Bernie Sanders tells us the truth.

Senator Bernie Sanders (S-VT)[1]Technically, Mr Sanders is listed as an Independent, who caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate, but I believe that S, for ‘Socialist,’ is far more accurate. is many unsavory things, but he does, on occasion, tell the truth. From USA Today:

Bernie Sanders told the truth about Kamala Harris trying to fool voters. Believe him.

Harris is tiptoeing around the positions on issues that won her elections in California and cautiously testing what voters will grab onto and what they will reject.

by Nicole Russell | Tuesday, September 10, 2024 | 5:11 AM EDT | Updated: Thursday, September 12, 2024 | 2:35 PM EDT

You may have heard Maya Angelou’s powerful saying, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Sometimes, when other people tell you who a person is, you should believe them, too. Especially if the person in question doesn’t want to tell you who they really are.

That is the case with Vice President Kamala Harris.

In an interview Sunday on “Meet the Press,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, a progressive independent from Vermont, said something about the Democratic presidential nominee that she isn’t willing to admit to voters.

NBC News host Kristen Welker asked: “She has previously supported Medicare for All, now she does not. She’s previously supported a ban on fracking, now she does not. These, Senator, are ideas that you have campaigned on. Do you think that she is abandoning her progressive ideals?”

Sanders: “No, I don’t think she’s abandoning her ideals. I think she is trying to be pragmatic and do what she thinks is right in order to win the election.”

You have to give the seasoned senator kudos for saying it like it is, especially because Harris has yet to describe her own campaign with such clarity.

There’s more at the original. If you get stopped by a paywall, you can also read the original here.

Opinion author Nicole Russell stopped short of writing the unvarnished truth, but I will not: what the Distinguished Gentleman from Vermont was saying is that he believes that Kamala Harris Emhoff — just because the Vice President hasn’t shown enough respect for her husband to have taken his last name does not mean that I shall show him similar disrespect — has been lying to us! Mr Sanders told us, in effect, that he understands that the hard left policies that he has long advocated are not popular enough nationwide to win elections, and that he thinks that the Democratic presidential nominee knows the same thing.

Did Mrs Emhoff tell Mr Sanders thus? Was there a quiet conversation in which she whispered, “Don’t worry, Bernie, I can be my authentic self after the election?,” or is it simply something that the Bolshevik from Burlington believes to be the case? We don’t know the answer to that, but one thing has been pretty clear: a lot of the Vice President’s supporters believe just what Mr Sanders stated.

As it happens, I certainly believe that she would move harder to the left were Americans foolish enough to elect her.

Many voters also got caught up in all the laughter and joy. But when they started to look around to see what the frenzy was about, they found a record of flip-flopping on really progressive policies, running mate Tim Walz’s fabulism and a bunch of vague promises.

Sanders is right, of course. Harris’ pattern of flip-flopping on policies − like favoring a ban on fracking for oil and gas before opposing it now, or supporting mandatory gun buybacks in 2019 but opposing them now − isn’t about her growth as a leader or the evolution of her thinking.

It’s really about her campaign’s recognition that far-left ideas that played well in California won’t sell in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin.

At least her policy proposals didn’t play well enough, among Democrats, for her to make any headway in her campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, and she dropped out in December of 2019, before the first contest in Iowa. It didn’t help her that then-Representative Tulsi Gabbard Williams (D-HI) demolished her in a previous debate.

Gaslighting is not just bad form; it’s bad news for voters because it violates the principle of informed consent. Politicians have long tried to fool voters into believing they stand for one thing while they quietly support something else − as Sanders says Harris is doing now − but they deserve to be called on it as well.

The Democrats believe that as well, as they continually try to link former President Donald Trump to the so-called Project 2025, even though Mr Trump had nothing to do with writing or approving it, and has politically distanced himself from it.

At a certain point, it becomes laughable. Comedian (?) Kathy Griffin whined that if Mr Trump is re-elected, he’ll throw comedians like her in jail, even though he never tried to do so during his first term, despite the fact she posted a photo of her holding a Trump mask dripping with fake blood, as though he had been beheaded. The Philadelphia Inquirer and columnist Will Bunch in particular keep telling us that if Mr Trump wins, democracy is finished, while Salon writer Amanda Marcotte has gone just bat guano insane with #TrumpDerangementSyndrome.

