Category: Biden/Harris

How was the immigration of José Antonio Ibarra supposed to make the average American better off?

by philg

Let’s take a moment to remember Laken Riley. In a closed-border world she would in all likelihood be getting ready to enter the nursing profession, ideally here in Florida where population growth means that we’re always short of healthcare providers. Instead, she is gone, her murderer welcomed into the U.S. by the Biden-Harris administration in 2022.

Suppose that José Antonio Ibarra hadn’t killed Laken Riley or committed any other violent crimes. What was there in his educational or employment background that the U.S. needed? We are informed that diversity is our strength and that every immigrant enriches us culturally and economically. What was there about José Antonio Ibarra that made us want to welcome him to the U.S., pay for his housing and airfare from NYC to Georgia, etc.? What is the rationale for our open borders policy, in other words? Why wouldn’t it have made sense to screen out Mr. Ibarra even if we didn’t expect him to kill anyone?

Laken Riley was killed back in February, so I hope that it isn’t too soon to look at the economics of what happened. José Antonio Ibarra killed a universally liked young soul who would have earned about $86,000 per year (BLS) in 2024 dollars. If we assume a 40-year working career and don’t do a net-present value adjustment, that’s $3.44 million in GDP that will be lost (perhaps $1 million was invested in Laken Riley’s upbringing and education, so that investment was destroyed via opening our border to Mr. Ibarra).

What will it cost to imprison this 26-year-old migrant for the rest of his life? USA Facts says that there is a big variation from state to state, with Maskachusetts being the leader:

It’s tough to believe that Georgia is able to imprison the convicted at $30,000 per year when Massachusetts is spending over $307,000/year, but maybe this is correct. If Mr. Ibarra can live to 82, the life expectancy for Hispanics nationwide (due to systemic racism, apparently, more than 3 years longer than white Americans can expect to live), this will cost approximately $1.7 million in 2024 dollars (probably not accurate because prison costs should rise faster than inflation).

On the third hand, if imprisonment means that Mr. Ibarra is prevented from reproducing, the U.S. taxpayer may actually spend far less on him than we spend on the typical low-skill migrant because the typical low-skill migrant and his/her/zir/their descendants require multiple generations of public housing, free or subsidized health insurance (Medicaid), SNAP/EBT, and Obamaphone.

Related:

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My mom’s aide ain’t Black and ain’t an immigrant

by philg

I decided to conduct a Scientific poll this evening around our kitchen table. My mom is 90 and came over from assisted living accompanied by an aide. The aide is an immigrant from Haiti via the Dominican Republic. She probably gets paid about $20/hour and lives in the Democrat stronghold of West Palm Beach, Florida (our own town of Jupiter is, unfortunately, majority-Deplorable/garbage). So that the kids might be exposed to a diversity of political opinions, I asked her if she was eligible to vote and, if so, for whom she had voted and if she was happy with the election outcome. “I voted for Trump,” she said. “Harris didn’t do or say anything in the last four years while she was in office.” In other words, by Biden/Democrat standards this Haitian-born lady ain’t Black and ain’t an immigrant.

There’s more bad news… she has a high-school-age son… who is a Trump supporter as well. Could it be that elite Democrats picked such a bad candidate that their choice has caused a Long Republicanism disease among young people?

How about the unionized public school teachers? I would expect them to be reliable Democrat voters. They’re supposed to reveal their personal political views, but our 5th grader suspects at least some of harboring sentiments in favor of smaller government(!) and Donald Trump.

My post-election Facebook post (if only they had a “defriend count” on a per-post basis!):

How much truth is there in the therapy/pacifier angle? “Harvard Professors Cancel Classes as Students Feel Blue After Trump Win” (Crimson):

At 7 a.m. on Wednesday, Sophia R. Mammucari ’28 woke up to a phone call from her mom — and the news that Donald Trump had been officially reelected.

“I still had some hope that she was going to win by a small amount. And then I woke up this morning, and that’s not what happened,” Mammucari said. “I probably cried for like an hour.”

Economics lecturer Maxim Boycko wrote in a Wednesday email to students in Economics 1010a: “Intermediate Microeconomics” that the course’s typical in-class quizzes would be optional.

