Washington Post Editorial Board Roasts Kamala Harris for Economic Plan
The Washington Post‘s editorial board roasted Vice President Kamala Harris for her newly announced economic plan.
In an editorial piece on Friday, the Washington Post noted that Harris “squandered” the opportunity to announce a “substantial plan” to the American public.
“Americans are clearly still anxious and angry about the high cost of groceries, housing and even $5.29 Big Macs,” the editorial board wrote. “While the inflation rate has cooled substantially since the 2022 peak, an ostensible Biden-Harris administration accomplishment, prices remain elevated relative to the Trump years”:
So it’s a real political issue for Ms. Harris. One way to handle it might be to level with voters, telling them that inflation spiked in 2021 mainly because the pandemic snarled supply chains, and that the Federal Reserve’s policies, which the Biden-Harris administration supported, are working to slow it. The vice president instead opted for a less forthright route: Blaming big business. She vowed to go after “price gouging” by grocery stores, landlords, pharmaceutical companies and other supposed corporate perpetrators by having the Federal Trade Commission enforce a vaguely defined “federal ban on price gouging.”
The piece from the outlet’s editorial board came after Harris vowed to build three million new homes over the course of four years, go after companies for price gouging, and give families a $6,000 child tax credit.
While the outlet noted that Harris’s housing plan was “built on a slightly firmer foundation,” it added that she had placed her finger on the problem with the “housing-affordability problem,” which was having an “insufficient supply.”
“She offers clever tax incentives to help make it happen,” the editorial board wrote. “But her proposed $25,000 in down payment assistance for first-time home buyers stimulates the demand side, which risks putting upward pressure on prices. Such a measure might make sense if Ms. Harris paid for it by eliminating other demand-side housing subsidies, such as the mortgage interest education, a roughly $30 billion annual drain on federal revenue that benefits many wealthy Americans — but she does not.”
Harris’s promise to build three million homes comes as almost 1.5 million homes were built in 2023 alone, according to a press release from Zillow.
As Breitbart News reported, Harris’s promise “would actually mean construction had” decreased by 50 percent.
“Her ideas would cost money, yet she insisted in her speech that she would hold to President Joe Biden’s pledge not to raise taxes on any household earning $400,000 or less annually,” the editorial board added.
The editorial board added that Harris’s promise to not raise taxes on families earning $400,000 or less each year did not include “80 percent of taxable income, and does not take into account the recent surge in families earning over $400,000.”
A report from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found that without a concrete plan to “raise revenue,” the policies proposed by Harris would add “$1.7 trillion over a decade” to the federal deficit.
“The Harris campaign has said this would be paid for through taxes on corporations and high earners and that they support the revenue raisers in the President’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 budget but has not put forward specific offsets as part of their Agenda to Lower Costs for American Families,” the report said.
Originally Posted At www.breitbart.com
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Bernie Sanders: Harris Is Laying Out a ‘Strong Progressive Agenda’
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said Friday on MSNBC’s “All In” that Vice President Kamala Harris laid out a “strong progressive agenda” during her economic speech earlier today.
When asked for his reaction to the speech, Sanders said, “I think given the fact she has been a candidate for only three weeks I think she’s doing really really well in a whole lot of ways. I think what she laid out today was a strong progressive agenda. Obviously in the weeks and months to come, I think she will add more specificity to some proposals and she’s going to add to it. I have always believed that good policy is good politics. What she is talking about today is raining and the outrageously high cost of prescription drugs that’s enormously popular and the right thing to do.”
He added, “She’s talking about building 3 million units of affordable housing at a time when we have a housing crisis in Burlington, Los Angeles and everyplace in between. We have to lower the cost of housing in America. She’s talking about ending medical debt so that a quarter of the people in this country who have cancer do not have to deplete their savings or go bankrupt. She’s talking about controlling the cost of groceries when we know there’s been massive concentration of ownership in that industry. They spike prices up and going after them is exactly the right thing to do and very good politics.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
Originally Posted At www.breitbart.com
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Poll: Majority of Voters Say Media Are Shilling for Kamala Harris
A majority of voters think news reporters are trying to help far-left Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris into the White House over former President Donald Trump, a new Rasmussen Reports poll found.
