Tag: Joe Biden

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Biden’s Pork Barrel Spending Bill

Calling it Build Back Better or the Reconciliation Bill; it is Still Redistribution of Wealth

Photo of Kelly R. Smith   by Kelly R. Smith

Federal Pork Barrel Spending
Federal Pork Barrel Spending
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This article was updated on 02/18/22.

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First, let’s look at what pork barrel spending is. Investopedia.com defines it this way, “Pork-barrel spending, or earmarking, is the controversial practice of directing government funding in a way that serves local businesses or other special interests. While the term has strongly negative connotations, there is no clear distinction between pork-barrel spending and funding legitimate local projects. Although House Democrats temporarily prohibited the practice in 2011, they are now revisiting the practice.1“

One obvious problem is that pork spending leverages an economic benefit to one or more particular regions involved, with the money typically going toward infrastructure and other projects that create jobs and improve quality of life. However, the effect on the rest of the country is negative, with taxpayers shouldering the cost of these pork barrel projects without receiving the benefits.

Biden’s $3.5 Trillion Build Back Better Plan

As of this writing, the “Reconciliation” package is writhing in turmoil. I don’t know about you but I can’t even conceptualize that number. When and if this behemoth financial folly passes, it will be in a trimmed-down version. There’s just too much self-serving and progressive fecal matter involved. For example

Biden’s scheme to inflate government spending by about $3.5 trillion over the next 10 years—paid for with a merging of massive tax increases and up to $1.75 trillion in new borrowing (from who, the Chinese?) will decrease future economic growth and hammer private wealth, according to a new analysis from the Penn Wharton Budget Model (PWBM), a macroeconomic forecasting project based at the University of Pennsylvania.

A CBS poll determined that a meager 10% of Americans knew “a lot of the specifics” about the Build Back Better plan (also known as the budget reconciliation bill). 29% did not know what was in it at all. Surprise!

Liberals believe an inexhaustible fund exists that can be tapped endlessly to pay for government social programs. Tax the rich and give it to a long line of moochers, pork barrel hustlers and ne’er-do-wells. These funds would otherwise have been employed as additional capital indispensable to economic progress.

James Cook

What is in the Reconciliation Bill?

Build Back Better concentrates on a long laundry list of progressive social policies and programs including education healthcare, housing, and climate. Republicans are unified in opposition so Democrats are using a special, roundabout budgetary gambit known as “reconciliation” in order to avoid the 60-vote filibuster threshold and pass the bill on a party-line vote. Why are fiscal conservatives in opposition? Here are the included provisions:

  • Universal preschool for children. This is aimed at children aged three and four. Parents can either elect to sign up their children to a publicly-funded preschool program or to any number of the privately run preschool programs already available. Indoctrination begins early. Hello, Critical Race Theory.
  • Expanded Medicare services and Medicaid. It will expand Medicare services to take care of vision, hearing and dental health needs. As far as Medicaid goes, it will remove specific income and health limitations to allow more people to qualify for the first time.
  • Lower prescription drug costs. The U.S. stands first in the cost of prescription drugs such as insulin and lisinopril. The reason? Right now, pharmaceutical companies can determine the price of drugs because the US lacks price controls. In addition to expanding Medicare services, Build Back Better would give Medicare bargaining power to negotiate the cost of prescription drugs with pharmaceutical companies for the first time to bring prices down.
  • Tax cuts for families with children and childcare support. Build Back Better (here BBB is not the Better Business Bureau) would raise the current child tax credit from $2,000 to $3,000 for kids ages six and older. The new tax credit for children under the age of six would be $3,600. The credit arrives in the form of monthly checks, so that parents don’t have to pay the cost of childcare all at once. This is the intent but there is no oversight to be sure that is where the money goes.
  • 12 weeks of paid family leave. Currently, the United States is the only industrialized country to not offer paid family leave, or financially compensated time off after adopting, fostering, or birthing a child. Some private companies offer this as part of a compensation package to their employees, but Biden’s plan would make sure all new working parents (and caregivers) enjoy job security and almost three full months of at least partial paid time off.
  • Housing investments. This involves investing in the production, preservation and upgrading of an excess of a million affordable rental housing units and 500,000 homes for low- and middle-income aspiring homebuyers, as well as increase rental assistance agreements. How is this problematic? It puts the government in charge of a segment of the economy that rightfully belongs to private investors. Clearly, using your tax money like this is a Marxian redistribution of wealth.
  • It establishes a taxpayer-funded climate army. The Civilian Climate Corps would be the largest mobilization of federal government labor after the New Deal, a massive and most likely permanent bloat of government power entrenching the radical progressive climate agenda in the bowels of our government. It would saddle taxpayers with a gargantuan debt — without any impact at all on the global climate — and allow unelected apparatchiks to shuffle your taxpayer dollars to overtly political organizations with nearly no oversight. In fact, it explicitly endorses racially oriented decision-making. This is the opposite of both equity and transparency.
  • Tax cuts for electric vehicles and other climate incentives. Well, you knew this one was going to be in it, didn’t you? The term “New Green Deal” is toxic on so many levels. This is a way to sneak some of AOC’s key tenets in there. A tax credit of a minimum of $4,000 would be offered to those buying an electric vehicle (again, your tax money, Mr. and Ms worker bee). If the car is bought before 2027, enjoy an additional tax credit of $3,500. If the car was made in the U.S., there would be $4,500 added on top of that. When it’s all said and done, a taxpayer in the US can reap a maximum of $12,500 in tax credits for buying an electrical vehicle under these conditions. When Obama gave an incentive for electric vehicles, people in my neighborhood rushed out and bought golf carts.
  • It penalizes reliable electric utilities for doing their jobs. According to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, “By far the furthest-reaching proposal in the bill, the Clean Electricity Performance Program aims to place financial penalties on utilities who do not meet arbitrary increases in renewable electricity generation. The plan has no provisions to ensure reliable electricity even though history has shown time and time again that increasing variable generation on the grid leads to an unstable and expensive power supply.2“