“As we recover from the eventful election night and process the implications of Trump’s victory, please know that class will proceed as usual today, except that classroom quizzes will not be for credit,” Boycko wrote. “Feel free to take time off if needed.”

“At an Upper West Side synagogue, Jews gather to ‘sit shiva’ following Trump’s win” (Jewish Telegraphic Agency):

Congregants at the Upper West Side synagogue B’nai Jeshurun had gathered for a post-election prayer service on Wednesday night, but the congregation’s senior rabbi, Roly Matalon, understood that they had really come together for a different kind of Jewish gathering.

“We’re sitting shiva,” Matalon said to a crowd of about 100, including both members and guests. “Sitting shiva with a sense of loss, of grief.”

The synagogue characterizes itself as “inclusive”. In theory, they’re not “Reform”, but they seem to have two females who call themselves “Rabbis”, one of whom is the author of Faithfully Feminist: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Feminists on Why We Stay. (Would one good reason for a Muslim feminist to “stay” Muslim be that leaving Islam is punishable by death?)

Related:

  • In case someone is looking at this 10 years from now… “Biden: ‘If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black’” (CNN)
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Why is Kamala Harris still raising money?

by philg

Email received just now:

Suppose that I do send in the requested $60. Kamala Harris has thus far raised $1.4 billion from her billionaire supporters. Will the $60 additional actually change what they can do over the next four days? How? Or is there some other reason for trying to convert me into a financial supporter at the peasant level?

The above email came two hours after a request for $47:

We need everyone, honestly. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment for an expensive final push.

$47 to help get voters to the polls — voters we need to win.

$47 to make sure Trump never returns to the White House.

$47 one last time before the election. For Vice President Harris. For our democracy.

(They say “honestly”. Does that mean that previous statements from Harris and/or Walz were dishonest? Also, “our democracy” is at stake. Is that a message for the truly passionate anti-Trumpers to spend $47 on ammunition?)

At 5:23 pm today:

“our very democracy is at stake”! Where is a Latter-day Thomas Matthew Crooks to save our very democracy?

There were quite a few more today. My favorite has a subject line of “Your neighbors in Cambridge are counting on you!” (the direct mail hucksters have figured out that we moved to Florida; why couldn’t the political machines?)

At 12:14 pm, the price of virtue had fallen to just $1: “That is the donation we’re asking you to make directly to Kamala Harris’s campaign for president today. Yes, we’re lowering our ask to just $1 in the hopes you’ll chip in for the first time.”

So… with just a few days to go before what used to be considered the “big day” (before mail-in ballots and early voting) why does a $1 donation help? Why does a $60 donation help? Is the idea to build habitual donors so that money can be spent on the 2026 election?

(I can’t show any comparable examples from the Trump-Vance campaign because either they aren’t emailing out similar appeals or their computers agree with Harris-Walz’s that I am a Massachusetts progressive Democrat.)

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Another call from Kamala Harris for Donald Trump to be assassinated

by philg

Here’s Kamala Harris, a few days ago, referencing Hitler and warning of “unchecked and extreme power” that could soon be wielded by the hated dictator Donald Trump:

(Notice that the person who calls everyone opposed to her a “Nazi” has chosen to wear a brown shirt.)

Is there a way to combine the above warning with Kamala Harris’s worrisome poll numbers in such a way that it isn’t a call for Donald Trump’s assassination? Americans are too stupid/deplorable to save themselves from Nouveau Hitler via the electoral process, according to some polls, which means it will fall to latter-day replacements for General Friedrich Olbricht, Major General Henning von Tresckow, General Carl-Heinrich Rudolf Wilhelm von Stülpnagel, and Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg. Assuming that there is a Nakba on November 5, will it be Pete Buttigieg, fresh back at his/her/zir/their desk from maternity leave, who leaves a briefcase under a conference table at a Trump transition meeting? Who could suspect a smiling friendly Mayor Pete?