If Mrs Emhoff really knows what she wants to do if elected, and that’s a very big “if,” she’s keeping it down to vague, broad-stroke proposals, trying not to offend anyone, but, in doing that, she’s concomitantly telling us that it will be the bureaucrats and functionaries who will be doing the governing. That’s not really a surprise, because that’s what happens in every modern administration, with the President setting a policy, and then the ‘experts’ trying to figure out how to make it work.

And that’s the real danger of a victory for the Vice President: the people she would bring into office with her will be uniformly hard-left, and they would be the ones who would destroy our society and economy, with proposals written in ways the voters would never approve. Mr Sanders knows this, and knows that the candidate has to temper what she says, but he strongly believes that he would get most, if not all, of what he would want were he the President.

I suspect that a lot of the further left people in the United States believe the same thing.

References

References
1 Technically, Mr Sanders is listed as an Independent, who caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate, but I believe that S, for ‘Socialist,’ is far more accurate.

Anti-Semitism in America isn’t about religion

It was just last night, at 10:14 PM EDT, that I published an article pointing out that Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff opted against choosing Governor Josh Shapiro (D-PA) as her running mate, noting that, despite the denials, it was all because he and his wife are Jewish. With the open drive toward anti-Semitism by the young and the ignorant among the harder left, and Mrs Emhoff’s husband, Douglas Emhoff also being Jewish, there’s just no way the Vice President and her staff would make a selection which would drive the anti-Jewish and anti-Israel leftists away.

And on Monday morning, The Philadelphia Inquirer gave OpEd space to Zev Eleff, president and professor of American Jewish History at Gratz College in Melrose Park, that barely glossed over — if you can even call it that much — the radical anti-Semitic left in the decision:

Josh Shapiro, the veepstakes, and the role of faith in presidential politics

I’m proud that the governor was reportedly on the short list of Kamala Harris running mates. Yet I was also troubled by those who asked whether America was “ready” for a Jewish vice president.

by Zev Eleff | Monday, August 12, 2024 | 6:37 AM EDT

The polarizing discussion surrounding Gov. Josh Shapiro’s faith and his recent bid to join Kamala Harris on the Democratic ticket struck a very different tone than the Jewish presidential question of 1959. Back then, the journalist Bernard Postal polled a who’s who of American politics — Earl Warren, Hubert Humphrey, Dwight Eisenhower, to name-drop a handful of the 30 respondents — on a very pithy question: “Can a Jew be elected president?”

Postal was prompted by the wide speculation that John F. Kennedy, the Catholic senator from Massachusetts, would run for president in the next election. “I believe that a candidate’s religion should have no bearing upon his qualifications for the Office of President,” wrote Kennedy to Postal. “Accordingly, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews should all base their appeal to the voters upon their record of accomplishments and their program or action.”

Postal reported that most agreed with Kennedy, hopeful “that before too long the voters will do away with the tacit but nonetheless effective religious test that has traditionally barred all but white Protestants from the Presidency and the Vice Presidency.”

There’s a lot more at the original, but, like so many historians, he has missed the point!

Dr Eleff’s OpEd piece tells the reader something of the history of religious tolerance, as it slowly gained a foothold in the American body politic. While there were a few, and I stress the description few, anti-Semitic influences and incidents in the United States, the bigotry against Jews, Muslims, and Catholics in the United States was fairly minor as far as being based on their faith. It was more pronounced based upon ethnicity, and ethnicity was not part of the professor’s OpEd.

Catholics don’t really come with an ethnicity link in the United States, other than we are primarily white and Hispanic; the percentage of blacks who are Catholic has always been small. For Muslims, much of the ethnic mix are of Arabic or African extraction.

