Tag Archives: ethics

Biden Wants Abrams?

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Is Progressive-Democratic Party primary candidate wannabe for President—and the most Progressive candidate in (or almost in) the Party primaries—really thinking about asking Stacey Abrams, ex-Minority Leader of Georgia’s House of Representatives and late of the race for Georgia governor, to be his Vice President candidate in his campaign?

That brings up a question of what he really thinks of Abrams:

I mean, you got the…African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking [woman]. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.

Or is he simply that desperately pandering?

Time for a Clean Break

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No more bad faith pseudo-negotiations by Brussels.  No more dithering and bad-skilled pseudo-negotiations by Theresa May.

The UK asked the European Union to delay its departure from the bloc until June 30, an extension that if approved would give Prime Minister Theresa May just weeks to break an impasse in Parliament over her withdrawal deal.

It’s not just an internal impasse between the PM and Parliament. It’s also and more importantly an impasse between Great Britain and Brussels.

Cut the cord.  The other 27 nations of the EU, or at least that one of them with sense and integrity, should reject the request for more time.  It’s time that only will be wasted by both sides, each for its own reasons.

Update: The EU, lacking even that single nation of the 27, has voted to grant Great Britain’s request for more time before leaving. In fact, the EU offered a couple of options for more time.

  • Option 1: If the UK parliament votes for the withdrawal agreement next week, it can delay exiting until May 22 to ratify the text.
  • Option 2: If it does not approve the deal, the EU will offer a shorter extension until April 12.
  • If it rejects the deal and takes the shorter extension, it can then decide whether to seek a much longer delay and vote in the European elections or leave on April 12 without a deal.

The withdrawal agreement the Parliament is expected to vote on is the same one it’s rejected twice before.  The EU isn’t serious about that thing being accepted on the third try.

This is a sham offer, designed only to drag things out; Brussels is continuing to deal in bad faith. The continent has, perhaps, one or both of two motives for this disingenuousity.  It’s still looking to make an example of Great Britain as a warning to other member nations that might be thinking of leaving.  It’s looking to dismember Great Britain by taking Northern Ireland out of the nation with its demand of an open, unguarded border between Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland.

If the Brits have any sense at all left (an increasing question), they’ll reject the deal and go out from the EU on schedule, on 29 March, and with no deal at all.  No amount of time is going to get them a better deal, incessant delay will only give the Remainers on both side of the Channel time to find a way to keep Great Britain trapped in the EU cage.

Progressive-Democrats Politicizing Banking?

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Who would have thought such a thing?

House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D, CA) has decided to use her committee to go after the hated banking industry.  Congresswoman and Committee member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) has announced

We’re going to hold oversight hearings to make these banks accountable for investing in and making money off of the detention of immigrants[.]

Dangerously, and sadly, the overt intimidation seems to be working.

On February 5 JPMorgan Chase announced it will no longer do business with private prisons. In January Wells Fargo said it would no longer market to private prison companies, aiming to achieve the same objective by attrition.

Never mind that the Progressive-Democratic Party—then just the Democratic Party, with 61 Senators and 292 Representatives in that 95th Congress—politicized, and racialized, banking ‘way back in 1977 with their Community Reinvestment Act.

Today’s bankers are bowing and scraping and showing the same abject cowardice that bankers in the late ’70s and ’80s displayed when those Democrats attacked the banks for being banks—and for concerning themselves with their fiduciary duty to their owners and investors regarding loan risk.

It’s going to be a long two years for the American financial industry and so for our economy.

Gillibrand Declares

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Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D, NY) has entered the Progressive-Democratic Party’s primary contest for President.  Her statement of entering can only show her campaign to be satirical rather than serious.

We need a leader who makes big, bold, brave choices. Someone who isn’t afraid of progress. That’s why I’m running for president.

Bold choices.  Like the one she made during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings in which she rejected the American legal position of innocent until proven guilty and replaced it with her own legal theology of guilty by woman’s accusation.

Progress: to boldly run before the wind—wherever it blows.  She was for the 2nd Amendment, even getting an A rating from the National Rifle Association, before she was against it.  Indeed, the political winds changed her course so sharply that an ardent anti-gun Progressive-Democrat, then-Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy (D, NY) advised her

Don’t change your mind so fast—learn the issue first[.]

But Gillibrand had learned the issue quite clearly: the issue that her political fortune depended on her new position, whatever “new” might work out to.

She was against same-sex marriage as a Representative—insisting on having civil unions—before she was for them as a Senator.

On immigration, she was against amnesty for illegal immigrants as a Representative—in any of its many forms—before she was for it—in any of its many forms—as a Senator. As a Representative, she favored deputizing local policemen to act as immigration agents before, as a Senator, she was for abolishing ICE.

She was staunchly pro-Israel, even as a Senator, insisting there should be no daylight between the US and Israel on matters related to Iran, before she moved away from Israel, supporting ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) and Motorboat Skipper and part-time Secretary of State John Kerry’s (D) nuclear weapons deal with Iran.  She’s become an ardent supporter of Tamika Mallory, Bob Bland, Carmen Perez, and Linda Sarsour—all of whom are themselves public and ardent supporters of Louis Farrakhan.

She even took money from the Clintons to support her various campaign expenses—and then she said Bill Clinton should have resigned over his…affair…with Lewinski.

Regardless of one’s own position on any of those questions and others, Gillibrand will take the one that benefits herself politically, and she’ll take it the moment the wind shifts.

Who can trust such a one?

Joe Biden, Candidate for President

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Bill McGurn thinks ex-Vice President and ex-Senator Joe Biden (D) would make a formidable candidate for President on the 2020 Progressive-Democratic Party ticket.  After all, he has all that Presidential campaign experience from 1988 and 2008. And he presents as an everyman with whom ordinary Americans can identify.

But McGurn also listed these two items as Biden’s rationalizations for not running in 2016 (the sheer number of rationalizations McGurn came up with also is an indicator of Biden’s viability).

…efforts of President Obama and his team to persuade him he couldn’t win the Democratic primary and therefore shouldn’t run, and what he apparently took as a veiled threat from Mrs Clinton that if he did challenge her for the nomination, her team would go dirty.

The former shows how gullible he is. The latter shows what a coward he is. We don’t need someone whom our enemies can both sucker and cow in the White House.