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.
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.
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.
Kellogg’s makes Cheez-Its, a cheesy, corny confection that’s attractive to lots of folks, especially at boring parties. Some versions of this snack are marketed as “Whole Grain” or “Made With Whole Grain,” and the text on the packaging makes plain that this means 5 to 8 grams of whole grain for each 29-gram serving along with the primary ingredient being “enriched flour.”
This is too confusing for three women to bear, so they sued. One of the women went so far as to claim she was injured by all of this, yet, were the packaging only changed, she would continue to purchase the products in the future (where are the feminists over this feigned stupidity?). There started out some sanity in this idiocy:
A federal judge dismissed the case in 2017, ruling that the “Whole Grains” wording was factually correct. In toto, the label “would neither mislead nor deceive a reasonable consumer.”
Amazingly, the 2nd Circuit reversed.
Additional verbiage on the front and side of the package is no defense, the court said.
The 2nd Circuit thinks Americans are just too stupid for words. Or it finds entirely reasonable that Americans are too mind-numbingly lazy to read a simple label.
The Macron administration utterly failed in its cynical effort to raise its taxes on the French working class and poor with its “climate” tax on transportation fuels, so now it’s going to go after American tech companies with carefully targeted taxes. And that administration is desperate to get going, and it’s going to do it unilaterally.
In early December, Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire said France would give the EU until March to come up with a deal on taxing US internet giants. But ten days later he announced the tax would be introduced on January 1.
Wait, what?
France said at the start of December it would start taxing Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, the big US technology companies known as GAFA, if European Union finance ministers failed to agree on a bloc-wide digital tax next year.
And here’s the game, as confessed by Le Maire.
The digital giants are the ones who have the money.
So he intends to rip off uniquely tax our American companies for the heinous crime of outcompeting his precious French companies and then of being better tax managers than his precious French government.
Our companies need to think very carefully about the value they get from doing business in France compared with the French government’s imposition of wholly artificial costs for the privilege of doing business there.