Is Buttigieg For Sale?

In Thursday’s Progressive-Democratic Party debate, in the context of ridiculing competing Party Presidential Candidate Pete Buttigieg’s fund raiser with rich folks in a “wine cave,”  Party Presidential candidate and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) said,

Billionaires in wine caves should not pick the next president of the United States.

Sure sounds like she’s accusing Buttigieg of raffling himself off to the highest bidder. Wine sellers, though, seem to be jake with Warren, including, if not $900 bottles of wine, at least $1,000/donation bottles of wine.

Her accusation, too, stands in sharp contrast with her decision not to call out two billionaires who are trying to buy their own way, first, into the nomination and then into the White House: Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg.

Data Transfer and Privacy

The European Union’s Court of Justice had recommended to it by an adviser to the court in a particular case involving Facebook that

Companies, including US tech giants, should be blocked from transferring European users’ data in some cases if they can’t guarantee it will be handled in compliance with European Union privacy laws….

That would seem to include a large number of international companies besides ours. Yet several EU member nations are moving apace to bring Huawei into their communications networks….

Hmm….

Foolishness

Russia and Ukraine have agreed a new natural gas transit arrangement to facilitate Russian natural gas through Ukraine to Europe.  The EU was in on the negotiations, and it’s pleased.  Maros Sefcovic, who was Vice-President of the European Commission for the Energy Union until last January and who then transitioned to Vice-President of the European Commission for Interinstitutional Relations and Foresight, led the EU’s part of the negotiations.  He now says,

Russia remains a reliable supplier to European markets and Ukraine maintains its role as a strategic transit country.

Never mind that this reliable supplier has already used Ukrainian transit pipelines to blackmail both Ukraine (over unpaid bills) and the EU (over Russia’s demand that the EU do what Russia wants).  The same Russian government personnel who led those blackmails remain in place in the Russian government.

Judgment and Impeachment

Congressman Jerry Nadler (D, NY) had some interesting things to say 21 years ago regarding an impeachment proceeding [emphasis added].

The effect of impeachment is to overturn the popular will of the voters as expressed in a national election. We must not overturn an election and remove a president from office except to defend our very system of government or our constitutional liberties against a dire threat. And we must not do so without an overwhelming consensus of the American people and of their representatives in Congress of the absolute necessity.
There must never be a narrowly voted impeachment or an impeachment substantially supported by one of our major political parties and largely opposed by the other.
…
We have no right to overturn the considered judgment of the American people.

One difference between then and now, though, is that today Nadler and his fellow Progressive-Democrats don’t think that us ordinary Americans have any considered judgment—after all, we disagree with him and his.  We must be ill-informed, or stupid. We have, since 1998, sunk to bitter religion- and gun-clinging and to the sorry state of irredeemability and deplorability.

And, because so many millions of us support the wrong politician’s policies, we’re racist to our core.

As such, we’re simply to be ignored by our Betters.

An Appeal

Bayer is appealing a District court judgment against it and its Roundup product which has glyphosate as an important ingredient. The judgment is for $25 million, and Bayer thinks it’s a wrong judgment.

The German company’s main argument is that US federal agencies have determined its product is safe and not a carcinogen.

Bayer noted that the

verdict defies both expert regulatory judgment and sound science.

And

Because the EPA has consistently approved the sale of glyphosate without a cancer warning and has stated that including such a warning on the label would render the product misbranded, any state-imposed cancer warning is expressly preempted

Wow. Truth as defense.  What a concept.