Tag Archives: markets

Hysteria

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Some Congressmen are working on bills that, in their aggregate, would bar sales of critical computer components to the People’s Republic of China’s communications companies Huawei, ZTE, and other PRC companies caught violating our export laws or sanctions on those companies or companies with which these do business.

The PRC is upset.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said it was all “hysteria,” and

I believe the action of these few representatives are an expression of extreme arrogance and an extreme lack of self-confidence[.]

The PRC’s insults and hysterical response, whether individual or taken together, are sufficient evidence that we’re on the right track.

We cannot allow PRC insults to influence our domestic matters (or our international matters, come to that), particularly including moves to hold those doing business in our nation accountable for their illegal activities.

PRC hysteria should simply be disregarded where it’s not ridiculed.

A Judge’s Error

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The Trump administration had expanded rules allowing employers to opt out of being required to provide birth control coverage to their employees at no cost to the employees, so long as the opting out was convincingly based on religious or moral grounds.  Federal District Judge Haywood Gilliam of the Northern District of California has issued an injunction blocking enforcement of the expansion while an underlying lawsuit against the expansion is underway.

Ordinarily, blocking an enforcement while the underlying case proceeds is no big deal, but this one is just plain wrong.  Gilliam based his ruling in significant part on the premise that

the [expansion] would result in a “substantial number” of women losing birth control coverage, which would be a “massive policy shift.”

For one thing, given how cheap birth control drugs and devices are and how easily obtained prescriptions for them are, it’s not at all clear that a “substantial number” of women would be unable to obtain birth control drugs or devices.

But the larger, vastly more important matter is this.  As Gilliam himself noted, the expansion would be a policy shift (massive or not, that’s irrelevant here).  Policy matters are political matters, and so they clearly are outside the purview of the courts.  Policy—political—matters are the exclusive province of the political arms of our government and of We the People.  A judge who intrudes, from his bench, into political matters clearly violates his oath to uphold the law.  Making policy has no place in his oath.

Dismantling Great Britain

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The EU is pressing its effort to punish Great Britain for the latter’s effrontery in leaving the EU.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas has reiterated that the EU finds a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland “unacceptable.” He warned of “serious damage” in the event of a no deal scenario.

Because the EU wants to split Northern Ireland away from Great Britain.

No threat there.

The California Magnet

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Newly sworn-in California governor Gavin Newsom (D) has a plan to expand on the State’s sanctuary “status” and draw even more illegal aliens into the State and into the country:

…an unprecedented new health care agenda for his state, aimed at offering dramatically more benefits to illegal immigrants….

As Newsom noted,

People’s lives, freedom, security, the water we drink, the air we breathe—they all hang in the balance

And Newsom wants to increase that risk by encouraging a flood of illegal aliens to enter the State. It’s true enough that the vast majority of those illegals are harmless beyond the economic burden they’ll inflict in Newsom’s brave new world of hugely expanded, and hugely more expensive, health care for all, citizen and illegal alike.  However, it’s also that the few who are dangerous are capable of inflicting vast damage—as the families of MS-13, et al.; the survivors of 9/11 (which terrorists entered legally, but they’re not the only terrorists entering); the victims and their families of the cartels’ drug epidemic; the families of Kate Steinle, Ronil Singh, Pierce Corcoran, Silvano Torres, and a host of others can attest.

His health care “expansion?”  He intends to implement the erstwhile Obamacare Individual Mandate at the State level.  Everyone will be required to purchase health coverage whether they need it or not, whether they want to or not.  Except those like illegal aliens, who can’t afford it.  Those coverages will be paid for by the State’s citizens and legal residents.  Somehow.  Oh, and “children?” They’ll be allowed, under Medi-Cal, to stay on mumsy’s and pop-pop’s health coverage plans until they’re 26, instead of the current age limit of 19.

Newsom has had no words on how this expansion is to be funded.  Apparently, he’s channeling Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY):

People often say, like, how are you going to pay for it, and I find the question so puzzling because “How do you pay for something that’s more affordable? How do you pay for cheaper rent?” You just pay for it.

Because vastly expanding a program makes it cheaper.  Sure.

But Newsom and his clan of Progressive-Democrats in the State’s legislature don’t care about that.  They only care about the bennies flowing from their expensive, and dangerous, virtue signaling.

The Party of Expansionist, Acquisitive Government

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That’s what we can see made plain in the incoming Congress’ House of Representatives.  Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman (D, NJ) had this on her Progressive-Democratic Party’s plans:

There are dozens of measures…that have been languishing with Republicans at the helm for years, and I expect to see many of them finally come to the floor under Democratic leadership[.]

Plans like rolling back the just enacted tax cuts and preventing the individual income tax cuts from becoming permanent.  Because the Progressive-Democrats know more about how to spend our money than we do.

Plans like Medicare for all, free education for all—paid for by raising those taxes.  So much for “free.”

Guaranteed jobs, especially, “green” jobs—at the Progressive-Democrat’s mandated minimum wage because, like all workers, “green” workers are just too stupid to be trusted with freely negotiating their own compensation package.  And hired by whom?  Not so much a free economy employer; “greenery” isn’t competitive, so the Progressive-Democrats intend to centrally plan our energy economy and require greenery along with subsidizing it.  That can be expected to work as well as the Progressive-Democrats’ centrally planned health economy.

Oh, and they want to deepen the central planning on that: as part of their “Medicare for all” bit, they intend for Uncle Sugar to be sole dispenser of and sole payer for each citizen’s (and illegal alien’s) health care.

Block border security by blocking any wall and by eliminating Immigration and Customs Enforcement.  And hamstringing US Customs & Border Protection generally.

It’s going to be an ugly, wasted two years with no serious legislation coming out of the House—only the Party’s nakedly socialist claptrap.  Socialist and Government-run because, these worthies insist, the average American is inadequate to the task of his democratic duty.