The Truths We Hold—For the People – by Amanda S. Green

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt
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picture from pixabay (released under CCO license) NOT labeled as “Green reads Harris” …. but it should be.

The Truths We Hold—For the People – by Amanda S. Green

Two weeks ago, I started my commentary on Kamala Harris’ new book,  The Truths We Hold: An American Journey. Since then, she confirmed what we all suspected—she is running for president. Of course, anyone reading the intro to her book would have already known it. The intro and most of the first chapter are not even thinly veiled talking points for her campaign.

“For the People” is the first full chapter of the book. I’m sure she gave a great deal of thought to the chapter title. It refers not only to her work as a law clerk, and later prosecutor, but also to her political posturing as being the people’s candidate. In fact, if you go to her campaign site, the first page you see has a video of her and the caption of Kamala Harris: For the People.

Now tell me this book is anything but a campaign tool for her.

The chapter opens in 1988 on the day Harris reported to the Alameda County Courthouse for first day orientation as a law clerk for the DA’s Office.

I had a sense that I wanted to be a prosecutor, that I wanted to be on the front lines of criminal justice reform, that I wanted to protect the vulnerable. But having never seen the job up close, I hadn’t made up my mind. (TTWH,loc. 160)

Wait, what? She is about to become a law clerk for the DA’s Office and she wanted to be on the “front lines of criminal justice reform”? That doesn’t even make sense. Prosecutors don’t, as a general rule, worry about reform. They worry about making sure the criminals are convicted and do their time. Even remembering that day so long ago, Harris can’t help herself. She has to frame it all into terms that will help push her narrative today.

But it gets better—or worse, depending on your point of view.

Alameda County District Attorney’s Office is itself something of a legend. Earl Warren led the office before becoming attorney general of California and later one of the most influential chief justices of the United States Supreme Court. He was on my mind that morning as I walked past the stunning mosaics in the lobby that depict the early history of California. Warren’s words—proclaiming segregation “inherently unequal”—had taken a long fifteen years to make it to Berkeley, California. I was grateful they had come in time for me; my elementary school class was only the second class in my city to be desegregated through busing. (TTWH, loc. 167)

Suuuure that’s what she was thinking.

Not.

Think about the first day you reported for a job you thought might be leading to your career of choice. Were you thinking about what someone else did? Or were you thinking about how you needed to make sure you didn’t screw things up and get yourself fired your first day? I don’t know about you, but I just wanted to get through the day without screwing up too badly. Hopefully, I might even manage to impress those I worked with. But considering judicial precedent and social change? Nope, not even close to the top 10 things I thought about.

As summer interns, we understandably had very little power or influence. (TTWH loc. 173)

Well, duh. What did she expect? They were law clerks, interns. They were there to be quiet, watch what was going on around them and learn. They weren’t there to be movers or shakers. But, being Kamala, she has a point to make and it is to show she was different. She wasn’t going to just sit back and do as expected. The great Kamala is more than your ordinary intern.

The police had arrested a number of individuals in the raid, including an innocent bystander: a woman who had been at the wrong place at the wrong time and had been swept up in the dragnet. I hadn’t seen her. I didn’t know who she was or what she looked like. I didn’t have any connection to her, except for the report I was reviewing. But there was something about her that caught my attention. (TTWH, loc. 178)

Okay, first impressions of this paragraph had me doing a double-take. The first is her use of “individuals” in this context. It implies the police go around arresting anyone they want, without probable cause and without concern for the rule of law. It also shows that she no longer thinks like a prosecutor and probably never did. A prosecutor would use the term “suspects” because that’ what they were.

But looks at it a little closer. Here’s this legal intern, a student, reviewing a case file. Okay, that’s done in some DA’s Office. Once upon a time, I held that same position in another office many, many miles and states away. The ADA you work with will give you cases to review, usually with some sort of assignment attached. You’re to research some point of law or follow up with a cop or witness. But Kamala doesn’t tell us why she was looking at the case. Just that something about the woman caught her eye.

She goes on to tell us about the woman, painting a picture of someone truly in the wrong place at the wrong time. Oh, does Kamala tug at the heartstrings. It was late Friday afternoon which meant the woman would have to spend the weekend in jail before appearing before a judge. Our oh-so-concerned legal intern worried about whether the woman worked on weekends and might lose her job. Or what if she had kids? Would someone take them in or would CPS be called? Did the kids know their mama had been arrested? Oh the horrors! Kamala had to do something.

I rushed to the clerk of the court and asked to have the case called that very day. (TTWH, loc. 181)

Notice the problem here? She goes straight to the court and not to the attorney who told her to review the case. Oops.

I begged. I pleaded. (TTWH, loc. 181)

I’m sure that went over really well with the clerk.

If the judge could just return to the bench for five minutes, we could get her released. All I could think about was her family and her frightened children. Finally, as the minutes in the day wound down, the judge returned. I watched and listened as he reviewed her case, waiting for him to give the order. Then, with the pound of a gavel, just like that, she was free. She’d get to go home to her children in time for dinner. I never did get the chance to meet her, but I’ll never forget her. (TTWH, loc 188)

Oh. My. G*d.

There are so many things wrong here, I’m not sure where to start. This legal intern, someone who has not yet passed the Bar, decides she knows better than the supervising attorney and decides to take action. Again, without discussing it with him or his supervisor. She begs and pleads for a judge to come back to the bench on a Friday afternoon so this poor woman can be released. Then, she proves she is the champion of the victims by getting it all done.

Look, law clerks and interns just don’t do this. Not if they want to keep their jobs and want a hope of ever working for that particular office after passing the Bar.

While I can’t say she stretched the truth here, I do have doubts. As I said above, most interns doing something like this would find themselves getting a come to Jesus lecture they wouldn’t soon forget. You just don’t jump the chain of command like that. Then there’s the judge. If he did agree to sit down and look at the file and listen to her argument, the first thing he’d ask is if her supervisor knew she was there and agreed with what she was doing. Remember what she said earlier. As legal interns, they had “very little power or influence.” So how in the hell could she pull something like this off without having her supervisor involved?