That’s Joe Biden’s pork barrel spending bill in a nutshell. You can put lipstick on that pig by calling it Build Back Better or the Reconciliation Bill but at the end of the day it will just drag the country deeper into the financial morass that we already find ourselves it. But that’s what the Marxist progressives do so well. “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

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References

  1. The Investopedia Team, Investopedia.com, How Does Pork Barrel Spending Hurt the Economy?, How Does Pork Barrel Spending Hurt the Economy? (investopedia.com)
  2. Texas Public Policy Foundation, Five Things You Should Know about the Reconciliation Bill, www.texaspolicy.com/five-things-you-should-know-about-the-reconcilliation-bill/

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About the Author:

Photo of Kelly R. SmithKelly R. Smith is an Air Force veteran and was a commercial carpenter for 20 years before returning to night school at the University of Houston where he earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science. After working at NASA for a few years, he went on to develop software for the transportation, financial, and energy-trading industries. He has been writing, in one capacity or another, since he could hold a pencil. As a freelance writer now, he specializes in producing articles and blog content for a variety of clients. His personal blog is at Considered Opinions Blog where he muses on many different topics.

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Fake News and Cognitive Ability

Information Overload, Attitude, and Social Media are Odd Bedfellows

Photo of Kelly R. Smith   by Kelly R. Smith
Inundated with fake news
Inundated with fake news
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This article was updated on 02/22/21.

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Fake news has always been with us, but the advent of the internet and social media really gave it legs. And under President Donald Trump, it really became a “thing.” In view of the recent presidential election, it seems ironic that Trump called the press out on it in no uncertain terms while Joe Biden created a lot of it. He’s made a cottage industry of fabrications, either to pander certain groups or to puff out his own feathers.

For example, when he tried to generate support with civil liberties advocates by telling this outrageous lie. The Washingtonpost.com reported Biden’s quote, “This day, 30 years ago, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and entered into discussions about apartheid. I had the great honor of meeting him. I had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see him on Robbens Island.”1 The problem? It never happened.

But that’s the problem with this kind of self-serving fake news. It sticks. And, it forms and solidifies opinions to some degree. But do those opinions remain set in stone? Even after fabrications have been fact-checked and exposed as fraud? It’s really a sliding scale; it depends on the level of the cognitive ability of the recipient.

What is Cognitive Ability?

In order to understand this sliding scale, it is important to understand what cognitive ability is. Sharpbrains.com says, “Cognitive abilities are brain-based skills we need to carry out any task from the simplest to the most complex. They have more to do with the mechanisms of how we learn, remember, problem-solve, and pay attention, rather than with any actual knowledge. For instance, answering the telephone involves perception (hearing the ring tone), decision taking (answering or not), motor skill (lifting the receiver), language skills (talking and understanding language), social skills (interpreting tone of voice and interacting properly with another human being).”2

The Relationship Between Cognitive Ability and Attitude Adjustment

Changing one’s opinions after learning that the initial reporting was fake news is surprisingly rare. People are polarized and resist changing opinion. But a person with high cognitive ability (we might unscientifically say open-minded) will take the fact-checking under consideration and re-evaluate. The low cognitive will not. Others lie somewhere in between.