Jews? In the United States, they are almost exclusively white, and so indistinguishable in appearance, other than by the way some sects of Judaism in the US dress, that the Nazis in Germany actually published a “Jewface” caricature of ‘Jewish physiognomy,’ because Jews weren’t that easy to distinguish in many cases just by looking. The Nazis wanted everyone to be able to know who was Jewish! In the United States, in most of Europe, Jews are characterized primarily by ethnicity. In a way that would be funny if it wasn’t so pathetically sad, so many good, white Europeans and Americans view Jews as not being white, while much of the Arab Middle East sees Jews as too white, and not ethnically connected to the Holy Land.

Do Mr and Mrs Shapiro attend the synagogue? Does Mr Emhoff go to Temple? If anyone has asked those questions, I haven’t seen them, but my point is that the discrimination against Jews is not really religious, at least not in the 21st century. We all seem to know that Jews have a different faith than Christians or Muslims — though I would point out here that every Catholic Mass on Sunday has a reading from the Old Testament, the pre-Christian Jewish holy books — but how many actually understand Judaism, as a religion, to be offended by the religious differences?

And let’s tell the truth here: a large percentage of Americans who might tell you that they are Christian don’t attend church. Joe Biden is famously Catholic, and attends Mass frequently, but his being a Democrat is far, far, far more important to him than being Catholic!

Today’s anti-Semitism is almost entirely political. We good, white Christians drove the Jews out of Europe, because the Nazis tried to kill them all. Half of the Jews of Europe were killed by the Third Reich, but those who survived were thoroughly dispossessed. They couldn’t return to their homes in Europe because they had no homes in Europe, and even if they had, their neighbors would have been the same good, white Christians who turned them over to the Nazis. Zionism was a political movement, started long before the Nazis came to power, but it became a political and social imperative thanks to the Nazis.

Mr Shapiro was not chosen as Mrs Emhoff’s running mate because he is religiously Jewish, but because his ethnic and family history is Jewish. Among today’s fanatical and anti-Semitic left, that’s all it takes.

Rubbing my hands in glee Could the pro-Hamas radicals recreate the 1968 Democratic National Convention?

1968 Democratic National Convention.

Regardless of their denials, Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff did not select Governor Josh Shapiro (D-PA) to be her runningmate because he is Jewish. More, his wife, Lori Shapiro, is also Jewish, as is the Vice President’s husband, Douglas Emhoff. Mrs Emhoff and her campaign staffers had a big picture of how the anti-Semitic far left of the Democratic Party would react to having three Jews out of four on the ticket.

So, she instead selected Governor Tim Walz (D-MN), as the least offensive candidate, but it still might not work. From The Washington Post:

Pro-Palestinian protesters vow massive showing at Democratic convention

Activists say the replacement of President Joe Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris does not affect their plans for a show of anger and dissent.

By Yasmeen Abutaleb | Sunday, August 11, 2024 | 6:00 AM EDT | Updated: 3:45 PM EDT

BRIDGEVIEW, Ill. — The scenes and stenches that greeted Hamza AbdulQader when he crossed Egypt’s border into Gaza in mid-March were far worse than the devastating videos he had watched as war raged in the territory.

I have deleted three useless paragraphs at this point, in which the practitioners of the ‘new’ journalism begin with a small story as a segue into the larger story.

Democratic leaders hoped that Vice President Kamala Harris’s ascent to the top of the ticket would shrink the protests, since she was not the architect of President Joe Biden’s Gaza policies and has been more vocal in challenging Israel and voicing empathy for Palestinians. But to many activists, Harris has not done nearly enough.

“We don’t expect any changes — we’re still anticipating that there will be tens of thousands of people in the streets,” said Hatem Abudayyeh, national chair for the U.S. Palestinian Community Network and a spokesman for the Coalition to March on the DNC, an amalgamation of more than 200 advocacy groups and community organizations. AbdulQader added, “Unless she clearly takes a stance and says this is not okay … that door is shut.”

The night that Biden dropped out of the presidential race on July 21, more than 80 people logged in to the coalition’s weekly Zoom meeting, Abudayyeh said, and organizers said they were moving ahead as planned even though it looked like Harris would soon become the Democratic nominee. They asked if there were objections, and no one raised concerns.