It was a defining moment in my life. It was the crystallization of how, even on the margins of the criminal justice system, the stakes were extraordinarily high and intensely human. (TTWH, loc. 188)

Wait, what? She only then realized it. Had she been living under a rock until then? Had she not paid any attention in law school? She said she’d thought about former Chief Justice Earl Warren when she entered the courthouse that first day on her internship. Had she forgotten all the opinions he wrote she would have studied in her constitutional law or criminal law classes?

Or, as I suspect, was that written with her eye firmly on the Oval Office?

And I knew the kind of work I wanted to do, and who I wanted to serve. (TTWH, loc. 185)

I’ll leave it to you to decide who and what.

The rest of the chapter sets up her bona fides to run for office. Trust me, this chapter, like the intro, is little more than a campaign speech. We learn about her childhood, her immigrant parents, how their divorce impacted her. Then she tells us about her maternal grandparents and their social activism. Oh, she doesn’t miss a beat as she sets the narrative.

There is something about Harris, and this book in particular, that is troubling. I can read anything. Oh, I might want to plant the book against the far wall, but I can force myself to read it. This book is different. I found myself not just skimming but skipping paragraph after paragraph. My brain went into bullshit overload. It recognized what Harris was doing and finally said “enough is enough”.

Unfortunately, there are those who have been and will be pulled in by the emotion she evokes in her stories. They won’t/don’t look past that to see if what she says makes sense. We can’t laugh her off because she does know how to play the game. She is a master at manipulating public opinion. So we need to know what she stands for—other than herself. If that means reading this book, so be it.

Next week, we’ll look at “A Voice for Justice”, the next chapter in the book.

Heaven help me.

(Help Amanda drink enough to keep snarking the unbelievable twaddle that passes for deep political thought these days.  We’ll collect for her liver transplant later. Hit her Pourboir jar now! – SAH)

206 thoughts on “The Truths We Hold—For the People – by Amanda S. Green”

  2. Any discussion of Kamala Harris should include her relationship with Willy Brown, former Speaker of the California State Assembly, former mayor of San Francisco and the man who, more than any other, made modern California what it is today. The known details are amply tawdry that anyone looking it up will want to employ a ten-foot pole, hand sanitizer and bleach-wipes for their computer afterwards.

    Suffice to say that among the truths Kamala Harris holds will NOT be found the idea that a woman shouldn’t pursue “bedroom promotions” nor avoid “relationships” with married men even though it might help her career.

    1. I’m thinkin’ there’s enough fodder in the cited relationship for a dirty campaign that would make her withdraw, if she actually had any shame, which apparently she doesn’t. They’ve already demonstrated they’re gonna fight dirty, so we’d better be willing to use ALL the weapons they hand us.

      As to the intern-for-justice story, my bullshit meter is pegged over so hard, I think it’s broken. Does IBM still sell ’em? I’m gonna need a bigger one for 2020.

      1. Only if there is someone else in the election that has the backing of the national propaganda corps. Otherwise it’ll be buried deeper than Hoffa.

    2. https://madworldnews.com/kamala-harris-sex-jeff-sessions/
      https://amgreatness.com/2018/04/21/poontronage-when-kamala-met-willie/
      https://www.truthorfiction.com/sen-kamala-harris-affair-married-man-used-launch-career-mostly-fiction/
      http://thepeoplesrepublicofcalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/02/ex-lovers-kamala-harris-and-willie-brown.html

      Aw heck, you can find plenty of articles on Ms. Harris online. Most of them are NOT very flattering, unless you admire slime molds.

      2. > sex
        > poontronage
        > lovers

        No. Nonono. I’m going to need the extra-strength Brain Bleach now.

      3. Slime molds serve a useful purpose by helping decompose things and return nutrients to the soil, air, and water. I don’t think most politicians today make such a positive contribution to the well-being of the planet.

        But that could just be me on a Friday typing.

      4. Noted today:
        Willie Brown Admits He Boosted Kamala Harris’s Career
        Influential California Democrat had extramarital relationship with Harris in 1990s
        Former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown broke his silence on his relationship with Democratic senator Kamala Harris on Saturday, admitting in his weekly column that he used his powerful post to boost her young career when they dated.

        Brown, who was openly in an extramarital relationship with Harris when he was speaker of the California State Assembly and running for mayor, had avoided commenting on his relationship with Harris since she announced her run for president a week ago. Harris has also managed to avoid addressing the role Brown played in the early stages of her political career.

        In his weekly San Francisco Chronicle column, however, Brown referred to it as the “elephant in the room” and acknowledged that he used his position to help her career.

        “I’ve been peppered with calls from the national media about my ‘relationship’ with Kamala Harris, most of which I have not returned,” Brown wrote. “Yes, we dated.”

        [INSERT GIF: Frau Blucher declaring, “He Vas My Boyfriend!!”]

  3. My guess is that all this was very, very carefully vetted. One of Harris’s big problems in the Dem primary is going to be her record as a prosecutor: to put it mildly, law enforcement is not real popular around the far-left circles at the moment. She’s trying to get ahead of the spin, paint herself as a daisies and rainbows “I work for the people and reined in those evil cops” sort of prosecutor and hope that no one looks too closely into the actual record.

    I’ll say that I too have questions about that anecdote. I notice it’s nicely unverifiable: she doesn’t remember the woman’s name, never met her or figured out what she looked like, all we know is that she was arrested as part of some sort of bust on a Friday. No one can hunt her down and figure out the truth of what happened. I also notice that, though this may be an artifact of your reviewing, this woman’s kids went from entirely hypothetical in one paragraph to “a family and frightened children” all of a sudden.

