September 9, 2024

Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.

As Kamala Harris refuses to make the sale to voters, Donald Trump can close the deal at the debate

By Robert Romano

As the 2024 presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump begins to enter to closing stretch, all eyes are now turned to the Sept. 10 debate between the two candidates, as national polls still show the race to be closely contested both nationally and in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina and Nevada.

For example, Harris, who thus far has chosen to run a campaign light on specifics, still trails Trump in the New York Times-Sienna poll taken Sept. 3 to Sept. 6, 48 percent to 47 percent. That’s no better than late July, before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Ill., when it was Trump leading 48 percent to 47 percent, and is no better than in April when Trump led Biden 47 percent to 46, underscoring how little the race has changed as Harris has offered little reason for voters to change their opinions.

The truth is, Democrats were in trouble long before the catastrophic June 27 debate between Biden and Trump.

At the debate, Harris might yet wish to shape the election as something of a personality contest between her and Trump, but her challenge remains her need to outline a vision that she wants Congress and her administration to work on. That is something she largely failed to do in Chicago, instead opting for a short speech focused on her personal story, and was otherwise suited for a Vice Presidential challenger nominee to give, attacking Trump and his policies (even though he hasn’t been in office for three and a half years), but offering very few of her own.

Harris might be hoping to run as a blank slate, but the truth is, as the Vice President, she is the incumbent, representing the incumbent party, the Democrats, who have held the White House since 2021 under Biden and Harris. Incumbents are supposed to run on success, not how they would do things differently. And as usual, the election will be a referendum on the incumbent party — regardless of the nominee — and the current state of things.

And Trump will be on the attack.

Harris will have to defend the current economy, which are the product of her administration’s policies and appears to be weakening, with unemployment having increased 1.4 million since Dec. 2022.

That followed a dramatic spike in inflation to 9.1 percent in June 2022 following production not catching up with demand after the Covid lockdowns and a torrent of federal spending that began in Covid but continued her first year in office with $1.9 trillion so-called American Rescue Plan and another $891 billion of green and other subsidies.

Now we are past peak employment and as the economy overheats, Americans have maxed out their credit cards, and so demand is low. Making matters worse, prices still have largely not come down.

Food is still up 21.8 percent since Feb. 2021.

Electricity is still up 27.3 percent in that time.

Utility piped gas service is up 29.3 percent during the same period.

Gasoline is up 40.3 percent.

Shelter is up 21.8 percent.

New motor vehicles are up 18.95 percent.

And those were so expensive, demand for used vehicles surged, which are up 13.7 percent.

Moreover, the American dream of home ownership remains elusive, thanks to all the inflation, interest rates have surged, including 30-year mortgage interest rates, from 2.7 percent in Feb. 2021 to 6.35 percent today. Coupled with the spike in home prices, the cost of a monthly mortgage payment for a recent home purchased has largely doubled.

Overall consumer prices for everything are up 18.9 percent.

The risk for Harris is that, without specifics, she will come across as out of touch and indifferent, but worse, if she told voters what she really wants, which is to ultimately restrict energy production even further, driving prices even higher, to make way for green new fantasy.

Making matters worse, and the reason this matters the most, is incomes have not kept up by any measure. Personal incomes, which include government transfer payments from all the printed money, are only up 18.6 percent. Median nominal weekly earnings for wage and salary workers are only up 17 percent.

This rarely happens historically, where wages and incomes don’t keep up with prices, but when it does happen — under Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush — it has proven to be catastrophic for incumbent parties. The classic historic summation was by Ronald Reagan when he asked at the debate against Carter in 1980, “are you better off than you were 4 years ago?”

The answer was no then, and today it is no again. It’s an incredibly easy case for Trump, who has offered policies including to boost energy production, to make, and it will be one that Harris will have no easy answers for. Harris has not made the sale to the American people, and so that might mean Trump is able to close the deal. Stay tuned.

Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.

