Displaying items by tag: Kamala Harris

With ten candidates still in the running we have three obvious front runners and two additional wildcards. Biden, Warren and Sanders are at the top. Mayor Pete (Buttigieg) and Harris round out the top five. Yang, Klobuchar, Booker, Gabbard and Steyer should pack it in. I mean, after something like fifteen debates if you’re not in the top 3-5 you should, you know - move on. 

In fact, I’m willing to bet most of you went - “Steyer? Who is Steyer?” I know, right? There are too many people running. Let’s get rid of some of the candidates on the bottom. Also, Tom Steyer is a non politician, progressive billionaire who wants term limits for Congress, wants to decriminalize illegal border crossings and wants to expand the Supreme Court. Well, term limits for Congress is a fantastic idea! I’m all for that. Unfortunately, he’s polling at less than 1% so I’m not sure what he’s still doing in the race. 

Anyway. Sanders is out raising them all, but seems to be consistently in the number three spot in terms of news coverage and polls. Warren, just a few weeks ago was the clear front runner but she took a huge slump, for some reason. And now it’s good old “Uncle Joe” back as the front runner. Which, you may remember, is Biden’s unofficial nickname. 

Well, all of them were at it again last night at another debate that had way too many people on stage. And, I thought it was pretty clear that Mayor Pete came out on top. No one is attacking him because he’s not a front runner and so he was able to get his points across. And man o’ man Mayor Pete comes across poised, intelligent and filled to the brim with common sense and reason. 

Warren did her Warren thing - Medicare for all, tax the rich. I don’t think she gained or lost ground. Same with Sanders. Biden pushed civility, which is great but I’m not sure that will help him surge up in the polls. All three of them kind of pushed their brand name. Harris, who has fallen so far behind the other front runners was more aggressive than I have seen her in the past few months and even called out President Trump for getting “punked” by North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un. 

I don’t think last night’s debate changed the way anyone views the democratic candidates, with perhaps the exception of Mayor Pete. I know Pete is surging in Iowa, which is a critical caucus to win, but too many people don’t know him. But that’s the thing about him, the more people hear about him the more people are clearly like, “I don’t know who this guy is … but I like him!” 

Yeah. Me too. He’s a great candidate. But … can he beat Donald Trump in the popular vote? Perhaps. But perhaps he’s too much of an underdog to win. Perhaps the Democrats need a big name to win. And they have three big names in Biden, Sanders and Warren. Mayor Pete just might have to wait four or eight more years for a legitimate shot.  

And, I know we are still miles away from the finish line but sometimes I just wonder what is taking some of these politicians so long to drop out. Senator Harris is a decent progressive candidate but she’s clearly, and I mean clearly - too far behind. Drop out of the race and get back to the Senate - you know, the job you were elected for. I guess one could say the same about Senator Warren; however, she’s actually on top so there is reason for her to stay in the race. But Klobuchar? Gabbard? It’s not happening, maybe it’s time to get back to the Senate / House for your elected jobs. Booker? I mean, Booker had a great closing speech but this is just not your year. There is, as they say - a snowball's chance in hell the nomination will go to any of the folks on the bottom.

Unless some catastrophic event happens, it’s clearly going to be one of Biden, Sanders or Warren. Or, if they get really clever - a Biden / Warren ticket. Or a Sanders / Warren ticket. Or a Warren / Sanders ticket. 

Or, heck - a Warren / Mayor Pete ticket. Think of that. Wow. I like it. (Probably won’t happen). 

Any combination of the above will probably mount a decent challenge to President Trump. Just as long as Hillary Clinton doesn’t enter the race, which she (probably jokingly) hinted at a few days ago.

Ugh. She just won’t go away. Please, please Hillary - you lost to Obama, you lost to Trump. Leave it alone. The Dem’s don’t need more candidates.

We had another nutburger start shooting at police last weekend in West Texas.  