Half (50 percent) of likely U.S. voters expect most reporters to help Harris ahead of the November presidential election, while 14 percent say they will help Trump. Roughly a quarter (26 percent) believe most reporters will offer unbiased coverage, and 10 percent say they are unsure, the survey found.
“Looking ahead at the campaign, 66 percent of Republicans, 34 percent of Democrats, and 50 percent of unaffiliated voters expect most reporters to try to help Harris,” according to the poll report. “Thirty-eight percent (38 percent) of Democrats say most reporters will offer unbiased coverage instead, but only 14 percent of Republicans and 26 percent of unaffiliated voters agree.”
The survey found that 60 percent of respondents believe most reporters try to help their preferred candidate when covering political campaigns, up from 51 percent during the 2020 election cycle. Nearly three in ten (28 percent) disagree and say most reporters are unbiased, and 12 percent are unsure.
Democrats (44 percent) are more likely than Republicans (16 percent) and unaffiliated voters (23 percent) to say reporters try to offer unbiased campaign coverage. In contrast, 74 percent of Republicans, 64 percent of unaffiliated voters, and 45 percent of Democrats think reporters shill for the candidate they want to win, the survey found.
Nearly six in ten (57 percent) say Harris has received the best treatment from the media so far, while 29 percent say the media have favored Trump. Thirteen percent are undecided.
“Majorities of every political category – 65 percent of Republicans, 53 percent of Democrats and 54 percent of unaffiliated voters – say Harris has received the best treatment from the media so far,” the poll report reads.
President Joe Biden’s strongest supporters are more likely to think the media are unbiased. More than half (55 percent) of voters who “strongly approve” of Biden’s job performance think most reporters try to give unbiased campaign coverage. Only seven percent of voters who “strongly disapprove” of Biden feel the same way.
The survey was conducted with 1,158 likely U.S. voters between August 12-14, 2024. The margin of sampling error is ±3 percentage points with a 95 percent level of confidence.
Originally Posted At www.breitbart.com
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Kamala Promises to Build 3 Million Homes in 4 Years; Biden-Harris Built Only 8 EV Stations in 2.5 Years
Vice President Kamala Harris promised Friday that she would build 3 million new homes in four years if she were elected, but she and President Joe Biden barely managed to build eight EV charging stations in two-and-a-half years.
Harris said at a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina:
There’s a serious housing shortage in many places. It’s too difficult to build and it’s driving prices up. As president, I will work in partnership with industry to build the housing. We need both to rent and to buy. We will take down barriers and cut red tape including at the state and local levels. And by the end of my first term, we will end America’s housing shortage by building 3 million new homes and rentals that are affordable for the middle class.
Harris did not explain how those new homes were to be built in a high-interest-rate environment. She also did not explain whether she meant 3 million units in addition to those that would already have been built, or three million units total. Nearly 1.5 million homes were built in the U.S. in 2023, so 3 million over four years would actually mean construction had slowed down by 50%. Presumably, she meant 3 million additional homes — 750,000 extra per year.
That would match or exceed the pace of the peak housing boom of the post-World War II period. But Harris has a track record against which to measure her promise, and it is the failure of the Biden-Harris administration to build the electric vehicle (EV) charging stations that it promised to build under the infrastructure bill of 2021. at a cost of $7.5 billion. The goal was 500,000; two-and-a-half years later, as of May 2024, only eight EV stations had been built.
The situation is even worse when it comes to the Biden-Harris administration’s promise to build new broadband Internet connections. FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr told Breitbart News earlier this week that despite $42.5 billion in the infrastructure bill for broadband, the effort had yet to connect one American to the Internet — and Vice President Harris was supposed to be in charge of the project. The prospects of Harris’s housing boom look doubtful.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of “”The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Originally Posted At www.breitbart.com
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Somali migrant who beheaded and stabbed victim 111 times could avoid deportation from Germany
A Somalian migrant who beheaded his victim in a brutal murder that included 111 stabbings may avoid deportation from Germany. Prosecutors said that if the government sent him back to Somalia, he would simply return.