The same night, the coalition put out a statement saying, “Democratic Party leadership switching out their presidential nominee does not wash the blood of over 50,000 Palestinians off their hands. When it comes to the genocide in Gaza there is no difference between Biden, Harris, or any of the likely candidates for the nomination.”

Hey, that’s great! Recreate 1968, please!

I have a difficult time picturing many of the pro-‘Palestinian,’ pro-Hamas demonstrators voting for former President Donald Trump, but I’d be perfectly happy if they were just so angry that they don’t vote at all: that not only takes potential votes away from the top of the ticket, but in the ‘down-ballot’ races as well.

American Jews normally give roughly ¾ of their votes to the Democrats, but if they see the Usual Suspects rioting in front of the Democratic National Convention, and Mrs Emhoff and her minions trying to mealy-mouth platitudes to the pro-Hamas crowd, that number just might change. They’ll realize the two-faced actions, and then remember that it was President Trump and his Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner, engineered the Abraham Accords between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, and which was later supported by Bahrain and Oman. They’ll also remember that it was President Trump who finally ended the practice of American Presidents certifying every six months that the American embassy in Israel could not be moved to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, as required by a 1996 law, and moved our embassy to the Israeli capital.

There’s still a lot that can happen, and only the Lord knows who will win the elections, but anything that weakens the Democrats is a good thing.

The left are pro-choice on exactly one thing

Journalist James Ochoa of The Street has said that Ford is sending “mixed signals” about its “commitment” to plug in electric vehicles, but he’s got that wrong. Reality is that car buyers have sent signals that the left do not like concerning the silly things!


Ford execs send mixed signals about EV commitment

The Dearborn-based automaker’s moves are a grim reflection of the EV market

James Ochoa | Sunday, July 21, 2024 | 5:09 PM EDT

Despite CEO Jim Farley’s enthusiasm about electric vehicles, navigating the avenues of the EV marketplace has been a rocky road at best for Ford (F).

In its earnings report released in April, the Blue Oval reported that its electric car division, Model e, lost $1.3 billion in the first quarter of 2024. Meanwhile, the automaker’s commercial and fleet vehicle division, Ford Pro, made $7,300 per vehicle on the nearly 400,000 vehicles it sold.

Meanwhile, the electric Model e division lost $130,000 on each of the nearly 10,000 EVs it moved in the same period.

Think about that: Ford was losing twice the cost of its most expensive electric vehicle, the F-150 lightning, on each unit sold.

During the company’s earnings call, Farley expressed that much work had to be done to make its EVs positively impact the company’s bottom line.

“We’re being very consistent about our discipline on profitability,” Farley said. “We expect every one of our EVs to make money in the first 12 months, and that is a very disciplined process.”

But here comes the kicker:

Part of Ford’s “disciplined process” is outsizing the need to build more profitable vehicles. Unfortunately for the environment, those vehicles aren’t electric vehicles but rather massive, fuel-burning, heavy-duty pickup trucks.

In a recent announcement, Blue Oval said it’s investing $3 billion to boost the output of the Super Duty, the bigger, bulkier sibling of the popular F-150 pickup trucks. These trucks, equipped with up to a 7.3-liter V8 engine, are popular with tradespeople and laymen who want extra power for towing larger objects like boats.

The article continues to tell readers about the investments the company is making to produce more of the Super Duty, which is a version of the F-250 or F-350, not the F-150 — because Ford is having trouble keeping up with the demand for the trucks. And here’s the money line:

While Ford’s Model e division loses $130,000 on each EV, Ford makes an estimated $20,000 in profit on every Super Duty.

Translation: in a market in which the federal government is providing tax credits and incentives to buy plug-in electric vehicles, Ford still cannot sell enough of them to come close to breaking even, while the company not only makes money on its larger trucks, but is just barely, if that, keeping up with the demand. While there are obviously some people who want EVs, the majority of the new vehicle buying market simply don’t want them.