The lame-o media—in this case NBC News—decided for America that the important part of the story was this:

• The attack, the second mass shooting in Texas this month, prompted a round of calls for stricter gun laws from some hopefuls running for the Democratic nomination for president.
• U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., said on Twitter, “America is sick of this. We need to act.”
• Former Congressman Beto O’Rourke of El Paso, Texas, where 22 people were killed in an Aug. 3 attack at a Walmart, tweeted, “More information is forthcoming, but here’s what we know: We need to end this epidemic.”
• U.S. Sen Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said on Twitter that the violence makes her “heartsick.” “We’ve already lost far too many to gun violence-Congress must act now,” she said.
• Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, also called for stricter firearms rules.
• Entrepreneur Andrew Yang tweeted, “We are better than this. We will do better for our kids.”
• And California billionaire Tom Steyer called for “emergency gun legislation.”

Imagine that.  Six Democrat who think they could, when they grow up, become President of the United States are so consumed with their run to get the nomination to nowhere that, irrespective of the facts, they hear about a crazy person using a gun to kill innocent citizens and can think of nothing more than we need new laws.

Answer me this: Isn’t murder and jacking a USPS mail truck already illegal? 

To me, this comes under the heading of, “but Achmed, we can’t do that in the United States, there’s a law against that.”

For its part, Google gives the so-called national media infinite amounts of preference when you google “Odessa TX shooting”  On early Sunday morning, you had to get to the fourth page before you got past CNN, MSNBC, NBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, etc.  I never actually found the Odessa American on Google as a news source for the shooting, even though they had their police reporter assigned to it.  The Washington Post?  The New York Times?  Seriously?

The fact is that the shooter is a resident of Odessa who was killed by police at a theatre complex after he hijacked a U.S. Postal Service truck killing the truck driver.  And, had been fired from his job that morning.  It has been reported that he called the FBI and other law enforcement tip lines before he used what appears to be an illegally purchased weapon.

The point is that, short of repealing the Second Amendment and confiscating over 300,000,000 guns, nothing “proposed” by the six Democrats referred to above would have prevented any of the “mass shootings” we have recorded since 1966.

The only thing which might work is repealing Democrat sponsored bills like those which make it illegal to consolidate databases of mental health issues and allow for one central constantly updated database against which background checks are made.

And even that’s a relatively long shot.

Because, in my opinion, what stops bad guys with guns are good guys with guns—and the training to make a difference.

They may be crazy when they go somewhere and shoot it up, but they’re not stupid.

These shootings almost never happen where there’s much of a chance that someone there might be able to shoot back.

But the left can’t accept that.  Guns bad.  Criminality good.  That’s the way the left sees it—which is why NOTHING meaningful will ever happen.

If, by chance, one of these idiots were to get elected President and Democrats take Congress, you might see an armed revolution.

Or, more likely, we would find out that these guys were blowing smoke up our butts all along.

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Fred Weinberg is a columnist and the CEO of USA Radio Network. His views and opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of GCN. Fred's weekly column can be read all over the internet. You can subscribe at www.pennypressnv.com. This is an edited version of his column, reprinted with permission. 

CNN has released a new poll about the Democratic candidates and it revealed a huge increase in Biden support and a huge drop in interest in Harris. The Biden rise does not exactly surprise me, the Harris decline surprise me a bit. But whatever. There are still something like eighteen candidates in the race, pretty soon some of them are going to be dropping like flies. 

Anyway, Biden is clearly viewed as the most moderate candidate. I know there was some recent progressive pushback against his “inappropriate touching” but any common sense analysis of said videos of Biden “inappropriately touching women” revealed them to be ridiculously harmless. And in some cases the women who were on the receiving end of a Biden hug have come out and said things like, “Ummm … he’s my close friend of 40 of years. Of course it’s okay for him to hug me!”  