Mursal Mohamed Seid, 24, murdered his 52-year-old flatmate Alex K. in a homeless shelter in Regen in July 2021. He confessed to the killing and told police he thought Alex was possessed by demons that he had to kill, the Daily Mail reported.
Court documents state that Seid stabbed his victim 111 times before decapitating him. The victims’ intestines spilled out due to the severity of the stab wounds.
Seid was confined to the high-security ward of the district hospital in Mainkofen, Bavaria, as he purported to have committed the offense in a schizophrenic delusion.
The German immigration authorities are eager to return him to his homeland of Somalia as soon as possible. However, prosecutors are hesitant to issue a deportation order, as they believe that the criminal would return to Germany regardless, according to Bild.
A few weeks after killing his housemate, the Somalian tried to escape the high-security ward of a Bavaria hospital by hiding in a food cart. Seid attempted a second escape last week and sneaked by his psychologist and intern while watching a Disney movie during a family movie night at the ward.
After eight hours on the run, 100 police officers found him three miles from the cinema.
Prosecutors have been debating his deportation for two years. Senior public prosecutor Oliver Baumgartner told Bild: “In this regard, it was necessary to take into account that the convicted person would be free in his home country and that there is no guarantee that he will be treated properly. A return to Germany was considered possible.”
Seid wrote a letter in February that stated he refused to be deported back to Somalia.
This Story originally came from humanevents.com
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Tourist claims she was gangraped by 5 Pakistani men for 5 days, tied up and dumped on street: report
A 28-year-old woman was reportedly gang-raped for five days after being abducted while on vacation in Pakistan. She was dumped out on the street in Islamabad with her hands tied behind her back and her ankles shackled. A passerby found her in distress.
The unidentified woman, who claimed she was from Belgium, told police that she had been in Pakistan for six months when she was abducted and thrown out of a vehicle days later. Police have arrested one male suspect and searched his apartment, the Daily Mail reported.
The Belgium Embassy was unable to confirm the woman’s identity and Pakistan’s security agency said it has no documentation of the woman entering the country. Pakistan does not believe the victim is a foreigner, according to the paper.
The arrested suspect told police that the woman was mentally unwell. She did not have an ID on her, authorities said.
This occurred two years after a 21-year-old American vlogger reported that her guide and an accomplice, who recorded videos of her for the purpose of extortion, had gang-raped her in a Pakistani hotel. Police arrested two men over the alleged incident. The woman had been in Pakistan for three weeks before she claimed she was sexually assaulted.
The investigation into the alleged Belgium woman’s gang rape incident remains ongoing.
This Story originally came from humanevents.com
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Germany demolishes Grafenrheinfeld cooling towers as nuclear power is phased out in the country
Germany demolished two cooling towers at its decommissioned Grafenrheinfeld nuclear power plant in controlled blasts on Friday.
The plant, which was once a symbol of Germany’s energy independence, was taken out of service in 2015 after 33 years, per DPA. Germany was reportedly alarmed by Japan’s Fukushima nuclear accident in March 2011 and then-chancellor Angela Merkel declared nuclear power would be phased out in the country after 6 decades of the country’s reliance on it.
Eight older nuclear plants were decommissioned in the summer of 2011 and the last three were shut down in April of 2023. Grafenrheinfeld marks the second demolition of cooling towers from a decommissioned German nuclear power plant, the first being in May 2020 at the Philippsburg nuclear power plant.
The cost to blow up the cooling towers was over €3 million. Dismantling of Grafenrheinfeld started in 2018 and will take around another decade to complete according to the project manager. He stated that over two-thirds of the material from the demolished cooling towers can be reused.
Onlookers were allowed to watch the demolition from a safe distance.
This Story originally came from humanevents.com
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AUSTIN PETERSEN: Aussie Rachel ‘Raygun’ Gunn’s ‘rigging’ accusation is an object lesson in merit trumping victimhood
Aussie Olympic break-dancer Rachel Gunn, a female leftist white professor (this is important), received zero points for her terrible breakdancing in the 2024 Paris Games. Her goofy kangaroo hops and lackluster spins have already spawned a million memes and laughter across the globe.
