A new poll released Monday from Gallup showed that the four days of virtual speeches and minimal fanfare produced by the Democratic National Convention did little to shore up support for the party of Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris.
In fact, despite the glowing reviews from corporate media of the DNC and its speakers, the Gallup poll showed that Americans claiming to be Democrats or affiliated with the party dropped by two points since the same poll was conducted in June. Enthusiasm for the Republican Party, however, increased by three points, shrinking the Democratic advantage by a stunning five points as the presidential election draws ever closer.
The new poll follows a trend in national polling that has shown a dramatic narrowing of the gap between the Democrats' nominee Joe Biden and President Donald Trump, after months of numbers reflecting Biden as the clear leader. Rasmussen reported on Monday that recent polling also showed the nation's approval of the president was on the rise, sharing that 51 percent of respondents approved of the job he was doing.
The favorable shifting in polling for the president comes amid months of unrest that has included widespread calls from the far-left to defund and abolish police departments, abolish ICE, and abolish prisons across the country.
Over four days of the Democratic convention, no party representative, currently working in public office or otherwise, even mentioned the widespread violence that has stemmed from Black Lives Matter protests in cities across the nation. As the RNC kicks off on Monday, the president and many other speakers have vowed to condemn the violence, destruction, and criminal activity associated with groups that have shaken several cities every night since the end of May.
Democrats also failed to mention the soaring rates in violent crime and homicides that have been recorded in most urban centers of America. Those crimes have disproportionately affected Black communities, which Democrats claim to care about deeply.
While polling results include a margin of error and can change on a daily basis, the trend shows a waning of enthusiasm for 77-year-old Joe Biden, who has rarely left his own basement while campaigning. The diminished enthusiasm for the Democratic Party also matches the stunningly low excitement for the Biden-Harris campaign ticket.
Both Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Mitt Romney in 2012 drummed up more enthusiasm for their failed presidential bids than Biden and Harris have been able to muster thus far in 2020.
Democrats have also traditionally held a polling lead in party affiliation, according to historic results from Gallup. Even in years that Republicans have claimed victory in the presidential contests, including in 2016, Democrats have claimed more party affiliation than the GOP. In 2000, When George W. claimed victory over Al Gore, Democrat-affiliates held an 11-point advantage over their conservative counterparts.
As the RNC goes forward over the next few days, the president and other party members have promised to speak clearly about issues that polled Americans have said they care the most about. The GOP and the Trump administration released a 49-bullet-point plan for 2020, which included a promise to "return to normal" in 2021.
Dr. Harvey Risch, a noted Yale epidemiologist, went on with Mark Levin on Sunday night on Life, Liberty and Levin.
This was a must-see segment!
Dr. Risch is an outspoken proponent of hydroxychloroquine treatment for COVID-19.
According to Dr. Steven Hatfill at Real Clear Politics, and aswe have reportedhereat The Gateway Pundit numerous times, there are dozens of global studies that show hydroxychloroquine is an effective treatment for COVID-19.
** 53 global studies that show positive results with HCQ on COVID-19 ** 14 global studies that show neutral or negative results with HCQ on COVID-19 ** 10 of those 14 negative studies were of patients in very late stages of the disease ** 2 of those 14 negative studies were by the same doctor in Minnesota ** 1 of the studies used by Dr. Fauci from a Brazilian outlet was debunked ** The last study be Lancet was later found fraudulent and retracted
Dr. Risch did not hold back tonight.
According to Dr. Risch — Dr. Fauci is now responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths and must be stopped!
Dr. Risch described how Dr. Fauci allowed at least 17,000 AIDS victims to die by not certifying an effective drug for treatment back in the 1980s.
Dr. Risch now argues the Dr. Fauci is doing the same thing with the coronavirus!
Dr. Risch: This has gone on before. Now we have Dr. Fauci denying that any evidence exists of benefit (of HCQ). And that’s pervaded the FDA. The FDA has relied on Dr. Fauci and his NIH advisory groups to make the statements saying that there is no benefit in using hydroxychloroquine in outpatients. And this is counter to the facts of the case. The evidence is overwhelming… Dr. Fauci and the FDA are doing the same thing that was done in 1987 and that’s led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans that could have been saved by the usage of this drug! And this is the same thing that the FDA has done. It’s outrageous! People need to be writing or calling their congressman or senators and complaining that this is not the way the country should work!