But, of course, the federal government, and some state governments, want to force-feed the American people on things they do not really want. President Biden put in place a mandate that all new vehicles sold in the United States must be zero-emission by 2035, but his term ends in January. The expected Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Emhoff[1]Just because she does not respect her husband enough to have taken his name, I will not show him similar disrespect. launched her own presidential campaign in 2019, and her stated positions were even more stringent than Mr Biden’s:

  • A bold target to exceed the Paris Agreement climate goals and achieve a clean economy by 2045;
  • Investing $10 trillion in public and private funding to meet the initial 10-year mobilization necessary to stave off the worst climate impacts;
  • Modernize our transportation, energy, and water infrastructure;
  • Accelerate the spread of electric vehicles, solar panels, and wind turbines;
  • Make big investments in battery storage, climate-smart agriculture, advanced manufacturing, and the innovative technologies that will build our carbon-free future;
  • By 2030, we will run on 100 percent carbon-neutral electricity, all new buses, heavy-duty vehicles, and vehicle fleets will be zero-emission;

As we have previously reported, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Agency (SEPTA) bought 25 battery-electric buses from California manufacturer Proterra in 2016, but all have been parked since 2020 because they were pieces of feces had problems. In November of 2022, one of the mothballed Proterra buses spontaneously caught fire, which a SEPTA spokeswoman confirmed was traced to lithium ion battery units inside the bus.

  • All new buildings will be carbon-neutral; and
  • Transition our public lands from producing the fossil fuels that represent 24 percent of national emissions to carbon sinks.

In 2023, the United States was the world’s largest crude oil producer, as it had been for the previous five years, and has the world’s greatest proven recoverable oil reserves. In 2023, the US was by far the world’s largest natural gas producer, at 1,035,000,000,000 cubic feet, 76.4% more than #2 Russia’s 586.4 billion ft³, and over four times as much as third place Iran.

The propane fireplace that is our secondary heat source.

Mrs Emhoff would curtail our oil and natural gas production where she could, raising prices for consumers, and sending more of Americans’ hard-earned dollars to foreign countries to buy oil and natural gas, and, of course, cut the number of jobs in oil and natural gas production in the US.

That is all pie-in-the-sky, and four years of economic reality ought to temper her proposals, but it tells us that Mrs Emhoff doesn’t care about what the American people actually want, as measured by our own economic choices. We vote every couple of years for political candidates, but we vote every single day of our lives with our economic choices. Those people buying gasoline-powered vehicles are voting against the Democrats’ plans to require zero-emission cars and trucks, at least for themselves. Those people buying or remodeling with natural gas furnaces and ranges are voting against the liberals’ stated policies.

The United States has been blessed with tremendous natural resources, including huge oil and natural gas resources. The US also has the world’s largest coal reserves, 250.3 billion tons, 56.1% more than second place Russia’s 160.3 billion tons. Mrs Emhoff and the Democrats would squander that great natural wealth by leaving it untapped, costing the American people wealth and jobs, and sending more of our remaining wealth overseas to buy things we currently produce ourselves.

References

References
1 Just because she does not respect her husband enough to have taken his name, I will not show him similar disrespect.

We have a President willing to play nuclear patty-cake with Vladimir Putin, and he’s only lucid six hours a day? Even White House insiders are telling us that he can't answer the 3:00 AM phone call

I have used the image of this tweet from Democrats.org previously, but it’s gained new meaning. Note that the photo used shows a smiling, apparently robust Joe Biden, which the Democrats want you to believe that he is. With today’s news, I also noticed that it shows Mr Biden in the middle of a reasonably warm, sunny day.

Two Joe Bidens: The night America saw the other one

Continue reading

Gee, she’s dumb!

At 11:30 AM EDT on Thursday, September 16, 2021, Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff tweeted, “Our Administration will always fight to defend the right of women to make decisions about their own bodies. It is non-negotiable.” The image of the tweet to the right is a screen capture, in case the dummy deletes it; the link to the tweet is embedded above.

Of course, as we noted about Governor Andy Beshear’s tweet, Mrs Emhoff’s tweet was quite possibly written by one of her minions. I’d like to think that the first person in line to the presidency isn’t dumb enough to have tweeted that while the President is trying to impose COVID-19 vaccine mandates on everybody, but, at least thus far, there isn’t a lot of evidence to support that hope.