      1. Additionally her conduct was unethical, and the judge’s chambers would have almost certainly have reached out to her supervisor to report her actions, at the least to find out if the supervising attorney was aware of the contact. A non-lawyer who contacts a court without it being at the direction of a licensed attorney to discuss a legal matter that the firm, or in this case prosecutor’s office, is handling, is an ethics violation, both for the person making the call AND the supervising attorney (lack of adequate supervision of subordinate). This is legal ethics 101 and would have been one of the first things that the interns would have been instructed in.

        Kamala Harris therefore either 1) is lying or 2) is admitting she engaged in unethical conduct.

        1. > unethical conduct

          They don’t think like that. They’re not only above the rules, they’re honestly hurt when people try to apply the rules to them.

          1. Rules are to prevent the riffraff from doing bad stuff. By definition, everything they do is good.

        2. When I was referring to unethical conduct I was referring to the actual rules of ethics governing attorney conduct that attorneys are obligated to follow, and which are codified as part of the Court Rules in each state and the Federal bar. The vast majority of attorneys do take those rules very seriously, although of course there are exceptions, which is why there are ethics boards, etc.

        3. Both are benefits as far as democrat credentials go. I mean its not like she said a meeting years ago was on tuesday morning while some other witness said monday morning. That’s complete evil lying.

          She just is embellishing and creating composite events

    2. “this woman’s kids went from entirely hypothetical in one paragraph to “a family and frightened children” all of a sudden.”

      As with any Progressive, once the woman’s children had inflamed her imagination and empathy they became real, just as Nick Sandmann’s and Bret Kavanaugh’s sins became real once conceived.

        1. Remember all that sympathy from Democrats/left for Elian Gonzalez when Bill Clinton admin had him taken away at gun point and shipped back to Castro’s Cuba…oh wait, there was none. Nor in fact was there any outrage when the same Obama who welcomed illegals with open arms expressly made an exception for those coming from Cuba, changing longstanding US policy of allowing people from Cuba who made it to the USA to remain as refugees.

          This of course exposes the motive of the Democrats; they only care about people coming into the country who they think will vote for Democrats; those fleeing communist tyrannies like Cuba are to be sent back to those tyrannies, because they won’t vote “the right way” for Democrats and socialist policies.

          1. The cuban community, especially at the time of Elian was very much anticommunist and disliked the dems. Its softened now that the wounds inflicted by the regime softened and the generation raised here has been properly taught in the glories of socialist fascism. Meanwhile a good chunk of the reason CA went blue and Texas quickly is is because south American aliens have flooded them and the reconquista is ahead of schedule.

        2. As far as they cared, That just meant they went to the mother. This is a benefit because men are just defective women so it’s good for the kid.

  4. Well, with this and Warren’s campaign plan to tax rich people more, they’re both a shoo-in for the White House if they come out as a lesbian couple… /s

    And of course the Left would want a Prez who hasn’t got anything but the whiff of an idea of how legal systems work. All the better to get her to sign unconstitutional and illegal bills with my dear…! (And they don’t want her to compete with ol Hitlery, since y’know, that one actually passed the bar exam…)

    1. I’m expecting Hillary to stab some of these ladies and gentlemen in the back as things develop.

          1. We need to do it on I40 from california. Why Oklahoma is now one of the congressional districts voting against ice.

        2. My Aunt who lived in Arkansas and was rather active in their politics, God rest her soul, used to tell me the people of Arkansas voted for Willie for President as the only way they could get them out of the state.

            1. That … I used to read Molly Ivens – I know, a leftie par excellence and not a real Texas gal (admittedly, neither am I), but she was hysterically funny back in the day before chemo and Bush-hate got to her … I often thought that she and PK O’Rourke would be a f**king hysterical tag team on some talk show together. They had the same kind of attitude, although on different sides …
              Yeah, I started with a point: she said in one of her essays that “We gave you all LBJ, and you b*stards gave him right back!”

          3. Reminds me of a bumpersticker seen in the Peoples Republic of Massachusetts when Dukakis was running for President:

            “Save the other 49, keep the Duke at home!”

          4. It was a common-enough sentiment at the time, yes.

            Clinton was backed by *massive* PAC money; if the fools in the other 49 hadn’t greased his path out, he’d probably *still* be Governor…

    2. You forgot an important word regarding Warren’s plan – she plans to tax PRODUCTIVE rich people more. Which conveniently exempts Warren herself.

      1. You cannot tax the rich. Money is movable. There’s always a loophole. Ask Bill “GatesFoundation” Gates and his kin. But people who talk about taxing the rich are lying. All their plans tax high income people. Big difference! Those plans tax those who threaten the already rich by actually making money. Cue the Catch 22 quote, something about “I understand the Hiltons still let rooms. We have never done anything for our money.”

        1. Yep. The actual ultrawealthy that are actually harming the country will be untouched. They provide a nice false front for government to avoid the constitution and thus get to use the same tax haven techniques politicos do. The folks trying to do well, endeavoring to reach even just the first base station will be soaked. I make well under the former 200k threshold for rich. I still see 35% of my income stolen by the feds. Only gets worse as you go up.

              1. They don’t. Beside if the money was made legally it’s okay.Equal opportunity not equal outcome. Being a politicians is a scam. They’re in it for the perks, money, ego-stroking and power.

                1. This is targeting mostly the folks who make money by govt extortion and/or being govt cutouts
                  Stuff like deplatformers and regulatory companies

            2. In a proper, hands off ecosystem. In the current one they do suck wealth from others and collude with feds to oppress anyone who could potentially threaten them

  5. With the Obamas, Warren, Hillary, Sanders, and now Harris here releasing their own pangyrics -ahem, I mean memoirs that aren’t at all thinly disguised political campaigns, Barnes & Noble is going to have expand their Domestic Affairs section to include a Virtue Signal bay.

    I kid, I kid. Barnes & Noble won’t be around by the time they all start properly campaigning.

      1. That’s probably why they’ve been kept afloat for the last few years.

        Rows of hardbacks in a Real Book Store have gravitas, y’know… and the Narrative needs all of that it can get.