But while it turned out to be a nonstory, I think the negative coverage of Biden dropped him in the polls a bit. And … well … I also hate to say this but his pretty bad performance in the first debate didn’t help him. But all that seems to be water under the bridge now and moderate American’s are reminding themselves how much they like Biden. Conservatives even kind of liked him in the same way that liberals kind of liked Senator McCain. That seems to be changing though as Biden is the front runner and now FOXNEWS is running attack ad after attack add on Biden’s health - which, to be honest - looks just fine. 

So - does that mean Biden is about to be our new President? Well - not so fast. This all comes from a single CNN poll of 1.001 people with a sampling error of 3.7%.  I know some folks are skeptical of polls but all you need to do is remind yourself is that a poll is a snapshot of voters, it is not a forecast of the future. BUT, even though it’s true that people can change their mind as in “Someone polls for Biden one day but changes their mind the following week to support Sanders,” and it’s true that this does happen. People change their minds. That being said, snapshots of voters are surprisingly accurate. 

I’ll bring Scientific American into the mix of things. According to their 2004 article, “How can a poll of only 1,004 Americans represent 260 million people with only a 3 percent margin of error?” - polls have a margin of error that depends: 

“... inversely on the square root of the sample size. That is, a sample of 250 will give you a 6 percent margin of error and sample of 100 will give you a 10 percent margin of error.” Okay, I think I’m following that. And by the way, that ten percent margin of error is too high and therefore makes a polling of 100  people statistically worthless. So polls with too small a sampling size are not useful. 

Well, just poll more folks! Right? 

Well, it sounds like that’s true - up to a certain point. While it’s true that the more people you poll the smaller your margin of error becomes. Again, from Scientific America: 

“... by surveying 4,000 people, you can get the margin of error down to 1.5 percent … but that is generally a waste of time because public opinion varies enough from day to day that it is meaningless to attempt too precise an estimate.” 

Okay. Fair enough. It sounds like it would take too much time to gather polling data from several thousand people because by the time you compile the data, public opinion may have significantly altered. So it sounds like polling folks in the several thousand range - isn’t worth it at all. Which is why pollsters find the sweet spot to be about “a thousand people,” which puts the margin of error at 3.7% but can be done quickly and in enough time that public opinion hasn’t changed much by the time the poll is released. 

Makes sense to me. 

But what about anomalies? What about human error? What about bias? 

Well, Scientific American covers that too:

“The margin of error is a mathematical abstraction, and there are a number of reasons why actual errors in surveys are larger. Even with random sampling, people in the population have unequal probabilities of inclusion in the survey. For instance, if you don't have a telephone, you won't be in the survey, but if you have two phone lines, you have two chances to be included. In addition, women, whites, older people and college-educated people are more likely to participate in surveys. Polling organizations correct for these nonresponse biases by adjusting the sample to match the population, but such adjustments can never be perfect because they only correct for known biases. For example, "surly people" are less likely to respond to a survey, but we don't know how many surly people are in the population or how this would bias polling results.”

Okay. I think I got it - a poll is a snapshot of voter opinion but again - it is not an actual prediction of exactly what will happen. A 3 percent margin of error means that “there is a 95 percent chance that the survey result will be within 3 percent of the population value.” 

What that means is that pollsters, much like weathermen are better at their jobs than we give them credit for. I mean we have plenty of jokes about both are wrong all the time (especially the weatherman), the opposite is true - polls (and the weatherman) for the most part -  are pretty accurate. 

But anomalies do exist, errors happen. I mean, polls predicting the likely outcome of the 2016 Presidential election could have one candidate ten points ahead one week, and then watch that candidate lose mainly due to Widespread Russian Interference in all 50 States which rendered all the polls meaningless - and handing the election to the other candidate.  

For example.

"It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their own selfish purposes." -President Andrew Jackson

People need to first understand those who are guilty of the crimes against the American people and how they operate by doing the unthinkable. That is how they get away with what they get away with because people don’t believe that they would do such things. Well, guess what?  They are.

