Monthly Archives: March 2020

Elizabeth Warren’s Nearby Future

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Now that Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator (D, MA) has suspended her presidential campaign, the question arises regarding her future—and the future of the present Party campaigns for the nomination.

Second thing first: there’s little direct impact from her dropping out. She has only a handful of delegates with which to bargain at a brokered convention, although her few will increase in importance as the number of ballots required to get to a nominee grows.

Her real impact will be from her direct absence from the debate stages and from her commentaries as she campaigns. This will sharpen the contrast between the remaining Progressive-Democratic Party candidates, Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) (the other candidates aren’t worth noticing at this point, except to the extent they play their delegate hands with skill at the brokered convention). That contrast, and the debates between the ideologies of the two, actually will work to the benefit of Party, as its core ideology gets a measure of clarification at the end of the primaries.

First thing second: the big winner here actually is Warren. Her dropping out creates a win-win situation for her. Why is she dropping out at this stage after having assured all around, as late as Tuesday night when those results were coming clear, that she was in it all the way to the Convention? Was she lying about that (don’t answer)?

Mark my words: Sanders offered her the Vice Presidency if she’d drop out.  Biden offered her her choice of Treasury or Commerce if she dropped out.

A British Proposal

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In contrast with UK-EU negotiations, begun earlier this week, these are the high points of Great Britain’s suggestion of what a US-UK trade deal would look like.

  • reduce or remove tariffs for UK exports…US has indicated its intention to seek to reduce or remove UK tariffs on US exports in a UK-US FTA
  • customs procedures at the border are as facilitative as possible makes importing and exporting easier
  • address subsidies which have the potential to distort trade. Provisions for fair, effective and transparent competition rules could underpin liberalisation of trade between the UK and the US
  • a UK-US FTA as an opportunity to build on our global leadership in this area to develop a world-class [Intellectual Property] chapter

These form the core of an actual free trade agreement, one that is much better than the restrictive, anti-competition, anti-business straitjacket in which the EU wants to trap Great Britain and in which it wants to keep remaining member nations trapped.

The proposal itself can be seen in its entirety here.

Question for the Future

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My wife put it to me re the Progressive-Democratic Party: Stipulate arguendo that Trump is reelected (regardless of the [Progressive-Democrats’] nominee). Who’s their bench for 4 years from now? Amy? Pete? ?????

It’s true enough, there is no next generation in Party; they’re going to have to skip one to get to anyone even remotely viable.  Who do they have?

Senator Amy Klobuchar (D, MN) is all they have in their next generation, but she’s a one-hoss shay that’s starting to fall apart.

Pete Buttigieg would seem to be the front-runner in that skipped-to generation, but he’s just not capable. Too many demographics don’t trust him: black voters because he’s been worthless, even counterproductive, in his own small city; veterans because he’s bragged too much about his soft tour in Afghanistan (as such tours go), spending his free time on roof tops smoking and getting into his laptop instead of looking for ways to further his unit’s mission; moderates of any stripe because his economic and social safety net ideas are destructive of the things that actually would support the least among us.

Robert Francis O’Rourke is in the mix—and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden has promised to make him the head of a Gun Confiscation program in a Biden administration. And he is born to it.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) will be old enough for 2024 and beyond elections, but she won’t be mature enough. Her social welfare, climate, and economic ideas are just plain crazy.

Ro Khanna (D, CA) will happily parrot the Party line, including the new Party-centric position of free stuff for everyone, and that’s certainly sufficient to qualify him for Party standard bearer. He virtue signals with the best of them, too, but none of that is enough for anything serious. And he doesn’t have the fire in the belly required to go past the safety of his California district.

I tend to favor an Ocasio-Cortez-O’Rourke ticket, though: their ideas need to be dragged out into the open and clearly, sharply debated as the only way to put those foolishnesses to rest.

(Double) Standards of Protection for Government Officials

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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) threatened two Supreme Court Justices if they didn’t rule his way on a Louisiana law requiring doctors to have hospital admission privileges as a prerequisite to doing abortions. (The case actually has little to do with abortions; it concerns whether third parties—doctors here—can sue on behalf of others, especially when those others have suffered no harm from the matter.)