TOPEKA, Kan. (WIBW) - New audio from the training at the Topeka Goodyear plant gives more details about what was talked about in that meeting, including updates on their zero-tolerance policy.
The meeting has come into question after a photo of a slide showed what is and isn’t acceptable in the workplace.
13 NEWS-WIBW obtained an audio recording of the presentation. The speaker referenced instances of racial graffiti in the locker room, and detailed what is and is not allowed under the company’s zero-tolerance policy.
“Some people may wish to express their views on social justice or inequity or equity issues such as black lives matter or LGBTQ pride on their face coverings, shirts or wristbands. That will be deemed approved because it applies with a zero-tolerance stance,” the speaker said during the meeting. “However if any associate wears all, blue, white lives matter shirts or face coverings, that will be not appropriate.”
The unidentified speaker says the rules were created to make a better work environment.
“The rules around now what you can wear. Let’s try and comply with these so you know everybody feels good in this factory. I want to make sure guys, think about what we do in this factory, in this factory right. We all work together to make tires that’s what we do. That’s what we get paid to do. So, let’s continue to do that and do the right thing and keep this place what it has always been, a good place to work,” the speaker said.
The speaker does not specifically mention the Donald Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan shown on the slide, but did say political campaigns are a no-go.
“Democrat. Republican. Trump. Biden. Sanders. Whatever. That will no longer be allowed in the plant,” he listed off.
In a statement Wednesday morning, Goodyear said its corporate office did not create or distribute the slide. A spokesperson declined comment when asked if it was created locally, or if the content was inaccurate.
The local United Steelworkers Local 307 declined comment, but the national union responded to the President’s tweet with the following:
“During the past year, our union and our individual members reached out directly to the President and his White House staff on countless occasions as Goodyear was closing its 90-year-old American tire plant in Gadsden, Ala., which resulted in hundreds of workers losing their jobs,” USW International President Tom Conway said.
“This closure happened as imported tires from around the globe flooded the U.S. market, leaving the union no choice but to again file a trade case challenging these unfairly traded imports.
It would have been nice if the President would have paid as much attention to that loss of American jobs as he does to his MAGA hats. Maybe a tweet or two back then would have been helpful.”
Michelle Obama participates in the International Day of the Girl on NBC’s “Today” show at Rockefeller Plaza on Thursday, Oct. 11, 2018, in New York
As we reported Monday night and earlier, Michelle Obama took a little license with truth and reality with her DNC speech in which she attacked President Donald Trump.
While most media either fawned over her, as we reported earlier, or printed what she said uncritically, not pointing out the lies, she told one whopper so big that the AP fact-checkers just couldn’t let it pass.
Now, there are actually a few lies in this clip including “peaceful protesters” and “emboldening white supremacists.”
But the obvious deception the AP nailed was the chastising Trump for the kids in “cages” when it was her husband and Joe Biden who built the “cages.”
A look at her remark in the keynote address at the opening night of the remote Democratic National Convention:
MICHELLE OBAMA, on Americans: “They watch in horror as children are torn from their families and thrown into cages.”
THE FACTS: The reference to cages is misleading and a matter that Democrats have persistently distorted.
Trump used facilities that were built during the Obama-Biden administration to house children at the border. They are chain-link enclosures inside border facilities where migrants were temporarily housed, separated by sex and age.
At the height of the controversy over Trump’s zero-tolerance policy at the border, photos that circulated online of children in the enclosures generated great anger. But those photos — by The Associated Press — were taken in 2014 and depicted some of the thousands of unaccompanied children held by President Barack Obama.
When that fact came to light, some Democrats and activists who had tweeted the photos deleted their tweets. But prominent Democrats have continued to cite cages for children as a distinctive cruelty of Trump.
These were never cages in the sense that people generally consider cages, they were huge holding areas that folks were held in when they first came into a border control facility, that were separated by chain link fencing. But the media never cared about the “cages” although Obama had thousands of kids there and they were problematic for overcrowding.
A Nashville grade school is using a book that teaches second graders to believe that white people are “bad, mean and racist” against Blacks and Mexicans, an angry dad told the Todd Starnes Radio Show.
