Category Archives: politics

Second Verse Same as the First?

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The last time France tried a wealth tax, just a few years ago, it lost a lot of economic income, and the associated tax revenue on it, as the tax-targeted wealthy pulled up stakes and headed to other nations.

Now it looks like the French government is fixing to try that again.

France’s slide into political and fiscal dysfunction is generating a groundswell of support for a sweeping wealth tax that would represent a radical break from the pro-business agenda of President Emmanuel Macron.
The proposal is the work of French economist Gabriel Zucman, a former adviser to US Senators Bernie Sanders [I, VT] and Elizabeth Warren [D, MA]. He wants to impose a 2% tax on the assets of people with net wealth of 100 million euros, equivalent to $118 million, or more.

Here, though, it’s not just the politicians who have trouble even saying the words “cut spending.” The French unions continually demanding their cushy short work weeks and their even cushier pensions are actively aiding and abetting the government’s wastrelly profligate spending and those politicians who push that spending.

This is a tax that won’t end well for France.

Yeah, And?

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The headline says it:

The US Is Forfeiting the Clean-Energy Race to China

The article’s news writers then went on to decry the Trump administration’s decision to do away with “green” energy/renewable energy production subsidies and to push increased production of hydrocarbon-sourced energy.

They had no answers to oil, natural gas, and coal being far more reliable and lower cost than those renewable sources, sources which cannot compete in the market place without those subsidies. They mentioned the alternative, equally reliable nuclear energy production only as an afterthought.

But the argument over green vs hydrocarbon energy, while at the center of the debate, really is only a sideshow.

Why should we care about producing, or not, green energy? Aside from the fact that atmospheric CO2 is plant food rather than a pollutant, the whole underlying premise of human-caused global warming is false.

Earth has been warming since if was formed because the sun has been heating up since it lit off its fusion core.

Today, some 11,000 years after the last glaciation, we’re still cooler than that geologic warming trend. Some 6,000 years after the glaciers retreated, we were warmer than we are today.

Epochs of higher and temperatures than today and higher and lower atmospheric CO2 than today are unrelated to each other: life was lush during both higher temperatures and higher atmospheric CO2. In those times when higher atmospheric CO2 coincided with cooler-than-today temperatures, life suffered.

Ice cores reaching back 400,000 years indicate that atmospheric CO2 increases coincide with, or lag, planetary warming.

Too much national weal has been wasted on chasing the chimera of global disaster from warming already. Let the People’s Republic of China waste its treasure chasing renewables. It’s a foolish race that has no meaning and so can have no serious winner.

It’s time to knock it off.

She’s Right

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White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded to ex-President Barack Obama (D) after the latter yapped on about Jimmy Kimmel getting suspended for a bit over his own lies about Kirk and about who murdered him.

With all due respect to former President Barack Obama, he has no idea what he’s talking about. The decision to fire Jimmy Kimmel and to cancel his show came from executives at ABC.

And as I’ve already pointed out just below, that was a demonstration of the cowardice of those executives.

Beyond that, President Donald Trump (R) hasn’t arrested any reporters, nor has he snooped into any of the reporters’ mothers’ emails like Obama did. Obama not only is speaking from his ignorance, he’s crassly hypocritical to boot.

Yes, “They” Did

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On this, Karl Rove is broadly wrong.

Our culture is built on the principle that individuals are responsible for what they say and do. People can be influenced by words they hear and groups they’re part of.

So far, so good.

However, there are vulnerable people of all ages who can be, and are, influenced to deadly action. “They” know this full well. “They” are the Left’s and the Left’s politicians’ carefully crafted environment of divisiveness and violent and violence-inspiring anti-Republican, anti-Conservative, anti-right leaning Americans.

  • New York’s Senator Chuck Schumer standing on the Supreme Court building steps threatening by name two Supreme Court Justices, followed shortly by an assassination attempt against one of them
  • Vermont’s Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders likening Conservative Republicans to fascism, followed shortly by a mass murder attempt against a gathering of Republicans at a baseball practice
  • Sanders and them-President Joe Biden likening Republicans and then-Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump to Hitler, followed shortly by two assassination attempts against Trump
  • Jimmy Kimmel nakedly lying about Charlie Kirk in the hours after Kirk’s murder, insisting Kirk was a Jew-hating bigot
  • Other Leftists claiming Kirk’s killer was a Republican
  • The New York Times nakedly smearing Kirk as a Jew-hater and only posting a correction after an enormous outpouring of opprobrium, and then burying its correction instead of giving it the same prominence as its lie
  • The left, relying on their Newspeak Dictionary, distorting MAGA as though it were some right-wing crazies, rather that the hope and dream of every American to Make America Great Again—the American English dictionary definition of the acronym

Just one example of the outcomes of the Left’s and Party’s constructed environment comes from “Bowser,” a protestor supporting the murder of an insurance company executive:

Bowser says[:] “Political violence is how this country was established.”

“They” know full well that the hostile environment they constructed would influence more than one of their minions to violence. That carefully crafted overtly hostile environment most assuredly facilitated—made possible—Kirk’s murder by influencing one vulnerable young man to commit that murder.

Until we broadly recognize that simple environmental fact, and yes, that includes the Karl Roves and the others who insist on downplaying the Left’s artificial political climate, and act on that recognition, that Left and their Party politicians will continue to spout their rhetoric of violence, continue to proselytize their hostility toward those who are not of them, and their atmosphere of hate will continue to cause murders to be committed among the rest of us.

Leaks

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Leading off a Wall Street Journal article alleging Pentagon internal lawyers’ concerns regarding the Trump administration’s targeting of drug boats in international Caribbean Sea waters, there’s this:

Some military lawyers and other Defense Department officials are raising concerns about the legal implications of President Trump’s expanding military campaign against Latin American-based drug cartels, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

Leave aside the worries about the legality of destroying boats and the crews on them that are targeting American citizens with those poisons. Of course, there’s nothing illegal about destroying those attacks in progress.

The larger question is this: who are those people with knowledge? They’re speaking without authorization, discussing in public matters of national security, and they’re doing so in direct violation of their terms of employment by the government, and depending on who they are, perhaps in violation of their oaths of office.

Some defense officials and career military lawyers have provided written and verbal legal opinions to decision makers inside the Pentagon, but believe they are being ignored or deliberately sidelined, according to one of the people.

This is pretty dispositive—in the WSJ‘s own words—of these people’s deliberate violation of their employment parameters. And all because these wonders actually think they run the show, and are quite cross that they’re not being heeded on the spot.

These are people—these are leakers—who need to be identified and fired for cause.