planted.
On August 8th, Harris was stopped on a tarmac and answered questions for an entire minute. The press, so rabid for the truth, gave her a complete pass when she said she would look at having an interview by the end of the month (23 days later). She did comply with that 21 days later, but with her new soulmate at her side. Who wants to subvert the Joy Campaign?
The Joy Campaign would be unique if it were not modeled after, you guessed it, The Trump campaign. It is as if the fawning press had skipped over the events where often tens of thousands of people line up for days to participate in a Trump rally. It is almost as if the members of Pravda had never read the multiple stories of formerly anti-Trump people attending a Trump rally, feeling the love, and telling the world the people– you know, the ones they were told to either hate or that they were just rubes, were actually genuinely nice, warm, kind people. What used to be considered “Minnesota nice” really could be found in Pennsylvania or Georgia or Nevada at a Trump Rally.
Sure, the rallies for the Joy Campaign are drawing lots of people, but the question is are they there because they are just delighted with their former candidate — the old, weird man who leaned into the mic and whispered at us while stating something unintelligible — is gone? Don’t you think at some point they want to hear whether the person who was ridiculed by the same press just three months ago as a bumbling, inept second banana all of a sudden is now St. Kammy?
ADVERTISEMENT
How long can the charade of the Joy Campaign continue? Will the truth be told about this pitiful candidate so that she can be sent off to become the newest member of The View, where Harris really belongs?
The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.
Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.
Please click the following link to learn more.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2024-09-10 02:28:002024-09-10 02:28:00The Joy Campaign