To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2024/09/as-kamala-harris-refuses-to-make-the-sale-to-voters-donald-trump-can-close-the-deal-at-the-debate/

The dam lie

By Rick Manning

Environmentalists are busily celebrating the destruction of the Klamath River dam system under the auspices that fish will thrive as a result. 

Here is the problem.

40,000 people depend upon the Klamath River dams for their electric power. Now, 40,000 people added to the grid doesn’t seem like much, but in California and Oregon where these people live, fossil fuel and coal generated electricity are being phased out, and nuclear is verboten.  So, the choice made by the ‘authorities’ was to end the only truly renewable electricity generation system – dams using turbines powered by running water – for the ultimate unreliable sources – wind and solar.

Both California and Oregon have vowed to end sales of gasoline powered vehicles by 2035 – that’s eleven years. Neither has an honest plan to produce the electricity needed to power millions of electric vehicles.

Inverse.com cites TESLA CEO Elon Musk as estimating that the grid will need to generate around twice as much electricity if all vehicles go electric and if heating also switches we will need about three times as much electricity. Musk, in the article, pushes the idea of solar energy plus batteries to meet these needs.

Of course, this would require a quantum leap in battery capacity with particularly bad effects in places like Portland, Oregon which doesn’t get much sun from the fall to the spring. Nothing like your heating being reliant on solar, when the sun doesn’t really shine in your gloomy city for six months.

Ironically or not, the heavily green coastal Northwest is almost completely dependent upon the exact hydro-electric power that has been dismantled in northern California and southern Oregon and which is proposed to be ripped out of the Snake River, which forms much of the border between the Washington-Idaho border and along the Washington-Oregon border in the eastern part of the states.

The Snake River dam system produces the equivalent of three large nuclear power plants or six medium-sized coal plants (3,000 MegaWatts).  Those who seek to destroy the dams assure the public that a combination of conservation and solar/wind will replace the energy generated by the Snake River dam destruction. After all, the Spokane Spokesman-Review advises that the Snake River dams are not ‘big power producers’ but play an important regional role in a March, 2021 headline.

A reasonable person might question why people who are so clearly dependent upon hydropower dams to meet their current electricity needs would support both tearing down the dams while at the same time increasing their dependence on electricity?

It isn’t because they are ignorant or stupid as many would surmise.

It is because for the environmental left, making electricity scarce is key to controlling the usage of that electricity. This would give enviro-bureaucrats control over every factory and home in America simply through the imposition of electricity rationing.

If the goal is to de-industrialize America, then the answer is to destroy the electricity grid which is the critical component of increasing wealth in our country. After all, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt recognized this simple fact when he pushed rural electrification initiatives, like the Tennessee Valley Authority during the Great Depression. Electricity means business and enterprise as opposed to subsistence living.

The modern left sees America’s wealth as a problem to the rest of the world as they view our consumption of ‘resources’ to be unfair to the rest of the world. So, they push the idea of man-made climate change, and then seek to have those who have been indoctrinated to vote to make themselves dramatically more poor while telling them that it will be okay, there is magic in the sun and wind.

The Harris-Biden push for ending gasoline powered vehicles, along with natural gas powered stoves are perfect examples of creating a future artificial dependency which enhances the power of the self-appointed electricity gods in Washington, D.C..

Now, when you hear the dam lie that pushes the destruction of renewable hydroelectric power along with the contradictory push to create total dependency on electricity for everyday living, you can ask yourself who benefits from making Americans poor and reliant on others for their very survival? 

Once you get to that question, just look at who or what country benefits from solar and wind power the most and you will understand what is really at stake.

To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2024/09/the-dam-lie/

Time for Never Trumpers to Drop their Conservative Charade

By Rick Manning

Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party nominee, is the most liberal nominee for president in history.