  6. Sadly, the left will just shrug and tell conservatives they have no right to judge, especially after electing That Awful Bad Man.

    1. After all the “Chimpy McBuhitler” they haven’t a right to damn thing regarding criticism, nor any immunity from from it. They’ve damn well EARNED contempt. And the nonsensical name-calling of Trump, too. Not that Trump doesn’t deserve some criticism, but it would so much more effective it were reasoned rather than the stuff of the schoolyard when not in adult earshot.

      1. Well it worked against bush and looks like trump blinked in the shutdown. With how luck seems to go, Harris is probably next potus

          2. Look at the timing though. It takes away any excuse that Pelosi has to try to stop the state of the union address being held in the House chambers, and gives Trump a national TV platform to slam the Democrats, during which he can urge people to use the next three weeks to prevent another shutdown by pushing the Democrats to act in the nation’s interest instead of their own personal partisan political power. In essence, if he uses the 3 week period wisely (which of course is a significant “if”), then if the impasse shuts things down in 3 weeks, he can say “I tried, they simply are utterly unreasonable, and this shutdown is solely on Democrats”.

              1. If DJT caves…

                Trump got elected because he promised what the electorate wanted to hear, and he was popular because he delivered on most of it.

                There are certainly McPoliticians out there who realize that hiring a campaign manager to run the same campaign all their competitors are running is a waste of money.

                If DJT’s platform got him elected, then they’ll promise more of… whatever it is they took away from watching it.
                Which the media assures them was racism, sexism, and homophobia…

                I foresee a herd of Straw Trumps dancing through the next nomination cycle, each one trying to be more radical than the next.

                Note that this is the same policy that has put so many Democrats in office. “Our predecessors raised taxes, so we must raise them more! Well, why not 70% then? etc.”

                1. “I foresee a herd of Straw Trumps dancing through the next nomination cycle, each one trying to be more radical than the next.”

                  And at least half will be False Flag Trumps. Making Stuff Up is standard for Leftists.

                  1. In his first autobiography Nixon talked about running against JFK, and how Kennedy campaigned as a “super hawk” who was going to kick Soviet ass. Nixon knew a whole lot that Kennedy didn’t (officially…) know, and wasn’t able to do much about refuting Kennedy’s rhetoric since he officially *did* know what he was talking about, but couldn’t use it since it all fell under “national security” and “secret” classifications.

        2. The Oval Office is a stone’s through from a major internet NAP and its communications are managed by the NSA, which *runs* the NAP. He has all the bandwidth of the whole East Coast, one hop away, an office, and a nice desk to sit behind.

          Do it from the Oval Office and livestream it.

        3. I’m more optimistic. It gives the Dems 3 weeks to negotiate in good fath (like they said they would…did anybody see where my eyeballs rolled off to?), and when they blow it off, Trump can declare the emergency.

          Meanwhile, the CG gets paid, air traffic controllers get paid, and the progtards think that POTUS caved. I’ve seen that victory dance before, the dozens (hundreds) of times they think he’s boxed in.

          Unfortunately, TSA gets paid. Not that I plan to set foot in an airliner again.

          1. If he wants a chance he has to bring the fight and history into the public. Bring up the multiple times that the promised security was a couple more paper pushers hired to rubber stamp asylum and such. That in areas where physical barriers exist there have been profound effects in the illegal traffic. That this is merely funding a law passed a decade and a half ago.

            But people don’t see that. They see furloughed mandarins having to prioritize bills. They see a president who just wants sone vanity project while robodogs and cameras are touted as all you need to prevent entry. Since the propaganda corps were never properly castrated they have no excuse not to piss all over the truth, and they do.

            And yet when the same happens to us, “just learn to code dummy” or “just find another job.” There is celebration of the fact that white men (stereotypical trump base) are the group most affected by the suicide and drug epidemics in society. Forgive my wondering if the unwillingness to even attempt defense in depth against heroin and the rest coming over the border both legally and illegally is because the victims are loathed and seen as subhuman

            1. After Buzzfeed, PuffingtonHost and Gannet laid off a bunch of people, there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth by the (former) Journalists on twitter. They were rather unhappy at being told “Learn to Code” in response to their plight. Actually, several went ballistic. Made my day.

              Schadenfreude hot, cold or lukewarm; it’s still a great snack.

              1. Part of why I noted it. Same reason why I had no sympathy for the furloughed. First job I applied for had monthly (or maybe bimonthly) furlough day. Current job requires 4 hrs week unpaid work before overtime allowed and probably charges those 4 hrs to customer as normal hours. Meanwhile you have no chance at advancement unless you take on extra work at higher levels.

                Even with the good economy, I go into work every day expecting a layoff because they offshored the work as a bribe to some govt to buy their product.

                1. I’m not feeling the love for the Federal workers either. My late-hubby ended up with a furlough day every month for three years. The money was never offered back. Plus he worked on those days just like always.

                  1. Yep. I go to work every day worrying that it will be the last because someone decided my back be a nice stepping stone. And don’t have nearly enough funds to survive. But since im not a fed my life or chances don’t matter

                    2. Thx. Sadly its a fact of the industry. And this is the one less likey to be exterminated by the upcoming dem administration that I could get into.

                2. Salaried? Unlawful if you’re hourly.

                  I know some major retailers schedule fulltimers only 36 hours. They normally end up with 40 with last minute end of shift things that need to be done.

            2. It seems as if the sick-out by air traffic controllers was a major issue, a highly visible broadly-inconvenient example of government gone missing.

              The Democrats will agree to NOTHING LESS than a complete package of government funding, not allowing cherry-picking of funding for “critical” components. Expect the battle to be fought in those details.

              1. Sounds like nanzi isn’t fully on board either. Wants 6 months. So will see. Figuring it’ll be a repeat of the total capitulation we saw with the last cr.

          1. Or maybe the Stone arrest is the final step in Mueller breaking Trump to the will of the bureaucratic power elite?

            1. Honestly, I suspect he’s doing this because much longer we were going to start seeing failures of the things we do need to keep working, and while he was peeling off more Democrats every cycle, he just needs the time to work.