Schumer stood on the steps the Supreme Court building in front of a noisy protest crowd and, pointing back at the Supreme Court building, said [the quote below starts at about 0:45],

I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.

The lack of “Justice” honorific might seem merely rude on Schumer’s part, but he omitted it to emphasize the directness and seriousness of his threat. The smirk on his face as he took in the crowd’s noisy approval illustrates the matter, too.

Schumer, of course, denied through his spokesman (apparently he didn’t have the courage to speak directly), that he was threatening the Justices, insisting that he was talking political retribution for Republican politicians. The video at the link demonstrates the lie of that. Schumer, in one paragraph of his speech was clearly addressing—facing, pointing at, calling by name—two Justices. It wasn’t until the next paragraph that he addressed—facing his crowd, no pointing, no Republican addressed by name (not even his chiefest opponent, the Senate Majority Leader so instrumental in getting those Justices confirmed)—Republican politicians.

On the floor of the Senate Thursday, Schumer doubled down on his threat. First, he lied about making a threat; his words weren’t intended that way, he claimed. He’s from Brooklyn and Brooklynites speak in strong language, he said—as if being his habit makes it all right. Then he tried to downplay his words by insisting that Republicans are creating the situation with their politics and with their “manufactured outrage” over Schumer’s remarks.

Then Schumer, still on the floor of the Senate at the end of his doubling down, refused even to apologize to the Justices. He just yielded back his time.

The Wall Street Journal, in its op-ed on the matter, mentioned President Donald Trump’s call for Justice recusal in emphasis of the seriousness of Schumer’s escalation of the Left’s political rhetoric:

Mr Trump recently tweeted that liberal Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor should recuse themselves on cases involving his Administration.

It’s much more than this, though.  Trump didn’t threaten Ginsburg and Sotomayor, individually or together, if they didn’t comply. Not tacitly, especially not as nakedly as Schumer threatened Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

The Secret Service gets after folks who threaten Presidents. Don’t Justices—on the same government hierarchical level as Presidents—deserve the same protection? Apparently not, when it’s a Progressive-Democrat who makes the threat.

A Post-Super Tuesday Thought

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With Progressive-Democratic Party Primaries and Caucuses mostly complete (California is still…counting…its ballots, and I’m ignoring Iowa’s pseudo-caucus entirely) through last Tuesday, some results have become more or less apparent.

Joe Biden has won or leads in (as I write, Maine remains too close to call) 11 States, and Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) has won 5 States.  There’s nothing to be gleaned from any geographical spread in these States; there remain 34, scattered about the countryside, in which Party contests are yet to be held.

What’s interesting in these results is the margin of victory by each candidate.

Biden’s margin of victory averaged 17%, and Sanders’ averaged 18%. (Fun with statistics: taking out margins less than double-digits, and Biden’s margin of victory jumps to 25%, while Sanders’ moves to 20%—his lone single-digit margin was 9%.)

Seventeen and eighteen per cent, and that’s with five or six serious candidates on the ballots. I include Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D, HI), who’s serious and articulate in her positions, even though she has no chance at the nomination.  Pete Buttigieg and Senator Amy Klobuchar (D, MN) got serious numbers of votes even though they folded to pressure from the Party Elites and quit in favor of endorsing Biden: their quitting came too late to be removed from any Super Tuesday ballots. What if Biden and Sanders had been going head-to-head with their votes not diluted by these other candidates?

Biden’s and Sanders’ margins of victory indicate that the Progressive-Democratic Party is every bit as bitterly divided on ideological grounds as Party has made our nation.

Look now for a brokered convention, and watch carefully the antics and shenanigans Michael Bloomberg pulls in Milwaukee. He’s dropped out and endorsed Biden, and he still has tons of uncommitted cash money for his horse-trading and deal-making. Is he now the Veep candidate?

Note:  My claims are based on votes cast, not delegate counts, and they’re taken from Fox News’ estimates as of Wednesday morning.  While the vote totals are incomplete as I write, they’re very nearly so, and so they’re highly indicative of the final outcome for these States.