An experiment reported on by ScienceDirect said, “The present experiment (N = 390) examined how people adjust their judgment after they learn that crucial information on which their initial evaluation was based is incorrect. In line with our expectations, the results showed that people generally do adjust their attitudes, but the degree to which they correct their assessment depends on their cognitive ability. In particular, individuals with lower levels of cognitive ability adjusted their attitudes to a lesser extent than individuals with higher levels of cognitive ability. Moreover, for those with lower levels of cognitive ability, even after the explicit disconfirmation of the false information, adjusted attitudes remained biased and significantly different from the attitudes of the control group who was never exposed to the incorrect information.”3

Compounding this problem is the fact that the case can be made that the social media platforms are using their power of censorship to shape opinions, and further, to suppress those opinions that they don’t agree with. This is why there are so many congressional hearings (which just turn out to be lip service; congress members bloviate but then they just do a press conference).

Fake News and Social Media

It may be called “social” media, but it has become so much more than that. Dustin Carnahan, an assistant professor of communications at Michigan State University’s College of Communication Arts and Sciences, explains it thus, “We’re reaching a critical point regarding what role social media should play in society as these platforms — and how we use them — have evolved. Instead of being places where people stay connected and share the details of their lives, they’re increasingly being used as sources of information. A recent Pew survey found nearly six in 10 people regularly use social media for news and while it’s not their only news outlet, it’s an important one. As a result, the quality of information people receive from social media is becoming a bigger question.”4

Take for example, the recent situation, prior to the presidential election, when Twitter censored the New York Post’s posting about an article detailing Hunter and Joe Biden’s shenanigans. Part of this was misusing the power of the office of vice president. “The story story outlined the connection between Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, and money then Vice-President Biden held hostage from the Ukraine until they dismissed the prosecutor that was investigating the energy giant Burisma, on whose board Hunter Biden sat.”5

Actions such as this go beyond shaping opinion; this is interfering in a presidential election. Twitter’s rationale? They said the story violated the policy against the “distribution of hacked material.” Hacked? They knew that as soon as the posting was made? In the end it turned out to be be not only true, but on Hunter Biden’s computer.

In the end, the proliferation of fake news, filtered news, and censorship by the mainstream media and social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook do have consequences. The end result is nothing less than social engineering. Corporate attitude adjustment.

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Resources

  1. Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post, Biden’s ridiculous claim he was arrested trying to see Mandela, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/25/bidens-ridiculous-claim-he-was-arrested-trying-see-mandela/
  2. SharpBrains, What are cognitive abilities and skills, and can we boost them?, https://sharpbrains.com/what-are-cognitive-abilities/
  3. Jonas De Keersmaecker, Arne Roets, ScienceDirect, ‘Fake news’: Incorrect, but hard to correct. The role of cognitive ability on the impact of false information on social impressions, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289617301617#ks0005
  4. MSUTODAY, The truth behind fake news and politics on social media, https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2020/the-truth-behind-fake-news-and-politics-on-social-media/
  5. Kelly R. Smith, I Can Fix Up My Home Blog, Social Media Censoring New York Post to Protect Biden, http://www.icanfixupmyhome.com/WPBlog1/2020/10/16/social-media-censoring-new-york-post-to-protect-biden/

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Photo of Kelly R. SmithKelly R. Smith is an Air Force veteran and was a commercial carpenter for 20 years before returning to night school at the University of Houston where he earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science. After working at NASA for a few years, he went on to develop software for the transportation, financial, and energy-trading industries. He has been writing, in one capacity or another, since he could hold a pencil. As a freelance writer now, he specializes in producing articles and blog content for a variety of clients. His personal blog is at I Can Fix Up My Home Blog where he muses on many different topics.

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The Biden Family/China/Russia Connection is Breaking Open

by Kelly R. Smith

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Forget Trump’s Russiagate and the four-year waste of time and money in an attempt to impeach the president. The real story is the Bidens doing back door deals. The mainstream press has been rather successful in protecting Joe Biden.

It all started on Oct. 14, when Delaware computer repairman John Paul Mac Isaac claimed that in April 2019, a man who identified himself as Hunter Biden brought a liquid-damaged MacBook Pro to his small repair shop. That MacBook is now in the possession of the FBI and is reputed to have some very damaging emails about the Biden’s dirty business deals. The ramifications and details are in the video below. Let’s make it go viral. The election is nigh.

https://youtu.be/HGVc5F_l8XQ

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Photo of Kelly R. SmithKelly R. Smith is an Air Force veteran and was a commercial carpenter for 20 years before returning to night school at the University of Houston where he earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science. After working at NASA for a few years, he went on to develop software for the transportation, financial, and energy-trading industries. He has been writing, in one capacity or another, since he could hold a pencil. As a freelance writer now, he specializes in producing articles and blog content for a variety of clients. His personal blog is at I Can Fix Up My Home Blog where he muses on many different topics.