You might be tempted to just laugh at her antics too, and give her credit, as Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese did, since she at least “had a crack,” and “good on her.” But frankly, I’m more inclined to side with Dr. Dre’s take when he said, “It was funny, I got some laughs out of it, but what the f**k? […] There are incredible breakdancers out right now; I don’t know how that happened.”
How indeed, Dr. Dre?
The first thing you need to know is that “breakdancer” Rachel Gunn, AKA Raygunn, wrote her doctoral thesis on the subject, “Deterritorializing gender in Sydney’s breakdancing scene: a B-girl’s experience of B-boying.”
Because of course. It couldn’t be that she was just a normal person who enjoyed dancing and somehow ended up way out of her league on the world stage. Her push to get a spot in the Olympics was all about DEI, ie demanding a place as a woman in a “male dominated” sport.
What could be more woke? And what could be a better example of affluent white female liberal (AWFL) behavior than the fact that she is engaging in cultural appropriation (something I thought was a big woke no-no) of a sport that’s traditionally dominated by minorities? Leftists like Gunn will gladly insert themselves where they don’t belong to advance her feminist victimhood agenda. So why no mention of breaking down the color barriers in the “sport,” Rachel?
To their credit, many in the black community are agreeing with Dr. Dre, such as Human Events columnist Adam Coleman who wrote on X that Gunn can’t “PhD her way into being extremely athletic.”
One X user put it well when he said, “real ivory tower academic move to misapply an intersectional justice lens onto a Black cultural thing and think that it becomes a system that marginalizes you because you’re a white lady that didn’t grow up in the culture.”
As it turns out, Dr. Dre was right, there are better breakdancers out there. But Rachel Gunn is accused of managing the qualification process so that she would be guaranteed a spot, despite the fact she couldn’t qualify for a barn dance. A Change.org petition titled “Someone who hates corruption” is calling for action and accountability in the selection process for the Olympics, focusing on chef de mission Anna Meares and breakdancer Rachel Gunn.
The petition, addressed to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, accuses Gunn of manipulating the selection process to her advantage, claiming more talented breakdancers were unfairly overlooked. It demands public apologies from Gunn and Meares, an investigation into the selection process, and scrutiny of Gunn’s business dealings. The petition has garnered over 23,000 signatures in just two days. To her credit, the Sydney Morning Herald is claiming the gaming of the selection process is not true.
From 2021 to 2023, she competed in various international events, typically placing low on the leaderboard, with rankings ranging between 40th and 70th, as reported by the Olympics website. Despite her struggles, she hadn’t qualified for the Paris Games until the Oceania Championships in Sydney, Australia. However, something changed at that event. Gunn unexpectedly outperformed all her competitors, securing a first-place finish and finally qualifying for the Olympic Games somehow. She’s accused of preventing other actual talented breakdancers from appearing to compete against her.
Anna Meares, a former professional cyclist/Australia’s chef de mission, advanced Gunn’s feminist victimhood narrative, saying, “If you don’t know Rachael’s story, in 2008, she was locked in a room crying being involved in a male-dominated sport as the only woman, and it took great courage for her to continue on and fight for her opportunity to participate in a sport that she loved.”
So, she locked herself in a room crying because she was in a male dominated sport? And for that she deserves sympathy? A spot in the Olympics? Maybe if she had locked herself in a room practicing instead of crying she might have actually improved to have been good enough to represent her nation honorably.
Meares then went on to describe Gunn as the best female breakdancer in the country, which would be even funnier than Gunn’s dancing if it weren’t an obvious lie.
Gunn turned what used to be a celebration of black culture and the freewheeling 1980’s into a crude parody. Her antics are a prime example of how the left seeks privilege through race and gender, only to completely ignore their own rules when a white woman wants to use her gender to exploit black culture.
Leftists who seek to be victims for the reason that it grants them special privileges are often said to be competing in the “Victim Olympics,” and the saddest commentary of all is that apparently playing the victim can take you to the real Olympics as well. But there is one upside to this: in the actual Olympics they aren’t handing out any gold-plated participation trophies. In the actual Olympics, if you don’t have merit, you get memed to death. In the actual Olympics, being a victim still matters less than being excellent. And if you ask me, there’s a lesson there for society at large.