To prove the point, just look to those who are changing American government to that which is foreign to American government on a daily basis by those who are playing the good guys. This is all being done little by little through incrementalism or a siege (Deuteronomy 28:52).

If only the American people would take the time and read their Bibles and founding documents, how soon they could identify these counterfeits that operate under false pretenses (Jeremiah 6:16), both in the Christian realms, as well as the political realms (Mark 8:14-15).

Look at how Americans have been under heightened attack over the last 2 years by those who have been sold as the good guys to represent them.  Free speech, the right to bear arms, the sodomite agenda, personal and national security, etc. all of this during the tenure of the said good guy.

Then again, the old Communist tactic comes to my aid,

“The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.” -Vladimir Lenin

Today, we see President Donald Trump is sold as the victim by those he fails to prosecute.  Meanwhile, the support that is driven to his base only ensures a victory for his next 4 years in the people's White House. This helps him to further his attacks on his support base.

In other words, Americans are being set up for the fall.

Mark my words.

Just this last week, Fox News, the best that the conservatives have, just put out a fake poll (Causing the enemy, “Americans,” to believe that there is a lot more of them than there really is) stating that their poised and controlled opposition criminal and actor Joe Biden was winning over that of Trump, 49% to 39%.

Have you seen the crowds that go to Donald Trump's engagements? Pretty astounding. There were over 100,000 ticket requests for Trump's presidential 2020 kickoff at the same time that this fake poll came out.

For years, Americans have seen Joe Biden exposed for his perversions. He has the support of no one and Americans know it.

What of lunatic Senator Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts, who endorses a coup against Donald Trump?  Warren also argues the illegal border invasion shouldn’t be against the law.”  How much support do you suppose she has in her efforts against Trump? None!  This is exactly what drives support to Donald Trump. It is called controlled opposition. 

Meanwhile, and on the other hand, President Donald Trump releases 196,000 illegals back into the cities of America.

What of criminal Senator Kamala Harris, who recently said that she would usurp Congress and unconstitutionally change gun laws? Again, this takes all eyes off Donald Trump's administration that is actually doing what she is talking about, and drives support to Trump.

The "establishment" knows that Americans will never get behind Kamala Harris and her criminal actions.  No, the "establishment" transgresses (1 John 3:4) the law with the help of those who have been sold to you the American people as the good guys (2 Corinthians 11:14).

Who has attacked gun rights more than that of Donald Trump's administration?

No one.

Twenty-six states have now passed 55 new gun control policies by a majority of Republican governors. 

What about openly gay presidential contender mayor Pete Buttigieg from Indiana, who claims that he cannot help himself, that he was born that way, and then blames God for the choices that he makes (Deuteronomy 30:19)? Outside of the likes of less than 1.7 percent of the population that engage in homosexual behavior, who do you think is going to support this guy? (Editor’s note: The number of people who identify as gay varies depending on the country you live in, but is generally considered to be within the 1% to 2% range; however, in the U.S., that number appears to be much closer to 4%).  Again, this all drives support to Donald Trump, who in turn supports the agenda to decriminalize sodomy on a global scale.

I hope that you are getting my point here friends, this is the enemy play book and has been for decades in this country (Proverbs 20:12). The right wars against the left (Mark 3:25) and who wins and loses at the end of these contrived unconstitutional wars? Americans lose, and corruption wins every-time.

When will Americans learn?

Furthermore, there are hundreds of other candidates who are running for the White House to serve “We the People.”  Why is it that we have only heard from the MainStream Media and their hand-picked candidates and not from the others? All cameras are to be kept on their global players and pushers of a global agenda.

The global agenda players that the American people are trying to rid themselves from are the very agenda's that President Donald Trump is implementing on his followers (Jeremiah 17:5).

This is how the American people, and that of other countries throughout history that have been destroyed are being undermined (1 Kings 13:33). Nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

And just think friends, if I listened to the modern day professed and hypocritical Christians and conservatives of the day we would all be wrong.