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Social Media Censoring New York Post to Protect Biden

by Kelly R. Smith

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Twitter massive fail censoring New York Post and users to protect Joe Biden
Twitter massive fail censoring New York Post and users to protect Joe Biden

What a sad turn of events for America. The New York Post has been booted out of Twitter over an article that they published on Joe Biden’s alleged corruption. According to business reporter Noah Manskar, it was because the story violated the policy against the “distribution of hacked material.” If that rationale strikes you as lame as well, you are certainly not alone. It is out and out smoke and mirrors.

The Personnel Connection

Just last month that the Post1 reported that Carlos Monje, who was Twitter’s director of public policy, left Twitter to take a position with Biden’s transition team. Now, it is plain to see that Twitter is actively suppressing information that reflects badly on the Biden campaign, and indeed, on Hunter Biden.

Monje now serves as co-chair of Biden’s infrastructure policy committee. Earlier he served as the director of agency review on the team that prepared for a possible Hillary Clinton administration. Even before that he served in former President Obama’s White House. At a glance it is not a stretch to deduce that he is not an impartial player. The question is, is he still pulling partisan strings at Twitter? Now, I’m not one for conspiracy theories, but…

The Post Story

The story story outlined the connection between Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, and money then Vice-President Biden held hostage from the Ukraine until they dismissed the prosecutor that was investigating the energy giant Burisma, on whose board Hunter Biden sat.

It would be fair to ask, “Where did the Post get their info?” It was based on exclusive emails that resided on a laptop computer that was allegedly left at a Delaware computer repair shop. The Post reported that the FBI seized the laptop in December 2019.

Part of the story the Post printed concerned how the emails were obtained. What the emails themselves illustrated was that Hunter Biden, while serving on the board of Ukrainian energy giant Burisma, personally introduced his father, who was then Vice President Joe Biden, to executives at that company. After that introduction was made, Joe Biden held back $1 billion in aid to Ukraine until that government fired a prosecutor who was investigating Burisma for wrongdoing. Oh, what a web we weave.

While running for president on the Democrat ticket, Biden has consistently denied any knowledge of Hunter’s position with the company or business dealings. Clearly, this is one of Joe Biden’s lies (misstatements if you reside on the left) that he has bandied about.

Joe Biden forgets strong-arming the Ukraine to protect Hunter, his son

This isn’t the first time that social media has indulged in suppressing or promoting information to sway public opinion. Indeed, Facebook banned or punished many people that are not on the same page as Mark Elliot Zuckerberg. Censoring the New York Post to protect Democratic presidential candidate Biden and injure the Republican candidate Donald Trump sets a dangerous precedent that threatens the fabric of our political system and our first amendment rights.

Update: I just posted this article on Twitter and it was rejected until I edited the post to take the image out. Yes, I was censored by Twitter for posting an article about Twitter censoring. My head is spinning.

References

  • Yaron Steinbuch, Twitter’s public policy chief departs to join Joe Biden’s transition team, https://nypost.com/2020/09/18/twitters-public-policy-chief-leaves-for-biden-transition-team/

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Photo of Kelly R. SmithKelly R. Smith is an Air Force veteran and was a commercial carpenter for 20 years before returning to night school at the University of Houston where he earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science. After working at NASA for a few years, he went on to develop software for the transportation, financial, and energy-trading industries. He has been writing, in one capacity or another, since he could hold a pencil. As a freelance writer now, he specializes in producing articles and blog content for a variety of clients. His personal blog is at I Can Fix Up My Home Blog where he muses on many different topics.

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Joe Biden and Education; His History and Opinions

by Kelly R. Smith

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Joe Biden orating at the podium
Joe Biden orating at the podium

Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden isn’t exactly cutting a broad swath on the campaign trail. He seems to have his own cloak of invisibility, only occasionally emerging from his basement bunker. When he does, he calls it a day before noon. In the bunker he does “live, candid, off-the-cuff interviews” with the questions and answers on a teleprompter. Seemingly, his handlers don’t let him ad lib because of his strange gaffes and confused speech about all topics. Joe Biden and the topic of education is no exception.

Atlantic writer Mark Bowden has a very forgiving opinion of Biden’s tenuous relationship with the truth. In a 2010 piece where depicted the then-vice president as having “the limber storyteller’s tendency to stretch.”

Joe Biden’s Education

The real Joe Biden graduated from the University of Delaware in 1965 and Syracuse University in 1968. In his previous failed presidential campaign years he bragged that he finished in the top half of his law school class. The truth is that he finished 76th place out of 85 students in his graduating class at Syracuse law school and not even the most forgiving of rounding errors could place him in the neighborhood of the 50th percentile. Math or hyperbole?

Here is where Biden’s memory starts to take a strange twist — the Western Journal tells us that, “Last autumn, for instance, he told a town hall in South Carolina that he ‘got started out’ at Delaware State University. He actually attended the University of Delaware.”