              Given that Pelosi has been stating loudly, that reopening the government was a pre condition of talks, if she then refuses to open talks once the government is reopened, she’s going to cause a lot of problems for precisely the D’s that Trump needs to peel away from her.

              I don’t know this was the best outcome, but given that she both had hostages and appears willing to shoot all of them, a delaying action probably is the least bad maneuver at this point.

              Also, it ties the House up with this for another month. I don’t think we can discount the value of keeping them from focusing on passing any other legislation…

              1. Reopen talks and again tout the ‘smart wall’. A couple cameras and drones that video tape the leisurely stroll across before the invader disappears into the enemy held territory (sorry, but when a cop killer can go to this community and get almost complete support to escape back to country of origin and the community is skimming money from economy to send to another nation while they displace people born here and sometimes even loyal to here there is no itger term that can be used)

                1. I favor a single strand of barbed wire, some signs saying “This Is A Wall”, and licensing bounty hunters.

                  Fat chance of that, though.

            2. Doesn’t matter if he is or isn’t. The bandwagon effect these polls create drives enough. I’ll note again that Moore badly underperformed, Beto was within a few percent of being senator beto (as well as gillum, Nelson, and Georgia lady. Meanwhile the FL ag sec flipped and can now slow walk any firearm licensing), the state that hadn’t had a single county vote for obama in either 2008 or 12 now has their own dem representing the bureaucracy. And just by turning a blind eye to citizenship and voting there may not be another conservative majority in my natural lifetime.

              All because the Soviets and their sympathizers made our schools and media into propaganda organs.

          3. The people want border issues to go away. Last I heard the idea of a barrier was underwater because orangemanbad. Plus that just reiterates why they have elected to create a new populace more amenable to the increasingly overt fascism underlying our govt

              1. Last one I remember seeing had 50 odd to 40 odd against the wall. Just because the dems can still make people toxic.

                  1. Even spotting 15% for bias 65/35 still way too lopsided, especially when the 35 has the pulpit and most if the government

                    2. Not sure. You have easily at least 35 percent of populace that would complain if Trumpitler cured AIDS and cancer. And since that 35% is most of not only the decision making class but the enforcing class, indoctrinating class, and propaganda class it’s no stretch to see enough of the populace duped because they associate borders with Trump and have never had any interaction with border jumpers so it has to be bad since all these important people say so.

      2. I’ve said it again and again; Want to compare Trump to Huey Long? I’ll listen. Say he’s William Tweed come again? You might just have a point. But to say he’s ‘literally’ that revolting Austrian? You’ve lost your goddamned mind.

        1. Half Germans are genetically foreordained identically, whether the other half is Austrian, Scot, or Zulu.

        2. For starters, Trump’s taller. And paler. And doesn’t have the schnurrbart (the name for the under-the-nose beard). I’d wager Trump is closer to Admiral Troomp than to the Austrian.

          1. I am old enough to remember when the same Democrats/Leftists (but I repeat myself) were calling Reagan Hitler. They have done this to any prominent Republican who runs for President and have now extended it to anyone who does immediately voice enthusiastic acceptance of the leftist party line,

        3. All he is is a convenient boogeyman that the populace is programmed to hate. Most people’s understanding of WW2 comes to the holocaust and that Hitler started war (the role of the USSR conveniently ignored). And that person is on tv and the news. He must be right, plus he’s a foctor.

      3. But they’ve apologized for saying that about W! (Besides, he was a tool of the evil, manipulative VICE-president!) This time is different!

        Heck, even Bill Kristol and Jen Rubin say Trump is bad!

      1. Some lefties I know are actually arguing about whether Malaria Shark (anagram for Kamala Harris) is too “right-wing” to get elected.

        They really don’t have a clue.

        1. The real 2020 election will be the dem primary. So the brownshirts will have outsized power. Just gonna continue to see the dnc propaganda arm continue to make it all up until enough people think there is enough smoke for their to be fire.

          Probably within 10 yrs have imprisoned trump, family and confidents on false charges and destroyed business.

          1. I understand where you are coming from, but I have serious doubts. Yes, right now it looks like Trump went wobbly on the Wall and if that is where it rests he will lose in 2020. But if the Democrats deal in bad faith (and they don’t know how to do anything else) and Trump then rams the Wall up their collective backside, then matters aren’t so clear. And if he follows that by playing hardball on an investigation into vote fraud (by, say, having any Democrat elected official who refuses to cooperate jailed), well then the Democrats will be in deep kimchee.

            The Democrats don’t know how to deal with Trump, and don’t give any indication that they are learning.

            1. Historically the dems have never dealt in anything but bad faith. If people haven’t reaized that by now they never will. Should just outsource atc. Save money and give the taste of private sector

        2. Oh goodness! I’ve heard lefties tell me that NPR and the BBC are conservative news sources. That told me far more about them than I really wanted to know!

  7. Sarah, are you trying to send Amanda to the Looney bin by making her read this garbage? 😈

  8. Damnit, this has me pouring a bit of single malt. It’s a no-age-statement, but does this… garp… deserve better? No. It deserves Old Crow, but I’ve found that while the Manhattan can take some serious abuse, that is going just a bit too far.

    1. Would that be the Earl Warren who, as Attorney-General, “became a driving force behind the internment of over one hundred thousand Japanese Americans without any charges or due process.“?*

      Doubtless she has him in mind as a model for handling the Deplorable situation.

      *Wiki, with emphasis added

      1. Well, Deplorables tossing hundreds of thousands of Progressives into camps might be an important part of dealing with the current existential crisis facing America and Western Civilization, but I’d prefer to avoid that being a first choice.

        1. Hmm. Depends. We would basically have to institute a reign of terror against everyone identified as a progressive similar to the way the rebels terrorized the Tories prior to, during, and after the War of Independence/Revolutionary War. As much as I wish to not be vindicative, history doesn’t have many good endings for when the winners of a conflict allowed the losers to still hang around afterwards.