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Bradlee Dean is a guest contributor to GCN news. His views and opinions are his own and do not reflect the views and opinions of the Genesis Communication Network. Bradlee's radio program, The Sons of Liberty, broadcasts live M - Sat here at GCN. This is an edited version of an op-ed originally published by Sons of Liberty Media at www.sonsoflibertyradio.com. Reprinted with permission. 

Well, this is going to be easy to write. Wednesday night’s Democratic debate (that wasn’t a debate) was pretty tame and stuffed to the brim with a whole lot of “meh.” Last night’s Democratic debate (that was slightly more of a debate) had more fire. Not, much - but a bit. 

And here’s the thing. It was so painfully, clearly obvious that Senator Kamala Harris came out on top that I don’t actually have anything quippy to say. I mean, when the issue of race came up, Harris beat Joe Biden down like he was an amateur. (Editor’s note: This is the same link as the one on the front page). 

Just like Warren on the previous evening’s debates, Harris was razor sharp across the board and was, again (as we always say) … presidential. I think Biden, Warren and Sanders have been the obvious front runners but that’s simply because they’ve raised a lot of money and get a lot of press. Which is important. 

And, while it’s true that I don’t think you can have much of a “debate” when you only allow each candidate 60 seconds to answer questions (because you’re not really going to get to the meat of the deal.)  That being said, when you put ten people up on the stage, sometimes it does become clear - “who is out of their league?” 

And, there was a whole lot of “this candidate is out of their league.” Andrew Yang, who is mainly an “automation is a huge problem” candidate (he’s right); self-help author Marianne Williamson, former Gov. John Hickenlooper; Rep. Eric Swalwell (who had a nice “pass the torch” exchange with Biden); Sen. Kristen Gillibrand; and finally Sen. Michael Bennet - all of which, performed well (except, perhaps for Williamson) but are clearly just “out of their league.” 

Which brings it down to Harris, Biden, Sanders and Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Frankly, Biden kind of bungled it. Harris clearly got under his skin and it showed. After her beat down exchange, Biden awkwardly tried to explain his positions but it didn’t matter. From that point on he was stony faced and submissive. He, quite literally, lost -  and he knew it.

Sanders was … well, he was Sanders. He didn’t offer anything that he hasn’t been consistently saying his entire career in politics - free health care, go after wall street and big Pharma, end student loan debt. His usual playbook. BUT THEN, he said something that I thought took guts. When asked if he would “raise taxes on the middle class,” he told the truth. He said, “Yes.” Because - that’s how government pays for things. 

I mean, politicians usually say “no” to that question (and then raise taxes on the middle class anyway). So, at least Sanders is consistent and truthful. And I do like Sanders but, compared to the youth on stage he really did stand out as … old. 

So, I wouldn’t say Sanders lost the debate in the same way that Biden did; however, Sanders, I feel, probably didn’t win over new voters. 

Which brings us to Pete Buttigieg, or “Mayor Pete” as his constituents know him. He’s still not mainstream well known but is considered a rising star on the left. And he is. He’s incredibly smart. He’s extremely well spoken. He’s a veteran having served in Afghanistan. He has governing experience (several years Mayor). And, to be honest - he’s just flat out likable. I don’t see him as a front runner though. He’s just too unknown. But, perhaps a VP pick or a cabinet position?

Anyway, it all comes down to this. Biden has the money. He has the reputation. But he got his butt handed to him by the fiery Senator Harris. Who also has money. Primary’s are still a long way away and anything could happen, but after two nights of hearing twenty candidates, it really does look like these folks are at the head of the pack: 

Senator Kamala Harris, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Bernie Sanders and VP Joe Biden (even though he lost big time last night, I wouldn’t count him out just yet). Then I would add both Julian Castro and Mayor Pete near the top of the race as they appear to be exceptionally good candidates … that probably don’t have a chance to make the top of the ticket.