“My wife and I were outraged at a couple of the books,” Grant Benson said. “We’re not going to be letting our daughter read this.”
One of the controversial books is titled, “Separate is Never Equal,” an award-winning book written by a social justice advocate.
The book tells the story of a California family’s attempt to integrate schools seven years before Brown V. Board of Education.
But the story book portrays white children as evil villains. Here’s how Benson described one part of the book:
“The Mexican kids were sent away and forced to sit in the dirt with flies around them and an electric fence that shocked them because white people are bad.”
“This is NOT a civil rights lesson,” he wrote in a Twitter post. “This is self-hate & fake white privilege.”
Benson says he taught his daughter to treat everyone with respect and equality. And he didn’t appreciate the school pushing an agenda.
“I will be pulling her out immediately. Her first ‘English’ lesson of the year is teaching her that white people are bad, mean & racist against African-Americans & Mexicans,” he wrote on Twitter.
It was about about nine years ago when consulting company BCG first suggested that in a time of out of control spending and soaring debt loads, the only fiscally sustainable "solution" was to implement a wealth tax (see "There May Be Only Painful Ways Out Of The Crisis").
While the idea was well ahead of its time in 2011, and was quickly shut down in the court of public opinion, several years later none other than the IMF resurrected the idea of a wealth tax, which has only gained momentum in recent months, and despite widespread grassroots pushback, the concept of a "wealth tax" has moved front and center and most recently the chairman of Capital Economics, Roger Bootle, said that the world’s wealthiest could be subjected to higher tax rates as governments scramble to fund spending and repair their economies amid the coronavirus crisis.
Fast forward to today when the ultra-liberal state of California is now ready to take this "socialist" idea from concept to the implementation phase, with the SF Chronicle reporting that a group of CA state lawmakers on Thursday proposed a first-in-the-nation state wealth tax that would hit about 30,400 California residents and raise an estimated $7.5 billion for the general fund.
The proposed tax rate would be 0.4% of net worth (most likely ended up far higher), excluding directly held real estate, that exceeds $30 million for single and joint filers and $15 million for married filing separately.Oakland Democrat Rob Bonta, who is the lead author of the wealth tax proposal AB2008, justified the wealth expropriation by saying that California is facing a big budget deficit because of the health and economic crisis brought on by the coronavirus, and "we can’t simply rely on austerity measures," to close it. It wasn't immediately clear why austerity doesn't work considering that California has never actually tried it, but in any case the Democrat's proposal was clear: "We must consider revenue generation."
And in doing that, California will trigger an exodus of billionaires who will be the first to realize which way the wind is blowing, and end up hurting the state far more than helping it as hundreds of ultra wealthy taxpayers leave for places like Florida or - for that matter - any other place in the world.
Bonta said that the union-sponsored bill will not be heard before the Legislature adjourns Aug. 31, but “it can be reintroduced on day one of the next session.”
Now what most normal Americans (i.e. those not living in California) may not know, is that this would be the second wealth tax set to pass in California. Bonta said he would like to see a wealth tax passed in addition to the “millionaires tax” proposed in a bill introduced in late July. AB1253 would add surcharges of 1% to incomes (joint or single) between roughly $1 million and $2 million, 3% on income between $2 million and $5 million, and 3.5% on income greater than $5 million, bringing the top rate to 16.8%.
California’s top rate today, at 13.3%, is already the highest in the nation, and it's only going higher.
The millionaires (and soon to be hundred thousandaires, then ten-thousandaires and so on) subject to the wealth tax would report it to the Franchise Tax Board along with their income taxes. They would have to report all assets including stock in publicly and privately traded corporations; interests in partnerships, private equity or hedge funds; cash, bonds and savings accounts; mutual funds, futures and options; art and collectibles; offshore financial assets, pension funds, non-mortgage debt, real property and mortgage debt. Which of course is idiotic because some of that wealth is extremely illiquid and evaluating it will not only take material time and effort, but also result in drastic costs. Furthermore, just how will the government confirm that whatever wealth is reported represents reality. But such is life in a half-baked socialist utopia where every idea is for lack of a better word, idiotic.
There was some good news: "Directly held real property, and mortgages and other liabilities secured by directly held real property,” must be reported, but would not be considered in calculating the taxpayer’s worldwide net worth, the bill said. How wonderful... oh wait, someone realized that this would simply be double taxing the same assets: "Real estate would be exempt from the wealth tax because it’s already subject to property tax, at a higher rate", Bonta said.