          3. It’s already happening. What do you think the political persecutions from Mueller, the social media lynchings and outright lying against folks like Kavanaugh, and the use of banks prevent undesireables from being able to do anything financial are. Only going to expand as the fascists regain power

            1. I’ve been wondering about the Gaslight Media’s reaction if a heavily armed FBI team pulled the kind of pre-dawn raid against Webster Hubbell, James or Susan McDougal as they pulled on Roger Stone this morning.

              1. We’ll probably never know. The stasi work for the government masters who work hand in glove with media

                1. Nah. Be shown interspersed with clips of SS going door to door and executing people for being Jewish and such. Be decried as a political persecution.

      2. That, and the rolling fuster-cluck of the Commission that bore his name, and the many smaller injustices he cheerfully rendered.

  10. I don’t think there is enough . . . organic matter . . . in the mythic Greek stables, let alone that picture, to convey how much such . . . stuff . . . spews from Harris’ mouth/typing. There isn’t enough whiskey on the planet to get me to read that tripe.

      1. Uranium Hexafluoride ought to do quite nicely. Poisonous, corrosive as all hell, and radioactive.

          1. Depends on whether you use the stuff before or after running it through enrichment centrifuges. Atomic weight won’t have any effect on poisonousness and corrosiveness; which will kill you faster than the radioactivity anyway.

  12. Her writing about Berkeley desegregation is also bovine. In the mid 60’s Berkeley started forcing people to go to school based on race. Berkeley has and had only 1 high school. Berkeley High, so everyone went there. There were 3 Junior high schools. (grade 7-9). Willard, Garfield and Burbank. Garfield in the hills, mostly white, Burbank in the flatlands mostly “negro”, Willard a naturally integrated school, at the base of the hills. So not segregation, just schools serving geographic areas.

    So in the mid 60s they started mixing by creating a single school for 9th graders, and sending 7th and 8th graders to more distant schools based on race. My younger brother would have gone to Willard like I had, but instead they sent him to another school as part of “integration”. So he went from an already integrated school to another as a pawn so people could look like they were doing something.

    Elementary schools up until the mid 60s were neighborhood schools. She seems to have been born in 1964, so by the time she went to school in 70 forced integration was nothing new. What was new was this idea of busing elementary children to distant schools. One of the left’s attempts at social engineering. One result was white flight over the Berkeley hills to Orinda and points east. We can see how much it improved inner city schools. We can see how well it worked in Boston.

    So she is lying. But this should not surprise anyone. She is a democrat. She also got her start because she was Willie’s girl. She thought he was going to leave his wife. Wrong. But she did get some spectacular parting gifts. Appointments to well paying boards that meet once in a while as a reward.

    What scares me about California now is how no one seems to notice the corruption. Chicago west. Repair of the Bay Bridge cost 5 Billion more than first estimated. Willie was mayor of SF at the time… I wonder where the money went?

    2. > corruption

      That’s the point. They don’t see it as corruption; it’s just the way things are done, and you’re foolish for imagining someone *wouldn’t* take every advantage of their position.

      The millions of illegals they’ve brought in share those same cultural values. They do as they please; if you obey the law, you’re a schmuck.

      1. Law is there to restrain the marks. The gentry needn’t follow them as long as the blatant mockery doesn’t rile up the subjects too much.

    1. Personally, any prosecutor who submits false evidence should be immediately tried, convicted and executed. The degree of falsification is irrelevant. The law is a lethal weapon, and its misuse by a lawyer is even more deadly than any loaded firearm in the hands of a homicidal maniac.

      1. Nah. We just promote them, give more prestige and benefits. At least if the lie isn’t against an undesirable. Bet the govt lawyers on the while Bundy thing not only still working but maybe got a one level down performance review.

        1. I keep wondering what happened to the team which brought the bogus case against Alaska’s Senator Ted Stevens.

          1. Given the time between case and realization of corruption probably promoted. May some time off with pay later. Why I trust a defendant over a cop or fed

            1. “WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has found that two prosecutors involved in the botched 2008 corruption trial of Senator Ted Stevens engaged in “reckless professional misconduct,” but it stopped short of firing the men, saying their mistakes were not intentional.

              In a cover letter to a 672-page report provided to Congress on Thursday, alongside additional attachments and findings, the Justice Department said the two prosecutors would be suspended without pay — Joseph Bottini for 40 days, and James Goeke for 15 days.”

          2. One of them is a member of Team Mueller. Mueller of course himself actively helped keep people he knew were innocent in prison because telling the truth that they were innocent would have spoiled his information pipeline with Whitey Bulger’s organization. And if anyone thinks Bulger’s mysterious transfer and subsequent murder were an accident, I have some bridges in New York I would like to sell you.

            1. I was growing up when Whitey was on the FBIMW list and captured. Delving deeper into that, the crime lab, Amerithrax, Atlanta, and Martha Stewart are why I am more likely to believe a defendant than a fed. Cop be 50/50.

              And joy oh joy I get that in April

              1. Don’t forget the FBI making Richard Jewell out to be the perp in Atlanta, the deaths at Ruby Ridge and Waco, failure to detect a Soviet spy in their own agency (Robert Hanssen) for over two decades, COINTELPRO, the suspicious document destruction following Hoover’s death, and blown cases against the Weather Underground because of FBI illegal activities.

          3. Joseph Bottini is still Assistant U.S. Attorney for Alaska. James Goeke has apparently disappeared from the face of the Earth.

            By the way, that case also involved FBI agent reports of interviews – the “302s” – that were altered by the prosecutors for use against their target. The same as in the Flynn case.

            To my mind, those alterations should be treated as perjury and malfeasance in office, with the attendant penalties.

            1. Unfortunately, modern American jurisprudence seems to have adopted the concept of “it’s not perjury if the prosecution does it.”