She has ardently supported Medicare for All, also known as a complete federal government takeover of health care, even though she has tried to walk it back in this election cycle. Philosophically, self-proclaimed conservatives have argued vehemently against this policy and the experience of Covid should have given the practical reasons to back the rhetoric.

She is on record as opposing hydraulic fracturing and the Biden-Harris energy policy is one that makes the country more dependent upon electricity generation while ending the most reliable sources to generate electricity. With the  key Electoral College state Pennsylvania being a major economic beneficiary of fracking Harris now claims to be against banning the process. GOP “leaders” claim to oppose the Green New Deal destruction of fossil fuels generation, and pretend to understand that reliance on unreliable sources of energy puts our nation at risk.

She has proposed price controls on food as a solution to inflation. You can’t find a single conservative leader in America who believes that the government can do a better job of pricing commodities than the market, and that food price controls don’t mean food shortages. Not even the Washington Post thinks this emphasis on price “gouging” is a good idea.

Kamala Harris is an abortion extremist who as the California Attorney General raided the home of an independent journalist who uncovered an elaborate business venture by Planned Parenthood to market and sell baby body parts from aborted children.  Kamala Harris did not prosecute Planned Parenthood, but the journalist who uncovered and videotaped the sickening practice of selling off body parts as if aborted children were human parts manufacturers.

On taxes, she has embraced taxing unrealized capital gains. An example of an unrealized capital gain would be to impose a tax on a homeowner on any appreciation of the value of their home even though that money is only a paper gain and not in their bank account.

Also, the Tax Foundation found that Harris’ pledge to end the Trump tax cuts will mean a tax increase for most Americans. In fact, the bottom half of taxpayers would have their average tax rate raised to 4 percent from the current 3.4 percent.  Married couples with two children making a joint income of $85,000 a year would see their taxes go up by $1,661 a year, the equivalent of almost 2 percent of their entire pre-tax salary for the year.   

And of course, the Biden border Czarina Harris has seen 10 million illegals encountered at the border since she was given stewardship of the border crisis by President Biden. Note that this does not include the estimated 2 million illegals who got away after being observed by the Border Patrol. It is so bad that Harris is trying to deny any part in the Biden border fiasco, but not even Google can make the news clips of her appointment go away.

It is really hard to find a screwball, California idea that Harris hasn’t supported, including banning gasoline powered cars, which the Biden-Harris administration would put out of business by 2037, two years after California banned them.

All of this does not even include the Biden-Harris weaponization of the Justice Department and intelligence agencies against their political opponents, the on-going censorship and manipulation of social media platforms to promote the left’s political agenda, or her adamant opposition to the Second Amendment. In fact, it is hard to find a part of the Constitution that Harris actually supports.

Given the above, any person who endorses Kamala Harris for president can no longer call themselves a conservative in any way, shape or form. They are not. They are massive government enablers unable to get over the fact that Donald Trump defeated them in a primary election in 2016 and again in the primary of 2024. 

The question that the Liz Cheneys of the world need to answer is whether they were lying when they claimed to be pro-life, support free markets, lower taxes, less federal government control, gun rights, energy independence and the basic freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution.

Even those with the worst cases of Trump Derangement Syndrome should be able to look at the policies of Kamala Harris and reject them outright. Those with the worst cases have the option of voting third party – maybe the pot party (err, the Libertarian Party) is high enough to earn your vote. But endorsing Kamala Harris is admitting that everything you said was important no longer matters, and that you support the likely final stage of the fundamental transformation of America because … Donald Trump.

I can no longer take those seriously who have embraced the New Age Harris who rejects constitutional governance in her musings about being unburdened by the past

The very soul of America is at stake, and there is no room in the fight to preserve the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution and the ideal that all are created equal endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights for those who would sacrifice our fundamental liberties because they don’t like mean tweets. Now, more than ever, in the words of Ronald Reagan, this is our time for choosing.

The author is president of Americans for Limited Government.

To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2024/08/time-for-never-trumpers-to-drop-their-conservative-charade/