Delaware State is a historically black university. Biden told the audience, “I got started out at an HBCU, Delaware State,” he told the audience, eliciting laughter. “Now I don’t want to hear anything negative about Delaware State here. They’re my folks.” Delaware State has since confirmed that Biden had never been a student there.

Your ever-so-humble blogger there may have grey hair, but he still remembers graduating for the University of Houston not high in my class. But then again, I’m not running for President.

Revisionist History Makes for Good Pandering

Biden is far from conservative candidate. If so, the media would fact-check him. But since that doesn’t happen, he is emboldened. Speaking at Grace Lutheran Church in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Biden told a real whopper, speaking to a predominately black audience. The Daily Mail quotes him, “‘Why in God’s name don’t we teach history in history classes. A black man invested the light bulb not a white guy named Edison. There’s so much. Did anybody know?”

False. Blatantly false. Black man Lewis Howard Latimer, who later worked with Edison, invented the carbon filament which allowed light bulbs to continuously shine.

Let’s just say that Joe Biden and the topic of education do not make good bedfellows. It is to be expected that in the world of politics the truth will be stretched or circumvented to some extent, but Uncle Joe seems to have gone off the rails. I can’t wait to see what emerges at the presidential debates as he faces President Trump. And the fact-checking will not be coming from the mainstream media. What do you think? Please answer the poll on the right.

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Photo of Kelly R. SmithKelly R. Smith is an Air Force veteran and was a commercial carpenter for 20 years before returning to night school at the University of Houston where he earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science. After working at NASA for a few years, he went on to develop software for the transportation, financial, and energy-trading industries. He has been writing, in one capacity or another, since he could hold a pencil. As a freelance writer now, he specializes in producing articles and blog content for a variety of clients. His personal blog is at I Can Fix Up My Home Blog where he muses on many different topics.

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What to Know About the 2020 Presidential and Vice-Presidential Debates

by Kelly R. Smith

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Donald Trump-Joe Biden 2020 Presidential Debate
Donald Trump-Joe Biden 2020 Presidential Debate

This article was updated on 10/07/20.

The much-awaited 2020 Presidential debates are upon us at last. President Donald Trump holds sway over the Republican corner, facing off against prior Vice President Joe Biden on the Democrat ticket.

There has been a question of whether the debates would be held at all. Some pundits bemoaned the COVID-19 pandemic. Nancy Pelosi has tried to shut them down more than once. Her rationale is that Trump is to be dismissed. The Washington Examiner quotes her as saying, “I do not think that the president of the United States has comported himself in a way that has any association with truth, evidence, data, and facts. I wouldn’t legitimize a conversation with him, nor a debate.”

The word on the street, however, is that Biden’s handlers are loathe to let him speak because of his continual gaffes and losing his place, mumbling, getting facts mixed up, and forgetting where he is. As for Trump, he is expected to speak off the cuff as usual but none of his inner circle is trying to take him out of the ring. Here are topics we might expect to be addressed.

Likely Debate Topics

  • The Trump and Biden Records. No surprise here; this is akin to a job interview. Trump has had great success with the economy, foreign relations, strengthening the military, and creating a robust economy. Biden had no real accomplishments as VP under former President Obama. Biden’s record on race relations is smoke and mirrors. Showing nepotism so his son could use government resources to make personal business deals might show its ugly head.
  • The Supreme Court. This will be an interesting topic. Trump is in a hurry to appoint a new judge before the election following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The Democrats are currently in quite the tizzy over the prospect, and rightly so; United States Supreme Court Justice appointments are for life and the institution has “assumed” much more power over the years than the Constitution originally granted it. Truly, it has become a deity unto itself with virtually as much power as the executive branch.
  • COVID-19. This is where I expect to see a lot of fireworks. For a while now, Nancy Pelosi, AOC, and the Far Left Wing have been showering fecal matter on Trump on this COVID-19 timeline topic. Their boilerplate line is mismanagement. Unfortunately, this observation doesn’t hold water and they know it (another reason to keep Biden from debating). According to cnnsnews, when Trump called for a travel ban from China right away, he was labeled a racist. When it worked they said he didn’t act soon enough. Can’t have it both ways and this will become obvious if the debate goes there. Biden is on the ropes here again; go with the party-line and be creamed by fact-checkers or avoid the subject and lose credibility.
  • The Economy. Once again, Joe will have a hard time. He and President Obama held sway over one of the most tepid recoveries ever and did their best to impede progress with “progressive” policy. Trump turned it around and produced the strongest economy in U.S. history.
  • Race and Violence in our Cities. This has risen to a critical level. BLM and Antifa are beating, burning, killing, and looting every day. Trump can list his attempts to rein it in and Biden’s record this year show that he has supported or at best turned a blind eye to the anarchy. And over the years he has misrepresented his position on race relations and his part in the civil rights movement when it was politically expedient.
  • The Integrity of the Election. This is such a broad and historied topic that it could go in any direction. Hanging chads, the electoral college, misplaced ballot boxes, bused-in voters, mail-in ballots, you name it. It is fodder for accusations but facts are facts. Only a narrow space is left for spin.