              I, on the other hand, would hold government officials to a *much* higher standard than an ordinary citizen, given the special powers and authority they are given by the citizens to do their jobs…

              1. Given that government’s power is granted them as agent by citizens as principal, the appropriate body of law to apply to such misuse of authority should be that covering agents who betray their principals.

                N.B.: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/principal-agent-relationship.asp

                Relevant portions, emphasis addeds:

                The principal-agent relationship is an arrangement in which one entity legally appoints another to act on its behalf. In a principal-agent relationship, the agent acts on behalf of the principal and should not have a conflict of interest in carrying out the act. The relationship between the principal and the agent is called the “agency,” and the law of agency establishes guidelines for such a relationship.

                Whether the principal-agent relationship is expressed clearly through a written contract or is implied through actions, the principal-agent relationship creates a fiduciary relationship between the parties involved. This means the agent acting on behalf of the principal must carry out the assigned tasks with the principal’s best interest as priority. The agent is responsible for completing tasks given by the principal so long as the principal provides reasonable instruction. Additionally, the agent has an obligation to perform tasks with a certain level of skill and care and may not intentionally or negligently complete the task in an improper manner. A duty of loyalty is also implied within the principal-agent relationship, which requires the agent to refrain from putting himself in a position that creates or encourages a conflict between his interest and the interest of the principal.

                1. >conflict of interest

                  You mean like “civil forfeiture”?

                  Every single state and Federal legislator or employee involved with passing or using that should be brought up on charges of malfeasance.

                  “We not only make the law, existing law is whatever we say it is. Ain’t life grand?”

                  1. And now, thanks to the bad orange man, we have two Justices expressly hostile to the Administrative State, with a third pending. Even better, it seems at least one of Obama’s appointees (IIRC, Sotomayor) is willing to constructively participate in restraining that power.

                    The ship of state is a bloody barge, slow to stop or turn, but it can be steered by the patient.

          4. IIRC, some of them are still in government disservice, some retired without any consequence, but I believe a couple lawyers got hit with action by a special counsel, and another offed himself.

        2. Nah. We did lock one up for five days for locking a man up decades. Mind you, we would get decades for locking a man up for five days, but you gotta have priorities.

          1. Ya…I’m not going to say what I think should be done in response to that, especially given where my head is today

  14. “Think about the first day you reported for a job you thought might be leading to your career of choice.”

    Oh, but none of us have the supreme moral and intellectual arrogance confidence of Kamala Harris! She was a woman who knew what little attention our nation pays to minorities.

    Or perhaps she was sleeping with her boss; it wouldn’t be the last time.

  15. “And I knew the kind of work I wanted to do, and who I wanted to serve.”

    Oh, absolutely I know who she wanted to serve. I’ve seen that episode of Twilight Zone.

  16. Eh, Harris falls even higher on the Progressive Stack than Obama. The media was completely willing to overlook several things about Obama:

    1) He palled around with terrorists
    2) He had no accomplishments of which to speak
    3) He wasn’t a “Constitutional Law” professor
    4) He had no academic achievements or output
    5) He had no real public or private sector experience
    6) He was a socialist/communist sympathizer (it’s in one of his autobiographies FFS)
    7) The authorship of his autobiographies is suspect

    And he sailed to victory with the help of the media.

    Unless it comes out that she sexually harassed someone higher on the Progressive Stack, I’ll go ahead and call it that Harris gets the Democrat nom. Any other strike against her will be gleefully overlooked.

    I’ll wait before calling her our future president until I see how Trump handles this temp re-opening.

    1. Yeah. Honestly, at this point? I’m pinning my hopes on the fact he’s Moist Von Lipwig. He always ups the ante. (there’s other things, but that’s one of them.)

      1. Yeah, I haven’t broken the seal on my hair kerosene yet, unlike some. He’s pleasantly surprised me before.

  17. Of course it sounds suspiciously made up. This is the woman who was perfectly okay with restriction the constitutionally protected rights of CA residents to further her political career.

  18. i lived through bussing desegregation, not in Ca. but in Louisville, Ky. 1970’s. (grad in 1978). we had riots, in the school. walk outs, many problems. I said then and I will say it now. WE WOULD HAVE HAD MIN. TO NO PROBLEMS IF THE DAMN PARENTS WOULD HAVE JUST SHUT UP.

  19. Amanda, I made it through the first few paragraphs of you description and had to stop. The crazy is STRONG with this one.

    In other news Elizabeth Warren proposed a “wealth” tax yesterday, so it will be a race for Official Craziest Lefty Beeotch between Harris, Warren and Occasional-Cortex. Occasional-Cortex proposed a 70% income tax, but Warren wants to tax -assets-. If you own more than $10 million in property/stock/farmland/cars/IP, they tax you based on that. Meaning you have to sell it to pay the tax, most likely. Farmers look out.

    Which will mean a mass exodus of Big Money from the USA to Canada and Europe. That’s the thing about Big Money. They can get on the private jet or board the gigantic yacht and LEAVE.

    1. Don;t overlook the Nazi style tax that they seek to impose on people who have above a certain amount of wealth who give up their US citizenship-and it is genuinely a Nazi style tax because the Nazis imposed such a tax as part of their effort to keep Jews from leaving Germany, so they couldn’t easily escape the coming genocide.

    2. Not so sure. The big money players will get exemptions like they always do. The folks who are rich in physical capital will be the ones destroyed. But theyare also the least mobile. Folks like steyer, brin, musk, zuck and so on will have a nice carve out they can move money to.

    3. “If you own more than $10 million in property/stock/farmland/cars/IP, they tax you based on that. Meaning you have to sell it to pay the tax,”

      When you sell assets you generate income, which will be taxed at a high rate.

      The race to safe havens will be boisterous.

      1. I dunno… there are probably a whole lot of Americans who have ten million or more in assets. [a quick web search shows about 1.5 million people could control ten million in assets… more than I thought]

        They’d have money, and they’d be righteously pissed.

