Category Archives: politics

It’s a Start

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The Trump administration has agreed to sell $330 million worth of spare parts to the Republic of China.  The spares will support the RoC’s F-16s, C-130s, and other of the island nation’s military aircraft.

It’s a start.  However, we need to do more.  We should be selling uprated F1-16s, F-15s, and A-10s to them.  We should be selling missile defense systems to them and brokering deals between the RoC and Israel for the latter’s Iron Dome and Arrow missile and rocket defense systems.  We should be selling the RoC anti-ship and anti-aircraft weapons systems.  We should be selling them land-attack cruise missile systems.

We should be selling the RoC the training necessary to maintain and operate those systems.

We should be helping the RoC defend itself against an increasingly aggressive and acquisitive People’s Republic of China.

Be Like Europe

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Instapundit has some data concerning what that would mean for us.  Citing the Foundation for Economic Education:

Most European countries (including Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Belgium) if they joined the US, would rank among the poorest one-third of US states on a per-capita GDP basis, and the UK, France, Japan and New Zealand would all rank among America’s very poorest states, below No. 47 West Virginia, and not too far above No. 50 Mississippi. Countries like Italy, S. Korea, Spain, Portugal and Greece would each rank below Mississippi as the poorest states in the country.

From FEE, here’s a table of our 50 States and a list of EU nations—along with other wealthy nations, like New Zealand, Japan, and the Republic of Korea (and the People’s Republic of China)—and how those nations compare with our States.

Yes, indeed, this is the Europe that the Progressive-Democrats and their Socialist hero Bernie Sanders are so anxious for us to emulate.  Remember this this fall.

Hatred’s Failure—and Success

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Shelby Steele had an op-ed in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal that discussed the reasons for today’s Left being consumed with hate.  He was generally correct until the end of his piece.

And then there is the failure of virtually every program the left has ever espoused—welfare, public housing, school busing, affirmative action, diversity programs, and so on.

I was with Mr Steele until this point. Far from failures, however, these programs have been the Left’s and their Progressive-Democratic Party’s greatest successes.  These are how the Left and the Party have kept blacks—and far too many women—trapped in the Party-built welfare cages, trapped in perpetual victimhood.

This victimhood is and always has been the font of the Left’s political power.  Keep in mind, after all, that it was the Progressive-Democrat Woodrow Wilson who resegregated the Federal government after Republicans had spent the post-Civil War years working to bring blacks into the governing fold.  It was the Progressive-Democrats who insisted that blacks needed the protection of segregation because they were inherently incapable of competing.  It’s the Progressive-Democrats who built on that segregationist “protection” with their soft bigotry of low expectations in making race and gender necessary deciding criteria for admission to any of their welfare programs—even to higher education.  It’s the Progressive-Democrats who built the welfare cliff into their programs in order to keep welfare recipients trapped in dependency on the largesse of those same Progressive-Democrats.

Ignorant Voters

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Recall the erstwhile tax on job creation that the Seattle city government passed a while back, and then repealed.  The tax would have charged businesses making more than $20 million in annual revenue a per employee tax of $275.  Although, in response to business and public outcry, the city repealed the tax a couple months later, the commentary of the tax’s chief supporter is illuminating.  Seattle City Councilwoman Lorena González, the lead proponent of the jobs tax:

Sadly the policy is right.  Our timing, however, was off. It’ll occur but we need to socialize people to what we’ve done, what we could do, the need and the real lack of resources.
A replacement may be in the cards but not now. We need to get rid of this albatross and then quietly work to figure out what takes its place. I’m thinking this is a November 2019 strategy.

Yep.  Business owners are just being greedy when they object to being taxed for hiring people. Those people are just too ignorant to understand that having their jobs taxed out from under them is good for them; they need to be socialized.

And the Progressive-Democrats on the Seattle City Council now will work secretively to slip this…tax…by the city under cover of a noisy city election.

Truth or Consequences

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Or The Politics of Destruction, as a recent Wall Street Journal editorial has it.

The Progressive-Democrats in Congress have sought out and brought up a second “witness” claiming a sexual assault by Judge and Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh.  This is a woman who couldn’t remember the alleged incident until six days of “recovery” with her lawyer.  This is a woman whose own requests of her friends and alleged witnesses turned up exactly no one who could corroborate her claim—to a man, and to a woman, they all said they weren’t there and had heard nothing about it.  This is a woman who confessed in her “story” that she was too drunk to know what was going on and couldn’t be sure the offending man (if he exists) was Kavanaugh.

Bork, then Thomas. Then teabaggers and astroturfers.  Then Herman Cain.  Now this.

This is the “freedom” we’ll have under [sic] a Progressive-Democrat Congress.

And an ugly unintended consequence: after Feinstein’s, Hirono’s, and Gillibrand’s shameless, artificially hysterical displays, how can any woman who claims sexual assault be believed—even if it happened?