Among those handful of rational voices who call out this sheer idiocy for what it is was Jared Walczak, a vice president with the Tax Foundation, a think tank, who said that “it is far easier to call for a state-level wealth tax than it is to actually design an enforceable one." Maybe that’s why no state has imposed one.
However now that California is on the verge of passing a wealth tax, every other insolvent state will follow suit, staring with New York.
“Some New York legislators are floating the idea, but Governor Cuomo has poured cold water on the notion, rightly concerned that it would lead to an exodus of high net worth individuals from the state,” Walczak said via email. Somehow California believes it is exempt from such an exodus. Spoiler alert: it isn't, and the state's wealthiest residents won't think twice to up root and move their tax residence to a state which treats their wealth with respect.
There is of course the possibility that this idiotic idea will somehow die before it is enacted. Walczak said that implementing a wealth tax at the state level “would be extremely complex, with questions of how to value illiquid assets and whether residents’ out-of-state wealth — including their investment holdings — can be taxed.” He added that "any tax that is actually effective at taxing wealth, however, would be equally effective at driving wealth out of state."
Emmanuel Saez, a UC Berkeley economics professor, i.e., a socialist, said income tax is not an effective way to tax the ultra-wealthy, because they can avoid the income tax as long as they don’t cash in their investments. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg could avoid the income tax as long as he doesn’t sell his Facebook stock, and if he moved to Florida before realizing his gains, he may never owe tax to California, Saez said during a call announcing the bill.
Saez, like any other socialist who has a terminal inability of grasping who the world really works and that every idiotic action by the state will have an appropriate reaction by the population, said the bill would not deter startups because it would let entrepreneurs defer the wealth tax for a period of time. Brilliant.
"Liquidity-constrained taxpayers with ownership interests in hard-to-value assets and business entities, such as startup businesses, shall be able to elect for an unliquidated and deferred tax liability to be attached to these assets instead of the net value of these assets being assessed at the end of a tax year.” The taxpayer would have to sign a contract with the state specifying when the tax would be paid.
Well, Emmanuel, instead of signing a "contract" with the state when the tax will be paid, all those entrepreneurs that keep the state afloat will simply... leave. And guess what happens to the already dismal tax collections then.
None of this matters to the Berkeley socialist, and instead he pointed to apaper he co-authored, saying that California has 12% of the U.S. population but 17% of all U.S. millionaires and 25% of its billionaires. In 2011, California had only 15.5% of the nation’s millionaires and 21% of billionaires. The wealth tax, he said, would hit about 0.15% of California tax filers.
We can't wait for the paper's second edition published in 2025 when the "professor" finds that California has none of the US' billionaires.
Until then, the rare voices of reason such as that of Robert Gutierres, president of the California Taxpayers Association, will become increasingly rare:
“The state approved $9.2 billion in business tax increases in the new budget, but Sacramento politicians and special interests continue to seek income tax increases, property tax increases, a ‘headcount tax’ on in-state employees, and this new annual tax on money that was left over after all the other taxes were paid,” Gutierrez said, adding that "a very small number of Californians pay the vast majority of state income taxes. When the constant drumbeat for outrageous tax hikes drives them away, who will pick up the tab?"
Editor's note: Some readers reacted strongly to this essay, seeing it as an attempt to ignite a racist conspiracy theory. That is entirely inaccurate, as this Note explains.
The fact that Senator Kamala Harris has just been named the vice presidential running mate for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has some questioning her eligibility for the position. The 12th Amendment provides that "no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States." And Article II of the Constitution specifies that "[n]o person except a natural born citizen...shall be eligible to the office of President." Her father was (and is) a Jamaican national, her mother was from India, and neither was a naturalized U.S. citizen at the time of Harris' birth in 1964. That, according to these commentators, makes her not a "natural born citizen"—and therefore ineligible for the office of the president and, hence, ineligible for the office of the vice president.
"Nonsense," runs the counter-commentary. Indeed, PolitiFact rated the claim of ineligibility as "Pants on Fire" false, Snopes rated it simply "False," and from the other side of the political spectrum, Conservative Daily News likewise rated it "False." All three (and numerous others) simply assert that Harris is eligible because she was born in Oakland—and is therefore a natural-born citizen from location of birth. The 14th Amendment says so, they all claim, and the Supreme Court so held in the 1898 case of U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark.