Separately, I encountered Donald Trump, fresh from a shift at McDonald’s, and a Secret Service agent, at a neighbor’s house last Saturday night:

Related:

A screen shot in case the above tweet is memory-holed:

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One-year anniversary of a Republican conspiracy theory

by philg

One year ago today… “Republicans float a quiet conspiracy theory that Biden won’t be on the ballot” (NBC):

Though no incumbent president has declined to seek a second term since Lyndon Johnson in 1969, there is an unfounded conversation among a faction on the political right that goes something like this: Democratic power brokers will intervene at the last minute to replace a weakened 80-year-old Biden with someone else as the party’s nominee.

Let’s go back four years to see what I was writing here….

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Being microaggressed when someone mispronounces Kamala Harris’s first name

by philg

As part of my software expert witness slavery, I’ve been working with some young attorneys. Billing rate for first year associates is now nearly $1,000 per hour, which they admit “is a lot of money for someone who doesn’t know anything.” Those fresh out of law school generally conform to orthodox ruling party political points of view. Abortion care should be provided at taxpayer expense at any stage of a pregnant person’s pregnancy (as in Maskachusetts!). If a respiratory virus emerges, Science requires that residents of the U.S. be locked down and making it illegal for healthy Americans to assemble does not violate what those without legal training might have understood as a Constitutional right to assemble. When schools are churches are ordered shut, it makes good epidemiological sense to keep alcohol and marijuana stores open and allow people to meet up via Tinder and then share a bed.

A senior associate got into the mix and he turned out to be a self-described libertarian. He pronounced “Kamala” the way that seemingly most people did through June 2024. It’s unclear how it should be pronounced, actually. Maybe “comma-la” (from Harris herself?). An Indian friend (not Elizabeth Warren) says the initial K should be pronounced more like a G. Maybe the pronunciation actually is different depending on which accent Kamala Harris is using that day or that hour?

What I found interesting was that a non-Deplorable took personal offense at “Kamala” being pronounced, from his point of view, incorrectly. His plan to vote for Kamala Harris gave him a stake in ensuring that everyone who failed to conform with the pronunciation of the moment was disciplined.

I’ve directly observed similar exchanges a couple of other times. The Democrat explicitly says that he/she/ze/they is being “disrespected” if the Deplorable doesn’t speak Sanskrit properly.

Separately, what if one were to send the following drinking glass to a Kamala Harris supporter?

What level of disrespect would that be?

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Idi Amin and Kamala Harris

by philg

A recent tweet from the person most qualified to be President of the United States:

This gives me a chance to dredge up one of my favorite stories at the intersection of African and American politics…

Idi Amin sent a letter to Richard Nixon during the Watergate crisis: “When the stability of a nation is in danger, the only solution is, unfortunately, to imprison the leaders of the opposition.”

(from the book Talk of the Devil: Encounters with Seven Dictators by Riccardo Orizio)

Still in the news, if not the New York Times authorized version, “Kamala Harris’ husband Doug Emhoff slapped me in the face so hard I spun around … I’m disgusted by his fake ‘perfect spouse’ persona” (Daily Mail):

The woman, a successful New York attorney, is remaining anonymous, but decided to speak out after Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s husband, denied the claims through a spokesman.

Emhoff’s accuser, who DailyMail.com is naming only as ‘Jane’, initially declined to comment on the record. But Emhoff’s denial, and his alleged hypocrisy by claiming to be a feminist in media interviews, finally became too much for her.

‘What’s frightening for a woman that’s been on the other end of it, is watching this completely fabricated persona being portrayed,’ Jane said.

‘He’s being held out to be the antithesis of who he actually is. And that is utterly shocking.’

But the second gentleman has since continued to brag about his long-held feminist values in softball media interviews arranged by the Harris presidential campaign.

‘Every time I see Doug on TV portraying the persona of a perfect spouse and non-toxic man, I wonder if Najen is watching too and feeling as disgusted as I am,’ Jane said.

(“Najen” is a reference to the Emhoff nanny who was apparently happy to do a lot of stuff that the wife wasn’t)

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How do Asian Americans process the elites’ selection of Kamala Harris?

by philg

Here’s Kamala Harris using the word “hypothesis” in a sentence:

I’m wondering how Asian Americans with IQs of 150 and long track records of achievement process the phenomenon of Kamala Harris having been selected by Democrat elites. If Harris had been elected via primaries, the intelligent Asian American could understand Harris’s victory by reflecting that “non-Asian American voters are, on average, stupid.” But after their coup against Joe Biden, the Democrats could have selected anyone as their candidate.