When and Where are the Debates?

The presidential debates are Sept. 29 in Cleveland, Oct. 15 in Miami, and Oct. 22 in Nashville, Tenn. The vice-presidential debate is Oct. 7 in Salt Lake City, Utah. They all start at 9 p.m. ET and will run 90 minutes without commercial interruption. The debates will be shown live on channels including ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and C-Span. You will also be able to stream the debate live on WSJ.com and YouTube. Keep up with the books you love while you walk, run, or walk the dog with Audible.com.

I’m looking forward to the first of the 2020 Presidential debates, and the subsequent ones of course, although generally, the first sets the tone and is the most impressionable on voters. Stay tuned because I will be reporting on each one. Have you made up your mind? Please vote in the poll posted on the right sidebar of this page.

Results of the First Presidential Debate

Not much of substance came out of this debate. Trump supporters say he won; Biden supporters say he won. Everybody agrees that Wallace, the moderator, was in Biden’s corner. No surprise there. Since then Trump is recuperating from COVID-19 and Biden occasionally emerges from the bunker to make gaffes. His latest is that he claimed he is able to isolate himself because a black woman is keeping the grocery store shelves stocked for him. Say what?

The Vice-Presidential Debate

This will happen tonight. I don’t expect much from it but who knows? Expect Harris to attack strongly with rhetoric and Pence to have facts and figures. Stay tuned.

Update: And now it has transpired, for better or worse. In my opinion, Vice-President Pence took the gold, and Harris took the silver, and I understand that everyone’s opinion is different so hear me out and don’t judge. Harris was clearly uncomfortable. Pence was clearly in his element. That’s just setting the tone; Pence has been VP for a long time now and Harris is having to reverse almost all her opinions that she espoused when running against Biden for the nomination and accused him of many things, specifically of the Biden racist history. She is an intelligent woman looking for verbiage that can reconcile her history and her current pitch but it is an untenable position. She was either right before or she’s right now. She’s a liar either way. There is no middle ground outside of the beltway.

On the subject of:

  • Packing the Supreme Court should she and Biden win: Just as Joe Biden refused to answer to the American people on this issue during the first debate, so did Harris. The Constitution is clear; the number of Supreme Court Justices is up to the President and Congress. When pressed, she rambled about Abraham Lincoln.
  • Tax cuts: Biden has promised to eliminate Trump’s tax cuts on day 1, even during the lockdown when many Americans are not getting a paycheck anyway. Harris tried to back-peddle this. She said the plan is to double down on taxes and then distribute those funds to the people. Is this not redistribution of wealth? Of course it is. In the first place, why not let people keep the money they make? Biden says, “I’m not a Socialist,” but this is the basic tenet of American Democratic Socialism.

“From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”

— Karl Marx
  • On the COVID-19 pandemic: Harris said, “The greatest failure of any president in the history of our country.” Whoa, back up here. When the Coronavirus first reached our shores, Trump enacted a travel ban with China. Biden immediately attacked him on it and called the action “xenophobic.” Now he says it wasn’t enough or soon enough.

Stay tuned for the next presidential debate. Meanwhile, please participate in the poll on the right-hand side of this page.

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Photo of Kelly R. SmithKelly R. Smith is an Air Force veteran and was a commercial carpenter for 20 years before returning to night school at the University of Houston where he earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science. After working at NASA for a few years, he went on to develop software for the transportation, financial, and energy-trading industries. He has been writing, in one capacity or another, since he could hold a pencil. As a freelance writer now, he specializes in producing articles and blog content for a variety of clients. His personal blog is at I Can Fix Up My Home Blog where he muses on many different topics.

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Joe Biden’s History on Race Relations and Civil Rights

by Kelly R. Smith

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(Uncle) Joe Biden describing Barack Obama
(Uncle) Joe Biden describing Barack Obama

Ex-Vice President Joe Biden is the Democrat party’s pick for Presidential nominee, running against President Donald Trump. Two of his main themes he is using to describe himself is being a standard-bearer for race relations and hero of the working class. But are those attributes correct or more Beltway hype? We’ll look at the former theme. We are entitled to our opinions but not our facts.

Biden’s History on His Part in the Civil Rights Movement

Biden talks of of being a prior public defender to point out his civil rights bona fides on the campaign trail. “I came out of the civil rights movement,” Biden said in February and frequently on the campaign trail.