The language of Article II is that one must be a natural-born citizen. The original Constitution did not define citizenship, but the 14th Amendment does—and it provides that "all persons born...in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens." Those who claim that birth alone is sufficient overlook the second phrase. The person must also be "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States, and that meant subject to the complete jurisdiction, not merely a partial jurisdiction such as that which applies to anyone temporarily sojourning in the United States (whether lawfully or unlawfully). Such was the view of those who authored the 14th Amendment's Citizenship Clause; of the Supreme Court of the United States in the 1872 Slaughter-House Cases and the 1884 case of Elk v. Wilkins; of Thomas Cooley, the leading constitutional treatise writer of the day; and of the State Department, which, in the 1880s, issued directives to U.S. embassies to that effect.
The Supreme Court's subsequent decision in Wong Kim Ark is not to the contrary. At issue there was a child born to Chinese immigrants who had become lawful, permanent residents in the United States—"domiciled" was the legally significant word used by the Court. But that was the extent of the Court's holding (as opposed to broader language that was dicta, and therefore not binding). Indeed, the Supreme Court has never held that anyone born on U.S. soil, no matter the circumstances of the parents, is automatically a U.S. citizen.
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA)
Granted, our government's view of the Constitution's citizenship mandate has morphed over the decades to what is now an absolute "birth on the soil no matter the circumstances" view—but that morphing does not appear to have begun until the late 1960s, after Kamala Harris' birth in 1964. The children born on U.S. soil to guest workers from Mexico during the Roaring 1920s were not viewed as citizens, for example, when, in the wake of the Great Depression, their families were repatriated to Mexico. Nor were the children born on U.S. soil to guest workers in the bracero program of the 1950s and early 1960s deemed citizens when that program ended, and their families emigrated back to their home countries.
So before we so cavalierly accept Senator Harris' eligibility for the office of vice president, we should ask her a few questions about the status of her parents at the time of her birth.
Were Harris' parents lawful permanent residents at the time of her birth? If so, then under the actual holding of Wong Kim Ark, she should be deemed a citizen at birth—that is, a natural-born citizen—and hence eligible. Or were they instead, as seems to be the case, merely temporary visitors, perhaps on student visas issued pursuant to Section 101(15)(F) of Title I of the 1952 Immigration Act? If the latter were indeed the case, then derivatively from her parents, Harris was not subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States at birth, but instead owed her allegiance to a foreign power or powers—Jamaica, in the case of her father, and India, in the case of her mother—and was therefore not entitled to birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment as originally understood.
I have no doubt that this significant challenge to Harris' constitutional eligibility to the second-highest office in the land will be dismissed out of hand as so much antiquated constitutional tripe. But the concerns about divided allegiance that led our nation's Founders to include the "natural-born citizen" requirement for the office of president and commander-in-chief remain important; indeed, with persistent threats from Russia, China and others to our sovereignty and electoral process, those concerns are perhaps even more important today. It would be an inauspicious start for any campaign for the highest offices in the land to ignore the Constitution's eligibility requirements; how else could we possibly expect the candidates, if elected, to honor their oaths to "faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and...to the best of [their] Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States?"Interestingly, this recitation of the original meaning of the 14th Amendment Citizenship Clause might also call into question Harris' eligibility for her current position as a United States senator. Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution specifies that to be eligible for the office of senator, one must have been "nine Years a Citizen of the United States." If Harris was not a citizen at birth, we would need to know when (if ever) she became a citizen. Her father's biographical page at Stanford University identifies his citizenship status as follows: "Jamaica (by birth); U.S. (by naturalization)." But there is some dispute over whether he was in fact ever naturalized, and it is also unclear whether Harris' mother ever became a naturalized citizen. If neither was ever naturalized, or at least not naturalized before Harris' 16th birthday (which would have allowed her to obtain citizenship derived from their naturalization under the immigration law, at the time), then she would have had to become naturalized herself in order to be a citizen. That does not appear to have ever happened, yet without it, she could not have been "nine Years a Citizen of the United States" before her election to the U.S. Senate.