Let’s consider Lisa Su, for example. She’s 54 years old, has a Ph.D. in engineering, and has successfully managed a 26,000-employee company in a competitive environment (Intel on one side and Nvidia on the other). When she was elevated to CEO in 2014, revenue at AMD was about $6 billion/year. Today it is 23 billion Bidies per year (i.e., roughly double if we adjust for inflation in the cost of stuff that investors in AMD might want to buy). How does Lisa Su watch the above video, and similar, and make sense of the selection of Kamala Harris, out of pool of more than 200 million, by what we are told is the Party of Science?

Here’s the politician whom Republican primary voters rejected delivering, without notes, a 150-year history of Florida weather, complete with the barometric pressure of various major hurricanes. (This is not to say that I endorse any particular point of view about climate change, though “Changes in Atlantic major hurricane frequency since the late-19th century” (Nature 2021) suggests that DeSantis is correct that recent hurricanes aren’t evidence of significant climate change.)

Related:

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Donald Trump’s mental condition and Detroit’s overall condition

by philg

My direct exposure to politicians on TV is minimal because I don’t watch TV or cable TV news. From skimming print media, such as the New York Times, and statements from Kamala Harris, I had the impression that Donald Trump’s brain had gone at least “half Biden” and possibly “full Biden” (“Never go Full Biden” being the conventional wisdom). Recently I saw some video on X of a 30-minute block of the man whom we are informed is (1) senile, and simultaneously (2) the world’s biggest threat to democracy.

For comparison, look at this NBC Saturday Night Live skit from 20 years ago. Do the videos support the legacy media/Democrat point of view that Trump has suffered more than ordinary age-related decline?

Separately, Kamala Harris and the New York Times are now telling us to believe that Detroit is a center of “excellence”:

There is no “fact checking” from this hard-hitting independent investigative newspaper regarding the politician’s claim that Detroit is a magnet for excellent Americans.

What does the market say? Here’s a house for sale in Detroit right now on Zillow… for $4,250. This includes three lots, so the actual price of being surrounded by “excellence” is less than $1,500 per lot:

We were supposed to believe that Joe Biden was a paragon of mental acuity (NBC, Feb 2024, interviewing the Secretary of Open Borders: Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas offered a similar defense, calling Biden “sharp.” “The most difficult part about a meeting with President Biden is preparing for it because he is sharp, intensely probing and detail-oriented and focused,” Mayorkas told “Meet the Press.”). Now we’re supposed to believe that Donald Trump is feeble-minded (but also capable enough to burn down the Reichstag on January 21, 2025) and that Detroit is jammed with the “excellent”.

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The Biden-Harris administration reminds young people of the horrible consequences of a vote for Donald Trump

by philg

An official U.S. Department of Education email received by a nephew who just finished college highlights the advantages of being an incumbent (his email and name redacted):

So.. a cabinet secretary in the incumbent administration can email all federal student loan borrowers and tell them they’ll have to pay way more if they don’t vote properly in November. Here’s some more of the email:

In addition to implementing these provisions of the SAVE Plan and vigorously defending the plan in court, the Biden-Harris Administration will also continue our work alleviating the burden of student debt for millions of Americans. That includes canceling student debt for borrowers under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program and making fixes to other income-driven repayment plans that were riddled with administrative errors long before our Administration. We are also continuing to pursue proposals for broader student debt relief through separate rulemaking that could benefit tens of millions of borrowers in the future.

While we disagree with the Republican elected officials’ efforts here to side with special interests and block borrowers from getting breathing room on their student loans, President Biden and our Administration will not stop fighting to make sure Americans have affordable access to the lifechanging opportunities a higher education can provide. We will continue to put the needs of students and borrowers first, help borrowers access the support and resources they need, and make the promise of higher education a reality for more American families.

We’ll keep fighting for you!

I would have thought that there was a rule against this, but apparently not!

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