No Delay

European Council President Donald Tusk, whose contempt for the Brits and their move to free themselves of the European Union is well known, now is insisting that Great Britain just willy-nilly delay its exit past the current legally mandated 29 March date.

European Council President Donald Tusk said that keeping the current divorce date at March 29 would be risky, as a revised deal is not in sight and businesses are worried about a chaotic exit under a “no deal” situation.

Perhaps a no-deal Brexit would be risky, but it would be considerably less risky, though, than adhering to the (failed in Parliament) “deal” imposed on a too timid British Prime Minister Teresa May that would leave the Brits in servitude to the EU.

Nor will it be as chaotic as the moles of Brussels make it out to be.  While London-based financial companies, for instance, are opening branches in continental capitals (particularly Berlin), they’re not pulling up stakes.

So far, May is showing some new-found backbone and staying on schedule.  She needs to maintain that; Brexit, deal or no deal, must occur on time.

Full stop.

Update: Sadly, this is more typical of May’s backbone:

Prime Minister Theresa May will allow parliament to vote to delay the U.K.’s exit from the European Union if lawmakers reject her divorce agreement next month….

Kamala Harris Wants to Confront Dark History

Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate wannabe and Senator Kamala Harris (D, CA) wants us to take our dark history seriously.

We must confront the dark history of slavery and government-sanctioned discrimination in this country that has had many consequences, including undermining the ability of black families to build wealth in America for generations.  We need systemic, structural changes to address that.

Absolutely.  The Progressive-Democratic Party must confront its dark history of slavery and government-sanctioned discrimination.

The Progressive-Democratic Party must confront its dark history of its Democrat, Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, who ruled that Dred Scott, a free (because escaped) black man in the north, must be returned to the southern ownership of his owner—and who further ruled that blacks could not be citizens of the United States because blacks were not fully men.

It must confront its demand for the States Right of holding slaves, slavery over which the nation had to fight a bloody civil war to end because of Party intransigence.

The Progressive-Democratic Party must confront its dark history of its creation, the Ku Klux Klan, which it used to terrorize newly freed blacks—and any who supported them—in the aftermath of the Party’s lost overt slavery policy.

The Progressive-Democratic Party must confront its dark history of its Jim Crow Laws, designed explicitly to keep blacks from voting.

The Progressive-Democratic Party must confront its dark history of segregation, resumed in full under President Woodrow Wilson (D), who actively resegregated the Federal government after it had been steadily integrated following the Civil War, a policy for which Wilson insisted blacks should be grateful for the “protection,” and which continued apace in schools under the fiction of “separate but equal,” which included all public spaces, and which extended even to sections of buses, drinking fountains, and rest rooms.

The Progressive-Democratic Party must confront its dark history of destroying black families by enacting “welfare” laws that paid single mothers but not intact families, making it fiscally useful, if not wholly immoral, for fathers to absent themselves.

The Progressive-Democratic Party must confront its dark history of deliberate, overt racial (and gender) discrimination in its “affirmative action” policies that give special treatment based, ultimately, on skin color and/or gender.

The Progressive-Democratic Party must confront its dark history of undermining the ability of black families (such as they’re allowed to exist) to build wealth by keeping them trapped in Party’s welfare cage with the designed-in welfare cliff that prevents welfare recipients—most of whom are minority recipients, with most of those black—from getting a new job or a pay raise that would put them above an income threshold because that would cut welfare payments by more than the pay raise.

The Progressive-Democratic Party must confront its dark present of identity politics that seeks to give special treatment to particular groups of Americans—which is nothing more than segregation modernized.

The Progressive-Democratic Party does, most definitely, need systemic, structural changes to address that.

The EU, Tariffs, and Trade

A collection of EU ministers are meeting in Bucharest to decide, among other things, how to retaliate against President Donald Trump’s tariff regime, which he has proposed implementing if the EU continues to not negotiate tariffs or US-EU trade in general.

German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier wants the ministers to act in unison, but he also has a more constructive view of how to approach negotiations with us.

…car tariffs between the US and Europe should be reduced and completely abolished.

Indeed.  It’s what the German auto industry wants, too, and Trump has on offer a completely tariff-free trade regime for the US and the EU.

The EU’s Trade Commission also estimates that were just the industrial goods tariffs, which average 4%, removed,

 exports in both directions could be boosted by 8% or 9% by 2033.

Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom:

We need to start negotiating[.]

So what’s the hold-up here?  Hmm….

Religious Freedom

Germany doesn’t appear to have the same strong belief in it that Americans (or most of us, anyway) do.  The Federal Labor Court has objected to a Catholic clinic terminating a doctor because he violated Church teachings, specifically, he both divorced and then remarried.

The doctor insisted—successfully, it turns out—that he was fired for being Catholic; colleagues of different faiths could divorce and remarry without consequence.

Never mind that the clinic was Catholic and the Catholic doctor violated the clinic’s Catholic requirements, requirements it could not impose on its non-Catholic employees without imposing on their religious freedom.  The situation illustrates the complexities of religious freedom in the work place, but if this ruling is allowed to stand, it will have serious implications for the employability of persons whose religious faith—or agnosticism or atheism—is different from the employer’s religious tenets—or agnosticism or atheism.