        1. I’m probably not the only one that would burn the property down and salt the earth rather than give it to feds

  20. Well, yes, if you want to protect the people, as a prosecutor you do it by prosecuting criminals. If you don’t have a good case that someone is guilty of a crime, that’s what the defense is for. She would have been entirely correct to let her supervisor know her opinion. Switching sides to act for her defense herself was highly unprofessional. Assuming her story is true…she skated. So by her own account, her professional ethics have been dodgy from the start of her career.

    When I was in high school in the early 1970s, my freshman class had a unit on social studies, in which we discussed social problems. This being not long after the race riots of the 1960s, court ordered busing was one of the topics that came up. I believed then, and still do, that the notion that racial problems could be solved by forced integration was naive at best. Rather than promoting familiarity, it seems that students would be least as likely to cluster together with those of their own race and neighborhood and form an indigestible and hostile lump. There are similar problems with any other sort of judicially imposed social tinkering. If she doesn’t see this, that’s another disqualification.

    1. That was my experience – my next-younger brother and I were students in a public school in a far-distant next-to-rural (before the freeway came in!) in Los Angeles. The suburb was basically working-class to no-class, just about all white, lashings of Asian, a sprinkling of Hispanic, and a very few African-American. The handful of AA students which were in our school were personally very popular, and much-liked, IIRC.
      Serious bussing in the service of racial equality came in, when our youngest brother (a decade younger) was HS-age – and he had a much-less-favorable opinion of the AA element.
      Familiarity does, indeed, breed contempt.

      1. Sounds similar to grad school. US students were only ones with cliques that were not mononational

      2. “Familiarity does, indeed, breed contempt.”

        Well, not exactly. Those half a dozen black kids most likely had parents who had worked hard, overcome social isolation if not actual racism by leaving their communities, and put off new cars etc to save the resources for moving into a neighborhood that offered better schools in exchange for those resources, because they knew those schools were important. And they encouraged their kids to want the same things.

        The ones that were bussed in? Straight out of the neighborhood and culture that didn’t value perseverance and delayed gratification, but acted like those attitudes and effects could be transferred by osmosis without having to adopt those alien values, when they weren’t deriding them as “acting white”. And when the parents, black and white, expected the rules to be enforced so that even if the imports didn’t want to learn they would at least be stopped from preventing those who did from learning….. “RAAAAACIST!!!!!eleventy!!!!” And the rules weren’t enforced on everyone….at which point you couldn’t enforce them on anyone.

        I saw that both as a student and with a mother who was a teacher.

    2. “I believed then, and still do, that the notion that racial problems could be solved by forced integration was naive at best.”

      As if the goal was solving “racial problems”! Distinguishing the pretext from the purpose is always important.

      1. In my 14 year old wisdom, I was not yet cynical enough for it to have occurred to me that the claimed purpose of achieving racial harmony was a pretext for something else. Other pretexts, I can see through. This one, isn’t quite so transparent.

        1. “Integration” came to Tucson in the late 1970s, as my nephews were still in elementary school.

          Now, my brother in law is half Mexican, and the eldest took after him in looks. The younger two took after my sister – blond, blue eyed, and quite pale.

          However, when it came time to decide which students needed to be bused across town for “ethnic balance”? All three of them.

          The brother in law figured it out, after talking to several other parents in the neighborhood. The ones being bused out of the area were those with parents that were “troublemakers.” I.e., they were quite willing to show up at the school to challenge a teacher or the administration when they screwed up, went to all of the PTA meetings (and were not quiet), etc.

          Most of the parents were like my brother in law, who worked either third or swing shift at the mines south of Tucson (around a hour drive one way). Living on the southwest corner of town, he could usually get to the neighborhood school before the problem teacher or principal had a chance to escape, but not to the one that was mid-city or even up in the northeast corner.

  23. Forced integration is kinda like squeezing/compressing a ball of uranium. As history has shown, “It’s gonna BLOWWWWWWWW.” (Here a KABOOM, there a KABOOM, everywhere a KABOOM KABOOM.)

  24. I have one positive story about forced integration, or at least semi-positive. My hometown (small city Texas), facing court intervention, closed the very sub-standard black school system completely, so the students had to be bussed into the rest of the schools. They tried to get some racial balance, so some of the anglo kids were bussed to a different school than they had gone to the year before, but they were mostly coming in from the farms anyway, so they only had another 10-15 minutes more or less on the busses. In-town kids didn’t have many changes. The black kids (according to my new friends in HS) missed their “own” schools, but most of us adjusted pretty soon* because we were ALL together in one high school, so there was no arguing about whether the HS was or was not correctly integrated. I remember some clumps and cliques, but it all settled down (we didn’t have a large black population anyway).
    The major change was in the junior highs, of which we now had two: one very old, on the poor side of town, and one built only a few years before, on the rich side of town.
    I had gone to 7th & 8th grade in the old one, the same building my mother & father went to HS in; it was falling down, sometimes literally on our heads, and majorly decrepit.
    Instead of keeping all the poor kids (black and white) in that older building, and all the rich kids (white and a few token blacks) in the newer building, some brilliant townspeople forced through a deal** that put ALL 7th graders on the old campus, and ALL 8th graders on the new campus. So, absolutely purely integrated, because there was no way to argue about the ratios, and everybody had some kids being bussed somewhere, so no cries of privilege were persuasive.

    Once the doctors and lawyers realized their kids were the ones who were going to get hurt the next time the boiler overheated and flooded the basement rooms, or the asbestos ceiling tiles fell on them (yes, they had happened before), it only took about 2 years to get a brand-spanking-new 7th grade school, and shutter the oldest one (well, it was a vocational trades building for awhile longer, but the end was in sight).

    *Our salutatorian the first year of integration (my senior year) was a black girl; an art student who won a prestigious award and had his design for the school mascot cast in bronze for the courtyard was Hispanic; one of the black boys a couple of years younger than me grew up to sing at the Met. Not too shabby.
    **Only God and my Mother knew how they swung that deal, and she never told me.

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