But did he? In an article from The Intercept, we’re told that, “during Biden’s first run for the presidency, in 1987, the then-senator frequently described himself as a teenage civil rights activist, only to withdraw those claims later. More than three decades later, having served under the first black president, Biden seems to have reversed himself again, and now describes himself as a participant in desegregation protests in his youth.” Why all the flip-flops? Is it political expediency, or a truly faulty memory as his current many gaffes would have us believe?

The Intercept goes on to report Biden saying in speeches, “When I marched in the civil rights movement, I did not march with a 12-point program; I marched with tens of thousands of others to change attitudes, and we changed attitudes.”

But alas, not true again. Biden’s aides tried, unsuccessfully, to nudge him back on script, reminding him that he had not, personally, marched. He would acknowledge the “error” each time he was reminded of it and then repeat it on the campaign trail. It was just too good of a sentimental talking-point to give up.

How about this one. The Washingtonpost.com reported Biden’s quote, “This day, 30 years ago, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and entered into discussions about apartheid. I had the great honor of meeting him. I had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see him on Robbens Island.”

— Former vice president Joe Biden, in remarks in Columbia, S.C., on Feb. 11

“After he [Mandela] got free and became president, he came to Washington and came to my office. He threw his arms around me and said, ‘I want to say thank you.’ I said, ‘What are you thanking me for, Mr. President?’ He said: ‘You tried to see me. You got arrested trying to see me.’”

— Biden, in remarks in Las Vegas on Feb. 16

The problem? None of it ever happened. Pure fiction. It’s a bit too elaborate to be a momentary lapse of reason and too well spoken to be one of his infamous gaffes (with a well-crafted follow-up.

Joe Biden, Integration, and Segregation

Biden seems to be on the flip-flop train on these issues as well. In 1975, he opposed the federally-mandated busing policy that was designed to terminate segregation in public schools. However, in the past few decades, he has maintained he actually wanted desegregation but believed the policy of busing would not achieve it. Last year, he stated he had voted heroically to protect busing, which is contrary to the actual facts.

According to the Washington Examiner, Biden said, “I think the concept of busing … that we are going to integrate people so that they all have the same access and they learn to grow up with one another and all the rest, is a rejection of the whole movement of black pride,” said Biden. Desegregation, he argued, was “a rejection of the entire black awareness concept, where black is beautiful, black culture should be studied; and the cultural awareness of the importance of their own identity, their own individuality.” So at this point Biden is back to the point of wanting to separate the races.

Biden was also a supporter of an anti-busing amendment offered by Sen. Robert Byrd, a senator from West Virginia and a Democrat. Byrd had denounced his racist past, which included being a recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan as well as attaining the high title of kleagle and exalted cyclops of his local chapter.

“I have never, ever, ever voted for anything I thought was wrong,” said Biden to three former senior aides in Obama’s White House. “In the middle of the single most extensive busing order in all the United States history, in my state, I voted against an amendment, cast the deciding vote, to allow courts to keep busing as a remedy. Because there are some things that are worth losing over.”

Biden’s VP Choice of Kamala Harris

“There are a number of women of color. There are Latino women. There are Asian. There are — across the board. And we’re just under way now in the hard vet of going into the deep background checks that take anywhere from six to eight weeks to be done,” Biden said during a campaign speech in Wilmington, Delaware.

So, in the end, he picked Kamala Harris. There are several possible reasons both for and against this choice and it is impossible to know for anyone who’s not a fly on the wall in back-door campaign meetings. In other words, we can all look at the facts and speculate as to relevance. Historically, the choice is — what voting block a VP can bring to the table? And, what kind of attack dog is that person? This is a reasonable approach for both parties and does not use the term “dog” in a pejorative sense.

As for Harris, she’s a woman. Check. She can attack furiously. Check; especially since Biden can’t do it effectively while ensconced in his bunker “campaigning” online. Person of color? Hmm. Mom is Indian, dad is Jamaican. That’s definitely color-ish but not “Black” or “African-American.” There are a lot of Black American leaders that have a problem with this.

Furthermore, her heritage includes field-hand slave-owners. Wouldn’t this be something Biden would be wanting to distance himself from? Certainly it worked to Obama’s advantage that Michelle Obama’s ancestors were slaves. But to go from that to one’s heritage actually being slave-owners? Kind of counterproductive on Biden’s part if he wants the Black Lives Matter vote.

There has been a lot of speculation in the media that since Biden’s nomination is a done-deal and he isn’t expected to last four years, health-wise or cognitively, it’s important to have a successor in the wings that is young and radical to take over and represent The Squad and the Far Left. Is this reality or conspiracy theory fodder? I don’t know. You decide.