This Story originally came from humanevents.com
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Fact Check: Harris Claims Trump ‘Tried to Cut Medicare Every Year’
CLAIM: Vice President Kamala Harris claimed during a speech on Friday that former President Donald Trump has tried to cut Medicare “every year.”
VERDICT: False. Trump did not try to cut Medicare during his time in office; the Biden-Harris administration has cut Medicare Advantage, which a majority of Medicare beneficiaries use over traditional Medicare.
Harris said during an address on her proposed economic policy, “He [Trump] tried to cut Medicare every year he was president. Threatening a program that tens of millions of seniors count on.”
However, despite Harris’s claim, this is not true. An NBC News fact check found that Trump’s White House budget proposals did not call for benefit cuts to Medicare.
NBC News wrote:
His fiscal 2020 blueprint called for Medicare changes to lower payments to providers and suppliers through new incentives and a lower inflation benchmark. Biden and Democrats embraced the same types of “cuts” under Obamacare, which extended the solvency of Medicare by lowering payments to hospitals and insurers, in exchange for more customers.
Sahil Kapur, a senior political reporter for NBC News, wrote, “Democrats have been using this line for years. It’s false. Trump’s budgets didn’t cut Medicare benefits; they targeted providers & suppliers—the same “cuts” Dems enacted in the ACA.”
Harris on Trump: “He tried to cut Medicare every year he was president.”
Democrats have been using this line for years. It’s false. Trump’s budgets didn’t cut Medicare benefits; they targeted providers & suppliers—the same “cuts” Dems enacted in the ACA. https://t.co/Bwg82v513o
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) August 16, 2024
In contrast, the Biden-Harris administration has moved to cut Medicare Advantage, which is so well liked and popular compared to traditional Medicare that over 50 percent of seniors, roughly 33 million, choose it over traditional Medicare.
Also, due to the Biden-Harris administration’s policies, they had to bail out Medicare Part D using billions of dollars to bail out insurers and placate seniors 100 days before the presidential election.
Joe Grogan, who served as the director of Trump’s Domestic Policy Council, told Breitbart News in an interview that the administration’s efforts to bail out Medicare Part D premiums with billions of dollars are akin to putting a “tourniquet on a mortal wound.”
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.
Originally Posted At www.breitbart.com
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UK LGBTQ Pride founder charged with 37 child sex crimes: report
The founder of a prominent LGBTQ Pride organization in the United Kingdom has been charged with 37 child sex abuse crimes, including rape and conspiracy to kidnap a child. All victims were under the age of 13, police said.
Stephen Ireland, 40, of Surrey, was arrested on Wednesday along with his colleague David Sutton, 26, who has been charged with 22 offenses. Ireland founded Pride in Surrey, the largest LGBT Pride organization in the county, and Sutton volunteered for his organization, as reported by Reduxx.
The 37 child sex crime offenses that Ireland has been charged with include rape of a child under 13; two counts of causing a child under 13 to engage in sexual activity (penetrative); sexual assault of a child under 13; sexual communication with a child; causing a child under 13 to engage in sexual activity (non-penetrative); six counts of making indecent photographs of children; two counts of possession of an extreme pornographic image; two counts of possession of prohibited images of children; five counts of distributing indecent photographs of a child, and one count of publishing an obscene article, according to Surrey Police.
The additional charges – that Sutton also received – include six counts of conspiracy to sexually assault a child; one count of conspiracy to kidnap a child; four counts of arranging the commission of a child sex offense; one count of conspiracy to administer a substance with intent; one count of publishing an obscene article; one count of voyeurism; and one count of perverting the course of justice.
Police said the horrifying atrocities occurred between Aug. 2022 and July 2024. Ireland and Sutton have been remanded to custody pending a hearing. Details about the alleged crimes have not yet been made public, and the investigation remains ongoing. Additionally, Ireland’s profile on the Pride in Surrey website has been scrubbed. The organization had him listed as its inclusions director.
Anyone with information that could help the case is requested to get in touch with Surrey Police by contacting 101 or via their online reporting facility, referencing reference number PR/45240080974. If someone has information and would prefer not to communicate with the police directly, they can call Crimestoppers, an independent organization, at 0800 555 111.
This Story originally came from humanevents.com
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