Category Archives: politics

Now He Has To Run

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Howard Schultz, who has been thinking of running for President as an Independent, is rethinking that.

The billionaire and former Starbucks CEO has told advisors that he was shocked by the stridency of the attacks made by Democrats following the announcement he was seriously considering running for president as an independent in the 2020 election, and is now said to be looking more closely at whether he wants to go through with the effort[.]

And

The intense nature of the criticism stunned Schultz, people close to him tell FOX Business. While he expected some carping, he did not foresee the ferocity of some of the vitriol, particularly from the party’s top officials and operatives. In addition to the barrage of criticism from leading Democrats, Schultz was also blindsided by the grass roots blowback….

The desperation of the Progressive-Democrats’ vitriol demonstrates the need for a Left-leaning Independent to run, if only to temper the Party’s excesses.  The bullying itself demands he run, lest he validate bullying as a political tactic.

If Schultz backs out now, he’ll show himself for a coward, and more dangerously for the nation, he’ll vindicate the Progressive-Democrats’ tactics of smear and personal ruin.

All Your Prosperity Belong to Me

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Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT), who caucuses with the Progressive-Democrats, has joined the Progressive-Democratic Party’s race to the bottom.  The President wannabe has proposed his cynically named For the 99.8% Act, which is targeted explicitly against the 588 Americans he hates the most: the 588 most successful of us.  His bill would deny these few Americans their ability to pass on the outcome of their success to their heirs, their families; his bill would overtly punish these most successful—and their families—for their success.

It’s a bill that’s borne of personal animosity and rank envy.  It’s a bill that would

establish a 45% tax on the value of an estate between $3.5 million and $10 million; a 50% tax on the value of an estate between $10 million and $50 million; a 55% tax on the value of an estate in excess of $50 million; and a 77% tax on the value of an estate above $1 billion….

Sanders rationalized his punitively confiscatory tax by claiming that what’s really needed is

stronger investment in skills, higher paying jobs, and a more progressive tax system.

He is ignoring the fact that the more progressive our tax system, the more it and the purveyors of progressivism punish success.  He is ignoring the fact that folks like the Walton family, the Kochs, and Jeff Bezos—from whom alone he would confiscate some $304 billion—have created more jobs and more higher paying jobs and have done more investment in work skills than anything Government has done.

Sanders is ignoring the fact that that money doesn’t sit in some vault as cash or gold bullion.  It’s invested, plowed back into the economy to create innovation, businesses, jobs, philanthropy, educational opportunities—even health coverage plans—all things Government cannot do as well, if at all.

For all Sanders’ and his Progressive-Democrat cronies’ rationalizations to the contrary, this bill and its ilk are nothing but the actualization of their mindless resentment of the achievements of others.

Italy and Migrant Shipping

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There’s a case making its way through the Italian courts that challenges the government’s policy of denying docking rights to migrant rescue boats.  Critics are up in arms. The policy, they assert, would

leav[e] them in the Mediterranean Sea for days or even weeks—a campaign critics have branded as cruel but that has garnered support from many Italians.

The critics, though, are being disingenuous. To the extent that there is cruelty here, it’s on the part of the “rescue boat” captains and the ships’ operators who have chosen to spend those days or even weeks trying to force entry rather than moving promptly to other nations’ ports where they would be allowed entry.

There are arguments for and against the Italian policy, but this sort of distortion does not advance the debate a bit.

The Party’s Core Philosophy

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And it even attacks its own.  In a Wall Street Journal article centered on Beto O’Rourke’s potential for a Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential campaign, there appeared this giveaway.

[S]ome Democrats have privately groused that he should have shared some of the $80 million he raised in 2018 with fellow candidates in the party.

There is the Progressive-Democratic Party’s core ideology: their demand to redistribute OPM, ideally to their own special interests.

“That’s not the O’Rourke campaign’s money.  He didn’t earn that.  He had help.”

Gimme, gimme, gimme.

German Intransigence

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Last Tuesday, the British Parliament voted to send Prime Minister Theresa May back to Brussels to renegotiate the status of Great Britain’s Northern Ireland border with the Republic of Ireland, which is part of the Brit-EU exit agreement that the Parliament had earlier rejected.  The same day, the Parliament also rejected an attempt by Labour to delay by nine months the actual departure of Great Britain from the EU, leaving the date set at 29 March.

European Council President Donald Tusk said through his spokesman

The backstop is part of the Withdrawal Agreement, and the Withdrawal Agreement is not open for renegotiation.

That’s standard fare for the EU, which never has negotiated in good faith and which has all along faced a negotiator, in May, whose heart never has been in leaving the EU.

It’s Germany, though, that not only refuses outright to renegotiate a small aspect of that failed departure agreement, now is directly interfering in the domestic affairs of Great Britain.  The nature of the current “agreement” would

keep Northern Ireland (and by extension the UK) in the EU customs union in order to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland.

A hard departure would take all of Great Britain (and by extension Northern Ireland) out of the EU and its internal free trade/free movement of goods and people zone altogether.  That might necessitate customs checks and border entry stations.

Germany’s Foreign Minister Heiko Mass:

We will not allow Ireland to be isolated on this issue.

Never mind that the only ones isolating the Republic of Ireland on this issue are Germany and the EU.  It gets worse, though.  Jürgen Trittin, Co-Chairman of Germany’s Green Party’:

It’s clear that we won’t accept a militarized border in Ireland[.]

Leaving aside the cynically constructed straw man nature of this claim—no one is talking about militarizing any border, only of the possibility of setting up customs stations—whether Great Britain chooses to “militarize” any of its borders is strictly a domestic matter for the Brits to decide.  They cannot, after all, station troops anywhere along any of their borders except on their side of them.  Trittin knows this.  (Beyond that, this ban also is a blatant interference in the internal affairs of the Republic of Ireland for the same reason.)

Aside from that, Trittin’s bar would result in…what, exactly?  What does Germany, or the EU, propose to do were the Brits to decide to “militarize” its border with the Republic of Ireland?  What concrete steps is Germany implying it, or the EU, would take to enforce its bar on the “militarization?”

Plainly, it’s an empty threat, intended only to intimidate and, worse, to meddle in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation—and so vindicating that nation’s decision to leave such an entity as the EU.