This has been a glimpse into Joe Biden’s history on race relations and civil rights. It is certainly not an exhaustive account of someone who’s made a career out of sausage-making politics. But it does cast a light on the fact that a penchant for flip-flopping might indeed not bode well for promises made after the votes are counted.

More on Biden

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About the Author:

Photo of Kelly R. SmithKelly R. Smith is an Air Force veteran and was a commercial carpenter for 20 years before returning to night school at the University of Houston where he earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science. After working at NASA for a few years, he went on to develop software for the transportation, financial, and energy-trading industries. He has been writing, in one capacity or another, since he could hold a pencil. As a freelance writer now, he specializes in producing articles and blog content for a variety of clients. His personal blog is at I Can Fix Up My Home Blog where he muses on many different topics.

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Why is the Democrat Left so Angry?

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This post was updated on 07/30/20.

Joe Biden's attitude; systemic, arrogant anger
Joe Biden’s attitude; systemic, arrogant anger

The mainstream left, since President Trump’s election, would be better described as the alt-left. Even previously reasonable citizens have jumped on the crazy bus. These people acted normally when President Obama was holding sway, signing constitution-adverse executive orders and playing hooky to hit the golf links. But now that the tables have turned, the alt-left has reduced itself into a saliva-slinging frenzy.

Just Can’t Accept Hillary’s Defeat

I was surprised when none of these Saul Alinsky wannabes didn’t let a single sigh escape their collective mandibles when it was shown that Hillary effectively stole her nomination by rigging everything against Bernie Sanders in collusion with the DNC and Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Neither did they cry foul when it was revealed that she gamed the system by having the debate questions spoon-fed to her beforehand. Neither did they cry foul when it was revealed that her “foundation” skimmed the donations meant for starving Haitians. She also dipped into those funds to pay for Chelsea’s wedding. OK, I could go on and on but you get the idea. The bottom line is, “Elect me because I’ve got a vagina, I’m entitled, and it’s my turn.”

But she lost. Forget the left and right-coasters; fly-over America spoke.  The electoral college has been much bemoaned. Middle America want its jobs back. They want off Obama food stamps and free cell phones. They want their dignity.

The problem now is that the activists (many professional activists paid by George Soros) are still looking for that free meal ticket. Supposedly from the party and philosophy of “inclusiveness, diversity, and respect for the rights of others,” they feel that it is OK to destroy public property and physically beat the crap out of people that don’t march to their brown-shirt tune. Antifa thugs relate to the Democrat party today just as the KKK did when they were the party’s enforcers.

When All Else Rails, Resort to Vulgarity

Conservatives may be a basket of deplorables but the Anti-Trumpers on the left enjoy getting down in the the pit of verbal excrement and have a good roll.

Case in point: Mark Roberts, an Oregon independent congressional candidate, caught fire with his canard calling the First Lady a “hoebag” during a bizarre series of Tweets whilst feuding with Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy. One must wonder if he kisses his mother with that foul mouth.

The first lady Melania Trump’s spokesperson Stephanie Grisham said in a statement to CNN, “This is just more hypocritical intolerance from those who oppose her husband’s administration. To say such ugly words about a mother, wife and our First Lady is not just a pathetic attempt at getting himself in the news, it is disturbing and despicable.”

What Can be Done in Government?

Unfortunately, not much. The geriatric Democrat party (Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi exemplify this in their state of senility) is still being marionette-string-controlled by the likes of Pelosi and God-help-me feces-for-brains Chuck Schumer. The average Democrat seems now willing to toss them on the dung-hill of historical have-beens but there isn’t really any new talent to replace them. These guys have been around since the Democrats sponsored the Ku Klux Klan and their heels are dug in. 

Face it, they are mad, mad, mad. The leftists don’t want jobs. They don’t want their neighbors to have jobs. They are not interested in safe neighborhoods. They don’t care about social justice unless it is their particular flavor (otherwise they will beat your ass, especially if you are wearing a “Make America Great” hat). What they really want is more free stuff, paid for by someone else. Their new rallying cry is, “Socialism now! Everything is for free!”

Wake up America. Have some self-respect, and for crying out loud, pull up your britches, yo. Nobody wants to see your ghetto boxers. The Democrat left continues to be angry.

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About the Author:

Photo of Kelly R. SmithKelly R. Smith is an Air Force veteran and was a commercial carpenter for 20 years before returning to night school at the University of Houston where he earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science. After working at NASA for a few years, he went on to develop software for the transportation, financial, and energy-trading industries. He has been writing, in one capacity or another, since he could hold a pencil. As a freelance writer now, he specializes in producing articles and blog content for a variety of clients. His personal blog is at I Can Fix Up My Home Blog where he muses on many different topics.

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